The Hollywood Liberal

Romney’s Middle East Dreams
Roger Cohen, New York Times
LONDON — So now we know: Mitt Romney believes the 13 North American colonies caused needless bloodshed by rejecting British authority, declaring independence in 1776 and waging war rather than encouraging King George III to see the error of his imperial ways, go touchy-feely with the upstarts across the Atlantic and grant freedom to the United States of America. For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.Roger Cohen The revolution could have been a consensual, bloodless glide to…

Mario Draghi Cannot Save the Euro
Simon Johnson, Bloomberg
European Central Bank President Mario Draghi has been making pronouncements that many have interpreted as positive for the future of the euro.I think his words mean things are going to get ugly.On July 26, Draghi said his institution would do “whatever it takes” to preserve the euro, and reinforced this with a nice turn of phrase: “Believe me, this will be enough.” He followed this up last week with a more official statement that the ECB “may undertake outright open market operations of a size adequate to reach its objective,” signaling that the bank is preparing…

Obama & The Hollow Republic
Yuval Levin, National Review
President Obama must surely wish he could undo the campaign speech he delivered in Roanoke, Va., on July 13. That was where he offered up the view that “if you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that, somebody else made that happen.” It is a line that could haunt him right to November, revealing as it does an unwillingness to credit success and a hostility toward the culture of entrepreneurship. But the remark came in the context of a broader argument that was just as telling on a different point, and no less troubling.After laying out his plans to…

Bill Clinton Becomes 2012 Touchstone
Eleanor Clift, The Daily Beast
Politicians come and go but Bill Clinton is forever, or so it seems with the former president slated for a starring role at the Democratic convention next month.His legacy is getting top billing in both the Obama and Romney campaigns. President Obama is running as the rightful heir to Clinton’s economic approach in the robust way that Al Gore should have but didn’t, and Romney is praising Clinton for being a “new Democrat” while saying Obama is stuck in the past with old-style liberalism.

Mitt Romney’s Taxing Math

Phelps Completes Career With Grace, Final Win
Pat Forde, Yahoo! Sports
In his right hand was a statue from FINA, the international governing body of swimming. It had been presented to him earlier Sunday night, after winning his 22nd and final Olympic medal "“ 18 of them gold, including the last one as part of the United States' 400-meter medley relay. The inscription on the trophy declared Phelps, “The Greatest Olympic Athlete of All Time.”In his left hand was an old, dingy orange foam kickboard. Its nickname: “Big O.” Phelps has had it forever, dating to when he was just a kid with raw talent and big dreams. 

Government Spending Can Create New Jobs
Mark Weisbrot, Denver Post
Three years after our worst recession since the Great Depression officially ended, the U.S. economy is still very weak.The people most hurt by this weakness are the unemployed and the poor, and of course the two problems are related. We have 23 million people who are unemployed, involuntarily working part-time, or given up looking for work — nearly 15 percent of the labor force. And poverty has reached 15.1 percent of the population — amazingly, a level that it was at in the mid-1960s.

Why Washington Accepts Mass Unemployment
Jonathan Chait, NY Mag
Good news! The economy added 163,000 jobs last month, just a bit over the level required to keep up with population growth. A return to a free fall now seems less likely. On the other hand, there is the small footnote that the return to full employment is nowhere in sight. The recovery looks safe for those of us who are not already screwed. That, sadly, has come to be the primary focus of our economic policy.In the years since the collapse of 2008, the existence of mass unemployment has stopped being something the economic powers that be even pretend to regard as a crisis.

Congress Goes Postal
Gail Collins, New York Times
Congress is gone. Yeah, I miss them, too.All the members are off on a five-week recess, after which they’ll return for a few days, then go away again, then hobble back as lame ducks. This is going to do terrible things to the Congressional approval rating, which had climbed all the way up to 17 percent at one point this year. Now it’s sunk to BP oil spill level, and it’s only a matter of time before we’re back to the point where poll respondents say they have a more favorable attitude toward “the U.S. becoming communist.” 

The Coming Obama Landslide?
Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast
There’s a secret lurking behind everything you’re reading about the upcoming election, a secret that all political insiders know—or should—but few are talking about, most likely because it takes the drama out of the whole business. The secret is the electoral college, and the fact is that the more you look at it, the more you come to conclude that Mitt Romney has to draw an inside straight like you’ve never ever seen in a movie to win this thing. This is especially true now that it seems as if Pennsylvania isn’t really up for grabs….

It’s Time to Unemploy Obama
Irwin Stelzer, The Weekly Standard
The latest jobs report should persuade all those who worry about the president’s economic policies but find him likable that enough is enough, and that policy trumps personality when it comes to deciding who should occupy the White House. Job creation remains anemic, the unemployment rate has ticked up to 8.3 percent, and the labor force participation rate continues to fall as more and more Americans choose the couch over tramping the streets looking for work. The Labor Department sums it up: Both the number of unemployed and the unemployment rate “have shown little…

Mitt Should Go Bold With VP Pick
Hayes & Kristol, The Weekly Standard
Mitt Romney will have many opportunities over the next three months to demonstrate to voters that they should choose him over Barack Obama: his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, the three presidential debates, major policy addresses, and more. But it may be that nothing will speak louder than his selection of a running mate.Voters seem to care. In a recent CBS News/New York Times poll, 74 percent of registered voters said the selection of a running mate will matter—48 percent saying it matters “somewhat” and 26 percent saying it matters “a…

Central Banks Can’t Save the World
Mohamed El-Erian, Bloomberg
The three central bank meetings this week — the Bank of England, the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve — made very good cases for additional stimulus measures, though they failed to specify what these would be.Equities and certain bonds that had surged on the basis of last week's verbal assurances by central bankers and political leaders sold off. There was no panic given central bankers' promises to do more in the future should additional action be needed. This is what the standard narrative has been.

Jobs Report: Not That Bad!
Andrew Leonard, Salon
The bleeding stopped — at least temporarily. The U.S. economy added 163,000 jobs in July, a significant jump from June’s revised 64,000 gain, and its best performance in five months. The unemployment rate rose one notch to 8.3 percent.In a healthy economy, 163,000 would not constitute  a very exciting number; barely enough to keep up with population growth, and most certainly not indicating that what economists call “full employment” is anywhere within sight. But in a presidential campaign entering its home stretch, the numbers are good enough…

Heitkamp Puts N. Dakota in Play for Democrats
Caitlin Huey-Burns, RCP
Most North Dakotans do not like President Obama or his health care law, surveys show. Voters here have not backed a Democrat for president since 1964, and polling forecasts a loss for the White House occupant in November.But North Dakotans also have a deep history of splitting the ticket. And that, mixed with a strong candidate and a booming economy, makes Democrats hopeful about winning a U.S. Senate seat here, despite the otherwise discouraging atmospherics.The Senate race figures to be one of the most competitive in the country — but it wasn't supposed to be this way.When veteran…

Professors Admit Anti-Conservative Bias
Emily Smith, Washington Times
It’s not every day that left-leaning academics admit that they would discriminate against a minority.But that was what they did in a peer-reviewed study of political diversity in the field of social psychology, which will be published in the September edition of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science.Psychologists Yoel Inbar and Joris Lammers, based at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, surveyed a roughly representative sample of academics and scholars in social psychology and found that “In decisions ranging from paper reviews to hiring, many social and…

The Romney Plan for Economic Recovery
Glenn Hubbard, Wall St. Journal
We are currently in the most anemic economic recovery in the memory of most Americans. Declining consumer sentiment and business concerns over policy uncertainty weigh on the minds of all of us. We must fix our economy's growth and jobs machine.We can do this. The U.S. economy has the talent, ideas, energy and capital for the robust economic growth that has characterized much of America's experience in our lifetimes. Our standard of living and the nation's standing as a world power depend on restoring that growth. 

What Mitt Romney’s Gaffes Tell Us
Ruth Conniff, The Progressive
Mitt Romney lurched through his trip overseas from gaffe to gaffe–making himself a lightening rod for mockery in London when he publicly questioned the city's readiness for the Olympics, then praising socialized medicine for keeping so many Israeli citizens healthy at such a low cost compared with this country (hey, why don't we try that here? . . . oops!). He wound up his tour of the Middle East backpedaling frantically, denying what he said about Palestinian cultural inferiority being responsible for the territories' economic hardships.This last remark, which Palestinian…

Romney Must Make the Case to Break Up the Banks
Ross Douthat, NYT
My Campaign Stops column this week runs through Mitt Romney’s possible vice presidential picks, and concludes that everything we’ve seen from the Romney campaign suggests they’ll make the most cautious, first-do-no-harm, don’t-rock-the-boat choice possible — which probably means picking the competent, experienced, and completely unexciting Ohio Senator Rob Portman. For further evidence that Team Romney is happy with the course they’re on, here’s National Review’s Robert Costa on the plan to reintroduce…

Obama Is Starting to Beat Himself
Holman Jenkins, Wall Street Journal
For some reason President Obama has us thinking of Marissa Mayer, Bill Ackman and Mark Zuckerberg. “You didn't build that,” Mr. Obama explained to the nation's entrepreneurs, and has been explaining ever since. He only meant to say we need government as well as private initiative, and who could disagree? This argument is anodyne, dispositive of nothing that is in dispute.

Tea Party’s Cruz Wins Texas GOP Senate Race
Caitlin Huey-Burns, RCP
The Tea Party trumped the institution in Texas on Tuesday, propelling attorney Ted Cruz to an upset victory over Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst in the nationally watched Republican primary for the Lone Star State's open U.S. Senate seat.Cruz, a 41-year-old Cuban-American who is expected to win the general election in November (Texas hasn't elected a Democrat statewide since 1994), has pledged to bring his unbending conservatism to the upper chamber. The Tea Party's upset win is significant given the widespread rumors of its demise. But Cruz's victory signals that the grassroots…

Cruz Gives Tea Party a Madisonian Flair
George Will, Washington Post
Ted Cruz’s victory in Tuesday’s Texas Republican runoff for the U.S. Senate nomination is the most impressive triumph yet for the still-strengthening tea party impulse. And Cruz’s victory coincides with something conservatives should celebrate: the centennial of the 20th century’s most important intraparty struggle. By preventing former president Theodore Roosevelt from capturing the 1912 Republican presidential nomination from President William Howard Taft, the GOP deliberately doomed its chances for holding the presidency but kept its commitment to…

Battle for Religious Freedom Continues
George Weigel, National Review
As of August 1, the Obamacare/HHS mandate requiring the provision of contraceptives, abortifacient drugs, and sterilization procedures — all in the name of “reproductive health” — is finalized. The mandate has triggered the most unexpected controversy of the 2012 election season.The Catholic bishops of the United States and other concerned parties have accurately described it as a grave violation of religious freedom; dozens of entities have sued the Obama administration over the mandate, charging that HHS is in violation of the Religious Freedom…