S.F. POLICE MISS SUSPECT, HIT TWO BYSTANDERS INSTEAD:

According to police, at 2:06 a.m., officers located a wanted person in the 400 block of Broadway. The suspect ran away from police and produced a weapon, they said.

Officers then fired at the suspect, who was not hit. However, two bystanders were hit by the gunfire. They were taken to a hospital to be treated for their injuries that are not believed to be life-threatening, according to police.

Just a note that if a CCW permit holder had shot at an assailant, missed, and hit bystanders we’d hear people claim that civilians can’t be trusted with guns. Oh, and they’d publish his/her name, while the officers’ names are left out of this account. Not saying the officers were wrong here, just noting the double standard.

BILL QUICK: “Is that it? Is that all you got left? Another freaking tax on rich people? Do you have any idea just how pathetic you’ve become? This sort of crap won’t even motivate your base any more.”

BOB OWENS: Cloward-Piven: The Ultimate Goal of Gunwalker? It’s hard to think of a more logical reason for Gunwalker to exist.

IS THE OBAMA WHITE HOUSE A HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT FOR WOMEN? Or is that just the grumbling of affirmative-action babies?

So… is there something sexist about the Obama administration? Seems like Suskind came up with a great angle for his book, but I’m skeptical. I think Obama may have been overenthusiastic about giving a lot of positions to women, and perhaps those women really weren’t as good as the men he surrounded himself with and really does need to rely on. In that case, he deserves credit for good judgment. But it is funny that he’s not more concerned about the optics. Perhaps he assumes that he is especially appealing to women constituents and he doesn’t need to do much to maintain that favor. It’s the men he’s in danger of losing. Time for another round of all-male, manly golf.

And maybe a beer summit with a Medal Of Honor winner. Oh, wait. . . .

AT AMAZON, it’s the DVD Outlet Sale.

WSJ: Obama’s Twitter Disaster: In the run-up to 2012, a high-profile effort by the re-election campaign to counter critics has become an online bulletin board for jokes.

TEENAGE BRAINS: Moody. Impulsive. Maddening. Why do teenagers act the way they do? Viewed through the eyes of evolution, their most exasperating traits may be the key to success as adults.

HAPPY CONSTITUTION DAY. Don’t take the Constitution for granted.

SOME SCIENCE FICTION MOVEMENTS AND MANIFESTOS.

NOT FITTING THE NARRATIVE: Byron York: Among Hispanics, strong support for voter ID.

LIGHTSQUARED: Lawmakers Question White House Role In Wireless Project.

SOCIAL SCIENCE CONUNDRUMS: Violent Crimes Drop 12%, Reason Unknown; In Other News, Record Number of Americans Carrying Concealed Weapons. Unexpectedly!

UPDATE: A North Carolina report.

REX MURPHY: The Media’s Love Affair with a Disastrous President. Now approaching an end, I think.

But he’s right about this: “As the bad economic news continues to emanate from the United States — with a double-dip recession now all but certain — a reckoning is overdue. American journalism will have to look back at the period starting with Barrack Obama’s rise, his assumption of the presidency and his conduct in it to the present, and ask itself how it came to cast aside so many of its vital functions. In the main, the establishment American media abandoned its critical faculties during the Obama campaign — and it hasn’t reclaimed them since. . . . As a result, the press gave the great American republic an untried, unknown and, it is becoming more and more frighteningly clear, incompetent figure as President. . . . To the degree the press neglected its function as watchdog and turned cupbearer to a styrofoam demigod, it is a partner in the flaws and failures of what is turning out to be one of the most miserable performances in the modern history of the American presidency.”

As with John Edwards, though, they’ll pretend they had nothing to do with it.

UPDATE: Steven Den Beste emails:

Rex Murphy’s column you linked to is interesting. But what’s particularly interesting is the word that isn’t there: “black”.

What no one wants to say is this: the reason the press gave Obama a free ride was because he is black. He’s the ultimate example of affirmative action.

Well, who can blame them, when every criticism of Obama is characterized as racism? And reader Sean Sorrentino writes:

You wrote “As with John Edwards, though, they’ll pretend they had nothing to do with it.” I think it will be more subtle than that. I think what will happen is that they will wring their hands and promise NEVER to do that again. They will take up their duties as political watchdogs with a vengeance. The next President will get the full treatment. The fact that the next President will be a Republican will not have anything to do with this. No Sir. Honest.

Heh. That’s probably right . . .

MORE: Den Beste posts an extended version.

STILL MORE: Bill Quick:

It’s all bullshit, you know. This new meme, that the press “neglected its functions as watchdog.” It didn’t. It performed to perfection what it truly believes its function is: to help shape history, politics, and culture in ways it finds congenial. Early on, the press made a collective decision that helping to effect the election of Barack Obama would admirably fulfill that function, and so it did everything it its power to help him defeat, first, Hillary Clinton, and next, John McCain. There was no failure here. There was instead complete success at fulfilling their intentions.

Unfortunately for them, the man they elected was nowhere near as effective in advancing their mutual goals as they were at getting him elected in the first place. And so, rather than admit their willing efforts to elect him, and take responsibility for the resulting disaster, they would rather pretend that their sin was a “failure” to “act as a watchdog.”

The truth is, their only failure was to drastically overestimate his ability to do what they elected him to do. That’s what they’re really ashamed of. They thought they were electing a full-on Marxist hero. Instead, they elevated an incompetent socialist with pretensions to Marxism. And now, steeped in the misery and humiliation of their own miscalculations, they want to pretend – and want us to believe – that their only sin was neglecting to vet him properly.

Indeed.

SOLYNDRA, CON’TD: “So now it turns out that the Obama White House was warned privately in no uncertain terms last January against a fresh infusion of taxpayer cash to financially beleaguered Solyndra.”

WHAT LUCKY PEOPLE DO DIFFERENTLY than unlucky people.

AT AMAZON, Kitchen Warehouse Deals.

AT SLATE, DEBATING TRANSHUMANISM. Put me down in the “for” camp. But, then, I’m already married to a Cyborg.

TECHNOLOGY REVIEW: Solyndra: We Told You So. “The failure of the government-backed solar company points to the dangers of conflating job creation and energy innovation.” At the very least.

YOU MEAN IT WASN’T BEFORE? “The Vagina Is Becoming Big Business.”

POYNTER: Why “NewsHour” omission of Obama’s Lincoln mistake looked like a liberal media conspiracy.

ARE PREDICTIONS OF RAPID ELECTRIC-CAR BATTERY PRICE DECLINES unrealistic? “The Academies and Toyota Motor Corp. have publicly said they don’t think the Department of Energy goals are achievable and that cost reductions are likely to be far lower. It likely will be 20 years before costs fall 50%—not the three or so years the DOE projects for an even greater reduction—according to an Academies council studying battery costs. The council was made up of nearly a dozen researchers in the battery field.” Well it wouldn’t be the first time the Administration was over-optimistic about green technology.

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN, WOMEN WOULD BE SECOND CLASS CITIZENS. AND THEY WERE RIGHT!

A new book claims that the Obama White House is a boys’ club marred by rampant infighting that has hindered the administration’s economic policy and left top female advisers feeling excluded from key conversations. “Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President,” by journalist Ron Suskind due out next Tuesday, details the rivalries among Obama’s top economic advisers, Larry Summers, former chairman of the National Economic Council, and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner. It describes constant second-guessing by Summers, now at Harvard, who was seen by others as “imperious and heavy-handed” in his decision-making.

In an excerpt obtained by The Post, a female senior aide to President Obama called the White House a hostile environment for women.

“This place would be in court for a hostile workplace,” former White House communications director Anita Dunn is quoted as saying. “Because it actually fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women.”

Well, the Dems could have nominated Hillary. But nooo. . . .

Related: Bloomberg poll sparks more useless pining for ‘President Hillary.’ Hmm. Useless? We’re sure seeing a lot of this kind of thing all of a sudden.

INTERNET LAW UPDATE: Senate Judiciary Committee Passes Amendment to Prohibit Prosecutions for Terms-of-Service Violations.

RAND SIMBERG: Some Commercial Crew questions for NASA.

IN THE MAIL: The People of the Book: Philosemitism in England, From Cromwell to Churchill.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: The War On The Young: A Warning From Italy And France.

The war on the young is led ‘by cadres of elderly men, content to manage decline. and exacerbated by younger generations, who don’t seem to know what’s going on or understand the gravity of the financial situation that will hit them in the future. . . .

The war on the young is most intense in countries (and, in the US, industries and states) which have the blue social model deeply embedded in their social institutions. It is an interesting struggle: these days, the young face serious trouble finding employment and will be saddled with debts run up by their elders as they grow up.

The older generations benefited from a kind of escalator system in life. You step on the escalator after finishing your education and it almost automatically carries you upward in life, with higher pay and higher status until, at retirement, you step off and enjoy a good, level standard of living for the rest of your days.

One of the younger generations’ biggest problems is that many of those escalators don’t work anymore. In Italy and Japan, companies are reluctant to hire young people on what American universities call “tenure track”; unsure about their future needs and resources they don’t want high cost employees that can’t be fired. The older workers are too powerful to dislodge — just as in American universities the tenured professors are too powerful to give up tenure. So younger workers increasingly are hired if at all on temporary contracts, with lower benefits and fewer prospects for promotion.

Hope and change!

OH, GOODY: U.S. Taxpayers Could Be On Hook For Fed’s Europe Bailout.

SOLYNDRA: The Green Bay Of Pigs? “It seems that Uncle Sam’s Mickey Mouse loan deal to the now-bankrupt solar manufacturer Solyndra was not only a bad investment decision, but likely a contributing factor to the company’s implosion.”

The new factory built with Department of Energy funds foisted fixed costs on a company already struggling through an industry shake-out, [investors] say. What’s more, the debt paradoxically made raising more money difficult. Once the government demanded priority in the event of failure, private investors were less likely to prop up the company.

Who could have seen that coming?

UPDATE: Solyndra Pressured Bush White House For Approval In January, 2009 — And Didn’t Get It. “Apparently, the Bush administration officials involved caught a whiff of desperation and decided to back away. Too bad Obama administration officials didn’t make the same choice.”

TAKING THE WHOLE CONSTITUTION PLEDGE:

But, as Ed Whelan points out, Article V is part of the “whole Constitution,” too — indeed, the part that helped bring about the Amendments that the pledge authors so praise. So I should say that I pledge to support the whole Constitution, including the provision that allows repeal of those provisions that were enacted by yesterday’s Americans but that today’s Americans choose to revise through the constitutionally prescribed means. As to which particular provisions should be kept and which should be repealed, I make no pledges.

Funny how the “progressives” are now the party of stasis. Though I think they’re actually okay with constitutional change via the judiciary — at least so long as it’s the right sort of change.

ANDREW MALCOLM: America’s newest hero, Sgt. Dakota Meyer: How he rescued 36 guys under fire.

BLOG REPORT: Andrew Breitbart in Lexington, Mass.

AT AMAZON, Coupons Galore.

BILL WHITTLE’S AFTERBURNER: What We Did Right.

AP: Obama admin reworked Solyndra loan to favor donor. “The Obama administration restructured a half-billion dollar federal loan to a troubled solar energy company in such a way that private investors — including a fundraiser for President Barack Obama — moved ahead of taxpayers for repayment in case of a default, government records show.”

UPDATE: Tom Blumer: AP’s Sept. 16 Solyndra Story, Part 1: Passing Off Weeks-Old News As Its Own Work. Sadly, my expectations have been driven so low that I’m just grateful they’re covering the story . . . .

BETTER HAIR: “Oh, what a huckster that John Edwards was!” And oh, how happy the press was to enable his huckstering, until it exploded and they pretended they had never pumped him up.

BOX-OFFICE POISON: Disappointed Hollywood Giving Obama The Cold Shoulder.

CHANGE: Obama’s job approval — and favorable rating — hit new lows in NYT poll.

THE ONLY THING THAT MIGHT SAVE OBAMA? Donald Trump reiterates possibility of running as an independent after dinner with ‘Jim’ Perry.

If Trump wants to be widely and intensely hated, this’ll do it for him. (Via Mickey Kaus).

VOX DAY is predicting another crash, which is consistent with his longer-term argument. Me, I don’t make market predictions. But I do get the feeling that our financial leaders are papering over deeper problems.

UPDATE: “We can buy time, but we can’t change the outcome.” I think they just want to buy enough time to get past November, 2012.

DAN MITCHELL: Obama and Geithner Advising the Europeans on Fiscal Crisis?!? This Is a Case of the Blind Leading the Blind…on Steroids.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Where Universities Can Be Cut: Administration? “Multiple layers of management can exacerbate complexity. Complexity and related operating issues lead to inefficiency.”

Ya think?

HYPERINFLATION ARBITRAGE: $6.95 for a 100 Trillion Zimbabwe Banknote.

Hey, don’t laugh. How long before we see these for real?

I just hope I can figure out a way to make a buck Yuan off of it when it happens . . . .

THE CARTER ERA HAD SKYLAB, AND NOW THIS: Huge Defunct Satellite Falling to Earth Faster Than Expected, NASA Says. I have a salvaged piece of Skylab in lucite on my desk. Let’s hope this crash does no more damage.

WELL, THAT’S WHAT IT’S FOR — SHUTTING DOWN DEBATE: ‘Civility Pledge’ Shuts Down Debate At Tucson City Council Meeting.

AT AMAZON, the portable audio & video outlet sale.

JAY COST: Does Obama Really Believe He’s Still Popular? “Don’t all presidents suffer declining popularity? Not all of them, but most of them do. Still, Obama so far has been one of the less popular presidents since World War II. . . . I’m not making a point here about Obama’s reelection prospects, as Reagan and Clinton both bounced back and won solid victories. Instead, I want to highlight his unpopularity to suggest that the White House has demonstrated a shocking level of political incompetence. . . . Either he and his team don’t realize that the bottom has dropped out, so they don’t know that they need to change strategies, or they do realize it but haven’t come up with any alternatives. My money is on the former – he and his team haven’t figured it out yet.”

AND THAT’S PRETTY MUCH HIS PROBLEM IN A NUTSHELL: Jon Huntsman gets the Vogue treatment.

And why is he, with his minuscule poll standing, in all the debates while Gary Johnson and Thaddeus McCotter are passed over?

UPDATE: Reader Kevin O’Brien writes from New Hampshire:

One of the great benefts of living in NH s having the quadrennial presidential circus sweep through. (And one of the miseravle ordeals of living in NH is the quadrennial… you get the idea. Idi et Amo as Catullus said). You can actually meet and interact with candidates if you’re so inclined. Most of them are interesting and personable people. Recently my brother and I attended an event where Thad McCotter spoke. In personal interaction as well as in his speech, a very impressive man. He has a wry sense of humour and is very likeable even among these people who tend to be more personable than average (if you’re a misanthrope, politics would weed you out, yes?)

My bro and I are bleah on social issues, strong on the economy and strong on national security (I’m retired from Army/reserve/guard, 30 years total). We think we’re fairly typical NH Republicans. Many candidates had horrible defense policies, and Huntsman stood out as lacking in Vitamin Clue. (This is the problem I have with the more libertarian candidates like Paul and Johnson).

Huntsman did not attend the event (the foks that did were all second- and third-strng candidates (Fred Karger? Buddy Roemer? Christopher V. Hill?) but had a very large team. THey were wearing very striking, artistically designed t-shirts featuring a huge “H”. Best t-shirts, worst policies. A Hollywood campaign.

A who’s who of NH politics was here and a high point for me was meeting John Sununu. Sununu gave the briefest and best speech, which in essence was: we need to unite behind the nominee, because any of them is an improvement over the incumbent. We’re calling it the Sununu rule. and that’s pretty much how I feel. There’s a lot of talent in this race and even some who have little shot at the Oval Office, like Newt, Bachmann and McCotter, bring real strengths to the race and you hope whoever is #XLV can find ways to use their gifts. Huntsman may be the exception to the Sununu Rule: I don’t see what he’s got over Obama. Why elect Mini-Me when you can have Dr Evil himself?

I can live with Perry even though he’s prone to hipshots and dreadful on immigration. I can live with Mitt even though he’s worse on guns than Perry is on immigration (and Mitt’s not real great on immigration, either). These imperfections in our probable standard-bearers just serve to remind us how important the down-ticket races are, also. We need a President with mostly good instincts, and we need a Congress that will frustrate him in his bad instincts. (It seems like everyone but anyone in Washington knows that our immigration system is too open to unskilled and criminal line jumpers, and too harsh on productive immigrants, for example. And note where legislative innovation in the gun arena takes place, in the labs of the states — we just passed stand-your-ground reform, after an egregious case two years ago, over the petulant veto of our lib dem Governor).

Indeed. And I love “best t-shirts, worst policies.”

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Hello, Rising Poverty Rate: 5 Tips For Dating A Broke Guy.

THE DISNEY MYTH: Why So Many Women Are Misled About True Love.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Freedom of the press applies to everyone — yes, even bloggers.

WAR ON TERROR NEWS: FBI Teaches Agents: ‘Mainstream’ Muslims Are ‘Violent, Radical.’

The FBI is teaching its counterterrorism agents that “main stream” [sic] American Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathizers; that the Prophet Mohammed was a “cult leader”; and that the Islamic practice of giving charity is no more than a “funding mechanism for combat.”

Some people are unhappy about that.

IN UTAH, pro-gun groups urge gays to arm themselves. “Nelson, the owner of Stonewall Shooting, says that many attackers would be surprised if the victim brandished a weapon at them.” And even more surprised if the victim shot them, I’d imagine.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: SpongeBob Doesn’t Harm Kids’ Brains.

No word on the effect of the infamous Spongebob Barbie.

BRITISH TO TEST Geoengineering Scheme. “In October, British researchers supported by the U.K. government will attempt to pump water a kilometer into the air using little more than a helium balloon and a rubber hose. The experiment, which will take place at a military airfield along England’s east coast, is meant as a test of a proposed geoengineering technique for offsetting the warming effects of greenhouse gases. If the balloon and hose can handle the water’s weight and pressure, similar pipes rising 20 kilometers could pump tons of reflective aerosols into the stratosphere.”

BINARY SUNSET: Kepler Spots a Planet Orbiting Two Suns, Just Like Star Wars’ Tatooine.

BECAUSE THEY’RE DEMOCRATS: Professor Jacobson: Why do these people feel no fear of bragging about assaulting a lawmaker?

AT AMAZON, 10% to 30% off on Men’s Jeans & Tees.

WHY LAUGHTER feels so good.

REUVEN BRENNER: Want Less Inequality? Stop Subsidizing Schools And Universities.

JAMES RAY PALMER and the truth about gunfights. “When bad things happen, lots of folks will have no clue what’s going down. Even though the angle of the camera doesn’t show the actual shooting, it shows something else that blows my mind. At the 2:28 mark, right in the middle of the gun battle on the courthouse lawn, a dark minivan drives down Main Street, right to left, directly in front of the courthouse. I wonder who was in it, and did they happen to actually notice the gunfight going on less than 50 yards away?”

ED DRISCOLL: Mister President, We Cannot Afford a Porn Shaft Gap!

CONSUMERS WANT GENETICALLY BOOSTED FOOD ANTIOXIDANTS: “While genetic modification of crops elicits considerable opposition in Europe the opposition is much less in the United States. An Iowa State economist says in a survey he did consumers indicate they would pay more for crops genetic engineered to contain more antioxidants.”

I LIKE MY TOYOTA HYBRID, BUT DOES THE MARKET? Toyota pins comeback hopes on hybrids; predicts they’ll be 20% of market by 2020.

THE EDUCATION OF STEVE JOBS: Why do so many talented entrepreneurs drop out of school?

IN THE MAIL: Money in a Free Society: Keynes, Friedman, and the New Crisis in Capitalism.

ED DRISCOLL interviews Terry Teachout.

JOEL KOTKIN: Declining Birthrates, Expanded Bureaucracy: Is U.S. Going European? That approach has been working sooo well for Europe. . . .

GOVERNMENT CONTINUES TO SPEND MORE, S.A.T. Scores Continue To Fall.

CENSORSHIP DOWN UNDER? Government Won’t Rule Out A License To Publish. “A licence to publish? A licence to speak? This is becoming very serious indeed.”

Licensing publishers is, of course, a serious break with the English-speaking civil liberties tradition.

MICHAEL Z. WILLIAMSON on poverty in the U.S.

AT AMAZON, it’s the Friday Sale.

STEVE CROWDER: Is Social Security a Ponzi Scheme? I called the S.E.C. to find out. Hope they did better than they did with Madoff . . . .

MICKEY KAUS: What Did Peter Orszag Know And When Did He Know It?

LIGHTSQUARED: ANOTHER SOLYNDRA? “A pattern of providing White House support to favored companies — at taxpayer risk — is emerging.”

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN, THE WHITE HOUSE WOULD BE CRUSHING DISSENT. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! The Hill: White House officials work to quell Dem dissent over jobs bill.

SOLYNDRA IS NOT THE ONLY SUBSIDIZED GREEN FAILURE: “Solyndra, the solar panel company whose highly publicized failure and consequent investigation by federal authorities has flashed across headlines recently, isn’t the only business to go belly up after benefiting from a piece of the $800 billion economic stimulus package passed in 2009. At least four other companies have received stimulus funding only to later file for bankruptcy, and two of those were working on alternative energy.”

ER, BECAUSE IT WAS A SCAM? Why Solyndra Wasn’t Good Stimulus. I mean, just for a start . . . .

DRAGGED DOWN BY PRESIDENT MILLSTONE? Dianne Feinstein in Poll Trouble Now. It’s not too late for another Kaus candidacy!

Related: Weprin Throws Obama Under the Bus: ‘The Problem Was That He’s the President and People are Frustrated.’

REAL, OR GIMMICK? The StressEraser Biofeedback Device. I’m going with “gimmick,” but I could be wrong, I suppose.

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): More Young Adults Are Poor, Live With Their Parents. “It’s not your imagination: It really is more crowded at mom and dad’s place. The Census Bureau made headlines yesterday with news that the nation’s official poverty rate hit 15.1%, the highest since 1993. Tough times have also translated into a rise in adult children moving back into (or never leaving) their parent’s homes. In the spring of 2011, 5.9 million young adults aged 25 to 34 lived with their parents, up from 4.7 million before the recession. And these adult kids still at mom and dad’s make very little money: Over 45% have incomes that’d put them below the poverty threshold.”

SOLARGATE UPDATE: Chicago Tribune Editorial: The Solyndra saga: Obama administration put taxpayers on hook for failed venture. “There are a lot of questions around this deal. At least one investor in it was a prominent Obama fundraiser. Some Democrats say Solyndra executives may have misled them. If the federal government can’t responsibly manage the money it’s doling out in the name of economic stimulus, then it has no business doling out the money — period. At a minimum, this episode illustrates the perils of sinking taxpayer dollars into risky private ventures.”

At a minimum. Plus this: “A nickel’s worth of business sense and a dime’s worth of caution might have saved Uncle Sam millions — and the Obama administration a heap of trouble.” Where are you going to find a nickel’s worth of business sense in an administration where there’s no private-sector experience? And caution is for lesser mortals, not The One and his chosen crew.

THE MORALITY OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION: “The students at a university are always the students who were admitted. They feel hurt or outraged if they think the message is that they shouldn’t be here. They’re here, in the room, and the individuals who did not get in are not here to cry out with corresponding outrage. . . . The policy will only affect individuals who are not in the room, who are out there, just as the students who didn’t get in this year are out there. The difficult thing — and the true moral challenge — is to visualize those who are affected who are not in the room to express pain when you hurt them.”

Another case of what is seen and what is not seen. Politicians — among whose number I certainly count university presidents — advance their careers by exploiting the difference between the two.

GALLUP: Obama Slips With Jews.

TAXPROF: IRS Reaps Billions On Offshore Account Amnesty.

OH, I DON’T WONDER ALL THAT MUCH: Solyndra Employee: You Wonder Where All the Money Went.

GEORGE WILL: Our Floundering “Federal Family.”

For two years, there has been one constant: As events have refuted the Obama administration’s certitudes, the administration has retained its insufferable knowingness. It knew that the stimulus would hold unemployment below 8 percent. Oops. Unemployment has been at least 9 percent in 26 of the 30 months since the stimulus was passed. Michael Boskin of Stanford says that, even if one charitably accepts the administration’s self-serving estimate of jobs “created or saved” by the stimulus, each job cost $280,000 — five times America’s median pay.

And research by Garett Jones and Daniel M. Rothschild of George Mason University’s Mercatus Center indicates that just 42.1 percent of workers hired by entities receiving stimulus funds were unemployed at the time. More (47.3 percent) were poached from other organizations, and 10.6 percent came directly from school or outside the labor force.

Obama’s administration, which is largely innocent of business experience, knew its experts would be wizards at investing taxpayers’ dollars. Oops.

If my family were this bad, I’d consider looking for someone to adopt me . . . .

GOLDMAN, SACHS AND SOLYNDRA: “Anywhere you look… Goldman has already been there.”

STRATEGYPAGE: The Arab Disease. “In the last decade, the world has learned what Israelis have known for a long time; Arabs and their governments tend to favor self-destructive policies. Western nations have generally ignored this madness, or excused each instance as a momentary lapse in good judgment. But this bad behavior has spawned Islamic terrorism, and sustains it. Many Arabs believe what al Qaeda preaches, that the world should be ruled by an Islamic religious dictatorship, and that this must be achieved by any means necessary (including force, against non-Moslems, and Moslems who don’t agree.) This sort of thinking has been popular with Islamic conservatives since Islam first appeared in the sixth century. Since then, it has periodically flared up into major outbreaks of religious inspired violence. But that’s not the only problem. Arabs, in particular, sustain these outbursts with their fondness for paranoid fantasies and an exaggerated sense of persecution and entitlement.”

LIGHTSQUARED: The Next Obama Pay-For-Play Morass? “The Obama FCC took the lead in intervening on the donor, billionaire hedge fund manster Philip Falcone’s, behalf and granting his company called ‘LightSquared’ one of those coveted Obama waivers from existing law. Then Obama officials reportedly pressured a general to alter his testimony about the company’s impact on military satellite transmissions.”

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: LIVING MISERABLY.

What’s a six-letter word that describes what you get when you combine spiking jobless claims and rising inflation? Answer: M-I-S-E-R-Y. And as new reports show, Obama is dishing out heaping portions of it.

The two reports out of the Labor Department are troubling enough on their own. Jobless claims hit 428,000 last week, up 11,000 from the week before, the highest level in months and, naturally, unexpected. And inflation in August was up 3.8% over last year, also higher than forecast.

These reports also point to a more worrisome trend. With unemployment stuck at a stratospheric 9.1% — and giving no signs of coming down soon — inflation is now climbing. The current annual rate is more than twice where it stood in January. Combine the two, and you have a Misery Index of 12.9 — up 21% this year and a stunning 64% since Obama took office.

To put the current index in some historical context: (1) it’s higher than any time in the past 28 years, (2) it’s 36% higher than the post-World War II average of 9.5 and (3) there have been only nine years in the past 63 when the annual Misery Index topped 12.9 — all in the inflationary 1970s.

Welcome back, Carter. Except that, as I keep saying, a Jimmy Carter rerun now represents a best-case scenario.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Virginia Postrel: Harvard Pledge Values “Kindness” Over Learning. Ask them to publicly sign a pledge of patriotism and see how it goes . . . .

But wait, there’s more: “And that brings us to the second half of the pledge equation: intellectual attainment. Not inquiry or excellence, but ‘attainment.’ What a strange, and revealing, choice of words. . . . Harvard is the strongest brand in American higher education, and its identity is clear. As its students recognize, Harvard represents success. But, it seems, Harvard feels guilty about that identity and wishes it could instead (or also) represent ‘compassion.’ These two qualities have a lot in common. They both depend on other people, either to validate success or serve as objects of compassion. And neither is intellectual.”

MONEY, MEET MOUTH: Bioethicist Offers $10,000 Reward For Proof of Bachmann Vaccine Claims.

SOLARGATE UPDATE: AP on Solyndra: White House ignored at least three watchdog reports criticizing Energy Department’s loan controls. “Even their own OMB guys saw the iceberg coming. Why didn’t the Energy Department turn the ship when it had a chance?”

THE SINCEREST FORM of flattery.

BRYAN PRESTON: Video: The Story Behind Rick Perry’s Gardasil Mandate. “Watch the interview with Burcham’s friends, and decide for yourself if anything that Michele Bachmann has said about Perry, crony capitalism and Gardasil makes any sense.”

FROM JOHNATHAN PIERCE IN LONDON, thoughts on the collapse of the Eurozone.

WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS: An anti-mosquito pill.

THOUGHTS ON the future of jobs. “Workers in our economy are in a race between development of as-yet-non-commoditized cognitive capabilities on one hand, and wage reductions as capabilities are commoditized through technological advances (broadly defined) on the other. This has been going on for a long, long time, but it does seem to be speeding up — why?”

AT AMAZON, 50% and more off in Sports & Outdoors.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Why not start college later?

UPDATE: Reader Lawrence Faria writes:

I remember such people in my college classes in the ’60s. The instructors weren’t happy to see them in their classes.
Instructors preferred 18 year olds fresh out of high school for the same reason as the military: They’re uninformed
and malleable. The last thing instructors want is older students with a personal philosophy and already-formed opinions
based on actual life experience. They just know too much.

I actually kinda like the older students. Meanwhile, reader Jon Hoagboon writes:

I just started going to college (University of Nebraska at Omaha) after I retired from the Air Force earlier this year. Getting back into the “groove” of learning has taken a bit of adjustment, but I would like to say I am getting more out of it now, as I am able to apply some of the life lessons I have learned over the years. That, and I am keenly aware of the actions of some of the students in my classes; the sleeping, texting, or leaving early/showing up late. I can’t help to think that I could have been just like them, had I gone to college straight out of high school. With the post 9/11 GI Bill, I have to pass these classes, or I have to reimburse the government if I fail or choose to withdraw. Regardless, I want to learn and do well, and apply the knowledge to my next career in life. At this point in my life, I know what awaits me if I don’t do well.

Indeed.