The state’s economy is outperforming most of the rest of the country. Why is that?

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Note: This column went up at Pajamas Media and was teased here at BizzyBlog on Friday.

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Given the economic damage inflicted on us by the current administration and many state governments, most readers of this column would probably be quite happy to live in a state where:

• The official unemployment rate in March was 6.6%.
• The average unemployment rate in 2009 using the most comprehensive definition was 10.5%, the fourth-lowest in the nation behind three much smaller states, and far lower than the national average of 16.2%.
• The number of people either working or looking for work has actually grown during the past twelve monhs (in most states, the labor force has contracted significantly).
• The economy grew in 2008, and probably did so again in 2009.

Unless you live in Oklahoma, you’re not in that state.

It “just so happens” that the Sooner State passed a strict immigration enforcement measure in May 2007. It went into effect six months later. Specifically:

House Bill 1804 was passed by overwhelming majorities in both the House and Senate of the Oklahoma Legislature. The measure’s sponsor, State Representative Randy Terrill, says the bill has four main topical areas: it deals with identity theft; it terminates public assistance benefits to illegals; it empowers state and local police to enforce federal immigration laws; and it punishes employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens.

Oklahoma is no longer “O.K.” for illegal aliens, Terrill observes. “When you put everything together in context,” he contends, “the bottom line is illegal aliens will not come here if there are no jobs waiting for them, they will not stay here if there is no government subsidy, and they certainly won’t stay here if they know that if they ever encounter our state and local law enforcement officers, they will be physically detained until they’re deported. And that’s exactly what House Bill 1804 does.”

An amazing animated graphic still available at The Mess That Greenspan Made shows what happened in the immediate wake of “1804′s” passage. It shows month-by-month changes in the unemployment rate for each state in the Lower 48. From March 2007 to March 2008, alone among all states, Oklahoma’s unemployment rate fell significantly, especially in the final few months of the 12-month period presented, i.e., the first few months after “1804″ went into effect.

Coincidence? Well, if fewer jobs are available to illegals, you would expect that lesser-skilled individuals shut out of the labor market by low, often under-the-table wages would be in a position to take them. Sadly, blacks and Hispanics in this country and in Oklahoma are likely to be disproportionately represented among the lesser-skilled, so looking at those groups’ unemployment rates will serve as a useful proxy for my premise.

Here are the facts:

… newly released numbers for 2009 show the unemployment rate for black Oklahomans is 11.1 percent, compared with 5 percent for whites and 7.4 percent for Hispanics. In 2008, black unemployment in the state was 8.7 percent, while the rate for whites was 2.9 percent and the rate for Hispanics was 9 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Shannon Muchmore at the Tulsa World had a reaction that was sadly and predictably ignorant:

The unemployment rate for black people in Oklahoma is twice as high as the rate for white people, and Hispanics face a similar disparity that exists regardless of education, training or experience, data show.

Just a minute, Shannon. The 2.4% increase in the black unemployment rate from 2008 to 2009 was barely more than the 2.1% increase for whites; the “twice as high” degree of difference between the two rates (actually 2.2 times as high) was down from three times as high the year before. The unemployment rate for Hispanics went not up, but down, by 1.6%. Nationally, from December 2008 to December 2009 the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for blacks and Hispanics increased 4.1% and 3.5%, respectively.

I’d say this is evidence that lesser-skilled Oklahomans have been quite willing to take the “jobs that Americans (supposedly) won’t do.” While in the neighborhood, I’ll note that perhaps the knee-jerk elitist stereotypes about race- and ethnicity-based discrimination in the heartland need to be revisited.

If “1804″ isn’t the reason Oklahoma has vastly outperformed most of the rest of the country, someone will have to try to explain what is.

Not that those who oppose any kind of immigration enforcement legislation are impressed. In an April 28, 2010 Christian Science Monitor opinion piece (“Arizona immigration law: painful lessons from Oklahoma”), Sally Kohn rolled out this startling claim about “1804″:

One study suggests the bill led to an estimated 50,000 people fleeing Oklahoma and a 1.3 percent drop in economic output statewide. As a result, Oklahoma may well have incurred $1.8 billion in economic losses, just as it, like the rest of the nation, was bracing for recession.

Hmm, that’s funny, because Uncle Sam’s Bureau of Economic Analysis reports that the state’s economy grew by 2.7% in 2008, a performance that puts it in the top ten among all states in a year when the national economy only grew by 0.4%. Additionally, information from the Census Bureau shows that the state’s population increased by just under 75,000, or 2%, between July 2007 and July 2009, in line with the country as a whole. If those results are “painful,” I wonder how Ms. Kohn would characterize what’s going on in Michigan and California?

The Sooner State’s economic indicators are comparatively positive just about no matter where one looks. Per capita personal income in Oklahoma grew 2.8% between 2007 and 2009; nationally, it fell by 0.7%. The state’s already puny welfare caseload dropped by 11% in 2007 to under 19,000, and stayed there until June 2009. The number of SNAP/Food Stamp recipients in Oklahoma fell in both 2007 and 2008 by a combined 3.8% while rising 6.5% nationally. Loosened eligibility rules allowing those who don’t really need them and even college-aged children of the well-off to qualify have since made the SNAP/Food Stamp program an unreliable indicator of the true extent of poverty. Oklahoma does have a budget problem that bears watching, but so does the large majority of other states.

The aforementioned Ms. Kohn’s characterization of Oklahoma’s economy as “littered with crumbling farms and factories and aging populations who feel that any prospect of prosperity is passing them by” seems more than a little overwrought and offensively arrogant.

Since “1804″ passed, Oklahoma has not suffered nearly as much economically as most of the rest of the U.S. In fact, the state can fairly be described, especially on a relative basis, as prospering. Even before considering the reductions in crime the citizens of Arizona are so desperately seeking in their state’s new immigration enforcement measure, what the Sooner State has done seems well worth imitating elsewhere for pocketbook-related reasons alone.

As to the legal and moral dimensions of limiting illegal immigration, I would suggest that the hand-wringers first aim their critiques at other countries which deal much more harshly with trespassers — starting with Mexico.

From Jenny Sanford:

MAY 12, 2010; 11:02 AM ET

I have recently weathered the demise of a 20-year marriage. My former spouse, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, clearly lost sight of the values we had shared, values that formed the basis of our relationship. His ego blinded him to the consequences of the poor choices he was making. His public fall was quick and terrible for him, for us, for our children. But caught up in the drama of it all, I took the applicable truism of Proverbs 11:2 to heart: “When pride comes then comes disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom.”

I have worked hard on my own humility in the hopes I would come through wiser, stronger, and more grounded in my faith and spirituality. I didn’t always succeed in being humble and no doubt will come up short again. But I worked to remain focused on my family, friends and faith and in my darkest hours I clung for life to my values. I reminded myself daily to be the best that I can in God’s eyes and in light of who I know I can be. And, importantly, as He teaches, I worked to forgive. Indeed, I knew that peace and happiness for me and for my family could only come if I let forgiveness light the way. Each of us is answerable to God for our sins; I came to understand that passing my own judgment hurts only me.

If today’s headlines are to be believed, public figures sin now more than ever before and a person who seems too good to be true has something to hide. But, as Ecclesiastes wisely put it, there is nothing new “under the sun.” Sin itself is as old as our world; the Bible is filled with tales of kings and other spiritual or community leaders who fall precipitously from their places of power for their myriad sins. …

Go here for the rest of Ms. Sanford’s essay.

This is one of those “you know the ending, but someone has to take note anyway” media bias posts.

On Thursday, NewsBusters colleague Noel Sheppard revealed that Obama administration Attorney General Eric Holder had told an oversight hearing of the House Judiciary Committee the following about his knowledge of Arizona’s recently pass immigration law-enforcement measure:

I have not had a chance to, I’ve glanced at it. I have not read it.

… I have not really, I have not been briefed yet.

… I’ve only made, made the comments that I’ve made on the basis of things that I’ve been able to glean by reading newspaper accounts, obviously, looking at television, talking to people who are on the review panel, on the review team that are looking at the law.

It will surprise almost no one who visits this site that Holder’s admitted ignorance about a routinely misrepresented law — misrepresentations that have led to calls for boycotts of Arizona, a PC-obsessed cancellation of a girls high school basketball team’s hoop dreams, and hysterical hyperventilation at Holder’s Justice Department as well as by the President of the United States himself — has received very little establishment media attention.

There is one interesting exception to this at the Washington Post, where Jerry Markon hit Holder pretty hard. Here are a few paragraphs from Markon’s dispatch:

Holder is criticized for comments on Ariz. immigration law, which he hasn’t read

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has said that Arizona’s tough new immigration law could drive a wedge between police and immigrant communities. He has expressed concerns it could lead to racial profiling, and he has made it clear that his Justice Department is considering a lawsuit to block the legislation from taking effect.

But what Holder has not done, as least as of Thursday, is read the law: an admission that continued to draw criticism Friday from some talk-radio hosts and conservative Web sites.

The fuss began with a simple question from Rep. Ted Poe (R-Tex.) at a House Judiciary Committee hearing Thursday.

“Have you read the Arizona law?” Poe asked.

“I have not had a chance. I grant that I have not read it,” Holder acknowledged.

Poe, after helpfully pointing out that the 10-page law is “a lot shorter than” the Obama administration’s health-care overhaul bill, said he couldn’t understand “how you would have concerns about something being unconstitutional if you haven’t even read the law. It seems like you wouldn’t make a judgment about whether it violates civil right statutes, whether it violate federal preemption concepts, if you haven’t read the law.”

Holder said he based his public comments about the legislation on reading news reports, watching television and talking to Justice Department lawyers who are reviewing it. “I’ve not reached any conclusions as yet” about the law’s constitutionality, he said, adding that he will soon “spend a good evening reading that law.”

Before making too much of Markon’s mashup, readers should realize that it’s datelined 4:11 p.m. on Friday, May 14, just in time to be ignored, and that it seems not to have made it into Friday’s or Saturday’s WaPo print edition.

Elsewhere, it’s slim-to-none pickings:

• At the Associated Press’s main web site, a search on “Eric Holder Arizona” (not in quotes) returns nothing relevant.
• The same search at the New York Times returns nothing relevant. The two May 14 items only appear at the top of the paper’s search results because there’s a link to the 1966 Miranda v. Arizona ruling at those web pages. There is also nothing relevant at the Times’s Caucus blog or its Opinionator blog.
• A Google News Search for May 13-15 on “eric holder arizona immigration law read” (not in quotes; string was necessary to separate Holder’s immigration law comments from other unrelated items) returns 95 items. This is light coverage for an admission such as Holder’s, and the roster of the 95 contains very few establishment press outlets. One prominent exception, as usual, is Fox News. Another notable link is at Investors Business Daily where the paper calls for Holder to resign.

The betting here is that Holder isn’t going anywhere as long as there’s no pressure from the lapdog press, where an incompetence-betraying comment such as Holder’s would have reached front-page headline status at least 48 hours ago.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Note: This post originally appeared at the Washington Examiner’s OpinionZone and was teased here at BizzyBlog on Friday.

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I guess when your track record stinks to high heaven, it’s the only place to go to try to score campaign points.

Ohio Governor Ted Strickland, who has presided over the state since January 2007, during which time its unemployment rate has roughly doubled to its current 11%, decided yesterday that the issue Buckeye State voters will be most interested in when they go to the polls in the fall will be GOP challenger’s John Kasich’s eight-year employment at Lehman Brothers, which ended over 18 months ago.

As reported by Reginald Fields at the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

… the Democratic incumbent on Wednesday used his first major campaign speech of the year to go on the attack, painting a picture of former Republican Congressman John Kasich for voters. And the portrait was less than flattering.

… Strickland, who does not usually go negative in campaigns, nearly used his entire 25-minute speech to accuse Kasich of being an out-of-touch Wall Street tycoon whose most recent job was with Lehman Brothers, the failed banking giant whose 2008 collapse helped trigger a national recession.

And Strickland said Kasich is ducking media questions and trying to distance himself from his record in Congress for supporting trade agreements that hurt Ohio jobs before he went on to reap the rewards of Wall Street at Lehman from 2001 to 2008.

Lord have mercy. Setting aside Fields’ howler about how Strickland “does not usually go negative,” it’s as if Ohio’s current chief executive thinks that the race is for Governor of Lehman instead of Governor of Ohio.

In May of last year, here is how the Associated Press described John Kasich’s performance when he was last involved in national governance:

Kasich, a 9-term Congressman from Ohio, was the chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Budget Committee in 1997 that balanced the nation’s budget for the first time in more than 30 years. He said that budget paid down the largest amount of debt in American history.

Yes, the AP was observing the obvious, namely that Kasich was a major player in creating the flush federal budgets of fiscal 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2001.

This happened without tax increases. In fact, a major element of the federal government’s fiscal turnaround was a 1997 capital gains tax cut.

Ohio under Strickland has been reduced to begging the administration in Washington for a bailout. Even that wasn’t enough, as late last year (with the help of lapdog Republicans in the Ohio Senate), Strickland increased income taxes retroactive to January 1, while dishonestly portraying the exercise as a “tax cut delay.” Sadly but predictably, Ohio’s media played along.

During Strickland’s term, Buckeye State residents have also seen the personal information of hundreds of thousands disappear without a trace, chronically late financial reports, a faith-based initiatives director who was arrested and imprisoned for running a prostitution ring, and drug-dealing by inmates selected to help out at the Governor’s Mansion. In true Clintonian tradition, we’ve even seen the governor tell us that a subordinate wasn’t really lying under oath when she was really lying under oath.

As to the relevance of Strickland’s “argument” about Kasich’s stint at Lehman, the GOP candidate has frequently said, “Blaming me for Lehman Brothers is like blaming a car dealer in Zanesville for the collapse of General Motors.”

If I were Ted, I’d be attacking Kasich too, because no other credible arguments are available. “Kasich-Lehman” is probably all we’ll hear until November. It’s hard to see how it will work.

A few weeks ago (covered at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), the Associated Press tried to pass off a poll it had conducted with its partner GfK Roper Public Affairs and Media (inexplicably held for 40 days) as showing that “Americans (are) shifting to US cars.”

Actually looking at the poll’s detailed results revealed that Americans are “shifting to US cars” made by Ford, and either shifting away or staying away from those made by the two wards of the state known as Government/General Motors and Chrysler.

They’re still at it, just not quite as blatantly. A brief AP item yesterday reported that automotive residual data collector Automotive Lease Guide’s Spring 2010 Perceived Quality Study (PDF here) had shown a significant decline for Toyota and significant improvements at Ford and Kia.

Guess who AP “forgot” to mention? When you see the graphic results, you will see who, and instinctively understand why.

Here’s a portion of AP’s unbylined report:

Here’s what the AP “somehow” forgot:

Gee, AP could have noted that GM’s and Chrysler’s brands have mostly improved. Unfortunately, that would have also meant noting that Chrysler’s primary brands now own the basement (having been passed by Kia), and that GM or Chrysler brands and former brands occupy 8 of the bottom 11 slots. Better to pass on saying anything about the still-foundering efforts of President Obama’s car czars, I suppose.

No, there isn’t a separate article about GM or Chrysler. The results of an AP main site search on “Automotive Lease Guide” (not in quotes) shows the story discussed in this post is the only one.

ALG also published a similar chart for luxury vehicles (Page 3 at the PDF) the AP chose not to cover. It shows that Toyota’s Lexus brand has dropped six points in the perceived quality in the past six months (ALG does its survey two times a year), and has dropped from first to third, closely trailing Mercedes and BMW.

All in all, AP was mighty selective. Well, at least a complimentary call-out to Ford beats what the wire service did a few weeks ago.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

From Fatima, Portugal:

May 14, 2010 / 09:01 am

Fr. Federico Lombardi, the spokesman for the Vatican, said it was not a surprise that hundreds of thousands of people were in Fatima for Pope Benedict’s Mass at Fatima yesterday. He recognized a “vitality” in the response and commented on the Holy Father’s observation that the prophetic mission of Fatima is not complete.

Estimates put the number of pilgrims in Fatima for Wednesday morning’s Mass at around half a million between those who filled the enormous esplanade that sprawls before the Church of the Most Holy Trinity and the tens of thousands of others who joined in from the adjacent streets.

“The crowd of about 500,000 faithful that have participated this morning in the Mass celebrated by the Pope on the esplanade of the Shrine of Fatima is not a surprise,” said Fr. Lombardi in an Avvenire newspaper report. He added, “for the Christian people, Papal trips are always occasion for a great mobilization.”

Fr. Lombardi noted that there were more people there than in the times of John Paul II, who also was joined by thousands of pilgrims on May 13, 2000 when he celebrated the beatification Mass for Jacinta and Francisco and on two other occasions.

The Vatican spokesman pointed out that the recently surfaced sex abuse scandal could have led to the perception that the vitality of the Church and people’s attention to the Pope had be been “obscured.”

“But this did not happen,” he said, “this vitality is not in crisis because of the discussions of months past, and the fact that the force of the faith manifests itself in such an evident way is very encouraging.”

Included in the Pope’s homily during Mass was the observation that the prophetic mission of Fatima is not complete because Mary’s call to the faithful to offer themselves to God for the reparation of sins and conversion of sinners continues to be relevant. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

Today was a same-old, same-old day in California.

For the second year in a row, a state official has proposed eliminating the former Golden State’s “welfare-to-work” program, which the rest of us know as “welfare,” or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). Last year, it was left to a spokesman for the state’s Department of Finance to bring out the idea. This year, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger fronted it himself.

As has been the case for the almost four years I’ve been following the situation, the press once again universally failed to provide anything resembling context. If it did, people would understand that this is a story about a decade-long shocking level of theoretically well-intentioned waste (the cynical observation would be that the good intentions are tempered by the likelihood that dependent voters are overwhelmingly Democratic voters).

The as up to date as possible context (through September 30 of last year) for recipients and families, the latest available government data; some estimation was required because certain data fields are blank) is this:

• Though California has roughly 12% of the nation’s population, the state’s 1.36 million TANF recipients as of September 30 of last year represented 32% of the nation’s welfare caseload. That’s up from 25% in March of 2006.
• The percentage of Californians on welfare (roughly 3.75%, up from less than 3% in March 2006) was almost four times higher than that of the rest of the country (roughly 0.95%). In Illinois (of all places), the percentage of the population on welfare was 0.43% in September of last year.
• Press reports today indicating that the welfare population is 1.4 million and that Schwarzenegger’s proposal would affect “about 1 million children” indicate that the caseload has continued climbing out of control in the intervening months (where’s the “to work” part of the equation?).
• There still is no rational justification as to why the state’s caseload is so out of whack. The bad economy doesn’t explain it, because basket case Michigan’s caseload is less than 2% of the population. It isn’t immigration, because Arizona and Florida’s welfare caseloads are under control.

(Programming note: Yours truly fully realizes there are other “welfare” programs. I plan to address them in the coming weeks, because they’re exploding dangerously on a national scale.)

An evening dispatch by the Associated Press’s Judy Lin and every other press report I located made no mention of the state’s ridiculous caseload. Here are a few paragraphs from Lin’s report:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Friday called for eliminating California’s welfare-to-work program, one of the deep cuts he proposed to close a $19 billion budget deficit in the coming fiscal year.

Slashing the welfare program would affect 1.4 million people, two-thirds of them children.

… Among the options Schwarzenegger presented is eliminating CalWORKS, the state’s welfare-to-work program. The program provides a maximum $694 monthly cash assistance for families and helps single mothers with child care and job training.

Gina Jackson, a single mother who lives in Fremont in the San Francisco Bay area, said she would not be able finish her college degree in political and social science without the state’s assistance. She currently receives about $1,000 a month to cover after-school care for two of her four children.

“I certainly can’t take my kids to school with me every single day,” said Jackson, 45, who was laid off from her job as an administrative assistant two years ago.

Other publications covering the welfare aspect of the Governor’s announcement included these:

• The Sacramento Bee, where a county official told the paper’s reporters that, “It’s the remake of ‘Slum Dog Millionaire’ in California.”
• The San Jose Mercury News where one finds Democrats still harping on eliminating “corporate tax breaks” as the solution.
• The San Francisco Chronicle, where an opponent described the proposal as “an all-out scorched earth campaign.”
• The Los Angeles Times, which of course provided a provocative title (“Schwarzenegger’s budget deals blows to the poor”)

As noted, there was not a word about the bloated caseload anywhere.

It’s long past time to stop considering this journalistic failure to provide meaningful context a mere oversight.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

The “Can You Top This?” outrages continue ….

I don’t know why I should be surprised about anything Eric Holder says or does, except the actual admission (also at Hot Air) about his familiarity with Arizona’s immigration-enforcement law:

“I have not had a chance to, I’ve glanced at it. I have not read it.”

“… I’ve only made, made the comments that I’ve made on the basis of things that I’ve been able to glean by reading newspaper accounts,” (hopelessly biased people who also more than likely haven’t actually read the law) …

“… obviously, looking at television,” (ditto) …

“… talking to people who are on the review panel, on the review team that are looking at the law.” (politically correct appointees who wouldn’t dare say the law is okay in a group setting lest it harm their professional advancement)

So the nation’s politically correct “opinion leaders” are conducting a persecution of a sovereign state over an 18-page bill the nation’s Attorney General (and its President, who couldn’t keep his more than likely uninformed mouth shut either) hasn’t even read?

Maybe someone should ask Highland Park, Illinois school officials who unilaterally decided that its girls high school basketball team couldn’t make an already planned trip to Arizona if they have read the bill … under oath.

It’s here.

Yours truly’s new affiliation with the Washington Examiner is a pretty cool development.

OpinionZone is the paper’s multi-author blog. It has been in operation for over a year, and in that time has become an important part of the ongoing national discussion.

I appreciate James Dellinger’s invitation to participate, and the referral to the opportunity I received from a gentlemen at another web site. I expect that a good time will be had by all — except, perhaps, the objects of our criticism and scorn, including the aforementioned Strickland.

It’s a little disorienting to see one’s name on the same page with long-time luminaries like Mark Tapscott and Mark Hemingway, but I promise to work on getting used to it. :–>

I will usually mirror Examiner blog posts here at BizzyBlog about 48 hours after their initial appearance. So the one above will show up here tomorrow afternoon (link obviously won’t work until then).

It’s here.

It will go up here at BizzyBlog on Sunday morning (link won’t work until then) after the blackout expires.

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Background:

The column builds on a number of posts from 2-3 years ago concerning “1804,” the Sooner State’s immigration law-enforcement measure.

• May 19, 2007 — “Oklahoma’s Brand of Immigration Reform Barely Makes News; Guess Why?” The press mostly ignored what the state was doing, possibly because Congress and the Bush administration were attempting to push slow-motion illegal-immigrant amnesty on the rest of the nation, and didn’t want the rest of us to know that the really is a consensus for enforcing the law, controlling the borders, and keeping people who are here illegally from taking jobs from U.S. citizens.
• January 10, 2008 — “USAT Report on Okla. Immigration Law Impact Heavy on Anecdotes, Light on Facts and Stats.” It critiqued a USA Today item that wanted us to believe that work wouldn’t get done because illegals had been chased away. In my post, I noted that “… an admittedly cursory review of statistics at the state’s Department of Human Services, indicates that Food Stamp, Medicaid, and other program participants and costs had been growing significantly for several years until the spring of 2007.” 1804 passed in May of 2007 and became effective in November.
• April 22, 2008 — “Oklahoma Unemployment Is Way Down. Will Media Look into Why?” If anyone has, I’ve missed it.
• April 23, 2008 — “More on Oklahoma’s Employment Situation: A Graphic I Wanted to Steal ….” The graphic shows how Oklahoma’s unemployment rate went down in late 2007 and early 2008, while the rest of the states, virtually without exception, started to see their unemployment rates rise. The nationwide rise that turned into a rout once the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) Economy started up in June of 2008, creating the recession As Normal People Define It that began in that year’s third quarter.

At the time, the only thing one could say without lots of investigation was that there were a lot pretty interesting coincidences.

Two years later, Oklahoma is clearly outperforming the rest of the country. Absent any other acceptable explanation, it would seem that 1804 deserves a large share of the credit.

Go to the column for the details.

From the Canada Press:

Harper rejects UN chief’s plea to make climate change G20 agenda’s top priority

Canada brushed aside a direct public demand Wednesday by the visiting United Nations chief and reiterated that it will not make climate change a priority agenda item when it hosts the G20 summit next month.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper stuck to his G20 plan to keep the summit’s focus squarely on the global economic recovery after he met UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in his Parliament Hill office.

Ban said he wanted climate change front and centre on the agenda when Canada hosts the G20 summit next month in Toronto. Ban also exhorted the Conservatives to live up to the greenhouse-gas reduction targets Canada negotiated under the Kyoto Protocol.

“Canada has a special role and special responsibility to play. That is what I am going to emphasize here,” Ban told about 500 diplomats, civil society leaders and academics in a packed hotel ballroom before meeting Harper.

“I urge Canada to comply fully with the targets set out by the Kyoto Protocol. You can strengthen your mitigation target for the future.”

Harper has rejected the Kyoto Protocol, which was negotiated by the previous Liberal government and calls for a six per cent reduction of greenhouse gases by 2020 based on 1990 levels.

Recall that it was Bonkers Ban Ki Moon who last August predicted the end of the world as we know it if the Copenhagen Summit didn’t result in a climate change treaty raid on the wealth of first-world countries:

As we move toward Copenhagen in December, we must “Seal a Deal” on climate change that secures our common future. I’m glad that the Chairman of the forum and many other speakers have used my campaign slogan “Seal the Deal” in Copenhagen. I won’t charge them loyalty. Please use this “Seal the Deal” as widely as possible, as much as you can. We must seal the deal in Copenhagen for the future of humanity.

We have just four months. Four months to secure the future of our planet.

Well, four months is up. Actually, it’s nine. I guess the window has closed. How ’bout we just sit back and enjoy it?

But actually since then, the ClimateGate scandal has revealed that the entire enterprise known as global warming/climate change “science” is a flat-out fraud. No credible scientific basis remains for warmers’ claims. None. It’s over. But Bonkers Ban Ki and his fellow globalarmists won’t get off the playing field.

Bonkers Ban Ki acts as if nothing’s changed. It’s time for him and others who have seen the foundation of global warming disappear to get through their period of global mourning and get on with doing something useful.

In a Wall Street Journal column this morning that should be read in full, Daniel Henninger looks over the ocean and describes where we’re heading under the person HillBuzz likes to call “Dr. Utopia”:

One of the constant criticisms of Barack Obama’s first year is that he’s making us “more like Europe.” But that’s hard to define and lacks broad political appeal. Until now.

Any U.S. politician purporting to run the presidency of the United States should be asked why the economic policies he or she is proposing won’t take us where Europe arrived this week.

In an astounding moment, to avoid the failure of little, indulgent, profligate Greece, the European Union this week pledged nearly $1 trillion to inject green blood into Europe’s economic vampires.

For Americans, this has been a two-week cram course in what not to be if you hope to have a vibrant future. What was once an unfocused criticism of Mr. Obama and the Democrats, that they are nudging America toward a European-style social-market economy, came to awful life in the panicked, stricken faces of Europe’s leadership: Merkel, Sarkozy, Brown, Papandreou. They look like that because Europe has just seen the bond-market devil.

… Angus Maddison, the eminent European historian of world economic development who died days before Europe’s debt crisis, wrote in 2001: “The most disturbing aspect of West European performance since 1973 has been the staggering rise in unemployment. In 1994-8 the average level was nearly 11% of the labor force. This is higher than the depressed years of the 1930s.”

Whoa. Stop. Right. There.

Grasp what is in the bolded sentence. ….

Read it again, just to be sure, and never forget it.

What Maddison is telling us by inference is that Europe during the Herbert Hoover/Franklin Delano Roosevelt Depression Era far outperformed the USA in keeping its people at work.

As is somewhat commonly known, US unemployment stayed unacceptably high throughout the 1930s despite (really because) of everything Hoover and then FDR did:

By June 1937, the recovery—during which the unemployment rate had fallen to 12 percent—was over. Two policies, labor cost increases and a contractionary monetary policy, caused the economy to contract further. Although the contraction ended around June 1938, the ensuing recovery was quite slow. The average rate of unemployment for all of 1938 was 19.1 percent, compared with an average unemployment rate for all of 1937 of 14.3 percent. Even in 1940, the unemployment rate still averaged 14.6 percent.

Every unemployment figure cited is far worse than the “under 11%” of 1930s Europe, which with the exception of Germany was not embracing doctrinaire socialism.

In other words, we’ve been here before. It was awful. Only World War II and FDR’s passing saved us from his central-planning nightmare.

As has been noted at this blog many times, they should have known better, but many if not most of those who supported Barack Obama in 2008 did not believe they were opting to put the worst aspects of FDR on steroids and a not-too-distant circling of the economic drain in their future. But that’s really the deal they made.

Five months of election results and their offshoots — just for starters, see defeated Congressman Allan Mollohan, retiring Congressman David Obey, retiring Congressman Bart Stupak, new Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown, elected New Jersey Governor Christie, elected Virginia Governor McDonnell — have made it crystal clear that many of those who opted for the hopey-changey mush they were offered in 2008 have realized that they were baited and switched into 21st century Euro-style socialism.

Actually, it’s even worse than that, as I wrote in March in detailing ObamaCare’s subsidy structure, which includes de facto marginal “tax” rates of over 100% (see the purple boxes in the graphic on the right after clicking to enlarge it). I called it “far more extreme than virtually anything Europe’s most brazen socialists have attempted since World War II” — because it is.

This time, a World War won’t save us. Going back to Henninger:

Stagnation isn’t death. Economies don’t die. Greece proves that. They slow down. Europe’s low growth rates allow its populations to pretend that real, productive work is being done somewhere by someone. But new jobs are created slowly, if at all. Younger workers lose heart.

Economic stagnation is a kind of purgatory. Once there, it’s not clear how you get out. The economist Douglass North, in his 1993 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, said that one of the vexing problems of his discipline is, “Why do economies once on a path of growth or stagnation tend to persist?” Japan also seems unable to free itself from stagnation.

I have an answer to Douglass North’s question that I believe will stand up to scrutiny: The dependents and rent-seekers in a statist/socialist economy won’t let go of their freebies and privileges without a (sometimes violent) fight, and it’s easier for politicians to try to find any way they can to accommodate them. Witness the reaction on the streets of Greece.

We’ve already gone too far down the Greecey 21st century European path. We must stop it before it boxes us into persistent stagnation, demoralizes our young, and condemns future generations to mediocrity and misery.