BEWARE the Downgrade Deniers.

PAUL RAHE: Chickens Coming Home To Roost.

IN THE MAIL: From Christopher Heard (Ed.), Johnny Depp Photo Album.

BRIAN MICKLETHWAIT ON LETTING THE POLICE DO THEIR JOB:

One of the more depressing things about these riots is the way that the only thing that the Police can think of to say to us non-looters and non-arsonists is: “Don’t join in” and “Let us handle it”. If the bad guys start to torch your house, let them get on with it. If they attack your next door neighbour, don’t join in on his side. Run away. Let the barbarians occupy and trash whatever territory they pick on and steal or destroy whatever property they want to.

There was a fascinating impromptu TV interview with some young citizens of Clapham last night, not “experts”, just regular citizens, one of whom stated the opposite policy. Law abiding persons should get out of their houses, he said, en masse, and be ready to defend them.

The trouble with “letting the Police do their job” is that in the precise spot in which you happen to live, or used to live, their job probably won’t start, if it ever does start, for about a week. In the meantime, letting the Police do their job means letting the damn looters and arsonists do their job, without anyone laying a finger on them, laying a finger on them being illegal. This is a doomed policy. If most people are compelled by law to be only neutral bystanders in a war between themselves and barbarism, barbarism wins. The right to, at the very least, forceful self defence must now be insisted upon.

Indeed.

Plus: The riots are not about “cuts.” No, but the bureaucrats being cut hope you’ll think so, so that they can profit from the violence.

UPDATE: Richard Fernandez:

Since no police force has the numbers to be everywhere at once, it maintains order through the force of its name, the power of the uniform. This was once known as ‘prestige’; today it is better known as ‘legitimacy’. Although as insubstantial as air it is as vital as oxygen. Without it things become very dificult. Once the authorities begin lose their prestige they must rely ever more heavily on force, of which there is never, ever enough.

In one sense legitimacy is the fiction on which society is based. It is to government what confidence is to a bank.

As he notes, the British government has been undermining its own legitimacy for decades. As I’ve noted before, maintaining a sufficiency of moral capital is at least as important as maintaining sufficient financial capital, but our elites are oblivious to the importance of both, since paying attention to such concerns might limit their short-term freedom of action.

MORE: Can’t stop the riot, but they’ll stop the cleanup: “Local people arrived in Peckham High Street armed with cleaning equipment to help restore order in the aftermath of the riots. About 20 residents with dustpans and brushes offered small businesses help cleaning up their destroyed stores. But people waiting to clean up Clapham Junction have been told they cannot help because of health and safety issues.”

MORE STILL: Brendan O’Neill: A Mob Made By The Welfare State. “This is not a political rebellion; it is a mollycoddled mob, a riotous expression of carelessness for one’s own community. And as a left-winger, I refuse to celebrate nihilistic behaviour that has a profoundly negative impact on working people’s lives. . . . So this street violence was largely ignited by the excesses of the welfare state and was then intensified by the discombobulation of the police state. In this sense, it reveals something very telling, and quite depressing, about modern Britain.”

STILL MORE: Victor Davis Hanson on paralytic Western society:

It is fascinating to see how postmodern Western societies react to wide-scale rioting, looting, and thuggery aimed at innocents. In Britain, politicians contemplate the use of water cannons as if they were nuclear weapons; and here the mayor of Philadelphia calls on rappers to appeal to youth to help ease the flash-mobbing that has a clear racial component to it (is the attorney general’s Civil Rights Division investigating?). . . .

We seem able to admit that massive federal and state entitlements have created a sense of dependency, a loss of self-respect and initiative, and a breakdown of the family, yet we still seem to fear that trimming the subsidies would lead to some sort of cold-turkey hyper-reaction. We assume that society is to blame for disaffected youth and therefore are hesitant to use commensurate force to quell the violence or even to make it clear that perpetrators are responsible for their own conduct. Yet at some point — when the violence reaches middle-class communities or, in serial fashion, downtown or suburban stores — we likewise assume that sufficient force will be used. Sociological exegesis will go out the window. Reality has a way of dispelling such cognitive luxuries.

The gods of the copybook headings will have their way in the end.

Plus, from Andrew Stuttaford: “The British state lectures, hectors and micro-manages the law-abiding. When it comes to defending them, it is, all too often, AWOL.”

Related: Hacker News: 5000% Increase In Sale Of Baseball Bats On Amazon.co.uk.

FINALLY: Reader Barbara Van Horn sends this perennial Internet favorite. Perhaps some British policymakers will take a lesson, though I very much doubt it.

F.I.R.E.: Widener Law School, Dean Ammons Continue to Embarrass Themselves in Professor Connell Case. Indeed they do. It’ll take Widener’s reputation a decade to recover from this, if Widener’s even still around in a decade. . . .

THIS ISN’T A VERY RADICAL MOVE: Texas Gov. Perry supports adult stem cells after undergoing procedure.

ER, A TIN BOX BURIED IN YOUR BACKYARD? Where To Park Your Cash.

BYRON YORK: Bachmann’s Political Touch Turns Doubter Into Fan. “Anyone who doubts Michele Bachmann’s talents as a hands-on politician didn’t see her performance here Monday. In an otherwise unremarkable town hall meeting, Bachmann turned a potentially embarrassing encounter with a grouchy voter into an opportunity to win the most treasured political commodity in Iowa these days: a vote in Saturday’s Republican straw poll.”

You can’t win the White House with hands-on skills. But you can win Iowa. And New Hampshire.

THE NEW RELATIONSHIP TREND: “STAYOVERS.” “According to the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, an increasing number of coupled twenty-somethings have struck the perfect balance between casual dating and cohabitation. The ‘stayover trend’ involves spending three to seven nights per week together while maintaining separate homes. This relationship model is popular among college students and seems to satisfy the potentially conflicting desires to remain romantically attached while pursuing academic and career interests. The schema also appreciates the difficulty associated with splitting up once a couple shares a home.” But will this trend survive the economic suckage?

UPDATE: A reader emails: “‘Stayovers’ are also very popular with people that have spousal support that ends with marriage or cohabitation. Why not keep the safety-net of your own place when someone else is paying for it?”

TODAY ONLY: Panasonic Internet Security Camera for $89.99.

DANA MILBANK: “A familiar air of indecision preceded President Obama’s pep talk to the nation.”

Plus this: “It’s not exactly fair to blame Obama for the rout: Almost certainly, the markets ignored him. And that’s the problem: The most powerful man in the world seems strangely powerless, and irresolute, as larger forces bring down the country and his presidency. . . . That is the enduring mystery of Obama’s presidency. He delivered his statement on the economy beneath a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, but that was as close as he came to forceful leadership.” It’s as if, in some sort of national spasm of carelessness and self-deceit, we elected a guy entirely unqualified by experience or personal characteristics to the single most important office in the land, to serve during a period of unusual troubles that he was not equipped to address.

Nice to see that even the press is starting to notice.

UPDATE: Obama In The Headlights.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Is Obama Smart?

Plus: Obama’s penchant for speeches now sounding hollower by the word. I’m definitely sensing a shift in the tone here. . . .

Hey, they once loved Jimmy Carter, too. Until they didn’t. But, as is worth repeating, at this point a Carter rerun is a best-case scenario.

MORE: Reader Robert Burnham emails that an MSM preference cascade may be underway:

I think this week and last will be seen as when Obama lost the MSM. His inexperience and political incompetence have become too obvious to ignore, even for them. He’s become a liability to the Party. They won’t turn on him viciously because they invested so heavily in him before. But we’ll see a chilling of tone in regard to him, and simultaneously a warmer response toward Democrats who appear more electable.

Another matter is that Democrats looking farther down the road may actually not want to jump into 2012, figuring that a primary fight against a sitting president will be fratricidal to the Party — and perhaps also that a political reversal next year has become highly probable anyway.

Yeah. Unless there’s a grudge involved.

TWEET OF THE DAY: “If the Tea Party is to blame for the downgrade, the doctor is to blame for your lung cancer.”

RICHARD EPSTEIN: Four Reasons S&P Got It Right. “The clear lesson to the S&P analysts is that entitlement spending remains on autopilot.”

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: An Anatomy Of European Nonsense. “I rarely comment on the op-eds of others. And I try not to use ad hominem attacks in lieu of argument. Usually I reply forcefully on the principle of retaliation rather than preemption. So I hesitate to devote space to a single essay. But in the case of an article by one Jakob Augstein in the recent issue of Der Spiegel I’ll make an exception, since his asinine views are emblematic of the poverty of thought that now is so evident among the European Left.”

PRESIDENT DOWNGRADE: A reader sends this image for the new era. I think it works! (Bumped from yesterday).

GORDON CHANG: Obama Can’t Say the Word “China.”

A READER RECOMMENDS REREADING The Gods Of The Copybook Headings.

FROM GERARD VAN DER LEUN, A PREDICTION: When Fall 2012 rolls around the killer question in the Presidential debates will be…. “Are you better off now than you were a month ago?”

KEITH HENNESSEY: The debt limit threat was undesirable, necessary, and effective.

Congressional Republicans’ legislative tactic created temporary liquidity risk that is now gone. That threat was undesirable but unavoidable, given their policy goal and the inaction of other policymakers.

The U.S. economy was weak before the debt limit battle, throughout that battle, and still is weak today. The past few months’ legislative tactics did not cause March’s big drop in consumer confidence. These tactics did not cause U.S. GDP to grow by only 0.4% in the first quarter of this year.

The increased liquidity risk that resulted from those tactics was resolved last Tuesday when the President signed the new law. Problems in Europe, S&P’s downgrade and future solvency risk, and fears of a double-dip recession are better explanations for current market turmoil, not fear of liquidity risk that was eliminated six days ago.

The President is trying to attribute everything bad in the economy and financial markets to a temporary legislative tactic of the opposing party. While this is politically clever, I cannot see how he can back up this claim. Does the President think that 8-12 weeks of fear of a possible bad outcome that came not to pass caused “enormous damage to our economy and the world’s?”

At this point, he’ll try anything. Plus this:

I disagree with the President when he says “the gridlock in Washington over the last several months has not been constructive.” That at times raucous battle resulted in a new law that promises to cut government spending and deficits by $2.1 T over the next decade. That battle resulted in a negotiating structure and a fallback sequester to achieve at least another $1.2 T of deficit reduction. That battle resulted in a negotiated list of hundreds of billions of dollars of additional entitlement spending cuts that I presume will form the foundation of that second stage process. That battle resulted in the President sticking his fiscal toe in the water on Medicare spending and CPI. That battle caused the President to start talking positively about the Bowles-Simpson recommendations that he had previously ignored.

These results are big for Washington but small relative to the remaining underlying problem left to be solved. Had everyone gone along quietly and politely with a clean debt limit increase, even this limited progress would be absent.

If we had a better political class, the threat wouldn’t have been needed. But if we had a better political class, we wouldn’t be in this fix.

JAMES BUCHANAN 2.0? Comparing Obama to Jimmy Carter May be Unfair to Carter.

ON THE LONDON RIOTS, DONALD GATELY WRITES THAT IT’S TIME TO LINK THEODORE DALRYMPLE: “On Amazon, the Kindle editions of ‘Life at the Bottom’ and ‘Our Culture, What’s Left of It’ are marked down to just $5 in the Kindle editions. I just took the opportunity to grab both.”

IN IOWA, HERMAN CAIN SLAMS OBAMA: “That’s not leadership!”

AT AMAZON, markdowns on office electronics.

WITH THE RECALL TOMORROW, HERE’S A WISCONSIN UPDATE: New Wisconsin collective bargaining law will save Milwaukee millions in health-care costs.

INSIDER INFORMATION? Who ‘made $10bn on 10/1 bet that U.S. credit rating would be downgraded’?