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.

STEVEN HAYWARD: Ohio Class Notes: Hayek Is Overtaking Keynes. “It appears to me that Hayek’s vindication is slowly proceeding.”

IN AMERICA, WE HAVE ATTACKWATCH.COM. In Mexico, a deadly threat to ‘scandal mongers’ using social media.