You’ll remember the ironically-named Essential Air Service program from the FAA extension debate. The $200 million program was one of two issues on which Senate Democrats refused to budge, opting to suspend infrastructure spending and revenue generation rather than to let Republicans cut subsidies for 13 airports. Finally a compromise was struck under which Republicans would formally eliminate the program — because Senate Democrats couldn’t really defend paying for empty planes to fly into empty rural airports — but Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood would be allowed to very quietly waive the cuts. Guess how that went.

The Associated Press followed up on the story today, using the town of Ely, Nevada as an illustration. There are plenty of days when the airport gets planes with exactly zero passengers, and across the entire year flights average 1 or 2 passengers per flight. Last year exactly 227 passengers departed from the Ely airport terminals, with each passenger paying between $70 and $90 for their heavily-subsidized one-way tickets. The difference between the full price and what each passenger paid was left for taxpayers to pick up. Average price per ticket: $4,107.

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More than a few commentators argue that Newt Gingrich helped himself during last night’s debate by his feisty attacks on Fox’s Chris Wallace and Bret Baier. Maybe, but I rather doubt it. The confrontations appeared to me to be defensive and even contrived, the kind of thing a poorly performing candidate does when he’s in search of creating a memorable moment. It was a pale imitation of Ronald Reagan’s “I am paying for this microphone” comments in 1980.

What’s not clear to me is why questions about Gingrich’s campaign meltdown qualify and his impossible-to-follow positions on Libya qualify as “gotcha questions”? The answer is: They don’t. Gingrich should not be imitating Sarah Palin when it comes to his attacks on the press.

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Six years ago, I penned a piece for the Middle East Quarterly about Turkey’s “Green Money” problem, basically putting pen to paper about a problem which Turkish journalists, politicians, and economists all whispered about, but which because of the chill on press freedom in Turkey, could not write: Basically, billions of dollars from Persian Gulf states and financiers had flooded into Turkey illegally and appeared to be funding the ruling Islamist party and the pet projects of its leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Alas, it seems the problem continues. According to the Turkish press, almost $10 billion in unexplained money entered the Turkish economy in the first six months of the year. Alas, with no more separation of power in Turkey, such discrepancies can no longer be investigated. Some of the money might have gone to give the ruling party a competitive advantage over its competitors, other money might have been used to pay off judges and prosecutors, and still others might have gone to the prime minister’s favorite Islamist causes.

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Chris Christie is attracting some grudging respect from New Jersey residents for his efforts to rein in state spending and his tough approach to this year’s budget. His approval rating among registered voters is at 50 percent—the first time his approval has hit that milestone. Among all New Jersey residents, his approval stands at 48 percent.

Those numbers are up from when Christie revealed his budget plan this spring. According to Monmouth University, which conducted this poll as well, in May Christie’s approval/disapproval was 46/49. His approval has increased by four points while his disapproval has decreased by eight points, to 41 percent.

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During the course of the debt ceiling debate, Obamacare, the largest expansion of government-funded entitlements was kept off the table by the president and the Democrats. But it appears that Obama’s signature legislation may be on its way to the scrapheap anyway. Yet another federal appeals court has ruled that the individual mandate that is at the core of President Obama’s healthcare legislation is unconstitutional. The decision by the 11^th Circuit Court of Appeals today in Atlanta that all Americans must buy health insurance or face penalties makes it even more certain that the legality of Obamacare will wind up being decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Though the 11^th Circuit decision did not go as far as Florida’s U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson’s ruling this was a crucial victory for Obamacare critics.  Though other courts have ruled against the mandate, this was the first time a judge appointed by a Democrat has voted to strike it down. In the 2-1-majority decision, Judge Frank Hull, who was nominated by President Clinton, cast one of the two votes against the mandate.

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For months, President Obama has been urging Congress to approve three pending free-trade agreements, which are pretty much the only constructive job-creating proposal he’s recommended so far.

“Right now congress can advance a set of trade agreements that would allow American businesses to sell more of their goods and services to countries in Asia and South America,” Obama said at a press conference back in June.

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A delegation of Democratic members of Congress met with Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas yesterday and received a blunt message about his vision for the state he hopes to lead. If he gets the independent Palestinian he says he wants, it will have no Jewish settlements.

This demand for an ethnically cleansed Palestine would mean the forced removal of all Jews living in the territories. Since he is calling for that state to exist in all of the territory of the West Bank, Gaza and the part of Jerusalem that was illegally occupied by Jordan from 1949 to 1967, that would mean in theory the eviction of over a half a million Jews to accommodate his ambition.

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This article in National Journal is, for Obama supporters everywhere, depressing.

Perhaps nothing sums up the precariousness of President Obama’s reelection chances better than a Quinnipiac Poll released on Thursday morning. In “the most heavily Democratic large state” (in the estimation of National Journal’s Almanac of American Politics), 49 percent of voters disapprove of the job the president is doing, while only 45 percent approve–the first time that Obama has received a negative score in New York, according to Quinnipiac.

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The non-war against the Qaddafi regime in Libya continues to languish. Feuding among the rebels that led to the killing of their military commander, Gen. Abdel Fatah Younis, has further put off the day when Moammar Qaddafi will finally have to yield power. It hardly helps that President Obama, after getting the U.S. involved in this conflict, has taken such a laid-back attitude that he seems barely to notice that we are at war at all. Nevertheless the likelihood is that Qaddafi will have to step down sooner or later, and it is important to plan for that day.

Thus it is encouraging to see the rebels’ National Transitional Council drawing up plans for administering a post-Qaddafi state. The key challenge—as it was in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other states were dictatorial regimes were toppled—will be maintaining order. The rebel government will obviously have an important role to play in this task but it is doubtful that it will have sufficient resources, at least not right away. It is therefore incumbent on NATO states that have been waging war on Qaddafi to make plans to send in a stabilization force after he is gone.
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I regularly work with American serviceman either preparing for deployment or in the early phase of their time away. It is hard for anyone to be away from their families for long. In my most recent work, I met a sailor who left a two-week-old new born at home, and could not talk about it without tearing up. One of the most moving experiences I have witnessed, however, was by chance: the return of soldiers at Camp Dodge, near Des Moines. Seeing the soldiers march amidst bagpipers in to a hall in which their families were sitting was impressive: To see little kids break from the pack to run to their moms and dads and the true happiness of their reunions was truly emotional.

Sitting at an airport lounge earlier today, I saw the tail end of a video on television about a returning army major who surprised his wife at a ball game in Mississippi. Unbeknownst to his wife, he arranged for his wife to throw out the first pitch, but he had switched places with the catcher. I googled the reunion so I could see the full clip and found the video here.

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Rick Perry hasn’t even officially entered the race yet but David Axelrod is already taking some preemptive strikes at his jobs record, Politico reports. Over the past two years, half of all national job creation has taken place in Texas, so the White House is right to be nervous. The Democratic talking point on Perry – which has already been gaining some traction in the media — is that the majority of the job growth was due to federal spending, not Perry’s policies.

On the CBS Early Show, Axelrod fired the Obama campaign’s first shot:

”I don’t think many people would attribute it to the leadership of the governor down there,” he said of jobs growth, citing federal spending on oil production and the military.

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In late 2007, three months before he would even go on to win the Iowa caucuses, Mike Huckabee was so popular among Christian conservative voters that he was encouraged to run a third-party campaign backed by Christian groups. Ironically, when Huckabee declined the invitation, he said it would split the vote and only help get Hillary Clinton elected (that’s how early in the process this was).

In January 2008, Huckabee won the Iowa caucuses and launched an energetic but ill-funded campaign that ultimately fell short of his goal. His support from Christian conservatives, however, suggested his endorsement in future elections would be a much sought-after feather in the cap of Republican candidates. While Huckabee’s endorsement in this year’s race for the GOP nomination is unlikely to come for a while, his voters and supporters, the Washington Post finds, are up for grabs:

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I’ve developed an interest in President Obama’s speeches not because they are eloquent or uplifting — they are neither — but because of what they reveal about his emotional state of mind. And Mr. Obama’s remarks in Holland, Michigan yesterday are helpful in that respect.

After once again blaming the economic slowdown on (among other things) the Arab Spring and the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, Mr. Obama said this:

Unfortunately, what we’ve seen in Washington the last few months has been the worst kind of partisanship, the worst kind of gridlock — and that gridlock has undermined public confidence and impeded our efforts to take the steps we need for our economy…. This downgrade you’ve been reading about could have been entirely avoided if there had been a willingness to compromise in Congress. See, it didn’t happen because we don’t have the capacity to pay our bills — it happened because Washington doesn’t have the capacity to come together and get things done. It was a self-inflicted wound. That’s why people are frustrated. Maybe you hear it in my voice — that’s why I’m frustrated. Because you deserve better. You guys deserve better.

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For months we’ve been hearing that what the people want is for members of Congress to forget about ideology and concentrate on problem solving. But according to a feature in today’s New York Times, what most members are hearing as they head out to town hall meetings and to speak to constituency groups is that compromise is the last thing many citizens want them to do. On both the left and the right, what most people seem to want is for their representatives to fight harder for their principles, not to back down on them.

The message that many in Congress have been getting this month during their recess is the opposite of the lecture they have been getting from many in the mainstream media, not to mention President Obama, who have demanded that both parties back away from their dug in positions about taxes, spending and the debt ceiling. Instead, a lot of Americans are insisting that what they want is less compromise. While this may come as a surprise to media elites and the president, this belief goes a long way to explain the popularity of hard-core ideologues like Michele Bachmann as well as the persistent dissent against Obama that is coming from liberals.

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Last night’s Iowa Republican presidential debate promised to be the most substantive confrontation so far between the candidates and that’s what we got. The result helped clarify the outline of the race as it stands today.

Romney stayed comfortably on top. Bachmann decisively beat back a suicidal charge from Pawlenty but did not emerge unscathed giving Rick Perry a change to parachute into the race at just the right moment.

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Last night’s debate was immensely entertaining, as I relate in today’s New York Post. And it ought to put paid to the notion that the Fox News Channel is a Republican shill machine, since it featured the toughest and most pointed questioning in any presidential-primary debate ever. But the debate highlighted a very strange aspect of this race: Just how second-rate the candidates are. When it comes to speaking seriously about issues, showing appropriate demeanor, and connecting both to an actual political record, there are only two candidates in the race now that seem remotely plausible in the arena with Barack Obama, and one of them (sorry, Abe) knocked himself out of the race last night for good.

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The Fox-Examiner crew was so strong that the debate signaled a new degree of serious in the GOP field. We heard tough and well-tailored questions that forced everyone to raise their game, including cynical onlookers.  Paradoxically, this revealed a lot in terms of character and core strength, but little in terms of policy distinction.  The best lines were broad appeals for laughs and cheers. Herman Cain said that America needs to learn to take a joke, Rick Santorum drew a distinction between showmanship and leadership, and Tim Pawlenty offered to cook dinner for anyone who could identify Obama’s policies on Medicare, Medicaid, and social security. These resonated more than any wonky flourishes could. This is in large part due to the fact that no one really understands what can actually be done to get us out of the current national predicament.

Michelle Bachmann, I think, showed a few cracks, and these might combine with this past week’s hit jobs to do her some harm.  I don’t entirely agree with Jonathan that she slaughtered Tim Pawlenty. Up until his fact-based challenges this evening she’d only been dealing with broad, cheap, and impressionistic character assassination. Calling her out on policy specifics took her to new untested ground, and her passionate pronouncements didn’t fully satisfy. She started out the night yelling and gesturing meaninglessly about Obama being a one-termer and ended up having to defend her record to another Republican. She was late coming back from a commercial break, as Jonathan noted, and that’s exactly the kind of curious and memorable lapse she didn’t need. Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain, and Ron Paul gave hopeless and erratic performances. The intricacies of Paul’s libertarian vision are as wacky as his passion and vision are genuine. But that he believes sincerely in something so undiluted gives him a strange edge over the others

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