Russia Is Indeed Back . . .

. . . thanks in large part to diplomatic bungling by the Obama administration over Syria. Ariel Cohen points out that the ramifications of the administration's errors go far beyond what will happen in Syria:

In what appears as yet another strategic blunder, Obama even elected to forego a binding UN Security Council resolution on Syrian disarmament under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, which allows for enforcement, while Putin may hit the geopolitical jackpot.

If the disarmament initiative succeeds, Obama will “owe” Putin. America will be enticed to forget quickly the damage caused by the NSA and CIA defector Edward Snowden, who received asylum in Russia. America will remain mum as a Russian court has sentenced anticorruption crusader and whistleblower Alexei Navalny. Moscow is rife with rumors about preparations for the third trial of jailed oil tycoon and political opponent Mikhail Khodorkovsky. It is equally unlikely that Russia’s ambitious plans to expand the Eurasian Union to include Armenia and Ukraine into the Customs Union will meet a vigorous U.S. response.

Obama may not realize that Putin, a former KGB recruiting officer, seems to have played him like a violin. Putin has demonstrated that he is capable of stopping the world’s only superpower from using force—making him “the go to” man, to whom many on the U.S. blacklist will run to seek protection.

Putin will also have demonstrated that Russia, despite being seven times smaller than the U.S. economically, and weaker militarily, is capable of gaining impressive geopolitical results even when dealt a poor hand. As the military operation against Assad is postponed, Putin has increased the chances of the pro-Iranian regime’s survival, and possibly ensured the continued presence of a modest Russian naval facility in Tartus.

Moscow also has a growing interest in a Shia strategic belt extending from Lebanon via Syria and Iraq to Iran, as it prevents Sunni radicals from flooding into the North Caucasus and Central Asia—Russia’s soft underbelly.

Moscow also sent a signal that a U.S. military operation against the Iranian nuclear program may not happen—without the UN Security Council—i.e., the Kremlin’s—sanction. And that sanction will not be forthcoming.

Not bad for a week’s work.

Recall (again) that one of the reasons given for re-electing the president in 2012 was that he is supposedly a much better geopolitical chess player than that bumbler, Mitt Romney, who had the effrontery to tell us that Russia's interests don't exactly line up with our own. How is that argument looking now?

This Must Be the Economy We Are Told Is Getting Better All the Time

Imagine how much we would be hearing about this story if a Republican were currently president:

It’s almost 6 p.m. on a Friday and the tables near the bar at The Hamilton in downtown Washington are getting crowded. That means waitress Victoria Honard is busy.

Honard, 22, who graduated from Syracuse University in May, works about 25 hours a week at the restaurant while looking for a job related to public policy. She moved to Washington four days after graduation with the hope of finding a position at a think tank or policy-related organization, she said, and has applied to about 20 prospective employers.

“The response has been minimal,” said Honard, whose degree focused on education, health and human services. “There are two ways of looking at it. I could be extremely frustrated and be bitter, or I can make the most of it, and I’m trying to take the latter approach.”

Unemployment data appear to reflect big advances for women. The jobless rate in August for females 20 years and older was 6.3 percent, the lowest since December 2008, compared with 7.1 percent for men. As recently as January, the rate was 7.3 percent for both genders, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The downside is that the gains have been largely in lower-paying industries such as waitresses, in-home health care, food preparation and housekeeping. About 60 percent of the increase in employment for women from 2009 to 2012 was in jobs that pay less than $10.10 an hour, compared with 20 percent for men, according to a study by the National Women’s Law Center using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

And to think that once upon a time, people got into a tizzy because Mitt Romney refered to "binders full of women."

Russia: Revealing Its True Self

There was a terrible shooting at the Washington Navy Yard today, which elicited concern, shock and sympathy from people of decent and elevated sensibilities, and gloating from Alexey Pushkov, the Russian parliamentary foreign affairs chief. I don't know why Pushkov believed that it was necessary to taunt and make fun of Americans in the aftermath of the shooting, and I don't know whether the government of Vladimir Putin has the wit to be upset about Pushkov's behavior, but it ought to go without saying that none of this behavior serves Russian interests in the slightest.

I suppose it is worth noting that this little but meaningful incident is yet another indication that Russia is not nearly the kind of friend to the United States that we were led to believe it is during the 2012 presidential election, when Barack Obama and Mitt Romney were arguing about whether we should be concerned about Russia. Through actions great and small, Russia appears to have done everything within its power in order to show that it cannot be counted on as an ally. Maybe Russian activities--both substantive and petty--will cause us to see Russia for what it is; not the "number one enemy" of the United States that Mitt Romney seemed to think it is, but no friend either.

The Vindication of Mitt Romney?

A lot of his comments during last year's election campaign look rather prescient, don't they? I still don't agree that Russia is our number one geopolitical foe, but I am betting that there are a number of people in the Obama administration who are far less willing nowadays to dismiss some of the comments Romney made about the state of Russian-American relations.

The Economy Is a Disaster Case

So sayeth the UCLA Anderson Forecast.  It is hard to disagree with its findings, which are written in admirably candid fashion:

The expected U.S. "Great Recovery" hasn't materialized and the economy has fallen short of even normal growth, according to a forecast released Wednesday.

The second-quarter UCLA Anderson Forecast said the growth of real gross domestic product - meaning the inflation-adjusted value of goods and services produced - is too small to help the nation climb out of its slump.

The figure was 15.4 percent below a "normal" growth trend, forecast director Edward Leamer wrote.

"To get back to that 3 percent trend, we would need 4 percent growth for 15 years, or 5 percent growth for eight years, or 6 percent growth for five years, not the disappointing twos and threes we have been racking up recently," he said.

"It's not a recovery. It's not even normal growth. It's bad," he wrote.

A real GDP growth rate of just 1.9 percent is expected for this year, only rising to 3 percent in 2015, according to the forecast.

[. . .]

Unemployment should fall to 6.9 percent next year and 6.6 percent by 2015, according to the forecast - partly due, however, to discouraged workers dropping out of the labor force.

Leamer said that while jobs are being created, "the tepid growth continues to obscure the nation's most fundamental problems: too much government spending funded with too much borrowing, too little national savings to cover late-in-life health care issues and too many workers lacking the skills to compete in the modern economy," according to a University of California, Los Angeles press statement.

In addition, the jobs being created may not provide workers with a secure future and the education system is failing to provide skills such as analytical thinking that will be crucial for future workers, he wrote.

"Regrettably we reward teachers if their students can regurgitate the information on standardized tests," Leamer wrote.

About the only good news contained in the report is that the housing market appears to be further recovering. But the rest of the news is bad, and the commentary on education policy failings is entirely apt. Recall that during his re-election campaign, President Obama told us that things were definitely looking up when it came to the economy. I wonder if he will be made to take back those words. Perhaps the national media, which is supposed to hold public officials to account, might want to get on the president's case regarding the rhetorical puffery he used to try to convince us that all is well with the economy.

In the meantime, James Pethokoukis admirably pushes back  against the notion that we need to have a tighter Federal Reserve. I can't believe that this issue is actually being discussed. Inflation will be a threat down the line if we do not get fiscal policy under control, but it is not a threat now, or in the near future. And the economy could use all the help that it can get from an expansionary monetary policy.

Accountability Has Become Such an Antiquated Concept

Gene Healy  on the president who is never there:

"Hey, don't look at me -- I'm just the president!" That's the common thread in President Obama's response to his recent scandal eruptions, from IRS harassment of Tea Partiers to his Justice Department's spying on AP reporters. Like everybody else, Obama learns about these things via cable news, according to press secretary Jay Carney.

Obama's flight from responsibility punctured the stratosphere in his recent speech on "the Future of Our Fight against Terrorism" at the National Defense University in D.C. In the speech Obama seemed to position himself as the loyal opposition to his own administration.

He worried that "perpetual war ... will prove self-defeating, and alter our country in troubling ways." Look at the current situation at Guantanamo Bay, Citizen Obama chided, "where we are force-feeding detainees who are being held on a hunger strike ... Is this who we are? Is that something our founders foresaw?" Obama pronounced himself "troubled" by the proliferation of drone strikes in an ever-expanding war and "the possibility that leak investigations may chill the investigative journalism that holds government accountable."

All valid concerns, compassionately expressed. So how can we get this guy into the room when the big decisions are being made?

Mitt Romney may have had his faults as a candidate. No, check that; Mitt Romney most certainly had his faults as a candidate. But I have a hard time believing that he would have been as disengaged a president as the guy we actually re-elected in November of last year has turned out to be.