† Is It Too Soon To Discuss The “I Word”? (second item): The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait predicts: “Hear me now and believe me later: If Republicans win and maintain control of the House of Representatives [and] if Obama wins a second term, the House will vote to impeach him before he leaves office””

Last spring, the political press erupted in a frenzy over the news that the White House had floated a potential job to prospective Senate candidate Joe Sestak. On a scale of one to 100, with one representing presidential jaywalking and 100 representing Watergate, the Sestak job offer probably rated about a 1.5. Yet it was enough that GOP Representative Darrell Issa called the incident an impeachable offense.

It is safe to say that Issa’s threshold of what constitutes an impeachable offense is not terribly high. As it happens, should Republicans win control of the House, Issa would bring his hair-trigger finger to the chairmanship of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The Sestak pseudo-scandal disappeared because there was no process to drive the story forward. Had Issa been running the Oversight Committee, it would have been the subject of hearings and subpoenas.

In a different context, The Stiletto postulated (OK, fantasized) a different impeachment scenario: 

The Dems take such a shellacking in the mid-term elections that it will be years before they can hope to approach parity in either house of Congress, and sit on their hands while Repubs find some Blago-like reason to bring articles of impeachment against President Barack Hussein Obama. Then Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) will play the Barry Goldwater role.

† Every Bubble Bursts Eventually: An Associated Press-mtvU poll of 2,207 randomly chosen undergraduates aged 18 to 24 at 40 randomly selected four-year schools with at least 1,000 undergrads finds that Obamamania has become Obamamehnia:

Forty-four percent of students approve of the job Obama is doing as president, while 27 percent are unhappy with his stewardship, according to the survey conducted late last month. That's a significant drop from the 60 percent who gave the president high marks in a May 2009 poll. Only 15 percent had a negative opinion back then. …

[H]is diminished backing from college students raises further questions about whether the Democrats' efforts to rally them _ and other loyal supporters such as blacks and union members _ will be enough to prevent Republicans from winning control of Congress in the Nov. 2 elections.

Obama's weaker performance on campus also underscores his party's struggles to turn the 15 million first-time voters of 2008 - nearly one in eight of that year's total - into a solid political army. Exit polls from 2008 show 55 percent of new voters were age 18 to 24, and those young first-timers strongly backed Obama and Democratic House candidates - a potent bloc if Democrats could lure them back to the voting booth. …

Political scientists, campaign workers, students and others say many students are unhappy with Obama's handling of the economy, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and failures to end the ban against gays serving openly in the military or to close the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. There's also frustration with the messy political process and his inability to deliver on his campaign promise to change Washington.

† How Did We Get From A Knowledge Economy To An Unskilled And Illiterate Economy?: Part II: The Wall Street Journal suggests lowering “the barriers we now put on immigrant entrepreneurs”:

[T]o become eligible for an EB-5 visa, an individual must invest at least $500,000. It's no wonder that fewer than 3,700 people received EB-5 visas last year -including spouses and children - and most of them went to immigrant investors looking to expand existing U.S. ventures, not create new businesses.

Senators John Kerry of Massachusetts and Richard Lugar of Indiana have introduced legislation that would award a conditional green card to immigrant entrepreneurs who receive at least $250,000 from a U.S. venture capitalist. The immigrant would receive permanent residence status if the enterprise employed at least five workers or reached $1 million in revenue within a year. This would improve the status quo, but the capital requirements would still remain needlessly high. In retail and manufacturing, for example, start-up costs average $98,000 and $175,000, respectively. …

Lowering U.S. barriers for foreign-born entrepreneurs can only help the economy. It would also help President Obama begin to fulfill his campaign pledge to address immigration reform. Republicans who claim to know something about job creation should welcome an opportunity to support a pro-growth immigration fix that doesn't involve "amnesty." A visa for job creators is a political and economic winner all around.

† Fatwa Fatigue (second item): The Associated Press attempts to contrast the supposedly rational fatwas issued by the Saudi government via the Council of Senior Religious Scholars (boys and girls swimming in the same pool causes “mischief and evil”; taking flowers to a hospital patient “imitates Allah's adversaries”; relationships of "mutual affection, love and brotherhood" with non-Muslims - or even initiating an exchange of greetings with them – is forbidden) and the obviously crazy fatwas issued by independent clerics via the Web, TV stations and text messages (a supermarket chain employing female cashiers should be boycotted; a woman who must appear without her veil in front of an unrelated adult male can first breast-feed him to establish a mother-son bond; anyone advocating easing gender segregation should be put to death):

Under a royal decree issued in mid-August, only the official panel may issue the fatwas that answer every question of how pious Saudis should live their lives. …

[M]any of the powerful clerics on the 21-member council are themselves hard-liners. Beyond strict edicts on morality, they reinforce a worldview whereby non-Muslims and even liberal or Shiite Muslims are considered infidels, and their stances on jihad, or holy war, at times differ only in nuances from al Qaeda's. …

[S]ome of the now-barred independent sheiks have issued fatwas that are more moderate than those of official clerics - men like Sheik Adel al-Kalbani, who challenged the Wahhabi ban on music by saying it is permitted provided the lyrics don't promote sin. …

"This is not reforming the clerical establishment," Christopher Boucek, an expert on Saudi Arabia at the U.S.-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said of the royal decree, "but rather a process to institutionalize and bureaucratize the state."

Plus ça change …

† Medics On Meal Break Allegedly Ignore Dying Woman: NYC EMT Melissa Jackson was arraigned on the misdemeanor of official misconduct for failing to help a dying pregnant woman. If convicted, she faces up to one year in jail. Jason Green, the other EMT on the scene who also refused to provide assistance to the stricken Au Bon Pain cashier, was fatally shot after an altercation outside a Manhattan nightclub over a parking space in July (second item).

† The Devil Is In The Disclosure Details: In his article, “A Double Standard at H.P.,” New York Times business columnist Joe Nocera failed to disclose a conflict of interest, as this Editors’ Note explains:

In the Talking Business column in Business Day on Saturday, Joe Nocera wrote about a lawsuit by Oracle against a division of SAP, claiming theft of intellectual property. Mr. Nocera learned after the column was published  that Oracle was represented by the law firm of Boies, Schiller & Flexner, where his fiancée works as director of communications. To avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, Mr. Nocera would not have written about the case if he had known of the law firm’s involvement.

The Wall Street Journal blog "All Things Digital" ridicules Nocera – and The Times - over the ethical lapse: “Odd to learn that Nocera, the Times’ star business columnist, was unaware that his own fiancée was a flack for the law firm repping Oracle in the suit that provided so much of the subject matter for his column.”

† Updates To Previous Posts (penultimate item, WA Housewives Join Eco-Nazi Resistance: Even as state and local governments are passing laws forcing consumers to use "eco-friendly" household cleaners and the Federal Trade Commission is proposing changes in the "Green Guides" it issues to marketers "to help them avoid making misleading environmental claims," the Green Gauge Global report from GfK Roper Consulting and a survey by Marcal Small Steps finds that consumers don’t want to buy green products, because they are more expensive than conventional products, reports Adweek:

One gets a sense of the relative importance of price and environmental virtue from a pair of numbers in [the Marcal] survey: While 74 percent of respondents rated price as "extremely important" in their purchases of household paper goods, just 15 percent accorded that status to "environmentally friendly" as a factor. …

[W]ith all due respect to the planet, what consumers generally care most about is what the product will do for them and their families. Marketers of green goods are apt to go awry if they focus exclusively on what they'll do for the environment. "The most effective way to increase green-product adoption is to communicate the personal benefit and then deliver on this benefit," says Tim Kenyon, director of GfK Roper Consulting's Green Gauge study. "The Green Gauge research suggests that this is true in the U.S. and around the world. Two levers that marketers can pull are saving money and protecting health. Of course, this also exists within the framework of providing a product that delivers on quality as well. Most consumers are not willing to compromise for an environmentally friendly product that they feel is inferior."

That's a problem when, as Green Gauge polling in the U.S. found, one-third of consumers believe the eco-friendly products don't work as well as the "regular" ones. Similarly, when the Marcal polling asked respondents why they don't choose eco-friendly household products more often, 21 percent said, "They do not perform as well as conventional products."

It likely doesn't help matters for marketers of green products that global warming has become the dominant concern of environmentalists, shunting aside more immediate matters like air and water pollution. As Kenyon remarks, "Consumers respond to issues that they can touch, feel and see - air pollution, water pollution, oil spills, industrial accidents, etc. It is harder for consumers to have a tactile or sensory response to global warming or carbon offsets." …

However green marketers state their case, the claims probably won't resonate as strongly until the economy gets better. Inevitably, the downturn affects many consumers' attitudes about the relative urgency of environmental issues. Fifty-two percent of the Green Gauge respondents subscribed to the statement, "First comes economic security, then we can worry about environmental problems."

† Updates To Previous Posts (fourth item, Is Obama Already A Lame Duck?): In this post for The Wall Street Journal's “Political Diary,” John Fund reports that “President Obama's campaign refrain that the country must ‘go forward, not go backward’ to the past actually loses votes for Democrats”:

"Though voters agree the economy was an 'inherited' problem, they do not like to hear politicians blaming Bush or looking backwards," [former Bill Clinton pollster Stan Greenberg] concluded in his study. …

A new CNN poll finds voters still believe Mr. Obama is a better president than Mr. Bush was, but by only 47% to 45%. That's down from a whopping 23-point margin last year. "Democrats would be wise to think twice before bringing up the name of President Bush on the campaign trail this fall," says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.

† Updates To Previous Posts (fifth item, Why Middle Class Americans Can’t Afford Health Insurance: Part II): A Congressional investigation finds that from 2007 to 2009 Aetna Inc., Humana Inc., UnitedHealth Group Inc. and WellPoint Inc. - the four largest for-profit health insurers in the U.S. – together denied coverage to more than 651,000 people, or one out of every seven applicants, due to pre-existing medical conditions, reports The Wall Street Journal:

While most Americans have coverage through their employer or Medicare, an estimated 15.7 million adults under age 65 received coverage through an individual policy as of 2008, the congressional report said. Those are the customers who can be denied coverage because they have a past illness.

In some cases, customers can enroll in a policy but aren't covered for ailments that predate the enrollment. During the three-year period, the four carriers together declined to pay 212,800 medical claims for that reason, the report found.

In a separate report released Tuesday, the lawmakers found that women who are pregnant, fathers-to-be and those attempting to adopt children are generally unable to buy policies on the individual insurance market.

While Obamacare promised to stop the practice of denying coverage, to people who have a pre-existing health condition beginning in 2014, insurers are responding by abandoning some segments of the business such as child-only policies or jacking up premiums.

† Updates To Previous Posts (sixth item, Couple Lifted Luggage: Cops): Keith King, who pleaded guilty in September to burglary, theft, drug possession and trafficking stolen property for stealing up to 1,000 pieces of luggage from Sky Harbor airport in Phoenix, has been sentenced to 10½ years in state prison and ordered to pay nearly $84,000 in restitution. His wife, Stacy King, was sentenced to 3½ years in prison.