Plus, photos and video from St. Louis.

Maybe this kind of thing is why the stimulus isn’t creating many actual jobs.

UPDATE: Obama Says Stimulus Plan Worked As Intended. Now that I can believe. . . .

Plus, from Mickey Kaus, Tremors of Doom on Health Care. We can hope . . . .

If it were some other business, we’d be hearing about “greed,” not “stumbles.”

No country is going to create wealth if its leaders exploit the economy to enrich themselves — (applause) — or if police — if police can be bought off by drug traffickers. (Applause.) No business wants to invest in a place where the government skims 20 percent off the top — (applause) — or the head of the Port Authority is corrupt. No person wants to live in a society where the rule of law gives way to the rule of brutality and bribery. (Applause.) That is not democracy, that is tyranny, even if occasionally you sprinkle an election in there.

American businessmen, meanwhile, are exclaiming, only twenty percent?

Related item here.

Well, it’s not like they’re going to be busy looking into her tax problems.

I’m beginning to feel that this business of shoveling money out to cronies isn’t really helping the economy as much as was promised.

This is particularly true because — despite all the “line-by-line” promises — the money seems to just be being shoveled out to political interest groups.

Mr. Lee, the former pastor of In His Steps, an African-American Wesleyan church in Los Angeles that he described as “very conservative,” said he saw failures both in the leadership of the conference (“Dr. King would be turning over in his grave right now,” he said) and the largely white anti-Proposition 8 movement that did not more actively seek the support of church-going African-Americans.

“The black church played a significant role in Proposition 8 passing,” Mr. Lee said. “The failure of the campaign was to presume that African-Americans would see this as a civil rights issue.”

Hope and change.

Fortune magazine recently reported that the number of U.S. companies in the world’s top 500 fell to the lowest level ever, while more Chinese firms than ever before made the list. Thirty-seven Chinese companies now rank in the top 500, including nine new entries. Meanwhile, the number of U.S. firms has fallen to 140, the lowest total since Fortune began the list in 1995. This is not good.

China also surpassed the U.S. as the world’s biggest automaker in the first half of 2009, with June sales soaring 36.5 percent from a year earlier. The Chinese registered 6.1 million car sales for the first half of the year. That way outpaced American sales, which were only 4.8 million. . . .

Here’s the clincher: Year-to-date, Dow Jones stocks are off 7 percent, while China stocks are up 71 percent. The world index is up 4 percent. Emerging markets are up 25 percent. They’re all beating us. None of this is good.

Hope and change!