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Richard Epstein chronicles the problems with the Affordable Care Act.  

The ACA’s new marketplaces are said to allow ordinary individuals to shop for their own policies. This modest goal sounds easy, but it is not. As the current rules demand, all enrollment must be possible online, in person, by phone, fax, and mail. In addition to a website, the exchanges must provide “culturally and linguistically appropriate assistance,” along with a navigator program to promote public awareness. They must offer seamless linkage with other public initiatives, and accurate information on premium tax credits and cost-sharing subsidies, all under a program whose key provisions are not yet fully worked out. Already, HHS has distributed over $3.6 billion to states for implementation, with more to come.

Yet for all of these Herculean efforts, at present, only 18 states have opted to create their own exchanges, and seven are planning for a partnership exchange in cooperation with the federal government. A whopping 26 states have defaulted on their option, leaving the feds to pick up the pieces. Similarly, only 29 states have opted into the ACA’s Medicaid extension program, even though it promises substantial federal support early on. Twenty states have already opted out of the program and two are weighing their options.

At this point, the total administrative burden on the federal government has massively increased. Yet neither the federal government nor the states have the human or financial resources to discharge these tasks in a timely fashion, making it highly unlikely that these exchanges will be up and running by January 1, 2014. To achieve that goal, the various private participants on the exchanges must design and post their policies by October 1, 2013.

Unfortunately, these private insurers cannot do their part unless they have enough information to accurately price the “essential minimum conditions” required under the ACA. At present, it is estimated that only around 2 percent of the current plans meet the ACA’s outsized legislative ambitions. Nor can the federal government set up, all at once, the federal exchanges that are needed to make this system work. Similarly, the tepid reception to the Medicaid extension program only stretches scarce government resources. With each passing day, it becomes clearer that the entire process is backing up.

Then there is the matter of the initial 21-page enrollment form that the Department of Health and Human Services first released to the public. The President’s speech crowed that HHS has compressed that form to 3 pages, making it shorter, analogous to private enrollment forms. Yet like everything else about the ACA, his point is a public relationships ruse that has already backfired. As Grace-Marie Turner has pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, much of the reduction in form length comes from shrinking the font, or from relegating key parts of the basic application to separate forms. Needless to say, HHS has just announced a $150 million grant for its navigation program to help people work their way through the now abbreviated form.

Gabriel Schoenfeld, who was in these pages often before he left Commentary and signed on to the Romney campaign, has written a book about how the loss came about.

Even before my new book, A Bad Day on the Romney Campaign: An Insider’s Account, went on sale and could be read, it was suggested to me by former colleagues in a series of e-mails, calls, and statements in the press that I would regret airing “dirty laundry” in public.

One top aide warned that I would become “permanently radioactive” and would never work in this town again. Others called me disreputable and disloyal — and those are among the kinder words directed my way. And then the smearing began, with Romney’s deputy campaign manager going so far as to state to Time that I was lying about being a “senior adviser” to the campaign, an attempt to discredit me readily disproven by the campaign’s own official documents.

Is this fierce reaction warranted? Am I wrong to speak up? Both questions raise interesting issues.

The ferocity, I believe, comes from fear. Throughout the campaign, the Romney organization was relatively successful in keeping its secrets to itself. Although the problems of the campaign were visible to the world, a code of silence prevailed, and continues to prevail, in its ranks. It exists for reasons of self-protection, to evade responsibility for a loss that was avoidable. Those warning me off publishing have not even read my book, but their anxiety about what I might say is a measure of how much they have to hide.

My book exposes incompetence, yes. Too often, incompetence is blithely excused in politics. “That’s how campaigns always are,” the experts assure us. For one, if the Republican party hopes to win, that lackadaisical attitude needs to change. Exposing incompetence is a start. …

Michael Barone says Benghazi and the IRS thuggery are just politics by other means. 

What do the Benghazi cover-up and the IRS scandal have in common? They were both about winning elections, under false pretenses.

Winning elections, after all, is something Barack Obama is good at. He obviously loves campaigning and delivering grand orations to enormous adoring crowds.

He loves it so much that he flew off to Las Vegas to campaign the day after the first murder of a U.S. ambassador in 33 years.

What actually happened in Benghazi was out of sync with the Obama campaign line. Osama bin Laden was dead. Al Qaeda was on the run. The global war on terror — well, don’t call it that anymore.

A deliberate effort to mislead the voters was launched. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, White House press secretary Jay Carney and the president himself talked about a spontaneous protest of an anti-Muslim video — even though no evidence of that came from Benghazi.

The White House and the State Department altered the CIA’s talking points — not just in one minor particular, as Carney claimed, but through 12 separate versions. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice, armed with the talking points, spoke sternly about a spontaneous protest and an anti-Muslim video on five Sunday interview shows.

The campaign trail press grilled Mitt Romney for his (impolitic) statement immediately after the attacks. Obama went on talk shows and peddled his line about an anti-Muslim video.

Debate moderator Candy Crowley came to Obama’s defense when he claimed that he had immediately stated that Benghazi was a terrorist attack — a claim Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler awarded four Pinocchios. …

Christian Science Monitor Blog says Bob Woodward thinks we should not ignore Benghazi.

Bob Woodward compared Benghazi to Watergate during a Friday morning appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

The famous Washington Post reporter and former antagonist of President Richard Nixon said the US government’s editing of talking points used by public officials in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks in Benghazi, Libya, is “a very serious issue.”

“I would not dismiss Benghazi,” Mr. Woodward said.

Woodward’s own main talking point was that he believed there are similarities between the process used to produce the Benghazi talking points and Nixon’s release of edited transcripts of the White House tapes.

Citing the lengthy e-mail chain detailing the production of the talking points, released by the Obama administration earlier this week, the Watergate press hero said that in the wake of the Libyan tragedy “everyone in the government is saying, ‘Oh, let’s not tell the public that terrorists were involved, people connected to Al Qaeda. Let’s not tell the public that there were warnings.’ ”

Forty years ago, Nixon went line by line through his tape transcripts and made his own edits.

“He personally went through them and said, ‘Let’s not tell this, let’s not show this,’ ” said Woodward on “Morning Joe.”

Nixon, of course, was trying to deflate the increasing public and congressional pressure for him to release the tapes themselves. He wasn’t successful. The tapes revealed the extent of his involvement with the Watergate break-in and subsequent cover up.

As to Benghazi, Woodward concluded that the edits “show the hydraulic pressure that was in the system not to tell the truth.”

WaPo reporters do a good job exposing Eric Holder’s lies that purported to explain and excuse the AP wiretaps.

For five days, reporters at the Associated Press had been sitting on a big scoop about a foiled al-Qaeda plot at the request of CIA officials. Then, in a hastily scheduled Monday morning meeting, the journalists were asked by agency officials to hold off on publishing the story for just one more day.

The CIA officials, who had initially cited national security concerns in an attempt to delay publication, no longer had those worries, according to individuals familiar with the exchange. Instead, the Obama administration was planning to announce the successful counterterrorism operation that Tuesday.

AP balked and proceeded to publish that Monday afternoon. Its May 2012 report is now at the center of a controversial and broad seizure of phone records of AP reporters’ home, office and cellphone lines. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said the unauthorized disclosure about an intelligence operation to stop al-Qaeda from detonating explosives aboard a U.S. airliner was among the most serious leaks he could remember, and justified secretly obtaining records from a handful of reporters and editors over a span of two months.

Now, some members of Congress and media advocates are questioning why the administration viewed the leak that led to the May 7 AP story as so grave.

The president’s top counterterrorism adviser at the time, John O. Brennan, had appeared on “Good Morning America” the following day to trumpet the successful operation. He said that because of the work of U.S. intelligence, the plot did not pose an active threat to the American public.

Holder said this week that the unauthorized disclosure “put the American people at risk.” …

Now for the important stuff. In a working class neighborhood south west of downtown Milwaukee is the Holler House Bar. Not your average bar, but one with its own entry in Wikipedia. Two notable things about the tavern are the bowling alleys (first in the nation, they say) and the patron’s bras shed and signed so they can be posted for posterity. Then government idiots got involved and told the owner, Marcy Skowronski to remove the “fire hazard” or face fines up to “$10,000 per day.” Typical government creeps. We can thank Jim Stingl of the Journal-Sentinel for the story with the happy ending. Sounds like the bar has lots of support. 

Stripped of the bras that decorated the tavern’s ceiling for nearly half a century, the Holler House looked mighty naked.

But on Thursday, justice was restored to the universe. A ridiculous city order to ban the bras as a fire hazard was rescinded.

“Oh my goodness, we won,” cried Marcy Skowronski, the always colorful 87-year-old owner of the south side bar. “We’re going to have a party to throw the bras back up.”

I’ll let Skowronski explain what happened when a city inspector stopped in recently.

“We’ve had bras hanging here for 45 years. It’s been a charm of the place. So here comes this gal, and she’s walking in here like Lady Astor’s pet horse, you know, and she says she wants those bras down because they’re a fire hazard. Now how can a bra be a fire hazard unless someone is wearing it? Honest to God.” …

… “We’ve got a bunch of crazy people who come in here,” Skowronski said.

But no crazier than the city’s short-lived ban on the frilly things they leave behind. 

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When it comes to exposing administration incompetence, we are in a target rich environment. John Fund reviews the unfolding, cringe inducing, tales of government idiots. Pickerhead never begrudged the president’s golf rounds figuring if he was on the links that was less damage he could do to the country. Turns out though, he outsourced the presidency to Valerie Jarrett. It is easy to believe she was heavily involved in many of the things that have gone bad for this bunch of miscreants.

The recent spate of Washington scandals has some liberals finally confessing in public what many of them have said privately for a long time. The Obama administration is arrogant, insular, prone to intimidation of adversaries, and slovenly when it comes to seeing that rules are followed. Indeed, the Obama White House is a strange place, and it’s good that its operational model is now likely to be finally dissected by the media.

Joe Klein of Time magazine laments Obama’s “unwillingness to concentrate.”

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post tars him as a President Passerby who “seems to want no control over the actions of his administration.” Milbank warns that “he’s creating a power vacuum in which lower officials behave as though anything goes.” Comedian Jon Stewart says Obama’s government lacks real “managerial competence” and that the president is either Nixonian if he knew about the scandals in advance or a Mr. Magoo–style incompetent if he didn’t.

But it was Chris Matthews of MSNBC who cut even deeper in his Hardball show on Wednesday. A former speechwriter for President Carter, he wondered if Obama “really doesn’t want to be responsible day-to-day for running” the government. He savaged the White House for using “weird, spooky language” about “the building leadership” that must approve the Benghazi talking points. “I don’t understand the model of this administration: weak chiefs of staff afraid of other people in the White House. Some undisclosed role for Valerie Jarrett. Unclear, a lot of floating power in the White House, but no clear line of authority. …

Kimberley Strassel details how the IRS scandal started with the one.

Mr. Obama now professes shock and outrage that bureaucrats at the IRS did exactly what the president of the United States said was the right and honorable thing to do. “He put a target on our backs, and he’s now going to blame the people who are shooting at us?” asks Idaho businessman and longtime Republican donor Frank VanderSloot.

Mr. VanderSloot is the Obama target who in 2011 made a sizable donation to a group supporting Mitt Romney. In April 2012, an Obama campaign website named and slurred eight Romney donors. It tarred Mr. VanderSloot as a “wealthy individual” with a “less-than-reputable record.” Other donors were described as having been “on the wrong side of the law.”

This was the Obama version of the phone call—put out to every government investigator (and liberal activist) in the land.

Twelve days later, a man working for a political opposition-research firm called an Idaho courthouse for Mr. VanderSloot’s divorce records. In June, the IRS informed Mr. VanderSloot and his wife of an audit of two years of their taxes. In July, the Department of Labor informed him of an audit of the guest workers on his Idaho cattle ranch. In September, the IRS informed him of a second audit, of one of his businesses. Mr. VanderSloot, who had never been audited before, was subject to three in the four months after Mr. Obama teed him up for such scrutiny.

The last of these audits was only concluded in recent weeks. Not one resulted in a fine or penalty. But Mr. VanderSloot has been waiting more than 20 months for a sizable refund and estimates his legal bills are $80,000. That figure doesn’t account for what the president’s vilification has done to his business and reputation.

The Obama call for scrutiny wasn’t a mistake; it was the president’s strategy—one pursued throughout 2012. The way to limit Romney money was to intimidate donors from giving. Donate, and the president would at best tie you to Big Oil or Wall Street, at worst put your name in bold, and flag you as “less than reputable” to everyone who worked for him: the IRS, the SEC, the Justice Department. The president didn’t need a telephone; he had a megaphone.

Weekly Standard learned from NBC’s Lisa Meyer the IRS chose to hide the scandal until after the election.

NBC’s Lisa Myers reported this morning (Friday) that the IRS deliberately chose not to reveal that it had wrongly targeted conservative groups until after the 2012 presidential election:

The IRS commissioner “has known for at least a year that this was going on,” said Myers, “and that this had happened. And did he share any of that information with the White House? But even more importantly, Congress is going to ask him, why did you mislead us for an entire year? Members of Congress were saying conservatives are being targeted. What’s going on here? The IRS denied it. Then when — after these officials are briefed by the IG that this is going on, they don’t disclose it. In fact, the commissioner sent a letter to Congress in September on this subject and did not reveal this. Imagine if we — if you can — what would have happened if this fact came out in September 2012, in the middle of a presidential election? The terrain would have looked very different.”

Jennifer Rubin watched the latest press conference.

President Obama’s press conference in the rain was not a success, if by success, his supporters would mean an event which convinces anyone who doesn’t work for him that he’s getting ahead of the scandal deluge. The sight of a Marine holding an umbrella over his head only added to the weirdness of the event.

So what did we learn?

1. He has full confidence in Attorney General Eric Holder, the man who purportedly recused himself (whenever) without putting it in writing (whatever). When asked about the untrammeled snooping on Associated Press reporters and editors, Obama said he doesn’t talk about a “pending case” (except in numerous shootings, the IRS, etc., I suppose). He reiterated his intolerance of leaks. In other words, the great liberal icon is pleased (“no apologies”) with an investigation that went far beyond anything previously undertaken against a media outlet.

2. He’s going to get the Internal Revenue Service in tip-top shape. Still, it’s an independent agency and all. (The willingness to show he is in charge is undercut by his insistence he had no idea what was going on there.)

3. His lip-service to the importance of a free press that holds him “accountable” suggests the most important attribute he now has is shamelessness. …

Peter Wehner calls him the “ad hominem president.”

1. President Obama is once again engaging in what psychiatrists refer to as projection, in which people lay their worst attributes on others.

In this instance, the most hyper-partisan president in modern times is ascribing that trait to Congressional Republicans. What we’ve learned about Mr. Obama over the years is that he that while he is unusually inept at governing, he’s quite good at campaigning. He certainly enjoys it, having taken the concept of the Permanent Campaign beyond anything we’ve ever seen. It turns out it’s the only thing he does well—no human being in history has raised campaign cash quite like he has—and it’s all he seems interested in doing.

On some deep, subconscious level, though, Mr. Obama seems ashamed of the path he’s chosen. And so the president projects those traits he loathes in himself on to others. To give you a sense of how deep the malady runs, the president does more than merely project; he actually preaches against the very character flaws he himself cannot overcome.

2. The president can hardly go a day without impugning the motivations of his opponents. They never have honest differences with the president. Instead they are suffering from an illness (“fever”), cowardice (afraid of what Rush Limbaugh might say about them), and lack of patriotism (caring about elections rather than future generations). Mr. Obama is the ultimate ad hominem president. …

Dana Milbank called him “president passerby” and now he’s turned his sights on the placeHolder.

As the nation’s top law enforcement official, Eric Holder is privy to all kinds of sensitive information. But he seems to be proud of how little he knows.

Why didn’t his Justice Department inform the Associated Press, as the law requires, before pawing through reporters’ phone records?

“I do not know,” the attorney general told the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday afternoon, “why that was or was not done. I simply don’t have a factual basis to answer that question.”

Why didn’t the DOJ seek the AP’s cooperation, as the law also requires, before issuing subpoenas?

“I don’t know what happened there,” Holder replied. “I was recused from the case.”

Why, asked the committee’s chairman, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), was the whole matter handled in a manner that appears “contrary to the law and standard procedure”?

“I don’t have a factual basis to answer the questions that you have asked, because I was recused,” the attorney general said.

On and on Holder went: …

Jennifer Rubin on the Holder faux recusal.

Attorney General Eric Holder told the House Judiciary Committee he recused himself from the leak investigation involving sweeping surveillance of the Associated Press because he was a “fact witness,” meaning he had access to the classified data at issue and was questioned about it. But he can’t recall when he recused himself. And it wasn’t in writing. In one of the worst security leaks of which he is aware (he says), he never told the White House (he says) that he took himself out of the loop.

Remarkable really, even if true. John Yoo, who authored the enhanced interrogation memos in the Bush Justice Department and was widely criticized by the left for taking a broad view of executive power, was somewhat incredulous when I asked him about the Justice Department’s behavior. As for the paperless recusal, he told me, “There must be something in writing to at least the DAG [deputy attorney general].”

Former attorney general Michael Mukasey agreed, emailing me that ”it is inconceivable to me that you would not do it formally. Of course, you’d have to inform all the people who might otherwise have to contact you. Indeed, if you didn’t you might conceivably come into possession of information you should not have.” He added that “in the one case I can recall in which I recused myself I did it in writing. Hard to imagine how else you’d do it — shout ‘I recuse myself’ in your office? In the hall?”

But it is the unrestrained nature of investigation that is breathtaking, beyond anything Mukasey has seen, he told me. Yoo observed, “I cannot think of another example this broad that didn’t turn out to be unauthorized. The only comparable thing was cases where a court tried to get a journalist to reveal a source. But I cannot think of the actual monitoring of reporters and editors.” He added, “If something like that had ever come up during the Bush administration in my time at DOJ, I would have said it was unconstitutional.” …

As John Fund mentioned above, even Chris Matthews is starting to gag. Politico has the story.

President Obama “obviously likes giving speeches more than he does running the executive branch,” Chris Matthews said tonight.

Yes, you read that right: The MSNBC host who in 2008 felt a “thrill going up my leg” after hearing Obama speak has grown disenchanted. Tonight’s episode of Hardball saw Matthews delivering a rare, unforgiving grilling of the president as severe as anything that might appear on Fox News. …

You can’t make it up! ABC News tells us Sarah Hall Ingram, the IRS creep in charge of the tea party targeting, now runs the IRS health care office. Of course. 

The Internal Revenue Service official in charge of the tax-exempt organizations at the time when the unit targeted tea party groups now runs the IRS office responsible for the health care legislation.

Sarah Hall Ingram served as commissioner of the office responsible for tax-exempt organizations between 2009 and 2012. But Ingram has since left that part of the IRS and is now the director of the IRS’ Affordable Care Act office, the IRS confirmed to ABC News today.

Her successor, Joseph Grant, is taking the fall for misdeeds at the scandal-plagued unit between 2010 and 2012. …

And from the Examiner we learn Ingram got $100,000 in bonus over the last three years. 

Sarah Hall Ingram, the IRS executive in charge of the tax exempt division in 2010 when it began targeting conservative Tea Party, evangelical and pro-Israel groups for harrassment, got more than $100,000 in bonuses between 2009 and 2012.

More recently, Ingram was promoted to serve as director of the tax agency’s Obamacare program office, a position that put her in charge of the vast expansion of the IRS’ regulatory power and staffing in connection with federal health care, ABC reported earlier today. …

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This is rich. Dana Milbank, certified WaPo liberal, calls him “president passerby.”

President Passerby needs urgently to become a participant in his presidency.

Late Monday came the breathtaking news of a full-frontal assault on the First Amendment by his administration: word that the Justice Department had gone on a fishing expedition through months of phone records of Associated Press reporters.

And yet President Obama reacted much as he did to the equally astonishing revelation on Friday that the IRS had targeted conservative groups based on their ideology: He responded as though he were just some bloke on a bar stool, getting his information from the evening news.

In the phone-snooping case, Obama didn’t even stir from his stool. Instead, he had his press secretary, former Time magazine journalist Jay Carney, go before an incensed press corps Tuesday afternoon and explain why the president will not be involving himself in his Justice Department’s trampling of press freedoms.

“Other than press reports, we have no knowledge of any attempt by the Justice Department to seek phone records of the Associated Press,” Carney announced.

The president “found out about the news reports yesterday on the road,” he added.

And now that Obama has learned about this extraordinary abuse of power, he’s not doing a thing about it. “We are not involved at the White House in any decisions made in connection with ongoing criminal investigations,” Carney argued. …

Politico says the media has turned on the president and his minions.

… Obama’s aloof mien and holier-than-thou rhetoric have left him with little reservoir of good will, even among Democrats. And the press, after years of being accused of being soft on Obama while being berated by West Wing aides on matters big and small, now has every incentive to be as ruthless as can be.

This White House’s instinctive petulance, arrogance and defensiveness have all worked to isolate Obama at a time when he most needs a support system. “It feel like they don’t know what they’re here to do,” a former senior Obama administration official said. “When there’s no narrative, stuff like this consumes you.”

Republican outrage is predictable, maybe even manageable. Democratic outrage is not.

The dam of solid Democratic solidarity has collapsed, starting with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd’s weekend scolding of the White House over Benghazi, then gushing with the news the Justice Department had sucked up an absurdly broad swath of Associated Press phone records. …

WaPo fact checker gives him four Pinocchios – their max for a lie.

… the president’s claim that he said “act of terrorism” is taking revisionist history too far, given that he repeatedly refused to commit to that phrase when asked directly by reporters in the weeks after the attack. He appears to have gone out of his way to avoid saying it was a terrorist attack, so he has little standing to make that claim now.

Indeed, the initial unedited talking points did not call it an act of terrorism. Instead of pretending the right words were uttered, it would be far better to acknowledge that he was echoing what the intelligence community believed at the time–and that the administration’s phrasing could have been clearer and more forthright from the start.

Four Pinocchios

J. Christian Adams describes his experience with an IRS audit. 

Franklin Graham, the Tea Party, and Larry Conners all faced the wrath of the Obama IRS.

You can add me to that list.

After Obama was elected, I faced my first IRS audit shakedown after decades of filing income tax returns. Overdue coincidence?  Perhaps.

Given the headlines of the past 48 hours, perhaps not.

My audit experience was a headache, as anyone who has experienced one can attest.  When it happened, a former IRS lawyer with whom I associated in private practice told me – “it’s no accident you were audited.”

I brushed it off.  But I wonder how many left-wing election lawyers and leftist bloggers were audited.  Any Media Matters drones face an audit in the last four years? Step right up and announce yourself if you did. …

It wasn’t just the IRS. The EPA did the same thing. Examiner has the story. 

Conservative groups seeking information from the Environmental Protection Agency have been routinely hindered by fees normally waived for media and watchdog groups, while fees for more than 90 percent of requests from green groups were waived, according to requests reviewed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

CEI reviewed Freedom of Information Act requests sent between January 2012 and this spring from several environmental groups friendly to the EPA’s mission, and several conservative groups, to see how equally the agency applies its fee waiver policy for media and watchdog groups. Government agencies are supposed to waive fees for groups disseminating information for public benefit.

“This is as clear an example of disparate treatment as the IRS’ hurdles selectively imposed upon groups with names ominously reflecting an interest in, say, a less intrusive or biased federal government,” said CEI fellow Chris Horner.

For 92 percent of requests from green groups, the EPA cooperated by waiving fees for the information. Those requests came from the Natural Resources Defense Council, EarthJustice, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, The Waterkeeper Alliance, Greenpeace, Southern Environmental Law Center and the Center for Biological Diversity.

Of the requests that were denied, the EPA said the group either didn’t respond to requests for justification of a waiver, or didn’t express intent to disseminate the information to the general public, according to documents obtained by The Washington Examiner.  CEI, on the other hand, had its requests denied 93 percent of the time. …

Maybe David Axelrod has joined the Tea Party, because this is the whole point. The government is too big. From The Corner.

The government is simply too big for President Obama to keep track of all the wrongdoing taking place on his watch, his former senior adviser, David Axelrod, told MSNBC. “Part of being president is there’s so much beneath you that you can’t know because the government is so vast,” he explained. …

Nile Gardiner has more on Lady Thatcher’s funeral and the snub delivered by our government. 

In his joint press conference yesterday (Monday) with David Cameron at the White House, President Obama began with warm words for the former British prime minister, who passed away on April 8. “Here in the United States,” declared Obama, “we joined our British friends in mourning the passing of Baroness Margaret Thatcher, a great champion of freedom and liberty and of the alliance that we carry on today.” The British Prime Minister responded by saying: “Thank you for what you said about Margaret Thatcher. It was a pleasure to welcome so many Americans to her remarkable funeral in the UK.”

Significantly, however, those Americans who attended Lady Thatcher’s funeral in St Paul’s Cathedral did not include a single serving member of the Obama administration in Washington. As is so often the case with President Obama, his flowery, grandiose words frequently fail to match his actions. There is a name for this kind of approach – rank hypocrisy. As I noted in a previous piece: …

BBC report on how our economy has been saved from the government of rank amateurs by fracking.

… The surge in US production will reshape the whole industry, according to the IEA, which made the prediction in its closely-watched bi-annual report examining trends in oil supply and demand over the next five years.

The IEA said it expected the US to overtake Russia as the world’s biggest gas producer by 2015 and to become “all but self-sufficient” in its energy needs by about 2035.

The rise in US production means the world’s reliance on oil from traditional oil producing countries in the Middle East, which make up Opec (the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries), would end soon, according to the report.

US production is set to grow to a level that is some 3.9 million barrels of oil per day (bpd) higher in 2018 than it was in 2012, accounting for some two thirds of the predicted growth in traditional non-Opec production, according to the IEA. …

Andrew Malcolm tops off the week with late night humor.

Leno: President Obama says the IRS targeting conservatives is ‘outrageous.’ And he promises to get his Benghazi investigators on the case immediately.

Leno: Obama down in Texas on his ‘Middle Class Jobs & Opportunity Tour.’ Don’t confuse that with his first term ‘Jobs & Missed Opportunities Tour.’ Obama also told people to ‘Remember the Alamo’ and forget Benghazi.

Conan: New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie revealed that he underwent a surgery earlier this year that restricts the amount of food he can eat. As a result, 12 animals have been removed from the endangered species list.

Today’s cartoons should not be missed.

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It is history day. Tomorrow we’ll continue with coverage of the creeps in DC.

Maybe after this travesty of an administration passes from the scene, a memorial to Winston Churchill will find its way to DC. Richard Jencks makes the case in a WSJ OpEd.

… There is a grotesque stereotype that he was a buoyant and bellicose man who had simply found his time. What really differentiated him from the pragmatic foreign secretary, from the hero-aviator, from the ambivalent philosopher, and from the Indian apostle of nonresistance, was that Churchill’s moral judgment of evil was more acute and implacable than theirs. He himself, in his history of the war, called the final result “Triumph and Tragedy.” But what we of the generation who participated in it called it at the time, and since, was Victory.

Early in Barack Obama’s presidency, he removed from the White House a bust of Winston Churchill. It has been speculated that this might have been done because the president was offended by an opinion rendered by Churchill in 1899 during his early career as a British officer in the Middle East. He then wrote: “Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities but the influence of the religion paralyzes the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exits in the world.”

It seems probable that the next president will restore the Churchill bust to the Oval Office. An even better outcome would be for some publicly minded person or group, with the concurrence of the responsible authorities, to place a statue of Churchill on or near Capitol Hill in Washington, together with the text of his July 1943 speech to the House of Commons.

England has long recognized great Americans with public statues, beginning with the statue of Abraham Lincoln just outside Parliament Square. Closely following World War II, England honored President Roosevelt with public statues, one in Grosvenor Square and one of FDR with Churchill, seen sitting and talking together, on a bench in Mayfair.

This spring marks the 50th anniversary of a White House ceremony when President Kennedy granted honorary U.S. citizenship to Winston Churchill, the son of an American mother. It is a propitious time to bestow another honor on him.

The other history lesson for today is offered by the May 11th anniversary of the Mossad capture of Adolf Eichmann, one of the most notorious of the German persecutors of Jews. We get the story from the Jewish Virtual Library.

… Adolf Eichmann had escaped both the Nuremberg trials and the Avengers. All trace of him had been lost in May 1945. He had actually remained in Europe until 1950, maintaining no contact with his family. In 1950, with the help of an organization assisting former Nazis to leave Europe, he escaped to Argentina. He sent for his wife and children two years later.

The passport issed to Adolf Eichmann by the International Committee of the Red Cross on June 1, 1950 was discovered by a graduate student in at the University of San Martin mid-2007 conducting research on Eichmann’s wife, Veronica Catalina Leibel. The name on the passport reads “Ricardo Klement,” and claims that he was a “technician born in Bolzano, Italy, and apolide (without nationality).”

When Eichmann arrived in Argentina in 1950, he lived for almost three years in a quiet town near Buenos Aires called San Fernando, where he worked in a metal factory. He then moved to the province of Tucuman, located over 600 miles from Buenos Aires, where he worked at an engineering company called the Capri firm, to which Juan Peron, the Argentine president at the time and known Nazi-sympathizer, gave many state contracts in order to modernize the province’s water administration.

Eichmann’s wife and two children arrived in Argentina in mid-1952, and accompanied him to Tucuman. He registered his two children at a German school, known to promote anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi propoganda at the time, under the name Eichmann, suggesting again how the Argentine government aided and abetted former Nazis and their sympathizers.

In April 1953, the Capri firm declared bankruptcy and Eichmann moved his family to Buenos Aires, where he worked for a number a companies. He was hired by Mercedes Benz in March 1959, where he continued to use the alias Ricardo Klement.

No one had heard him for years. But in the autumn of 1957 Walter Eytan at the Israeli Foreign Ministry, got a call from Fritz Bauer, the public prosecutor of the province of Hesse, Germany. Hesse told Eytan that Eichmann was alive and living in Argentina.

Eytan immediately alerted Isser Harel, the head of the Mossad. Harel spent one autumn night reading Eichmann’s dossier. At that point Harel didn’t know much about him. As Harel writes in his book on the capture of Eichmann, The House on Garibaldi Street; “I didn’t know what sort of man Eichmann was. I didn’t know with what morbid zeal he pursued his murderous work or how he went into the fray to destroy one miserable Jew with the same ardor he devoted to the annihilation of an entire community. I didn’t know that he was capable of ordering the slaughter of babies – and depicting himself as a disciplined soldier; of directing outrages on women – and priding himself on his loyalty to an oath; or of sending helpless old men to their deaths – and classifying himself as an ‘idealist’…But I knew when I rose from my desk at dawn that in everything pertaining to the Jews he was the paramount authority and his were the hands that pulled the strings controlling manhunt and massacre. I knew that at all the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals this man was pointed to as the head butcher. I knew that he was a past master in police methods, and that on the strength of his professional skill and in the light of his total lack of conscience, he would be an exceedingly dangerous quarry. I knew that when the war was over he had succeeded in blotting out all trace of himself with supreme expertise.”

Harel knew that this man must be brought to justice and punished for his crimes; the victims of his slaughter demanded it; justice and morality demanded it; but no one was looking for him – no agency, no government, no police force. Until the Mossad took over.

It was not going to be an easy task. …

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Joe Klein of Time roughs up the administration again.

The Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups is outrageous. Those who did this should be fired immediately. That’s obvious.

It continues a slovenly week for Barack Obama. The President has been very proud of the absence of scandal in his administration, and rightly so. The inability of his opponents to find any significant corruption in the historic $800 billion stimulus package was a real achievement, given the speed of the payout. None of his top aides have been caught up in taking bribes while in office–although their race through the revolving door into lucrative private sector positions is well beyond nauseating.

As in most presidencies, there have been an awful lot of political hacks populating the mid-reaches of this Administration. In the Obama instance, these have shown an anachronistic, pre-Clinton liberal bias when it comes to the rules and regulations governing many of our safety net programs, like social security disability. And now they have violated one of the more sacred rules of our democracy: you do not use the tax code to punish your opponents.

Lois G. Lerner, the IRS official who oversees tax-exempt groups, said the “absolutely inappropriate” actions by “front-line people” were not driven by partisan motives.

Does anyone actually believe this?

Yet again, we have an example of Democrats simply not managing the government properly and with discipline. This is just poisonous at a time of skepticism about the efficacy of government. And the President should know this: the absence of scandal is not the presence of competence. His unwillingness to concentrate–and I mean concentrate obsessively–on making sure that government is managed efficiently will be part of his legacy.

Previous Presidents, including great ones like Roosevelt, have used the IRS against their enemies. But I don’t think Barack Obama ever wanted to be on the same page as Richard Nixon. In this specific case, he now is.

Michael Barone asks if Hillary and barack believed their Benghazi baloney. 

What were President Barack Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton thinking? Why did they keep pitching the line that the Sept. 11, 2012 Benghazi attack that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans started as a spontaneous protest against an anti-Muslim video?

One possible explanation is confusion. There was such an attack on our embassy in Cairo earlier that day that fit that description.

When Hillary Clinton on Sept. 14 talked of a “mob” and “violent attacks” over the caskets of the Americans slain in Benghazi, she could have been referring to the attacks in Cairo. In that case she would not exactly be lying, as many have charged.

But she would have been misleading people, quite possibly intentionally. We know she assured one victim’s father, Charles Wood, that “we’re going to prosecute that person that made the video.”

Not entirely successfully, by the way. “I knew she was lying,” Woods said after the House committee hearing on Benghazi last week.

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that Clinton was knowingly attempting to mislead. She certainly knows the difference between Cairo and Benghazi.

And it’s undisputed that Gregory Hicks, the No. 2 man in our Libya embassy, reported that it was an “attack” on Sept. 11. That was the word he heard in his last conversation with Chris Stevens. …

Boston Globe tells us where some of the bogus “studies” came from.

A prominent Dutch social psychologist who once claimed to have shown that the very act of thinking about eating meat makes people behave more selfishly has been found to have faked data throughout much of his career.

In one of the worst cases of scientific fraud on record in the Netherlands, a review committee made up of some of the country’s top scientists has found that University of Tilburg Prof. Diederik Stapel systematically falsified data to achieve the results he wanted.

The university has fired the 45-year-old Stapel and plans to file fraud charges against him, university spokesman Walther Verhoeven said Thursday.

Stapel acknowledged in a statement the accusations were largely true.

“I have manipulated study data and fabricated investigations,” he wrote in an open letter published by De Volkskrant newspaper this week. “I realize that via this behavior I have left my direct colleagues stunned and angry and put my field, social psychology, in a poor light.” …

Ann Coulter defends John Lott, the author of “More Guns; Less Crime.”

You can tell the conservatives liberals fear most because they start being automatically referred to as “discredited.” Ask Sen. Ted Cruz. But no one is called “discredited” by liberals more often than the inestimable economist John Lott, author of the groundbreaking book More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws .

Lott’s economic analysis of the effect of concealed-carry laws on violent crime is the most thoroughly vetted study in the history of economics, perhaps in the history of the world.

Some nut Dutch professor produces dozens of gag studies purportedly finding that thinking about red meat makes people selfish and that litter leads to racism — and no one bothers to see if he even administered questionnaires before drawing these grand conclusions about humanity.

But Lott’s decades-long studies of concealed-carry laws have been probed, poked and re-examined dozens of times. (Most of all by Lott himself, who has continuously re-run the numbers controlling for thousands of factors.)

Tellingly, Lott immediately makes all his underlying data and computer analyses available to critics — unlike, say, the critics. He has sent his data and work to 120 researchers around the world. By now, there have been 29 peer-reviewed studies of Lott’s work on the effect of concealed-carry laws.

Eighteen confirm Lott’s results, showing a statistically significant reduction in crime after concealed-carry laws are enacted. Ten show no harm, but no significant reduction in crime. Only one peer-reviewed study even purported to show any negative effect: a temporary increase in aggravated assaults. Then it turned out this was based on a flawed analysis by a liberal activist professor: John Donohue, whose name keeps popping up in all fake studies purporting to debunk Lott. …

According to a BBC report, the risk of skin cancer is more than overcome by the healthy effects of sunshine. 

The health benefits of exposing skin to sunlight may far outweigh the risk of developing skin cancer, according to scientists.

EdinburghUniversity research suggests sunlight helps reduce blood pressure, cutting heart attack and stroke risks and even prolonging life.

UV rays were found to release a compound that lowers blood pressure.

Researchers said more studies would be carried out to determine if it is time to reconsider advice on skin exposure.

Heart disease and stroke linked to high blood pressure are estimated to lead to about 80 times more deaths than those from skin cancer in the UK. …

WSJ reviews a book on the bird watcher’s holy grail.

She’s there in a 1957-era ornithologist’s film, tossing her springy curled crest, whacking away at scaly pine bark and hitching vigorously up a tree. She is an imperial woodpecker, the largest woodpecker who ever lived: almost 2 feet tall; jet black and snow white, with a staring doll’s eye, a Kewpie crest and an oversize bone-colored bill, stuck like an awl in a surprised-looking face. And she is, sadly, one of the last of her kind: No one has spotted an imperial woodpecker in the half-century since the film was made.

Even though Tim Gallagher reported seeing an ivory-billed woodpecker, the imperial woodpecker’s northern cousin, fly across Arkansas’s Bayou De View in 2004 (and wrote a 2006 book, “The Grail Bird,” about his quest), you’re aware from the get-go that his hunt for the imperial woodpecker in Mexico won’t be a saga of discovery. There won’t be a photo of an oversize, pied woodpecker on the book’s cover, just an artist’s rendering. Instead, “Imperial Dreams” is more along the lines of Peter Matthiessen’s “The Snow Leopard.” It’s yearning, put into words and wistfully unrequited. …

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Mark Steyn attributes Benghazi to lack of character.

Shortly before last November’s election I took part in a Fox News documentary on Benghazi, whose other participants included the former governor of New Hampshire John Sununu. Making chit-chat while the camera crew were setting up, Governor Sununu said to me that in his view Benghazi mattered because it was “a question of character.” That’s correct. On a question of foreign policy or counterterrorism strategy, men of good faith can make the wrong decisions. But a failure of character corrodes the integrity of the state.

That’s why career diplomat Gregory Hicks’s testimony was so damning — not so much for the new facts as for what those facts revealed about the leaders of this republic. In this space in January, I noted that Hillary Clinton had denied ever seeing Ambassador Stevens’s warnings about deteriorating security in Libya on the grounds that “1.43 million cables come to my office” — and she can’t be expected to see all of them, or any. Once Ambassador Stevens was in his flag-draped coffin listening to her eulogy for him at Andrews Air Force Base, he was her bestest friend in the world — it was all “Chris this” and “Chris that,” as if they’d known each other since third grade. But up till that point he was just one of 1.43 million close personal friends of Hillary trying in vain to get her ear.

Now we know that at 8 p.m. Eastern time on the last night of Stevens’s life, his deputy in Libya spoke to Secretary Clinton and informed her of the attack in Benghazi and the fact that the ambassador was now missing. An hour later, Gregory Hicks received a call from the then–Libyan prime minister, Abdurrahim el-Keib, informing him that Stevens was dead. Hicks immediately called Washington. It was 9 p.m. Eastern time, or 3 a.m. in Libya. Remember the Clinton presidential team’s most famous campaign ad? About how Hillary would be ready to take that 3 a.m. call? Four years later, the phone rings, and Secretary Clinton’s not there. She doesn’t call Hicks back that evening. Or the following day.

Are murdered ambassadors like those 1.43 million cables she doesn’t read? Just too many of them to keep track of? No. Only six had been killed in the history of the republic — seven, if you include Arnold Raphel, who perished in General Zia’s somewhat mysterious plane crash in Pakistan in 1988. Before that you have to go back to Adolph Dubs, who died during a kidnapping attempt in Kabul in 1979. So we have here a once-in-a-third-of-a-century event. And at 3 a.m. Libyan time on September 12 it’s still unfolding, with its outcome unclear. Hicks is now America’s head man in the country, and the cabinet secretary to whom he reports says, “Leave a message after the tone and I’ll get back to you before the end of the week.” Just to underline the difference here: Libya’s head of government calls Hicks, but nobody who matters in his own government can be bothered to.

What was Secretary Clinton doing that was more important? What was the president doing? Aside, that is, from resting up for his big Vegas campaign event. A real government would be scrambling furiously to see what it could do to rescue its people. It’s easy, afterwards, to say that nothing would have made any difference. But, at the time Deputy Chief Hicks was calling 9-1-1 and getting executive-branch voicemail, nobody in Washington knew how long it would last. A terrorist attack isn’t like a soccer game, over in 90 minutes. If it is a sport, it’s more like a tennis match: Whether it’s all over in three sets or goes to five depends on how hard the other guy pushes back. The government of the United States took the extremely strange decision to lose in straight sets. …

IBD Editors on the Clinton intimidation of Gregory Hicks.

The secretary of state in the most transparent administration in history has her chief of staff warn a Benghazi whistle-blower to not spill the beans on Benghazi to a U.S. congressman.

In the course of the career of Hillary Clinton’s husband, William Jefferson Clinton, there were handlers delegated to deal with what were famously called “bimbo eruptions,” past dalliances that might impede his political career.

Now on her own politically, Mrs. Clinton apparently has her own handlers, paid for by the U.S. taxpayer, to deal with what we’ll call “Benghazi eruptions.” Those who know the truth and are willing to speak it must be dealt with by intimidation.

One of the things we learned during Wednesday’s hearings from Greg Hicks, the deputy chief of mission in Libya and a career foreign service officer for 22 years, is that after he talked to investigators about Benghazi, he received a searing phone reprimand from a very angry Cheryl Mills, who happened to be the chief of staff to his boss, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

In the State Department, when Cheryl Mills calls, you pick up the phone. She’s been one of the Clintons’ right-hand men, so to speak, for decades. She worked in Bill’s White House legal office, then as counsel to Hillary’s presidential campaign, and then became chief of staff at State when Hillary was appointed secretary. She knows how to help handle “eruptions, ” bimbo or otherwise. …

Michael Barone says colleges have learned how the market works.

.. Now the higher education bubble has burst. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that that the average “tuition discount rate” offered incoming freshmen last fall by private colleges and universities has reached an all-time high of 45 percent.

At the same time, their “sticker price” tuitions have increased by the smallest amount in the last dozen years. Tuitions for in-state students at public four-year colleges and universities also increased by the smallest amount during that period.

Applicants are negotiating bigger discounts than they used to. Market competition has kicked in.

What has happened is that in a recessionary and sluggish economy potential customers have been figuring out that a college diploma may not be a good investment — particularly if it entails six-figure college loan debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.

The Millennial Generation that voted so heavily for Barack Obama — 66 to 32 percent in 2008, 60 to 37 percent in 2012 — has had a hard time finding jobs, even with diplomas in hand. Especially if their degrees are in gender studies or similar fields beloved of academics.

In even worse condition are those students who never get a degree, a disproportionate number of whom are blacks and Hispanics admitted under affirmative action programs who prove unable to keep up with the pace of instruction at schools where most students enter much better prepared.

We see in higher education something like what we saw in housing. Government programs aimed at increasing college education and homeownership, particularly among minorities, turn out to hurt many of the intended beneficiaries.

The intentions of the people who created these programs were good. The results? Well, not so much. …

Der Spiegel tells us about the plight of the African lion.

It’s a Sunday in South Africa, and on the green lawn of the Weltevrede Lion Farm, arms reach for a white animal that could double for a cuddly stuffed animal. Visitors are being allowed to pet Lisa, an eight-week-old lion cub with unusual coloring.

Lisa was two weeks old when she was taken from her mother. “To make them manageable you have to do this,” explains Christiaan, who is leading visitors on a tour of the grounds.

When cubs are born here, on this lion farm in Vrystaat, a province of South Africa, “each employee is assigned to bottle-feed one of them,” says Christiaan. “You can buy a cub for 40,000 rand (€3,400, or $4,455).” A delighted visitor asks whether she can take a lion baby into her room at night. It can be arranged, promises the guide.

Lisa’s father, a grown specimen with a stately mane who lives in the enclosure, can be had for about €20,000. Roughly 2,000 lions are kept in captivity in Vrystaat alone, where they are bred for a practice called “canned hunting.” It’s a diversion that executives at major German companies have been known to enjoy.

The king of the animals has fallen on hard times in his own kingdom. “In all of South Africa, there are almost as many lions behind bars as in the wild,” says Fiona Miles of the Vrystaat chapter of the international animal rights group Four Paws, which has been unsuccessful in its efforts to protest the hunting of animals that are somewhat tame and are sometimes even drugged to keep them calm. “As a first step to ban canned hunting,” Miles is calling for a moratorium on the breeding of lions.

Across the entire continent, the large African predator, a symbol of strength and majesty, is threatened with decline. Outside fenced enclosures, there is hardly any room left for Panthera leo. Scientists and conservationists warn that the king of the steppes has lost much of his habitat in the last 50 years. …

WSJ OpEd defends carbon dioxide. 

Of all of the world’s chemical compounds, none has a worse reputation than carbon dioxide. Thanks to the single-minded demonization of this natural and essential atmospheric gas by advocates of government control of energy production, the conventional wisdom about carbon dioxide is that it is a dangerous pollutant. That’s simply not the case. Contrary to what some would have us believe, increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will benefit the increasing population on the planet by increasing agricultural productivity.

The cessation of observed global warming for the past decade or so has shown how exaggerated NASA’s and most other computer predictions of human-caused warming have been—and how little correlation warming has with concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide. As many scientists have pointed out, variations in global temperature correlate much better with solar activity and with complicated cycles of the oceans and atmosphere. There isn’t the slightest evidence that more carbon dioxide has caused more extreme weather.

The current levels of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere, approaching 400 parts per million, are low by the standards of geological and plant evolutionary history. Levels were 3,000 ppm, or more, until the Paleogene period (beginning about 65 million years ago). For most plants, and for the animals and humans that use them, more carbon dioxide, far from being a “pollutant” in need of reduction, would be a benefit. This is already widely recognized by operators of commercial greenhouses, who artificially increase the carbon dioxide levels to 1,000 ppm or more to improve the growth and quality of their plants. …

… We know that carbon dioxide has been a much larger fraction of the earth’s atmosphere than it is today, and the geological record shows that life flourished on land and in the oceans during those times. The incredible list of supposed horrors that increasing carbon dioxide will bring the world is pure belief disguised as science.

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Jeffery Tucker at Laissez Faire Today on how government wrecked the gas can. 

The gas gauge broke. There was no smartphone app to tell me how much was left, so I ran out. I had to call the local gas station to give me enough to get on my way. The gruff but lovable attendant arrived in his truck and started to pour gas in my car’s tank. And pour. And pour.

“Hmmm, I just hate how slow these gas cans are these days,” he grumbled. “There’s no vent on them.”

That sound of frustration in this guy’s voice was strangely familiar, the grumble that comes when something that used to work but doesn’t work anymore, for some odd reason we can’t identify.

I’m pretty alert to such problems these days. Soap doesn’t work. Toilets don’t flush. Clothes washers don’t clean. Light bulbs don’t illuminate. Refrigerators break too soon. Paint discolors. Lawnmowers have to be hacked. It’s all caused by idiotic government regulations that are wrecking our lives one consumer product at a time, all in ways we hardly notice.

It’s like the barbarian invasions that wrecked Rome, taking away the gains we’ve made in bettering our lives. It’s the bureaucrats’ way of reminding market producers and consumers who is in charge.

Surely, the gas can is protected. It’s just a can, for goodness sake. Yet he was right. This one doesn’t have a vent. Who would make a can without a vent unless it was done under duress? After all, everyone knows to vent anything that pours. Otherwise, it doesn’t pour right and is likely to spill.

It took one quick search. The whole trend began in (wait for it) California. …

ObamaBS gets derision from Charles Krauthammer.

You know you’re in trouble when you can’t even get your walk-back story straight. Stung by the worldwide derision that met President Obama’s fudging and fumbling of his chemical-weapons red line in Syria, the White House leaked to the New York Times that Obama’s initial statement had been unprepared, unscripted and therefore unserious.

The next day Jay Carney said precisely the opposite: “Red line” was intended and deliberate.

Which is it? Who knows? Perhaps Obama used the term last August to look tough, sound like a real world leader, never expecting that Syria would do something so crazy. He would have it both ways: sound decisive but never have to deliver.

Or perhaps he thought that Syria might actually use chemical weapons one day, at which point he would think of something.

So far he’s thought of nothing. Instead he’s backed himself into a corner: Be forced into a war he is firmly resolved to avoid, or lose credibility, which for a superpower on whose word relies the safety of a dozen allies is not just embarrassing but dangerous.

In his recent rambling news conference, Obama said that he needed certainty about the crossing of the red line to keep the “international community” behind him. This is absurd. The “international community” is a fiction, especially in Syria. Russia, Iran and Hezbollah are calling the shots.

Nor, he averred, could he act until he could be sure of everything down to the “chain of custody” of the sarin gas.

What is this? “CSI: Damascus”? …

Neo-Neocon posts on speechwriters in the administration who get rewarded with real jobs where they are out of their depth.

Several people have mentioned Ben Rhodes in connection with the Benghazi debacle (just Google “Ben Rhodes Benghazi” and you’ll find plenty of the speculation). It’s not at all clear how much responsibility Rhodes had for the decisions during the Benghazi attack and the spin afterward. But what is clear is that Rhodes is one of Obama’s many advisors who lack anything remotely connected with expertise, except in the art of politics and speechwriting. Despite this, for Obama Rhodes doesn’t just write about foreign policy, he helps to make it.

Rhodes’ resume is singularly unimpressive, except after he was tapped by Obama to write for him and then to somehow be a foreign policy “expert.” Rhodes is hardly unique in the Obama administration for having this sort of background. The president seems to prefer to have people around him with even less experience and expertise than he has, which is saying something. …

Scott Johnson of Power Line quotes David Gelernter on Benghazi revelations.

… It is the Democratic Party that’s on trial today; and to a lesser extent, America’s mainstream media.  For Democrats (and especially Democratic senators) it is put-up-or-shut-up time: are they Democrats or Americans first?  Obviously their first instinct was to defend the Democratic administration.  Republicans would have done the same.  But starting with the Hayes story on the Rice propaganda points (and the neo-Soviet process that turned them from truth to lies), and then the Issa hearing Wednesday (and a recent ABC news piece focusing again on the phonied-up talking points), no honest observer can fail to suspect this administration of doing unspeakable things.  It is Congress’s duty to find out the truth.

How would Republicans act if a GOP administration were under this sort of cloud?  We know exactly how.  It was the radically partisan Edward Kennedy who proposed that a senate select committee investigate Watergate—but in February 1973, the Senate voted unanimously to create that committee.  Republican Senator Howard Baker was vice chairman, and asked the key question: ”What did the president know and when did he know it?”  Which Democratic senator will ask that question today, now that the issue isn’t breaking-and-entering but lying about four murders, including the murder of an American ambassador? …

Jennifer Rubin says this is pointing toward Hillary.

… To begin with, the very compelling witness Gregory Hicks explained to lawmakers that the YouTube video lampooning Muhammad was a non-event; rather, he understood the assault on the Benghazi consulate to be a terrorist attack and briefed Clinton that night. There was no confusion about the attack in that sense. The “spontaneous demonstration” story line did not come from people on the ground or from the intelligence community (who knew from the get-go that al-Qaeda linked operatives were involved). It came from senior administration officials.

Hicks, the State Department’s deputy chief of mission in Libya, asked Beth Jones, the acting assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs, why U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice was pinning the incident on the YouTube video. He said he was told not to ask questions.

Then there is the matter of the rescue forces. Among others, then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta testified in February that no forces were called and none were told to stand down. The testimony yesterday tells us that isn’t true. (That may have been a correct military judgment, but we’ll never know.) The forces from Aviano Air Base in Italy and a second team of special forces in Tripoli were told to stand down, according to Hicks. He said the military personnel there were “furious. [A military officer told Hicks,] ‘This is the first time in my career that a diplomat has more balls than somebody in the military.’ ” Mark Thompson, the State Department’s deputy coordinator for counterterrorism, also testified, “I was told this was not the right time to deploy the team.”

In the wake of the attack, Hicks testified, he was told not to speak with a congressional delegation visiting Libya. After he participated in a classified briefing without a State Department lawyer present, Cheryl Mills, Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff and sometimes called Hillary’s alter ego at State, contacted Gregory Hicks and told him she was “very upset.” …

This has become so serious for the administration, they are losing The New Yorker. 

It’s a cliché, of course, but it really is true: in Washington, every scandal has a crime and a coverup. The ongoing debate about the attack on the United States facility in Benghazi where four Americans were killed, and the Obama Administration’s response to it, is no exception. For a long time, it seemed like the idea of a coverup was just a Republican obsession. But now there is something to it.

On Friday, ABC News’s Jonathan Karl revealed the details of the editing process for the C.I.A.’s talking points about the attack, including the edits themselves and some of the reasons a State Department spokeswoman gave for requesting those edits. It’s striking to see the twelve different iterations that the talking points went through before they were released to Congress and to United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice, who used them in Sunday show appearances that became a central focus of Republicans’ criticism of the Administration’s public response to the attacks. Over the course of about twenty-four hours, the remarks evolved from something specific and fairly detailed into a bland, vague mush.

From the very beginning of the editing process, the talking points contained the erroneous assertion that the attack was “spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and evolved.” That’s an important fact, because the right has always criticized the Administration based on the suggestion that the C.I.A. and the State Department, contrary to what they said, knew that the attack was not spontaneous and not an outgrowth of a demonstration. But everything else about the changes that were made is problematic. …

According to Mary Kissel of WSJ’s Political Diary, the Thomas Perez LaborSec nomination might be in trouble.

Are the political winds starting to shift against labor secretary nominee Thomas Perez? Senate Republicans delayed a vote on his nomination Wednesday on a procedural technicality. The hearing is now expected to be held next week. But the more surprising news is that Rep. Elijah Cummings, a Maryland Democrat, called Wednesday for Mr. Perez to comply with a subpoena of his personal email account.

Until now, Democrats have denounced the House investigation into a legal quid pro quo that Mr. Perez negotiated with the City of St. Paul, Minn., last year, in his role as the Justice Department’s civil-rights chief. …

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Debra Saunders writes on “extortion in the skies.”

This week, the Obama administration furloughed 14,500 air traffic controllers — staffers will lose two days of work per month — ostensibly to comply with the 2011 Budget Control Act’s $85 billion in sequester cuts this year. The Federal Aviation Administration’s share is $637 million. So expect delays at the airport. That’s the idea, but it didn’t have to be.

The Obama administration has chosen to hold airline travel hostage in its never-ending effort to extort further tax increases from the GOP.

The administration argues that its hands are tied. By law, the FAA must cut spending across the board. Many lawmakers and industry leaders disagree, as air traffic controllers are “essential employees.” But to make absolutely sure, GOP senators have proposed legislation to allow the administration to prioritize cuts. For weeks, the White House has wanted no part of that. …

Jennifer Rubin has “10 reasons why it is a no good rotten second term.”

It’s been a rough year so far for the president, and it could get worse:

1. President Obama wound up ratifying all but a sliver of the Bush tax cuts.

2. He exaggerated, got caught exaggerating and lost on the sequestration implementation.

3. Now he’s backing down from the latest punish-the-public gambit. (The Associated Press reports: “Under pressure, the White House signaled Wednesday it might accept legislation eliminating Federal Aviation Administration furloughs blamed for lengthy flight delays for airline passengers, while leaving the rest of $85 billion in across-the-board spending cuts in place. The disclosure came as sentiment grew among Senate Democrats as well as Republicans for legislation to ease the impact of the cuts on the FAA, possibly by loosening restrictions on agency spending.”)

4. He lost on gun control. …

Jim Geraghty writes in National Review about the high costs of the education of a president.

… Time and again, we hear anecdotes of the president angered, befuddled, and frustrated that the policies implemented in the beginning of his presidency, with a compliant Congress, haven’t generated the results he promised. But very little seems to change, other than a bit of fuming at aides behind closed doors.

President Obama was surprised to learn, in discussions with economic adviser Christina Romer, that large-scale investment in infrastructure and clean-energy projects wouldn’t create enormous numbers of new jobs.

In a December 2010 meeting with economic advisors, he “boiled over” with frustration that his housing policies hadn’t helped struggling homeowners like he promised.

When federal program after federal program fails to generate the desired result, it’s not crazy talk to become at least a little skeptical of the latest pledges and promises and idealistic visions.

But Democrats often speak as if the Right’s skepticism of the government’s problem-solving ability is driven by some sort of abstract ideological theory. It’s not. It’s usually built upon hard experiences. Human behavior isn’t predictable, particularly their interactions with the government. Unintended consequences pile up like a car crash.

That pattern is depressingly predictable: Someone in government comes up with some laudable goal, and announces some new program. After the press conference, when the cameras and microphones are away, implementing the idea proves more complicated than the press-conference announcement made it seem. Deadlines get missed. Costs turn out much higher than expected.  Bureaucratic inertia begins to exert the gravitational pull of a black hole.

Perhaps it is the nature of the modern presidency that the Oval Office’s occupant glides from photo-op to photo-op, and never spend too much time getting entangled in the messy work of actually making his policies live up to his promises. Certainly that’s the pattern for this president; even in this non-campaign year, the schedule is heavy with campaign-style rallies on gun-control initiatives here, a DCCC fundraiser there, then off to a tour of a national laboratory. He flits from issue to issue; to judge from his remarks and his schedule, the health-care issue is resolved and our system’s problems are fixed. Maybe White House press secretary Jay Carney will get a question about the exchanges or the electronic records system, which he’ll defuse with another defensive, meandering word salad.

Implementing Obamacare? That’s for somebody else to worry about.

Andrew Malcolm kicks off a section on the rehabilitation of George W.

Fifty-one months of an Obama presidency seem like an eternity of speeches, photo ops, fundraisers, soaring debt, stagnant job growth, blame games and did we mention speeches?

In historical context, however, it’s the snap of a finger. Which makes it somewhat surprising that already Americans are quietly rehabilitating President George W. Bush’s image in their own minds. This despite Bush’s virtual disappearance from the political scene since Jan. 20, 2009, save for a brief promotion tour for his book, “Decision Points.”

You’re about to hear a whole lot more about Bush, at least briefly, with Thursday’s dedication of his presidential library at Laura Bush’s alma mater, Southern Methodist University in Dallas. By custom, all former presidents will attend.

President Obama will also be there, although he’s blamed Republican Bush for just about everything that’s gone wrong during these long 1,554 days, except Obama’s miserable NCAA tournament brackets. First, of course, to make the trip worthwhile, Democrat Obama will do another political fundraiser in Dallas.

Remember those iconic billboards that went up during the great ObamaCare legislative con? A smiling Bush waving with the caption, “Miss Me Yet?” Well, apparently more people do. ABC News and the Washington Post came out early this morning with a new poll timed to the library dedication. …

Peter Wehner has more on W.

… In fact, over the last 40 years and eight presidencies, only two presidents have kept spending below 20 percent of GDP in even a single year: George W. Bush did it in six of his eight fiscal years; Bill Clinton in four. Barack Obama has averaged 24 percent of GDP spending so far; and even his optimistic budget projections don’t have the U.S. getting close to 20 percent again. Ever. As another reference point: during fiscal years 1981-88, the Reagan years, federal spending averaged over 22 percent of GDP. Just in case anyone is interested in it.

But I wanted to focus on one other comment that former Prime Minister Blair made, which is that Bush continues to believe that the world is safer without Saddam Hussein in power and added: “When you see what is happening in Syria today, the sense of that argument is evident. . . . What it does is just make clear that these decisions are very difficult. If you intervene, it can be very tough. If you don’t intervene, it can also be very tough.”

There is in Blair’s comments both wisdom and nuance, which is often lacking in those who comment on presidents and public officials and who themselves have never been in positions of influence in government. Having been on both sides of things, let me just say it’s easier to tweet about policy than it is to implement policy; and it’s more effortless to comment on unfolding events from the comfort of a television studio or from behind a microphone than to make decisions in the Oval Office.

George W. Bush, over the course of eight eventful years, made literally thousands of decisions. Under enormous pressure and facing tremendous challenges–during his years as president, Bush faced the worst attack on the American homeland in our history, two wars, the worst natural disaster in our history, and a financial collapse unlike any since the Great Depression–he got the vast majority of them right. And every day he was president–even when he got decisions wrong–he dignified the office. …

Karl Rove on his old boss.

… Mr. Bush ran in 2000 promising to restore honor and dignity to the presidency. He took seriously the example of John Adams, whose words to his wife Abigail are etched over the fireplace in the State Dining Room in the White House: “I pray heaven to bestow the best of blessing on this house, and on all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof!”

In his biography of Harry Truman, David McCullough wrote that CBS newscaster Eric Sevareid “would say nearly forty years later of Truman, ‘I am not sure he was right about the atomic bomb, or even Korea. But remembering him reminds people what a man in that office ought to be like. It’s character, just character. He stands like a rock in memory now.’ “

Character is what is being celebrated in Dallas this week.

Abby Thernstrom reviews a book on Manhattan’s Little Red School and affiliated high school – Elizabeth Irwin.

… Author Dina Hampton does not deny the schools’ dedication to political indoctrination. The students, she writes, “grew up in a counter-culture hothouse steeped in progressive pedagogy and radical politics.” At assemblies, everyone would stand to sing the “Negro National Anthem” (“Lift Every Voice and Sing”) instead of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” Social studies, taught by “a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist,” formed the core of the curriculum, “with emphasis placed on the exploration of oppressed cultures.” The school took students on field trips searching for the downtrodden proletariat (my description, not Hampton’s). They stayed away from ordinary workers—most of whom would have been violently anti-Communist, of course—but met instead with those on strike or laboring as migrant workers; they toured Pennsylvania steel mills and coal mines. 

I was an Elisabeth Irwin student in the early 1950s, and I remember clearly the curriculum and those politically heavy-handed trips. But neither made the intended impression on me, for reasons I don’t entirely know—except that I was always terrible at listening to my elders.

Hampton provides little information about the school itself. But Little Red’s subtitle, Three Passionate Lives Through the Sixties and Beyond, offers those lives as her subject. They are Tom Hurwitz, Angela Davis, and Elliott Abrams. Hurwitz and Davis were both in the class of 1961; Abrams graduated in 1965. Hampton views all three as “radicals,” a term of endearment, but only when speaking of those on the left. Amazingly, she equates the radicalism of the Black Panthers, the Weathermen, and the CPUSA with the views of Jeane Kirkpatrick, Henry Jackson, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Nathan Glazer, and Irving Kristol—members of what she calls the “radical neoconservative movement that came to power with the Reagan administration.” 

Elliott Abrams was clearly included to make the story ostensibly fair and balanced; but Davis and Hurwitz are heroes, while Abrams is conservative and, thus, a villain. …

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Andrew Malcolm calls our attention to the funeral of Margaret Thatcher. Follow his link and you can hear the sermon by Rev. Richard Chartres.

Britain staged the funeral of former British Prime Minister and staunch American ally Margaret Thatcher the other day. It contained almost all the pomp and circumstance you’d expect from the Brits.

They skipped the RAF flyover at the request of Thatcher, a conservative thrift even in death. We wrote here about that impressive day, including its regrettably classless dismissal by America’s highest-ranking South Sider. It’s as if Obama already knows and resents how much more she accomplished as a leader from the front than he can ever dream of from his chosen position behind.

You can watch the entire Thatcher funeral video here. And we have another one below too. As the baroness’ remains were being cremated Wednesday, the Marathon Finish Line bombings in Boston were completely distracting this country.

Now that the threat of these lethal culprits is over, we wanted to devote a few quiet minutes on this Sunday to ruminate over something that struck us about the Thatcher funeral. British pageantry aside, we were quite taken by the language in general of the service–the music, hymns and gospel–in the exquisite 17th-century St. Paul’s Cathedral of Sir Christopher Wren.

And more specifically by the sermon of Bishop Richard Chartres. He has a richly-deserved reputation for elocution, diction and simplicity/clarity of presentation. …

Nile Gardiner has more on Lady Thatcher’s funeral.

I have just returned to Washington from London where I attended the funeral of Lady Thatcher. Many Telegraph writers have described the deeply moving and truly beautiful service held at St. Paul’s Cathedral. It was a fitting farewell to a great leader who dedicated her life to serving her country and fighting for freedom, both at home and abroad.

On a personal note, it was a final farewell to my former boss and mentor, for whom I worked in her private office in Belgravia. I was with Lady Thatcher for some of the final years of her public life, and owe her an immense debt of gratitude. She was extraordinarily kind and compassionate towards her staff, and looked after those who worked for her as though they were part of her own family. She was a leader of great principle and integrity, selfless in her dedication to the British people, and remarkably humble for someone who had achieved so much in her life. She will be missed beyond words by those who knew her, and her death leaves a huge void in Britain and on the world stage. …

James Pethokoukis posts a chart everyone should understand.

It’s sad that the case for economic growth needs to be made. But it seems that too many people have lost sight of why growth is good as they fret about issues such as the environment and inequality (both of which growth actually helps).

In response, AEI’s Values & Capitalism series has published a little book, Economic Growth: Unleashing the Potential of Human Flourishing, that explores the benefits of growth and addresses common concerns regarding how growth impacts the poor, the environment, and culture.

Think about it: In real terms, the average income of Americans over the past two centuries went from $2,000 per person to $50,000. Here is the book’s formula for growth: …

Matthew Continetti on the president’s worst week yet.

… The combination of policy success and coddling by the media was sure to affect the president’s judgment. His ego never has been what one could call petite. “Phil, what’s my name,” the president is said to have asked his legislative director one day in the first term. “President Obama,” the aide replied. And Obama said, “Of course I’m feeling lucky.”

Such words are usually delivered at the moment in the play when Nemesis appears onstage, ready to correct the hubris of a tragic hero. And though Obama is neither a tragic figure nor a heroic one, he definitely suffers from a case of misplaced confidence. He clearly assumed that the power of his oratory, his charisma, and national shock at the horror in Newtown, Conn., would allow him to sign the first significant gun legislation in a quarter of a century. He was wrong.

The president entered the gunfight with three priorities: reinstating the assault weapons ban, banning high-capacity magazines,and universal background checks. By the beginning of this week it was clear that the assault weapons and high-capacity magazine amendments could not pass the Senate and that the background check language would have to be riddled with loopholes and concessions to have any chance. The amendment cobbled together by Sens. Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) and Pat Toomey (R., Pa.) was a misshapen shadow of the original proposal.The president hoped it would earn the requisite 60 votes. It did not.

Hence the genuine frustration and anger the president displayed Wednesday evening during his statement on the failure of his gun initiatives. Obama’s words may have been a futile protest directed at the Senate and the NRA, but they also carried the weight of shock at his own inability to convince four Democratic senators to support Manchin-Toomey. Once more, in Obama’s view, “politics” had conspired to frustrate his will. But even he would have to acknowledge that this happened only because he chose to fight over gun control.

The public did not want a fight. It has consistently prioritized the economy and the deficit over gun control. Nor had Obama campaigned on gun regulations in 2012. If there was any substance to his reelection, it was the promise he made in the Des Moines Register interview to push for amnesty for illegal immigrants. But the president went ahead anyway, deluded by the polls and by the misperception that the politics of the gun issue had changed.

And so any objective spectator would have to ask: What exactly has the president accomplished in the first 100 days of his second term? And here the only answer can be that Obama won Chuck Hagel confirmation as secretary of defense despite only four Republican senators voting for him and having Hagel recant all of the positions that endeared him to the antiwar left and right. Some accomplishment. …

Boston Herald tells us the Tsarnaev’s were funded by Massachusetts welfare. We live in a country that not only cannot defend itself, but goes one step further and finances those who attack it. 

Marathon bombings mastermind Tamerlan Tsarnaev was living on taxpayer-funded state welfare benefits even as he was delving deep into the world of radical anti-American Islamism, the Herald has learned.

State officials confirmed last night that Tsarnaev, slain in a raging gun battle with police last Friday, was receiving benefits along with his wife, Katherine Russell Tsarnaev, and their 3-year-old daughter. The state’s Executive Office of Health and Human Services said those benefits ended in 2012 when the couple stopped meeting income eligibility limits. Russell Tsarnaev’s attorney has claimed Katherine — who had converted to Islam — was working up to 80 hours a week as a home health aide while Tsarnaev stayed at home.

In addition, both of Tsarnaev’s parents received benefits, and accused brother bombers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan were recipients through their parents when they were younger, according to the state.

The news raises questions over whether Tsarnaev financed his radicalization on taxpayer money.

And ABC News notes Mom Tsarnaev has outstanding warrants for shoplifting $1,600 of clothing from Lord and Taylor. By all means, lets make sure we ease up on immigration. It is working so well for us.  However this helps us enjoy the irony that it was security video recorded by the Lord & Taylor store that provided the information that led to the capture of the bombers.  

The mother of accused Boston Marathon bombers has continued to defend her two sons from her home in Dagestan, Russia, but if she attempts to return to the United States to bury her older son, or care for the boy that remains hospitalized, she could face arrest on an outstanding warrant for shoplifting.

The clerk of the Natick District Court confirmed to ABC News that Zubeidat Tsarnaev, failed to appear at a court hearing on October 25, 2012 to resolve charges that she stole $1,600 worth of garments from a nearby Lord & Taylor department store. …

The NY Times reports on Denmark’s struggle to rein in welfare costs.

It began as a stunt intended to prove that hardship and poverty still existed in this small, wealthy country, but it backfired badly. Visit a single mother of two on welfare, a liberal member of Parliament goaded a skeptical political opponent, see for yourself how hard it is.

It turned out, however, that life on welfare was not so hard. The 36-year-old single mother, given the pseudonym “Carina” in the news media, had more money to spend than many of the country’s full-time workers. All told, she was getting about $2,700 a month, and she had been on welfare since she was 16.

In past years, Danes might have shrugged off the case, finding Carina more pitiable than anything else. But even before her story was in the headlines 16 months ago, they were deeply engaged in a debate about whether their beloved welfare state, perhaps Europe’s most generous, had become too rich, undermining the country’s work ethic. Carina helped tip the scales.

With little fuss or political protest — or notice abroad — Denmark has been at work overhauling entitlements, trying to prod Danes into working more or longer or both. While much of southern Europe has been racked by strikes and protests as its creditors force austerity measures, Denmark still has a coveted AAA bond rating.

But Denmark’s long-term outlook is troubling. The population is aging, and in many regions of the country people without jobs now outnumber those with them.

Some of that is a result of a depressed economy. But many experts say a more basic problem is the proportion of Danes who are not participating in the work force at all — be they dawdling university students, young pensioners or welfare recipients like Carina who lean on hefty government support. …

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Mark Steyn on last week’s events.

This has been a strange and deadly week in America. On Monday, two bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon, the first successful terrorist attack on a civilian target on American soil since 9/11. And yet a mere two days later,

Boston’s death toll was surpassed by a freak fertilizer accident at a small town in Texas.

In America, all atrocities are not equal: Minutes after the Senate declined to support so-called gun control in the wake of the Newtown massacre, the president rushed ill-advisedly on air to give a whiny, petulant performance predicated on the proposition that one man’s mass infanticide should call into question the constitutional right to bear arms. Simultaneously, the media remain terrified that another man’s mass infanticide might lead you gullible rubes to question the constitutional right to abortion, …

… The politicization of mass murder found its perfect expression in one of those near-parodic pieces to which the more tortured self-loathing dweebs of the fin de civilisation West are prone. As the headline in Salon put it, “Let’s Hope the BostonMarathon Bomber Is a White American.” David Sirota is himself a white American, but he finds it less discomforting to his Princess Fluffy Bunny worldview to see his compatriots as knuckle-dragging nutjobs rather than confront all the apparent real-world contradictions of the diversity quilt. He had a lot of support for his general predisposition. “The thinking, as we have been reporting, is that this is a domestic extremist attack,” declared Dina Temple-Raston, NPR’s “counterterrorism correspondent.” “Officials are leaning that way largely because of the timing of the attack. April is a big month for anti-government and right-wing individuals. There’s the Columbine anniversary, there’s Hitler’s birthday, there’s the Oklahoma City bombing, the assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco.” Miss Temple-Raston was born in my mother’s homeland of Belgium, where, alas, there were more than a few fellows willing to wish the Führer happy birthday back when he was still around to thank you for it. But it was news to me it was such a red-letter day in the BayState. Who knew? At NPR, “counterterrorism” seems to mean countering any suggestion that this might be terrorism from you know, the usual suspects. …

Ed Morrissey reports on the shocking fact that neither of the Tsarnaev brothers had a gun permit.

Take some comfort in the fact that this will almost certainly be the last dumb meme in the gun-rights debate for a long time to come.  After the Tsarnaev brothers allegedly planted bombs at the Boston Marathon, shot a cop to death in an ambush, and then wounded several more in a gun battle, the fact that the two didn’t have Massachusetts handgun permits has apparently made national news:

“The two brothers suspected in the Boston Marathon bombings, who police say engaged in a gun battle with officers early Friday after a frenzied manhunt, were not licensed to own guns in the towns where they lived, authorities said on Sunday.

In the confrontation with police on the streets of a Boston suburb, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were armed with handguns, at least one rifle and several explosive devices, authorities say.

But neither brother appears to have been legally entitled to own or carry firearms where they lived, a fact that may add to the national debate over current gun laws. Last week, the U.S. Senate rejected a bill to expand background checks on gun purchases, legislation that opponents argued would do nothing to stop criminals from buying guns illegally.”

And which last week proved. Criminals rarely go to the trouble of applying for gun permits because (a) previous convictions would keep them from getting one anyway, and/or (b) they don’t want to establish paper trails to themselves for police to find.  Criminals, especially those who want to commit high-profile crimes, usually steal their weapons (or buy them illegally, as Reuters notes) and discard them after the crimes so that investigators can’t tie them to the weapons. …

Jay Nordlinger posts that David Axelrod believes the president thinks the bombing was related to Tax Day.

David Axelrod said something interesting after the terror in Boston. (He is the president’s chief political strategist.) He said the president was connecting the bombing to Tax Day.

Friday night, I was sitting in a concert hall. The critic sitting behind me was saying to his friend, “I assumed this was right-wing domestic terror. It happened on Tax Day.”

The other week, a U.S. Army instructor issued a list of threats — a list headed “Religious Extremism.” At the top of the list was “Evangelical Christianity (U.S./Christian).”

Two years ago, Mayor Bloomberg in New York guessed that the Times Square terrorist was opposed to Obamacare.

I thought of something last week (and if you heard me say it on my podcast with Mona Charen, forgive the repetition). When Kennedy was assassinated, the speculation was that this was right-wingers. JohnTower’s family had to be evacuated. He was leading the Goldwater operation, I believe, and there were death threats against his family.

Then it transpired that the killer was a Communist. And a prominent liberal said, “Now our grief can be pure.”

In my view, American education — the weight of the culture — has done something sick to many American minds. If the country cannot recognize the threats against it — specifically Muslim extremism — it probably can’t defend itself. …

Roger Simon posts on the Salon expectations about the bombers. 

When you write about titanic events in progress, you risk appearing a fool. Nevertheless I have some strong feelings this morning with Dzhokar Tsarnaev still at large that I cannot resist spelling out.

Over the last few days I have wanted to write about an article published by David Sirota on Salon, which was commented on admirably by my colleagues Roger Kimball and Richard Fernandez. Sirota wrote to express his hope that the Boston Bombers would be white Americans, because otherwise our putative race-hatred of Muslims or people of color of any sort would be enhanced. It’s all about “white skin privilege,” doncha know?

Today Sirota seems like an imbecile (well, he did before), but I would venture to say he doesn’t know why. So I will spell it out for him:  the War on Terror (euphemism alert) is not about skin color. It is about ideology, Islamic ideology.

The Tsarnaevs are white people in the purest sense. They are Caucasians from the Caucasus, of all things, but they believe in Allah — do or die, apparently.

Too young for the civil rights movement, Sirota is an adherent of an ultra-bourgeois nostalgia for racism that hides under the ludicrous rubric “progressive.” It’s laughable, but it’s also sad and dangerous. …

… The Islamic people of the world need a reformation in the most extraordinary way. Ignoring that, as do the Sirotas of our culture, will not help it happen.

Interesting Chechen background by Stephen Green at VodkaPundit.

Starting back in the early ’60s, Colin McEvedy wrote a remarkable series of historical atlases for Penguin Books. Each covered a particular era and a particular area, usually Europe. And each map was exactly alike — except the borders. And every two-page spread was set up the same way: a map on the right-hand page, and explanatory text on the left. McEvedy’s writing style was that of an avuncular Oxford dean: friendly, warm, and knowing.

Later revisions of his work have more maps, but McEvedy’s words — those wonderful words! — had been tramped down by the boot of political correctness. But used copies of the original editions aren’t too hard to find. I highly recommend them, and still read the whole series every few years.

All of this comes to mind because of the craziness in Boston today, straight outta Caucasus.

To understand why, here’s one of McEvedy’s maps from The Penguin Atlas of Recent History, with “recent history” in his estimation being everything in Europe since Napoleon:

Look closely at the right hand side of the map in Tsarist Russia. There, in the northern Caucasus in the Krasnodar-Maykop region, you’ll see a bit of “Russian” territory indicated by a dotted line. If you can’t read it at this scale, it’s labeled “Unsubdued Circassians.” The territory is within the Russia Empire, but the Tsar’s writ did not run there. “Unsubdued” was how the Russians found the area when they took it from the Turks in the 1820s. And that’s how it stayed until the Soviets really clamped the lid down a century later.

It’s no coincidence that as the Soviet Union began to fall apart in the mid-to-late ’80s, the first violence to erupt was in the Caucasus. It’s a crazy patchwork of ethnicities and religions, everybody with legitimate grievances against everybody else.

We need two more maps to really see it. …

Andrew Malcolm has late night humor.