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The cartoonists have a special day of fun with the Clinton campaign.

Ron Fournier, left/liberal, from The National Journal continues the charge against H.Clinton.

I don’t believe her.

I don’t believe Hillary Rodham Clinton when she says—as she did at a brief news conference on Tuesday—that she has no control over the release of her State Department email. “They’re not mine. They belong to the State Department.”  

I don’t believe her because a person’s actions are more revealing than words: She kept her government email on a secret server and, only under pressure from Congress, returned less than half of them to the State Department. She deleted the rest. She considered them hers.

I don’t believe her when she says, “I want those emails out. Nobody has a bigger interest in those being released than I do.”

I don’t believe her because I’ve covered the Clintons since the 1980s and know how dedicated they are to what former Clinton spokesman Mike McCurry called “telling the truth slowly.” The fact is that she would rather delay the document dump until early 2016—and then have the email released on a single day to overwhelm the media and allow her to declare herself exonerated. That was her strategic choice, Clinton advisers confirmed for me, until a federal judge ordered the State Department on Tuesday to release the email in stages. …

Roger Simon wonders if Sid Vicious will upend the Clinton campaign.

Another shoe, a big one this time, dropped in the endless Benghazi-missing-emails-erased-servers-what-difference-does-it-make controversy that the Clintonistas are trying so hard to push under the rug before it upends Dame Hillary’s presidential campaign.  And the scoop comes, once again, from the New York Times, of all places, not some rascally website run by rightwing lunatics like this one.

Emails have surfaced from long-time Clinton bag man Sid Blumenthal indicating the whole Libya debacle was instigated by a cast of sleazy lowlife profiteers out of an Elmore Leonard novel.  Smarmy Sid was pumping info from this dramatis personae to Hillary (at more than one email address) about goings on in that benighted country and our then secretary of state believed him — at least most of the time — passing his “knowledge” on to her underlings.

And this is a woman who wants to be president?

We know the results of this insider information: Gaddafi gone, four Americans killed in Benghazi, including an ambassador, with Libya a massively failed state overrun by ISIS goons who lop the heads off Christians by the seaside for sport.  Good work, Hillary. Good work, Sid. …

Paul Mirengoff has more on the curious Clinton connection to Sid Blumenthal.

… Blumenthal reprised his role as Clinton hatchet man during the 2008 campaign. Team Obama came to despise Blumenthal so much that President Obama barred Hillary Clinton from giving him a spot at the State Department.

Which brings us to 2011 and Libya. According to the New York Times account, a group of U.S. businessmen who hoped to do business in post-Qaddafi Libya retained Blumenthal. From all that appears, the Clintons’ hatchet man had zero experience with Libya or with the businesses the Americans hoped to establish there.

Plainly, Blumenthal was retained because of his connection to Secretary of State Clinton. The Times points out that the projects contemplated by the U.S. businessmen — creating hospitals and building schools — would have required State Department sign off (but they never got that far).

Blumenthal began writing memos to Hillary Clinton about the situation in Libya. The existence of such memos became known due to the efforts of a Romanian hacker. Otherwise, given Hillary’s document non-retention policy, the memos probably would never have come to light.

According to the Times, Blumenthal sent at least 25 Libya memos to Hillary. One of them praised the efforts of Libya’s new prime minister to stabilize his government by choosing officials experienced in dealing with Western governments and businesses. …

Jennifer Rubin posts on the Clintons’ “blizzard of malfeasance.”

Perhaps Hillary Clinton is counting on the number of scandals, untruths and misdeeds to numb the public and media at some point. It’s not a bad strategy given the stuff that seems to wash up on the shore from the Clintons each day.

Recall what we already know: She kept a private server at her home in violation of State Department policy. She wiped the server clean so no third party could examine more than 30,000 e-mails. She signed an agreement with the administration promising to disclose potential conflicts regarding her husband’s speeches; she violated it repeatedly. Her foundation continued to receive foreign donations and in some cases pay for Bill Clinton’s speeches while Hillary Clinton was in office. The foundation has been described by a charity watchdog as a sort of slush fund whereby those wanting to gain access and favors to a president-in-waiting could contribute (with a tax write-off!). Numerous firms (including a Russian purchaser of critical uranium) and countries from whom the Clintons received speaking fees and/or contributions to the foundation wound up with business before the administration. The foundation in turn gave her visibility, paid for exorbitant travel and employed her cronies. That catches us up to this week.

So far — and it is only Tuesday — we have learned that despite her lawyer’s representations to the contrary, Hillary Clinton used yet another private e-mail address. Those e-mails (the ones not destroyed) that were turned over to the State Department are not going to be made public until January 2016. So much for coming clean any time soon. And now to top it off we learn famous Clinton flunky Sid Blumenthal, who was barred from working at the State Department, was busy writing policy memos for the secretary. The New York Times reports: …

From NY Post Page Six we learn that Chelsea is driving away Clinton Foundation staff.

Chelsea Clinton is so unpleasant to colleagues, she’s causing high turnover at the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, sources say.

Several top staffers have left the foundation since Chelsea came on board as vice chairman in 2011.

“A lot of people left because she was there. A lot of people left because she didn’t want them there,” an insider told me. “She is very difficult.”

Onetime CEO Bruce Lindsey was pushed upstairs to the position of chairman of the board two years ago, so that Chelsea could bring in her McKinsey colleague Eric Braverman.

“He [Braverman] was her boy, but he tried to hire his own communications professional and actually tried to run the place. He didn’t understand that that wasn’t what he was supposed to be doing,” said my source. “He was pushed out.” …

Looking forward to the 2016 vote, John Podhoretz wonders if the “ick factor” will doom Hillary and the Dems.

… At that point, a few million votes either way might be likely to decide the outcome.

That’s when the get-out-the-vote skills of the campaigns will come into play — as well as certain intangibles that play a key role in helping those last few million voters who may or may not go to the polls or have not yet decided make up their minds.

One of those is something you might call “the ick factor.” What kind of association does the candidate’s name conjure up? Is it positive or negative?

Democrats spent most of 2012 raising the ick factor associated with Mitt Romney’s name — condemning the supposed evils of his investment banking firm, publicizing his privately uttered remark that 47 percent of the electorate had become wards of the state, raising questions about his essential character because he was mean to a kid in high school and once put the family dog in a carrier on the roof of his car.

In this respect, Republicans are ahead of the game. Hillary is beginning her trek to November 2016 with a built-in “ick factor” regarding her essential truthfulness and the sense that she spends her life dancing around and about ethical lines.

Now, there will be a Republican nominee, and what was done to Romney will be done to him to the extent possible.

So what we may have, as Election Day nears, is a choice between relatively unattractive options. What’s far from clear is how Hillary can make herself even remotely attractive from here on in to anyone who isn’t already in her camp.

The tarnishment is permanent. The Clinton brand is damaged. The question is whether it’s going to tarnish the Democratic Party.

Spengler asks if the American people are as corrupt as the Clintons.

I have been reading Peter Schweizer’s book Clinton Cash with brief pauses to wipe the puke off the computer screen. For the past fifteen years, there has been no sewer too stinky for Bill and Hillary to bathe in. Most of Schweizer’s research has already made the mainstream media, but the sheer mass of it still amazes. It’s not one malfeasance or three, but an unbroken pattern of overtly corrupt behavior trading half-million-dollar speaking fees and multi-million-dollar payoffs to the Clintons’ foundation in return for billion-dollar mining concessions and corporate takeovers staged by the most revolting gangsters in the jungle of Third World governance. The English language needs a word like the Yiddish term “chutzpah” to describe them, but without the connotation of modesty and discretion.

What kind of people are we Americans, that we allow these kleptocrat’s hirelings to persist in public life? The answer, I fear, is that we have become corrupt ourselves. I’ve seen enough corruption in the Third World to know that it requires the consent of the governed. …

… As Schweizer reports, America’s favorite power couple made millions from Kazakhstan dictator Nurslatan Nazarbayev. In 2005 Bill came to the homeland of Borat with Canadian penny-stock speculator Frank Giustra. Giustra’s  shell company UrAsia Energy, a paper entity with no track record, beat out bigger competition to scupper Kazakhstan”s uranium mining concession. Bill endorsed Nazarbayev’s bid to head the Organization for Security and Cooperation Europe. a human rights organization founded by the 1975 Helsinki Accords, despite Nazarbeayev’s execrable human rights record. Senator Hillary Clinton lifted her previous objection to Kazakhstan’s chairmanship of the organization. …

… Americans are becoming a nation of hustlers. 87% of men of working age used to belong to the labor force. Now it’s down to 70%. …

… Democracy exists to give people the kind of government they deserve. If the American people do not have the moral fibre to extirpate corruption on the Clinton scale, they will deserve what’s coming to them.

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George Freidman of Strafor provides an overview of the world’s chaos.

A pretentious title requires a modest beginning. The world has increasingly destabilized and it is necessary to try to state, as clearly as possible, what has happened and why. This is not because the world is uniquely disorderly; it is that disorder takes a different form each time, though it is always complex.

To put it simply, a vast swath of the Eurasian landmass (understood to be Europe and Asia together) is in political, military and economic disarray. Europe and China are struggling with the consequences of the 2008 crisis, which left not only economic but institutional challenges. Russia is undergoing a geopolitical crisis in Ukraine and an economic problem at home. The Arab world, from the Levant to Iran, from the Turkish border through the Arabian Peninsula, is embroiled in politically destabilizing warfare. The Western Hemisphere is relatively stable, as is the Asian Archipelago. But Eurasia is destabilizing in multiple dimensions.

We can do an infinite regression to try to understand the cause, but let’s begin with the last systemic shift the world experienced: the end of the Cold War.

The Repercussions of the Soviet Collapse

The Cold War was a frozen conflict in one sense: The Soviet Union was contained in a line running from the North Cape of Norway to Pakistan. There was some movement, but relatively little. When the Soviet Union fell, two important things happened. First, a massive devolution occurred, freeing some formally independent states from domination by the Soviets and creating independent states within the former Soviet Union. As a result, a potentially unstable belt emerged between the Baltic and Black seas.

Meanwhile, along the southwestern border of the former Soviet Union, the demarcation line of the Cold War that generally cut through the Islamic world disappeared. Countries that were locked into place by the Cold War suddenly were able to move, and internal forces were set into motion that would, in due course, challenge the nation-states created after World War I and the fall of the Ottoman Empire that had been frozen by the Cold War. …

Erik Wemple is still after an answer from ABC News.

… After Politico’s Dylan Byers published his story on George Stephanopoulos’s donations to the Clinton Foundation, Washington Free Beacon staffers — including editor in chief Matthew Continetti and digital managing editor Andrew Stiles — tweeted out denunciations of ABC News, saying that they’d inquired about this matter the night before. …

… ABC News has failed to respond to numerous inquiries from the Erik Wemple Blog about this move. In the most recent e-mail, we asked ABC News spokeswoman Heather Riley whether the network had logged any run-ins with the Washington Free Beacon that would contextualize its alleged behavior. No response just yet. …

Mark Steyn has Stephie comments with the idea we turn it around and have Karl Rove hired by ABC.

Picture it the other way around:

Karl Rove is hired as an anchorman by ABC News. Whoa, you can stop right there. We’re already in the realm of the fantastical, even though it is, objectively, exactly the same as hiring Stephanopoulos.

But Rove says not to worry, my partisan days are behind me. I’m strictly Mister Even-Handed Newsman now.

And then he spends ten years as a high-profile pitchman for the George W and Jeb Bush Foundation.

And, when he interviews some guy who’s written a book on all the dodgy donations to the Jeb Bush Foundation, he doesn’t mention that he’s a member of it.

The only interesting question is whether ABC knew about all this, and colluded with Stephanopoulos in perpetrating a fraud on their audience.

As for Stephanopoulos’ regret that he didn’t go “the extra mile” in disclosure, the loyal Clinton flunkey didn’t go the initial inch-and-a-half. At the very least, he should be dropped from all election coverage between now and November 2016. There’s plenty of other stuff he could do – Kim’n’ Kanye, Bruce transitioning – where his faithful service to his longtime benefactors is of less obvious advantage.

Jennifer Rubin turns here attention to the Clinton/Blumenthal links. 

The discovery that Hillary Clinton received some 25 memos from Clinton family confidante and hatchet man Sidney Blumenthal is causing another round of angst for Democrats. It should. Why are the memos a problem?

1. They show the degree to which Hillary Clinton defied the Obama administration edicts. Told she couldn’t hire him through the front door, she let him in the back. Perhaps the Obama team will conclude she was a disloyal and problematic employee and cease making her life easier (e.g. by refusing to investigate unreported conflicts of interest).

2. Blumenthal had no foreign policy expertise and yet his unvetted memos were given credence. Clinton’s judgment in relying on him is troubling; her decision to share his views with State Department officials is worse.

3. Blumenthal was engaged in a massive conflict of interest since he was working with people attempting to do business in Libya. If Clinton knew, her behavior in circulating the memos was egregious. If not, her recklessness is once again apparent. …

Maybe there’s hope for higher ed. The University of Texas’ new president rejects the offer of a “vulgar” salary. Taxprof has the story.

Gregory Fenves recently got a big promotion, from provost to president of the University of Texas at Austin. A raise came with it. Instead of his current base of about $425,000, he was offered $1 million.

And he rejected it — as too much. … He suggested, and agreed to, $750,000.

That’s hardly chump change. But in the context of the shockingly lucrative deals that have become almost commonplace among college presidents, the sum — or, more precisely, the sentiment behind it, — is worthy of note and praise. 

Another of those deals came to light late Tuesday night, when The Wall Street Journal reported that YaleUniversity had paid its former president, Richard Levin, an “additional retirement benefit” of $8.5 million after he retired from his post in 2013. The Journal characterized this as an “unprecedented lump-sum payment” for a college president and noted that Levin’s annual compensation package during his final years at Yale was already over $1 million. …

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Bret Stephens wonders if Ben Rhodes, deputy national security advisor, actually believes the stuff he’s saying.

Ben Rhodes, President Obama’s deputy national security adviser, has been offering a reassuring view of the Iranian nuclear deal in the face of some Arab skepticism. “If you can diplomatically and peacefully resolve the nuclear issue in a way that prevents Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” he told reporters last week, “we believe that will lead to a much more stable region.” Mr. Rhodes also contends that with a deal “there will be no need to see [a] regional arms race.”

So what’s more frightening: That Mr. Rhodes believes what he’s saying? Or that he does not?

Just for Mr. Rhodes’s benefit, here’s a refresher course on stability and the arms race in the Middle East since April 2, 2015, the day Mr. Obama announced his framework nuclear agreement with Iran.

April 2: Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif immediately accuses the U.S. of “spin” and contradicts Mr. Obama’s key claims regarding the terms of the deal. … (etc., etc., etc.  . . . . . )

… I recount these events not just to illustrate the distance between Ben Rhodes’s concept of reality and reality itself. It’s also a question of speed. The Middle East, along with our position in it, is unraveling at an astonishing pace. Reckless drivers often don’t notice how fast they’re going until they’re about to crash.

We are near the point where there will be no walking back the mistakes we have made. No walking away from them, either. It takes a special innocence to imagine that nothing in life is irreversible, that everything can be put right, that fanaticism yields to reason and facts yield to wishes, and that the arc of Mideast history bends toward justice.

Ben Rhodes, and the administration he represents and typifies, is special.

Craig Pirrong posts on the military brains in the administration who think special forces ops are a substitute for a strategic vision.

The administration is hyping an allegedly successful Delta Force attack on an Isis target in Syria. I say “allegedly successful” because even though it appears that at least one high value target was killed, and some intelligence was seized, there are doubts that the raid killed the original target. But even if the raid was successful in that it achieved its objective, it testifies to the broader strategic failure of the American campaign to “counter Isis.”

One does not win wars by special operations alone. As their name implies, special operations are special, exceptional. They can be an important and very specialized component of a military campaign that uses all elements of combat power to destroy a conventional or semi-conventional enemy force that holds territory: they cannot be the entire campaign, or even the main element of that campaign. Special operations support the main operations. They are not a substitute for infantry, armor, artillery, and airpower: they are a complement. …

… Given the grave risks of these raids, the limited number of operators, and the very high cost of training and retaining these unique personnel, they should not be employed in operationally and strategically barren operations. It is almost certain that the recent raid in Syria will be operationally and strategically barren. It should not have been mounted, and similar operations should not be mounted in the future, except as part of a sound operational plan that utilizes conventional forces to achieve a strategically meaningful objective.

Obama is categorically opposed to using conventional forces in Iraq and Syria, but feels that he has to do something, and drones and special forces raids are something, even if they accomplish little or nothing of strategic importance. It is pointless to rely  on these instruments of national power, which are only truly useful if joined up with other elements of that power, as the backbone of a campaign against Isis. If there is a more telling testament to the strategic vacuity of Obama’s “slow burn” campaign than the daring raid in Syria, I would be hard pressed to name it. So much professional expertise and courage put at grave risk to achieve a glittering tactical victory that will have no effect on the ultimate outcome in Syria and Iraq. One cannot win wars by special operations alone, and it borders on the criminal even to try.

WSJ Op Ed says the fall of Ramadi is a perfect illustration of the emptiness of our strategy. 

In the closing years of the Vietnam War it was often noted sardonically that the “victories” against the Viet Cong were moving steadily closer to Saigon. The same could be said of Baghdad and the victories claimed against Islamic State, or ISIS, in Iraq in the past year. The ISIS takeover of Ramadi in the Anbar province over the weekend exposed the hollowness of the reported progress against ISIS. The U.S.-led bombing campaign in support of Iraqi forces isn’t working.

Clearly, the Iraqi government needs greater military assistance if it is to defeat what is proving to be a formidable enemy. ISIS in Iraq, the successor of al Qaeda in Iraq, is made up of Iraqi Sunnis and foreign Islamist fighters, similar to those the U.S. Army and Marines fought so hard for so many years. ISIS has routinely defeated other rebel groups in neighboring Syria and claimed large swaths of that country’s territory. The militants almost took the Iraqi Kurdish capital city of Erbil in February, despite the fierce resistance of the vaunted fighters of the Kurdish Peshmerga. …

… Like it or not, the U.S. is the only country with the strength and know-how to rid Iraq of ISIS. Iran’s proxy forces are on the defensive in Syria and have made no overall progress in Iraq. Some argue that Iran isn’t serious in trying to defeat ISIS. It’s more likely that Iran isn’t capable of doing so. What is needed is decisive U.S. leadership. Without it, the long-term entrenchment of Islamic State in Iraq may become a disturbing reality.

Turning our attention back to last week’s poverty summit, Thomas Sowell has some thoughts.

… Since free speech is guaranteed to everyone by the First Amendment to the Constitution, there is nothing to prevent anybody from asking anything from anybody else. But the federal government does not just “ask” for money. It takes the money it wants in taxes, usually before the people who have earned it see their paychecks.

Despite pious rhetoric on the left about “asking” the more fortunate for more money, the government does not “ask” anything. It seizes what it wants by force. If you don’t pay up, it can take not only your paycheck, it can seize your bank account, put a lien on your home and/or put you in federal prison.

So please don’t insult our intelligence by talking piously about “asking.”

And please don’t call the government’s pouring trillions of tax dollars down a bottomless pit “investment.” Remember the soaring words from Barack Obama, in his early days in the White House, about “investing in the industries of the future”? After Solyndra and other companies in which he “invested” the taxpayers’ money went bankrupt, we haven’t heard those soaring words so much. …

… When all else fails, redistributionists can say, as Obama did at Georgetown University, that “coldhearted, free-market capitalist types” are people who “pretty much have more than you’ll ever be able to use and your family will ever be able to use,” so they should let the government take that extra money to help the poor.

Slippery use of the word “use” seems to confine it to personal consumption. The real question is whether the investment of wealth is likely to be done better by those who created that wealth in the first place or by politicians. The track record of politicians hardly suggests that turning ever more of a nation’s wealth over to them is likely to turn out well.

It certainly has not turned out well in the American economy under Barack Obama.

Income inequality is also the subject of Richard Epstein’s column for the week.

… One outspoken critic of income inequality is the New York Times’ columnist Nicholas Kristof, who in a recent column, “Inequality is a Choice,” made it appear that the issue is more tractable to legislative fixes than is in fact the case.

Kristof used as his lightning rod the deplorable state of affairs in Baltimore, Maryland, to explain the urgency of the income inequality crisis. But, as I have already argued, the precarious situation in Baltimore is the necessary outcome of the very economic policies that progressives like Kristof would like to see implemented on a national scale. The simple economic truth is that the prolonged downturn in Baltimore does not trace its roots back, as has often been claimed, to segregation, but to the simple fact that Democrats have controlled every aspect of the public life in the city from 1963 to the present, during which time crime increased, taxes rose, regulations proliferated, and about one-third the city’s population fled. The challenge is to find a set of progressive policies that do not have that combined toxic effect.

It is just there that the tired suggestions of Kristof demonstrate the futility of his position. He berates his fellow Americans for not thinking that inequality is the result of conscious social choices. He is surely right about the general point, but wrong in sizing up the situation when he denounces the nation, which has “chosen to prioritize tax shelters over minimum wages, subsidies for private jets over robust services for children to break the cycle of poverty.”

But his argument breaks down because of two mistakes; the first is the near random juxtaposition of two programs, each of which should be considered separately from the other. The second is the failure to ask which of these proposals will pass muster in an economy that runs on the principles of strong property rights, freedom of contract, and limited government. …

While the president goes to poverty conferences, the results of his ruinous ideas continue in Baltimore. The Washington Post reports on the murders after the riots. Thirty murders in thirty days. Left liberals have supported policies that have made husbands and fathers superflous and we are reaping the whirlwind as families have been ruined.

Andre Hunt counseled troubled kids through the Boys and Girls Club. He volunteered at the local NAACP chapter. A barber, he befriended the son of an assistant high school principal, swapping tales of football and life while the boy grew into adulthood under the clips of his shears.

“He was like a big brother to my son,” the mother, Karima Carrington, said of her trips to Cut Masters on Liberty Heights Ave­nue.

The 28-year-old Hunt was lured out of the barbershop, according to his attorney, and shot in the back of the head on the afternoon of April 29. He was among more than 30 people slain in Baltimore in 30 days, an alarming number of killings and part of an undercurrent of violence here.

Although riots and protests after the death of Freddie Gray, who was injured in police custody, brought national attention to the city, the slayings have attracted little notice. They come as Baltimore works to recover from the unrest, with a police force demoralized by the arrests of six of its members — three of whom face murder or manslaughter charges in Gray’s death — and under the scrutiny of the Justice Department.

The Rev. Jamal H. Bryant, pastor of the Empowerment Temple and a local activist, said city residents have “almost been anesthetized” to the killings. “In any other community, these numbers would be jaw-dropping.”

A month before Gray’s death, Bryant joined Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake (D) at a summit to urge black men to help stop black-on-black killings. African Americans comprised 211 of Baltimore’s 216 homicide victims in 2014. Now Bryant, who eulogized Gray at his funeral, believes in “enlarging the narrative beyond Freddie Gray” to harness the anger and renew the focus on curbing violence. …

… Tessa Hill-Aston, president of the Baltimore chapter of the NAACP, said Hunt volunteered at her office. “He was trying to change his life around,” she said, “and was looking forward to serving his sentence and starting over. I’m so sorry he didn’t have a chance to do that.”

Hill-Aston was talking on the phone with a reporter on a recent Monday afternoon. A friend had just called her from a doctor’s office in West Baltimore and told her she dived to the floor when three gunshots went off outside.

It was 1:30 in the afternoon, at a place called Walbrook Junction. Another man shot in the head. Another death.

Hours later would be a funeral for another man killed May 2, the last day of the curfew imposed during the rioting. He was the grandson of a founder of Bible Way Church, oldest son of the church’s former bishop, nephew of the bishop-designee.

The shootings and the burials continued their frenzied pace.

“It’s almost like there’s a war going on,” Hill-Aston said.

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Last week we devoted some space to the president’s failure to get the leadership of the Gulf Arabs to attend his summit. Another of his failures took place closer to home as the Dems in congress snubbed his trade authorization bill. Along with this defeat, he went on to display the famous presidential petulance those of us on the right have seen for the last six years. It was fun to see it turned on the Democrats. Jonah Goldberg tells the story well.

These are not good times for the Republic (and if you laughed or scratched your head at me calling America a republic, I rest my case). But they are amusing times, at least for those of us capable of extracting some measure of mirth and schadenfreude from the president’s predicament. With the sand running out on the Obama presidency, it’s finally dawning on the president’s friends and fans that he can be a real jerk.

Consider the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank. For the last six years, he’s spent much of his time rolling his eyes and sneering at Republicans. His subspecialty is heaping ridicule on conservative complaints about, well, everything and anything. If it bothers conservatives, it must be irrational, partisan, churchy, fake, hypocritical — or all of the above. Meanwhile, poor Barack Obama, while not always without fault in Milbank’s eyes, is the grown-up, the good guy trying to do good things amidst a mob of malcontents and ideologues.

That is, until this month. President Obama wants to get a trade deal passed. He needs Democrats to do it. But, Milbank laments, Obama’s blowing it.

“Let’s suppose you are trying to bring a friend around to your point of view,” Milbank writes. “Would you tell her she’s emotional, illogical, outdated, and not very smart? Would you complain that he’s being dishonest, fabricating falsehoods and denying reality with his knee-jerk response?”

“Such a method of a persuasion is likelier to get you a black eye than a convert,” Milbank notes. “Yet this is how President Obama treats his fellow Democrats on trade . . .”

Yes, well, true enough. But lost on Milbank is the fact that this is precisely how Obama treats everyone who disagrees with him. …

Bill McGurn has more on President Arrogant. 

So this is what the president means by having a “conversation.”

At a GeorgetownUniversity conference last week, President Obama appeared on a panel billed as a “conversation” on poverty. It proved illuminating, though not in the way its sponsors intended.

Begin with the panel itself. A solitary conservative, the American Enterprise Institute’s Arthur Brooks, was pitted against two liberals, President Obama and Harvard social scientist Robert Putnam. The panel was moderated by the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne.

To put it another way, what we had here was a “conversation” stacked in favor of liberals, moderated by a liberal, and taking place before a liberal crowd at a liberal university.

As if to underscore the point, the president and the moderator squeezed off three boorish references to House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell—all rooted in the idea that it would take a “miracle” to get GOP leaders to care about the poor. …

Mona Charen calls it his “third class temperament.”

Like cult members who awake to find their leader swigging gin and squirreling money into a Swiss bank account, liberals are rubbing their eyes in disbelief at President Obama’s behavior. The figure they worshipped so fervently and for so long is now revealed to be a “sexist” – at least according to National Organization for Women president Terry O’Neill.

Her view is seconded by Senator Sherrod Brown (D., Ohio). They are upset about the president’s derisive treatment of Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.), who committed a sin to which the president does not take kindly: She disagreed with him. For differing about the merits of the TPP trade deal, she got what everyone should already recognize as the Obama treatment — her views were caricatured and her motives were questioned. “The truth of the matter is that Elizabeth is, you know, a politician like everybody else.” Senator Brown thought the president’s use of Warren’s first name betokened sexism.

No, Senator Brown, that’s not sexism, that’s all-purpose disrespect. The president has been displaying the same condescension to world leaders, Senate majority leaders, House speakers, and everyone else since first taking office. It was always “John” and “Harry” and “Hillary” — never Speaker Boehner, Leader Reid, or Secretary Clinton. It was “Angela” and “David,” not Chancellor Merkel and Prime Minister Cameron. Can’t wait to see whether, when the Pope visits in September, the president refers to him as “Jorge.” There was one exception to this rule — Obama was at pains to refer to Iran’s Ali Khamenei, who has never been elected to anything, as “Supreme Leader.”

It’s hard to think of another figure whose self-esteem is so inversely proportional to his merit. …

… During the discussion, Mr. Obama disparaged John Boehner’s and Mitch McConnell’s interest in helping the poor. So it’s worth recalling that one of Obama’s first acts as president was to seek to defund the District of Columbia’s Opportunity Scholarship Program. When the Democrats controlled Congress, he succeeded. But someone who cared waited for a chance, and when Republicans gained control of the House and Congress was in a tense budget showdown with the White House, John Boehner personally saw to it that the program was revived.

So who is judging whom when it comes to the poor?

Enough of DC idiots. Here’s a story about California idiots? You know, the state that’s running out of water. The WSJ Weekend Interview is with a man who wanted to build a desalinization plant near San Diego. It took six years to get the permits.

… Poseidon does have a $1 billion desalination plant slated to open this fall in Carlsbad, north of San Diego. Upon completion it will be the largest in North America, capable of producing 54 million gallons of water each day. Construction began in 2013, but first Poseidon spent six years battling 14 environmental lawsuits.

For instance, the Surfrider Foundation charged that the plant’s open-ocean intakes might harm marine life, though a judge ruled that Poseidon had reasonably mitigated the threat. Mr. Riva says the intakes “entrain two to three fish eggs or larvae” for every thousand gallons of water sucked in. “Not to make value judgments about fish, but these aren’t from any protected species,” Mr. Riva says. “They’re anchovies and things like that.” He adds that environmentalists believe that “all fish life is precious, and you have to do everything to save it.”

Obtaining the dozen or so permits required to build the plant was vexing as well, since regulatory authority over water in California is spread among state, federal and local agencies—the Bureau of Reclamation, the State Water Resource Control Board and the California Coastal Commission, to name a few.

“Because there are multiple agencies,” says Mr. Riva, there are “multiple opportunities for intervenors to delay.” The CEO is careful in his choice of words to avoid giving offense. However, what he appears to mean is that environmental obstructionists waged war on numerous fronts. Not totally without success, either: To obtain final approval from the Coastal Commission, Poseidon had to agree to restore 66 acres of wetlands and buy renewable energy credits—green indulgences.

Urged on by the Surfriders, the Coastal Commission is now gumming up Poseidon’s plans to build a second plant, which has been in the planning stages for 15 years, south of Los Angeles in Huntington Beach. …

Back to Stephie. Turns out ABC has reason to be upset. They agreed to pay him $105 million for the next seven years. Emily Smith at NYPost Page Six has the story.

… Sources have said ABC News execs were blindsided by Stephanopoulos’ largesse, and one TV insider noted Monday that “ABC really has all their money on Stephanopoulos.”

“ABC was desperate to lock him down after Josh Elliott left,” the source said.

“But network execs didn’t announce the figure because they didn’t want George to get the kind of backlash that Matt Lauer got over his huge NBC contract,” which pays him $20 million a year to host the “Today” show.

“If [Stephanopoulos] stumbles, so does the network,” the source added.

When Stephanopoulos signed his contract extension in April 2014, an ABC spokesman said, “George is vital to the success of the news division and will continue to be a leader here at ABC News. We expect him to remain with us for many, many years.”

Republicans have already said that Stephanopoulos’ donations disqualified him from moderating a GOP primary debate, and a spokesman for one candidate, US Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), went even further on Monday. …

Howard Kurtz writes on the sinking reputation of the press. 

By failing to disclose his donations to the Clinton Foundation, George Stephanopoulos has damaged his credibility and tarnished his network.

But you know something? He’s got plenty of company.

What an awful couple of years it’s been for the news business, even by our already-tattered standards.

While ABC’s chief anchor has landed himself in a heap of trouble, this comes at a time when NBC’s chief anchor, Brian Williams, is serving a six-month suspension for fabricating an Iraq war tale and possibly embellishing other reporting exploits. And it comes weeks after Rolling Stone had to retract its horrifyingly irresponsible tale of a gang rape at the University of Virginia.

When these episodes erupt, critics carp about how this or that organization has suffered a grievous blow. What’s often missed is that all of us who practice journalism suffer as well, that it reinforces public doubts about whether the business is riddled with bias and conflicts of interest. …

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Stephanopoulos is still in the news. John Fund writes on his long record of loyal service to the Clintons.

… So, to recap: Stephanopoulos first came to public attention as the relentlessly slash-and-burn Clinton communications director in the 1993 film The War Room, a chronicle of the Clinton presidential campaign.

During his White House years, Stephanopoulos was always known to be among those who were most eager to discredit any Clinton critic at the first get-go. Even Rahm Emanuel, another famously aggressive Clinton aide, sometimes thought Stephanopoulos wanted to go too far.

After being hired by ABC News, Stephanopoulos used his position soon after the Lewinsky scandal broke to outline the White House’s scorched-earth strategy to discredit and expose potential opponents. He then sought to avoid legal questions about his role by claiming to be a journalist. He was rebuked by a federal judge for providing “not truthful” testimony in a lawsuit.

Now, Stephanopoulos shows up again, aggressively trying to discredit Peter Schweizer’s new book Clinton Cash when it becomes clear that it’s a threat to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. He chooses not to reveal his extensive ties with the Clinton Foundation, which go way beyond the mere donation of $75,000 to include the following items compiled by NewsBusters:

Asserted that “there is hope” donations to foundation will “lead to something”

Appeared on conference calls with Democratic strategists

Used his ABC News platform to run unofficial infomercials for Clinton Foundation

In his 1999 memoir, recounted his “love” for Hillary Clinton

Hillary’s campaign manager Robby Mook interned for Stephanopoulos; thanked in memoir

In addition, NewsBusters’ Geoff Dickens has compiled a list of ten times George Stephanopoulos sucked up to the Clintons on ABC’s airwaves. …

And at the Daily Beast, Lloyd Grove continues to lead the charge.

It has been a rough weekend for ABC News’s embattled chief anchor, George Stephanopoulos, and an even worse Sunday.

On CNN’s Reliable Sources media criticism program, Stephanopoulos’s former ABC News colleague, Carole Simpson, unloaded on the former top aide to Bill and Hillary Clinton that she said she likes and respects.

“There is a coziness that George cannot escape,” said Simpson, who toiled for two decades at ABC News, notably as the weekend anchor of World News Tonight from 1988 to 2003. “While he did try to separate himself from his political background to become a journalist, he really isn’t a journalist.”

Thus Simpson attempted to obliterate Stephanopoulos’s claims of impartiality as the 2016 presidential campaign heats up, featuring Hillary Clinton’s status as the prohibitive frontrunner for the Democratic nomination.

Like Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter and another former ABC News colleague, Jeff Greenfield, Simpson said she was “dumbfounded” by Thursday’s revelation that Stephanopoulos failed to disclose $75,000 in recent donations to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation—this, as he conducted a confrontational April 26 interview with Clinton Foundation critic Peter Schweizer.

“I wanted to just take him by the neck and say, ‘George, what were you thinking?’ Clearly, he was not thinking. I thought it was outrageous,” Simpson said. “And I am sorry that again the public trust in the media is being challenged and frayed because of the actions of some of the top people in the business.” …

Media Mash Up has more.

We don’t think saying you’re sorry is enough. But most media types are willing to give ABC media maven George Stephanopoulos a pass for apologizing for his ethical error, bypassing ABC News’ standards and letting his liberal skirts show. At least Fox News’ Howard Kurtz got it right: “For George to give money to the Clinton Foundation, out of all possible charities, knowing full well that Hillary was gearing up to run, is a grave error in judgment. For him not to disclose this to his network or viewers—especially when he was aggressively interviewing ‘Clinton Cash’ author Peter Schweizer about that very foundation—is unthinkable. And for ABC to brush this off as an ‘honest mistake’ is embarrassing.” …

Scott Johnson says Stephie’s apology is a bunch of ”weasel words from a weasel.”

… Stephanopoulos wraps his statement in a profession of his great generosity, of which the Clinton Foundation was coincidentally an additional beneficiary. He made the donations over the past three years only to support worthy causes: to heal the sick, protect the weak and feed the starving. Make room for the apostle George.

Nevertheless, Stephanopoulos gave a somewhat more jaded account of contributions to the Clinton Foundations only last month to Jon Stewart. At that time, before the Free Beacon had dug out the record of Stephanopoulos’s contributions to the Clinton Foundations, Stephanopoulos lucidly explained: “But everybody also knows when those donors give that money, President Clinton or someone, they get a picture with him, there is a hope that is going to lead to something.” Everybody knows!

This is all before we get to the proposition that Stephanopoulos’s failure to disclose the contributions in connection with the Schweizer interrogation represented a failure to go “the extra mile.” It didn’t represent a failure to comply with the fundamental requirements of honesty and integrity (or ABC News policy). I believe the technical term of art that applies here, as explicated by William Voegeli, is “bullshit.”

Michael Goodwin says Georgie has forfeited all trust as a newsman.

My, my, the bigger they are, the dumber they think we are.

Dan Rather of CBS was toppled by a phony document scam. Lyin’ Brian Williams at NBC casually mixed fact with self-aggrandizing fiction. Now George Stephanopoulos is caught in a Clinton web of deceit at ABC.

The hat trick of arrogant anchor scandals helps explain why Americans don’t trust network news. With apologies to Walter Cronkite, that’s the way it is, and the way it is stinks.

Stephanopoulos shares with Rather and Williams the rotten distinction of fessing up only after being exposed by real journalists. In his case, the Washington Free Beacon uncovered his secret donations to the Clinton Foundation and contacted ABC for a response.

That was the honorable thing to do — get the other side of the story before publishing it. But Stephanopoulos ditched his journalistic veneer and reverted to his Clinton White House roots by quickly leaking the info to what he regarded as a more friendly news outlet, Politico.

His track record of secrecy, partisanship and dishonorable behavior blows up his claim that he made an honest mistake. He engaged in a prolonged and brazen act of dishonesty. …

And Erik Wemple of WaPo is still on the warpath about the slight of the journalistic efforts of Andrew Stiles at the Free Beacon. He wants an apology or at least an explanation from ABC News.

… Unresolved by Stephanopoulos’s repeated meae culpae is the conduct of ABC News’s PR operation, which stands accused of “running” to Politico with the story of Stephanopoulos’s donations after having received an inquiry from the Washington Free Beacon. Staffers from the Washington Free Beacon attest that they received official statements after ABC News provided them to Politico.

ABC News’s PR has failed to respond to inquiries from the Erik Wemple Blog on this matter.

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Craig Pirrong points out the ways the left is exploiting the train tragedy. Wait ’til you see what the New Yorker cooked up.

One of the least savory aspects of human behavior is the tendency to exploit tragedy for personal or political ends. This low tendency was on display in spades in the aftermath of the Amtrak derailment in Philadelphia. Before the bodies of the dead were even cold, pundits and politicians were out in force moaning that the tragedy proved the lamentable decay of American infrastructure, and the lack of government spending on it. Remarkably (or maybe not), the lamentations have continued even after it was revealed that the train had been going more than twice the speed limit, thereby making it highly unlikely that shoddy track or a poorly maintained train was to blame. No tragedy should go to waste, apparently, and the facts shouldn’t get in the way of a politically useful narrative.

There are many examples of the mo’ guvmint types exploiting the deaths of 8 people in Philly, but for 99.9 percent pure, unadulterated stupidity, you have to read this screed by Adam Gopnik* in The New Yorker. Where to begin?

To leverage the Philadelphia tragedy into a justification for more government spending, Gopnik has to claim that railroads, and passenger railroads in particular, are public goods:

“And everyone knows that American infrastructure—what used to be called our public works, or just our bridges and railways, once the envy of the world—has now been stripped bare, and is being stripped ever barer.

. . . .

This week’s tragedy also, perhaps, put a stop for a moment to the license for mocking those who use the train—mocking Amtrak’s northeast “corridor” was a standard subject not just for satire, which everyone deserves, but also for sneering, which no one does. For the prejudice against trains is not a prejudice against an élite but against a commonality. The late Tony Judt, who was hardly anyone’s idea of a leftist softy, devoted much of his last, heroic work, written in conditions of near-impossible personal suffering, to the subject of … trains: trains as symbols of the public good, trains as a triumph of the liberal imagination, trains as the “symbol and symptom of modernity,” and modernity at its best. “The railways were the necessary and natural accompaniment to the emergence of civil society,” he wrote. “They are a collective project for individual benefit … something that the market cannot accomplish, except, on its own account of itself, by happy inadvertence. … If we lose the railways we shall not just have lost a valuable practical asset. We shall have acknowledged that we have forgotten how to live collectively.”

Trains take us places together. (You can read good books on them, too.) Every time you ride one, you look outside, and you look inside, and you can’t help but think about the private and the public in a new way.”

In point of fact, railroads are not public goods, as defined by economists. Not even close. I get no benefit whatsoever from your trip on a train, or a train that ships a good to you. The benefits of rail travel and rail transport are internalized by the traveler and the consumer of the transported good.

Further, what characterizes public goods is non-exclusivity. If you produce it, I get to consume it too, and you can’t exclude me from doing so. Not true of railroads. You have to buy a ticket to ride. …

… Gopnik’s economic illiteracy is annoying, but his supercilious tone and East Coast superiority makes his ignorance almost unbearable: he fits in perfectly at the New Yorker, and personifies the famous cover depicting the view of the US from 9th Avenue. A condescending ignoramus. Not an appealing combination.

In sum, it’s appalling enough that Gopnik, like others, leaped to use the Philadelphia tragedy to advance his pet political cause.  It’s even worse that this pet political cause is economically retarded.

*Gopnik’s name cracks me up, because in Russia the term “gopnik” (го́пник) refers to lower class street punks known for their drinking, loutish behavior, petty criminality, and stylish dress, usually consisting of Adidas track suits and dress shoes. In other words, го́пники are pretty much the antithesis of Manhattan prog Adam Gopnik, and no doubt the typical го́пник would take great pleasure in beating the snot out of the likes of Adam Gopnik.

Carl Cannon says a train crashes and the Dems jump the tracks.

Even in the context of our hyper-partisan politics, the press release that landed in my inbox Thursday morning was surprising in its ugliness. “Republican Cuts Kill… Again,” it screamed, announcing a new attack ad funded by a fledgling liberal group called The Agenda Project Action Fund.

The group’s previous spot—“Republican Cuts Kill”—blamed the Ebola crisis on Capitol Hill conservatives, earning the dreaded “four Pinocchio” designation from The Washington Post face-checking team. The newest installment splices graphic images from Tuesday’s crash of Amtrak Train 188 with random budget figures and videos of Republican leaders calling for cuts in Amtrak’s subsidies and other federal programs.

Yes, you heard right. As Amtrak’s twisted railroad cars remained on their sides, bodies were still being recovered from the wreckage, and the critically injured were being prepped for surgery, self-styled “progressives” sought to score political points by essentially accusing fiscal conservatives of murder. …

Walter Jacobson says if H. Clinton is elected we can expect continuing executive power grabs.

… Obama expanded his power domestically far more than any other president in memory. His executive action on immigration is a good example of legislating from the bureaucracy by implementing policies directly contrary to existing law and anything Congress would be willing to do. So too his use of Environmental Protection Agency rulemaking power to remake the energy sector where previous efforts to do the same legislatively had gone nowhere. And let’s not forget Obama’s unilateral changes to Obamacare to postpone its day of financial reckoning beyond the 2014 elections.

Whether such executive power grabs are upheld or rejected in court, they all show the degree to which Obama has tried to expand his power at the expense of Congress.

Should we expect any better from Hillary should she become president? I don’t think so; in fact, I think we can expect worse. …

Paul Mirengoff says Stephie has more to disclose.

George Stephanopoulos has admitted, under pressure, that he is a donor to the Clinton Foundation. He has also acknowledged that he should have so informed his viewers before attempting to light into Peter Schweizer and feebly trying to discredit Peter’s reporting about the Clinton Foundation on the grounds that he worked (for a few months) as a speechwriter for President George W. Bush.

But there is much Stephanopoulos has yet to disclose to his viewers. Schweizer lists the following: …

More on Michelle’s Tuskegee address from Rich Lowry.

Michelle Obama gave a commencement address at TuskegeeUniversity that was a ringing call for the graduates not to be discouraged by her whining.

Much of the first lady’s speech was what is right and proper for a Tuskegee commencement, drawing on the story of the determination and skill of the Tuskegee Airmen. But she devoted a long passage to her own struggles that was off-key and characteristically self-pitying. …

But, the Target story was told by Michelle the Victim another way on the Letterman show. Michelle Malkin was keeping track.

… On David Letterman’s show in 2012, the haute-couture-clad first lady recounted the same “incognito” Target visit to demonstrate her just-like-you bona fides. She chuckled as she shared how the shopper asked, “Can you reach on that shelf and hand me the detergent?” As the audience laughed with delight and Mrs. Obama grinned from ear to ear, she told Letterman: “I reached up, ’cause she was short, and I reached up, pulled it down — she said, ‘Well, you didn’t have to make it look so easy.’ That was my interaction. I felt so good.”

From overjoyed Regular Mom to Oppressed Martyr, can Mrs. Obama’s shopping fable get any more absurd? To paraphrase a popular slogan of the social-justice mob: Jig’s up, don’t compute.

It just goes to show you: Once a race hustler, always a race hustler. …

Here’s another race hustler in training. Al Sharpton’s daughter sprained her ankle in New York. Now she’s suing the City for $5 million. Daily Caller has that story.  

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, especially when the tree is rotten.

Dominique Sharpton, the 28-year-old daughter of MSNBC host and race activist Al Sharpton, sprained her ankle last October on the corner of Broome Street and Broadway in New York City, and now she wants the city to pay – big time.

Claiming to have been “severely injured, bruised and wounded” by uneven pavement, Dominique is seeking $5 million in damages from taxpayers for the sprain. …

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Kevin Williamson writes on the particular failings of Stephanopoulos.

… When I was editing a small newspaper in the Philadelphia suburbs, one of my reporters asked for a meeting with me, which was in itself unusual — my standing policy for reporters was that after hiring them I did not care if I ever saw them again, so long as their stories showed up on time. I’d assumed we were going to do the usual thing where he asked for a raise and I told him no, but he sheepishly explained that he needed to modify his beat because he was beginning to develop a personal relationship with one of the people he covered. His reasoning was sound: Whether it worked out or went nowhere, he could not claim to be disinterested.

What would have happened if he hadn’t told me? I’d have fired him. And if I hadn’t, somebody would have fired me. And I would have deserved it. …

… Stephanopoulos has offered a half-hearted apology: “I should have gone the extra mile to avoid even the appearance of a conflict.” But “extra mile” assumes a previous mile, and he did not really hike an inch to disclose this conflict — not an “appearance of a conflict,” but an actual conflict. The Clintons’ relationship with the eponymous nonprofit organization is a legitimate public issue, and Stephanopoulos has significant relationships with both family and foundation.

It is impossible to see how Stephanopoulos could do his job with any integrity in an environment in which the Clintons and their foundation will be central to the political news for the foreseeable future. Certainly not after concealing his relationship with the foundation. ABC News owes it to itself to live up to at least the standards of a small-town weekly newspaper. It owes them a lot more than that, in fact, but it cannot deliver the goods with Stephanopoulos at the desk.

Jonathan Tobin has more thoughts on the Stephie flap.

… Author Schweizer is understandably upset that Stephanopoulos questioned him closely about his own possible bias in writing a muckraking book about the Clinton. Schweizer has a history as a writer connected to conservative causes and served briefly as a speechwriter to George W. Bush. That’s fair game. But how is it that the ABC host thought that was worthy of exposure but believed his own hefty contributions to the Clinton’s foundation was neither relevant nor of interest to viewers watching him try to shoot down the allegations about the Clintons?

The answer is that like the Clintons themselves, some of those around them seem to have the sense of entitlement and belief that the normal rules of political conduct or journalism ethics don’t apply to them.

To be fair, unlike most of those who gave far more than he did, Stephanopoulos cannot be accused of hoping to trade the donation for favors. He may well have given the money in order to support efforts to combat AIDS and deforestation as he said in the apology he issued today. Nevertheless, a savvier journalist than the ABC host might have noted the fact that the Clinton foundation actually spends only a fraction of the money given to it on actual charitable work (only ten percent) and contributions given to other more ethical and less political organizations would have done a lot more for those causes.

The revelation makes everything Stephanopoulos has said on the air trying to pooh-pooh the Clinton Cash scandal seem self-interested or biased but in the great scheme of things, it can’t be said that those comments did much to alter the trajectory of the story or harm the future of the republic.

But it does remind us of the intolerable coziness of so many media elites with the people they cover. …

And liberals at the Daily Beast like Lloyd Grove are not pleased with the weak apology.

… In a non-apology apology that is unlikely to appease the referees of press ethics, let alone his Republican detractors—and may just baffle morning television viewers who haven’t paid attention to the blossoming scandal within the media-political complex—the former top aide to Bill and Hillary Clinton put the very best face possible on his lapse in judgment in not disclosing $75,000 in donations to the Clinton Foundation when he conducted a contentious April 26 interview with foundation critic Peter Schweizer on This Week With George Stephanopoulos, ABC News’s Sunday show.

Although Stephanopoulos’s case is very different from—and nowhere near as serious as—the embellishments of suspended NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams, his explanation of his mistake on Friday morning was much in the same vein as Williams’s claim last February that he made up a story about a helicopter ride in Iraq simply in an innocent, good-hearted attempt to honor America’s fighting men and women.

Willams wrapped himself in the flag; Stephanopoulos cloaked himself in charity. …

More from the left, this time Jack Shafer from Politico. Pay attention to the pretention that a Politico reporter “broke” the story. We’ll have more on that later as a WaPo blogger calls ABC News on the shaft they gave to a Free Beacon reporter.

Former Clintonland insider George Stephanopoulos, who has excelled at both politics and journalism, appears to have failed both professions with a single transgression.

As my POLITICO colleague Dylan Byers reported today, ABC News’ “This Week” and “Good Morning America” host Stephanopoulos has donated a total of $75,000 to the Clinton Foundation, something he had not previously disclosed to viewers or his employers. In a statement to Byers, Stephanopoulos apologized for not disclosing the gifts. ABC News called the oversight an “honest mistake,” a sentiment Stephanopoulos amplified in an afternoon interview with Byers.

“We stand behind him,” the network also offered, which is corporate-speak for we will bind George in barbed wire and dump him into a surging storm sewer and drive off into the night the minute he becomes an intolerable distraction.

The donation corrodes much of the journalistic credibility Stephanopoulos has labored so carefully to build since joining ABC News as a correspondent and analyst in December 1996. …

Victor Davis Hanson calls out Stephie’s “staggering hypocrisy.”

The problem with George Stephanopoulos’s Clinton-gate mess is that his own words prove him to be both a bully and a hypocrite, as well as abjectly unethical.

Set aside the fact that — if not outed — he would likely never have informed his viewership about his contributions to the Clinton Foundation (and presumably would have continued to grill authors like Peter Schweizer for attacking the pay-for-play Clinton culture). Set aside the fact that, in Clinton Foundation tax-reporting fashion, he “forgot” a $25,000 donation when he initially and erroneously stated that he had contributed $50,000 rather than the actual $75,000. And that he confused the news source that originally discovered his gifts. What we are left with is George Stephanopoulos indicting George Stephanopoulos. …

… And when it is reported that ColumbiaUniversityJournalismSchool professor Richard Wald intones of the scandal that, “It’s a mistake, and it’s a dumb one, but it’s not a criminal offense; other people have done other dumb things,” one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Wald once worked as “ethics czar” for Stephanopoulos’s own ABC network and, in good Clintonian fashion, is invoking for him the now familiar Bill/Hillary defense of “at least it can’t be proven a crime in a court of law” and “everyone does it.”

Now we get to the story about how ABC News treated a Free Beacon reporter in shabby fashion. And it is a Washington Post blogger who tells ABC he’s not gonna rest until they answer some questions. The post is by Eric Wemple. 

Every journalist lives in fear of a certain scenario: You have a news story, quite possibly an exclusive, on a significant public figure. You Google the keywords and a jumble of old links pops up; no one has written it! So you take your revelations to the public figure’s PR rep and ask whether your reporting is true and real. In making that inquiry, you relinquish a bit of control over your investigation; now someone outside of your news organization — a PR official — knows what you have. You have no choice but trust that the official doesn’t play any games with a prospective scoop.

Games may have been played yesterday in connection with the week’s resounding media story. On Thursday morning, Politico media reporter Dylan Byers broke the story of George Stephanopoulos’s big-money donations to the Clinton Foundation (at first they were reported as $50,000 but grew to $75,000 by day’s end). The headline of Byers’s story: “George Stephanopoulos discloses $75,000 contribution to Clinton Foundation.” …

… Continetti is the editor-in-chief of the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website that launched in February 2012. Stiles is the digital managing editor for the Washington Free Beacon. The Stephanopoulos story surfaced on Wednesday just before 3:30 p.m., when Stiles found his name on the Clinton Foundation’s donor lists. He e-mailed Continetti, who told him to move on the story and also directed a researcher to check whether Stephanopoulos had seeded any of his on-air work with disclosures about the donations.

The research turned up no evidence of Stephanopoulos having told viewers of his largesse to the Clinton Foundation, clinching the need for a story. “I think you have to write this one straight,” Continetti wrote to Stiles, who sometimes takes attitudinal approaches to the news. The editor-in-chief also cited the need for a comment from Stephanopoulos’s office. “I knew immediately that this was a news story,” says Continetti.

Despite Stiles’ best efforts, ABC News didn’t cough up a response on the spot. Heather Riley, a spokeswoman for ABC News, e-mailed Stiles just after 9 p.m., promising him “something.” “What time are you posting? Want to make sure I get it to you in time,” she wrote.

Hear this, knee-jerk detractors of modern web journalism: Absent a comment from ABC News, Continetti & Co. decided to let the matter sit overnight. They just waited. …

… The Washington Free Beacon’s industrious use of Twitter ensured recognition of its pioneering efforts on the Stephanopoulos story. Major news outlets, in their writeups of the story, credited the site for its inquiry into the donations. That dynamic undercut whatever result the network sought in releasing its statements to Politico first.

Silence is unacceptable here. ABC News has to do one of two things: Either apologize to the Washington Free Beacon for whatever precisely it did or explain how its actions meet the commonly acknowledged standards of the industry. Today Stephanopoulos issued his second apology for his evasions in the Clinton Foundation case, so that story may ebb in the coming weeks. Yet the Erik Wemple Blog is committed to keeping this unfinished business about the Washington Free Beacon in play until the network resolves it.

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For a treat today we have Hugh Hewitt’s interview of Charles Krauthammer. The answers are not as well organized as his writings, but it’s good to hear some of the rambling thoughts of Sir Charles.

HH: Charles, tomorrow, I’m talking to your colleague, Kirsten Powers, about her new book, The Silencing. There’s an entire chapter on the President’s obsession with Fox News. But what does, it kind of reached a crescendo yesterday. What did you make of that?

CK: I remember we talked about it last night on Special Report, and I suggested that Fox buy a full-page ad touting the fact that Barack Obama is apparently now a constant viewer of Fox News, he’s such an expert on it. He said if you watch it all the time, so I’m glad to know that he’s joined this vast audience that Fox commands. Look, this is sort of a pathological Obama where you know, he picks up these memes. He doesn’t know a damn thing about what’s on Fox. The idea that Fox is constantly showing, you know, sponges and leeches, and never shows the waitress trying to make it, it’s just sort of the mythological world that he lives in. Or he may be cynical. I mean, he may know it’s all nonsense. I mean, I can’t tell. I mean, after all, you probably need a psychiatrist to figure that out. But it’s either cynical or just hopelessly deluded on this. I would prefer to think he’s cynical, because I’d like somebody in the White House who’s not delusional. And this is the usual Obama cynicism. It’s the media, it’s the press, they’re underreporting liberal successes. I mean, look, the fact is a war on poverty, the billions poured into helping the poor, which in my 20s I rather supported until in my 30s, the empirical social science evidence began to come out that not only was money poured down the drain, but it was undermining the traditional structures of even the poorest neighborhoods and leading to real terrible pathologies, including helping to accelerate the breakdown of the family. So these are, there’s just the empirical social science refuting the liberal nostrums about how to help the poor. But he never engages in an argument. It’s all ad hominin. …

 

HH: Where do you see this race going? We have a minute to the break.

CK: I think it’s very clear, this is analysis, not advocacy. The top tier clearly is Jeb Bush, Scott Walker and Marco Rubio. They’ve had all pretty good launches. Bush has declines, which makes him, so he’s not the runaway frontrunner. I don’t even know that he is the frontrunner. But there are three in the top tier. I am sure that either one or two will emerge from the second tier to join them, but that will take time, probably happen at the debates, the way Huckabee joined the top tier in ’08 when he came out of nowhere. And I think Cruz would be a candidate for that. I don’t think Rand Paul will ultimately be, because as a libertarian, he’s got a ceiling that’s rather low – high floor, low ceiling. And he’s somewhat hurt by the rise of foreign policy as an issue, where I think he’s rather weak. …

Jonathan Tobin posts on the snub the Saudis have sent to the president.

… The Saudis, like the Israelis, know that America’s promises about both the nuclear deal and the future of the region are not worth much. The Iranians have been granted two paths to a bomb by the United States. One is by cheating via the easily evaded restrictions in the nuclear pact with little fear of sanctions being snapped back. The other is by patiently waiting for it to expire while continuing their nuclear research with little interference from a West that will be far more interested in trade than anything else.

That leaves the Saudis thinking they may need to procure their own nuclear option and to flex their muscles, as they have been doing in Yemen. It also sets up the region for what may be an ongoing series of confrontations between Iranian allies and the Saudis and their friends, a recipe for disaster.

Will Obama get the message and change course? That’s even less likely than him embracing Netanyahu. An administration that came into office determined to create more daylight between itself and Israel has now embarked on a policy designed to alienate all of America’s traditional allies in order to appease a vicious Islamist foe. Anyone who thinks this will turn out well simply isn’t paying attention to the same events that have left the Saudis and other U.S. allies thinking they are more or less being left on their own.

Jennifer Rubin posts on the fact nobody trusts this president. 

The Post reports: “King Salman of Saudi Arabia, a key ally of the United States, will not attend a summit this week at Camp David called to address security concerns among Persian Gulf nations about a potential nuclear deal with Iran, the Saudi foreign minister said Sunday.” To say this is a slight or an insult is to minimize the symbolism of the decision. The Saudi king is telling America and the world: There is nothing President Obama can promise that is worth the trip. Out of all the Gulf states, only two will be sending heads of state.

Jonathan Schanzer of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) says dryly that “the optics of this are bad.” Indeed, he tells me that “regardless of how Camp David plays out, one thing is clear: the Gulf states are decidedly uneasy about this Iran deal. And I suspect that there is little Washington can offer that will change this.”

You know it’s bad when the White House is insisting it isn’t: …

Max Boot has more on the latest embarrassment for President Disaster. 

President Obama is in the position of a high-school student who thinks that the cool kids are going to come to his birthday party and starts bragging about it around school, only to have his prized guests opt out at the last minute, leaving him looking considerably embarrassed. The guests in question are the leaders of America’s closest Gulf allies. They had been invited to a fence-mending summit at Camp David but only two—the emirs of Qatar and Kuwait—have accepted. All the others have suddenly discovered they have something else urgent to do that weekend. (Haircuts scheduled! Barbecues to attend!) Most embarrassing for Obama, as Jonathan Tobin noted earlier today, is that Saudi King Salman had at first accepted the invitation before declining it.

The administration spinmeisters can put a happy face on this all they want by claiming that they can still negotiate with the lower-level leaders the Gulf countries are sending but there is no doubt that this is a rebuke of the administration for putting Iran first. The Gulf leaders see the U.S. increasingly cozy with the rulers in Tehran, whose imperial designs they regard as a mortal danger, and they are not reticent about signaling their displeasure. Refusing to attend the Camp David summit is the least of it. Other actions that the Gulfies are taking are more serious—for example launching bombing campaigns against extremists in both Libya and, on a larger scale, in Yemen without asking for America’s permission or even bothering to notify us more than a few hours in advance. …

Speaking of disasters, David Harsanyi posts on the worst of the GOP contenders – Huckabee. Harsanyi tries to understand why he dislikes the Huckster so much.

… Maybe it’s the awe-shucks populism that isn’t substantively very different from the class-conflict rhetoric we hear from so many on the Left these days. Or maybe it’s that everyman Huckabee has been running for one political office or another for the past 25 years – a fact that might escape the attention of anyone listening to the nuggets of blue-collar wisdom found in his speeches and those God, guns, grits, and gravy books he writes.

Since his last run for the presidency, Huckabee has hosted a national radio show and television show, and he’s endorsed all sorts of interesting products, including “secret biblical cures for cancer” to, no doubt, some unfortunate and desperate people. Because, Huckabee, like all of those selfish plutocrats he likes to denounce, is out to make a buck.

Or maybe it’s his paternalistic attacks on pop culture, the ones that make him sound like some reincarnated member of the PMRC, that are so off-putting? After all, as governor of Arkansas Huckabee was a zealous NannyState advocate– passing precedent-setting intrusions into the lifestyles choices of individuals in Arkansas.

It could also be his role as John McCain’s hitman in the 2008 primaries, when he attacked Mitt Romney’s faith in an effort to dissuade Evangelicals from supporting the Mormon candidate. Focusing on a candidate’s belief system, at least from my perspective, is within the bounds of acceptable political debate. But Huckabee’s churlish innuendo dropping should have undercut any perception you might have that the cheery former Baptist preacher is anything but your typical politician. …

Andrew Malcolm was thinking he would pass on commenting on the awful commencement speech delivered at Tuskegee by the president’s wife. We were going to leave it alone too, but Malcolm was too good.

… Commencement speeches are relatively easy compositions for writers to put in politicians’ mouths. Graduations are happy times. Pols want to be associated with happy times. The publicity-seeking school wants a celebrity to grace the stage to confirm the day’s import for the mere cost of an honorary degree.

So, they come. Congratulate the grads. Urge appreciation for supportive families. Offer one or two pieces of free advice that no one will remember. And get out of the way.

Not the Obamas. Not First Lady Michelle Obama. Presidential spouse is an unusual job. Unpaid. Unstructured. Presidential helpmate, privately. Sometimes publicly. So far, only women. (Susan Swain of C-SPAN, by the way, has just published a fascinating book, “First Ladies,” profiles of all 44 unique women who’ve held that position, available in hardback and e-book here.)

While hubby played golf this Mother’s Day weekend, Mrs. Obama went to Alabama’s TuskegeeUniversity’s. Her 3,700 words began in standard form, but quickly became a detailed recounting of American racism including the famed Tuskegee airmen who overcame it seven decades ago.

Then, her address took a turn we’ve become accustomed to expect more from her husband: The celebration of 500 hard-won graduations became instead a speech more about her. …

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New York Magazine covers the Clinton Foundation’s problems with Charity Navigator, an independent non-profit watchdog. 

Last Wednesday, Bill Clinton ratcheted up Clintonworld’s counter assault on Clinton Cash, the book by conservative author Peter Schweizer that ignited the latest media frenzy over the former First Couple’s $2 billion foundation. “There’s just no evidence,” Clinton defiantly told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour during an interview at the Foundation’s confab in Morocco. “Even the guy that wrote the book apparently had to admit under questioning that we didn’t have a shred of evidence for this, we just sort of thought we would throw it out there and see if it flies, and it won’t fly.”

Clinton’s analysis is flawed in at least one regard. As my colleague Jonathan Chait recently wrote, the Clintons’ web of murky relationships and opaque finances exacts a political cost whether or not their critics ever find a there there. The Clintons, more than anyone, should know that negative press — true or not — can have potentially catastrophic consequences. Remember, it was David Brock’s 1993 American Spectator article alleging that Arkansas state troopers arranged Bill’s trysts, which sparked Paula Jones’s sexual harassment lawsuit, which led to the Supreme Court case, which led to Monica Lewinsky lying under oath about the affair, which led Linda Tripp to turn the tapes over to Ken Starr, which led to impeachment.

The Clinton Foundation scandal cycle is already spinning off new complications. A case in point: After being the subject of a spate of negative newspaper accounts about potential conflicts of interest and management dysfunction this winter — long before Clinton Cash — the Clinton Foundation wound up on a “watch list” maintained by the Charity Navigator, the New Jersey–based nonprofit watchdog. The Navigator, dubbed the “most prominent” nonprofit watchdog by the Chronicle of Philanthropy, is a powerful and feared player in the nonprofit world. …

Matthew Continetti says Hillary Clinton is having a hard time defining herself.

Hillary Clinton is moving so quickly to the left that it’s hard to keep up. Her aides are telling the New York Times she wants to “topple” the One Percent, she’s pledging solidarity with union bosses over lunch meetings at Mario Batali restaurants in Midtown, she supports a constitutional amendment to suppress political speech, she’s down with a right to same-sex marriage, she’s ambivalent over the Keystone Pipeline and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, she’s calling for an end to the “era of mass incarceration,” she wants to go “further” than President Obama’s illegal executive amnesty. It’s called pandering, but the press is too frazzled or sympathetic to call her on it. There’s desperation to Clinton’s moves, an almost panicked energy, to close the gap between her and her party’s base. If Elizabeth Warren called for full Communism, Clinton would be at the barricades the next day.

Warren’s the reason for the policy shuffle. Clinton is so terrified of losing the Democratic primary—again—that she’s willing to trade consistency for security against an insurgent from the left. But she may be trading electability too. The Democrats have an advantage in presidential elections, but last I checked the country hasn’t turned into a really big MSNBC greenroom. One day Clinton will have to defend her positions against a non-witch Republican, and she’ll have eight years of Obama to answer for as well. She doesn’t have the gall, the rakishness, or the aw-shucks charm that allowed her husband to slither out of such difficulties, and judging from Bill’s most recent interviews he’s losing his abilities too. Indeed, the politician Hillary Clinton reminds me most of lately isn’t her husband or Warren. It’s Mitt Romney. …

Mary Anastasia O’Grady writes on the Clinton way in Haiti.

… Mr. Clinton loves to paint himself as a third-world redeemer, as he did in an interview in Africa with an NBC reporter that aired last week. The reporter asked about charges that the Clinton Foundation’s practice of pulling in big money from governments and wealthy donors during Hillary’s tenure as secretary of state was a conflict of interest. Mr. Clinton countered that he’s helping the poor.

As an NBC narrator described Clinton Foundation activities, the former president and his daughter were shown fitting locals with hearing aids. Pravda could not have crafted a better piece of propaganda.

Yet peel back the veneer of “charity” and one finds that the Clinton way has inflicted egregious harm on the poor in developing nations because it has undermined respect for the rule of law that is so necessary for economic growth. If a former president of the U.S. flouts anticorruption protocols, why should the locals get hung up on them?

Haitians learned about Mr. Clinton’s affinity for cronyism after he used the Marines to restore deposed Haitian strongman Jean Bertrand Aristide to power in 1994. As I have documented in this column, “friends of Bill” subsequently were awarded, in secret, a sweetheart deal from the state-owned monopoly phone company, Haiti Teleco, that gave them a substantial edge over the prevailing, mandated long-distance rates set by the Federal Communications Commission.

Within two weeks of Haiti’s January 2010 earthquake, the word had already gone out from the State Department that Bill Clinton would be in charge of U.S. reconstruction efforts. “That means,” one individual told me and I reported in a Jan. 25, 2010 column, “if you don’t have Clinton connections, you won’t be in the game.” …

Jonathan Tobin says the Clinton war room has “jumped the shark.”

By the end of last week, the Hillary Clinton camp was acting as if they had weathered the worst of the Clinton Cash scandal and emerged unscathed. While polls showed that trust in Hillary and belief in her truthfulness was heading south, support from the overwhelming majority of Democrats remained strong. She also maintained leads in head-to-head matchups against possible Republican opponents. But in spite of these reasons for confidence that the Clinton brand can survive — as it has before — virtually anything, their bold talk about no one believing the book isn’t convincing anyone. The drip, drip, drip of scandal stories from a variety of news outlets inspired by Peter Schweizer’s muckraking book has kept the allegations in the news rather than it fading away. As a result, the Clinton “War Room” that has been assembled to trash Schweitzer and dismiss the book is starting to show the initial signs of panic. When longtime Clinton family retainer Lanny Davis called the book and those exploring its charges an example of “McCarthyism” during an appearance on C-Span, it was clear that Hillary’s friends have officially jumped the shark in their efforts to silence the nation’s unease about the former First Family’s conduct. …

Power Line picks up on a book store in DC with a sense of humor. This will be the start of some great cartoons

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We have a couple of posts today on the recent shooting in Texas. Mark Steyn is first and he has some cartoons drawn by the winner of the contest in Garland that the jihadis had gone to break up.

As we mentioned a week ago, I’m none too well at the moment, and it so happens my preferred position in which to write causes me severe pain – which is presumably some kind of not so subtle literary criticism from the Almighty. But I’m back, more or less, with lots to catch up on. …

… If the American press were not so lazy and parochial, they would understand that this was the third Islamic attack on free speech this year – first, Charlie Hebdo in Paris; second, the Lars Vilks event in Copenhagen; and now Texas. The difference in the corpse count is easily explained by a look at the video of the Paris gunmen, or the bullet holes they put in the police car. The French and Texan attackers supposedly had the same kind of weapons, although one should always treat American media reports with a high degree of skepticism when it comes to early identification of “assault weapons” and “AK47s”. Nonetheless, from this reconstruction, it seems clear that the key distinction between the two attacks is that in Paris they knew how to use their guns and in Garland they didn’t. So a very cool 60-year-old local cop with nothing but his service pistol advanced under fire and took down two guys whose heavier firepower managed only to put a bullet in an unarmed security guard’s foot.

The Charlie Hebdo killers had received effective training overseas – as thousands of ISIS recruits with western passports are getting right now. What if the Garland gunmen had been as good as the Paris gunmen? Surely that would be a more interesting question for the somnolent American media than whether some lippy Jewess was asking for it. …

… In Copenhagen, in Paris, in Garland, what’s more important than the cartoons and the attacks is the reaction of all the polite, respectable people in society, which for a decade now has told those who do not accept the messy, fractious liberties of free peoples that we don’t really believe in them, either, and we’re happy to give them up – quietly, furtively, incrementally, remorselessly – in hopes of a quiet life. Because a small Danish newspaper found itself abandoned and alone, Charlie Hebdo jumped in to support them. Because the Charlie Hebdo artists and writers died abandoned and alone, Pamela Geller jumped in to support them. By refusing to share the risk, we are increasing the risk. It’s not Pamela Geller who emboldens Islamic fanatics, it’s all the nice types – the ones Salman Rushdie calls the But Brigade. You’ve heard them a zillion times this last week: “Of course, I’m personally, passionately, absolutely committed to free speech. But…”

And the minute you hear the “but”, none of the build-up to it matters. A couple of days before Garland, Canadian Liberal MP (and former Justice Minister) Irwin Cotler announced his plan to restore Section 13 – the “hate speech” law under which Maclean’s and I were dragged before the Canadian “Human Rights” Commission and which, as a result of my case, was repealed by the Parliament of Canada. At the time Mr Cotler was fairly torn on the issue. We talked about it briefly at a free-speech event in Ottawa at which he chanced to be present, and he made vaguely supportive murmurings – as he did when we ran into each other a couple of years later in Boston. Mr Cotler is Jewish and, even as European “hate” laws prove utterly useless against the metastasizing open Jew-hate on the Continent, he thinks we should give ‘em one more try. He’s more sophisticated than your average But boy, so he uses a three-syllable word:

“Freedom of expression is the lifeblood of democracy,” said Cotler, who was minister of justice under Paul Martin.

“However…”

Free speech is necessary to free society for all the stuff after the “but”, after the “however”. There’s no fine line between “free speech” and “hate speech”: Free speech is hate speech; it’s for the speech you hate – and for all your speech that the other guy hates. If you don’t have free speech, then you can’t have an honest discussion. All you can do is what those stunted moronic boobs in Paris and Copenhagen and Garland did: grab a gun and open fire. What Miliband and Cotler propose will, if enacted, reduce us all to the level of the inarticulate halfwits who think the only dispositive argument is “Allahu Akbar”. …

… Can Islam be made to live with the norms of free societies in which it now nests? Can Islam learn – or be forced – to suck it up the way Mormons, Catholics, Jews and everyone else do? If not, free societies will no longer be free. Pam Geller understands that, and has come up with her response. By contrast, Ed Miliband, Irwin Cotler, Francine Prose, Garry Trudeau and the trendy hipster social-media But boys who just canceled Mr Fawstin’s Facebook account* are surrendering our civilization. They may be more sophisticated, more urbane, more amusing dinner-party guests …but in the end they are trading our liberties. …

Craig Pirrong of Streetwise Professor has kudos for the policeman in Garland.

A few words about Garland.

First, the traffic cop who blew away two Islamist would-be mass murders is a total badass. He took out two guys who surprised him and were spraying him with assault weapon fire: pictures from the scene show dozens of evidence markers on the ground, most of which are likely indicating ejected brass from their assault weapons. His assailants were wearing body armor, which means he took them out with freaking head shots while taking rifle fire. With a service pistol. If that isn’t coolness and courage under fire, I don’t know what is. …

… Third, this event has provoked the left into paroxysms of rage . . . at Pamela Geller and Geert Wilders, for having the audacity to engage in politically incorrect speech. As in the aftermath of Charlie Hebdo, I’ve lost count at the number of talking heads and pixel stained wretches who condemn the violence but . . . The “but” involves some variant on the theme that Geller engaged in hate speech, and had it coming, or at least the government should constrain such offensive speech to prevent such unfortunate events from recurring.  Indeed, the “buts” are more frequent and insistent here, because the Hebdo staff were hard core leftists, and Geller and Wilder are most definitely not.

As my father would say when I would try to talk my way out of something: No buts. Period. …

… The fact that a local traffic cop was the only thing that saved hundreds from the homicidal plans of two Islamist fanatics (one of them a native born American citizen) is deeply concerning. But what is far more disturbing is that this isn’t what disturbs what I would wager is a clear majority of the chattering class. What disturbs them (or what they opportunistically claim disturbs them) is speech that they disagree with, and which they are hell-bent on limiting the rights to engage in such speech. They are not targeting hate speech: they are targeting speech and speakers that they hate.

Fine. As we say in Texas: Come and take it.

Michael Barone has written 5,200 words on the British elections. We have some of it and then a link if you want to read more.  

Big surprises in Thursday’s British election. For weeks the pre-election polls showed a statistical tie in popular votes between Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative Party and the Labour opposition led by Ed Miliband. It was universally agreed that neither party could reach a 326-vote majority in the House of Commons. A prominent British political website projected that Conservatives would get 280 seats and Labour 274.

But the exit poll, released when voting ended at 10 p.m., projected Conservatives with 316 seats and Labour with only 239. It showed the Scottish Nationalist Party sweeping 58 of Scotland’s 59 seats and the Liberal Democrats, the Conservatives’ coalition partners for five years, reduced from the 57 seats they won in 2010 to 10 this time. That turned out to be pretty close to the mark. The main error was that even this underestimated the Conservative wave.

Both major parties were suffering because of choices they had made. As party leader since 2005, Cameron made the Conservatives more metropolitan- and less traditional-oriented. The result was a strengthening of the anti-European Union, anti-immigration United Kingdom Independence Party, which was getting 13 percent in pre-election polls.

As Labor leader since 2010, Miliband abandoned Tony Blair’s New Labour philosophy and turned Left. But Blair’s creation of a separate Scottish parliament whetted rather than slaked the desire of Scots for independence. Scotland voted against independence by only a 55 to 45 percent margin last September, after which the Scot Nats rallied to seriously contest parliamentary seats, 41 of them held by Labour.

So how did Conservatives come to win?

Scotland was a large part of it. In televised debates SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon promised to support a minority Labour government to keep Cameron out of No. 10 Downing Street. But that raised fears that the SNP would force left-wing policies on the whole country — and demand more subsidies for Scotland. “They would take money from the West Midlands,” one Conservative candidate there said, “and send it to Scotland.” So Labour failed to make the gains in England predicted by the pre-election polls. …

… Still, the Conservative victory shows that, once again, the appeal of economic redistribution and the opposition to “austerity” have been overestimated. Maybe that’s a lesson for America too.

After a few days reflection Barone has some observations. 

… Were the 2015 results far out of line with historic precedent? Not really. In fact, if you look at each party’s percentages of the popular vote, you see that Conservatives and Labour were very close this year to their percentages in 2010. Conservatives have clearly recovered from the trough they found themselves in during the Blair election years (1997, 2001, 2005) but still below the percentages they won in the Thatcher and Major election years (1979, 1983, 1987, 1992).

However, the Liberal Democrat vote evaporated far below the level of all those previous elections and the Ukip (United Kingdom Independence party) did much better and the Scottish Nationals somewhat better than in previous contests (keep in mind that the Scots Nats fielded candidates only in the 59 Scottish seats and not in the 591 English, Welsh and Northern Irish seats). …

… 2. Why were Conservatives able to get a majority in 2015 when they weren’t able to do so in 2010 with a similar popular vote margin over Labour?

The first answer is that this year they had more incumbents, who had been able to perform constituency services over the past five years: that can be good for 1 or 2 percent and occasionally more: the difference between victory and defeat in a target seat. I noticed this tendency in the Watford constituency, where the hard-working Conservative Richard Harrington was re-elected by a wide margin in a seat which was close in 2010 and in which Conservatives finished third in 2005.

The second and more important reason — though here I am speculating — is that the Conservative campaign, run by the Australian campaign guru Lynton Crosby, seems to have targeted districts shrewdly and bombarded them with messaging emphasizing especially the dangers posed by the possible Scots Nats dominance of a Labour government.

Perhaps in some places this included a high-minded appeal not to break up a Union which has existed since 1707 and under whose Union Jack flag Scots and Englishmen fought and died in battles that saved the world from tyranny. The more typical message would be similar to the Conservative billboard showing former SNP leader Alex Salmond picking a man’s pocket and urging voters not to let the Scots Nats steal their cash.

The appeal might be aimed particularly at Ukip sympathizers and supporters: the only way to stop the Scots stealing your money is to vote Conservative. My hypothesis — I need to see more evidence on this — is that prompting Ukippers to vote Tory is the best explanation of why Labour won so few of the Conservative seats it targeted in England and Wales, and why Conservatives managed to take Labour seats there in significant numbers. …

Follow this link if you want to read more of Barone’s analysis.

Here are some further observations about the British election, based on further analysis over the weekend.

Roger Lowenstein reviewing David McCullough’s biography of the Wright Brothers calls them “the workingest boys.”

In “The Wright Brothers,” David McCullough has etched a brisk, admiring portrait of the modest, hardworking Ohioans who designed an airplane in their bicycle shop and solved the mystery of flight on the sands of Kitty Hawk, N.C. He captures the marvel of what the Wrights accomplished and, just as important, the wonder felt by their contemporaries. John T. Daniels, who witnessed the first flight in 1903, wrote: “It was one of the grandest sights, if not the grandest sight, of my life.”

Aviation was an improvement that people did not expect to see. The Washington Post had stated plainly that “it is a fact that man can’t fly.” There had been many attempts in the 19th century, mostly leading to humiliation. “The difficulty,” Mr. McCullough observes, “was not to get into the air but to stay there.” The predecessor who seems to have gotten furthest, at least conceptually, was a German, Otto Lilienthal, who disparaged the popular air balloons and, hoping to mimic the technique of birds, built more than a dozen gliders before fatally plunging from an altitude of 50 feet in 1896.

Lilienthal inspired Wilbur, then 29 and the proprietor with Orville, 25, of a thriving bicycle business in their hometown of Dayton, Ohio. Nothing in their prior lives hinted at epoch-making greatness; they were talented mechanics, unusually well-read (books were among their few possessions) and a bit eccentric. The brothers, Mr. McCullough observes, “worked together six days a week, ate their meals together, kept their money in a joint bank account” and even, according to Wilbur, “thought together.” …

Speaking of work, ESPN Golf Writer Bob Harig writes on the prospects for Tiger Woods being able to learn how to again grind out the work that precedes wins on the Tour.

Tiger Woods gingerly made his way from the 18th green Sunday, fans screaming his name as he headed toward the scoring area, about to sign for his worst 72-hole score ever at the Players Championship.

Sweat continued to pour from his face as he took questions afterward, summing up a week he described as “a mixed bag,” probably something all should have expected given his lack of play both recently and in general.

Perhaps that might explain why Woods walked a bit carefully, maybe it was fatigue, possibly stiffness setting in after a rare 72-hole tournament of late. The Players marked the first time since December of 2013 that Woods played a fourth round in consecutive tournaments, and that really says everything about his game at the moment.

A nine-week break starting in February was a necessary step to get numerous issues in his game back in working order. Then came the Masters, where he surprised many by not only making the cut, but by finishing 17th. A month later brought a tie for 69th at the Players Championship on a TPC Sawgrass course that doesn’t allow for the inconsistency Woods is fighting now.

A healthy dose of perspective is again in order, and Woods typically is the one lacking it. So many times he stubbornly pushes forward, looking for results now instead of patiently looking toward the future. And yet it was Woods who took the long view on Sunday. …