Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

It can make your hair hurt, but getting the story straight on the West’s understanding about Iraq’s WMD’s is going to be a point historians will find important. Peter Berkowitz of Real Clear Politics reviews Judith Miller’s new book. Miller was in Pickings a few days ago introducing her book.

… That is where Miller almost ends her book.

In the epilogue, however, she discloses that she now believes she gave incorrect testimony in United States v. Libby and that she did so because prosecutor Fitzgerald—who declined to respond to written questions about the case—withheld crucial information from her.

Of the nine journalists who testified at Libby’s trial about conversations with him—including Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, Times reporter David Sanger, and syndicated columnist Robert Novak—Miller was the only one to say that Libby voluntarily revealed Plame’s CIA employment. She writes that her testimony “was also crucial to Fitzgerald’s assertion that the vice president had been involved, since Libby had told the grand jury that Cheney had approved his suggestion that he discuss the intelligence estimate [the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate] about Iraq and WMD with me.”

Before she appeared before the grand jury in the autumn of 2005, Miller writes, Fitzgerald led her by pointed queries to believe that a four-word question contained between parentheses in her notebook—“(wife works in Bureau?)”—was the smoking gun that proved that Libby, in a June 23, 2003 conversation, had told her about Plame’s CIA employment. She so testified to the grand jury in 2005 and at trial in 2007.

Three years later, while reading Plame’s book, “Fair Game,” Miller was astonished to learn that “while working overseas for the CIA, Plame’s cover were jobs at the State Department.” This threw “a new light” on Miller’s notebook jotting, because the State Department has “bureaus,” while the CIA is organized into “divisions.”

Miller saw that she must have begun her conversation with Libby wondering whether Wilson’s wife worked at the State Department. Moreover, had a seasoned Washington insider like Libby sought to reveal Plame’s CIA job, Miller realized, he would not have referred to the place she worked as a “bureau,” but rather as a “division.” These revelations, according to Miller, shattered her confidence in her recollection and led her to believe that Fitzgerald misled her into providing false testimony.

The prosecution had the classified file of Plame’s service and Fitzgerald knew, or should have known, of Plame’s State Department cover. But despite his obligation to provide exculpatory evidence to witnesses as well as to the defendant, he withheld this information not only from Judy Miller, but also from Scooter Libby’s lawyers even though they had requested Plame’s employment records.

It would have been easy for Miller to take her knowledge of her mistaken testimony to her grave. Who would have known? Who would have cared?

Nevertheless, as she had done with the prewar intelligence failures, Miller investigated.  In addition to finding injustice to Libby she also revealed that Fitzgerald’s three-and-half year pursuit of him damaged American national security.

In a 2013 interview, former Vice President Cheney told Miller that but for Fitzgerald’s sidelining of Libby, the Iraq War might have turned out differently. In 2003, Libby was the principal figure in the White House arguing for the counterinsurgency strategy that President Bush only embraced in late 2006 after many wrong turns and much carnage, and which Gen. David Petraeus successfully implemented in 2007. It is painful to contemplate how many lives—American and Iraqi—might have been spared had Libby, the foremost champion within the White House in 2003 of stabilizing Iraq through counterinsurgency operations, not been hindered by, and eventually forced to resign because of, Fitzgerald’s overwrought federal investigation and prosecution.

Serendipity, a biased press, and a fanatical prosecutor combined to yoke together the fates of Scooter Libby and Judith Miller. Elite left-wing opinion demanded that the Bush administration pay for its supposed lies about Iraqi WMD. The left wanted to take down Bush or Cheney and when they couldn’t destroy either, they settled for Libby.

At the same time, the left had no interest in toppling their beloved New York Times, but relished the newspaper’s guilt offering of Miller. That the only lies of consequence were those they promulgated about Libby and Miller does not yet seem to have registered in, much less troubled, the left-liberal conscience.

Miller’s sobering book, which demonstrates her devotion to getting the story right, makes a major contribution to correcting the record.

For another back-story that exposes the lies of the left, The Daily Caller shows the link between the obama administration and the fraudulent Rolling Stone article about UVA.

A top-ranking official at the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has emerged as a potentially key figure in Rolling Stone’s false article, “A Rape on Campus.”

Catherine Lhamon, who heads the Department’s civil rights wing, was identified in a letter sent last month by University of Virginia Dean of Students Allen Groves to Steve Coll and Sheila Coronel, the two Columbia Journalism School deans who conducted a review of the Nov. 19 article, written by disgraced reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely.

Groves’ letter was included as a footnote to the Columbia deans’ report, which was released on Sunday and cataloged the failures and lies that led to the article’s publication.

In the letter, Groves wrote that he has suffered “personal and professional” damage as a result of Erdely’s reporting and comments Lhamon made about him which were included in the article.

As the Rolling Stone article fell apart, Lhamon’s involvement has gone virtually unmentioned. But a deeper look reveals her ties to Emily Renda, a University of Virginia employee and activist who put Erdely in touch with Jackie, the student whose claim that she was brutally gang-raped by seven members of a fraternity on Sept. 28, 2012, served as the linchpin for the 9,000-word Rolling Stone article. President Obama nominated Lhamon to become the Education Department’s Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights in July 2013. The Senate approved her unanimously the following month.

She has served as the Education Department’s designee to the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault which Obama created on Jan. 22, 2014. Renda served on the same task force.

Besides that link, both spoke at a February 2014 University of Virginia event entitled “Sexual Misconduct Among College Students.” …

The above is not the first time Emily Renda’s fingerprints were found in the Rolling Stone disaster. The blog 28 Sherman posted on her involvement last December.

Even after my Erdely-Renda post from Thursday, the Rolling Stone article continues to unravel elsewhere. The Washington Post managed to do the yeoman’s work on the problems to the story. Chuck Ross at the Daily Caller has interviewed Jackie’s friend Randall, adding to the catfish elements to the story. Emily Renda’s still skating free from scrutiny except here. A really weird coincidence is found between Renda’s words and Jackie’s story in the Rolling Stone. This plays into who came up with Sabrina Erdely’s story details. The media should be asking Emily Renda deeper questions than the softballs NPR threw her way.

Jackie’s story to her friends differs from Erdely’s reporting. Jackie has accused Erdely of lying, people have accused Jackie of lying, and it is a tornado of lies. This is where Renda fits in. Emily Renda’s testimony to the Senate was in June. Here is a passage about a vicious rape on campus.

“One of the student survivors I worked with, Jenna*, was gang-raped by five fraternity men early in her freshman year. Despite the severity of the assault and injuries she sustained, Jenna still experienced a feeling of personal responsibility. Looking for affirmation, she sought out peers and told her story. Sadly, each and every one of the friends she reached out to responded with varying denials of her experience; these responses worsened her feelings of self-blame – that she must be confused because that fraternity “is full of great guys”; that she must have made them think she was “down for that”; questioning how no one else at the party could have heard what was going on if she was telling the truth; or discouraging her from seeking help because “you don’t want to be one of those girls who has a reputation” for reporting “that kind of thing.” These statements haunted Jenna. She told me that they made her feel crazy, and made her question whether her own understanding of the rape was legitimate.”

Sounds familiar? …

And the blog The Other McCain posts on the “coven of liars” that promoted the story.

… The Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross reports that Lhamon and Emilly Renda are part of the same federal apparatus:

“[Lhamon] has served as the Education Department’s designee to the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault which Obama created on Jan. 22, 2014. Renda served on the same task force.
Besides that link, both spoke at a February 2014 University of Virginia event entitled “Sexual Misconduct Among College Students.”
Lhamon has been invited to the White House nearly 60 times, according to visitor’s logs. Renda has been invited six times. Both were invited to the same White House meeting on three occasions. One, held on Feb. 21, 2014, was conducted by Lynn Rosenthal, then the White House Advisor on Violence Against Women. Twenty-one people, mostly activists, were invited to that meeting. Lhamon and Renda were invited to two other larger gatherings — one on April 29 and the other on Sept. 19.
It is unclear if both attended the three meetings. Renda did not respond to an emailed request for comment.
Renda and Lhamon also testified at a June 26, 2014, Senate hearing on campus sexual assault. It was at that hearing that Renda cited Jackie’s story that she was brutally gang-raped by five fraternity members — a statement that was inconsistent with Jackie’s claim to Erdely that she was raped by seven men. According to the Columbia report, Renda first told Erdely about Jackie’s allegation on July 8, nearly two weeks after her Senate testimony.
During her testimony, Lhamon claimed that “The best available research suggests that 20% of college women, and roughly 6% of college men, are victims of attempted or completed sexual assault.” That “one-in-five” claim about the prevalence of sexual assault on campus has been heavily disputed.”

Now, read the second page of Chuck Ross’s report:

“In his letter, Groves wrote that he filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking correspondence between Lhamon and Erdely. Likewise, The Daily Caller filed a FOIA request but expanded the inquiry to include emails Lhamon and her assistant sent to Renda.
In his letter to Coll and Coronel, Groves wrote that he was “one of the professionals vilified by name” in Erdely’s article.
He claimed that Erdely completely mischaracterized remarks he made at a Sept. 2014 meeting with university trustees about sexual assault and that Lhamon disparaged him with comments she made to Erdely. . . .
Despite the context provided by Groves, the Department of Education is not backing off of Lhamon’s comments to Erdely.
“We stand by the statement Catherine made during her interview with Rolling Stone,” Dorie Turner Nolt, the agency’s press secretary, told The DC.”

This is serious. Here you have Erdely misrepresenting a UVA dean’s words and a federal official disparaging the dean on the basis of that misrepresentation, and the Department of Education declares that it will “stand by” this smear? More than that, however, Lhamon and Renda appear to have a very close connection through the White House task force, and both were sources for Erdely’s now-discredited article. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

It’s been awhile since we have spent time on the Clinton campaign. Now that she is about to announce it is time to correct that. The left is getting worried. New York Magazine has a long piece that asks if Hillary is any good at running for president. 

A lot can happen between now and then, but barring something truly unprecedented and totally unforeseen — a meteorite, a Benghazi revelation, a health scare, or a Martin O’Malley groundswell — on July 28, 2016, Hillary Clinton will step onto a stage in Philadelphia. There, surrounded by red-white-and-blue bunting and balloons — as well as Bill, Chelsea, baby granddaughter Charlotte, and tens of thousands of screaming Democrats — she will officially become her party’s presidential nominee. It will be a long-awaited and historic moment, the first time a woman (and the second time a Clinton) has topped a major party’s presidential ticket. And already some Republicans are licking their chops, while some Democrats are experiencing pangs of buyer’s remorse.

For much of the Obama presidency, there has been a general sense of calm among Democrats about their chances to retain the White House. Clinton’s tenure as secretary of State was distinguished, if not especially consequential. Her favorability ratings hovered around all-time highs. It wasn’t just that her nomination seemed a foregone conclusion; given the dysfunction of the Republican Party and the demographic changes in the American electorate, the race seemed hers to lose. It was hard to find a Democratic operative not in fairly high spirits.

Then, over the past few weeks, the country watched as Clinton dealt with the fallout from the revelation that she used a personal email server while heading up the State Department. Her fiercest critics have charged that she employed the private email system to skirt government transparency laws and, in the process, endangered national security. Her supporters worry that, even if Clinton’s private email was legal and innocent, it was a self-inflicted error that has needlessly handed her enemies yet another cudgel to wield against her. But the glee and regret among Republicans and Democrats have been most pronounced over the disastrous press conference Clinton held at the United Nations to try to put the matter to rest, which served to remind them of something many had forgotten: what an abominable candidate she can be. …

 

… Pat Buchanan, the venerable Republican operative who advised Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, likes to assess politicians as “political athletes.” Putting aside ideologies, policy preferences, even personalities, how do they perform on the political playing field? “It’s charisma, charm, savvy,” he says. “Being a political athlete is having an extra dimension — it’s not learned; you’re born with it.” In Buchanan’s long career, the greatest political athletes he’s encountered have been John F. Kennedy, Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. “They’re naturals: Roy Hobbs or Mickey Mantle,” he says. Hillary, in Buchanan’s view, is the furthest thing from a natural: “She’s like Pete Rose, who has to grind out every hit.”

The grind can be obvious watching Clinton on the campaign trail. In her two successful Senate races and her unsuccessful presidential run in 2008, she often struggled to exhibit the basic qualities required of politicians. “Let’s remember who she’s beaten in her career: Rick Lazio and John Spencer,” says a Democratic consultant who has worked for and against Hillary. “The only time she’s run against anyone decent, she’s lost.” …

 

… Campaigns are punctuated by moments of high stagecraft — debates, convention speeches — that require oratorical talents that Clinton does not possess in abundance. “She doesn’t make mistakes in the debates, but that’s different than being good,” says a Democratic operative. “She doesn’t win a lot of people over.” The former Obama aide Bill Burton, who thought Clinton did well in her 2008 debates, nonetheless sums up her performances another way: “Maya Angelou said people won’t remember what you say or do but they’ll remember how you made them feel. If anything, she was a little too driven by data and less driven by how she was going to come off.” In fact, one of the greatest sources of agita among Democrats these days is that, deprived of a competitive primary, Clinton will face her well-seasoned Republican opponent without having debated in more than eight years.

But various academic studies have shown that even the debates that we consider most game-changing — Kennedy’s besting of a sweaty, five-o’clock-shadowed Nixon in 1960; Michael Dukakis’s botching of a question involving the hypothetical rape and murder of his wife; George H.W. Bush’s impatiently glancing at his watch in 1992 — had little or no impact on voter preferences. …

 

… Clinton’s worst gaffe of late came last year, in response to a question from Diane Sawyer about her sky-high speaking fees. Recognizing her vulnerability, she overcompensated, claiming that she and Bill were “dead broke” when they left the White House. According to one Republican operative who’s conducted focus groups on Clinton in Ohio and Colorado, “when you play that Diane Sawyer interview for lower-income women, women who really have struggled to put food on the table for their kids, they got physically upset at her about that remark.” Clinton only compounded the error when, in subsequent interviews, she tried to defend it as literally true. “She’s not very adept at cleaning that stuff up,” says the Republican operative. “Her tendency is to double down, rather than say that was a ridiculous comment.” Or, as Luntz says, “She doesn’t know when or how to say, ‘Hey, I f**ked up.’ ” ..

 

… The biggest difficulty in analyzing Clinton’s candidacy right now is, of course, that we don’t know whom she will be running against. In her wildest dreams, it will be Ted Cruz or Rand Paul, two senators skilled at rallying the Republican base but distrusted (or, in Cruz’s case, loathed) by the party Establishment. But let’s assume that David Karol is correct, and that the GOP nominee will be a familiar name popular among the party’s core donors. Let’s also assume that though his campaign will be extraordinarily well funded (groups backed by Charles and David Koch have pledged to spend almost $1 billion leading up to 2016), Clinton’s fund-raising will be equal to the task, and the finance race will roughly balance out.

Perhaps, then, Clinton will be positioning herself against Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. Unless Walker dramatically shifts strategy, he will be running a campaign focused less on broadening the GOP tent than on increasing the turnout of his base. This, in turn, would give Clinton ammunition to increase minority turnout for her. A Walker candidacy would clarify certain themes for Clinton — her vision for the role of government is considerably more expansionist than his, and it polls better. A recent Washington Post poll proposing a Clinton/Walker election had her leading 55 percent to 38 percent. But Walker complicates Clinton’s life in one major way. He’d be, as he calls himself, “a face for the future.” Time for a Change, in spades.

A campaign against Jeb Bush would present different opportunities and different challenges. A Bush surname would certainly help neutralize Clinton fatigue, and he might have more trouble getting his base to turn out. …

 

… It’s almost impossible to overstate just how much Clinton hates the press. She doesn’t trust it, avoids it at all costs, assumes the worst intentions, and generally wishes it would just go away. Her contempt for the people who cover her was on full display in her press conference last month — as was their contempt for her. It’s a poisonous relationship with multiple levels of dysfunction on both sides. Unfortunately for Clinton, she’s the one who bears the brunt of the fallout. …

And Karl Rove turns a critical eye on Hillary’s efforts.

… Mrs. Clinton’s main problem in 2008 was lack of a compelling message—and she lacks one now. She has recently tried channeling her inner Elizabeth Warren by talking about income inequality, but her comments had a check-the-box quality. 

She is someone searching for a rationale to run, rather than seeking how best to present it to the public. Mr. Podesta is smart enough to realize this, but slogans and soft lighting can’t substitute for real convictions and an authentic sense of purpose. 

Mrs. Clinton’s run for the White House seems more about personal political ambition than the country’s well being. Aides, consultants and even spouses can’t change that. …

National Review calls it Hillary’s Truman Show.

In the catalogue of stock political events, a campaign launch may be as easy as it gets. Sure, first impressions are important. But you find a setting that is historically or personally significant, you hang a few American flags, you gather a crowd of cheering supporters, you talk about America’s great promise, you march out to an upbeat tune. The bar is low. It’s hard to screw up a campaign launch.

But Hillary Clinton might be about to do it. According to the Guardian, Clinton plans to announce her presidential campaign at noon on Sunday, en route to Iowa, “on Twitter . . . followed by a video and email announcement.” Getting to Iowa is suddenly so urgent that she has to make her announcement from a plane 30,000 feet over St. Louis? Hardly.

In 2008, Clinton announced via video, too — a 90-second clip in which she declared, “I’m not just starting a campaign. I’m starting a conversation — with you, with America.” Because nothing says “dialogue” like a pre-recorded video with only one person in the room.

Eight years later, the Clinton team is doing the same thing. Why? Because for someone who has spent her life in public, Hillary Clinton is very bad in public. And her team knows it. …

After contemplating HRC as president, we need some comic relief and Andrew Malcolm is just in time with late night humor.

SNL: Despite Hillary Clinton’s claims that she used her personal email while Secretary of State to avoid carrying more than one device, a new report shows that she emailed with her iPad in addition to her BlackBerry. Even more alarming, her email signature was, “sent from my Benghazi cover-up device.”

SNL: ABC is denying reports that Barbara Walters wants to replace Rosie O’Donnell with Monica Lewinsky on “The View.” Said an ABC spokesman, “We have not had contractual relations with that woman.”

Great News! Bacon can prolong your life. 

Bacon may have the ability to prolong your life, according to a recent study by researchers from ETH Zurich. Well, kind of.

The pork product is apparently full of niacin – also known as Vitamin B3 – which has been linked to a longer life span. Researchers tested the theory by feeding a selection of roundworms a good dose of niacin and their life lasted one-tenth longer.

You can also find the vitamin in paprika, sun-dried tomatoes, peanuts, and marmite (which is apparently yeast extract). But who cares? You can find niacin in bacon, which is all that really matters. So eat up! It’s good for you.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Victor Davis Hanson, whose day job is California farmer, writes on the “Engineered Drought” in his state.

California governor Jerry Brown had little choice but to issue a belated, state-wide mandate to reduce water usage by 25 percent. How such restrictions will affect Californians remains to be seen, given the GoldenState’s wide diversity in geography, climate, water supply, and demography.

We do know two things. First, Brown and other Democratic leaders will never concede that their own opposition in the 1970s (when California had about half its present population) to the completion of state and federal water projects, along with their more recent allowance of massive water diversions for fish and river enhancement, left no margin for error in a state now home to 40 million people. Second, the mandated restrictions will bring home another truth as lawns die, pools empty, and boutique gardens shrivel in the coastal corridor from La Jolla to Berkeley: the very idea of a 20-million-person corridor along the narrow, scenic Pacific Ocean and adjoining foothills is just as unnatural as “big” agriculture’s Westside farming. The weather, climate, lifestyle, views, and culture of coastal living may all be spectacular, but the arid Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay-area megalopolises must rely on massive water transfers from the Sierra Nevada, Northern California, or out-of-state sources to support their unnatural ecosystems. …

Megan McArdle posts on the subject.

… California has to do something — many of its reservoirs are half-empty, and the Sierra Nevada snowpack, which provides much of California’s water, is far below normal levels. But that doesn’t mean it should do this particular thing. California’s proposal is far too heavy on top-down regulatory management, and far too light on pricing.

I’ve seen a lot of apocalyptic writing about California only having a year of water left (not true),  and I’ve heard some idle talk about whether California can continue to grow. But California’s problem is not that it doesn’t have enough water to support its population. Rather, the problem is that its population uses more water than it has to. And the reason people do this is that water in California is seriously underpriced, as Marginal Revolution’s Alex Tabarrok notes. While the new emergency rules do include provisions for local utilities to raise rates, that would still leave water in the state ludicrously mispriced. According to Tabarrok, the average household in San Diego pays less than 80 cents a day for the 150 gallons of water it uses. This is less than my two-person household pays for considerably less water usage, in an area where rainfall is so plentiful that the neighborhood next door to me has a recurrent flooding problem. …

Mr. Hanson has more on the general drift in California.

The proverbial thin veneer of civilization has never been thinner in California, as if nature has conspired to create even greater chaos than what man here has already wrought. What follows below was a fairly typical seven-day period in the land of the highest sales, fuel, and income taxes that have led to the nearly worst freeways, schools, and general infrastructure in the nation.

I recently came home from an out-of-state trip. Something was wrong: I noticed off in the distance a strange geyser at the top of the hill. Vandals had apparently earlier taken sledgehammers to the pump’s four-inch plastic fittings — all to scavenge two brass valves (recycle value of about $20).

The fools did not know the pump was even on. When they smashed open the plastic pipes the spurting water apparently drenched them, and so they left their self-created mess. (No, criminals here do not know how to turn off a pump.) The ensuing deluge of several hours had ripped a three-foot-deep gully for about 20 yards.

I’ve lost count of how many pumps have been vandalized over the last decade. Some people play golf after work and weekends, but out here the pastime is to drive out to the countryside to wreck things for a few dollars of copper and bronze. It reminds me of the Ottomans in Greece, who pried off the lead seals over the iron clamps that had held together the marble blocks of ancient Greek temples and walls. The Turks, who could make little but scavenge a lot, got their few ounces of lead for bullets. In the exchange, the exposed iron marble clamps rusted and fell apart, ruining the antiquities that had theretofore survived 2,000 years of natural wear and tear. One civilization builds and invests, quite a different one destroys and consumes. …

… Does anyone realize that the entire California experiment — having 75% of the people live in a Mediterranean climate where 25% of the state’s rain and snow fall — is unnatural and depends on each generation’s ingenuity and industriousness to ensure water, an educated populace, safe freeways, and basic safety and security for the citizenry?

The enervated middle class of California struggles under high taxes, high housing costs, high-cost energy, terrible schools, and high crime. Increasingly it is considering leaving paradise. In our pyramidal state, there is a vast underclass (22% of the state lives below the poverty line, schools are rated 46th in the nation, and one out of three hospital admittances over 35 suffers from diabetes, etc., a disease for whose prevention California rates near last in expenditures). The base of the pyramid is growing, and now represents one in six of all American welfare recipients. …

… What nature’s deadly four-year drought is teaching California is that even the liberal aristocracy eventually has a rendezvous with what they created.

All the capital, income, and influence in the state cannot guarantee exemption from their own self-induced chaos. Climbing atop the smokestacks of the sinking Titanic is of little use after you have deprecated the idea of more lifeboats.

John Fund deals with Harry Reid’s lack of regret for his lies about Romney.

It was just over 60 years ago that the tactics of Senator Joseph McCarthy were repudiated when he was censured by the Senate in December 1954. Ever since then, McCarthyism — the reckless hurling of accusations at adversaries so as to destroy their reputations — has been considered one of the lowest forms of political behavior and one liberals love to crusade against.

But McCarthyism isn’t limited to one party or ideology. And if liberals have any sense of self-awareness they will recognize the tactic has returned and is growing in their back yard.

Harry Reid, the top Democrat in the Senate, was asked by CNN’s Dana Bash this week if he regretted his 2012 accusation on the Senate floor that GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney “hasn’t paid taxes for ten years.” Reid presented no evidence at the time and claimed he didn’t need any: “I don’t think the burden should be on me. The burden should be on him. He’s the one I’ve alleged has not paid any taxes.”

Reid’s response in the interview was fascinating. When asked by Bash if his tactic was McCarthyite he visibly shrugged on camera, smiled, and said “Well, they can call it whatever they want. Romney didn’t win, did he?” White House spokesman Josh Earnest refused to criticize Reid for his comment because it “was three years old,” when in reality Reid’s televised reveling in it was only three days old. …

More on the Left’s lies from Naomi Schaefer Riley.

The verdict’s in on Rolling Stone. According to no less an authority than the Columbia Journalism Review, the magazine’s last year story of a University of Virginia gang rape was a “journalistic failure [that] encompassed reporting, editing, editorial supervision and fact-checking.”

But as with many other stories that don’t fit into the right narrative, the media will continue to draw the wrong lessons.

As an AP article noted, “Despite its flaws, the article heightened scrutiny of campus sexual assaults amid a campaign by President Barack Obama.”

Despite its flaws? You mean despite the fact that as far as anyone can tell, the story was made up out of whole cloth?

Even once the police investigated the claims of the alleged victim, The New York Times reported: “Some saw a more complex picture, saying that the uproar over the story and the steps that the university had taken since in an effort to change its culture had, in the end, raised awareness and probably done the school, and the nation, some good.”

How has the university benefited from the fact that a fraternity has been falsely accused of a horrific crime? And how has the nation benefited from the false but now widespread belief that violent rape, even gang rape, is raging on US campuses? …

The writer who first called bullshit on the Rolling Stone rape story has posted a reaction to the Columbia Journalism School’s review of the disaster. In his blog Shots In The Dark, Richard Bradley has gone long. We include it here since this is the last post for a few days so there’ll be time to go back to it. Bradley’s first post dated November 24, 2014 started the ball rolling for a more critical look at the story. You can find it in Pickings December 4, 2014.

… I want to go through a few specific things that I jotted down as I read the CJS report, and then I’d like to conclude with where I think it does fail in one very important way.

1) In Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s public statement, she makes no apology to the fraternity she defamed. I imagine she feared, or was told, that doing so might have legal implications. I doubt that that would be the case; whether that was her intention or not, she obviously harmed the fraternity. There can be no doubt about that. So it is particularly galling that instead of apologizing to people on whom she inflicted tangible harm, she apologizes to ” any victims of sexual assault who may feel fearful as a result of my article.” What about people whom she falsely accused of rape?

Rubin Erdely owes Phi Psi and its members—probably all fraternity members, frankly—an apology. That she refuses to acknowledge her obligation says something about her character.

It also suggests that, despite everything, she still believes, whether Jackie’s story is true or not—it obviously isn’t—some larger truth about rape culture and the predilections of fraternity members. Seen in this light, her refusal to apologize actually strengthens the fraternity’s lawsuit; it reinforces the idea that Sabrina Rubin Erdely really, really doesn’t like fraternities—and was determined to portray their members as rapists.

2) The Columbia report notes that Rolling Stone refused to waive its attorney client privilege and give Coll access to their lawyers. The tautological reason Rolling Stone gave: That to do so would be waiving attorney-client privilege. (Get it? They wouldn’t waive attorney-client privilege because that would mean waiving attorney-client privilege.)

The magazine’s lack of transparency casts doubt on virtually all of what Rolling Stone has to say in its own defense.

Here’s why: With a story this sensitive, good libel lawyers—and I assume Rolling Stone has very good lawyers—are, or should be, very much in the mix. On sensitive stories, they become something akin to editors with a law degree. You simply could not publish such an accusatory article without having it very heavily lawyered; there is, or ought to be, a lot of discussion between the editor-in-chief and the magazine’s libel lawyer(s). That Rolling Stone won’t disclose their lawyers’ advice suggests that the magazine did not take it, or did the least amount possible to satisfy legal concerns. After all, if the lawyers argued that the magazine had done excellent work and was on safe ground publishing the story, disclosing that information would likely have discouraged any potential lawsuits—like the one Phi Psi is now pursuing against the magazine.

In other words: It’s highly likely that Rolling Stone had a prepublication warning that this story had significant problems—and published the story anyway. Because they knew it was a sexy story, and they were willing to take the risk. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

John Hinderaker of Power Line calls our attention to a piece by Daniel Pipes on the administration’s serial foreign policy failures.

Daniel Pipes reviews the wreckage of Barack Obama’s foreign policies:

“Count the mistakes: Helping overthrow Muammar Qaddafi in Libya, leading to anarchy and civil war. Pressuring Husni Mubarak of Egypt to resign, then backing the Muslim Brotherhood, leading now-president Sisi to turn toward Moscow. Alienating Washington’s most stalwart ally in the region, the Government of Israel. Dismissing ISIS as “junior varsity” just before it seized major cities. Hailing Yemen as a counterterrorism success just before its government was overthrown. Alarming the Saudi authorities to the point that they put together a military alliance against Iran. Coddling Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey, encouraging his dictatorial tendencies. Leaving Iraq and Afghanistan prematurely, dooming the vast American investment in those two countries.

And, most of all: Making dangerously flawed deals with the nuclear-ambitious mullahs of Iran.”

As always, the question is: is Obama failing, or succeeding? As Glenn Reynolds keeps pointing out, that depends on what he is trying to achieve. Pipes continues:

“Is this a random series of errors by an incompetent leadership or does some grand, if misconceived, idea stand behind the pattern? To an extent, it’s ineptitude, as when Obama bowed to the Saudi king, threatened Syria’s government over chemical weapons before changing his mind, and now sends the U.S. military to aid Tehran in Iraq and fight it in Yemen.

But there also is a grand idea and it calls for explanation. As a man of the left, Obama sees the United States historically having exerted a malign influence on the outside world. Greedy corporations, an overly-powerful military-industrial complex, a yahoo nationalism, engrained racism, and cultural imperialism combined to render America, on balance, a force for evil.

Being a student of community organizer Saul Alinsky, Obama did not overtly proclaim this view but passed himself off as a patriot, …”

Caroline Glick, writing in the Jerusalem Post says the Middle East in now on the “diplomatic path to war.”

… No one trusts Obama to follow through on his declared commitment to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power.

No one trusts Washington when Obama claims that he is committed to the security of Israel and the US’s Sunni allies in the region.

And so we are now facing the unfolding disaster that Obama has wrought. The disaster is that deal or no deal, the US has just given the Iranians a green light to behave as if they have already built their nuclear umbrella. And they are in fact behaving in this manner.

They may not have a functional arsenal, but they act as though they do, and rightly so, because the US and its partners have just removed all significant obstacles from their path to nuclear capabilities. The Iranians know it. Their proxies know it. Their enemies know it.

As a consequence, all the regional implications of a nuclear armed Iran are already being played out. The surrounding Arab states led by Saudi Arabia are pursuing nuclear weapons. The path to a Middle East where every major and some minor actors have nuclear arsenals is before us.

Iran is working to expand its regional presence as if it were a nuclear state already. It is brazenly using its Yemeni Houthi proxy to gain maritime control over the Bab al-Mandab, which together with Iran’s control over the Straits of Hormuz completes its maritime control over shipping throughout the Middle East.

Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Eritrea, and their global trading partners will be faced with the fact that their primary maritime shipping route to Asia is controlled by Iran.

With its regional aggression now enjoying the indirect support of its nuclear negotiating partners led by the US, Iran has little to fear from the pan-Arab attempt to dislodge the Houthis from Aden and the Bab al-Mandab. If the Arabs succeed, Iran can regroup and launch a new offensive knowing it will face no repercussions for its aggression and imperialist endeavors. …

Roger Simon asks, “Munich, anyone?”

When Barack Obama told us on dozens of occasions that we could keep our previous health plan and doctor under the Affordable Care Act, he was doing it for one of two reasons.  Either he was ignorant of his own legislation (unlikely) or he was deliberately lying to get it passed. He knew best what was good for us and if he had to prevaricate, so be it.

The so-called  framework agreement on Iranian nuclear activities is almost exactly the same.  Obama again believes it is best for us, but if we are to believe Amir Taheri (and I do), this “agreement” (that the Iranians are calling merely a press release) is understood completely differently by both parties.  We have been told another series of lies in order to get something passed — or in this case not to oppose it. 

Only there is one huge difference. Obamacare is reversible.  Nuclear armageddon is not. …

And Jonah Goldberg says the Iran deal is no deal at all. 

The first thing one needs to know about the nuclear deal with Iran is that it is not, in fact, a deal. You might be confused about this point, given that so many news outlets refers to a “deal” that doesn’t exist.

In fairness, many do so simply for expediency’s sake. The various parties to the talks did come away with an agreement, but it was an agreement to haggle more about what a deal might look like. We don’t have a good word for such things, so people use “deal” as a placeholder.

But in any other realm of life, if you left a negotiation where things stand in Lausanne, Switzerland, you wouldn’t think you had a deal. The known disagreements are profound and the room for further disagreements vast.

When you have a deal with a car salesman, money changes hands and papers are signed. But if you left a car dealership with this kind of understanding, you might never get a car at all, or you might expect that the salesman will ultimately sell you a new Porsche while the dealer is equally confident you’ll come down to the lot next weekend to pick your used Zamboni. …

Kevin Williamson says 1970′s scandals seem almost tame in comparison to today’s.

… Richard Nixon was a snake who understood himself as such but had sufficient vestigial conscience to be ashamed of his snakery. When Tricky Dick wanted to spread a nasty rumor about a political rival, he insisted on a few degrees of separation between the deed and himself; when Harry Reid wants to spread lies about someone, he does so from the Senate floor and then laughs about it. In Nixon’s time, the political misuse of the IRS was considered a serious crime; today, it happens quite in the open without consequence. When Nixon insisted that his attorney general violate his official responsibilities for political reasons, Elliott Richardson understood what duty required, and resigned; Eric Holder, by way of comparison — suffice it to say that he understands his duty somewhat differently. …

… If the other side is evil, then anything is permissible. Of course Harry Reid doesn’t feel guilty about lying about Mitt Romney: “He didn’t get elected, did he?” Of course so-called progressives are willing to lock up nonconformist bakers or merrily cheer on those who promise to set their businesses on fire. Of course the Obama administration will try to sign us up for a phony nuclear deal with Tehran that undermines our national security — and that of our allies — in the service of its own political interests. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Matthew Continetti has doubts about the Iran agreement since the president and his minions have shown themselves to be serial liars.

President Obama strode to the lectern in the Rose Garden Thursday to announce a “historic” agreement between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran. The preliminary deal made in Lausanne, Switzerland, the president said, “cuts off every pathway Iran could take to develop a nuclear weapon.” I hope he’s right.

But I’m not counting on it. The president has a terrible record of initial public pronouncements on national security. He has a habit of confidently stating things that turn out not to be true. Three times in the last four years he has appeared in the Rose Garden and made assertions that were later proven to be false. He and his national security team have again and again described a world that does not correspond to reality. No reason to assume these concessions to Iran will be any different.

The U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, was attacked on September 11, 2012. Four Americans were killed, including our ambassador. Obama delivered remarks on the attack in the Rose Garden the following day. “No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation,” he said. What he didn’t say was that the killings in Benghazi specifically were a “terrorist attack” or “terrorism.” On 60 Minutes, when asked if he believed Benghazi was a “terrorist attack,” the president replied, “It’s too early to know how this came about.” On September 14, neither the president nor Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called what had happened a terrorist attack. On September 15, Obama referred to Benghazi as a “tragic attack.” On September 16, Susan Rice, then U.N. ambassador, called it a “spontaneous attack.”

By September 24, when Obama recorded a campaign interview with The View, he again refused to say Benghazi was an attack by terrorists. “We’re still doing an investigation,” he told Joy Behar. It was not until two days later that administration officials began referring to Benghazi as a terrorist attack—something the Libyan government had been saying since September 13.

The story originally put out by the White House, that Benghazi was the result of spontaneous anger at an Internet video offensive to Muslim extremists, fell apart in a matter of days. Yet the White House persisted in its false description of reality, declining to confirm what was widely accepted as a premeditated terrorist assault on a U.S. compound, and chose to ascribe responsibility for the events in question to anti-Islamic bias. The evidence continues to mount that Ansar al-Sharia, the Qaeda affiliate in lawless Libya, was behind the events of September 11, 2012, not the stupid video. …

David Harsanyi writes on the false choice presented to the country.

“It’s either this or war.”

War?! Well, jeez, if those are our choices everyone better get on board, pronto.

According to Politico, this false choice is the central political argument the White House plans to use to convince members of Congress, voters, and allies that capitulation to Iran is the best course of action. It’s not surprising since that’s been the standard rhetorical ammo used by Left since Iranian negotiations began. If you’re not as anxious as others to help an apocalyptic, terror-funded, destabilizing regime reach the threshold of nuclear weapons, you, my friend, are the warmonger.

So what happens if the “framework for an understanding of a potential agreement” falls apart? The Iranians are, after all, notoriously unreliable in negotiations, with a long history of lying about their intentions and breaking agreements. How soon will Obama, who can barely get himself to say an unkind word about the Iranian regime, deploy ground troops to take care of business? Maybe someone will ask him.

As a political matter, this Obama standby–my economic plan or ruin, my climate plan or Armageddon, my health-care plan or death–makes the very act of coming to any “deal” palatable because the alternative is unfathomable.  It’s also an easy way smear the enemies of peace–Israel and Congress, in this case–and dismiss any legitimate concerns they have regarding security as inconsequential because no matter how bad this deal looks, the imaginary consequences of not doing it are far worse.

“This is very complicated. A lot of this is hard to talk about to the American people,” one senior administration told Politico. “This is tough stuff to put your mind around.” So they will simplify it for you. …

Judith Miller penned an interesting WSJ OpEd on the Iraq War and “stubborn myths.”

I took America to war in Iraq. It was all me.

OK, I had some help from a duplicitous vice president, Dick Cheney. Then there was George W. Bush, a gullible president who could barely locate Iraq on a map and who wanted to avenge his father and enrich his friends in the oil business. And don’t forget the neoconservatives in the White House and the Pentagon who fed cherry-picked intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, or WMD, to reporters like me.

None of these assertions happens to be true, though all were published and continue to have believers. This is not how wars come about, and it is surely not how the war in Iraq occurred. Nor is it what I did as a reporter for the New York Times. These false narratives deserve, at last, to be retired.

There was no shortage of mistakes about Iraq, and I made my share of them. The newsworthy claims of some of my prewar WMD stories were wrong. But so is the enduring, pernicious accusation that the Bush administration fabricated WMD intelligence to take the country to war. Before the 2003 invasion, President Bush and other senior officials cited the intelligence community’s incorrect conclusions about Saddam’s WMD capabilities and, on occasion, went beyond them. But relying on the mistakes of others and errors of judgment are not the same as lying.

I have never met George W. Bush. I never discussed the war with Dick Cheney until the winter of 2012, years after he had left office and I had left the Times. I wish I could have interviewed senior officials before the war about the role that WMDs played in the decision to invade Iraq. The White House’s passion for secrecy and aversion to the media made that unlikely. Less senior officials were of help as sources, but they didn’t make the decisions.

No senior official spoon-fed me a line about WMD. That would have been so much easier than uncovering classified information that officials can be jailed for disclosing. My sources were the same counterterrorism, arms-control and Middle East analysts on whom I had relied for my stories about Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda’s growing threat to America—a series published eight months before 9/11 for which the Times staff, including me, won a Pulitzer. …

Paul Campos, law prof from Boulder, writes on the real reason college tuition is so high.

ONCE upon a time in America, baby boomers paid for college with the money they made from their summer jobs. Then, over the course of the next few decades, public funding for higher education was slashed. These radical cuts forced universities to raise tuition year after year, which in turn forced the millennial generation to take on crushing educational debt loads, and everyone lived unhappily ever after.

This is the story college administrators like to tell when they’re asked to explain why, over the past 35 years, college tuition at public universities has nearly quadrupled, to $9,139 in 2014 dollars. It is a fairy tale in the worst sense, in that it is not merely false, but rather almost the inverse of the truth.

The conventional wisdom was reflected in a recent National Public Radio series on the cost of college. “So it’s not that colleges are spending more money to educate students,” Sandy Baum of the Urban Institute told NPR. “It’s that they have to get that money from someplace to replace their lost state funding — and that’s from tuition and fees from students and families.”

In fact, public investment in higher education in America is vastly larger today, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than it was during the supposed golden age of public funding in the 1960s. Such spending has increased at a much faster rate than government spending in general. For example, the military’s budget is about 1.8 times higher today than it was in 1960, while legislative appropriations to higher education are more than 10 times higher. …

… By contrast, a major factor driving increasing costs is the constant expansion of university administration. According to the Department of Education data, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which Bloomberg reported was 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions.

Even more strikingly, an analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the C.S.U. system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183 — a 221 percent increase. …

NY Post OpEd on the “Kennedy Whitewash.”

… On the occasion of the opening of an “Edward M. Kennedy Institute” in Boston, “CBS Evening News” anchor Scott Pelley oozed, “Another New England superstar was honored today.

Politics was his game, and we’ll have his story next.” There was not one discouraging word — not even the word “liberal” — applied to arguably the single most left-wing senator of all time.

This is not a bipartisan practice. When President George W. Bush dedicated his library on April 25, 2013, CBS reporter Jim Axelrod insisted that “this library is an intellectual fortress defending one of the most controversial modern presidents, whose time in office saw the [9/11] attack on the US, two wars and the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.”

The whitewash was so complete that even “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace barked up the carnival: “Up next, our Power Player of the Week: Vicki Kennedy, on her husband’s vision to inspire new generations about the US Senate.”

Wallace noted that Teddy was fiercely partisan, and the second Mrs. Kennedy replied, “He was the proudest Democrat that there was, but the great thing about Teddy was that he always listened to the other side and worked so well with the other side.”

Except he didn’t.

Let us recall his vicious “Robert Bork’s America” speech in 1987, when he stated, “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government.” …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Here’s an item from the Washington Post that portrays the country in a favorable light. Turns out there are more museums in the country than there are Starbucks and McDonald’s combined.

There are roughly 11,000 Starbucks locations in the United States, and about 14,000 McDonald’s restaurants. But combined, the two chains don’t come close to the number of museums in the U.S., which stands at a whopping 35,000.

So says the latest data release from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, an independent government agency that tallies the number and type of museums in this country. By their count the 35,000 active museums represent a doubling from the number estimated in the 1990s.

While most of us think of massive institutions like the Smithsonian and the Guggenheim when we think of museums, one lesson of the new data is that the majority of U.S. museums are small, nearly mom-and-pop affairs. Of the roughly 25,000 museums with income data in the file, 15,000 of them  reported an annual income of less than $10,000 on their latest IRS returns.

And these museums are literally everywhere. Below, I mapped the total number of museums per county in the U.S., in both raw number and per-capita terms.

One shocker? The nation’s cultural capital, at least as measured by number of museums, isn’t New York, but rather Los Angeles — a city known more for Hollywood and the Hiltons than for Holbein and history. L.A.County has 681 museums compared to New YorkCounty’s 414. Chicago (CookCounty), San Diego and D.C. round out the rest of the top five. …

The above is a good illustration of some of the things Alexis de Tocqueville found when he studied the United States almost 200 years ago. The Learning To Give blog has a post on de Tocqueville’s writings on American “associations.” The complete post is not here because of length. Follow the link if you wish to read it all.

… Tocqueville does not use the word “philanthropy ” which means literally, “the love of people.” But he writes extensively about the American phenomenon of forming ” associations ” of all types including professional, social, civil, and political. It is in this discussion of associations that the modern student may understand how Tocqueville’s observations relate to philanthropy—now understood to mean the contribution of financial support and volunteer resources to the not-for-profit, non-governmental organizations which aim to serve the public good and improve the quality of human lives.

Tocqueville’s description of associations is an enduring impact of Democracy in America . Tocqueville’s extensive analysis of the role associations play in strengthening and moderating democracy are widely cited, and highly influential on the structure of American philanthropy. Tocqueville viewed the proliferation of associations as a unique response that was not only critical to the success of the experiment of democratic government, but also served to provide for the well-being of all of its citizens in accordance with a sense of equality that was previously unknown (Tocqueville 1840).

“In the United States, as soon as several inhabitants have taken an opinion or an idea they wish to promote in society, they seek each other out and unite together once they have made contact. From that moment, they are no longer isolated but have become a power seen from afar whose activities serve as an example and whose words are heeded” (Tocqueville 1840, 599). …

A NY Times report shows how sheer chance plays a role in who comes down with cancer. 

Unlike Ebola, flu or polio, cancer is a disease that arises from within — a consequence of the mutations that inevitably occur when one of our 50 trillion cells divides and copies its DNA.

Some of these genetic misprints are caused by outside agents, chemical or biological, especially in parts of the body — the skin, the lungs and the digestive tract — most exposed to the ravages of the world. But millions every second occur purely by chance — random, spontaneous glitches that may be the most pervasive carcinogen of all.

It’s a truth that grates against our deepest nature. That was clear earlier this month when a paper in Science on the prominent role of “bad luck” and cancer caused an outbreak of despair, outrage and, ultimately, disbelief.

The most intemperate of this backlash — mini-screeds on Twitter and hit-and-run comments on the web — suggested that the authors, Cristian Tomasetti and Bert Vogelstein of JohnsHopkinsUniversity, must be apologists for chemical companies or the processed food industry. In fact, their study was underwritten by nonprofit cancer foundations and grants from the National Institutes of Health. In some people’s minds, those were just part of the plot.

What psychologists call apophenia — the human tendency to see connections and patterns that are not really there — gives rise to conspiracy theories. It is also at work, though usually in a milder form, in our perceptions about cancer and our revulsion to randomness. …

Science Magazine suggests the white skin of Europeans is a relatively new development.

Most of us think of Europe as the ancestral home of white people. But a new study shows that pale skin, as well as other traits such as tallness and the ability to digest milk as adults, arrived in most of the continent relatively recently. The work, presented here last week at the 84th annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, offers dramatic evidence of recent evolution in Europe and shows that most modern Europeans don’t look much like those of 8000 years ago. …

An article in the Christian Science Monitor says the conviction of Atlanta educators in a widespread cheating scandal is just the tip of the iceberg.

A jury convicted 11 educators of racketeering Wednesday for their role in the Atlanta cheating scandal. But nationally, there’s a strong split between those who see their actions as an aberration and those who would convict right alongside them the accountability systems that have attached increasingly high stakes to standardized tests in recent decades.

The teachers and administrators face potentially harsh sentences for a conspiracy to manipulate test scores – which investigators said involved more than 44 schools and about 180 educators. Eleven out of 12 who went to trial were convicted, and they were sent immediately to jail to await sentencing (with the exception of one who is pregnant).

For opponents of such high-stakes testing, there’s likely to be more sympathy for the educators because of undue pressures being placed on teachers by an overemphasis on test scores. But for proponents of accountability, it’s just as easy to hold up these educators as an example of why strong objective systems are needed to oversee and measure educators’ performance.

The pressured atmosphere doesn’t justify cheating, but it’s one indication of a much larger problem, say critics of how testing has been used.

Especially as the federal government has pushed states to tie teacher evaluation policies to standardized-test gains, the testing regimen “creates a climate in school where you have to boost scores by hook or by crook,” says Robert Schaeffer, a spokesman for the NationalCenter for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest).

Atlanta offered up extreme examples such as test-cheating “parties.” But “Atlanta is the tip of the test-cheating iceberg,” Mr. Schaeffer says, with other cases surfacing in about 39 states, including a dozen or more that showed widespread cheating. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

It is surprising to learn 99% of transocean data and voice traffic is carried in undersea cables. Scientific American reports on a visit to a cablesystem’s maintainence operation.

Today, 99 percent of our transoceanic data traffic—including phone calls, text and e-mail messages, Web sites, digital images and video, and even some television—travels across the oceans via undersea cables. These cable systems, as opposed to satellites, carry most of the intercontinental Internet traffic. In her new book, The Undersea Network, New York University assistant professor of media, culture and communication Nicole Starosielski tracks submarine systems as they thread together small islands and major urban hubs, conflicts at coastal landing points, and Cold-War–era cable stations.
 
In this excerpt Starosielski visits the network operations centers where global cable systems are monitored and maintained by a small group of elite engineers.

Entering the network operations center of a globe-spanning undersea cable system, I find what you might expect: a room dominated by computer screens, endless information feeds of network activity, and men carefully monitoring the links that carry Internet traffic in and out of the country. At first glance, it seems to be a place of mere supervision, where the humans sit around and watch machines do the work of international connection, waiting only for a moment of crisis, such as when a local fishing boat drops an anchor on the cable or a tsunami sweeps the system down into a trench.
 
This vision of autonomous networks is shaped more by Hollywood cinema than by actual cable operations. In reality, our global cable network is always in a sort of crisis and, at the same time, highly dependent on humans to power the steady flow of information transmissions. …

The Economist reports on a study that indicates animals may be able to sense impending earthquakes.

SEISMOLOGISTS tend to greet the idea that some animals know when an earthquake is coming with a sizeable degree of scepticism. Though reports of odd animal behaviour before a quake date back at least as far as ancient Greece, the data are all anecdotal. They are also subject to vagaries of the human psyche: “confirmation bias” ensures that strange behaviour not followed by earthquakes gets forgotten, and “flashbulb memory” can, should an earthquake strike, imbue quotidian animal antics with great import after the fact. The US Geological Survey—arguably the world’s authority on earthquakes—undertook studies in the 1970s to find out if animals really did predict them, but came up empty-handed. However, the latest data, just published in Physics and Chemistry of the Earth, are not just anecdotal.

Friedemann Freund of San JoseStateUniversity, in California, and his colleagues considered the earthquake of magnitude seven that hit north-eastern Peru in August 2011. They found that, by coincidence, the nearby YanachagaNational Park had in the month running up to the quake been using nine so-called camera traps. These are employed to track the movements of rare or skittish animals, silently snapping pictures (for example, that above, of a paca) when motion sensors are triggered. …

Remember when Sweet and Low was said to cause cancer. Turns out according to Futurity, it may fight cancer.

Labeled as a cancer-causing chemical for decades and declared safe about 15 years ago, saccharin may actually inhibit the growth of cancer cells, according to new research.

The artificial sweetener shows considerable promise for its ability to block an enzyme upregulated in many cancers that helps tumor cells survive and metastasize, researchers say.

After testing its effectiveness on cancer cells, scientists believe saccharin could eventually lead to the development of drugs that treat highly aggressive cancers affecting the breast, liver, prostate, kidney, and pancreas, says Robert McKenna, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at University of Florida. …

Smithsonian Magazine reports on the male bonding rituals of elephants. It does not say they sit around and burp.

I spoke with O’Connell about elephant bonding and getting to know the Mushara posse. (The following has been edited for length.)

Why did you choose to focus your new book on male elephants?

Most people don’t realize that male elephants are very social animals. Having company is important to them. They form close bonds and have overtly ritual relationships. When a dominant male arrives on the scene, for example, you have the second-, third-, fourth-ranking bulls back up and let him into the best position at the water hole. The younger bulls will stand in line and wait to be able to place their trunks in his mouth. They are waiting with anticipation to be able to do this. In time, all of the bulls will come and greet the dominant male in the same way. It is extremely organized, like lining up to kiss the ring of a pope or a Mafioso don.

The big, older bulls are targets of poaching. People think of lone bulls out there, and they might think, “What is it going to hurt a population if you cull a few of those elephants?” But these old males are similar to matriarchs. They are repositories of knowledge, and they teach the next generation. …

Bonding is also important if you’re thinking of having a stroke. The Economist says stroke victims with companions get faster treatment.

… Stroke victims arriving with someone were more than twice as likely to be correctly diagnosed by the triage nurse, and had their CT scans performed earlier. Patients eligible for clot-busting medication also received it much faster if accompanied, although their numbers were too few for the researchers to be sure it was because they had company. The differences were far from trivial. Patients with one companion had CT scans an average of 15 minutes sooner than those unaccompanied. A second companion shaved a further 20 minutes off the wait, although three or more companions did not confer any additional benefit.

Dr Ifergane did not record who the companions were, however, or how they were able to reduce delays. He believes that it is probably a combination of focusing the attention of clinical staff on their loved ones, and providing basic care such as helping to move patients into bed. …

NY Times reports on a Finish study that says old folks gotta exercise and get some vitamin D.

Exercise and vitamin D supplements may help prevent injurious falls in older adults, a randomized trial found.

Finnish researchers recruited 409 women ages 70 to 80 who were living at home. They randomly assigned them to one of four groups: a placebo without exercise, daily vitamin D supplements without exercise, placebo with exercise, and vitamin D supplements with exercise. The exercises, done regularly over two years, concentrated on balance, weight bearing, strength and agility. The study is online at JAMA Internal Medicine.

Neither vitamin D supplements nor exercise reduced the number of falls. But compared with the placebo without exercise group, those who took vitamin D alone were 16 percent less likely to be injured in a fall; the placebo and exercise group were 54 percent less likely to be injured; and those who exercised and took supplements were 62 percent less likely to be hurt.

The authors suggest that physical conditioning and vitamin D increase bone density, which could help prevent injury.

“It’s important to develop muscle power, because without muscle power, you can’t have good balance,” said the lead author, Kirsti Uusi-Rasi, a senior researcher at the UKK Institute for Health Promotion Research. As for vitamin D supplements, she said, “If you have low levels, supplements are important, but if you have sufficient levels, more is not better.”

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Canada geese are invading the DC’s National Mall. Kevin Williamson writes on the antidote – border collies. We have the humor section first today. Late night humor follows.

… If there is to be a plague of goose poop befouling an American city, it really could not happen to a more fitting municipality than our hideous national capital, and especially to the gallery of architectural malpractice and monumental grotesquery that is the National Mall, that eternal testament to the unfinished work of Major General Robert Ross, who had the good taste to put Washington to the torch but who tragically failed to salt the earth on his way out. …

… The obvious question here — or at least the first thing I wondered about — is: Where do the all those border collies come from? We have a national strategic petroleum reserve and, hilariously enough, a national strategic helium reserve — in case we ever decide that we want to make all those Boko Haram throat-cutters talk like Alvin the Chipmunk — so it is not beyond all conception that we have a national strategic border collie reserve, too. I am sorry to report that my inquiries to the Department of the Interior late last week regarding this critical national resource went unanswered. But I will stay on the story.

In the United States, we have public debts and unfunded-entitlement liabilities equal to the value of all the stocks trading on all the world’s stock markets — combined and multiplied by three. We are beset by the very real possibility of atomic ayatollahs engaging in casual nuclear war — not only in the Middle East, but possibly also in Europe, in Asia, and, given the state of our border security, right here. We have a crime syndicate in charge of the Internal Revenue Service, and a Department of Homeland Security that can’t stop millions of people from crossing the border illegally but does an absolutely awesome job of making sure that you do not bring more than 3.4 ounces of Sensodyne onto an airplane. We have record numbers of people pushed into dependency on an ever-proliferating variety of welfare programs. Washington responds to this array of existential threats with the urgent dynamism and focus of Jabba the Hutt on a glitterstim bender.

But an anatid from up north drops a deuce on the site of the John F. Kennedy Memorial Field Hockey Tournament — “the oldest field hockey tournament in the United States,” hurrah! — and Leviathan arises from his dreamy slumber. Really, given what we know about Washington and how it works, can you blame the birds?

Canada geese: Doing jobs American voters won’t do.

Andrew Malcolm has late night humor.

Conan: A new app is out that helps find missing dogs using facial recognition technology. There’s also a companion app for dogs to find their owners using crotch-recognition technology.

Meyers: In a new video, a lion at a South African safari park has reportedly learned how to open the doors on tour jeeps. The video was taken with an iPhone recovered from the stomach of a lion in South Africa.

Thomas Sowell writes on who is trashing the liberal arts. 

An op-ed piece titled “Conservatives, Please Stop Trashing the Liberal Arts” appeared last week in the Wall Street Journal. But it is not conservatives who trashed the liberal arts.

Liberal professors have trashed the liberal arts, by converting so many liberal arts courses into indoctrination centers for left-wing causes and fads, instead of courses where students learn how to weigh conflicting views of the world for themselves. Now a professor of English, one of the most fad-ridden of the liberal arts today, blames conservative critics for the low esteem in which liberal arts are held.

Surely a professor of English cannot be unaware of how English departments, especially, have become hotbeds of self-indulgent, trendy fads such as trashing classic writings — using Shakespeare’s works as just another ideological playground for romping through with the current mantra of “race, class and gender.”

Surely he cannot be unaware of the many farces of the Modern Language Association that have made headlines. And when our English professor uses a phrase like “critical thinking,” he must be at least dimly aware of how often those words have been perverted to mean uncritical negativism toward traditional values and uncritical acceptance of glittering catchwords of the left, such as “diversity.” …

Speaking of the farce on many college campuses, The Economist cover story is on more money spent on education with less to show for it.

… If America were getting its money’s worth from higher education, that would be fine. On the research side, it probably is. In 2014, 19 of the 20 universities in the world that produced the most highly cited research papers were American. But on the educational side, the picture is less clear. American graduates score poorly in international numeracy and literacy rankings, and are slipping. In a recent study of academic achievement, 45% of American students made no gains in their first two years of university. Meanwhile, tuition fees have nearly doubled, in real terms, in 20 years. Student debt, at nearly $1.2 trillion, has surpassed credit-card debt and car loans.

None of this means that going to university is a bad investment for a student. A bachelor’s degree in America still yields, on average, a 15% return. But it is less clear whether the growing investment in tertiary education makes sense for society as a whole. If graduates earn more than non-graduates because their studies have made them more productive, then university education will boost economic growth and society should want more of it. Yet poor student scores suggest otherwise. So, too, does the testimony of employers. A recent study of recruitment by professional-services firms found that they took graduates from the most prestigious universities not because of what the candidates might have learned but because of those institutions’ tough selection procedures. In short, students could be paying vast sums merely to go through a very elaborate sorting mechanism.

If America’s universities are indeed poor value for money, why might that be? The main reason is that the market for higher education, like that for health care, does not work well. The government rewards universities for research, so that is what professors concentrate on. Students are looking for a degree from an institution that will impress employers; employers are interested primarily in the selectivity of the institution a candidate has attended. Since the value of a degree from a selective institution depends on its scarcity, good universities have little incentive to produce more graduates. And, in the absence of a clear measure of educational output, price becomes a proxy for quality. By charging more, good universities gain both revenue and prestige. …

We have been unrelenting during the past years including items about the coming student loan disaster. The Huffington Post reported that delinquencies are much higher than the government has previously reported. The government has lied to us? Who could have seen that coming?  

About one-third of borrowers with federal student loans owned by the U.S. Department of Education are late on their payments, according to new federal data.

The figures, released by the Education Department on Thursday, are the first comprehensive look at the delinquency plaguing those who hold federal student loans. By the new metric, which the department has never used before, roughly 33 percent of borrowers were more than five days late on one of their federal student loans as of Dec. 31. (Since the department only released individual figures for its four largest contractors, rather than a total percentage, however, the actual figure may be a few percentage points higher or lower.)

Previous measures had put the delinquency rate much lower, masking the true amount of distress among borrowers trying to make good on their taxpayer-backed debts.

Some 41 million Americans collectively carry more than $1.1 trillion in education loans owned or guaranteed by the Education Department, a total that surpasses every form of consumer credit in the U.S. except home mortgages. Thursday’s figure reflects more than two-thirds of the $1.1 trillion total. The remainder is owned by the private sector as part of a bank-based federal loan program that has since been discontinued.

The new measure of borrower distress comes as the White House urges the Education Department to improve its management of the growing federal student loan program and to give borrowers more protections against unmanageable debt loads.

In recent years, groups ranging from federal financial regulators and Federal Reserve policymakers to chief executives of banks and other industry groups have warned about the increasing risk that student debt poses to U.S. economic growth, noting that debt burdens are sapping households’ purchasing power amid an era of stagnant inflation-adjusted wages. …

WSJ Reviews say the new Samsung Galaxy phone is a good competitor for the iPhone.

In this unpredictable world, it’s the constants in life that I can count on.

The sun rises in the East, Starbucks lattes always taste the same, and Apple’s iPhones are always better than Samsung’s Galaxy phones.

Since the dawn of the smartphone wars, there have been basic truths about Samsungs: They’re made of flimsy plastic, their cameras can’t keep up with the iPhone’s, and their modified Android software is ugly and intolerably cluttered.

With the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge, which arrive at U.S. carriers on April 10, none of that is true anymore. I am not afraid to say it: I love Samsung’s new phones, maybe even more than my own iPhone 6. Like a child who just found out that Santa isn’t real, I have spent the past week questioning everything I know.

OK, maybe that’s a bit dramatic for smartphones, but I’m serious about how drastic the change is. Samsung has taken direct aim at Apple’s smartphone, this time even seeming to copy some of the iPhone’s design and features.

No, neither of the new Galaxys brings any original ideas to the evolution of the smartphone. If anything, Samsung has actually sucked out the differentiators, including the waterproof design and removable storage and battery. And Samsung still needs some schooling in the software department.

Yet with a series of improvements, the Galaxy now has a leg up on the hardware of other Android phones and the iPhone. It’s got me, a once extremely satisfied iPhone 6 owner, wishing for a better screen, sharper camera and faster charging. …

And, piercing another balloon, NY Times says fish oil claims are not supported by research. 

Fish oil is now the third most widely used dietary supplement in the United States, after vitamins and minerals, according to a recent report from the National Institutes of Health. At least 10 percent of Americans take fish oil regularly, most believing that the omega-3 fatty acids in the supplements will protect their cardiovascular health.

But there is one big problem: The vast majority of clinical trials involving fish oil have found no evidence that it lowers the risk of heart attack and stroke.

From 2005 to 2012, at least two dozen rigorous studies of fish oil were published in leading medical journals, most of which looked at whether fish oil could prevent cardiovascular events in high-risk populations. These were people who had a history of heart disease or strong risk factors for it, like high cholesterol, hypertension or Type 2 diabetes.

All but two of these studies found that compared with a placebo, fish oil showed no benefit.

And yet during this time, sales of fish oil more than doubled, not just in the United States but worldwide, said Andrew Grey, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and the author of a 2014 study on fish oil in JAMA Internal Medicine.

“There’s a major disconnect,” Dr. Grey said. “The sales are going up despite the progressive accumulation of trials that show no effect.” …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

We have another look at Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew. This time from John Fund. Fund says there is much to copy in Yew’s economic success, but not so much in the political sphere.

… It’s no wonder that other countries constantly consult Singapore for guidance on how to turbo-charge their economies. In 2011, Ghana’s vice president, John Dramani Mahama, told a visiting delegation from Singapore that his country “takes a lot of inspiration from Singapore in their economic transformation from a third- into a first-world country.”

There is less to emulate from Singapore’s brand of politics. As Frank Lavin, a former U.S. ambassador to Singapore from 2001 to 2005, notes: “Lee believed that open politics can lead to demagoguery, rent-seeking, and short-term thinking. Yet over time, Singapore did become more open, allowing for both political debate and contested elections. . . . Of Lee’s many successes, his most important legacy might be the move to that more open political system to complement the open economics.”

But from my visit there, I believe that the least appreciated part of Lee Kwan Yew’s legacy is his method of ensuring that one generation won’t bankrupt future generations by selfishly living beyond its means. It’s a welfare state that works, and one he always said was available to any political leader with the courage to tell his people the truth about the limits of government’s power to pass out goodies.

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit writes on growing number of crimes that can be inadvertently committed.

Ignorance of the law, we are often told, is no excuse. “Every man is presumed to know the law,” says a long-established legal aphorism. And if you are charged with a crime, you would be well advised to rely on some other defense than “I had no idea that was illegal.”

But not everybody favors this state of affairs. While a century or two ago nearly all crime was traditional common-law crime — rape, murder, theft and other things that pretty much everyone should know are bad — nowadays we face all sorts of “regulatory crimes” in which intuitions of right and wrong play no role, but for which the penalties are high.

If you walk down the sidewalk, pick up a pretty feather, and take it home, you could be a felon — if it happens to be a bald eagle feather. Bald eagles are plentiful now, and were taken off the endangered species list years ago, but the federal law making possession of them a crime for most people is still on the books, and federal agents are even infiltrating some Native-American powwows in order to find and arrest people. (And feathers from lesser-known birds, like the red-tailed hawk are also covered). Other examples abound, from getting lost in a storm and snowmobiling on the wrong bit of federal land, to diverting storm sewer water around a building.

“Regulatory crimes” of this sort are incredibly numerous and a category that is growing quickly. They are the ones likely to trap unwary individuals into being felons without knowing it. …

The failure of the left to make us care about their bogus climate change claims is covered by David Harsanyi. 

If you want to understand why so many Democrats believe it’s okay to circumvent Congress and let international agreements dictate environmental policies—well, other than their newfound respect for monocracy—you don’t have to look much farther than the new poll by Gallup.

Since 1989, there’s been no significant change in the public’s concern level over global warming. To put this in perspective, note that the most expensive public-relations campaign in history—one that includes most governmental agencies, a long list of welfare-sucking corporations, the public school system, the universities, an infinite parade of celebrities, think tanks, well-funded environmental groups and an entire major political party—has, over the past 25 years or so, increased the number of Democrats who “worry greatly” about global warming by a mere four percentage points.

During this era, they’ve gone from gentle nudging to stern warnings, to fearmongering, to conflating the predictive abilities of scientists with science itself, to launching ugly campaigns to shame and shut down anyone who deviates from liberal orthodoxy—which includes not only the existence of anthropogenic global warming, but an entire ideological framework that supposedly “addresses” the problem.

And considering the absurd amount of media this crusade continues to garner, its ineffectiveness is doubly amazing. The Government Accounting Office hasn’t been able to calculate the theoretical benefits of the billions we spend each year battling climate change (one theory: they don’t exist). Can one imagine how it difficult it would be to tabulate what hundreds of millions spent on indoctrination bought us? The return is pitiful. And completely foreseeable. …

Last week on the 24th and 25th we included some items on the collapse of families, both black and white. We have more today with this from the National Review; “Why Won’t Liberals Talk about the Most Important Kind of ‘Privilege’ in America?” The ‘privilege the authors are referring to is marriage.

Much has been written about privilege in academic settings over the past few decades. There’s the privilege of wealth, and the advantages wealth confers if a baby is lucky enough to be born into it. Much too has been written about the advantages of being born into this world as a Caucasian — known in academia as “white privilege.”

But not enough has been written about the most important advantage a baby can have in America: the advantage of being born with a mother and father who happen to be married. Call it “the marriage privilege” — the advantages are startling.

In a report last year entitled “Saving Horatio Alger,” which focused on social mobility and class in America, Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution discovered that the likelihood of a child raised by parents born into the lowest income quintile moving to the top quintile by the age 40 was a disastrous 3 percent. Worse, 50 percent of those children stay stuck in the bottom quintile. And the outlook for the children of those marriage-less children is equally stark.

That’s bad news for the country, and the American dream, such numbers.

But Reeves discovered a silver lining while crunching the data: Those children born in the lowest quintile to parents who were married and stayed married had only a 19 percent chance of remaining in the bottom income group.

Reeve’s study revealed that this social-mobility advantage applied not just to the lower class: The middle class was impacted, too. The study revealed that children born into the middle class have a mere 11 percent chance of ending up in the bottom economic quintile with married parents, but that number rises to 38 percent if their parents are never married.

You’d think a finding like that would be headline news across the nation, or that the media might want to talk about the real reason for the wealth gap in America — the marriage gap. …

More from Michael Barone.

Christmastime is an occasion for families to come together. But the family is not what it used to be, as my former American Enterprise Institute colleague Nick Schulz argues in his short AEI book Home Economics: The Consequences of Changing Family Structure.

It’s a subject that many people are uncomfortable with. “Everyone either is or knows and has a deep personal connection to someone who is divorced, cohabiting, or gay,” Schulz writes. “Great numbers of people simply want to avoid awkward talk of what are seen as primarily personal issues or issues of individual morality.”

Nonetheless, it is an uncomfortable truth that children of divorce and children with unmarried parents tend to do much worse in life than children of two-parent families. (I’ll leave aside the sensitive issue of children of same-sex marriages because these haven’t existed in a non-stigmatized atmosphere long enough to produce measurable results.)

As Schulz points out, that uncomfortable truth is not controversial among social scientists. It is affirmed by undoubted liberals such as Harvard’s David Ellwood and Christopher Jencks. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

We continue examining the detritus left in the wake of decisions by Empty Suit. The desertion charges against Bergdahl and the collapse of the government in Yemen are two current examples of the results of his foolishness.

Tom Bevan is first on Bergdahl.

Travel back with me, dear reader, to a magical and sunny time. It was only 10 months ago, on a glorious June morning when President Obama called the White House press corps together in the Rose Garden. There, our smiling president proudly announced that the United States had secured the release of an American serviceman held captive in Afghanistan for five years.

Flanked by the grateful parents of returning Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the president lauded his administration’s “ironclad commitment to bring our prisoners of war home.”

The soldier’s father, Bob Bergdahl, read a prayer; the young man’s mother, Jani, hugged the president. It was a story that could please all Americans: parenthood (quite properly) trumping partisanship.

Yet even as White House image-makers touted the picture of a concerned commander-in-chief looking out for the troops, a nagging bit of foreshadowing interjected itself into the narrative. For starters, the senior Bergdahl’s prayer was delivered in Arabic and began with a blessing from the Koran. While his son was in captivity Bob Bergdahl had grown his hair and beard long, Taliban-style, and now he also sprinkled his remarks from the White House lectern with a few words of Pashto, the language of Bowe Bergdahl’s captors.

More disconcerting still were the terms of the deal securing the soldier’s release, which the president referred to only fleetingly. …

The Daily Beast says “everything the White House told you about Bowe Bergdahl was wrong.”

His release was supposed to be the political masterstroke in the last days of the war. But the war is still going, and Bergdahl is going to court.

In the space of nine months, he went from being heralded at the White House to facing prison for life.

On Wednesday, the U.S. military charged Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, the former Taliban captive who was freed in exchange for five GuantanamoBay detainees, with desertion and misbehaving before the enemy.

His capture, release and now charge became a parable of how narratives about the war in Afghanistan did not pan out. The soldier whose service Susan Rice, U.S. national security adviser, once characterized as “honorable” and whose release came at the price of five prisoners could now himself end up in an American prison for life. The prison exchange that some political operatives thought would be heralded was instead widely condemned. And the war that was supposed to be ending with no soldier left behind has now been extended for five months.

Bergdahl’s case will now go before an Article 32 hearing, the equivalent of a grand jury in civilian court, to determine how the case should proceed. …

Jonah Goldberg has a great take on the Bergdahl flap. Later his post morphs into a discussion of the disaster in Yemen.

What I find interesting about the Bergdahl story is that it is the quintessential Obama fiasco. If you were compiling a checklist of all the things that drive conservatives crazy — and by conservatives I basically mean people who are (a) paying attention and (b) not enthralled in the Obama cult of personality — the Bergdahl story would achieve a near-perfect score.

The Obama M.O. remains remarkably consistent. He announces some initiative, policy, or presidential action. The public rationale for the move is always rhetorically grounded in some deep, universally shared principle, even if the real agenda is something far more ideological or partisan. The facts driving the decision are never as the White House presents them. Indeed, the more confident the White House appears to be about the facts, the more likely it is they’re playing games with them.

Sometimes the facts are simply made up. There are millions of “shovel ready jobs” right around the corner! “You can keep your doctor!” The Benghazi attack was “about a video!” “One in five women are raped!” “The Islamic State isn’t Islamic!” …

 

… Using the above criteria, the Bergdahl story is quintessential Obama.

Invoking high-minded principle? Check!

Really motivated by partisan and ideological agenda? Check!

Made-up facts? Check!

Critics denounced as partisan ideologues opposed to high-minded principle? Check!

Group-think-driven White House’s failure to anticipate the political downsides? Check!

Flagrant contempt for Congress and its laws? Check!

The high-minded-principle part is obvious. We leave no one behind. Who can disagree with that?

But it was obvious long ago that Obama had other priorities in mind. “It could be a huge win if Obama could bring him home,” a senior administration official told Rolling Stone in a 2012 piece on Bergdahl. “Especially in an election year, if it’s handled properly.”

The other major priority was to use the marching band and fireworks celebration of Bergdahl’s return to hasten the shuttering of Gitmo. Dump the worst of the worst anywhere you can and the political rationale for keeping the place open evaporates. So trading five hardened Taliban commanders for one deserter was a win-win.

Then there’s the thumbless grasp of political reality. Maybe the president didn’t think going AWOL was that big a deal. Maybe he thought it was understandable. Maybe he assumed everyone shared his take on things. Maybe he thought he could just bluster through because the American people are idiots. Who knows?

The fact remains they knew Bergdahl had been AWOL and yet still thought this would be a clear-cut “huge win,” particularly in the context of winding down the War in Afghanistan. They had no idea this fiasco would blow up in their faces, though I like to think some of the savvier political operatives on the Obama team had at least a moment of doubt when they saw Bergdahl’s dad show up with his Johnny Taliban beard. When the elder Bergdahl started speaking Arabic and Pashto in the Rose Garden, I like to imagine that David Axelrod’s bowels stewed just a little bit. (Every political pro I know who watched that announcement responded pretty much the same way you or I would if we saw a polar bear pooping a live hamster on a bus made of graham crackers; “What the Hell am I looking at?”) …

Peter Wehner thinks the real motivation was to free five terrorists from Gitmo.

… But what made this particular case even more problematic is that Bergdahl was freed in exchange for five high-value Taliban figures who had been held captive in GuantanamoBay. As several outlets and individuals have pointed out, getting back a soldier who was almost certainly a deserter was simply a pretext. The main goal of President Obama is to empty GuantanamoBay. It is something the president declared he wanted to do during his first day in office and it’s something he is committed to doing before his last day in office. Swapping Bergdahl for five Taliban leaders–several of whom are trying to return to the battlefield so they can kill more Americans–was the convenient (if explosively contentious) excuse. The Wall Street Journal reminds us that Mr. Obama told NBC that emptying Gitmo “is going to involve, on occasion, releasing folks who we may not trust but we can’t convict.”

So we have a president with at least two obsessions: One of them is attacking the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and weakening the Jewish State of Israel; the second is to empty GuantanamoBay and release terrorists committed to killing as many Americans as possible.

We’ve never seen anything quite like this president.

Walter Russell Mead posts on our “comprehensive failure” in Yemen.

Over the weekend, several C-17 transport planes transported a reported 350 U.S. Special Operations forces out of Yemen as the country stood on the precipice of civil war. The Wall Street Journal has a trenchant summary of just how President Obama’s policy has gone up in smoke:

What happened in Yemen, according to descriptions by current and former officials and experts, was a miscalculation about the changes unleashed by the Arab Spring revolutions. It involved an overreliance by Washington on a promising new leader who ultimately was unable to hold off rival forces and tensions, they said.

As a result, a country President Barack Obama last year cited as a model of American counterterrorism success has now descended into chaos, with U.S. influence and drone strikes no match for at least four sides at war with one another.

Jennifer Rubin posts on the presser where Josh Earnest continued to pretend Yemen is a “template that has succeeded.”

… Josh Earnest had his talking point and was sticking with it (just like the talking point that Obama meant what he said when he called the shooting of innocents in a French kosher market “random”). For over three minutes Earnest refused to acknowledge their model was not a mess. Pressed again, he insisted this is still a “template that has succeeded.” An incredulous Jonathan Karl of ABC News continued to press him, but Earnest refused to admit the obvious, namely that the administration had failed in its leading from behind, light footprint.

It was embarrassing and unbelievable. But it was also instructive. The administration is failing as far as the eye can see. Iraq and Syria are infested with jihadists from the Islamic State. The civil war in Syria has killed 200,000 and, because of our failure to come to their aid in a timely and effective manner, the Free Syrian Army is in dismal shape. Iran is pulling the strings in Syria, Yemen and Lebanon while its fighters are doing what we will not, combating the Islamic State in Iraq. Our Sunni allies and Israel are exasperated with our passivity and willingness to appease Iran. The “peace process” is a joke. So the president bashes our closest ally and tells us Yemen is a success.

Consider what would have happened if President George W. Bush refused to believe the Iraq War was going poorly, denied any strategy change was necessary and never implemented the surge. Ironically, critics accused him of being stubborn or cut off from reality. Right diagnosis, wrong president.

The administration at this point plainly has no regard for the facts or else no elementary judgment. When it comes to a monumental deal with Iran or a “shift” in U.S. policy toward Israel at the United Nations, it is becoming increasingly clear this crowd cannot be trusted. Congress must step in not only where Iran is concerned but also in demanding a coherent and accurate accounting of events. …

We close with Roger Simon, who always has a way of providing a telling summary of events. Roger wonders if President Petulant is the crazy pilot.

… Obama and his minions are huddled wherever they’re huddled, busy destroying the Western World with their bizarre policies and eagerness to make a deal with Iran that is so desperate it makes the word pathetic seem pathetic. The results of this desperation have been wretched, a fascistic new Persian Empire emerging from Libya to Yemen with Obama auditioning for the role of Cyrus the Great – or is it Ahmadinejad Junior? Whatever the case, it’s horrible  Even those same Democrats know it.  They’re embarrassed – and they should be.  But for the most part they don’t have the guts to say anything. This is the kind of administration that exchanges a creepy sociopath like Bergdahl for five Islamic homicidal maniacs and expects praise for being humanitarian.  And everyone walks away shaking their heads.

It’s hard to know why Obama is doing it all.  I know it sounds like a rude overstatement but in a way he reminds me of that crazy German pilot flying that plane into that alpine cliff, only the plane is us (America and the West).  Does he hate us all that much – or is it just Netanyahu?  Whatever the explanation, it’s mighty peculiar.  At this point almost no one  in the Congress appears to be backing him up – and yet he continues.  Who knows what will happen next?

The cartoonists have another field day.