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Victor Davis Hanson knows why weaker nations like Russia thumb their noses at stronger states like the US.

… From Benito Mussolini’s invasions in 1940-41 of France, the Balkans, and Greece to Argentine Gen. Galtieri’s attack on the Falklands in 1982 and Saddam Hussein’s entry into Kuwait in the summer of 1990, there are plenty of examples of weak states attacking countries who have alliances or friends far stronger than the attacker. Why then do the Putins of the past and present try something so shortsighted—as the Obama administration has characterized the Ukraine gambit? 

Answer? Strength is in the eye of the attacker.

What might prove to be demonstrably stupid in the future, or even seems foolish in the present, may not necessarily be so clear to the attacker. The perception, not the reality, of relative strength and weakness is what guides aggressive states.

Obama looks to logic, reason, and morality in his confusion over why Putin did something that cannot be squared away on any rational or ethical calculators.

Putin, however, has a logic of his own. American intervention or non-intervention in particular crises is not just the issue for Putin. Instead he sees fickleness and confusion in American foreign policy. He has manipulated and translated this into American impotence and thus reigns freely on his borders.

Red lines in Syria proved pink. Putin’s easily peddled his pseudo-WMD removal plan for Syria. America is flipping and flopping and flipping in Egypt. Missile defense begat no missile defense with the Poles and Czechs. Lead from behind led to Benghazi and chaos. Deadlines and sanctions spawned no deadlines and no sanctions with Iran. Then there was the reset with Russia. Obama’s predecessors, not his enemies were blamed. Iraq was cut loose. We surged only with deadlines to stop surging in Afghanistan. Loud civilian trials were announced for terrorists and as quietly dropped. Silly new rubrics appeared like overseas contingency operations, workplace violence, man-caused disasters, a secular Muslim Brotherhood, jihad as a personal journey, and a chief NASA mission being outreach to Muslims.

Putin added all that up. He saw a pattern of words without consequences, of actions that are ephemeral and not sustained, and so he concluded that a weaker power like Russia most certainly can bully a neighbor with access to stronger powers like the United States. For Putin and his ilk, willpower and his mythologies about Russian moral superiority are worth more than the hardware and data points of the West. …

Jennifer Rubin wonders why NCAA Brackets are more important then serial disasters in foreign policy.

Other than finger-wagging, the administration seems to be doing precious little in the wake of the invasion and annexation of Crimea. Vice President Biden was sent to Eastern Europe to make platitudinous promises of mutual defense. He says, “I want to make it clear: We stand resolutely with our Baltic allies in support of the Ukrainian people and against Russian aggression. As long as Russia continues on this dark path, they will face increasing political and economic isolation.” What does that even mean at this stage? The administration is not arming Ukraine to protect it from further aggression, it has yet to kick Russia out of international institutions and has made no move to flood the European market with liquefied natural gas, which would be reassuring to allies and undermine Russia’s economy.

Biden was not alone in the empty-rhetoric sweepstakes. The New York Times reports, “The NATO secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said on Wednesday that Russia’s military intervention was the ‘gravest threat’ to European security since the end of the Cold War. ‘This is a wake-up call, for the Euro-Atlantic community, for NATO and for all those committed to a Europe whole, free and at peace,’ Mr. Rasmussen said in a speech at the Brookings Institution on Wednesday afternoon.” But has President Obama woken up — this happened on his watch, after all — or is he busying himself with his NCAA Tournament bracket, Obamacare and saving the Senate? …

Peter Wehner posts on the president’s world of make believe. 

For anyone who has observed Barack Obama over the years, it’s obvious that a fundamental part of his self-identity involves seeing himself, and having others see him, as pragmatic rather than ideological, reality-based, driven by reason instead of bias.

This has never actually been true. Mr. Obama is, in fact, unusually dogmatic, blind to counter-evidence, and mostly unable to adjust his views to the way things are. So when his worldview collides with reality, he often can’t adjust. He instead creates his own make believe world.

We’ve seen it time and time again with the Affordable Care Act. (Earlier this month the president declared,  ObamaCare “is working the way it should.” He may be the only person in America who believes such a thing.) We’ve also seen this in Mr. Obama’s dealings with Vladimir Putin, who with lightning speed has seized Crimea, threatens Ukraine, and whose top officials are now openly mocking the president (including with tweets ending with smiley faces). Yet President Obama insists that Putin is acting “out of weakness, not out of strength” in attempting to take control of Crimea. This is an effort to seek comfort by engaging in an almost clinical level of delusion. And it’s not isolated to Mr. Obama.

As Russia began its aggression against Crimea, Secretary of State John Kerry said, “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext.” Except that Russia did exactly that. Earlier this week Mr. Kerry said Putin’s speech announcing the Crimean annexation “just didn’t jibe with reality.” But the reality is that Crimea is once again part of Russia. …

Paul Mirengoff says Susan Rice wants to bring affirmative action to Russia.

To date, Team Obama’s response to Russia’s takeover of Crimea has been criminally lame. But now Susan Rice reportedly wants to take affirmative action.

Unfortunately, the affirmative action she contemplates is affirmative action in the legal sense — affirmative action on behalf of women.

The post of U.S. ambassador to Russia has been vacant for three weeks. Al Kamen of the Washington Post reports “we’re hearing that national security adviser Susan Rice would like to place a woman in Moscow.”

If true, this report is a perfect demonstration of Team Obama’s lack of seriousness. While Eastern Europe worries about the emergence of a Russian empire, Susan Rice worries about doling out jobs to women.

It may be, of course, that the best candidate for brutally difficult job of “our man in Moscow” is a woman. But to inject consideration of gender into the selection process — which is what I take Kamen to be reporting — is to reduce the odds of selecting the best candidate.

It could be worse, though. Last week it was rumored that White House press secretary Jay Carney, who once worked in Moscow for Time Magazine, wanted the job. In what universe does unsuccessful sparring with the White House press corps qualify someone to spar with the Russian bear?

Still, I concede that it probably doesn’t make much difference who becomes the new ambassador to Russia. Obama, assisted by John Kerry and Susan Rice, will set our Russia policy. And they will set it with the same lack of seriousness that lends plausibility to reports that Rice wants to make an affirmative action pick for the post of ambassador.

Long an also ran in the ACC, UVA Men’s Basketball is having quite a season. NY times reports on the team that plays tonight at 8:40 in the third round of the NCAA tournament. 

If Ralph Sampson raised Virginia’s national profile and gave the men’s basketball program its identity in the 1980s, he remains the towering measure of every team that has come through Charlottesville since.

Yet in all the years after the Sampson era, which ended in 1983, few Virginia teams have come close to matching that success. Until now.

The Cavaliers, coming off their first Atlantic Coast Conference tournament title since 1976, enter the N.C.A.A. tournament as the No. 1 seed in the East Region. Virginia will face No. 16 Coastal Carolina on Friday in Raleigh, N.C. …

… If there was any doubt about Virginia’s mettle, that was settled in the A.C.C. tournament. Victories against FloridaState and Pittsburgh set up a final against Duke, the only team Virginia had not defeated this season. How fitting. After all, you cannot become a blue blood in the A.C.C. unless you beat one.

Not that Virginia is in that category quite yet.

“U.N.C. and Duke are the two blue bloods in the conference,” Brogdon said. “We should be one, but we’re not. We’re not looked as one right now. But we’re getting there.”

And for now, that is enough for longtime fans who have waited decades to see Virginia become a factor in the A.C.C. and the N.C.A.A. tournament again. …

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Watching how Putin’s Russia gets things done, David Harsanyi reminds us why gridlock is good.

… Without a strong minority voters are awash in self-determination. Without any true division of power, courts function under a weak and malleable constitution and crony plutocrats work closely with Moscow for the collective good. There is little economic uncertainty and lawmakers are able “accomplish” much without hassle. The Russian Constitution, for example, already guarantees a citizen the right to free healthcare and medical assistance provided by the state. Not us. 1918 called, it wants its debate back.

In general, I’m not comparing the ambitions of Barack Obama and Putin. But Russian politics offers us another lesson on why gridlock is more useful than destructive. The Founders erected an elaborate system of checks and balances to impede the flood of power, bad ideas, and passions, the exigency of overcoming “gridlock”—the “fierce urgency” to get things done, as Obama might put it, seems trumps all other concerns here at home. Polarization in Washington is an organic safeguard against one party’s ability to fundamentally changing the institutions of the country, yet we’re schooled to be repelled by it. In a 2013 Gallup poll 78 percent of Americans disapprove of the way Congress was handling its job. The top concern offered was partisan gridlock. Other polls find that upwards of 95 percent have negative view of the GOP congress – who they blame for creating gridlock when, in fact, a diverse electorate is the guilty party.

Putin’s reprehensible play in Crimea exposes some of the problems with our knee-jerk support for majoritarianism, both internationally and domestically. …

While on the subject of governments without checks on their power, John Fund wrote a piece on hate crime laws.

Forty-five states and the District of Columbia provide additional penalties for crimes that they classify as “hate crimes,” over and above what would have been available if the same crime been committed with a different motivation. In 2009, President Obama signed into law a federal hate-crimes statute that adds a third level of criminalization for violent crimes that occur “because of” the victim’s “actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, disability, or sexual orientation.”

Actual hatred is not required. It is enough that there is a causal connection between the crime and one of these grounds.

Like all federal criminal statutes, this one gives federal authorities the power to prosecute a defendant who has already been prosecuted by state authorities. They can even prosecute a defendant who has been acquitted. Double-jeopardy protections do not apply.

But can such far-reaching federal authority to try a defendant twice be justified under the Constitution, especially given how emotionally charged these prosecutions often are? In the absence of evidence that states are “falling down on the job,” shouldn’t such prosecutions be state-controlled? On Friday, the Supreme Court will decide if it will hear a case directly challenging part of the federal government’s claim of authority in this area. …

According to Glenn Reynolds more government abuse comes from “prosecutorial discretion.”

… with today’s broad and vague criminal statutes at both the state and federal level, everyone is guilty of some sort of crime, a point that Harvey Silverglate underscores with the title of his recent book, Three Felonies A Day: How The Feds Target The Innocent, that being the number of felonies that the average American, usually unknowingly, commits.

Such crimes can be manufactured from violations of obscure federal regulations that can turn pocketing a feather or taking home a rusted bit of metal from a wilderness area into a crime. In other cases, issues almost always dealt with in civil court, disagreements over taxes for instance, can be turned into a criminal case.

The combination of vague and pervasive criminal laws — the federal government literally doesn’t know how many federal criminal laws there are — and prosecutorial discretion, plus easy overcharging and coercive plea-bargaining, means that where criminal law is concerned we don’t really have a judicial system as most people imagine it. Instead, we have a criminal justice bureaucracy that assesses guilt and imposes penalties with only modest supervision from the judiciary, and with very little actual accountability. (When a South Carolina judge suggested earlier this year that prosecutors should follow the law, prosecutors revolted.) …

Joel Kotkin calls for a re-appraisal of our system of education.

… As for the effectiveness of college, a recent Rutgers University report found that barely half of college graduates since 2006 had full-time jobs. And it’s not getting better: Those graduating since 2009 are three times more likely to not have found a full-time job than those from the classes of 2006-08. Since 1967, notes one 2010 study, the percentage of underemployed college graduates has soared from roughly 10 percent to more than 35 percent.

What we need to do is rethink the notion, supported by President Obama and others, that the solution to our education woes primarily is “more.” More what? What are the job prospects for the new crop of ethnic-studies majors, post-modern English graduates and art historians, for example, particularly those from second-tier institutions? These kind of liberal-arts degrees are, as the New York Times recently reported, that tend to earn graduates the least, while those degrees that pay the most are largely offered by schools aimed at technology, mining and other “hard skills.”

First, we need to understand that educational differences and capabilities exist and cannot be easily adjusted simply by forever lowering standards. Our most competitive institutions need to make sure that people leave with the highest degree of critical skills. Grade inflation at Harvard may not produce unemployables, but it does weaken the value of the degree and, even worse, suggests that one can not expect too much knowledge, or reasoning capacity, from graduates. Indeed, many employers complain about the lack of “soft skills,” such as communication and critical thinking, as much as they do about applicants’ lack of harder skills such as math and science.

This suggests that even those of us who teach at more selective universities cannot just rest on laurels. Schools have to focus more on developing actual skills – notably in presentation and research – even among the brightest students. Instead, all too often, as the Manhattan Institute’s Heather McDonald has pointed out, political education – usually, but not always, tending toward the progressive left – actually predominates over learning how to think critically and express ideas coherently.

More important is the need to put greater effort in lifting students who may not be ideal for a classical liberal four-year education. This may include a greater emphasis on skills with practical applications, such as nursing, rehabilitation, technical and scientific areas of specialization. It also includes expanding innovative programs, such as at LaGuardia College in New York, that helps high school dropouts to get their diplomas. …

 

Andy Malcolm has late night humor.

SethMeyers: A Virginia Tech professor claims he can turn wood-chips into food. However, still no luck with kale.

Conan: Workers building the LA subway have discovered Ice Age fossils. The fossils belong to the last creature ever to use the Los Angeles subway.

Letterman: New scam in town. A ring of hardened criminals is selling counterfeit Chapstick. I knew right away it was counterfeit. The cap didn’t come off in my pocket.

SethMeyers: The world’s longest-serving ice cream man is retiring after 50 years. He plans to spend the rest of his life trying to get that song out of his head.

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Bret Stephens says we got Putin just where we want him and we’re about to throw him into the briar patch.

Barack Obama thinks Vladimir Putin isn’t such a smart guy. “There’s a suggestion somehow that the Russian actions have been clever, strategically,” Mr. Obama said last week about Moscow’s bloodless coup de main in Crimea. “I actually think that this is not been a sign of strength.”

“Is not been a sign of strength” is not been a sign of grammar. Good thing it wasn’t George W. Bush doing the talking.

Let’s get to Mr. Obama’s main point about Mr. Putin’s alleged dumbness: “Countries near Russia have deep concerns and suspicions about this kind of meddling and, if anything, it will push many countries further away from Russia.”

Terrific. Maybe Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania can slip their Baltic moorings and row themselves west once Mr. Putin starts agitating on behalf of ethnic Russians in those once-Soviet, now NATO-member states. Kazakhstan, where ethnic Russians are in a majority in several districts bordering Russia herself, is also ripe for a Crimean-type caper. Has Mr. Obama worked out a plan for the Kazakhs to get away from Russia, other than by launching themselves en masse from the Baikonur Cosmodrome?

It’s funny, almost, to watch Mr. Obama and his friends in the media talk themselves into the conceit that they’ve gained the upper hand against Mr. Putin. “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake,” writes one of those friends, citing Napoleon. Really? Perhaps Mr. Putin will oblige us by seizing eastern Ukraine, too. Given this logic, by the time the armies of Vlad the Bad reach the Vistula, our victory will be all but complete. …

Jennifer Rubin has more.

… In putting forth Russian sanctions so slight that “pin prick” overstates their impact, President Obama merely cemented his image as a man who delivers empty threats but lacks the nerve or skill to exact a price for our foes’ aggression. Former ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton aptly assessed the president’s action as “so weak that it’s embarrassing.” Unsurprisingly, Vladimir Putin swiftly moved to annex Crimea.

The Wall Street editorial board pointed out that the seven sanctioned Russians did not include important names. “Defense Minister Sergei Shoygu, Mr. Putin’s chief of staff Sergei Ivanov and Alexander Bortnikov, who runs the FSB (formerly the KGB), belong to the circle of hard-liners on the Russian national security council, where the decisions on Ukraine are taken. Mr. Shoygu’s department has deployed some 20,000 men to Crimea. Mr. Bortnikov’s charges are running special operations in eastern Ukraine to whip up separatist demonstrators.” Obama gives new meaning to the phrase “too little, too late.”

Obama repeats the same empty phrases whether the adversary is Iran, Syria or Russia. “Country X will find itself isolated.” “Country X’s actions show its weakness.” “Country X will come to rue the day it defied the international community.” It never dawns on him that Country X doesn’t consider itself isolated (or doesn’t care), thinks it has shown up the United States and doesn’t give a fig about the international community. …

It was Lenin who coined the phrase “useful idiot” to describe westerners who, blinded by their hopes and their ignorance, could be counted on to inadvertently help the Soviet Union. The latest useful idiots are the three stooges; hagel, kerry and obama. Michael Barone shows how their lack of understanding creates what he calls cognitive dissonance. Putin is truly a lucky man. There is lots of low hanging fruit for him to harvest.

Cognitive dissonance is a phrase that describes what happens when the world turns out to operate differently from what you expected. It’s also a phrase that could be used to describe the state of mind of some of President Obama’s current and past foreign policy advisers, at least according to this David Sanger story in the New York Times. Excerpts:

The White House was taken by surprise by Vladimir V. Putin’s decisions to invade Crimea, but also by China‘s increasingly assertive declaration of exclusive rights to airspace and barren islands. Neither the economic pressure nor the cyberattacks that forced Iran to reconsider its approach have prevented North Korea‘s stealthy revitalization of its nuclear and missile programs. …

“We’re seeing the ‘light footprint’ run out of gas,” said one of Mr. Obama’s former senior national security aides, who would not speak on the record about his ex-boss. …

Still, some senior officials who left the White House after the first term concede — when assured of anonymity — that Mr. Obama erred in failing to have a plan to back up his declaration that [Syrian] President Bashar al-Assad had to leave office.

Obama’s central mistake, as I tried to argue in this recent Washington Examiner column, is solipsism, to “assume others see the world as you do and will behave as you would.” It would be nice if Putin, Assad and the Chinese leaders saw the world as Obama does and behaved as he would, but unfortunately they don’t.

Roger Kimball says Aristotle saw this coming.

In a melancholy passage of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle observes  that we can follow certain courses of action which will put us in situations where there is no right response.  Whatever we do, it will be wrong, or at least unhappy.

Confronted with the West’s habitual acquiescence in the face of Russian (and not only Russian) swagger and belligerence, Aristotle would no doubt have said, “See what I mean,” or words to that effect.

Skillful diplomacy might have headed off the crisis in Crimea.  But we did not field skillful diplomats. We sent John Kerry, backed up by Barack Obama, Susan Rice, and Joe Biden. As in 1854, “someone had blundered.” Tennyson recorded the result.  Today, the “reset button” turns out to have been disconnected at the source. Obama really did push it. Comrade Putin paid it no heed. He had taken the measure of the man long ago.  And if there was any doubt, in 2012, in a candid-camera moment, Obama pleaded with Putin’s protege Dmitry Medvedev to give him more “space” about missile defense. “This is my last election,”  Obama confided quietly to Medvedev, “After my election, I have more flexibility.”  Noted.

The microphones weren’t supposed to pick that up. In any normal world, the remark would have gone a long way towards sealing Obama’s defeat in 2012.  But this isn’t any normal world. It is the world according folks like Wolf Blitzer, who mocked Romney for describing Russia as, “without question, our number one geopolitical foe.” …

Jennifer Rubin again.

The New York Times describes Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea dramatically: “If there had been any doubt before Tuesday, Mr. Putin made clear that within what he considers his sphere of interest he would not be cowed by international pressure. And the speed of his moves in Crimea, redrawing an international border that has been recognized as part of an independent Ukraine since 1991, has been breathtaking.” This is a humiliation for the West and a collapse of 22 years of American foreign policy in which the former states of the Soviet Union were allowed to reclaim their place in a whole and free Europe.

White House spinners (past and present) and their media handmaidens have already begun making excuses and attacking critics, who for years have criticized the president’s handling of Russia.

“You can’t criticize the president without offering an alternative!” Who made that rule? The president, after five years of  serial errors (pulling anti-missile defenses from Eastern Europe, ignoring Russian arms violations, off-loading the Syria stand-off to Moscow, turning Russia’s internal repression, failing to check Russian support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and slashing defense spending), can hardly put the onus on critics to figure a way out of the mess. In any event, these same critics have been suggesting much stronger sanctions and actions (ranging from expulsion from international bodies to flooding Europe with liquefied natural gas to sink Putin’s gas monopoly). It’s pathetic, when you think about it, that the president’s answer to an international debacle is to claim that critics have no answers. It’s almost as if someone else is president. …

Michael Rubin sums up with a post titled The Reverberations of American Weakness. The result of five years of president dither is the world has become a very dangerous place. If, in our lifetimes we see an nuclear weapon used, we can lay that at the feet of president bystander who preened for the Nobel committee, but never could make a courageous decision.

… What happens in Crimea doesn’t stay in Crimea. In 1994, Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ukraine signed the Budapest Memorandum. In short, Russia recognized Ukrainian sovereignty over Crimea, Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons, and the United States and Great Britain offered Ukraine security guarantees. In hindsight, only the Ukrainians kept their promise; everyone else broke their pledge.

The problem is not simply potential Russian aggressiveness against former Soviet states like Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Moldova, but rather the notion that U.S. and European security guarantees are meaningless: Russia invaded a sovereign state and Obama reacted by putting Russian President Vladimir Putin on the diplomatic equivalent of double-secret probation. …

… Putin acted in Ukraine against the backdrop of stagnation in the Russian economy. Whipping up nationalist sentiment seems to have successfully distracted Russians from Putin’s own domestic incompetence. If sparking a crisis can distract from economic woes without fear of reprisal, why shouldn’t the Argentine government make its move against the Falkland Islands? After all, the age of Reagan and Thatcher is over. Israel, too, must recognize that American security guarantees aren’t worth the paper upon which they are written, …

The cartoonists get it too.

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Seth Mandel says Romney’s vindication is now complete. 

In the summer of 2012, Politico broke the news that Mitt Romney was planning to travel abroad to make a series of speeches intended to earn some foreign-policy credibility in his effort to defeat Barack Obama. One item on the itinerary was expected to be “a public address in Poland, a steadfast American ally during the Bush years and a country that shares Romney’s wariness toward Russia.” It made perfect sense: Russia had been causing trouble in its near abroad and in the Middle East, and allies who had been ignored (or worse) by the Obama administration were justifiably nervous.

To Obama-era Democrats, however, obsessed with erasing the Cold War from memory, countries like Poland stopped existing the moment they became independent from Moscow. Obama, in one of his trademark leaden attempts at humor, even dipped into junior-high parlance and taunted Romney that “the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back.” (Perhaps he was all out of knock-knock jokes.) Hence all the nonsense about blaming NATO enlargement for Vladimir Putin’s actions, as if the countries themselves should have no say in their own affairs but still be subject to Russia’s veto.

The idea of blaming NATO has been discredited of course, thoroughly refuted by events: Obama froze NATO expansion long before Russia invaded Ukraine, for example. But the idea of even recognizing those countries’ existence is generally treated as preposterous by the left, and so Romney’s proposed itinerary was received in the media as though he were visiting another planet. Laura Rozen tweeted that “his reported itinerary only seems 25 [years] out of date”–a sign that she was a better presidential stenographer than humorist. She followed that up later that month by devoting an entire story to various Obama administration officials’ equally ignorant snarking about Romney’s trip.

There were signs that the media had begun to figure out that they’d been had–that the Obama White House talking points they were parroting were making them look ridiculous. As Russia took center stage on world affairs in recent months, Romney began receiving respectful hearings on liberal cable news outlets and a refrain of “Romney was right” could be heard bouncing around among the left. …

George Will on how government makes inequality worse.

Someone who is determined to disbelieve something can manage to disregard an Everest of evidence for it. So Barack Obama will not temper his enthusiasm for increased equality with lucidity about the government’s role in exacerbating inequality.

In the movie “Animal House,” Otter, incensed by the expulsion of his fraternity, says: “I think that this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture.” Such thinking gives us minimum-wage increases that do very little for very few. Meanwhile, there are farm bills, like the one Obama signed last month at MichiganStateUniversity.

MSU was one of the models for the land-grant colleges created under the 1862 Morrill Act, whose primary purpose was to apply learning to agriculture. Today, we apply crony capitalism to agriculture. The legislation Obama lavishly praised redistributes wealth upward by raising prices consumers pay. Vincent Smith of Montana State University says small non-farm businesses are almost 30 times more likely to fail than farms, partly because the $956 billion farm legislation continues agriculture’s thick safety net. The geyser of subsidies assures that farm households will continue to be 53 percent more affluent than average households. …

WSJ OpEd on the hidden rot in the job numbers.

Most commentators viewed the February jobs report released on March 7 as good news, indicating that the labor market is on a favorable growth path. A more careful reading shows that employment actually fell—as it has in four out of the past six months and in more than one-third of the months during the past two years.

Although it is often overlooked, a key statistic for understanding the labor market is the length of the average workweek. Small changes in the average workweek imply large changes in total hours worked. The average workweek in the U.S. has fallen to 34.2 hours in February from 34.5 hours in September 2013, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That decline, coupled with mediocre job creation, implies that the total hours of employment have decreased over the period.

Job creation rose from an initial 113,000 in January (later revised to 129,000) to 175,000 in February. The January number frightened many, while the February number was cheered—even though it was below the prior 12-month average of 189,000.

The labor market’s strength and economic activity are better measured by the number of total hours worked than by the number of people employed. An employer who replaces 100 40-hour-per-week workers with 120 20-hour-per-week workers is contracting, not expanding operations. The same is true at the national level. …

Peter Wehner posts on the left’s slandering of Paul Ryan. 

If you want to know how fearful the left is of Paul Ryan, consider the efforts they make to slander him. In the past, they’ve portrayed him as someone eager to (literally) throw grandma over a cliff. The reason? Ryan wanted to make eminently sensible and absolutely necessary changes to Medicare.

Then came Barack Obama, who, when describing Ryan’s budget, made recklessly untrue assertions, saying (among other things) that Republicans want the elderly and autistic and Down syndrome children to “fend for themselves.”

And now, as Jonathan Tobin has written, comes the latest attempted mugging of Ryan, this time for what he said on Bill Bennett’s “Morning in America” program last week. When discussing his forthcoming effort to combat poverty, the House Budget Committee chairman and 2012 GOP vice presidential candidate said this:

We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.

The left immediately attacked. Some, like Representative Barbara Lee, accused Ryan of mounting a “thinly veiled racial attack”–one that “cannot be tolerated.” Others, like New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, wrote that Ryan’s words amounted to a “racial dog whistle.” …

Proving he is one of the left’s most decent men, Andrew Sullivan comes to Paul Ryan’s defense. And in the process, defends Charles Murray too.

One of the worst traits of some left-liberals is their easy resort to calling those who disagree with them bigots or racists or worse. There are some sites on the web that seem almost entirely devoted to patrolling the discourse for any sign of sin. This one’s a homophobe; this one’s a racist; so-and-so said this and that could be – shock! – prejudiced. It can sometimes be a way to avoid engaging arguments rather than tackling them. And so, on cue, Paul Ryan is taking heat for these remarks:

“We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.”

He noted that “Charles Murray or Bob Putnam over at Harvard – those guys have written books on this.” Cue liberal freakout. Josh Marshall focuses on the citation of Murray:

“When you start off by basing your arguments around the work of Charles Murray you just lose your credibility from the start as someone actually interested in addressing poverty or joblessness or really doing anything other than coming up with reasons to cut off what little assistance society provides for its most marginalized members or, alternatively, pumping up people with racial resentments against black people and giving them ersatz ‘scholarship’ to justify their racial antipathies. …”

After all the noise about the missing jet comes an article from Wired that makes sense. Remember Occam’s Razor – the simplest explanation is the best.

… We know the story of MH370: A loaded Boeing 777 departs at midnight from Kuala Lampur, headed to Beijing. A hot night. A heavy aircraft. About an hour out, across the gulf toward Vietnam, the plane goes dark, meaning the transponder and secondary radar tracking go off. Two days later we hear reports that Malaysian military radar (which is a primary radar, meaning the plane is tracked by reflection rather than by transponder interrogation response) has tracked the plane on a southwesterly course back across the Malay Peninsula into the Strait of Malacca.

The left turn is the key here. Zaharie Ahmad Shah1 was a very experienced senior captain with 18,000 hours of flight time. We old pilots were drilled to know what is the closest airport of safe harbor while in cruise. Airports behind us, airports abeam us, and airports ahead of us. They’re always in our head. Always. If something happens, you don’t want to be thinking about what are you going to do–you already know what you are going to do. When I saw that left turn with a direct heading, I instinctively knew he was heading for an airport. He was taking a direct route to Palau Langkawi, a 13,000-foot airstrip with an approach over water and no obstacles. The captain did not turn back to Kuala Lampur because he knew he had 8,000-foot ridges to cross. He knew the terrain was friendlier toward Langkawi, which also was closer.

Take a look at this airport on Google Earth. The pilot did all the right things. He was confronted by some major event onboard that made him make an immediate turn to the closest, safest airport.

When I heard this I immediately brought up Google Earth and searched for airports in proximity to the track toward the southwest.

For me, the loss of transponders and communications makes perfect sense in a fire. And there most likely was an electrical fire. In the case of a fire, the first response is to pull the main busses and restore circuits one by one until you have isolated the bad one. If they pulled the busses, the plane would go silent. It probably was a serious event and the flight crew was occupied with controlling the plane and trying to fight the fire. Aviate, navigate, and lastly, communicate is the mantra in such situations. …

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Michael Barone posts on the public trust that has been lost by this president.

During all of his first term, even as his job approval ratings tumbled in 2010 and 2011, more voters expressed positive than negative personal feelings toward Barack Obama. This was a source of strength that helped him overcome opposition to some of his policies, notably Obamacare, in the 2012 presidential election.

But now voters seem to be souring on him personally. Evidence comes from the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released Wednesday. It shows the percentages expressing “very” or “somewhat” positive feelings and “very” or “somewhat” negative feelings toward Obama in NBC/WSJ polls going back to February 2009. In the following chart I set out the averages of those expressing positive and negative feelings over stated periods.

It’s a pretty clear picture. Throughout the campaign year, 49 percent of people had favorable feelings to Obama, a number basically mirrored in the 51 people of the popular vote he won in November. Between the election and his second inaugural ceremony, Obama enjoyed a somewhat higher personal rating, an afterglow, as tends to happen when a president is re-elected. Through the first nine months of 2013 more voters express positive than negative feelings, though by a slightly reduced margin as compared to the campaign year. Then, in mid-October, as the fiasco of the Obamacare rollout reverberated and Obama was forced to admit that his promise that you could keep your insurance and your doctor were false, something snapped. Then, a plurality had negative feelings and only 42 percent expressed positive feelings.

How does a president re-establish the bonds of trust with most voters after they have snapped? That’s a question facing Barack Obama right now.

Editors of the Orange County Register call Sebelius a serial liar.

Sebelius keeps revising her script on the success of the Affordable Care Act.

Every time Kathleen Sebelius testifies before Congress, President Obama’s secretary of health and human services reminds us why she is unfit for her Cabinet post: She is a serial dissembler.

The latest example is her appearance this week before the House Ways and Means Committee. …

Dana Milbank on why the millennials have abandoned the administration and will cause the collapse of healthcare legislation.

The day before the Iowa caucuses in 2008, I wrote about the massive crowds of young people at Barack Obama rallies, noting that his candidacy would collapse “if they don’t show up.”

The next night, after Obama’s victory celebration in Des Moines, Obama strategist Steve Hildebrand spotted me in a crowd. “The kids showed up!” he said fiercely.

They did. But where are they now?

An army of 15 million voters under 30 swept Obama past Hillary Clinton and John McCain and to the presidency in 2008. More than 12 million helped him return in 2012. But now his presidency is on the line — and the Obama youth are abandoning him in his hour of need.

The administration announced last week that only 1.08 million people ages 18 to 34 had signed up for Obamacare by the end of February, or about 25 percent of total enrollees. If the proportion doesn’t improve significantly, the result likely will be fatal for the Affordable Care Act. …

Jay Sekulow writes on the “impossible enforcement of an unworkable law.” 

Does “ObamaCare” truly exist? Are we actually living with the law that was passed with so much fanfare four years ago?

I had to ask myself that question while reviewing the New York Times list of unilateral ObamaCare changes, a list that chronicles ObamaCare’s utter failure. Some highlights:

- A one year delay to the employer mandate.

- An additional year delay for medium-sized businesses.

Even the ideologues at HHS understand that the law won’t work, that it can’t work, and that the American people simply won’t stand for its full implementation.

- A one year grace period (no, make that three years) for non-compliant plans.

- Partial exemptions from the individual mandate.

The list can (and does) go on, and it doesn’t even include the recent, significant change to the Individual Mandate that the Wall Street Journal says “quietly repeals the individual purchase rules for two more years.”

How? By broadening the “hardship” exemptions significantly and then requiring proof of hardship by documentation only “if possible.”

In other words, if you claim hardship, it looks like the Obama administration is planning to take your word for it. …

Peter Wehner says the president is a “one man wrecking ball.” 

By now it’s settled on most people, including Democrats, that the loss of Alex Sink to David Jolly in Florida’s 13th Congressional District was, in the words of the New York Times, “devastating” to Democrats. It’s a district Ms. Sink carried in her unsuccessful race for governor against Rick Scott, a district that Barack Obama carried in his two elections, and a district that demographically now favors Democrats. In addition, Ms. Sink raised more money and ran a better campaign than Jolly. Even Bill Clinton lent his efforts to her campaign. And yet she lost.

What should particularly alarm Democrats is that Ms. Sink, who was not in Congress in 2010 and therefore did not cast a vote in favor of the Affordable Care Act, ran what Democrats considered a “textbook” campaign when it came to dealing with ObamaCare. She said she wanted to fix it, not repeal it; and she attempted to paint Jolly as a right-wing extremist on abortion, Social Security privatization, and in wanting to repeal ObamaCare. And yet she lost.

Even someone as reflexively partisan as Paul Begala said Democrats shouldn’t try to spin this loss.

But there’s another, broader point worth making, I think. It is that Barack Obama, who was the embodiment of liberal hopes and dreams, is turning out to be a one-man political wrecking ball when it comes to his party–and to liberalism more broadly. …

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Charles Krauthammer has ideas on how we might stop Putin.

… we can do nothing decisive in the short or even medium term. But we can severely squeeze Russia in the long term.

How? For serious sanctions to become possible, Europe must first be weaned off Russian gas. Obama should order the Energy Department to expedite authorization for roughly 25 liquified natural gas export facilities. Demand all decisions within six weeks. And express major U.S. support for a southern-route pipeline to export Caspian Sea gas to Europe without traversing Russia or Ukraine.

Second, call for urgent bipartisan consultation with congressional leaders for an emergency increase in defense spending, restoring at least $100 billion annually to the defense budget to keep U.S. armed forces at current strength or greater. Obama won’t do it, but he should. Nothing demonstrates American global retreat more than a budget that reduces the U.S. Army to 1940 levels.

Obama is not the first president to conduct a weak foreign policy. Jimmy Carter was similarly inclined — until Russia invaded Afghanistan, at which point the scales fell from Carter’s eyes. He responded boldly: imposing the grain embargo on the Soviets, boycotting the Moscow Olympics, increasing defense spending and ostentatiously sending a machine-gun-toting Zbigniew Brzezinski to the Khyber Pass, symbolizing the massive military aid we began sending the mujahideen, whose insurgency so bled the Russians over the next decade that they not only lost Afghanistan but were fatally weakened as a global imperial power.

Invasion woke Carter from his illusions. Will it wake Obama?

Paul Mirengoff spots the dumbest John Kerry statement, ever. There is a lot of competition for this, but Pickerhead agrees. It is a beautiful thing to see how the president has gathered blithering idiots to his cabinet; Kerry, Hagel, and the president – a matched set of incompetents. The American voting public has a lot to answer for.

John Kerry has said some criminally stupid things in his time. Recall, for example, this statement by Kerry from 2010 about Bashar al-Assad:

Let me just say that I am . . . absolutely convinced that carefully calibrated diplomacy, that if that is what we engage in, that Syria will play a very important role in achieving a comprehensive peace in the region and in putting an end to the five decades of conflict that have plagued everybody in this region.

Kerry is never merely convinced of things, he’s “absolutely convinced.” And almost invariably, he’s absolutely wrong.

Kerry is now absolutely convinced that “it’s a mistake” for Israeli leaders “again and again” to raise the PLO’s refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state “as the critical decider of their attitude toward the possibility of a [Palestinian] state and peace.” Apparently, Kerry believes that Israel should consider as its peace partner an entity that doesn’t accept its right to exist as it is fundamentally constituted. …

Andrew Ferguson caught a bunch of economists admitting their mistakes.

… The new report is not solely an admission of error. It is also a catalogue of errors by type. The biggest mistakes, the economists point out, occurred when they forecast growth rates in countries with a relatively high level of government regulation. This surprises the economists, though it won’t surprise anyone who takes a dim view of government regulation generally. The forecasters, good statists all, assumed that the regulations “would help to cushion financial shocks” in the highly regulated countries and would therefore aid recovery. 

The economists now say they failed to consider the damaging effects of regulation. In the real world, regulations “delay[ed] necessary reallocations across [economic] sectors in the recovery phase”—which, translated from the Economese, means that government was retarding the ability of businesses to do what they do best: find a way to create value and make money even in calamitous circumstances. The concession is implied, but it’s clear the economists regret letting an ideological assumption in favor of government intervention overwhelm their forecasts as the recession swept the globe, raining on the regulated and unregulated alike. 

Failures of foresight are common among experts—commoner among them, probably, than among the rest of us, who are unburdened by the expertise that tends to bind rather than liberate habits of mind. The OECD economists are happy to point out that their failures in figuring out the economy from one country to the next are no greater than those of the profession as a whole, especially in the years before and after the recession. Yet no amount of publicity about such spectacular failures deters their clients, whether in government or business, from asking economists for more. …

Perhaps one of this administration’s most contemptible actions came last week with proposals for changes to over-time pay work rules. It was not the result of any diligent effort of study. It is simply something flicked out there to compensate for, and change the subject from, their manifest failures in domestic and foreign policy. Ed Morrissey comments.

The Roman Empire notoriously distracted its citizenry by providing bread and circuses to mollify and distract them from the real problems of their lives and the failures of their government. WashingtonDC kept up that hoary tradition this week, starting with an all-night Senate session on global warming, conducted by Senate Democrats protesting the lack of action by the US government on the issue.

That protest had two big problems for Democrats’ credibility.  First, they control the upper chamber, so they can introduce legislation any time they wish – and they offered no legislation during the all-nighter. Second, climate change falls far down the list of priorities for Americans; according to Gallup, it’s second to last on a non-exclusive list of concerns overall, and near the bottom even among Democrats. The top priorities on Gallup’s list are the economy and unemployment, for voters of both parties.

With the failure of the circus on Capitol Hill, the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue focused on the bread. The White House told The New York Times and other media outlets that President Obama would take executive action to redefine salaried employment in order to expand overtime payment from employers. As usual, this top-down and unforeseen change in regulation will create more problems than it solves, and likely result in lowered compensation rather than the explosion of riches for the working class the Obama administration will claim. …

…All this does is give Obama and Democrats a wonky talking point for the midterm elections, and a way to distract the voters universally impacted by the negative consequences of Obamacare by discussing changes at the margins that will worsen the stagnation in the current economy. It’s just another ring in the circus, with imaginary bread promised to magically appear at some later date.

Camille Paglia never fails to surprise. Her comments on the failures of sex education is spot on. She wants more sex.  

Fertility is the missing chapter in sex education. Sobering facts about women’s declining fertility after their 20s are being withheld from ambitious young women, who are propelled along a career track devised for men.

The refusal by public schools’ sex-education programs to acknowledge gender differences is betraying both boys and girls. The genders should be separated for sex counseling. It is absurd to avoid the harsh reality that boys have less to lose from casual serial sex than do girls, who risk pregnancy and whose future fertility can be compromised by disease. Boys need lessons in basic ethics and moral reasoning about sex (for example, not taking advantage of intoxicated dates), while girls must learn to distinguish sexual compliance from popularity.

Above all, girls need life-planning advice. Too often, sex education defines pregnancy as a pathology, for which the cure is abortion. Adolescent girls must think deeply about their ultimate aims and desires. If they want both children and a career, they should decide whether to have children early or late. There are pros, cons and trade-offs for each choice.

Unfortunately, sex education in the U.S. is a crazy quilt of haphazard programs. A national conversation is urgently needed for curricular standardization and public transparency. The present system is too vulnerable to political pressures from both the left and the right–and students are trapped in the middle. …

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Robert Kaplan of Stratfor wrote a piece that could be a companion to the Pickings introduction about Russia from last week. Only, his is more elegantly written.

The Obama administration claims it is motivated by the G-8, interdependence, human rights and international law. Russian President Vladimir Putin is a more traditional historical actor. He is motivated by geopolitics. That is why he temporarily has the upper hand in the crisis over Ukraine and Crimea.

Geopolitics, according to the mid-20th century U.S. diplomat and academic Robert Strausz-Hupe, is “the struggle for space and power,” played out in a geographical setting. Geopolitics is eternal, ever since Persia was the world’s first superpower in antiquity. …

… It isn’t that geography and geopolitics supersede everything else, including Western values and human agency. Not at all! Rather, it is that geography in particular is the starting point for understanding everything else. Only by respecting geography in the first place can Western values and human ingenuity overcome it. …

… To wit, the late military historian John Keegan explains that Great Britain and the United States could champion freedom only because the sea protected them “from the landbound enemies of liberty.” Alexander Hamilton observed that had Britain not been an island, its military establishment would have been just as overbearing as those of continental Europe, and Britain “would in all probability” have become “a victim to the absolute power of a single man.” …

… Geography is no less relevant to the 21st century than it has been throughout history. Communications technology has not erased geography; rather, it has only made it more claustrophobic, so that each region of the earth interacts with every other one as never before. Intensifying this claustrophobia is the growth of cities — another geographical phenomenon. The earth is smaller than ever, thanks to technology. But like a tiny wristwatch with all of its mechanisms, you have to disaggregate its geographical parts and features in order to understand how it works.

Thus, any international relations strategy must emanate initially from the physical terrain upon which we all live. And because geopolitics emanates from geography, it will never go away or become irrelevant. Strausz-Hupe had it right. If liberal powers do not engage in geopolitics, they will only leave the playing field to their enemies who do. For even evolved liberal states, such as those in America and Europe, are not exempt from the battle for survival. Such things as the G-8, human rights and international law can and must triumph over geography. But that is only possible if geopolitics becomes part of the strategy of the West.

Along a similar vein, Jennifer Rubin asks non-interventionist libertarians how the inter-dependent world is working out?

One of the key assumptions of non-interventionist libertarians (who rankle at the term “isolationist”) is that through trade and economic integration we can woo our enemies and make a profit all at the same time. The only problem is that it is almost never true.

Seth Mandel points out that letting Russia into the World Trade Organization didn’t make it less aggressive: “It’s because the economic integration of Russia has done precisely the opposite of what it was expected to do in one crucial regard: the recent events in Ukraine and the West’s unsteady response indicate Russia’s increased leverage instead.” That is because the West’s business interests become invested (literally) in a new market (thereby weakening support for any kind of sanctions) and because the aggressor gets economic benefits at no costs. …

Ann Coulter recaps Dem disasters in foreign policy from Kennedy to the present.

… When Obama took office, al Qaida had been routed in Iraq — from Fallujah, SadrCity and Basra. Muqtada al-Sadr — the Dr. Phil of Islamofascist radicalism — had waddled off in retreat to Iran. The Iraqis had a democracy, a miracle on the order of flush toilets in Afghanistan.

By Bush’s last year in office, monthly casualties in Iraq were coming in slightly below a weekend with Justin Bieber. In 2008, there were more than three times as many homicides in Chicago as U.S. troop deaths in the Iraq War. (Chicago: 509; Iraq: 155).

On May 30, The Washington Post reported: “CIA Director Michael V. Hayden now portrays (al-Qaida) as essentially defeated in Iraq and Saudi Arabia and on the defensive throughout much of the rest of the world …” Even hysterics at The New York Times admitted that al-Qaida and other terrorist groups had nearly disappeared from Southeast Asia by 2008.

A few short years into Obama’s presidency — and al-Qaida is back! For purely political reasons, as soon as he became president, Obama removed every last troop from Iraq, despite there being Americans troops deployed in dozens of countries around the world.

In 2004, nearly 100 soldiers, mostly Marines, died in the battle to take Fallujah from al-Qaida. Today, al-Qaida’s black flag flies above Fallujah.

Bush won the war, and Obama gave it back.

Obama couldn’t be bothered with preserving America’s victory in Iraq. He was busy helping to topple a strong American ally in Egypt and a slavish American minion in Libya — in order to install the Muslim Brotherhood in those countries instead. …

Since we spent a lot of time looking at failures, we need an expanded humor section. Tim Stanley caught Chelsea Handler explained to Piers Morgan why he failed. Follow the link if you’d like to see the video.  

There’s been a lot of debate about why Piers Morgan lost his CNN talk show. A couple of days ago the comedian Chelsea Handler gave him a definitive explanation. Piers was “interviewing” her, they cut to an ad break, and when they returned they had this priceless exchange.

PIERS: You tweet very amusingly.
CHELSEA: I wish you did.
PIERS: Ha.
CHELSEA: I mean in the middle of the commercial break — I want your viewers to know, although they must know, because they’re probably following you on Twitter. I mean you can’t even pay attention for 60 seconds. You’re a terrible interviewer.
PIERS: Well you just weren’t keeping my attention.
CHELSEA: That’s not my problem.
PIERS: That is your problem.
CHELSEA: This is your show. You have to pay attention to the guests that you invited on your show.
PIERS: If they’re interesting enough.
CHELSEA: Yeah, listen. It doesn’t matter how interesting I am. You signed up for this job.
PIERS: Of course it does.
CHELSEA: Well, maybe that’s why your job is coming to an end.
PIERS: Wow.
CHELSEA: Wow.

It’s better watched that read, because that way you can hear Piers’ painful laughter.

More humor from Power Line with the best obit, ever.

There was quite a lot of notice given to this obituary last November of Leonard Smith, who asked that in lieu of flowers, “the family asks that you cancel your subscription to The New York Times.”  A rather sensible suggestion.

But I think I’ve found one that is even better from earlier this week, for Walter George Bruhl, a retired chemical company executive.  Highlights:

Walter George Bruhl Jr. of Newark and Dewey Beach is a dead person; he is no more; he is bereft of life; he is deceased; he has rung down the curtain and gone to join the choir invisible; he has expired and gone to meet his maker. . .

There will be no viewing since his wife refuses to honor his request to have him standing in the corner of the room with a glass of Jack Daniels in his hand so he would appear natural to visitors.

Cremation will take place at the family’s convenience, and his ashes will be kept in an urn until they get tired of having it around. What’s a Grecian Urn? Oh, about 200 drachmas a week.

RIP, Mr. Bruhl.  You sound like the kind of person I would like to have met.

We finish with late night humor from Andrew Malcolm.

SethMeyers: President Obama appeared on an online comedy show the other day. The president was there to talk about his own online comedy show, ObamaCare.

SethMeyers: Sunday’s Crimean vote to join Russia has no option for “No.” Only two boxes on the ballot — one for “yes,” and one for “murder my family.”

Conan: Obama is threatening Putin now. The U.S. president says if Russia doesn’t pull out of Crimea, he won’t lend Putin any of the money that we’ve borrowed from China.

Fallon: The College Board is revamping SATs to focus on what college students really need. The SAT is now just one question: “How much money do your parents have?”

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If you’re wondering why there are serial screw-ups in Washington, we have an answer.  So, before we get into details of the GOP win in Florida on Tuesday, here is Jim Geraghty on why liberals can’t govern.

Back in late February, a new contract document revealed that the Department of Health and Human Services would be paying $60 million for the computer cloud that supports back-end data sharing for HealthCare.gov and state Obamacare marketplaces, more than five times the amount in the original contract. This week HHS revealed that the contract has been further revised — to roughly $120 million, now more than ten times the original $11 million value of the contract when Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services first awarded it in 2011.

In most professions, when you end up spending ten times what you budgeted, the consequences are swift and severe. Heads roll. Responsibilities are reassigned. Budgetary authority gets yanked. This, of course, is not how things work in the federal government. …

… Over at The Washingtonian, Michael Gaynor offers further details on the culture of the Environmental Protection Agency, where John Beale was the highest-paid official while failing to show up for work months at a time, covering his tracks with strange and implausible tales of secret work for the Central Intelligence Agency.

The lack of accountability throughout the organization is jaw-dropping:

The EPA “research project” that took Beale to Los Angeles five times was really a smoke screen for visiting his parents in Bakersfield, two hours away. Yet his travel vouchers were barely reviewed. Officials didn’t question his expenses — they were approved laterally, by a peer instead of a manager. “Because of where he sat in the organizational structure, there were no questions,” [Office of the Inspector General special agent Mark] Kaminsky says.

Beale’s off-the-charts $206,000 salary, inflated because of the 25-percent retention bonus that never expired, was more than allowed under law. An Inspector General’s report published last year faulted a lack of internal controls at the EPA — there was no automatic stop on the bonuses after the designated allotments were distributed.

In the same report, the IG revealed that these pay issues had been brought to the attention of Beale’s office as early as July 2010. Yet managers believed that the discrepancy was a human-resources matter and tossed it back, causing it to languish for years. . . .Beale and Kaminsky counted up how often he’d used the CIA guise to skip work since 2000. The grand total: approximately 2 1/2 years.          

Investigators later put dollar amounts on his crimes: $437,901 in fraudulent retention bonuses, $58,127 for the “D.O. Oversight” absences, $8,000 for the parking spot, and so on. Altogether, he cost taxpayers $886,186.

Beale’s most recent manager at the EPA was Gina McCarthy, then the assistant administrator in the Office of Air and Radiation. She told the inspector general that she had “concerns” about Beale’s claim to be secretly working for the CIA, but there is no evidence she ever acted on those concerns, according to the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.

The consequence for McCarthy was a promotion; President Obama nominated her to head the EPA in March and she was confirmed in July. …

Josh Kraushaar says a 2014 GOP wave is looking more likely after the Florida election yesterday.

Tuesday night’s special election in Florida should be a serious scare for Democrats who worry that Obamacare will be a major burden for their party in 2014. Despite recruiting favored candidate Alex Sink, outspending Republicans, and utilizing turnout tools to help motivate reliable voters, Democrats still lost to Republican lobbyist David Jolly—and it wasn’t particularly close.

The Republican tool: lots of advertisements hitting Sink over Obamacare, even though she wasn’t even in Congress to vote for it. Sink’s response was from the Democratic playbook: Call for fixes, but hit her opponent for supporting repeal. Sink won 46 percent of the vote, 2 points behind Jolly and 4 points below President Obama’s 2012 total in the district.

Special elections don’t necessarily predict the November elections, but this race in a bellwether Florida district that both parties aggressively contested comes as close as possible to a November test run for both parties. Democrats worked to clear the field for Sink, an unsuccessful 2010 gubernatorial nominee, while Republicans missed out on their leading recruits, settling for Jolly, a lobbyist who once worked for Rep. Bill Young, the late congressman whose 13th District vacancy Jolly will fill. Sink outspent Jolly, but the Republican was able to close the financial gap with the help of outside groups. All told, Democrats held a $5.4 million to $4.5 million spending advantage. …

Byron York reports on the Florida race also.

The widely respected Florida political analyst Adam Smith sees big problems for Democrats in the loss of Alex Sink to Republican David Jolly in the special election to fill the House seat from Florida’s 13th Congressional District. “Democrats had a better-funded, well-known nominee who ran a strong campaign against a little-known, second- or third-tier Republican who ran an often wobbly race in a district Barack Obama won twice,” Smith wrote Tuesday night. “Outside Republican groups — much more so than the under-funded Jolly campaign– hung the Affordable Care Act and President Obama on Sink. It worked.”

Smith noted that both Democrat Sink and Republican Jolly insisted the race to replace the late GOP Rep. Bill Young was mainly about local issues. And indeed, watching the first debate between Sink and Jolly, on February 3, one came away with the sense that issues like flood insurance played a role in the race that some outsiders didn’t appreciate.

But one thing was clear from that debate, and it was that Sink didn’t have much to say about Obamacare.

As usual, informed analysis from Michael Barone.

… I score it as an uninspiring victory for national Republicans and a disappointment for national Democrats. Jolly got the same percentage of the vote, 49 percent, as Mitt Romney won in the district; Sink’s 47 percent was below Obama’s 50 percent in 2012. Turnout was 55 percent of November 2012 turnout, not an unusual decline for a special election; Jolly’s total was 53 percent of Romney’s and Sink’s 50 percent of Obama’s. Jolly naturally campaigned against Obamacare, and a Democratic loss in an Obama district confirms the unpopularity of that legislation. Sink tried campaigning on Social Security and Medicare, Democratic staples which once had a great resonance with St. Petersburg’s elderly population. But the district’s 65-plus population percentage, 22 percent, is significantly lower than that of several others in Florida, though above the national average. In any case, it doesn’t look like Social Security is trumping Obamacare with the elderly.

If this race is an indicator of the November results, it suggests that Democrats will not get the 49-percent to 48-percent edge they got nationwide in the popular vote for the House, and it suggests that they will win somewhat fewer than the 201 House seats they won then. If that’s true, it will be the first time we have had three House elections in a row with similar results, since the string from 1996 to 2004 in which Republicans narrowly won the popular vote and won majorities of seats, but in each case fewer than the 234 they won in 2012.

John Hinderaker says don’t forget about the trouble Alex Sink had with the immigration issue.

A postscript on David Jolly’s big special election over Alex Sink in Florida’s 13th Congressional District: Obamacare was the biggest issue in the race, and deservedly has gotten most of the post-election commentary. But, as Daniel Horowitz notes at RedState, let’s not forget that immigration was also an issue, and may have played an important role.

Sink was pro-amnesty and “comprehensive reform,” while Jolly flatly opposed amnesty and emphasized stronger borders. And Sink made an appalling gaffe–in the sense of saying what liberals really think about expanded low-skill immigration–that made the issue, in this race, an inflammatory one. Explaining her support for immigration reform, Sink said, “We have a lot of employers over on the beaches that rely upon workers and especially in this high-growth environment, where are you going to get people to work to clean our hotel rooms or do our landscaping?” It doesn’t come across any better when you hear her say it”

Sink’s comments reminded voters that the Democratic Party doesn’t care that 100 million working-age Americans don’t have jobs, but is deeply concerned about where they are going to get cheap landscaping services.

Chris Stirewalt of Fox has more.

.. Whatever they say in public, Democrats know that the defeat of their candidate, Alex Sink, in Tuesday’s special election in Pinellas County, Fla. is a very bad omen. If they cannot win in districts like these – won twice by President Obama – and with well-funded, well known candidates like Sink, there’s little reason to believe much of the palaver about Democratic strategies for blunting Republican advances this fall. Outspent, hampered by a Libertarian candidate and with some nagging party divisions lingering on Election Day, David Jolly carried the special election to replace the late Rep. Bill Young, R-Fla. The race provided a revealing snapshot of voter attitudes about ObamaCare and the motivation of the Republican base. There’s a long time to go until November and Democrats have just begun to spend their massive war chest, but the shape of things looks bad for the blue team’s chances to hold the Senate. …

Opportunities provided by increased production of oil and gas are so obvious, a non-political publication like Scientific American can see the value.

Ukraine is on its own, not least when it comes to energy—and that crimps the country’s ability to respond to Russia’s land grab in the Crimean peninsula. Ukraine relies on Russia for roughly two thirds of its natural gas supplies, suggesting that the current geopolitical impasse will likely continue to fall in Russia’s favor. Even with a few months of natural gas in storage, “they’re in a tough spot if those supplies are cut off,” notes Jason Bordoff, one-time Obama administration policy advisor and now director of Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy, who was a speaker on a panel of experts at Columbia University’s School of International and Political Affairs (SIPA) on March 10.
 
Russia has the leverage to use its energy supplies as a political cudgel in Ukraine or the rest of Europe—the European Union imports one third of its gas from the eastern giant—and has not hesitated to use it in the past, most recently in 2009. Western Europe’s gas purchases from Russia (then the Soviet Union) started in the early 1970s, mostly as symbolic trade—part of the policies of Cold War détente and Ostpolitik (the latter, West Germany’s unilateral attempt to normalize relations with the U.S.S.R.). The resulting energy trade with Germany expanded to other Western European countries in the ensuing decades, and grew to become what some critics of détente had always feared: dependence on Russia by Western Europe for essential energy supplies.
 
This vulnerability may not persist indefinitely, however. In fact, this could conceivably be the last time Moscow will be able to use gas as a weapon. The world’s fracking-enabled natural gas boom may, over time, upset this status quo, if not as soon as U.S. politicians would like because fracked gas cannot serve as a bargaining chip in the current crisis. …

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John Fund says counter Putin with natural gas exports.

Post-Crimea, everyone suddenly recognizes that Russia is a potential geopolitical menace to the West.

But for years the Obama administration has completely failed to use the U.S.’s boom in energy production to increase its security and that of its European allies. Frustrated members of Congress from both parties now want to force the White House to stop delaying a full two dozen permits for the export of America’s abundant natural gas.

Ukraine depends on Russia for more than two-thirds of its natural gas, and Russia is already raising prices steeply. Thirty-four percent of Europe’s gas came from Russia last year. Indeed, it was in part Ukraine’s reliance on Russian energy that pushed now-deposed Ukraine president Viktor Yanukovych to abandon a scheduled trade deal with the European Union in favor of discount natural-gas prices from Russia, among other inducements from Putin. That turnaround led to the street protests that toppled Yanukovych last month.

So far the administration, under pressure from its environmental allies, is exhibiting no sense of urgency on an issue that should be a no-brainer. “Its slow-walking of liquefied natural-gas plant permits is of a piece with its failure to approve the Keystone pipeline and get new trade deals done,” says James Lucier, an energy analyst with Capital Alpha Partners in Washington. “It’s all a sign of just how disengaged from the rest of the world the Obama folks have become.” …

Christopher Helman in Forbes says even the NY Times understands the opportunity our oil and gas boom has become. Will president ‘pipeline dither’ figure it out?

The hand-wringing over what to do to help Ukraine has had a very positive impact on the U.S. oil and gas industry. Politicians like Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) are seizing on the crisis to call for a lifting of the ban on U.S. oil exports — the better to counterbalance Russia’s petro-influence. While the Wall Street Journal this morning wrote that western politicians are working on a variety of options to help “loosen Russia’s energy stranglehold on Ukraine” including “larger exports of U.S.-made natural gas.”

Nevermind that the U.S. currently exports no natural gas in the form of LNG because new liquefaction plants won’t be completed until late 2015. The bigger point was made by economist Ed Yardeni in his morning note today: “By invading Crimea, Russian President Vladimir Putin may have succeeded in resolving the debate in the U.S. about whether or not we should export natural gas and crude oil.”

Yardeni noted this New York Times editorial over the weekend as proof positive that the Obama administration (and the rest of the left-leaning side of the political class) now embraces U.S. energy exports as a potentially powerful political tool. When even the New York Times editorial board defies the anti-fracking lobby to conclude that “natural gas exports could serve American foreign-policy interests in Europe” it indicates that LNG exports are something we can all agree on. …

We think we have stultifying bureaucrats? Walter Russell Mead says regulations are killing fracking in the UK.

The mood is downright gloomy at the Shale UK conference this week, where various stakeholders in the country’s fledgling industry are bemoaning a lack of progress in tapping the countries estimated 1.3 quadrillion cubic feet of natural gas trapped in shale. Despite having some of the thicker—and therefore easier to drill—shale in Europe, faulted stratigraphy, stunted support infrastructure, and a byzantine regulatory environment are preventing Britain from imitating America’s shale success. The FT reports:

Exploration is expensive and it is easy to spend more on drilling a well than the value of gas that comes out of the ground. Drilling costs are significantly higher in the UK than the US. The nascent supply chain and long licensing process are largely to blame.

“It’s a lot slower than in the US,” says Francis Egan, Cuadrilla chief executive. “We have to apply for eight or nine permits for each exploration well.” …

Ron Fournier, certified member of the left media, posts on Diane Feinstein’s accusations of CIA congress spying.

They spied on you. They lied to the Senate. They seized telephone records from the Associated Press and considered criminalizing investigative journalism at Fox News. What else can the U.S. intelligence community do to destroy its credibility, curb civil liberties, and ultimately undermine U.S. security?

Spy on Congress.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat bravely challenging a Democratic White House, accused the CIA of searching computer files used by her staffers on the Senate Intelligence Committee to review the CIA’s now-defunct interrogation programs, …

Peggy Noonan posts on Feinstein in her blog.

Here again is the problem of surveillance professionals operating within a highly technologized surveillance state: If they can do it they will do it. If they are able to take an action they will sooner or later take it, whether or not it’s a good thing, even whether or not it is legal. Defenders of the surveillance state as it is currently organized and constituted blithely argue that laws, rules, traditions and long-held assumptions will control or put a damper on the actions of those with the power to invade the privacy of groups or individuals. They are very trusting people! But they are wrong. You cannot know human nature (or the nature and imperatives of human organizations) and assume people will refrain from using the power at hand to gain advantage. And so we have to approach surveillance state issues not from a framework of “it’s OK, we can trust our government” but “it’s not going to be OK, government agencies give us new reasons each day to doubt their probity, judgment and determination to adhere to the law.”  …

In an article more appropriate for yesterday’s discourse on Russia, David Harsanyi says Russians get the government they want.

… the more Putin undermines liberal institutions the more popular he becomes. The people who vote for the presidents of Russia and the United States view are unrelated, emerging from distinct historical, moral and ideological perspectives. So expecting people — even people given a vote — to act in what we consider a logical manner, is a waste of time.  While we, for example, may be confused about the harsh fate of Pussy Riot!,  only 5 percent of Russians believed that the punk/activist band didn’t deserve serious penalties for its actions. Actually, 29 percent believed that the band should have been sent into forced labor, while 37 percent believe they should be imprisoned.

So the Russian government controls the country’s three main television channels, and at the end of 2013, Putin replaced the national news agency with a new and more compliant version. This undermines the free press, of course, but the ugly fact is there doesn’t seem to be much anger about it. In recent years, the Kremlin has imposed limits on protests, criminalized libel, and censored political material on the internet. It has banned the work of nongovernmental organizations (typically aimed at fostering more transparency in government), frozen the assets of human rights groups that receive funding from U.S. citizens, and jailed the political opposition. Occasionally a dissident dies of poisoning.

But the reversal of once promising liberal reforms in Russia is not the result of an undermining of democracy. It happened with the full consent of the electorate. In Russia’s first presidential election, in 2000, Vladimir Putin, who had previously been made prime minister, won 53 percent of the vote. In 2004, he won 71 percent of the vote. In 2008, his lackey Dmitry Medvedev also won in a landslide. In 2012, Putin returned to the presidency in a landslide election with a parliament dominated by members of his party, giving him virtually one party rule.

Sadder still, Putin may be a better choice. …

Paul Mirengoff posts on the GOP win in FL.

Republican Dave Jolly has defeated Democrat Alex Sink in the special congressional election in FLA-13. The margin was 48.5 to 46.5.

This was a closely watched election in which the Democrats invested lots of money and effort (Jolly was significantly outspent) and recruited a prominent candidate — their former nominee for Governor. Although the seat has been held for years by a popular Republican, Obama carried the district in 2012, albeit very narrowly, as did Sink herself in her 2010 run for governor. I discussed the numerous advantages Sink possessed in this post.

The race will be viewed by Republican operatives as a harbinger of things to come in this cycle. That view doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch. Sink will not be the last Democrat who sinks under the weight of Obamacare.

UPDATE: Dave Wasserman, the editor of the non-partisan Cook Political Report and certainly not a Republican operative, says “If Dems couldn’t win an Obama congressional district with a solid candidate against a flawed R, expect a rough November.”

Jennifer Rubin has more.

David Jolly eked out a win with less than 50 percent of the vote over now two-time election loser Alex Sink in a special election for Florida’s 13th Congressional District. We should not make more of it than there is, but here are some specifics regarding this election:

• Obamacare played a huge part in the race; Democrats who think it won’t be the primary issue in November may be deluding themselves. (And, unlike the Democratic incumbents who will be on the ballot, Sink didn’t vote for Obamacare.)

• American Crossroads spent $500,00on Jolly’s behalf. American Action Network also spent $500,000. Another mainstream group YG Network spent six figures as well. Tea party groups did little, if anything. Perhaps they aren’t much help in the trenches.

• That said, the money came out about even when all third-party activity was counted. Neither side left the candidate to fend for himself or herself. …

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One of our favorites, Craig Pirrong of Streetwise Professor, posted a piece highly critical of Putin. We have that here, and have rerun Paul Mirengoff”s Power Line post from a few days ago about the alternate reality that W encountered when dealing with Putin. We follow those two posts with a Forbes article by Paul Roderick Gregory explaining the milieu from whence Putin sprang. Then Michael Barone writes about communication difficulties on our side.

To help understand Russian attitudes it is worth repeating a story in a book about the history of their conquest of Siberia. In 1905 the first leg of the Trans-Siberian Railway was completed to Irkutsk, the town at the bottom of Lake Baikal 3,200 miles from Moscow. Because the Czar’s government was seriously in debt, (25% of the budget was going for interest payments. Was obama the czar?) there was not enough in the budget to do a proper job. As a result, the grades were too steep, the curves were too sharp, and good hardwoods were not used for ties. Speeds were so slow, the trip to Irkutsk took two weeks. At the time, someone pointed out to a Russian man that trains in Western Europe were able to travel three times as fast. To which the Russian responded, “Well, if you need to get someplace sooner, you can just take an earlier train.”

That confounding obliviousness is, to Pickerhead’s experience, typical for the country. We get fooled by a very thin veneer of Russians who have a Western point of view. And more confusion comes from their excellence in Western idioms of music and literature. This leads us to believe they are just like us. They are not. Scratch below the surface and you will find a xenophobic peasant; notable only for a capacity for suffering we cannot even imagine. Smart though. Because everyone of them can speak Russian like a native.

This xenophobia, the fear of the foreign, is something Russians come by honestly and we would too if geography had dealt us their poor hand. It is a huge flat country with no natural barriers to entry, or invasion, for a thousand miles. Don’t think of the Urals, they are like the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. The Volga provides an example. It rises in the Valdai Hills near Moscow and wanders for almost 4,000 miles before arriving at the Caspian Sea. A drop of less than 1,000 feet, or three inches every mile. As a consequence, the country was constantly tested from every direction and Russians came to value a strong government that would protect them.

Our political ancestors were on an island and learned to fear tyranny from inside the country. That’s why we got the Magna Carta, and a government constrained by a constitution and the rule of law. Those things did not happen because we were wrapped in virtue at birth. Our peoples solved a different set of problems.

There is another Western, particularly American, conceit that annoys Russians. It happens at the beginning of every June as we celebrate the anniversary of the D-Day invasion when we landed in Europe and subsequently, supposedly, won the war. Dmitri Vologonov, a Red Army General who served on the staffs of both Gorbachev and Yeltsin, was an historian with unique access to archives of both the Red Army and the Communist Party. His best estimate of the number of Soviets killed in WWII is 27,000,000. The United States lost 300,000. Hitler had lost the war long before June 1944. We were there for the mopping up. Not to say our contribution in national treasure was not immense. But it was Russia that paid the butcher’s bill.

Here’s Craig Pirrong with his post after what he saw as a distressing Putin performance in his presser last week.

… The impression of insanity is only reinforced by other actions during the past several days, including a live fire exercise in the Baltic (witnessed by Putin) and today’s launch of an ICBM test.  Put it altogether, and Putin gives the impression of approaching Kim Jung Un or Kim Jung Il levels of aggressive craziness.  (And for those who say these exercises and tests were planned in advance, they could have easily been canceled if Putin wanted to lower the tension level.  The fact he let them proceed tells you all you need to know about his intent and mindset.)

So what are the broader implications of his disturbing display of mental imbalance?  No doubt the Europeans are even more intimidated now, and will be all the more reluctant to challenge a leader with a nuclear arsenal that they view as mad.

And that raises another possibility: that Putin was playing the psycho for effect.  The Slavic version of Nixon’s Madman Theory, and which Machiavelli wrote about centuries earlier: he wrote that leaders can find it “a very wise thing to simulate madness.”

I will say, watching the video, that Putin did a very, very credible impression of a madman, but that’s necessary to make the gambit work, isn’t it?

I don’t know whether he’s truly mad, or merely feigning it, but the effect will likely be the same.  The disturbing display of mental imbalance will work to his favor, and lead the Europeans in particular to back away slowly, letting him keep his current conquests, and prepare for his next move.  He may back off now, but he will be back for more.  And quite possibly not just in Ukraine.  But in the Baltic states and Poland.

And for reference, Paul Mirengoff’s post on W’s “discussions” with Putin.

As John noted below, President Obama spent an hour and a half on the telephone with Vladimir Putin discussing the Russian invasion of Ukraine. What was the conversation like?

We can probably get a good sense of it by considering the account of President Bush’s conversations with Putin set forth by Peter Baker in his excellent book about the Bush presidency, Days of Fire.

It’s well known that Bush and Putin got on well at first. But when the relationship soured, Bush became exasperated by his talks with the Russian bully.

Putin seemed to delight in debating Bush. But according to Baker, Bush hated debating Putin. “He’s not well informed,” Bush complained. “It’s like arguing with an eighth grader with his facts wrong.” Bush described another encounter as “like junior high debating.”

One of Putin’s tactics was to present absurd analogies between his abuses of power and events in the U.S., a tactic also favored by Nikita Khrushchev in Soviet times:

“You talk about Khodorkovsky [the head of Yukos whose assets and freedom were taken from him after he became a critic of Putin], and I talk about Enron,” Putin told Bush. “You appoint the Electoral College and I appoint governors. What’s the difference?”

At another point, Putin defended his control over media in Russia. “Don’t lecture me about the free press,” he said, “not after you fired that reporter.”

“Vladimir, are you talking about Dan Rather?” Bush asked. Yes, replied Putin.

More along this vein from Paul Roderick Gregory writing in Forbes.

… After level-headed Angela Merkel of Germany talked by phone with Vladimir Putin on the Ukraine crisis, she came away reporting that he had lost touch with reality and was living in another world. Putin’s saber-rattling press conference was another shocking introduction to Putin’s parallel universe, in which black is white, down is up, and the sun rises at night.

In Putin’s world, all demonstrators in Moscow streets are paid agents of Hillary Clinton, and now John Kerry, a student deserves two and a half years in jail for injuring a heavily-armored riot policeman with a lemon,  the tiny Georgian army attacked Russian forces without prvocation as rabid Georgians killed and maimed the embattled citizens of Abkhazia, the Maidan demonstrators are Nazis and skinheads who burn innocent bystanders alive, Yanukovich’s Berkut riot police bravely held their ground as anti-Semitic snipers dropped them one by one, Yanukovich is the legitimate president although Ukraine has no president,  the new Crimean governor (who last commanded a whopping 4% of the vote) has the unanimous support of the people, desperate Russian-speaking Ukrainians turned to Russia for humanitarian support, and the Russian uniforms worn by Crimean “local self defense forces” were purchased in second-hand stores.

Chancellor Merkel should not be surprised by Putin’s lack of touch with reality, or that he is living “in another world.” After all, she grew up behind a wall, erected by Putin’s KGB heroes for the express purpose of keeping out “enemy provocateurs,” not to keep the people from fleeing. The likes of John Kerry and Barack Obama, however, face Putin’s KGB alternative universe for the first time. Let’s hope they come to understand Putin’s uncivilized provokatsia, desinformatisia, maskirovka, and the tried-and-true “big lie” as quickly as possible. …

Michael Barone thinks presidential-sized personality defects lead our country into trouble.

Solipsism. It’s a fancy word which means that you assume others see the world as you do and will behave as you would.

It’s a quality often found in narcissists, people who greatly admire themselves — like a presidential candidate confident that he is a better speechwriter than his speechwriters, knows more about policy than his policy directors and is a better political director than his political director.

If that sounds familiar, it’s a paraphrase of what President Obama told top political aide Patrick Gaspard in 2008, according to the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza.

More recently, Obama’s solipsism has been painfully apparent as the United States suffers one reversal after another in world affairs. But it has been apparent ever since he started running for president in 2007.

Candidate Obama campaigned not just as a critic of the policies of the opposing party’s president, as many candidates do. He portrayed himself repeatedly as someone who, because he “looks different” from other presidents, would make America beloved and cherished in the world.

Plenty of solipsism here. Obama’s status as the possible and then actual first black president was surely an electoral asset. Most Americans believed and believe that, given the nation’s history, the election of a black president would be a good thing, at least in the abstract.

But that history has less resonance beyond America’s borders. Obama must have been surprised to find, on his trip to his father’s native Africa, that he was less popular there than George W. Bush, thanks to Bush’s program to combat AIDS. …

Speaking of defects, John Podhoretz says the healthcare disaster is now undeniable.

The Washington Post has the bombshell story of the month: “A pair of surveys released on Thursday suggest that just one in 10 uninsured people who qualify for private health plans through the new marketplace have signed up for one—and that about half of uninsured adults has looked for information on the online exchanges or plans to look.” Well, and there goes the famed rationale for the health-care law—which was to bring the people, numbering anywhere between 31 million to 47 million depending on how and whom you count, without insurance into the system.

Why aren’t they signing up? First off, there will always be people who choose to live on the margins in some way or other. They don’t want to be in the system, they’re paranoid about the system, they keep their money in their mattress and lots of cans in the basement. But mostly, people aren’t signing up now and haven’t had health care before because of the cost: “Of people who are uninsured and do not intend to get a health plan through the marketplaces, the biggest factor is that they believe they could not afford one.”

Since October 1 of last year, the coverage of the Obamacare disaster has centered on the technical catastrophe of the healthcare.gov and the transitional problems afflicting insurers, employers, and the insured alike—and more recently the administration’s desperate efforts to delay the penalties and controls imposed by the law to limit the political fallout. It is safe to say, though, that this is the worst possible news for Obama and his people. They have thrown the entire health-care system into unprecedented chaos for a population that is, it seems, staying as far away from it as possible. Little has been fixed; much has been made far worse; nothing makes sense; and good luck to the Democrats who have to defend their votes for this colossal cock-up in November.