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It’s Ted Cruz day. We start with Thomas Sowell’s critical comments from last week.

Freshman Senator Ted Cruz says many things that need to be said and says them well. Moreover, some of these things are what many, if not most, Americans believe wholeheartedly. Yet we need to remember that the same was true of another freshman Senator, just a relatively few years ago, who parlayed his ability to say things that resonated with the voters into two terms in the White House. Who would disagree that if you want your doctor, you should be able to keep your doctor? Who would disagree with the idea of a more transparent administration in Washington, or a President of the United States being a uniter instead of a divider?

There are many things like this that freshman Senator Barack Obama said that the overwhelming majority of Americans — whether liberal or conservative — would agree with. The only problem is that what he has actually done as President has repeatedly turned out to be the direct opposite of what he said as a candidate.

Senator Ted Cruz has not yet reached the point where he can make policy, rather than just make political trouble. But there are already disquieting signs that he is looking out for Ted Cruz — even if that sets back the causes he claims to be serving.

Those causes are not being served when Senator Cruz undermines the election chances of the only political party that has any chance of undoing the disasters that Barack Obama has already inflicted on the nation — and forestalling new disasters that are visible on the horizon.

ObamaCare is not just an issue about money or even an issue about something as important as medical care. ObamaCare represents a quantum leap in the power of the federal government over the private lives of individual Americans. …

Sowell added a Part II.

… However unjustified Senator Cruz’s actions, the very fact that a freshman Senator can so quickly gain so many supporters, with so much enthusiasm, ought to be a loud warning to the Republican establishment that they have long been a huge disappointment to a wide range of Republican voters and supporters.

One of their most maddening qualities has for decades been their can’t-be-bothered attitude when it comes to explaining their positions to the American people in language people can understand. A classic example was Speaker of the House John Boehner’s performance when he emerged from a meeting at the White House a while back. There, with masses of television news cameras pointed at him, and a bank of microphones crowded together, he simply expressed his disgust at the Obama administration, turned and walked on away.

Here was a golden opportunity to cut through the Obama administration rhetoric and set the record straight on the issues at hand. But apparently Speaker Boehner couldn’t be bothered to have a prepared, and previously thought out, statement to present, conveying something more than his disgust.

Unfortunately, Speaker Boehner is just the latest in a long line of Republican “leaders” with the same disregard of the need to explain their position in plain English. …

Kimberley Strassel has more.

…  On Thursday, Mr. Cruz told me his debt procedure was a matter of principle, though he acknowledged an “additional benefit” was the “transparency” he’d forced on Republicans. He told me he had not “spoken to anyone at SCF in months.” However, when I asked if anyone on his staff had been in contact with outside groups about his debt-ceiling procedure, he acknowledged: “My staff periodically speaks with people across the conservative movement.” He added, “But the debt ceiling vote occurred suddenly and it was a surprise to everybody when Republican leadership asked every Republican senator to consent to letting Harry Reid raise the debt ceiling.”

In addition to Mr. McConnell, conservative groups are targeting senators John Cornyn (Texas), Pat Roberts (Kan.), Thad Cochran (Miss.), and Lindsey Graham (S.C.). While the primary challengers aren’t likely to win (Mr. Bevin is trailing by 25 points), the attacks are hurting incumbents’ general-election prospects.

None of this is about substance. If political principle were at stake, one would assume these outside groups—so keen on purity—would have already dropped Mr. Bevin. It came out recently that he had once praised the very bank bailouts that he has been slapping Mr. McConnell for supporting.

Mr. McConnell holds the same positions as Mr. Cruz on spending, ObamaCare, gun control, etc. His sin? He has refused to ask Republicans to run into the Obama fixed bayonets, a la the Cruz shutdown. Groups like SCF and Heritage Action want to replace the leadership with more of their own kamikaze caucus. They also understand there are far more fundraising dollars and media attention in attacking fellow conservatives.

Republicans have fumbled their last two Senate takeover chances, mostly thanks to infighting. But this latest movement—to take down incumbents over tactics—is a new low. If the GOP remains a minority, this will be why.

Jennifer Rubin compares Cruz and Cassius.

… Cruz is not a dumb man, so surely he knows what he is saying is patently false and unhelpful to his party. But he is, more than anything, an ambitious man. It is wrong to label him a McCarthyite, as some on the left do (for one thing, there were actual communists to worry about in the 1950s). He is, nevertheless, reminiscent of another figure, Shakespearean in fact, with “a lean and hungry look.” He plots, he schemes and he cloaks it all in self-righteousness.

What to do about a man like Cruz? For one thing it’s a farce to have him as a vice chair on the National Senate Republican Committee. He would more properly be placed on the Democratic counterpart. But really, the best Republicans can do is ignore him and support mainstream and responsible candidates. They can reject the grab-bag of flaky and unqualified candidates who would emulate Cruz (Matt Bevin in Kentucky being the prime example). And if Cruz should run for president on a platform of — hmm, grandstanding? — the voters can tell him what they think of him. There is nothing like getting 5 percent of the vote in New Hampshire to take the wind out of a pol’s sails.

This is a shame, not only because he does damage to his party, which has a real chance to take the Senate, but also because it is a waste of actual talent that could be used to win policy arguments. Cruz can be a positive and intelligent force on the right, as he has shown on foreign policy. By doing this, however, he reveals himself to be a two-bit operator for whom ambition crushes principle. He makes far too many enemies for too little positive result. That doesn’t get you to be president, no matter how many talk show hosts demagogue on your behalf.

Daily Caller posts that even Ann Coulter has had enough.  

First conservative icon Thomas Sowell turned on Ted Cruz, now it appears that Ann Coulter is souring on the Texas Republican as well.

Sowell published two columns this week slamming Cruz for being self-serving. Coulter praised the first of Sowell’s columns in a tweet Wednesday.

Later, in an appearance on Fox News’ “Hannity” Wednesday night, Coulter doubled down on her praise of Sowell’s anti-Cruz column: ”I never push anyone else’s column but mine. Today everyone has got to read Thomas Sowell’s article.”

During the “Hannity” segment, Coulter attacked tea party groups for being filled with “shysters” and “conmen,” naming specifically the Senate Conservatives Fund as an example. The Senate Conservatives Fund was a key outside group that supported Cruz in his fight to “Defund Obamacare” last fall, which ultimately led to a government shutdown.

“And these people are just trying to get money off good Americans by saying we’re going after ‘establishment Republicans,” Coulter complained about tea party groups like the Senate Conservatives Fund. “How about going after Democrats?”

“Do not trust anyone who says they are trying to defeat ‘establishment Republicans,’” she added.

Without mentioning Cruz by name, Coulter railed against tea partiers who fail to understand that the “only way to repeal Obamacare is to elect Republicans.”

“It is not to be fighting against Republicans,” she said.

Wired tells us about the systems (algorithms) used by UPS to plan the routes of their drivers. 

Let’s say you’re a driver for UPS. You have an hour and a half left before your shift ends and you still have 12 packages to deliver. Your challenge is to find the shortest route that takes rush-hour traffic, the higher priority of premium packages, the construction zone up ahead, and a slew of other variables into account. Should you try to shave a few miles off your regular route (better mile optimization) or deliver a high-priority package early (higher customer satisfaction)?

In the past we would have used our experience as drivers and our knowledge of local conditions to make a call based on our instincts. But what if we have a technical resource that can help make that call for us? Far from our workforce fearing automation, we need to embrace it — especially if we focus on designing the technology as a coach. …

… The answer lies in data. Take UPS’s On-Road Integrated Optimization and Navigation, or ORION, as an example. The brainchild of Jack Levis, UPS’s director of process management (he worked on it for nearly a decade before the first test implementation in 2008), it uses a variety of data streams — map data, customer information, business protocols, and work rules — to calculate the most streamlined and efficient delivery route … better than any mere mortal ever could. The system uses so many algorithms — nearly 80 pages of math formulas — that Levis describes it as “something Einstein would have on his blackboard.”

Many of us are a lot like UPS drivers in our daily lives: The only difference is we spend our days shepherding virtual bits between destinations rather than driving physical boxes around. But we still face many of the same prioritization and optimization challenges.

Yet one of the biggest misconceptions about software-enabled decision making is the idea that it’s far removed from us. Many people think of data as something technical that only accountants, warehouses, data scientists, or the latest slew of tech technology-as-a-coach startups need to worry about. We don’t recognize the strategic connection between information collection and decision making, or see how data can help increase our own performance. …

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Ron Christie says Justice Thomas is right about the country’s obsession with race.

Are we obsessed with race and racism in our society? Before you answer the question, consider how issues of race are brought up in the media and discussed around the proverbial water cooler. Do we discuss the remarkable progress we’ve made as a country since the dark days of segregation and Jim Crow?

Do we consider how blacks lived in the South in the not too distant past—like my grandparents, who ran the risk of being lynched for looking at someone white? That’s given way to interracial marriage no longer being a taboo. The Supreme Court didn’t repeal the statute banning interracial marriage in Virginia until 1967.  

Unfortunately, very little of the dialogue involving race in America today is positive, uplifting, or inspirational. Instead, there is a compulsion by many on the left to brand their political opponents as being racist. Two specific events occurred in the past week that have me firmly convinced that there is an obsession with race in America today that is destructive to our societal cohesiveness. 

First, consider the pivotal vote held by autoworkers in Chattanooga, Tenn., last Friday in which the majority ruled and decided not to join the United Auto Workers union. Perhaps these workers did not want their dues siphoned off for political activity. Perhaps they were motivated by the union influence in Detroit, which ultimately led to the town seeking bankruptcy protection. Whatever the reason behind their decision, the employees ultimately voted 712-626 against joining the UAW.  Case closed? Hardly. …

Bethany Mandel hopes Hillary will not run.

At a Shabbat (Sabbath meal) this past week, conversation veered into the political realm, as it often does when my husband and I are guests. We began to discuss the likelihood of Hillary Clinton running, the papers recently unearthed by my former colleague Alana Goodman, and about how Bill’s wandering eye could impact Hillary’s campaign. Around the table were three young people, ranging in age from about 9-17. Adult participants in the conversation soon realized that it was impossible to conduct a conversation about the Clintons with children present, and soon, the mother (rightfully) asked for a complete change in subject. Before doing so we reflected how sad it is that a president’s legacy cannot truthfully be discussed with innocent ears listening.

For how long can this mother shield her children from the topic? If Hillary runs, perhaps only a few more months. With the Clintons back in the news, pundits will be (and should be) discussing how ready America is to relive the sex scandals of the ’90s. Anyone who believes that Bill has learned his lesson need only look to Anthony Weiner to understand that old dogs can’t, and won’t, learn new tricks. Bill’s wandering eye, both in the past and, in all likelihood, the future, will be a topic of conversation for as long as a Clinton occupies the White House.

 

The conversation led me to reminisce about how my own understanding about marriage and sexuality was shaped during my childhood by the scandal. Bill Clinton taught me about sex, about truth, and about politics. Do I really want to have the same conversations with my children that my mother had to have with me? These were some of the many questions my poor mother (and all of her friends) had to grapple with: …

Megan McArdle on letting your kids fail. 

I’m on the road this week, giving talks on my new book about learning to fail better: that is, first, to give ourselves the permission to take on challenges where we might very well fail; second, to pick ourselves up as quickly as possible and move on when things don’t work out. This is, I argue, vital on a personal level, as well as vital for the economy, because that’s where innovation and growth come from.

The other day, after one of my talks, a 10th-grade girl came up and shyly asked if I had a minute. I always have a minute to talk to shy high school sophomores, having been one myself.

And this is what she asked me:

“I understand what you’re saying about trying new things, and hard things, but I’m in an International Baccalaureate program and only about five percent of us will get 4.0, so how can I try a subject where I might not get an A?”

I was floored. All I could think as I talked to this poor girl is “America, you’re doing it wrong.”

I was 15 in 10th grade. If you can’t try something new in 10th grade, when can you? …

Peter Berkowitz from the Hoover Institution on how we might improve colleges.

Liberal education is in decline. And professors and administrators at our best liberal arts colleges are hastening its demise.

Much has been written about liberal education’s skyrocketing costs, its failure to provide students with the knowledge and intellectual skills they need to succeed in a competitive globalized economy, and its burdening of students with massive debt. But these big problems are only part of the story.

As important as is its contribution to individual economic well-being and to national prosperity, liberal education’s traditional and proper aim is even more comprehensive and vital to the public interest: to prepare students to seize the wide range of opportunities and meet the full spectrum of responsibilities characteristic of free men and women.

When it lives up to its own standards, liberal education equips citizens with the mental habits needed to engage effectively in political debate and cast votes in an informed manner. Moreover, by acquainting students with the rich variety of opinions within Western civilization about moral, political, and religious life and introducing them to competing opinions in other civilizations, liberal education promotes the virtues of toleration and moderation.

Liberal education is not neutral. When true to itself, it encourages gratitude toward free societies for offering the opportunity to study fundamental ideas and seminal events, and for maintaining—by means of customs, laws, and political institutions—a framework that allows individuals and their communities a wide sphere in which to organize their lives as they think best. …

The cold winter creates a major tourist attraction in Northern Wisconsin. WSJ tells us about Apostle Islands National Lakeshore.

When Dan Gross learned that Lake Superior had frozen over enough this winter for people to walk to the ice caves along Wisconsin’s northern shoreline, he recruited a handful of friends to make the sojourn. On a recent Sunday, they rode their snowmobiles through the woods and arrived on the frozen lake at noon.

“The ice was incredible,” said Mr. Gross, a 46-year-old heating and cooling technician from Des Moines, Iowa, of the majestic formations that decorate a string of caves carved into the sandstone cliffs centuries ago. “But I was really amazed by all the people,” he said of the miles of visitors snaking their way from cave to cave on the frozen lakeshore. “It was like an exodus.

The migration is the handiwork of both mother nature and Facebook. Frigid temperatures gripping the Midwest have sealed the Great Lakes beneath vast sheets of ice, turning Lake Superior into flat, frozen tundra the likes of which has been seen just a couple of times in the past two decades. Since earlier this winter, when waves crashed and then froze against the cliffs, tens of thousands of visitors have flocked to see the resulting icicles, and their stories and pictures have exploded in news media and social networking. The attention has transformed the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore into a veritable museum of snow and ice, and a wildly popular tourist destination. …

CBS News shows us a NASA photo of the frozen great lakes.

A deep freeze has settled in over the Great Lakes this winter and a new image released by NASA shows the astonishing extent of the ice cover as seen from space.

NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image of the lakes on the early afternoon of Feb. 19, 2014. At the time, 80.3 percent of the five lakes were covered in ice, according to the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory (GLERL), part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Earlier this month, ice cover over the Great Lakes hit 88 percent for the first time since 1994. Typically at its peak, the average ice cover is just over 50 percent, and it only occasionally passes 80 percent, according to NASA’s Earth Observatory. [Earth from Above: 101 Stunning Images from Orbit] …

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James Delingpole writes on Mark Steyn’s court case.

When I first read, many months ago, that the notorious US climate scientist Michael Mann was suing the notorious right-wing bastard Mark Steyn for defamation, I admit that I felt a little piqued.

Obviously a libel trial is not something any sane person would wish to court; and naturally I’m a massive fan of Steyn’s. Nevertheless, after all the work I’ve dedicated over the years to goading Mann, I found it a bit bloody annoying that Steyn — a relative latecomer to the climate change debate — should have been the one who ended up stealing all my courtroom glory.

What made me doubly jealous was that this was a case Steyn was guaranteed to win. In the unlikely event it came to court — which I didn’t think it would, given Mann’s longstanding aversion to any form of public disclosure regarding his academic research — the case would fall down on the fact that defamation is so hard to prove in the US, especially when it involves publicly funded semi-celebrities who are expected to take this sort of thing on the chin.

Since then, though, much has changed. It now looks — go to Steynonline.com for the full story — as if Steyn is going to be up there on his own, fighting and financing his case without the support of his magazine, National Review; that the outcome is not as certain as it seemed at the beginning; and that this hero deserves all the help we can give him.

Why? Well, the fact that I even have to explain this shows what a cowardly, snivelling, career-safe, intellectually feeble, morally compromised age we inhabit. By rights, Mann v Steyn should be the 21st-century equivalent of the Scopes monkey trial, with believers in free speech, proponents of the scientific method and sympathetic millionaires and billionaires all piling in to Steyn’s defence with op eds, learned papers, and lavish funds to buy the hottest of hotshot lawyers.

Instead, what do I read? Crap like, ‘Steyn’s out of order: he shouldn’t have been so rude about the judge who mishandled the initial hearing.’ (OK, maybe he shouldn’t — but what are you supposed to say about judges who mishandle your case? ‘Nice job, ma’am’?) …

Jennifer Rubin posts on the disaster the president has crafted with his moves in Syria. 

It must be maddening spinning for the White House. The White House says Obamacare is fine, so the media spinners parrot that again and again — until the White House admits all is not well. The White House insist the president never promised you can keep your health care, so the spinners repeat that one — until the White House sort of apologizes. You do wonder if the pundits ever get tired of being hung out to dry.

Nowhere is the lunacy of the spin more evident than on Syria. You had a flock of liberals declaring the president’s about-face on Syria’s weapons of mass destruction was a brilliant move and he’d been right to insist we have no interests there. And then, three years after conservatives demanded stronger action against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the president declares himself “frustrated.” (Oh, and the WMD deal isn’t really disarming Assad, just as conservative hawks predicted.) I suppose it really has been a disaster all along.

The disaster, of course, is the president’s. It was his insistence on doing nothing — over the objections at various times of Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Robert Gates and Leon Panetta  — that has brought us to this sorry state of affairs. As a former  Republican official put it, “This rests entirely on his shoulders.”

Notwithstanding, we should not absolve aides and advisers of all responsibility here. ABC’s Jonathan Karl mused that Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power is “haunted” by the debacle. He reminds us that her whole career was built on making an argument about the responsibility to protect when you have a crisis like this.  And now she’s saying, it’s the biggest crisis in a generation and the United States is effectively doing nothing. Well, she could have quit. That is what people of principle do in order to call attention to a disastrous and immoral policy. But if that’s personally untenable because the lure of power is too great, she should be “haunted” by the atrocities unfolding on her watch. …

Michael Barone issues a challenge over mandatory minimum sentences. If they’re so unjust, why doesn’t the president issue pardons?

… So I tend to agree with Judge Ponsor when he laments that “defendants sentenced before the [2010 Fair Sentencing Act] was passed still languish today, serving out sentences that virtually all members of Congress now recognize as excessive.” This is indeed an anomaly and seems unjust.

But I disagree sharply with his next sentence. “And there is not a darn thing anyone can do about it.” But there is someone who can do something about it, even in Congress does not follow the judge’s suggestion and pass a law scaling back those sentences.

That person is President Obama. The president can pardon any offender and he can also commute part of a sentence, as George W. Bush did when he commuted Scooter Libby’s jail term but declined to extend a full pardon.

Obama’s rewriting of the Obamacare law is constitutionally dubious; there is a serious argument that he has not been performing his constitutional duty to faithfully execute the law. But the Constitution is clear in giving the president the “Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment” (Article II, Section 2).

Unless my constitutional interpretation is way off, the president could commute the sentences of all or some of those serving time under sentences that could no longer be imposed under the 2010 law, which Judge Ponsor hails and which President Obama signed.

There is a “darn thing” someone could do about the anomaly Judge Ponsor cites. He sits in the Oval Office, where the buck supposedly stops. Perhaps someone should ask him about it.

Oliver Stone normally turns to students seeking affirmation from the immature. This failed recently when he visited a conference of libertarians. John Fund with the story.

… Stone began by trying to make what he must have thought was an outreach to the audience by resurrecting and agreeing with the Old Right chestnut that “Roosevelt lied us into World War II.” He followed that up with highly personal criticism of Obama — claiming, in effect, that the president has been brainwashed by his national-security advisers into becoming pro-war. “The man stunned us with a lack of spine, he’s a weak man,” he mourned.

Many of the students agreed with panel’s general criticism of America’s military commitments. One noted that America still has 54,000 troops in Germany and 39,000 troops in Japan a full 70 years after World War II and a full 25 years after Communism’s collapse. But then a spirited group of Latin American students attending the panel decided to directly challenge Stone’s left-wing support for Latin dictators from Fidel Castro to Hugo Chávez.

Two months before Chávez’s death last year, Stone praised him on CNN, declaring with a straight face: “He represents hope and change, the things that Obama stood for in our country in 2008.” This past Thursday, in anticipation of the event, the Latin American students published an “Open Letter to Oliver Stone” that declared: …

So while hospitals in India are cutting into the work of U. S. brain surgeons, other Indians are after the rocket scientists. The NY Times reports on India’s launch and subsequent control of a mission to orbit Mars. Most amazing is the price tag; just about one tenth of our latest Mars probe.

While India’s recent launch of a spacecraft to Mars was a remarkable feat in its own right, it is the $75 million mission’s thrifty approach to time, money and materials that is getting attention.

Just days after the launch of India’s Mangalyaan satellite, NASA sent off its own Mars mission, five years in the making, named Maven. Its cost: $671 million. The budget of India’s Mars mission, by contrast, was just three-quarters of the $100 million that Hollywood spent on last year’s space-based hit, “Gravity.”

“The mission is a triumph of low-cost Indian engineering,” said Roddam Narasimha, an aerospace scientist and a professor at Bangalore’s JawaharlalNehruCenter for Advanced Scientific Research.

“By excelling in getting so much out of so little, we are establishing ourselves as the most cost-effective center globewide for a variety of advanced technologies,” said Mr. Narasimha.

India’s 3,000-pound Mars satellite carries five instruments that will measure methane gas, a marker of life on the planet. …

Late Night from Andy Malcolm.

Conan: Billy Ray Cyrus has come out with a hip-hop version of ‘Achy Breaky Heart.’ Experts say it’s the first time in music history that fans of hip-hop and country have hated the same thing.

Fallon: Congratulations to my buddy Charlie Sheen. He’s marrying for the fourth time. Charlie said, “I just know this is the woman I’m going to be with for the rest of my February.”

Conan: Boston Market offered a free dessert to couples. So she may be disappointed you took her to Boston Market on Valentine’s Day. But when she left halfway through the meal, you got two free desserts!

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There can be little doubt business people as a type are held in low regard by governments. media, and the academy. In his post on Elon Musk, Streetwise Professor has a good example of why. Musk spends his time trying to get approval and monies from governments, rather than from individuals in free exchange. The bien pensants come to believe all people in business are in the same ways corrupt because that’s all the business folk they see, and they do not have the imagination to realize there is a universe of people in business who want nothing other than to be left alone.

I haven’t written much at all about Elon Musk and Tesla since the middle of last year.  I have no reason to change my opinion that the prices of Tesla and Solar City stock were manipulated in April-May, but by the same token don’t believe that their subsequent increases are primarily the result of manipulation.  Those stock prices are partying like a 1999-era dot com company.  I think the party will end soon, but I don’t know when and I could be wrong.

But my main issue with Musk was not about the stock price.  It was about the fact that all of his companies were heavily dependent on government subsidies and support.  This support socialized the potential losses, and allowed Musk (and other major investors, notably Goldman) to capture the upside.  My point was if his products and business models were so great, he could succeed on his own, by attracting private capital.

One company that I mentioned in passing was SpaceX, his  space launch venture.  Inevitably, this company is dependent on government contracts, given that a very large fraction of space launches carry government payloads. This is something different from SolarCity and Tesla, where the government is providing subsidies but not receiving any product or service in return.  But still, it means that Musk depends crucially on cultivating government support.  Government contracting-especially big ticket contracting-is hardly a pristine activity.  A firm does not succeed or fail at it primarily on the basis of the superiority of its product, but instead on the basis of its ability to influence politicians and bureaucrats. And a lack of scruple is often a feature not a bug in that regard. …

… The poorest people in Brownsville will not benefit the slightest from the SpaceX venture.  But he and his lobbyist successfully importuned the state and county to take taxpayer money and give it to SpaceX by invoking their poverty.  It was utterly cynical for a billionaire to extract tens of millions from Texas taxpayers in the name of the poor Mexican Americans of Brownsville.

I know this is the way the game is played.  And that’s the problem: the game is cynical and wrong.  It is mere rent seeking.  Musk is particularly appalling because he is a rent seeker posing as a technological visionary.  His businesses all depend on extracting rents from the government, which he pockets. …

Power LIne posts on John Kerry’s sudden realization Assad is not keeping up with his part of the bargain.

We are ganging up on John Kerry this morning. Here’s the thing–Kerry has a number of problems, but the most basic is that he isn’t very bright. He doesn’t have a high enough IQ for difficult work. As a senator, he hid his incapacity by ignoring virtually all of his job duties. As Secretary of State, his ineptitude–one might say shocking ineptitude, if this were not the Obama administration–is being exposed.

Earlier today in Jakarta, having finished bloviating about global warming, Kerry complained that Syria’s Bashar Assad has been “stonewalling” in the Geneva peace talks:

Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday accused Syrian President Bashar Assad of stonewalling in peace talks and called on Russia to push its ally to negotiate with opposition leaders.

“Right now, Bashar Assad has not engaged in the discussions along the promised and required standard that both Russia spoke up for and the regime spoke up for,” Kerry said during a press conference in Jakarta.

Of course he is stonewalling, you fool! He is winning. …

More on Klueless Kerry from Power Line.

I see Scott has already commented on this story, but here’s my 2 cents worth, too:

Let’s see if I’ve got this straight: Secretary of State John Kerry, owner of five multi-million dollar mansions along with a luxury yacht, has seen fit to lecture Indonesians (average income in 2012: $3,420) about why  climate change is “perhaps the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction.”

“Because of climate change, it’s no secret that today Indonesia is … one of the most vulnerable countries on Earth,” Kerry told an audience of students at a high-tech U.S.-funded cultural center at a Jakarta mall.  ”It’s not an exaggeration to say that the entire way of life that you live and love is at risk.”

Maybe Kerry thinks every Indonesian can marry a rich condiment heiress or something.

Incidentally, according to World Bank figures, Indonesian per capita greenhouse gas emissions are 1.8 metric tons. The United States: 17.6. Like Al Gore, John Kerry’s per capita emissions are surely a multiple of this, which suggests an obvious first step. …

Time to look at the stunning UAW vote in Tennessee. Michael Barone is first of three.

It’s official: The United Auto Workers lost the representation vote at the Volkswagen Chattanooga plant. The cleverly named nooga.com has the story. The vote was close: 89 percent of workers voted, and they rejected the union by a 712-626 vote.

What’s remarkable about this is that the company and the union colluded in trying to get the workers to vote for union representation. The reason is that Volkswagen’s German union, IG Metall, which under German law has seats on the company’s board, wanted to install the UAW as the workers’ bargaining representatives. If you want to see evidence of this collusion, click on the link and look at the expressions on the faces of Volkswagen Chattanooga President Frank Fischer and UAW leader Gary Casteel. These are not happy campers. They still hold out of the prospect of some kind of workers’ council on which the union would represent the workers. But they seem to clearly understand that most of the plant’s employees don’t want UAW representation.

Why not? My guess is that you could sum it up in one word: Detroit. …

John Steele Gordon calls it the “UAW’s Waterloo.”

… as the American economy has undergone profound change in the last sixty years, labor law has not kept pace. The Wagner Act dates to 1935 and the Taft-Hartley Act to 1947. Like the unions themselves they are dinosaurs. So why do the unions continue to have such a large place in American politics while they have an ever-shrinking place in the American economy? The answer, of course, is the “mother’s milk of politics,” money. Unions are the single biggest source of funds for Democratic causes and candidates.

According to Opensecrets.org, of the top ten political donors in the last 25 years, six are unions. And they all overwhelmingly donated to Democratic causes and candidates. The UAW, for instance, has donated $41.7 million over the last 25 years. That’s well over twice what the infamous Koch brothers have donated, mostly to Republican causes. (The Koch brothers actually gave 8 percent of their money to Democratic causes and candidates.)

Of the UAW’s donations, 71 percent went to Democrats and zero percent went to Republicans. The other 29 percent went to organizations not formally affiliated with either party but it’s a safe bet they are left-leaning. Unions can also mobilize large numbers of “volunteers” for phone banks and get-out-the-vote efforts. …

More from Jennifer Rubin.

… The Democratic Party has become reliant on Big Labor to an extent not always appreciated by the voters and pundits. If you look at groups leading in independent expenditures between 1989 and 2014, the Service Employees International Union dwarfs all others ($83 million). In the top 15, 11 are labor unions. There is nothing to match the boots on the ground, phone banks and “volunteers” unions can enlist, almost exclusively for Democrats.

Despite its political power, or maybe in spite of it, Big Labor is dissolving in the workplace. From a high in the 1950s when membership peaked at 35 percent of the national workforce, only 6.7 percent of private-sector workers were unionized.  If not for public-sector employees (about 35 percent), Big Labor — with all those dues-paying members — would be kaput. And even there, as we saw in Wisconsin, once  the closed shop is abolished, employees stream out of public-sector unions.

On Friday Big Labor took a huge hit in Tennessee when, even with the help of management, the UAW couldn’t organize the Volkswagen plant. As the Wall Street Journal editorial board put it, “This wasn’t merely one more failed union organizing attempt. The UAW and its chief Bob King spent years working toward this vote as part of its strategy to organize plants in the American South, and all the stars were aligned in its favor.” That proverbial dog company thought so, too. …

And Jason Riley posts on the speculation president bystander tried, ineffectually of course, to interfere for the UAW.

We may never know for certain, but some are speculating that President Obama‘s attempt to help the United Auto Workers organize a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., may have done more harm than good.

The union-organizing vote failed, 712-626, despite the fact that VW management had given union officials plenty of time and opportunity to make their case. Moreover, the UAW had the White House on its side. Just hours before three days of voting ended on Friday, Mr. Obama told Democratic lawmakers in a closed-door meeting that opponents of the union’s effort “are more interested in German shareholders than U.S. workers,” according to Reuters.

Writing in the Chattanoogan on Tuesday, columnist Roy Exum pondered “what unexpected role a markedly unpopular Barack Obama may have played in the stunning defeat.” The president’s approval rating is 43 percent nationwide, based on the Real Clear Politics average, but it’s only about 30 percent in the Volunteer State.

When Mr. Obama “tossed in his two cents’ worth in a way that was clearly designed to be leaked, it isn’t that big a stretch to believe the polarizing Prez may have inadvertently swayed a few emotional votes among the solidly-conservative work force,” wrote Mr. Exum

This is (not) the first time that the president has waded into a state issue on behalf of unions, only to find himself on the losing side after the dust had settled. Back in 2011 when Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was pushing collective-bargaining reforms that were vehemently opposed by Big Labor, Mr. Obama weighed in on behalf of his union allies. Not only did the reforms pass but Mr. Walker, a Republican, later prevailed in a recall election against a Democratic opponent backed by unions and the president.

At this point, labor might be forgiven for asking the president simply to butt out of such matters going forward.

The Atlantic with a post on how much 401K fees can shrink your retirement funds.

… The answer is a lot more than you think. (No cheating with a calculator before we get to the big reveal). Now, let’s say you contribute $3,000 to your 401(k) every year, which is a little more than the national average, starting when you’re 25. Let’s also say that you’re choosing between two investments: the lowest-cost index fund with a 0.08 percent fee, and a typical managed stock fund with, according to Morningstar, a 1.33 percent fee. And finally, let’s say that, though you don’t know it, they both return 7 percent a year, because, as we saw above, most managed funds don’t beat the market.

This 1.25 percent difference in annual fees adds up to a six-figure difference in lifetime earnings. That’s because you don’t just lose the money you pay in fees. You lose the returns you could have had on the money you pay in fees, too. As you can see in the chart below, this compounding effect doesn’t matter much for the first 20 years or so, but really accelerates after that. If you chose the lowest-cost index fund, you’d have $15,000 more at age 45, $55,000 more at 55, and $159,000 more at 65. That would balloon to $257,000 more if you waited to retire at 70. …

Interesting book on JFK the Conservative reviewed by the Washington Times.

Who would have thought it could have happened?

The scene: A Democrat in the White House is a supply-side tax-cutter (before Ronald Reagan, no less). Moreover, he goes out of his way to condemn communism, and not just the foreign left-wing dictators (That was easy then. Today’s leftists brag about vacations in the Castros’ Cuba.) Beyond that, this president condemned the infiltrators on our own soil. (Today, it would be called a “witch hunt.”)

America, meet the real John F. Kennedy, as viewed by Ira Stoll, revisionist fact-checker. In “JFK, Conservative,” this author and journalist acknowledges the liberal “reforms” the 35th president promised the nation, including education and medical care for the elderly (pre-Medicare, and surely predating today’s wobbling Obamacare). …

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Walter Russell Mead on the disaster in Syria.

This is what a policy looks like when it dies and goes to hell. The FT reports that violence is ramping up in Syria, with Assad agents using devastating “barrel bombs” against rebel areas. More:

According to the opposition Syrian National Council, 20,000 people have been killed in barrel-bomb campaigns since the start of the conflict in 2011. A Turkish official said about 2,000 had been killed since peace talks began in Geneva last month. The Damascus reg­ime has failed to offer an explanation for the bombing, but insists in its official media and during the Geneva talks that it is fighting a war against terrorists [...]

Residents say not a single building in rebel-controlled parts of Aleppo has been spared from damage in the bombing. Pictures from the city show entire districts reduced to ruins. One video shows people digging a toddler from the rubble. The little girl survived.

The President can only count his one remaining blessing: the press is still busy trying to shield itself from understanding the full damage this administration’s painfully inept Syria policy has done. Our Syria response has harmed America’s position, our alliances in the Middle East, and our relationships around the world — to say nothing of the humanitarian disaster we’ve implicated ourselves in.

To bluster heroically about how ‘Assad must go’, then do nothing as he stays; to epically proclaim grandiose red lines and make military threats that fall humiliatingly flat; to grasp with pathetic eagerness an obviously bogus Russian negotiating ploy; to sputter ineffectually as the talks collapse…it is rare that American diplomacy is conducted this poorly for so long a period of time.

To some degree we sympathize with those in the mainstream media who turn their eyes from the sight. It’s not just the decomposing corpse of Obama’s Syria/Russia policy that’s stinking up the joint. The comforting assumptions and diplomatic ideas of a whole generation of ambitious Washington foreign policy wonks are being discredited. They thought to build a new Democratic consensus foreign policy on the tomb of George W. Bush’s failures, but “smart diplomacy” turns out to be deeply flawed. The left is moving toward the kind of meltdown moment that many neocons had as the Bush foreign policy went off the rails. …

More kudos for Jonathan Turley, this time from Peter Wehner. 

During the period of the impeachment of Bill Clinton, there were few intellectually honest liberals to be found. George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley was one of them.

Professor Turley is a liberal who was deeply troubled by President Clinton’s abuse of power and violations of federal law. I recall having had lunch with Professor Turley and William Bennett during that period, and being mightily impressed with Turley’s independence of judgment.

Some 15 years later, I still am.

Professor Turley appeared on FNC’s The Kelly File to discuss his concerns about President Obama’s willingness, even eagerness, to “rewrite or ignore or negate federal law.” Mr. Obama’s repeated and unilateral actions amount to “the usurpation of authority that’s unprecedented in this country.” The liberal “cult of personality” that has grown up around the president worries Professor Turley, who says we are “turning a blind eye to a fundamental change in our system.”

“I think many people will come to loathe that they remained silent during this period,” according to Turley. …

Turns out Bill de Blasio is really a typically hypocritical leftist as he tries to suppress charter schools in New York City. His opponent there is Eva Moscowitz who is the subject of this weekend’s interview in the Wall Street Journal. 

For several months running, the Bill and Eva Show has been the talk of New York City politics. He is the new mayor, Bill de Blasio, an unapologetic old-school liberal Democrat, scourge of the rich and of public charter schools. She is Eva Moskowitz, fellow Democrat and educational-reform champion who runs the city’s largest charter network.

How did Ms. Moskowitz, a hero to thousands of New Yorkers of modest means whose children have been able to get a better education than their local public schools offered, end up becoming public enemy No. 1?

She is the city’s most prominent, and vocal, advocate for charter schools, and therefore a threat to the powerful teachers union that had been counting the days until the de Blasio administration took over last month from the charter-friendly Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Assailed by Mayor de Blasio and union leaders, Ms. Moskowitz is fighting back with typically sharp elbows.

“A progressive Democrat should be embracing charters, not rejecting them,” she says. “It’s just wacky.”

As she reminds every audience, the 6,700 students at her 22 Success Academy Charter Schools are overwhelmingly from poor, minority families and scored in the top 1% in math and top 7% in English on the most recent state test. Four in five charters in the city outperformed comparable schools.

“We think one of the sins of American education is intellectually underestimating children,” she says. “It’s so much more engaging for kids when they’re challenged.” Her other complaint about many traditional schools: “It’s incredibly boring.” While those public schools don’t have her flexibility to design a curriculum and hire and fire teachers, “engagement doesn’t cost any money. It can be done tomorrow if the adults decide that boredom is not acceptable and you embrace a curriculum that’s interesting and rigorous.”

Such astringent assessments of public education-as-usual are fighting words in New York and other cities where schools find themselves struggling to explain chronic underperformance. …

NY Post editors still want to hear from Lois Lerner.

The American people still need to hear from Lois Lerner. That’s a point that can’t be made often enough.

Remember her? She’s the IRS official who gave a statement before Congress declaring herself innocent of any wrongdoing — and then promptly took the Fifth.

Recently, Congress unearthed another IRS e-mail on which she was copied, talking about taking “off-plan” a discussion about how to harass the 501(c)4 groups the IRS had targeted. Meanwhile, leaks from officials involved in the investigation claim the FBI has not found ­anything criminal.

That’s an amazing finding, given the statement by the AmericanCenter for Law and Justice, which represents the IRS targets, that the FBI hadn’t interviewed a single of the center’s 41 ­clients. …

For some reason E. J. Dionne thought he had the intellectual firepower to take on Hayek and his followers. Foolish man. Volokh Conspiracy post deals with him.

Last week, E.J. Dionne Jr. penned a column in the Washington Post that blamed adherence to the tenets of the Austrian school of economics for gridlock in Washington. Well, sort of. He seemed to say that Austrian economics simultaneously was an obscure set of ideas of which no one has heard (except Ron Paul) and is yet powerful enough to provide the rallying cry for the Republican Party in Washington. More important, he says that Austrian economics is troublesome as a practical matter by blocking activist-government Keynesian-style interventions and deficit spending that would spur the economy and bring about greater wealth redistribution, but Austrian economics is wrong as a theoretical and historical matter. (As an aside, listening to the recording of Ron Paul’s speech, it doesn’t sound like he says “We’re all Austrians now.”  He says, “I’m waiting for the day when we can say ‘We’re all Austrians now.’”).

Dionne’s column is problematic in two ways.  First, he completely misrepresents the central argument of Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, which seems to be his central target. Second, he fails to accurately reflect the debate over the historical record of Keynesianism during the Great Depression and in particular the “stagflation” episode of the 1970s, which shattered the Nixon-era consensus on the wisdom of Keynesian economics. …

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James Taranto examines the cases of liberals who say they’re tired of defending obamacare, and asks an important question.”Why is it they think they are responsible for the defense?”

Ron Fournier is as mad as hell and he’s not going to take it anymore.

Correction: That was the late Howard Beale. Fournier, National Journal’s senior political columnist and editorial director, is going to take it for at least a while longer, and he isn’t so much mad as tapped out, or nearly so. In a recent column he explains, as the headline puts it, “Why I’m Sick of Defending ObamaCare.”

Fox News Channel’s Kirsten Powers feels the same way. On “Special Report With Bret Baier,” she paraphrased Fournier and enthusiastically assented: “The headline was ‘Why I’m Getting Tired of Defending ObamaCare,’ and I’m going to say, ‘Amen, brother.’ . . . People who have supported this law, who support universal health care, are constantly put in a position where they have to defend the president, who has really incompetently put this together, rolled it out.”

Which raises a question: What made Fournier and Powers think they had to defend ObamaCare in the first place? In Powers’s case, an answer suggests itself: Cast in the role of “Fox News liberal,” perhaps she feels obliged to stay on that side most of the time (though one suspects her Fox bosses would be tolerant of that particular heterodoxy).

But Fournier? He’s not supposed to be a partisan. “Like so many political columnists inside the Beltway, Fournier regularly exhibits a devotion to even handedness,” notes Mediaite.com’s Noah Rothman. “With a near pious commitment, no criticism of the Democratic Party can be issued without a commensurate nod to the faults and foibles of the Republican Party, and vice versa.” …

Kathleen Parker writes on white house spin.

It is easy these days to imagine that one is living in a fairy tale, albeit a dreary one.

In fairy tales, as in Washington, things are true that can’t possibly be — and what is not true can be defended by tilting the facts a certain way and catching the light just so.

Objective truth, it seems, has gone the way of trolls, goblins and gremlins, by which one should not infer that Truth has taken up residence in the U.S. Congress.

Cognitive dissonance is a rational response to recent news that Obamacare will reduce the workforce, which is hardly helpful to the economy, and insure less than half of the uninsured — from 55 million down to 31 million.

Let’s see if we can iron this thing out a bit. First, a few indisputable facts:

We are recovering from a recession, slowly. We continue to hope for improved employment numbers, even though we’re now told the jobless rate doesn’t matter anymore. Only about 3 million people have signed up for health insurance through the new marketplaces, well below expectations.

But, says the White House, things are looking good. …

Hot Air’s Allahpundit posts on Jonathan Turley’s complaint that the left’s indifference to presidential power grabs is beginning to border on a cult of personality.

“Beginning”?

There’s nothing here that you haven’t heard before if you watched him testify before Congress in December but it’s still worth watching for two reasons. One is his tone, which has grown darker and more apocalyptic since then. More than once here he warns that Obama’s “enablers” are destined to rue the fact that they remained silent “during this period.” Precedents are being set that will be built on by future presidents of both parties; for all the complaining about executive overreach by Democrats circa 2006 and Republicans today, the cold realities of power are what they are. I’m tempted to say that it was O’s latest unlawful delay to ObamaCare’s employer mandate that soured Turley’s mood, but I don’t think that’s it. I think it was the State of the Union, where Obama embraced bypassing Congress as formal policy. Look out for the phrase “borders on authoritarianism.” …

NPR Blog posts on the weight reducing power of whole milk. That’s right, it helps you keep pounds off. How’s that for counter-intuitive? 

I have to admit, I melt at the creaminess of full-fat yogurt.

It’s an indulgence that we’re told to resist. And I try to abide. (Stealing a bite of my daughter’s YoBaby doesn’t count, does it?)

The reason we’re told to limit dairy fat seems pretty straight forward. The extra calories packed into the fat is bad for our waistlines. That’s the assumption.

But what if dairy fat isn’t the dietary demon we’ve been led to believe? New research suggests we may want to look anew.

Consider the findings of two recent studies that conclude the consumption of whole fat dairy is linked to reduced body fat.

In one paper, published by Swedish researchers in the Scandinavian Journal of Primary Health Care, middle-aged men who consumed high-fat milk, butter and cream were significantly less likely to become obese over a period of 12 years compared to men who never or rarely ate high-fat dairy.

Yep, that’s right. The butter and whole-milk eaters did better at keeping the pounds off. …

Late night humor from Andrew Malcolm.

Fallon: Did you see the Sochi Olympics Opening Ceremony? There was a massive fireworks display. And that was just when someone plugged a hairdryer in at the hotel.

Conan: We just had Groundhog Day. The groundhog came out, saw five minutes of the Super Bowl and then went right back into his hole.

Leno: Was that the worst Super Bowl ever? Colorado fans went straight from recreational marijuana to medicinal marijuana.

Leno: The Broncos just could not move the ball. The last time I saw a Bronco move that slow was in LA and OJ was in it.

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In an effort to describe the healthcare rollout, Bart Simpson is quoted by John Podhoretz, “I didn’t think it was physically possible, but this both sucks and blows.”

I could rage on and on about Monday’s gobsmacking announcement that the Obama administration is once again unilaterally delaying a key aspect of its health-care law and what this act of astonishing royalism suggests about the president and his fundamental disrespect for the American system of checks and balances.

But I’m not going to. Instead, with all the dignity that a 52-year-old man and father of three can bring to the task, I will offer these observations instead:

Neener neener neener.

Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah.

Face it, all of you who celebrated and wept and danced when it passed back in March 2010, all of you who viewed it as the historic moment of transformation for the United States: This law is a lemon.

As Bart Simpson once said, “I didn’t think it was physically possible, but this both sucks and blows.” …

Charles Krauthammer on a few of the ways obamacare hurts jobs.

… But Obamacare’s war on jobs goes beyond voluntary idleness. The administration is now conceding, inadvertently but unmistakably, Obamacare’s other effect — involuntary job loss. On Monday, the administration unilaterally postponed and weakened the employer mandate, already suspended through 2015, for yet another year.

But doesn’t this undermine the whole idea of universal health coverage? Of course it does, but Obamacare was so structured that it is crushing small business and killing jobs. It creates a major incentive for small businesses to cut back to under 50 employees to avoid the mandate. Your business becomes a 49er by either firing workers or reducing their hours to below 30 a week. Because that doesn’t count as full time, you escape both the employer mandate to buy health insurance and the fine for not doing so.

With the weakest recovery since World War II, historically high chronic unemployment and a shockingly low workforce participation rate, the administration correctly fears the economic consequences of its own law — and of the political fallout for Democrats as millions more Americans lose their jobs or are involuntarily reduced to part-time status.

Conservatives have been warning about this for five years. This is not rocket science. Both the voluntary and forced job losses were utterly predictable. Pelosi insisted we would have to pass the law to know what’s in it. Now we know.

Jennifer Rubin provides a link to Jon Stewart’s takedown of the president’s latest ambassador picks. Follow the link in her post and wait through a 30 second spot. It’s worth your time.

… How in the world can the Democrats confirm these people? Frankly, we’re going to get a whole lot more of these ridiculous nominees due to the evisceration of the filibuster. The temptation to do so increases, and the administration can’t very well turn to their big shot donors and say, “I’d like to, but the Senate you know . . .” If there were ever the perfect example of why the filibuster is needed this is it. …

… This is yet another instance in which politics trumps virtually everything else in the administration. Sending unqualified ambassadors to important nations is actually minor compared to shifting the Afghanistan withdrawal to get troops home before the 2012 election. It is ironic that the president who came into office as a purported wonkish intellectual, an ideal technocrat, has in so many instances reflected the worst of mindless partisan politics.

It’s hard to remember that voters took the transformational and inspirational rhetoric of 2008 seriously. All of that has gone by the wayside as Obama has dug in both rhetorically and ideologically. But what likely brings both Democrats and Republicans together is their horror at a president who lacks the competence and will to govern well. The ambassadorial picks are only the tip of iceberg, of course. It’s small compared to Obamacare or the disastrous Syria policy, but it is all of a piece.

And it’s not just our friends on the right who are disgusted by the ambassador picks. Here’s WaPo editors.

… All presidents appoint some ambassadors who are not professional diplomats. Most have been harmless; a few have been stellar. Mr. Obama, however, has considerably stretched the boundaries of previous presidential records, both in quantity and in apparent disregard for quality. The president promised in 2009 to increase professional appointments, and the State Department said last Friday that it aims for a 70-30 split between career and political ambassadors. Yet, so far in his second term, 53 percent of Mr. Obama’s appointments have been political, according to the American Foreign Service Association. A third have been fundraisers for his campaigns.

The bundlers are going not just to London, Brussels and Vienna, where their roles may be largely decorative, but also to countries where relations with the United States are troubled. In addition to Mr. Mamet, Mr. Obama is dispatching fundraiser and soap-opera producer Colleen Bradley Bell to Hungary, a NATO country whose government has a disturbing record of undermining democratic institutions. At her confirmation hearing, Ms. Bell was unable to spell out U.S. interests in Budapest other than “to promote business opportunities, increase trade.”

Mr. Obama’s new ambassador to Norway, George Tsunis, raised $1.3 million for the Democratic Party in 2012 but didn’t know at the time of his hearing last month that Norway has a king but not a president.

Ambassadorial appointments for small allies such as Norway or tough partners including Hungary and Argentina matter because their governments rarely receive the attention of high-level officials in Washington and yet require skilled diplomacy. It’s no wonder that Argentina, the third-largest economy in Latin America but a perennial trouble spot, was tended by career diplomats under the four presidents who preceded Mr. Obama. His use of the Buenos Aires embassy and so many others as political plums signals a disregard for U.S. foreign interests.

Tammy Bruce calls him the “Mrs. Fletcher of Politics.”

First, it’s important that you know I think President Obama was born in the United States. I also think he may be the love child of the television character Mrs. Jessica Fletcher of “Murder, She Wrote.”

Think about it: Wherever Mrs. Fletcher went, someone ended up dead. Wherever Mr. Obama goes, a part of America gets punched in the face, falls into a coma or dies. Oh, sure, both characters seem nice enough, but inviting either to dinner (or to run the country) portends something disastrous.

When Mr. Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize for waking up one morning, we should have known it would invite chaos. They give him the prize, he lobs missiles into Libya, loses Afghanistan and Iraq and Libya to al Qaeda, sides with a tyrant against the Egyptian people, and draws a faux “red line” for Syria (did he hear it in a movie?), managing to make Bashar Assad even more powerful than he was before.

Ask the Syrian people (those who haven’t been gassed to death yet), what they think of Mr. Obama’s foreign-policy prowess.

Recently, a Reuters report wondered if the Japan-China relationship was “at its worst.” Well, if Mr. Obama’s track record continues, it will be soon. …

Tech Dirt says yup Direct TV has dropped the Weather Channel and instead is showing people the weather.

The Weather Channel has been well-deserving of mockery over the last few years, whether its for their efforts to sex up storms by naming them (in the process creating a nation of weather neurotics who become hysterical about drizzle), or for an ocean of TV and website content that has absolutely nothing to do with the weather (here’s some funny faces, yuk yuk). As such, their recent battle with DirecTV over retransmission fees doesn’t find the company getting much sympathy. Especially when the channel tries to argue that people will die without their inane assortment of non-weather-related content.

Normally in such retransmission disputes the content company has some leverage over the satellite or cable TV provider because what they’re withholding has somewhat irreplaceable value to the viewer (say, like “Breaking Bad”). In The Weather Channel’s case, their belief that they somehow held an exclusive over weather forecasting, combined with the fact that they have increasingly gotten worse at their one and only job, has given DirecTV the upper hand in the ongoing feud. After pulling the channel from the lineup back in January, DirecTV continues to battle The Weather Channel in a very simple way — by simply offering viewers the weather for a change …

CNS News reports Lake Superior most likely will be frozen over this year.

Lake Superior hasn’t completely frozen over in two decades.

But an expert on Great Lakes ice says there’s a “very high likelihood” that the three-quadrillion-gallon lake will soon be totally covered with ice thanks to this winter’s record-breaking cold.

The ice cover on the largest freshwater lake in the world hit a 20-year record of 91 percent on Feb. 5, 1994.

Jay Austin, associate professor at the Large Lakes Observatory in Duluth, Minn., told CNSNews.com that he expects that record will be broken this winter when the most northern of the Great Lakes becomes totally shrouded in ice. …

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If you’re wondering where Mark Steyn has been lately, Robert Tracinski has an update on the lawsuit filed against Steyn, National Review, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

The global warming hysteria is disastrous enough in its intended goal, which is to ban the use of our cheapest and most abundant fuels and force us to limp along on “alternative energy” sources that are insufficient to support an industrial civilization. But along the way, the global warming campaign is already wrecking our science and politics by seeking to establish a dogma that cannot legally be questioned.

The critical point in this campaign is a defamation lawsuit by global warming promoter Michael Mann against Mark Steyn, National Review, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

When the “Climategate” e-mails were leaked five years ago, a lot of us speculated that it could all end up in the courts, given the evidence that climate scientists were pocketing large sums of government money on the basis of a scientific consensus they were manipulating behind the scenes. But it’s typical of our upside-down political and cultural environment that when this issue does reach the courts, it will be in the form of a lawsuit against the climate skeptics.

Steyn and the others are being sued for criticizing Mann’s scientific arguments. In the case of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, for example, they’re being sued for Rand Simberg’s complaint that Mann “has molested and tortured data.” (See a summary of the case here.) Frankly, I’m not sure how I escaped this lawsuit myself. I shall have to review what I have written and see if my language was not sufficiently inflammatory. Perhaps I don’t have pockets deep enough to be worth looting. Or perhaps I’m not a big enough target to be worth intimidating and bankrupting. Note the glee with which the left slavers at the prospect of taking out a prominent voice on the right, with one leftist gloating that “it’s doubtful that National Review could survive” losing the case.

(Steyn points out that National Review is insured against such lawsuits and will survive. …

Victor Davis Hanson posts on Icarus In Chief. .

In the last two weeks, we learned that Bashar Assad has dismantled only 5 percent of his WMD arsenal, despite President Obama’s soaring rhetoric to the contrary. Russia violated a long-observed agreement with the U.S. about testing missiles. Iran’s take on the negotiations over its bomb program bears no resemblance to our interpretation. Chinese officials now happily leak fantastic stories about using their military to punish Japan. All that is trumped by veiled threats from the SunniGulf monarchies, terrified of Iran, to buy a bomb or two from Pakistan. We hear other rumors that even China thinks the new leadership in North Korea is unhinged and is not worried about friendly warnings from Beijing.

Whether all these incidents are minor or serious, and whether they are random or interconnected and perceived as proof of the loss of U.S. deterrence, depends on which particular bad actor is studying them to try to guess whether the Obama administration will do anything should a provocateur start a war or attempt to redraw a regional map.

In short, our Icarus-in-Chief, without much foreign-policy experience but with youthful zeal and good intentions, soared far too high for his flimsy waxen wings. Now they are melting, and as the American commander-in-chief careens back to earth, lots of those below are wondering what will come next. Still, there is a lot of irony as Obama freefalls to earth.

Everyone assumed the Europeans were conveniently pacifist and had eroded their defenses because they could — given the fact that the United States had guaranteed the safety of Europe throughout the Cold War and for another quarter-century after it ended. Americans accepted that Europeans could afford to ankle-bite the interventionist United States because the latter’s pledge to the alliance was unquestionable, and such were the natural psychological gymnastics of patron and client.

Then came the waxen Obama soaring on hope and change …

David Harsanyi says “obamacare is just another word for laws we ignore together.”

… Normally, when policy is as burdensome and ungainly as the Affordable Care Act has been, an honest person might admit that perhaps something isn’t exactly right with the law itself. Not today. A never-ending fount of partisan defensiveness makes it impossible to rethink — much less repeal — any part of Obamacare.

So, question: when was the last time policy was executed as chaotically and with such little regard for the law?  I don’t want to sound like a troglodyte, but the president, as head of the executive branch of the federal government is constitutionally obligated to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” not implement laws in an expedient manner, or a more prudent manner, or even in a way that he believes is more moral or a helpful for people struggling to find affordable health care. This is why we write bills down and debate them prior to passage. Or, at least, it used to be.

Jonathan Tobin says delays in the healthcare act won’t save Dems in November. 

From its inception, the strategy behind the Obama administration’s implementation of ObamaCare has been simple: to frontload the benefits and postpone the pain and costs of this massive government intrusion into the private sector for as long as possible. This deceitful approach enabled President Obama run for reelection in 2012 on the spurious promise of extending insurance coverage to the poor and those with pre-existing conditions without being held accountable for the problems with the law that would only become apparent in his second term. Over the course of the last year, as the president’s signature accomplishment debuted with a disastrous rollout, the administration has retreated bit by bit from its insistence on implementing the entire unwieldy and gargantuan edifice on the American people immediately after Obama was safely ensconced in his second term. A dysfunctional website and the president’s broken promises about patients being able to keep their coverage and their doctors has led to the law being dismantled piece by piece as various elements were delayed. Today, yet another element of the law was similarly postponed, by executive order. As the New York Times reports:

The Obama administration announced Monday that it would again delay enforcement of a federal requirement for certain employers to provide health insurance to employees, giving medium-size companies extra time to comply. The “employer mandate,” which had already been delayed to Jan. 1, 2015, will now be phased-in beyond that date for some businesses with more than 50 employees.

The motivation for this latest delay is transparently political. By delaying yet one more element of the law until after the midterm elections, the administration hopes to save some faltering Democratic red-state incumbents who, unlike the president, are faced with the difficult task of running for reelection in the wake of the ObamaCare rollout. …

WaPo blogger says lots of Dems running for re-election have no interest in being near the president.

… Several of the Democrats facing reelection in 2014 hail from dark red districts in states such as Alaska, Arkansas and Louisiana — the regions of the country where Obama is the most unpopular. Conventional wisdom would dictate that those candidates would attempt to keep their heads down — distancing themselves from the Affordable Care Act and avoiding joint appearances with Obama during his official visits to their states. Several of the most vulnerable Democratics Senators are already publicly distanced themselves from Obama following last month’s State of the Union.

“Overall, I’m disappointed with the President’s State of the Union address because he was heavy on rhetoric, but light on specifics about how we can move our country forward,” said  Arkansas Sen. Mark Pryor. “I’ll work with the President when I think he’s right, but oppose him when I think he’s wrong… I’ll continue to oppose his agenda when it’s bad for Arkansas and our country.”

Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu used her first campaign ad of the cycle to criticize the implementation of the federal health-care law, while North Carolina Sen. Kay Hagan was a no-show when Obama appeared in her state to speak at N.C.State last month. And here’s Sen. Mark Begich on Obama: “If he wants to come up [to Alaska], I’m not really interested in campaigning [with President Obama].” …

Debra Saunders posts on the Clintons who are AWOL in the war on women.

Do Americans want another Clinton in the White House? As former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton flirts with running in 2016, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., also a potential White House candidate, has put an interesting spin on Bill Clinton’s White House years. Democrats shouldn’t accuse the GOP of waging a “war on women,” he recently told “Meet the Press,” because President Clinton was a “sexual predator” with former intern Monica Lewinsky.

The next skirmish in the war on the war on women came from the Washington Free Beacon, which reported on papers archived at the University of Arkansas Libraries by Diane Blair, a deceased political science professor and close friend of Hillary’s. According to Blair’s notes, in 1998, the then first lady told her friend that her husband’s relations with Lewinsky — a “narcissistic loony toon” — represented “gross inappropriate behavior,” but it was “consensual,” as in “not a power relationship.”

One of the uglier archived documents is a 1992 campaign memo written by attorneys Nancy McFadden, now chief of staff to California Gov. Jerry Brown, and Loretta Lynch, president of the California Public Utilities Commission from 2000 to 2002. Under the heading “Defensive Research: Tying up ends and seeing ahead,” the memo’s first item no doubt referred to Gennifer Flowers, who said she had an affair with Bill Clinton:

“Exposing GF: completely as a fraud, liar and possible criminal to stop this story and related stories, prevent future non-related stories and expose press inaction and manipulation.”

Six years later, President Clinton admitted under oath to having had sex with Flowers, so it turns out Flowers wasn’t the “liar” in this little tale. Didn’t matter. With both Flowers and Lewinsky, Clinton operatives’ first impulse was to smear the women as liars. …

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David Harsanyi puts the olympics in proper context. 

A few months prior to the 2008 Summer Olympics games in Beijing, there was an Olympic torch running ceremony in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa. There, the nation’s Communist Party leader, Zhang Qingli, declared that “China’s red flag with five stars will forever flutter high above this land” before dropping a bit Jesse Myerson-ish rhetoric on folks, explaining that China would “totally smash the splittist schemes of the Dalai Lama clique.”

Qingli saw the Olympics as optimal moment to launch into some political haranguing, because the Olympics is a political event. Always has been. And sporadically, regimes in various stages of authoritarianism, say the Nazis or the Chinese Communists or the Russian Putinists, use this overhyped and overrated sporting exhibition to try and convince others of the superiority of their regimes. This is why the Germans made a spectacle in 1936, why the Soviets spent decades trying to create Ivan Dragos — and also why, the 1980 United States ice hockey victory over Soviet Union team was, for many of us, the greatest sports moment of all time.

Here’s how Charles Lane put it in a superb column detailing the uselessness of the event:

Whatever might be said for that idea in theory, it hasn’t panned out in practice. The ostensibly apolitical Games have been marred by several boycotts — of Montreal in 1976 (by African nations protesting apartheid), of Moscow in 1980 (by the United States and other Western countries protesting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan) and of Los Angeles in 1984 (by communist countries retaliating for 1980).

The Games also have created a target for extremists, from the Palestinian terrorists who killed 11 Israeli athletes at Munich in 1972 to ultra-rightist Eric Rudolph, who placed a deadly bomb at the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta. Consequently, these celebrations of international conviviality proceed under heavy military guard.

On the bright side, Sochi has been utter embarrassment for Vladimir Putin …

Victor Davis Hanson says California has two droughts; the first is lack of water, the second is lack of common sense.

There is little snow in the state’s towering Sierra Nevada mountains, the source of much of the surface water that supplies the state’s populated center and south. The vast Central Valley aquifer is being tapped as never before, as farms and municipalities deepen wells and boost pump size. Too many straws are now competing to suck out the last drops at the bottom of the collective glass. 

The vast 4-million-acre farming belt along the west side of the Central Valley is slowly drying up. Unlike valley agriculture to the east, which still has a viable aquifer, these huge farms depend entirely on surface water deliveries from the distant and usually wet northern part of the state. So if the drought continues, billions of dollars of Westside orchards and vineyards will die, row cropland will lay fallow, and farm-supported small towns will likewise dry up. …

… Yet there are really two droughts — nature’s and its man-made twin. In the early 1980s, when the state had not much more than half its current population, an affluent coastal corridor convinced itself that nirvana was possible, given the coastal world-class universities, the new dot.com riches of Silicon Valley, the year-round temperate weather, and the booming entertainment, tourism, and wine industries. …

… The California disease is characteristic of comfortable postmodern societies that forget the sources of their original wealth. The state may have the most extensive reserves of gas and oil in the nation, the largest number of cars on the road — and the greatest resistance to drilling for fuel beneath its collective feet. After last summer’s forest fires wiped out a billion board feet of timber, we are still arguing over whether loggers will be allowed to salvage such precious lumber, or instead should let it rot to enhance beetle and woodpecker populations.

In 2014, nature yet again reminded California just how fragile — and often pretentious — a place it has become.

Just north of CA is another state making bad choices Joel Kotkin has the story of Oregon which has some factories that have fled CA, but unfortunately also has some ideas that came from some of CA’s flakiest. 

Oregon is a beautiful place, and, for many of the state’s well-heeled residents, including many refugees from equally beautiful but overpriced California, economic growth not only is unimportant but is even a negative. Rather than create opportunity, the real issue, according to Gov. John Kitzhaber, is making sure the state ranks high on “the happiness index.” Forget sweating the hard stuff, and cozy up with a hot soy latte.

There’s a problem with this. Oregon’s unemployment rate remains above the national average and underemployment – the measure of people working part-time or well below their skill level – stands at nearly 17 percent, behind only Nevada and California. Since 2007, the state has lost over 3.4 percent of its jobs, a performance much worse than the national average and even California.

“You have to wonder about the rhetoric of happiness,” suggests economist Bill Watkins, who predicts the state won’t be back to 2007 employment levels till next year. “You need jobs for people to be happy, you would think.”

This dearth of opportunity extends even into Portland, the state’s dominant city. One recent study showed that earnings for educated males in the city are among the worst in the country. Portland, the land of Ph.D.’s driving cabs and working in coffee shops, notes geographer Jim Russell, “attracts talent for the sake of attracting talent” but does little with them once they arrive. No surprise then that the place has become widely described the “slacker capital of the world.”

Indeed, notes economist Bill Watkins, Oregon over the past five years has lagged in job growth behind not only the nation, but, in particular, its demographic twin, Washington state. Seattle has emerged as the most potent competitor to Silicon Valley, while Oregon’s tech sector is largely propped up by Intel’s plant in suburban Hillsboro, itself a byproduct of California’s regulatory over-reach. There has been no widespread stirring of tech, or for that matter, any strong industry in Oregon. …

From Forbes Magazine we learn about another unintended consequence of the affordable care act. And one more bureaucrat learns a lesson we must all pay for.

After the flawed rollout of the Affordable Care Act, most of Washington focused on repairing and delaying the law’s most obvious problems. However, a handful of lawmakers have finally noticed one of the law’s hidden regulations: a strict calorie labeling requirement for chain restaurants, vending machines, and other food distributors. What at first appeared to be more bureaucratic but harmless government do-gooding is now proving a verifiable nightmare for small business owners and federal regulators alike. …

… The calorie label clause, buried deep within the ACA’s 10,000 pages, seems harmless enough at first glance. Each restaurant chain with over 20 locations is required to display the calorie content of each food and drink item it serves on signs and printed menus–with vending machine distributors subjected to the same rules. But the regulation also covers “similar retail food establishments,” a clause vague enough to give FDA regulators sweeping power to determine who does and doesn’t have to comply.

FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg admitted that she “actually thought [calorie labeling] would be one of the more straightforward tasks…but little did I know how complicated it would be.” Hamburg’s concerns are hardly unfounded, but it’s small business owners and franchisees—not FDA bureaucrats—that will feel the most pain under the new law. …

Mark Perry posts on the NY Times when they had some sense.

It’s pretty amazing how the New York Times editorial board has changed its position over the last 27 years on the  government-mandated wage floor that guarantees reduced employment opportunities for America’s teenagers and low-skilled workers:

Here’s what the NY Times editorial wrote in January 1987 (“The Right Minimum Wage: $0.00“):

There’s a virtual consensus among economists that the minimum wage is an idea whose time has passed. Raising the minimum wage by a substantial amount would price working poor people out of the job market. Most important, it would increase unemployment: Raise the legal minimum price of labor above the productivity of the least skilled workers and fewer will be hired.

If a higher minimum means fewer jobs, why does it remain on the agenda of some liberals? A higher minimum would undoubtedly raise the living standard of the majority of low-wage workers who could keep their jobs. That gain, it is argued, would justify the sacrifice of the minority who became unemployable. The argument isn’t convincing. Those at greatest risk from a higher minimum would be young, poor workers, who already face formidable barriers to getting and keeping jobs.

The idea of using a minimum wage to overcome poverty is old, honorable – and fundamentally flawed. It’s time to put this hoary debate behind us, and find a better way to improve the lives of people who work very hard for very little.

What a change, following several decades of “economic amnesia” at the NY Times, which editorialized in today’s paper (“The Case for a Higher Minimum Wage“): …

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Angelo Codevilla says Solzhenitsyn was right when he said we should not live by lies.

Being human, politicians lie. Even in the best regimes. The distinguishing feature of totalitarian regimes however, is that they are built on words that the rulers know to be false, and on somehow constraining the people to speak and act as if the lies were true. Thus the people hold up the regime by partnering in its lies. Thus, when we use language that is “politically correct” – when we speak words acceptable to the regime even if unfaithful to reality – or when we don’t call out politicians who lie to our faces, we take part in degrading America.

The case in point is Television personality Bill O’Reilly who, in his pre-Super Bowl interview with Barack Obama, suffered the President to tell him – and his audience of millions – that the IRS’ targeting of conservative groups had been a minor “bonehead” mistake in the Cincinnati office, because there is “not even a smidgen of corruption” in that agency. O’ Reilly knew but did not say that both he and the President know this to be a lie, that the key official in the affair, Lois Lerner, had made sure that the IRS’s decision on how to treat the Tea Party matter would be made in Washington by writing: that the matter was “very dangerous” and that “Cincy should probably NOT have these cases.”

O’ Reilly did not call out the lie. Nor did he just remain silent. Rather, he said of Obama that: “his heart is in the right place.” …

The most vulnerable in our country are worse off now after five years of this administration. Arthur Brooks proposes a conservative, free market safety-net construct.

Conservative leaders owe it to their followers and the vulnerable to articulate a positive social-justice agenda for the right. It must be tangible, practical, and effective. And it must start with the following question: What do the most vulnerable members of society need? This means asking the poor themselves. …

… What, then, do poor people say they truly need to lead prosperous and satisfying lives? The real answer is both simple and profound. They need transformation, relief, and opportunity—in that order. On these three pillars, conservatives and advocates for free enterprise can build the basics of the social-justice agenda that America deserves. …

 

… The first pillar is personal moral transformation. By now, everyone acknowledges that poverty in America is often intertwined with social pathologies. In the late 1990s, scholars at the Urban Institute estimated that up to 37 percent of individuals enrolled in Aid to Families with Dependent Children abused drugs or alcohol. Similar findings connect poverty with criminality, domestic violence, and other problems.

Whether these problems are a product of poverty or mutually causal, common sense and the testimony of the poor themselves say that moral intervention must precede economic intervention for the latter to be truly effective.

All the evidence on happiness and successful living shows that living with intentionality, meaning, and purpose boosts well-being in unique and unparalleled ways. …

… This, not puritanism or bourgeois condescension, is the reason that conservatives must promote and defend the time-tested stores of personal and social meaning. To presume that low-income Americans are somehow unworthy of the same cultural standards to which we hold ourselves and our own families is simple bigotry. Genuine moral aspiration, not patronizing political correctness, will be the tip of the spear in a true social-justice agenda. …

 

… After transformation comes material relief. To deny that some Americans are genuinely needy requires willful blindness. In addition to the one-sixth of Americans currently receiving food assistance, consider a few more findings. A 2010 analysis from the NationalCenter on Family Homelessness found that child homelessness spiked by a staggering 38 percent during the Great Recession years. And a team of public-health researchers stunned readers of the journal Health Affairs in 2012 when they released new life-expectancy findings. Among disproportionately low-income white females with fewer than 12 years of education, the scholars found that average life expectancy had fallen sharply since 1990.

Conservatives eager to reverse these facts naturally reach for their checkbooks. As I found in my 2006 book Who Really Cares, the average conservative household contributes significantly more to charity than does the average liberal household despite earning less income. According to the 1996 General Social Survey, those who strongly agreed that “the government has a responsibility to reduce income inequality” gave away $140 on average to charity. Among those who strongly disagreed, the average gift was $1,637.

Of the 10 most charitable states in 2012, as ranked by the Chronicle of Philanthropy, nine went for Romney over Obama. Three times as many red states as blue states placed in the top 20 states in giving. And all but one of the 10 least charitable states swung President Obama’s way. …

 

… To recognize that a safety net for the needy is meritorious is one thing; to say exactly how to build it is another. Which programs should conservatives support? The beginning of an answer lies in the conservative social-policy success story of our time: the welfare reform movement of the 1990s.

American social policy expanded enormously after World War II, largely directing new support to fatherless families in poverty. Conservatives watched as generations of Americans were alienated from the workforce, whole classes defined themselves as claimants on the government, and millions were consigned to squalid public housing and became dependent on income support disconnected from incentives to work.

Two centuries earlier, Thomas Jefferson cautioned that “dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.” More recently, Franklin Roosevelt had warned in his 1935 State of the Union address that “continued dependence” on government support “induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.”

But Jefferson’s and Roosevelt’s words fell on deaf ears, and central planners charged ahead enthusiastically. …

 

… Enlightened labor policy complimented by an appropriate safety net is a key component of material relief. But it also meshes with the sine qua non of American conservatism, the third plank in the social-justice agenda: opportunity.

Nothing inspires conservatives more than a Horatio Alger story, the tale of a man or woman who started with nothing and climbed to the top. Therefore, I submit, nothing should trouble the political right more than the fact that the ladder of socioeconomic opportunity seems to be losing its lowest rungs.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston has shown that in 1980, 21 percent of Americans in the bottom income quintile rose to the middle quintile or higher by 1990. But those who started off in the bottom quintile in 1995 had only a 15 percent chance of becoming middle class in 2005. That is a one-third decline in mobility in under a generation. Other analyses tell a similar tale. One 2007 Pew study measured relative mobility in Canada and Scandinavia at more than twice America’s level.

How can a conservative social-justice agenda reverse these trends and expand opportunity for all? An opportunity society has two basic building blocks: Universal education to create a base of human capital and an economic system that rewards hard work, merit, innovation, and personal responsibility. So opportunity conservatism must passionately advance education reform and relentlessly defend the morality of free enterprise. …

 

… Simply look at worldwide prosperity over the past four decades. When I was a child in 1970, third-world poverty was a picture in National Geographic of a needy child. Charity might help, but we all knew that there was effectively nothing to be done. Our efforts were just thimblefuls in a vast ocean of tragic need.

The world has changed profoundly since then. According to ColumbiaUniversity economist Xavier Sala-i-Martin, the percentage of people in the world living on a dollar a day or less—a traditional measure of starvation-level poverty that he adjusts for inflation—has fallen by 80 percent since 1970. This is the greatest antipoverty achievement in world history. Yet it is not the result of philanthropy, para-statist organizations, or government foreign aid. This miracle occurred when billions of souls pulled themselves out of poverty thanks to globalization, free trade, property rights, the rule of law, and entrepreneurship.

In short, it was the worldwide spread of American-style free enterprise that saved billions from poverty by giving them their first opportunity to rise in history. Truly, this is America’s gift to the world. Conservatives can and must champion this truth without apology or compromise. For the sake of all people, our end goal must be to make free enterprise as universally accepted and nonpartisan as civil rights are today. …

 

… Our nation has a great deal of need that goes unmet, and it is only exacerbated by years of misguided statist policies and a materialistic culture. The social-justice agenda outlined above can reorient us toward our best selves and toward our obligation to help the vulnerable.

It is an agenda that seeks transformation, relief, and opportunity. It means defending a culture of faith, family, community, and work; increasing our charity and protecting the safety net for the truly needy; and fighting for education reform and free enterprise as profound moral imperatives. …

… Fighting for people doesn’t mean a catalog of massive government programs. It means thinking carefully about who is in need and how their need can best be met. In some cases, such as caring for the truly poor and defending our allies around the world, the right solution may well involve the government. In others—such as a crumbling culture, needy children caught in ineffective schools, entrepreneurs struggling to start businesses, or people permanently dependent on the state—the proper conservative answer is for the government to stop creating harm and get out of the way. In both cases, conservatives can and should be equally bold warriors for vulnerable people.

The conservative creed should be fighting for people, especially vulnerable people, whether or not they vote as we do. Such an experiment cannot guarantee success. But its spark will relight the fires of hope in a wearied country that 64 percent of Americans feel is “off on the wrong track.” In ethical, emotional, and potentially even electoral terms, no opportunity could be more promising than this opening to champion those who need our help.

This is our fight, and it is a happy one. After all, as Proverbs 14:21 reminds us, “He that despiseth his neighbor, sinneth: but he that hath mercy on the poor, happy is he.”

Roger Simon who has visited Russia a few times, posts on events in Sochi.

… Communist, socialist, capitalist or something not yet invented, Russia will always be Russia — at least in most of our lifetimes anyway.  It’s a fascinating place with an amazing culture of many of history’s greatest writers and musicians,  but no one would ever want to live there or go there for a fun recreational vacation.  It’s just nerve-wracking. (Don’t ask about the time I stayed in the Hotel Ukraina and the whole place had just been covered with heavily leaded paint and you couldn’t open the windows.)

So when I heard that Sochi had been chosen for the Winter Olympics, I laughed and said to myself — this I’ve got to see.  And apparently we are.  Good luck to Team USA.  I hope they packed some extra cases of Pellegrino or Evian, like five hundred bottles per athlete.  It sounds as if they’re going to need it for showers.