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Ed Morrissey brings a chart comparing incomes in the country to those in DC. It is a graphic illustration of how DC’s rent seekers have become even more accomplished parasites.

Which part of the country is getting richer the fastest? That might seem like a strange question in the middle of a four-year economic stagnation. Chronic unemployment continues, and the American workforce participation rate remains at 35-year lows. 

The US economy has not added more than 250,000 jobs in a month since February, and only twice since February 2012. Nearly a million people (932,000) left the workforce in last month’s jobs report, and over 3 million in the past year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Household Survey.  Economic growth remains mired in the 2-3 percent range, with incremental gains giving way almost immediately to incremental setbacks. 

That doesn’t mean that everyone is sharing the pain equally, however. The Washington Post reported this week that the nation’s fastest-growing center of wealth and privilege can be found right in the nation’s capital – WashingtonD.C.  Who are the nouveau riche? “The former bureaucrats, accountants and staff officers … the lawyers, lobbyists and executives who work for companies that barely had a presence in Washington before the boom.” 

What boom? It’s not an economic boom, but a deluge of federal spending that “transformed the culture of a once staid capital and created a new wave of well-heeled insiders.” In other words, the “boom” is in part a transfer of wealth through taxation from everywhere else in the nation to the capital, and in part a borrowing spree that fuels federal spending and the lobbying and consulting industries that both benefit from it and bend it to their own interests – at the expense of economic growth everywhere else. 

This trend has proceeded for some time.  A chart from the Federal Reserve of St. Louis shows the dramatic gap that has opened up between WashingtonD.C. and the rest of the country in median household income.

Daniel Henninger says there is something in DC worse than the healthcare mess.

The ObamaCare train wreck is plowing through the White House in super slow-mo on screens everywhere, splintering reputations and presidential approval ratings. Audiences watch popeyed as Democrats in distress like Senators Kay Hagan, Mary Landrieu and Mark Pryor decide whether to cling to the driverless train or jump toward the tall weeds. The heartless compilers of the Washington Post/ABC poll asked people to pick a head-to-head matchup now between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Mitt won. This is the most amazing spectacle of mayhem and meltdown anyone has seen in politics since Watergate.

No question, it’s tough on Barack Obama. But what about the rest of us? For many Americans, the Obama leadership meltdown began five years ago.

In fall 2008, the U.S. suffered its worst financial crisis since the Depression. That wasn’t Barack Obama’s fault. But five years on, in the fall of 2013, the country’s economy is still sick.

Unemployed middle-aged men look in the mirror and see someone who may never work again. Young married couples who should be on the way up are living in their parents’ basement. Many young black men (official unemployment rate 28%; unofficial rate off the charts) have no prospect of work.

Washington these days kvetches a lot about what Healthcare.gov is doing to the Obama “legacy.” Far worse than ObamaCare, though, is that the 44th president in his second term presides over a great nation that is punching so far below its weight that large swaths of its people have lost heart. …

John Crudele follows up on last week’s NY Post story about the possible manipulation of employment data before the last election.

Let me be the first to ask: Did the White House know that employment reports were being falsified?

Last week I reported exclusively that someone at the Census Bureau’s Philadelphia region had been screwing around with employment data. And that person, after he was caught in 2010, claimed he was told to do so by a supervisor two levels up the chain of command.

On top of that, a reliable source whom I haven’t identified said the falsification of employment data by Census was widespread and ongoing, especially around the time of the 2012 election.

There’s now a congressional investigation of how Census handles employment data. And we can hope that we’ll find out this was just an isolated incident.

But let me tell you why it might not be.

Back in 2009 — right before the 2010 census of the nation was taken — there was an announcement that the Obama administration had decided that the Census Bureau would report to senior White House aides.

The rumor was that Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel was in charge of the nationwide head count. …

Paul Mirengoff of Power Line sees some good news in the Dems judicial power grab.

… On balance, I consider this a good thing. Why? Because much of the important stuff that federal appeals courts do is, indeed, politics by other means, and the public needs to understand this. The more that federal judges lose their mystique, the more that realism is enhanced. The more that judicial decisions in important controversial cases are understood as ideologically driven, the better.

Not every federal appellate judge is an ideologue in a robe. Chief Justice Roberts wasn’t when he broke with his non-liberal brethren and upheld the constitutionality of Obamacare’s individual mandate, although he may have had politics on his mind. A few conservative judges on lower courts had upheld the mandate too.

Obama’s nakedly ideological use of the federal judiciary won’t turn every judge into a naked ideologue. But it may, and should, color their approach to particular cases. For example, it may cause the five non-liberal judges on the Supreme Court more actively to scrutinize the work of the D.C. Circuit, especially the work of Judges Millett, Pollard, and Wilkins.

A heavy dose of reality won’t just help the public; it may also benefit some judges.

To be clear, I don’t celebrate the fact that law has become a subdivision of partisan politics. I just think it’s a good thing that this reality is being exposed.

John Podhoretz says this time the president will not get away with failure. 

People are puzzled: Why would Barack Obama have lied about how wonderfully everything was going to go with ObamaCare when officials in his administration knew perfectly well that disaster was going to strike?

In one sense, the answer is simple: At the time, just before Oct. 1, Republicans were insisting ObamaCare be delayed or defunded. The president and his team weren’t going to give the enemy the satisfaction of agreeing — or the potent ammunition that would have come from a rueful admission the system wasn’t ready.

Today, a bipartisan agreement to delay ObamaCare seems like it would have been a pretty good deal. It didn’t look that way at all in the last two weeks of September.

But there’s a deeper reason he and his people lied: They did it because they could. They did it because nearly five years in the White House had given Obama and his team confidence they would not face the music and they could finesse the problems until they got fixed. …

… As a result, Barack Obama and his administration have said what they felt they needed to say and done what they felt they needed to do for immediate political gain. They did so this time. But this time was different, because this time he was mishandling and discrediting the great liberal desideratum of our time — a national health-care system.

This time he hasn’t gotten away with it.

And Victor Davis Hanson says this was the tenth life.

An Obamcat administration is given nine, but not ten, lives:

1) The dismal economy
2) Guantanamo, renditions, and tribunals that were to be relegated to the Bush-Cheney ash heap
3) Fast and Furious
4) The “lead from behind” fiasco in Libya
5) Benghazi
6) The AP monitoring
7) The Syrian flip-flop-flip embarrassment
8) The NSA scandal
9) Lois Lerner’s IRS

The tenth, and one too many, was Obamacare . . .

WaPo blog says the rank and file IRS folks are fuming at Lois Lerner.

A top manager from the Internal Revenue Service’s  Cincinnati office was “furious” last May over allegations from Lois Lerner that “front-line” employees were responsible for the agency’s inappropriate actions toward conservative groups, according to e-mails from a former top official with the division.

Lerner, who headed the exempt-organizations office in Washington, D.C., blamed rank-and-file workers for the agency’s behavior during a legal conference in which she apologized on behalf of the IRS. She said actions were misguided efforts by workers to deal with a flood of applications from tax-exemption applicants during the 2010 and 2012 election cycles.

Cynthia Thomas, a former manager with the IRS’s exempt-organizations office in Cincinnati, fired off an e-mail to Lerner after the conference, complaining that the agency had blamed rank-and-file employees for its actions. …

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A treat today. We’ll not include anything about the people in DC who are busy ruining our country.

The secret life of a Manhattan doorman was in Business Insider.

The smells are the thing I don’t forget. Harsh cleaners, dead bodies, the results of four a.m. bodega runs, cluttered apartments filled with rotting paper. I can recall each smell distinctively; they are unique to that time and place. It also works in reverse: if I stumble upon one of the smells, it takes me back to being a naïve seventeen-year-old, working in the hot New York City summer—the buzz of air conditioners working in the night, straining power grids. The city was asleep and I was awake. I was a doorman.

Through the best Catholic invention of all time—nepotism—my uncle gave me a summertime job. While most of the youth of America struggled to find any money-making position, I was going to make $660 for my forty hours a week, after taxes. Union rules—god bless union rules—added time-and-a-half for overtime and double time-and-a-half for holidays. I covered vacations—most of the doormen and porters in the building had at least three weeks paid—so I would work whenever I was needed and, as a result, worked the crappy shifts. The swing shifts—literally working any time of day or night—and the midnight-to-eight a.m. shift became my summer.

That first summer, I dedicated myself to finding some kind of spiritual awakening. I decided to read the entire Kurt Vonnegut canon. It was not in order, but during lunch breaks and slow times at the door I would peel back the pages and plunge in. …

A reviewer in Telegraph, UK provides an overview of the latest JFK books. He gives a nod to one – written by UVA’s Larry Sabato.

“Telling the truth can be a scary thing sometimes.” So says Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney, in Oliver Stone’s JFK. In the film, Garrison, played by Kevin Costner, is the archetypal underdog, a hero who sacrifices everything in search of truth. In real life, he was a paranoid fantasist, a publicity hound and a crooked DA. Truth can be scary, but it’s never as frightening as the power of a good lie.

I had occasion to recall Garrison a few weeks ago when a box of books was delivered to my door. That box was physical proof of the desire by publishers to cash in on the 50th anniversary of John F Kennedy’s assassination on November 22 1963. It contained 12 books, …

… The obsession with Kennedy has inspired an insatiable need to know. That’s demonstrated by Those Few Precious Days (Simon & Schuster), by Christopher Andersen, a wonderful book for voyeurs. It examines, in painful detail, the last year of John and Jackie’s marriage. Andersen’s account of the death of their son, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, on April 9 1963, after 39 hours of life, made me feel like an intruder at a stranger’s deathbed. Apparently Jackie hoped that Patrick would cure Jack of his addiction to other women. Obsession forces open windows that should remain shut.

Larry Sabato examines that obsession in The Kennedy Half Century (Bloomsbury). Of all the JFK books, this one will endure. It’s certainly the most original. Sabato examines how the Kennedy legacy has been manipulated, marketed and abused in the 50 years since Dallas. In the process, he reveals a great deal about Kennedy, but even more about the generations of Americans whose lives have been shaped by his death. It’s nice to see that while small men debate the minute detail of Dallas, a genuine scholar has the vision to recognise an issue that really matters: the grip that Kennedy continues to exert on us all.

As Sabato shows, Kennedy’s assassination was so painful because the myth was so perfect. …

David Bernstein in Volokh goes after one of the most pernicious of the assassination myths – that JFK was done in by right wing “hate” in Dallas. The NY Times and WaPo were retailing this over the anniversary.  

This is really amazing to me. The New York Times and the Washington Post each manages to publish a piece on the Kennedy assassination, by two different authors, focusing on what they see as the right-wing extremist environment in Dallas in 1963, and while never saying so directly, implicitly blaming Kennedy’s assassination on that environment. [UPDATE: The Washingtonian magazine is more explicit: “The city of hate had, in fact, killed the President.”]

Look, guys. Lee Harvey Oswald murdered JFK. Oswald was a Communist. Not a small c, “all we are saying is give peace a chance and let’s support Negro civil rights” kind of Communist, but someone so committed to the cause (and so blind to the nature of the USSR) that he actually went to live in the Soviet Union. And when that didn’t work out, Oswald became a great admirer of Castro. He apparently would have gone to live in Cuba before the assassination if the Cubans would have had him. Before assassinating Kennedy, Oswald tried to kill a retired right-wing general. As near as we can tell, he targeted Kennedy in revenge for Kennedy’s anti-Castro actions. …

PJ Media lists 6 reasons why the media/left keep the JFK assassination story moving.

 1. Camelot. The brief Kennedy years represent for many in the media their own golden moment. JFK was their royalty, their idol, their ideal, their handsome and rich young war hero.  Jackie Kennedy was their queen.

And then it was all cut short, like a Shakespearean tragedy or fairy tale. The mythic Camelot fell to lust. The American Camelot fell to an assassin. For those of us who grew up after JFK, it’s all so much history. I grew up around Dallas and heard about the assassination any time I visited anywhere else as a child, and later on I visited the SixthFloorMuseum. It’s haunting but it’s history. For many in that generation, which was mostly born after World War II and then ended up losing Vietnam, JFK provides a meaningful anchor point, or at least a point that they have infused with meaning. Don’t bring up his womanizing or how the Kennedy patriarch behaved toward the Nazis. None of that has any place in the myth.

2. It provides them a chance to bash handy villains they already hate: Dallas, Texas, and the South.

Megan McArdle on how the great disruption has come to auto dealers.

At the turn of the millennium, when I was in business school, the auto dealership business model seemed ripe for disruption. Dell Inc. was already doing a bang-up business building computers to order. It seemed only a matter of time before General Motors Co. did the same, and we could buy our cars easily over the Internet rather than having to haggle with a dealer.

Ah, the optimism of youth! Ten years later, auto dealers are still very much with us. It turns out that building and selling cars is a bit more complicated than doing the same with computers. Oh, and auto dealers are extremely well connected in Congress and especially in state legislatures; they are often among the richest people in a legislator’s district, which has translated, over the years, into protective franchise laws that make it very hard for automakers to prune their dealer networks.

And yet, the dream of low, no-haggle pricing seems to be moving closer. The Internet didn’t get rid of the dealers, but it forced them to become much more competitive. Pricing is much more transparent, thanks to a wealth of Web-based information, and because dealers are now advertising. Lower your price a bit, and you’ll poach customers who in the old days might not have thought to check a dealer an hour and a half away when they had to make inquiries by phone. But they’ll happily drive that far to save a few hundred dollars. …

In Slate we learn anacondas are living in the Everglades.

On a muggy day about 10 years ago in the Florida Everglades, Jack Shealy was riding his bike along a dirt road leading into the Trail Lakes Campground, where he has worked for decades. Like any good gladesman, Shealy has a substantial portion of his brain wired to recognize snakes in places where the rest of us would see only leaves and shadows. He skidded to a stop at the sight of a serpentine form stretched out in the sun.

This particular snake was not especially large—only about a meter in length. Yet the color was something different. Greenish brown with dark, oval spots. This was not a snake that belonged in the Everglades. Shealy did something that comes naturally to the family. (His nephew Jack M. Shealy recently became notorious for jumping into the water to wrestle an invasive Burmese python.) He jumped off of the bike and captured the angry snake by hand.

TrailLakes Campground just happened to have a herpetologist on staff. Rick Scholle, who runs the campground’s roadside zoo, examined the snake and realized that he was looking at a juvenile green anaconda. A nonvenomous constrictor native to South America, the green anaconda is the biggest, heaviest species of snake in the world. It definitely does not belong in the Florida Everglades. …

The Boston Globe provides another example of porkers in college administrations.

When BrandeisUniversity president Jehuda Reinharz stepped down three years ago, he moved back into his old faculty office.

But unlike most history professors, Reinharz does not teach any classes, supervise graduate students, or attend departmental meetings. He did not bother posing for the department photo. The chairwoman for Near Eastern and Judaic Studies said she did not even know whether he was officially a member of her department.

Yet Reinharz remains one of the highest paid people on campus.

He received more than $600,000 in salary and benefits in 2011, second only to the new Brandeis president, according to the school’s most recent public tax returns. And that’s on top of the $800,000 Reinharz earned in his new job as president of the Mandel Foundation, a longtime Brandeis benefactor.

“There is puzzlement from faculty about why he gets paid at all” by Brandeis, said Gordon Fellman, a sociology professor at Brandeis. “His term as president ended.”

Like Reinharz, many other college presidents across the country are negotiating huge exit packages when they step down, which critics say is emblematic of schools’ unrestrained spending on everything from administrative salaries to elaborate new buildings that drive up the cost of higher education. Schools and public records say:

Lawrence S. Bacow, president emeritus of Tufts, received $1.7 million in 2011 for “end of service compensation.”  …

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Keeping up with the theme of last week’s first day of posting and Jonah Goldberg’s piece on healthcare schadenfreude, we open with a short from Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit about healthcare sticker shock among congressional aides. Glenn calls it the “feel good story of the week.”

Veteran House Democratic aides are sick over the insurance prices they’ll pay under Obamacare, and they’re scrambling to find a cure.

“In a shock to the system, the older staff in my office (folks over 59) have now found out their personal health insurance costs (even with the government contribution) have gone up 3-4 times what they were paying before,” Minh Ta, chief of staff to Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.), wrote to fellow Democratic chiefs of staff in an email message obtained by POLITICO. “Simply unacceptable.”

Here’s the Politico piece Glenn linked to.

… Under the Affordable Care Act, and federal regulations, many congressional staffers — designated as “official” aides — were forced to move out of the old heavily subsidized Federal Employees Health Benefits program and into the District of Columbia’s health insurance marketplace exchange. Others designated as “unofficial” were allowed to stay in the FEHB program. Managers had to choose whether aides were “official” or “unofficial” by Oct. 31, and Ta said that wasn’t enough time to make an informed decision about who would benefit and who would lose out by going into the new system. …

PajamasMedia portrays president’s plunging poll problems. (6P’s!)

For the White House, November has been the cruelest month, with increasing worry among Democrats that a year from now could mean another midterm electoral disaster, similar to the results in 2010 when Republicans picked up over 60 House seats to gain control and netted six Senate seats as well.

Each day produces a new poll with terrible numbers for the president and his policies. The Obama approval level has dipped below 40% in several surveys in recent days, and yesterday hit an all-time low of 37% in a CBS poll — a survey that in the past has often been better than average for President Obama. Disapproval of the president in the CBS poll reached 57% — a record 20% negative gap. In one month, the president’s approval score has dropped by 9% in the CBS poll, a collapse mirrored in pretty much every survey where there is  frequent polling. …

Mark Steyn writes on the lack of self restraint; connecting the dots from the “Knockout game” to Harry Reid’s nuke in the senate. First he starts with C. S. Lewis who happened to die 50 years ago too. So, actually, Steyn started with JFK and found his way to a government we should not respect.

… In his book The Abolition of Man, he writes of “men without chests” — the chest being “the indispensable liaison” between the head and the gut, between “cerebral man” and “visceral man.” In the chest beat what Lewis calls “the trained emotions.” Without them there is no honor or virtue, but only “intellect” and/or “appetite.” 

Speaking of appetite, have you played the “Knockout” game yet? Groups of black youths roam the streets looking for a solitary pedestrian, preferably white (hence the alternate name “polar-bearing”) but Asian or Hispanic will do. The trick is to knock him to the ground with a single punch. There’s a virtually limitless supply of targets: In New York, a 78-year-old woman was selected, and went down nice and easy, as near-octogenarian biddies tend to when sucker-punched. But, when you’re really rockin’, you can not only floor the unsuspecting sucker but kill him: That’s what happened to 46-year-old Ralph Santiago of Hoboken, N.J., whose head was slammed into an iron fence, whereupon he slumped to the sidewalk with his neck broken. And anyway the one-punch rule is flexible: In upstate New York, a 13-year-old boy socked 51-year-old Michael Daniels but with insufficient juice to down him. So his buddy threw a bonus punch, and the guy died from cerebral bleeding. Widely available video exists of almost all Knockout incidents, since the really cool thing is to have your buddies film it and upload it to YouTube. And it’s so simple to do in an age when every moronic savage has his own “smart phone.” …

… As a “continuing body” the Senate’s procedures are supposed to remain in force unless a two-thirds supermajority votes to change them. In this case, a 52–48 all-Democrat majority voted to change the rules, and so the rules have been changed. After all, who’s gonna stop Harry Reid? The Senate pageboys? Legislative majorities are here today and gone tomorrow, but legislative mechanisms are supposed to be here today and here tomorrow and here next year. If a transient party majority can change the rules on a single, sudden, party-line vote, then there are no rules. The rules are simply what today’s rulers say they are. After all, banana republics and dictatorships pass their own rules, too — to deny opposition politicians access to airtime, or extend their terms by another two or three years, or whatever takes their fancy.

As noted last week, the president knows no restraints either. He has always indicated a certain impatience with the “checks and balances” — “I’m not going to wait for Congress” has long been a routine applause line on the Obama ’prompter. From unilaterally suspending the laws of others (such as immigration), he has advanced to unilaterally suspending his own. So, for passing political convenience, he issued his proclamation of temporary amnesty for the millions of health plans he himself rendered illegal. The law is applied according to whim, which means there is no law. Four years ago, polls showed no popular support for anything as transformative as Obamacare. But, through procedural flimflam, lameduck-session legerdemain, threats to “deem” it to have already passed, and votes for a law whose final version was not only unread by legislators but was literally unreadable (in the sense that it had not yet rolled off the photocopier), through all that and more, the Democrats rammed it down the throats of the American people anyway: Yes, we can! Brazen and unrestrained, Obama and Reid are also, in Lewis’s phrase, “men without chests.” Cleverness, unmoored from Lewis’s chestly virtue of honor, has reduced them to mere tricksters and deceivers. So the president lied about his law for four years, and now lies about his lies.

A government that lies to its own citizens should command no respect. To accord them any is to make oneself complicit in their lies, which is unbecoming to a free people. …

So what does a left/media type think of Harry Reid’s actions? Here’s Dana Milbank quoting Carl Levin.

… Sen. Carl Levin (Mich.), one of just three Democrats who opposed his colleagues’ naked power grab, read those words on the Senate floor Thursday after Reid invoked the nuclear option. The rumpled Levin is not known for his oratory. But he is retiring next year and free to speak his mind — and his words were potent.

“We need to change the rules, but to change it in the way we changed it today means there are no rules except as the majority wants them,” Levin said. “This precedent is going to be used, I fear, to change the rules on consideration of legislation, and down the road — we don’t know how far down the road; we never know that in a democracy — but, down the road, the hard-won protections and benefits for our people’s health and welfare will be lost.”

The word “historic” is often tossed around in Washington, but this change ends a tradition dating to the earliest days of the republic. …

… “If a Senate majority demonstrates it can make such a change once, there are no rules which binds a majority, and all future majorities will feel free to exercise the same power, not just on judges and executive appointments but on legislation,” Levin said Thursday. Quoting one of the Senate’s giants, Arthur Vandenberg, Levin said his fellow Democrats had sacrificed “vital principle for the sake of momentary convenience.”

If it was possible to make things even worse in Washington, Reid just did it.

John Fund on the significance of move in the senate. Reid’s hypocrisy is on display here.

… This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Senate’s changing from a body selected by state legislatures to one elected directly by popular vote. But that change came through passage of a constitutional amendment and its subsequent ratification by four-fifths of the states. Reid’s move abandoning the Senate’s longtime protection of the minority was done by the will of one man acting with a bare 52 to 48 majority of his colleagues. Three Democrats (Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, and Carl Levin of Michigan) opposed his power play because it will inflame partisan tensions in the body and limit the role George Washington said the Founders envisioned for the Senate: “We pour legislation into the Senatorial saucer to cool it” from the passions of the House. Many now fear the Senate will almost inevitably come to resemble the House rather than a consensus-driven body consistent with the design of the Founders.

Democrats claim their move was necessary because Republicans have recently blocked three nominees to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and an executive-branch nominee, Representative Mel Watt (D., N.C.), who was nominated to be the regulator of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The GOP claimed that adding three new judges to the influential D.C. Circuit — which hears most major regulatory cases — was a purely ideological move, since the workload of the court was provably so light. In 2006, when Democrats were in the Senate minority, they used that very argument to urge the late Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter not to confirm any additional Bush nominees to the D.C. Circuit — and none were confirmed.

It’s certainly true that many Republicans were once tempted to trigger the nuclear option. In 2005, GOP Majority Leader Bill Frist (R., Tenn.) proposed invoking it to clear a filibustered logjam of judicial nominees. But an eloquent critic of the practice stepped forward and convinced enough Republicans to back down and keep the filibuster. His name was Harry Reid, and he was then the minority leader. As he said on the Senate floor at the time: “For 200 years, we’ve had the right to extended debate. It’s not some ‘procedural gimmick.’ It’s within the vision of the Founding Fathers of our country. They established a government so that no one person — and no single party — could have total control.”

Reid used to boast about his role in “saving” the filibuster. In 2008, he claimed: “In all my years in government, that was the most important thing I ever worked on.” He swore that as long as he was leader he would never use the nuclear option, saying it would be a “black chapter in the history of the Senate.” …

More from Jonathan Tobin.

… There’s no denying that partisanship is nastier in Congress than it once was. But if President Obama and Reid think it can’t get worse, they’re kidding themselves. For all of the bitter combat that has been carried on in just the last year over the budget, ObamaCare, the shutdown, and the various administration scandals, the business of government has largely proceeded unhindered. Many nominations have been approved, bipartisan legislation passed, and the unanimous consent to keep the upper body functioning has almost always been there. But now that Reed has pushed the plunger on the so-called nuclear option, all bets are off. The 45 Senate Republicans may no longer have the power to block the president’s appointments on their own, but Senate procedures still give them plenty of latitude to put holds on legislation. Not only will Reed find it even harder to do his job now that he has broken faith with his opponents and sought to squelch dissent, he and the president may also discover that the benefits of their decision will not be as great as they think. …

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We’re so busy looking at the administration’s domestic train wreck, their train wreck in the Middle East is overlooked. We’ll correct that today. Craig Pirrong, the Streetwise Professor is first.

It gets better and better. And by better and better I mean worse and worse. And by “it”, I mean the rubbing of the American nose in the manure pile in the Middle East. The Saudis flip out on us.  Then Bibi flips out on us.  (Quite an accomplishment to get the Saudis and Israelis on the same page.)

And now the Egyptians host a Russian naval vessel for the first time since 1992. Moreover, the Egyptians, who can’t even afford a pot to pee in (as my grandfather used to say), are looking to buy $4 billion in arms from Putin.  Obviously the Egyptians are sending a message to Obama. …

Spengler says Putin gets it and we don’t.

Middle East politics amounts to managing the decline of a failed culture. Nothing expresses Arab failure more vividly than Egypt, a banana republic without the bananas, now living on a $14 billion or so annual subsidy from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States. With 70% of its population living in agricultural areas, it imports half its food, and would starve if not for the Saudi check. ‘

Egypt is beyond the point of no return economically, and American foreign policy is beyond the point of no return intellectually. Americans of both parties–Obama and Kerry on one side, and Sens. McCain and Graham along with the Weekly Standard on the other–believed that by waving the magic wand of democracy over this cataclysmically failed state, all would be well. I characterized this consensus as “Dumb and Dumber” earlier this year.

The outcome, of course, is that Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov turned up in Cairo this week to hear his Egyptian counterpart declare that America’s erstwhile Arab ally wants to restore Russian-Egyptian relations to their level during the Soviet era–when Egypt was an enemy. As the Jerusalem Post summed up the mess:

“The more persistent the denials, the clearer it is that a marked shift is taking place in international ties that until recently bound the world’s single superpower with the most populous Arab state. The Russian ministerial visits were preceded by a visit by the chief of Russian intelligence and by Russian naval vessels.

More important, the visits by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu involve a major sale to Egypt of sophisticated Russian military hardware – clearly a counter move to the American halting of weapons supplies.” …

Caroline Glick takes no prisoners.

What happened in Geneva last week was the most significant international event since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The collapse of the Soviet Union signaled the rise of the United States as the sole global superpower. The developments in the six-party nuclear talks with Iran in Geneva last week signaled the end of American world leadership.

Global leadership is based on two things – power and credibility. The United States remains the most powerful actor in the world. But last week, American credibility was shattered.

Secretary of State John Kerry spent the first part of last week lying to Israeli and Gulf Arab leaders and threatening the Israeli people. He lied to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and the Saudis about the content of the deal US and European negotiators had achieved with the Iranians.

Kerry told them that in exchange for Iran temporarily freezing its nuclear weapons development program, the US and its allies would free up no more than $5 billion in Iranian funds seized and frozen in foreign banks.

Kerry threatened the Israeli people with terrorism and murder – and so invited both – if Israel fails to accept his demands for territorial surrender to PLO terrorists that reject Israel’s right to exist.

Kerry’s threats were laced with bigoted innuendo.

He claimed that Israelis are too wealthy to understand their own interests. If you don’t wise up and do what I say, he intoned, the Europeans will take away your money while the Palestinians kill you. Oh, and aside from that, your presence in the historic heartland of Jewish civilization from Jerusalem to Alon Moreh is illegitimate. …

Paul Mirengoff of Power Line demonstrates how Israel is being kept in the dark.

… the evidence supports Israel’s complaint that the U.S. kept Israel in the dark about the deal it was negotiating. Kerry gave the game away when he rejected Israeli criticism of the deal he was negotiating on the grounds that Israel did not know the details. He thus contradicted his assurances that Israel was being fully and continuously apprised of the negotiations.

Not a clever man, that John Kerry.

Friends don’t treat friends this way. But Obama is not now, and has never been, a friend of Israel.

This is the state of play as Obama and Kerry prepare to press ahead with a deal on a matter of existential importance to Israel and mainly PR importance to a foundering administration.

A Civil War historian shares his appreciation for the power of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

The surprisingly short story of the Gettysburg Address is that it was a surprisingly short speech — 270 words or so — delivered by Abraham Lincoln as part of the dedication ceremonies for the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg, on Nov. 19, 1863, four and a half months after the climactic battle of the American Civil War.

But the long story is that no single American utterance has had the staying power, or commanded the respect and reverence, accorded the Gettysburg Address. It has been engraved (on the south wall of the Lincoln Memorial), translated (in a book devoted to nothing but translations of the address), and analyzed in at least nine book-length critical studies over the last century.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow put down his morning paper’s report of the address and wrote to his publisher that “Lincoln’s brief speech at Gettysburg … seems to me admirable.” Longfellow’s friend Charles Sumner wrote, “Since Simonides wrote the epitaph for those who died at Thermopylae, nothing equal to them has ever been breathed over the fallen dead.” He added: “The world noted at once what he said, and will never cease to remember it. The battle itself was less important than the speech.”

What is less clear to us today is why it struck so many people as a landmark from the start. Partly, this instant recognition of the address’s power grew out of its language. It obeys the Churchillian dictum: Short words are best, and the old words when short are best of all. The address relies on crisp, plain vocabulary, over against the three-decker Latinate lexicon beloved of so many 19th-century school textbooks. Of some 270 words — there’s no recording — about two-thirds are single-syllable, and a half-dozen, four-syllable. Rarely has so much been compressed into such simple and uncomplicated elements.

The Onion says someone is trapped in the healthcare website.

According to an urgent report issued today by the White House, a terrified and frantic President Obama is currently trapped inside the healthcare.gov website.

Early reports indicate the president inadvertently became physically enmeshed in the inner workings of the online health insurance exchange at approximately 11:48 a.m. this morning, and is at this very moment attempting to find any possible means of escape from the highly unstable and dangerous healthcare.gov internal network.

“Please, if anyone can hear me, I need help!” said Obama, his voice reportedly echoing endlessly in the distance as he carefully stepped along a green grid of individual and family enrollment information. “Is anyone there? Can anyone hear me? I’m Barack Obama, President of the United States of America! I need to get out of here!” …

Late night from Andrew Malcolm.

Leno: A new world record today in the 100 meters. Set by Congressional Democrats running away from ObamaCare.

Fallon: Homeland Security reports dozens of hacking tries on the ObamaCare website. But they didn’t get in. Obama says, “When you do get in, please let us know how you did it.”

Leno: ObamaCare’s failures now reach members of Congress. Harry Reid just got a letter from his mortician canceling his embalming fluid coverage.

Fallon: On an Amtrak ride recently, Joe Biden runs into Whoopi Goldberg, asks here, “What’s it like making millions of Americans laugh every day?” Whoopi says, “I was gonna ask you the same thing.”

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We have a president created and supported by a bodyguard of lies. The latest example comes from a NY Post story about how pre-election employment figures were manipulated.

In the home stretch of the 2012 presidential campaign, from August to September, the unemployment rate fell sharply — raising eyebrows from Wall Street to Washington.

The decline — from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent in September — might not have been all it seemed. The numbers, according to a reliable source, were manipulated.

And the Census Bureau, which does the unemployment survey, knew it.

Just two years before the presidential election, the Census Bureau had caught an employee fabricating data that went into the unemployment report, which is one of the most closely watched measures of the economy.

And a knowledgeable source says the deception went beyond that one employee — that it escalated at the time President Obama was seeking reelection in 2012 and continues today.

“He’s not the only one,” said the source, who asked to remain anonymous for now but is willing to talk with the Labor Department and Congress if asked.

The Census employee caught faking the results is Julius Buckmon, according to confidential Census documents obtained by The Post. Buckmon told me in an interview this past weekend that he was told to make up information by higher-ups at Census. …

The healthcare train wreck prompted this from Walter Russell Mead.

… All this has plunged the White House into the deepest hole of the Obama presidency to date, but the biggest shock isn’t about the cruddy rollout, the kludgy law or the disingenuous sales job by which it was passed. The biggest shock and the most damning revelation came in the President’s hasty and awkward press conference when President Obama responded to a reporter’s question about his knowledge of the website’s problems:

“OK. On the website, I was not informed directly that the website would not be working as — the way it was supposed to. Ha[d] I been informed, I wouldn’t be going out saying, boy, this is going to be great. You know, I’m accused of a lot of things, but I don’t think I’m stupid enough to go around saying, this is going to be like shopping on Amazon or Travelocity, a week before the website opens, if I thought that it wasn’t going to work.”

This was eyepopping. Obamacare is the single most important initiative of his presidency. The website rollout was, as the President himself has repeatedly stated, the most important element of the law’s debut. Domestically speaking there was no higher priority for the President and his staff than getting this right. And the President is telling the world that a week before the disaster he had no idea how that website was doing.

Reflect on that for a moment. The President of the United States is sitting in the Oval Office day after day. The West Wing is stuffed with high power aides. His political appointees sit atop federal bureaucracies, monitoring the work of the career staff around them. The President has told his core team, over and over, that the health care law and the website rollout are his number one domestic priorities.

And with all this, neither he nor, apparently, anyone in his close circle of aides and advisors knew that the website was a disaster. Vapid, blind, idly flapping their lips; they pushed paper, attended meetings and edited memos as the roof came crashing down. It is one thing to fail; it is much, much worse not to see failure coming. …

And according to Yuval Levin, the healthcare long game has been sacrificed for short term news cycles.

… The president, in his Thursday press conference, did not treat November 30 as a key date. He did not suggest that there was just one large obstacle to overcome and then things would be fine. He did not say the product was good but the website is bad. He said things like this:

“But even if we get the hardware and software working exactly the way it’s supposed to with relatively minor glitches, what we’re also discovering is that insurance is complicated to buy. And another mistake that we made, I think, was underestimating the difficulties of people purchasing insurance online and shopping for a lot of options with a lot of costs and lot of different benefits and plans and somehow expecting that that would be very smooth, and then they’ve also got to try to apply for tax credits on the website.”

These are the words of a man who has had to internalize a lot of grim briefings lately, and to come to terms with some painful realities. And the decision the president announced is the decision of a man who has to just think about politics day by day now, rather than in terms of large goals and visions. 

It may turn out, of course, that the situation of Obamacare and its champions is not in fact this dire, that the exchange system will find some balance relatively soon and function in a way that bears some resemblance to how it was designed to work, and that the politics of health care in 2014 will be more mixed and complicated than the fiasco the Democrats now face. But the last few days have suggested that Democrats, including the president, are beginning to lose faith in that possibility. 

Things aren’t all bad, we do have Clarence Thomas sitting as a Justice of the Supreme Court. He was the main event at a recent meeting of the Federalist Society. Scott Johnson of Power Line posts.

I had the great good fortune of attending the Federalist Society National Lawyers Convention annual dinner featuring Justice Thomas last night. Justice Thomas was the attraction who drew a packed house of more than 1,300 justices, judges, attorneys and law students, and he just about brought down the house.

Responding to questions put to him by Seventh Circuit Judge Diane Sykes, Justice Thomas told a deeply American story. He ranged widely over his life and career, recalling his slave forebears, his grandparents, his teachers, his studies in college, seminary and law school, and his first job with Senator John Danforth. He recalled in detail the day he gave up the hate in his heart — April 16, 1970 — and spoke frequently of his loves. He spoke of his love for his wife, for his life on the Court, for his clerks, and above all, for the Constitution.

He moved the audience several times to laughter and, I think, by the end, to tears. David Lat captures the event in his Above the Law post “Justice Clarence Thomas speaks–and oh what a speech!” I left the event thinking, this is a man.

Here’s the article by David Lat mentioned by Scott.

Over the past few years, some amazing speakers have appeared at the Thursday evening dinner of the Federalist Society’s National Lawyers Convention. Last year, Justice Samuel A. Alito offered a very funny look back at his time at Yale Law School. In 2010, Justice Antonin Scalia engaged in a spirited and wide-ranging conversation with legal journalist Jan Crawford.

Last night’s event will be tough to top. Justice Clarence Thomas, speaking with Judge Diane Sykes of the Seventh Circuit, delivered remarks that were “equal parts hysterical, poignant and inspiring,” as Texas Supreme Court Justice Don Willett noted on Twitter.

I was lucky enough to attend, seated just one table away from the stage. Here’s my account of the evening (plus a few photos)….

The event took place in the cavernous ballroom of the Omni Shoreham Hotel, one of the few venues large enough to accommodate the roughly 1,300 attendees. The crowd included legal luminaries too numerous to mention; I’ll simply note that the room was one vote shy of being able to grant cert (Justice Antonin Scalia and Justice Samuel Alito also attended).

Judge Sykes — stylishly attired in a bright magenta jacket, shiny black pants, and an impressive amount of bling for a federal judge — did a superb job interviewing Justice Thomas. She did not make the mistake made by some SCOTUS interviewers of being too interventionist; instead, she gently and unobtrusively guided the conversation with thoughtful questions, keeping the spotlight on Justice Thomas. Her interviewing skill won praise from the attendees I spoke with after the event, as well as from the Los Angeles Times. …

Click here for Justice Thomas interview/speech from You Tube.

Interesting article from WaPo reports what American cities are warned against by foreign governments. 

Planning a trip abroad? It’s probably best to check out the State Department’s list of travel warnings for countries with unsafe political situations. At the moment, the State Department has issued travel warnings for 34 countries, from the Central African Republic and El Salvador to Iraq and North Korea.

Well, just as State warns Americans about dangerous places to travel, so too do foreign ministries in other countries — and some countries warn their citizens to avoid heading to certain cities in the U.S. France, in particular, warns travelers to be careful in a large number of specific cities.

Here’s what other countries, mostly France, say about American cities: …

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Politico published a lengthy article on the worst job in DC, which they say is being in the cabinet. It is long enough to fill us up today.

Steven Chu is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, a brilliant innovator whose research fills several all-but-incomprehensible paragraphs of a Wikipedia entry that spans his achievements in single-molecule physics, the slowing of atoms through the use of lasers and the invention of something called an optical tweezer.” President Barack Obama even credits Chu with solving the 2010 Gulf oil spill, claiming that Chu strolled into BP’s office and “essentially designed the cap that ultimately worked.” With rare exception, Chu is the smartest guy in the room, and that includes the Cabinet Room, which he occupied uneasily as secretary of energy from 2009 to the spring of 2013.

But the president’s aides didn’t quite see Chu that way. He might have been the only Obama administration official with a Nobel other than the president himself, but inside the West Wing of the White House Chu was considered a smart guy who said lots of stupid things, a genius with an appallingly low political IQ—“clueless,” as deputy chief of staff Jim Messina would tell colleagues at the time.

In April 2009, Chu joined Obama’s entourage for one of the administration’s first overseas trips, to Trinidad and Tobago for a Summit of the Americas focused on economic development. Chu was not scheduled to address the media, but reporters kept bugging Josh Earnest, a young staffer, who sheepishly approached his boss, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, with the ask. “No way,” Gibbs told him.

“Come on,” Earnest said. “The guy came all the way down here. Why don’t we just have him talk about all the stuff he’s doing?”

Gibbs reluctantly assented. Then Chu took the podium to tell the tiny island nation that it might soon, sorry to say, be underwater—which not only insulted the good people of Trinidad and Tobago but also raised the climate issue at a time when the White House wanted the economy, and the economy only, on the front burner. …

 

… never has the job of Cabinet secretary seemed smaller. The staffers who rule Obama’s West Wing often treat his Cabinet as a nuisance: At the top of the pecking order are the celebrity power players, like former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to be warily managed; at the bottom, what they see as a bunch of well-intentioned political naifs only a lip-slip away from derailing the president’s agenda. Chu might have been the first Obama Cabinet secretary to earn the disdain of White House aides, but he was hardly the last.

“We are completely marginalized … until the shit hits the fan,” says one former Cabinet deputy secretary, summing up the view of many officials I interviewed. “If your question is: Did the president rely a lot on his Cabinet as a group of advisers? No, he didn’t,” says former Obama Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. …

 

… Obama’s political guys had been skeptical of Holder’s appointment from the beginning, quietly backing Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano over the easygoing career prosecutor, whom they considered unimpressive in vetting interviews. But they were blocked by the president-elect and his senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, the Obamas’ Chicago friend and mentor who didn’t seriously consider any candidate besides Holder. Jarrett has had an all-access pass to the first family, a back channel to Obama unlike any other adviser, and she soon earned the sobriquet “Eric’s appeals court.” …

 

… The West Wing’s obsessive control of messaging drove Gates (SecDef) crazy, and he felt crowded by young amateurs in the White House who had much less experience and much better access to Obama—guys like McDonough and speechwriter Ben Rhodes, who would weigh in after the secretary’s SUV had departed for the Pentagon. Over the previous four decades, Gates had served in a variety of posts, from deputy director of the CIA to the upper rungs of the NSC, and had seen a gradual increase in White House influence over internal Pentagon affairs. But that trend hit warp speed under Obama. There were far more deputies’ meetings attended by too many lower-ranking aides, and Gates believed an alarming number of White House staffers were being read in on specific war plans.

Most importantly, Gates had significant policy disagreements with Obama. By the time of his exit in July 2011, the lifelong Republican was dissenting more and more on major decisions being pushed by liberal interventionists including Clinton, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and NSC adviser Samantha Power. He has called the NATO intervention in Libya “a mistake,” and took a dim view of Obama’s statements of solidarity with the Arab Spring protesters, who, Gates said, represented an unpredictable and destabilizing force.

Since retiring, Gates has become increasingly disillusioned with Obama’s foreign policy; one friend says Gates winced when the president drew his “red line” more than a year ago on the use of chemical weapons in Syria. White House aides are nervously awaiting the publication of Gates’s memoir in January. The manuscript, according to people with whom he’s shared details, questions Obama’s policy choices on the Arab Spring in particular, and even compares the president unfavorably with Bush, sure to be a headline-grabbing assertion. …

 

… For the Obama team, having a 2016 candidate-in-waiting created all kinds of unintended consequences, especially at the end of Clinton’s tenure, when she was mapping out her exit strategy. Early on, she was willing to hit the Sunday shows for Obama, but she considered it an enervating gotcha circus, so by the time the Benghazi firestorm hit on Sept. 11, 2012, she was a firm “no.” When network producers asked if Clinton would appear to discuss the killings of Ambassador Chris Stevens and other U.S. personnel, State Department officials told them the secretary was too exhausted from her recent travels. That wasn’t entirely true, three officials told me: Clinton had a “standing refusal” to do Sunday shows. “She hates them. She would rather die than do them,” one aide said at the time. “The White House knows, so they would know not to even ask her.”

In a classic Washington irony, Susan Rice turned out to be collateral damage. Rice, who started her career in the Bill Clinton White House and then infuriated both Clintons by backing Obama in the 2008 campaign, was at the time the only person Obama was seriously considering to replace Hillary Clinton at State.

And so Rice was tapped by the White House to appear on television that weekend instead of Clinton. ..

 

… As for the Cabinet, none of the three big replacements he’s made—John Kerry at State, Jack Lew at Treasury, Chuck Hagel at the Pentagon—seems destined to outshine those they replaced. And the lesser-known Obama picks—Gina McCarthy at the EPA; Ernest Moniz, Chu’s replacement at Energy; Tom Perez at Labor—are highly regarded technocrats who function more like West Wing staffers than traditional secretaries.

McDonough’s own role in the chaotic recent internal deliberations over the civil war in Syria suggests that all the coffees in the world won’t change Obama’s basic reliance on a small coterie of staff. On Aug. 30, Kerry had just delivered an impassioned argument in the State Department Treaty Room for launching an immediate missile strike on Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, when Obama invited McDonough—his most trusted national security aide before taking up the chief of staff portfolio—for a long stroll around the White House grounds. (The incident is regarded as significant enough to have its own name inside 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.: “The Walk.”) Obama returned to tell a stunned group of aides gathered in the Oval Office that he had decided to seek congressional approval first, despite dim prospects of passage.

A few weeks later, sitting on the sunny patio outside McDonough’s West Wing office, I asked him if it was true that Kerry and Hagel weren’t around to hear Obama’s big decision. “They were not in the Oval, that is correct,” McDonough told me, though he said the notion of going to Congress had at least been broached during several contentious meetings earlier that week, at which both men had been present. “I’m trying to figure out if I’m about to commit news here, but the president talked to both of those Cabinet members [later that evening by phone] … then they had another meeting the next morning.”

There was nothing out of the ordinary about the process, McDonough insists. But Kerry was taken aback, according to several people in his orbit—as stung by the West Wing’s planting of the “Walk” narrative in the media as by the snub itself. Outside the administration, it reinforced the idea that Obama was home alone now that the first-term principals were out the door. “To me, that sent a statement,” says David Gergen, who has served as a White House adviser to presidents in both parties. “Would he have done this if Hillary or Gates were still around?” …

 

… The most serious maelstrom to engulf the Cabinet in years came in October, when it became clear that neither Kathleen Sebelius nor her counterparts in the West Wing had adequately prepared for the staggering technical challenges of launching Obamacare. The health and human services secretary was well-liked—she was especially friendly with Jarrett—but many of Obama’s aides still pined for Tom Daschle, the wily former Senate Democrat whom Obama had originally tapped for the HHS job. Daschle, who withdrew from consideration in 2009 over a tax issue, was canny enough to know the way power flowed in Obama’s circle: As a condition for taking the job, he requested a West Wing office so he could keep close tabs on the executive staff. For years, Daschle privately expressed his concerns that Sebelius, who didn’t have the stature to make the same demands, simply wouldn’t have the power to implement the health care program.

Yet, in the end, it may not have been her lack of power that caused all the headaches, but a breakdown in communication and coordination between the White House and Sebelius’s staff. It started with a slow-walk of critical Obamacare rulemaking, a key part of Plouffe’s do-no-harm election-year strategy of minimizing controversial regulatory action. “The number-one culprit was [that] they deferred rulemaking until after the election,” says Mike Leavitt, the Bush-era HHS chief whose face Bob Gates couldn’t quite place. “When they did that, it threw the entire process off. … They were issuing rules in September for implementation in October.” The secretary herself admitted that Obama had been blindsided by the near-meltdown of the program’s web portal, and several administration officials involved in its creation told me they had been alarmed by pre-launch signs of trouble, even offering to tap outside computer experts to help the agency. Sebelius, they say, demurred. That Obama’s staff didn’t press the issue on the president’s signature policy initiative illustrates a paradox central to understanding his governing style: The president who forcefully pushed through the largest expansion of the federal government in generations has been significantly less zealous in overseeing its operation. …

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More on the disastrous news conference. This time from Jennifer Rubin. 

President Obama’s just-completed press conference was arguably worse than the Obamacare rollout. Alternately confessing, apologizing and blame shifting, he inadvertently made the case against his own executive skills, Obamacare and big government in general.

His announced fix is aimed at remedying the mass cancellation of individually-purchased insurance plans by letting insurance companies re-offer non-compliant policies. This makes clear that contrary to the statements from Jay Carney and Valerie Jarrett, Obamacare and not the insurers were the cause of the cancellations. Obama let slip that this is one big blame-shifting exercise when he announced that no one would be able to say Obamacare caused them to lose insurance. It is of course false because it is unlikely all the canceled policies can be restored.

The fix undermines the essential premise of Obamacare, namely that young, healthy people need to be herded into the  exchanges. Not only will this explicitly encourage many people to stay out but also will communicate that the entire program is in flux. Don’t sign up now — the deal may improve as the president gets more desperate! …

Charles Krauthammer with the reasons liberals are panicked about healthcare.

… Precisely when the GOP was returning to a more constitutionalist conservatism committed to reforming, restructuring and reining in the welfare state (see, for example, the Paul Ryan Medicare reform passed by House Republicans with near-unanimity), Obama offered a transformational liberalism designed to expand the role of government, enlarge the welfare state and create yet more new entitlements (see, for example, his call for universal preschool in his most recent State of the Union address).

The centerpiece of this vision is, of course, Obamacare, the most sweeping social reform in the past half-century, affecting one-sixth of the economy and directly touching the most vital area of life of every citizen.

As the only socially transformational legislation in modern American history to be enacted on a straight party-line vote, Obamacare is wholly owned by the Democrats. Its unraveling would catastrophically undermine their underlying ideology of ever-expansive central government providing cradle-to-grave care for an ever-grateful citizenry.

For four years, this debate has been theoretical. Now it’s real. And for Democrats, it’s a disaster.

It begins with the bungled rollout. If Washington can’t even do the Web site — the literal portal to this brave new world — how does it propose to regulate the vast ecosystem of American medicine?

Beyond the competence issue is the arrogance. Five million freely chosen, freely purchased, freely renewed health-care plans are summarily canceled. Why? Because they don’t meet some arbitrary standard set by the experts in Washington.

For all his news conference gyrations about not deliberately deceiving people with his “if you like it” promise, the law Obama so triumphantly gave us allows you to keep your plan only if he likes it. This is life imitating comedy — that old line about a liberal being someone who doesn’t care what you do as long as it’s mandatory. … 

“Put the toothpaste back in the tube,” orders the president. Craig Pirrong with the story.

… In essence, Obama has ordered that toothpaste be put back into the tube.  It can’t happen and it won’t happen.

At which time Obama will turn on the insurance companies, and blame them.  You can see this coming a mile away.

Not that that will help one individual who has lost coverage and can’t get it back.  But Obama really doesn’t care about that.  He is all about limiting the political damage.

Perhaps some insurance companies will challenge this in court, but I doubt it.  They know that the administration can-and will-punish them if they have the temerity to fight back.

It is hard to have too much sympathy for the insurers.  They made their bed, and they can’t really complain about what’s being done to them in it. …

Mark Steyn is on it.

… as historian Michael Beschloss pronounced the day after Obama’s election, he’s “probably the smartest guy ever to become president.” Naturally, Obama shares this assessment. As he assured us five years ago, “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors.” Well, apart from his signature health care policy. That’s a mystery to him. “I was not informed directly that the website would not be working,” he told us. The buck stops with something called “the executive branch,” which is apparently nothing to do with him. As evidence that he was entirely out of the loop, he offered this:

“Had I been I informed, I wouldn’t be going out saying, ‘Boy, this is going to be great.’ You know, I’m accused of a lot of things, but I don’t think I’m stupid enough to go around saying, ‘This is going to be like shopping on Amazon or Travelocity,’ a week before the website opens, if I thought that it wasn’t going to work.”

Ooooo-kay. So, if I follow correctly, the smartest president ever is not smart enough to ensure that his website works; he’s not smart enough to inquire of others as to whether his website works; he’s not smart enough to check that his website works before he goes out and tells people what a great website experience they’re in for. But he is smart enough to know that he’s not stupid enough to go around bragging about how well it works if he’d already been informed that it doesn’t work. So, he’s smart enough to know that if he’d known what he didn’t know he’d know enough not to let it be known that he knew nothing. The country’s in the very best of hands.

Michael Beschloss is right: This is what it means to be smart in a neo-monarchical America. Obama spake, and it shall be so. And, if it turns out not to be so, why pick on him? He talks a good Royal Proclamation; why get hung up on details? …

Roger Simon keeps wanting the president to resign. Pickerhead doesn’t think that’s a good idea. Keep this going another three years, and the GOP can run against this idiot for decades to come. Or course that will mean we get people like those that started the EPA and funded the ethanol mandate. 

If I were Barack Obama, I would resign as president. Forget all the temporary fixes and limited hangouts, I would be too ashamed of myself for having lied so blatantly to the American people — and on matters of such great significance.

Yes, I am a highly imperfect person. Yes, I have lied. But I doubt I would ever have done what he did, lie so repeatedly and manipulatively to my fellow citizens for my own aggrandizement or for what I personally believe is their better good (even if they don’t).

I do not believe the ends justify the means, although, apparently, our president does. Why else would he have lied? People like Stalin do, as we know. They end up killing millions of their compatriots in the process. Obama is not even faintly that bad, but he is bad enough.

One thing is certain. He will never recover from this. Even if his numbers go up, even if the Democrats win in 2014 or 2016, he is an immoral person and will only be seen that way by honest historians. He has stained himself immutably.

How important is this? Consider where we are now. Health care reform is a serious issue, but we are engaged in something even more serious, negotiating nuclear weapons with the Islamic Republic of Iran. …

We opened today with Jennifer Rubin and now she closes for us. 

Maybe it was arrogance that convinced the president he could misrepresent his health-care plan to Americans and get away with it. Maybe it was laziness in not immersing himself in the nuts and bolts (as George W. Bush did on the surge and Bill Clinton did on everything). Maybe it was insecurity that prompted him to stock his administration in his second term with lackeys who were short on competence. Maybe it is his lack of real-world experience that deprived him of the knowledge that buying insurance is “hard,” and the government doesn’t handle big technology challenges well. Whatever the cause, the president’s blundering on the cherished, decades-old liberal dream of universal health care and his jaw-dropping news conference Thursday are a blow to those on the left who still cling to the notion that he is a man of immense talent.

It is (and has been) obvious to those not transfixed by him that he has one superb skill: weaving his own story in print (his books) and in speeches. It is a sleight of hand to create composite characters and lofty rhetoric. It is ephemeral in that the words have little deeper meaning and are devoid of effective ideas and lasting value. It requires no particular depth of knowledge or detailed comprehension of policy or history.

Winston Churchill wrote about the history of his people; Obama wrote about himself. Ronald Reagan reminded us communism was evil and freedom the birthright of all people; Obama told us he was a citizen of the world. Obama’s closest confidante Valerie Jarrett told us Obama was bored all his life. That may have been because he was self-absorbed. …

And the cartoons continue to be wonderful.

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Every ten years or so during the continuing decline of our country, we are teased by a glimmer of hope. In 1994 it was the off year elections when Bill and Hillary got spanked by the voters. In the 2002 off year elections the voters rewarded W for his steadfast defense of our civilization. Now we witness the witless healthcare program in its death throes. We post early so all can enjoy this temporary halt to the march of the state.

It is Jonah Goldberg Day as he celebrates the collapse.

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, you’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the unraveling of Obamacare.

First, the obligatory caveats. …

… But come on, people.

If you can’t take some joy, some modicum of relief and mirth, in the unprecedentedly spectacular beclowning of the president, his administration, its enablers, and, to no small degree, liberalism itself, then you need to ask yourself why you’re following politics in the first place. Because, frankly, this has been one of the most enjoyable political moments of my lifetime. I wake up in the morning and rush to find my just-delivered newspaper with a joyful expectation of worsening news so intense, I feel like Morgan Freeman should be narrating my trek to the front lawn. Indeed, not since Dan Rather handcuffed himself to a fraudulent typewriter, hurled it into the abyss, and saw his career plummet like Ted Kennedy was behind the wheel have I enjoyed a story more.

Alas, the English language is not well equipped to capture the sensation I’m describing, which is why we must all thank the Germans for giving us the term “schadenfreude” — the joy one feels at the misfortune or failure of others. The primary wellspring of schadenfreude can be attributed to Barack Obama’s hubris — another immigrant word, which means a sinful pride or arrogance that causes someone to believe he has a godlike immunity to the rules of life.

The hubris of our ocean-commanding commander-in-chief surely isn’t news to readers of this website. He’s said that he’s smarter and better than everyone who works for him. His wife informed us that he has “brought us out of the dark and into the light” and that he would fix our broken souls. …

 

… During the government shutdown, Barack Obama held fast, heroically refusing to give an inch to the hostage-taking, barbaric orcs of the Tea Party who insisted on delaying Obamacare. It was a triumph for the master strategist in the White House, who finally maneuvered the Republicans into revealing their extremism. But we didn’t know something back then: Obama desperately needed a delay of Healthcare.gov. In his arrogance, though, he couldn’t bring himself to admit it. The other possibility is that he is such an incompetent manager, who has cultivated such a culture of yes-men, that he was completely in the dark about the problems. That’s the reigning storyline right now from the White House. Obama was betrayed. “If I had known,” he told his staff, “we could have delayed the website.”

This is how you know we’re in the political sweet spot: when the only plausible excuses for the administration are equally disastrous indictments. .

 

… Regardless, if Obama were a tenth as good a politician as he thinks he is, he could have blamed the delay he desperately needed on his political enemies, calling them “hostage-takers” even as he secretly understood they had rescued his most beloved hostage from his own incompetence. Instead, on September 26, he went out and told an adoring audience: “On October 1, millions of Americans . . . will finally be able to buy quality, affordable health insurance. In five days.” “Starting Tuesday,” he added, Americans will be able to “compare and purchase affordable health-insurance plans, side by side, the same way you shop for a plane ticket on Kayak — same way you shop for a TV on Amazon. You just go on and you start looking, and here are all the options.”

Come on, that’s hilarious.

Okay, maybe he didn’t know then what bad shape the website was in. But how to explain the president’s remarks three weeks after the debut of Healthcare.gov? Even if it’s true that the president only hears about bad news from the newspapers, by then the papers were full of reports that Healthcare.gov worked about as well as a Somali superconducting supercollider. Obama knew that Healthcare.gov was a fiasco, and that the “navigators” used the same broken website that consumers had spent days poking at like Chinatown chickens in an abandoned tic-tac-toe machine, desperately but fruitlessly trying to get some reward.

And yet the president strode out into the Rose Garden anyway and told millions of Americans they could buy their coverage by phone. He told them the 1-800 operators were standing by. He told them it would take only 25 minutes to apply. None of these things were true. In his mind, Obama surely thought he was putting the issue to rest, like Zeus declaring that Odysseus would make it home alive. But here’s the thing: All that Zeus needs to do to make something happen is to say it. When Barack Obama says  …

 

… When a product is brought to market and the market discovers — as it eventually has to — that the advertising wasn’t merely a tissue of lies but a geological stratum of lies, the utterly fair and justified response from the critics is “I told you so!” — not “Let’s make this thing bipartisan now.” That’s particularly true when the president continues to lie. On September 26 he said, “If you already have health care, you don’t have to do anything” to keep your plan. On November 3 he said, “What we said was you could keep [your plan] if it hasn’t been changed.” Who knew that dozens of flat declarative statements — “You can keep your plan. Period” — were trailed by a cloud of asterisks like so many invisible fireflies?

If Obamacare had been a shining success from Day One, do you think the Democrats would be in the mood to share the credit? Then why should Republicans be in more of a mood to share the blame?

Feel free to cross your fingers that reality will bend to the gravitational pull of Obama’s stellar ego, his invincible hubris. As for me, I’ll be sitting on the sidelines cheering on Nemesis, with joy in my heart. …

Jonah says it’s not just the administration that was telling lies. The Dems in congress were happy participants too.

… But whatever label you want to put on that untruth, Obama wasn’t alone in offering it. Moreover, even though the legislation may go by the moniker “Obamacare,” the fact is the president didn’t write the law. Congress did, specifically congressional Democrats, with virtually no Republican input.

Senate majority leader Harry Reid insisted that the Affordable Care Act “means making sure you can keep your family’s doctor or keep your health care plan, if you like it.” His number two, Senate majority whip Dick Durbin, said, “We are going to put in any legislation considered by the House and Senate the protection that you, as an individual, keep the health insurance you have, if that is what you want.” Senator Patty Murray, the chair of the Senate Budget Committee, said it too: “If you like what you have today, that will be what you have when this legislation is passed.” Democratic senators Chuck Schumer, Max Baucus, Jeanne Shaheen, Jay Rockefeller, Bob Casey, and many, many other Democrats spouted the same talking points.

Heck, Nancy Pelosi’s website still says that under Obamacare you can “Keep your doctor, and your current plan, if you like them.” …

… A great many Democrats voted for the Iraq war and then, when the war became unpopular, claimed they’d been lied to by President Bush. That was dishonorable enough. But at least the Democrats could claim they didn’t have all of the information.

When it comes to the quagmire of Obamacare, the only liars they should be mad at are Democrats.

In his blog, Jonah deals with the Katrina comparison retailed by the gnomes at NY Times.

… The New York Times today compares the Obamacare debacle to Bush’s problems with Katrina. It’s a comparison I’ve made several times myself. But the obvious difference is that George W. Bush didn’t spend years forcing the Affordable Hurricane Act on the American people. And he didn’t have three years to plan for its arrival, either. Nor did he have a national press corps desperate to minimize the downside of the storm. Unless you’re Louis Farrakhan or Spike Lee, nobody entertains the idea that flooding New Orleans has been a goal of conservatism for decades. Oh and conservatives didn’t go around saying that they had completely and totally mastered all of the nuances of meteorology and climate. And — wait — I should also mention that Republicans never said that any criticism of their Affordable Hurricane Act was racist and extremist. Aha! I almost forgot. Bush didn’t promise every single living American: “You can keep your current weather if you like it. Period.”

But other than that, I guess the comparison is spot on.

We depart from Jonah for a short from Jason Riley who posts in Political Diary about the hypocrisy of a president who allows the US justice department to continue the jihad against school vouchers.

… President Obama, who has never found a public school that was good enough for his own children, wants poor blacks consigned to the absolute worst schools that the system has to offer. Even, apparently, if that requires bringing to bear the full force of the U.S. Justice Department.

And the cartoons continue to be great.

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Steve Hayward sticks his neck out and predicts the healthcare law will be repealed.

Prediction: even if HealthCare.gov is fixed by the end of the month (unlikely), Obamacare is going to be repealed well in advance of next year’s election.  And if the website continues to fail, the push for repeal—from endangered Democrats—will occur very rapidly.  The website is a sideshow: the real action is the number of people and businesses who are losing their health plans or having to pay a lot more.  Fixing the website will only delay the inevitable.

It is important to remember why it was so important for Obama to promise repeatedly that “if you like your health insurance/doctor, you can keep your health insurance/doctor.”  Cast your mind back to the ignominious collapse of Hillarycare in 1994.  Hillarycare came out of the box in September 1993 to high public support according to the early polls.  This was not a surprise.  Opinion polls for decades have shown a large majority of Americans support the general idea of universal health coverage.  But Hillarycare came apart as the bureaucratic details came out, the most important one being that you couldn’t be sure you’d be able to keep your doctors or select specialists of your choice.  The Clintons refused to consider a compromise, but even with large Democratic Senate and House majorities the bill was so dead it was never brought up for a vote

Remember “Harry and Louise”?  Obama did, which is why he portrayed Obamacare as simply expanding coverage to the uninsured, and improving coverage for the underinsured while leaving the already insured undisturbed.  But the redistributive arithmetic of Obamacare’s architecture could never add up, which is what the bureaucrats knew early on—as early as 2010 according to many documents that have leaked.  The wonder is that Obama’s political team didn’t see this coming and prepare a pre-emptive strategy for dealing with the inevitable exposure of the duplicity at the heart of Obamacare’s logic.  Now that people are losing their insurance and finding that they may not be able to keep their doctor after all, Obamacare has become the domestic policy equivalent of the Iraq War: a protracted fiasco that is proving fatal to a president’s credibility and approval rating. …

Perhaps Hayward is right when even WaPo’s Chris Cilliazza can no longer ignore the disaster.

Who cares?

That’s a common reaction — particularly in the Democratic wing of the Twitter-sphere — anytime, like this morning, we post a piece detailing President Obama’s sinking poll numbers.  The thinking goes something like this: President Obama isn’t ever going to have to run for re-election again so focusing on his poll numbers — whether good or bad — is a meaningless exercise by political journalists.

Except that it’s not. At all.

Take a look back at the election results from the second midterm elections of presidents, which is what 2014 will be.  From the end of World War II up until the 1986 election, the president’s party lost an average of 48 seats in the House and seven seats in the Senate, according to the indispensable Congressional analyst Norm Ornstein.  That “six year itch” trend has slowed in more recent second term midterm elections — the average losses for the president’s party in the 1986, 1998 and 2006 midterms is 10 seats in the House and 4 seats in the Senate —  but the pattern of losses remain. (In only two six year itch elections since the Civil War — one of which happened in 1998 — has the president’s party not lost seats in Congress.)

There are a panoply of theories to explain the historical consistency of the six year itch. Here’s Fix mentor and non-partisan political handicapper Charlie Cook’s explanation: …

Jennifer Rubin lists 10 reasons for the administration to panic.

Sometimes a White House becomes obsessed with small dips in the polls and paranoid about transitory stories harmful to the president. This is not one of those times. It is time to call in a savior chief of staff in the mold of Howard Baker or look at some serious policy changes. Consider:

1. Instead of laudatory coverage, the administration is being slammed over its Iran negotiations, shedding doubt about the credibility of the president and his secretary of state. Like President Richard Nixon declaring “I am not a crook,” John Kerry was compelled to insist “We are not blind, and I don’t think we’re stupid.”

2. The administration has a knack for making bad situations awful. It misrepresented the president’s promise we could keep our insurance plans and doctors for days, until media pummeling made him give it up with a half-hearted apology. Now Kerry is spinning an unbelievable tale of the Geneva negotiations, making the Iranians’ account — which tracked all Western media accounts – seem the more honest of the two. (Iran negotiator Javad Zarif  tweeted, ” Mr.Secretary, was it Iran that gutted over half of US draft Thursday night? and publicly commented against it Friday morning?”) …

And Bill Clinton has left the reservation. The Hill has the story.

President Obama scrambled to find a coherent response Tuesday after former President Clinton jammed the administration by saying it should keep its promise that people could keep their health insurance plans if they liked them.

The White House said Obama agreed with Clinton, but it offered no concrete idea on how that could be done.

Anxiety is growing among congressional Democrats, with the House poised to vote this week on Republican legislation to let insurers offer their old plans even if they don’t meet the new standards required by ObamaCare.

Whatever Bill Clinton’s motives — Republicans say he is distancing his wife, Hillary Clinton, from the ObamaCare debacle in advance of a White House run — his comments sharply intensified pressure on the president to change his signature law. 

The White House opposes the pending House Republican bill but has no alternative yet. The quicker Obama comes up with an answer the better, House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Tuesday. …

More on Bill Clinton’s move from Jonathan Tobin.

The five-year-long dance between the Clintons and President Obama has always been an interesting show, but never more so than now as the runner-up in the 2008 Democratic presidential contest starts to maneuver in preparation for 2016. Hillary Clinton spent her four years as secretary of state playing the good soldier for the president, doing little of value but also (and unlike her spectacularly inept successor John Kerry) causing him little trouble. She exited the cabinet with a presidential love fest that had to annoy Vice President Joe Biden, her only likely rival for 2016. But now that she is safely out of the Washington maelstrom and embarked on a path that she hopes will see her return to the White House as president rather than first lady, her relationship with Obama has undergone a not-so-subtle change. That has allowed some of the old antagonism between her and, in particular, her husband and the man who beat her in 2008 to resurface.

That antagonism was on display today as Bill Clinton joined the growing chorus of critics of the ObamaCare rollout in an interview published in a web magazine. Speaking much as if he was one of the angry red-state Democrats who think the president’s lies about ObamaCare can sink their hopes of reelection next year, the 42nd president stuck a knife into the 44thpresident by saying the law should be changed to accommodate the demands of those who are losing their coverage despite the president’s promises to the contrary: …

And David Harsanyi asks what is wrong with rooting for failure?

… There are other reasons to cheer failure, as well. As Ed Rogers at The Washington Post recently wrote, “the failure of Obamacare would discourage and hopefully deter those who think a bigger, more domineering U.S. government is the answer to our problems. And most important, the horrors of this debacle and the collapse of Obamacare would have a chilling effect on politicians who want to promote big government solutions.”

My hope is that Obamacare — not to mention numerous other initiatives supported by the president — fails for a whole host of reasons. And not only do I have my fingers crossed that Obamacare fails in the way that most policy fails us but I hope it fails so hard that any residual perception among voters that any part of it was prudent policy is completely eliminated. Anything less might mean that a substantial enough bloc of Americans would continue to operate under the false impression that top-down technocratic control of their decisions is a good idea. And that would be a genuine failure.

Wishful thinking, no doubt. And admittedly, there’s also a self-centered reason to root for your ideological opponents not to succeed. Their misfortune confirms your worldview — one that you’ve probably spent considerable time and effort cultivating. Anyone with a shred of intellectual honesty remains somewhat open to the possibility that he is wrong, but he is certainly under no obligation to root against his own beliefs. Not even if a president armed with a straw man demands it of him.

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The Twitter IPO made big news recently. The Sunday Business Section of the NY Times reported on a man who makes his living in the world of “social media.”  The article is long, but helps understanding Twitter and its functions.

About once a week, Gary Vaynerchuk posts a Twitter message that reads, “Is there anything I can do for you?” He means it literally. He is inviting his roughly one million followers to send requests for any kind of help or favor. And if you respond, he will try to punch you in the face.

This will not be a conventional punch in the face, but a Vaynerchukian punch, which turns out to be the opposite of violent. Mr. Vaynerchuk, 37, is a social media marketer with some very big clients, and he’s a tireless self-promoter. Anyone fitting that description is all but required to find novel ways to win attention and coin catchphrases, and his new favorite is “jab, jab, jab, right hook.” That is also the name of his coming book, which is due out this month and is subtitled “How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy, Social World.”

A jab, in Mr. Vaynerchuk’s lexicon, is anything of value — a joke, an idea, an introduction. Or a meal. Not long ago, a follower in Minnesota joshingly responded to one of his can-I-help tweets with a request for a cheeseburger. The next day, a cheeseburger was delivered to the guy’s home. When a follower in Canada wrote “Just ran out of Tabasco,” Mr. Vaynerchuk overnighted eight bottles.

It’s unclear how a smack in the jaw came, in Mr. Vaynerchuk’s ever-churning imagination, to mean a gift. But after he delivers a few jabs, he — or the many companies that hire him to promote their brands through VaynerMedia, his agency based in Manhattan — can then hit you with a right hook, which in his world translates into a request to buy something.

Jab, jab, jab, right hook means give, give, give, ask. “A funny thing happens when you give value up front,” he is fond of saying. “You guilt people into buying stuff.” …

 

… One of his services is ensuring that a company stays on top of the latest trends in social media; he’s like a friend who knows the addresses of all the cool parties. He is the reason that G.E. had a Vayner-produced video on Vine, the six-second-video-sharing app, on the day the platform went live.

He is also the reason the company mailed out 314 pies in March.

“How do you thank people on Pi Day?” asked Ms. Boff of G.E., who was talking about March 14, or 3/14, which is as close as the calendar gets to a numerical representation of pi. “Gary came up with this idea.” G.E. sent 314 pies to 314 people who tweeted about pi that day.

It may come as a surprise that a company with $147 billion in annual revenue would consider sending a few hundred pies across the country to be an important part of its marketing strategy.

“Most people still associate our brand with appliances and lighting,” Ms. Boff explained. “But that’s a very, very small part of G.E. We are early adopters; we are a brand that is about innovation, invention, discovering things. And early adopters are the kind of people we want to be talking to, the kind of people who might want to work at G.E., or partner with us, or invest with us. And we want to humanize the company. We want to throw open the doors and behave the way a person behaves.”

And it’s not just about the 314 people who got the pies. It’s also about the people who read about the pies — perhaps, for instance, in The New York Times.

Mr. Vaynerchuk’s clients also include companies that just want to sell products. In the foyer of the main entrance of VaynerMedia, which is spread around two floors of a high-rise on Park Avenue South, there’s an enormous blackboard where a writer with fine penmanship has chalked — and this is the G-rated version — “We love social media because it sells things.”

For many, that premise has yet to be proved. …

 

… Much of what is produced at Vayner, in fact, looks like a digital version of the kind of work ad agencies have produced for decades. The company’s employees include dozens of “micro content producers,” who make images and videos for clients, using Photoshop and other programs. Zach Lansdale, a senior art director who oversees content producers, was at his desk one day in late October, creating GIFs for Furby, a brand of electronic doll sold by Hasbro.

“People are going to be scrolling when they see this,” he said, looking at a Halloween-themed Furby ad emblazoned with “Toastbusters” across the top, a riff on “Ghostbusters.” “Our goal is to catch their eye for a split second.”

There is little difference between this ad — which, it should be noted, is a word rarely used here; it’s called “content” — and one you might see in a magazine. But thanks to the endless demographic and lifestyle information spun off by sites like Facebook, the Furby ad can be aimed at consumers who are likely buyers, or fans of the brand.

“We have a client who sells dog food,” said Chris Gesualdi, a Vayner supervisor who handles paid media. “We can get so granular on Facebook that we can find people who are interested in specific breeds. Like: ‘Hey, you’re interested in cocker spaniels? Here’s some content.’ ”

Where VaynerMedia starts to look really different from conventional ad agencies is in its emphasis on speed. Social media are also interactive and immediate, so everyone here is on high alert for any event, any news that could be leveraged by any brand.

“The people I’m trying to hire here are journalists and improv actors,” Mr. Vaynerchuk said. “Creative today is more about breaking news. We need clever, funny and quick. If orange juice trees burn down in all of Florida, is there a play for our Tropicana client?” …

 

… Most of Mr. Vaynerchuk’s clients split their marketing dollars between social media and some combination of television, radio and print, making it hard to divvy up credit (or blame). But in August last year, Mondelez International, a snack and food conglomerate spun out of Kraft Foods, started an experiment. It spent every single ad dollar for one brand, Nilla — those little vanilla wafers — online, and put VaynerMedia in charge of the account.

“No other marketing,” said Bonin Bough, the company’s vice president for global media and consumer engagement. “No TV, no in-store. This was a brand using social in isolation.”

VaynerMedia created a campaign called “Momisms,” a series of Facebook ads aimed at mothers, the key Nilla audience. Many ads had the brand’s yellow background, and in red lettering offered cute homiletic quips like, “The best families are like fudge, mostly sweet with lots of nuts!” Vayner would try five different ads at the same time, aiming at a small group of Facebook users. Once it learned which ads were most “liked” and “shared,” Vayner spent more to push those ads to bigger audiences.

It worked. The Nilla Wafers Facebook page grew from 15,000 to 356,000 likes. More important, Mr. Bough says sales are up 9 percent so far this year compared with the same period in 2012. And the advertising costs for that increase are a small fraction of a conventional media campaign. (He declined to get specific.) The reason is efficiency. Instead of huge outlays for campaigns that would be seen by vast audiences, on television for instance, Mondelez spent small sums on people who had demonstrated an affinity for the brand.

“All of a sudden,” Mr. Bough said, “you’re talking about a new paradigm of marketing, built around microcontent.”

It’s hard to draw long-term conclusions based on a sample size of one. But if campaigns like Momisms build sales, you can be sure that there will be more of them. Which gets us to the tricky part: The more campaigns there are, according to Mr. Vaynerchuk, the less effective they will be. …

Last week on November 6th, Pickings led with a blog post titled Government is Magic. That blogger, Daniel Greenfield has come up with another great post about people who live in the government cloud. This is long too, so that’s all you get today.

Uncertainty and struggle are what we most often associate with poverty. Not knowing if you can still afford to pay next month’s bills and worrying over how much more you can cut back when you’re already barely getting by. This way of life has become more associated with the middle class than with those at the very bottom.

The statistic that shows that average black household worth is at $4,955 while average white household worth is at $110,729 is often quoted, but these numbers are not comparing similar things. Comparing the naked numbers is as misleading as comparing the average salaries in Tokyo and Bombay. What matters is not how much money you have, but how you live.

The $110,729 and $4,955 don’t reflect different standards of living; but different ways of living. Much of that $110,729 is home equity. But why do you need to shoulder the burden of a mortgage, when the government will just give you housing for free?

It’s misleading to think of the $110,729 families as privileged and of the $4,955 families as oppressed.

The $110,729 and  $4,955 families both have large flat screen televisions, smartphones and the usual baseline consumer toys. They could both eat equally well, except that the $4,955 family doesn’t bother watching its food budget. It just takes whatever it wants off the shelf and worries about prices later.

In terms of personal satisfaction, the $4,955 family is happier than the $110,729 family.

To understand this, think of the “Cloud”. You can buy a laptop powerful enough to store all your programs and data. Or you can get by with a mobile device whose apps connect online to a “Cloud” of someone else’s servers which store your data. The laptop is heavier to carry than the mobile device, but makes you more independent. Or you can just live in the “Cloud” confident that no matter how you mess up your device; your data will be backed up.

America is being divided between the workers and the dwellers in the government cloud. …

Isn’t it nice to have a day without posts about Stupid?