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Today we spend most of our time on healthcare. John Steele Gordon picks up on a NY Times idea for health care cost reform.

… Two weeks ago, I wrote about the medical outrage called the chargemaster, the exhaustive list of prices for procedures, drugs, and medical equipment that every hospital maintains and which every hospital refuses to reveal—until they send the bill. Interestingly, even the avidly pro-ObamaCare New York Times editorial page has noticed that price transparency is a big problem in the American medical marketplace.

Tina Rosenberg writes in today’s Sunday Review section:

“Here is a basic fact of health care in the United States: Doctors and hospitals know what they charge, but patients don’t know what they pay. As in any market, when one side has no information, that side loses: price secrecy is a major reason medical bills are so high. In my previous column, I wrote about the effect of this lack of transparency on the bills patients pay out of pocket.”

Here is an obvious reform that wouldn’t cost the federal government one cent and would exert an immediate and powerful downward pressure on medical costs: require that medical service providers make those chargemasters public. Market forces would instantly force the prices down towards the low end.

The natural forces that dominate an economy would do the work, and the Republicans can have the credit for lowering medical costs. What’s not to like?

Next a couple of items from Debra Saunders from SF Chronicle. First, she asks if the president owns obamacare.

If House Republicans had somehow erased chunks of the Affordable Care Act — the employer mandate, the ability to screen who gets subsidies and the annual cap on out-of-pocket costs for a year — the Democrats would have blasted those moves as unconscionable acts of sabotage. But the GOP didn’t sneak in those changes. President Barack Obama did.

The New York Times reported this week that the administration didn’t even announce its decision to delay a cap on copayments in many health care plans. “The grace period has been outlined on the Labor Department’s Web site since February, but was obscured in a maze of legal and bureaucratic language that went largely unnoted,” the Times reported.

Democrats argue that because Republicans don’t like Obamacare, they shouldn’t complain when the White House delays provisions.

This week, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius slammed Republicans who want to overturn Obamacare. She said: “It was passed and signed three years ago. It was upheld by the Supreme Court a year ago. The president was re-elected. This is the law of the land.”

OK, then, who made Obama king, and how does he get to override a law passed by Congress? …

Next Ms. Saunders writes on the president’s maneuver to exempt congress and its staff from healthcare reform.

… As a result of that brilliant maneuver, senators and congressmen will be able to exempt their staffers if they so choose. Capitol Hill, it turns out, is one colossal golden-domed exemption.

In pushing his amendment in 2010, Grassley rightly argued: “It’s only fair and logical that administration leaders and congressional staff, who fought so hard to overhaul America’s health care system, experience it for themselves. If the reforms are as good as promised, then they’ll know it firsthand. If there are problems, public officials will be in a position to really understand the problems, as they should.”

But there’s this ugly reality on ObamacareIsland: The rules do not apply to the people who make them.

Andrew Stiles writes about the coming “train wreck.”

The White House plans to delay yet another provision of Obamacare, the New York Times revealed on Monday, in what was described as “another setback for President Obama’s health-care initiative.” Indeed, it seems that every week the administration offers up a new example of the implementation “train wreck” of which Obamacare architect Max Baucus (D., Mont.), among others, has warned.

Here are nine examples of how Obamacare implementation hasn’t gone according to plan:

1. Caps on Out-of-Pocket Insurance Costs
The Obama administration plans to delay until 2015 a provision that limits out-of-pocket health-care costs, including deductibles and co-payments, for individuals ($6,350) and families ($12,700). In the meantime, many insurers will be able to set higher limits on out-of-pocket costs, or no limit at all.

The obscure ruling, which received attention this week despite being published on the Labor Department’s website back in February, has drawn complaints from advocacy groups representing individuals with chronic illnesses, who argue that patients requiring expensive drug treatments will face exorbitant out-of-pocket costs in the absence of caps. “The promise of out-of-pocket limits was one of the main reasons we supported health-care reform,” Theodore M. Thompson, a vice president of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, told the New York Times.

President Obama repeatedly touted the limits on out-of-pocket expenses in his effort to win support for the law. “No one should go broke because they get sick,” Obama told a joint session of Congress in September 2009. In explaining the decision to delay the requirement, a senior administration official told the Times, “We had to balance the interests of consumers with the concerns of health-plan sponsors and carriers” who “asked for more time to comply.” …

It is so bad, CNBC is running pieces on how to avoid the con-artists that are swarming to obamacare.

As the debate rages over who benefits from the Affordable Care Act, one thing is becoming clear: The controversial program is a dream come true for rip-off artists.

Consumer experts warn that the program has created a huge opportunity for swindling people by stealing their money and their sensitive personal information.

“Any time you roll out a big government program like this, confusion is inevitable,” said Lois Greisman, an associate director in the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the Federal Trade Commission. “This confusion creates a tremendous opportunity for the fraudster.”

Scammers have been at it for more than a year now, but consumer advocates and security experts warn that the problem will worsen as we get closer to Oct. 1. That’s when the millions of uninsured Americans can use a health insurance exchange, set-up by their state or by the federal government, to shop for coverage.

“I believe the incidents are going to skyrocket as that date approaches,” said Eva Velasquez, president and CEO of the nonprofit Identity Theft Resource Center. “And even people who are smart and savvy could get taken, so we are very concerned about the potential for some serious financial harm.” …

For a welcome change of pace, we go to Birmingham, MI, in suburban Detroit for last weekend’s dream cruise. The story is from the NY Times.

It’s Dream Cruise week in metro Detroit, and Woodward Avenue, main street to the American auto industry for more than a century, is dancing to the rumbling beat of some 30,000 muscle cars, street rods and classics.

A crowd estimated at more than one million has been gathering for days to witness Saturday’s bumper-to-bumper parade of automotive excess. The revelers are celebrating what the MotorCity does — and honoring the Woodward tradition of cruising, an automotive ritual of youth that’s generations old and hit a peak in the 1950s and ‘60s, glory days for Detroit’s industry.

The first Woodward Dream Cruise — a fund-raiser for a soccer program — took to the streets in 1995 and proved far more popular than organizers had anticipated. It returned the next year and each year since. Today, it is a mammoth outdoor party that’s a pilgrimage for enthusiasts who make the trek and a marketing showcase for automakers and sponsors.

Among those enjoying the festivities are Dave and Shirley Ziolkowski. The Ziolkowskis are well into retirement; he’s 70 and she’s 66. Their home is a modest ranch house in the quiet suburb of Sterling Heights, and their car is a 1988 Dodge Shadow, just the sort of thrifty transportation one might expect to find in the garage of seniors.

But the Ziolkowski’s Shadow shares little with the 93-horsepower front-drive compact that Chrysler built in 1987-94.

 In the lexicon of hot rodders, it’s a pro-street custom, with flaming-red sheet metal that conceals a professional-grade racecar frame and a brawny Chrysler V-8.

Subtlety is not part of the package:

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OK, we know Lincoln acted extra-constitutionally during the beginning months of the Civil War. How does that compare to the current lawlessness? Answers from a WSJ OpEd by a Georgetown Law prof.

… Scholars have debated whether Lincoln exceeded his power by suspending the writ and whether Congress’s retroactive ratification cured any constitutional infirmity. Whatever one’s answer, this is a case of a president—himself a constitutional lawyer—trying, under impossible circumstances, to be as faithful to the Constitution as possible.

Contrast all of this with President Obama’s announcement that he is unilaterally suspending part of the Affordable Care Act. Like Lincoln, Mr. Obama is a constitutional lawyer. And like Lincoln’s action, Mr. Obama’s was a unilateral executive suspension of the law. But in every other way, the president’s behavior could not have been more different from Lincoln’s.

First, Lincoln’s action was at least arguably constitutional, while Mr. Obama’s is not. The Constitution has a provision for suspending habeas. It has no general provision for executive suspension of laws. English kings used to suspend laws, but the Framers rejected that practice: The president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

Second, Lincoln volunteered an articulate constitutional defense of his action. Mr. Obama seemed annoyed when the New York Times dared to ask him the constitutional question. When the reporter asked whether he had consulted with lawyers about the legality of the mandate’s delay, he declined to answer.

As for Republican congressmen who had the temerity to question his authority, Mr. Obama said only: “I’m not concerned about their opinions—very few of them, by the way, are lawyers, much less constitutional lawyers.” Mr. Obama made no mention of Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin—a Democrat, a lawyer and one of the authors of ObamaCare—who said: “This was the law. How can they change the law?” …

Mark Steyn reacts to what NSA does “accidentally.”

On Thursday, the Washington Post’s revelation of thousands upon thousands of National Security Agency violations of both the law and supposed privacy protections included this fascinating detail:

A “large number” of Americans had their telephone calls accidentally intercepted by the NSA when a top secret order to eavesdrop on multiple phone lines for reasons of national security confused the international code for Egypt (20) with the area code for Washington (202).

Seriously.

I enjoy as much as the next chap all those Hollywood conspiracy thrillers about the all-powerful security state — you know the kind of thing, where the guy’s on the lam and he stops at a diner at a windswept one-stoplight hick burg in the middle of nowhere and decides to take the risk of making one 15-second call from the payphone, and as he dials the last digit there’s a click in a basement in Langley, and even as he’s saying hello the black helicopters are already descending on him.

It’s heartening to know that, if I ever get taken out at a payphone, it will be because some slapdash time-serving pen-pusher mistyped the code for Malaysia (60) as that of New Hampshire (603).

The Egypt/Washington industrial-scale wrong number is almost too perfectly poignant a vignette at the end of a week in which hundreds are dead on the streets of Cairo.

On the global scene, America has imploded: its leaders have no grasp of its national interests, never mind any sense of how to achieve them. The assumption that we are in the early stages of “the post-American world” is now shared by everyone from Gen. Sisi to Vladimir Putin. Sisi, I should add, is Egypt’s new strongman, not Putin’s characterization of Obama. Meanwhile, in contrast to its accelerating irrelevance overseas, at home Washington’s big bloated blundering bureaucratic security state expands daily. It’s easier to crack down on 47 Elm Street than Benghazi.

Perhaps this is unavoidable. A couple of months back, I quoted Tocqueville’s prescient words from almost two centuries ago: Although absolute monarchy theoretically “clothed kings with a power almost without limits,” in practice “the details of social life and of individual existence ordinarily escaped his control.”

In other words, the king couldn’t do it even if he wanted to. What would happen, Tocqueville wondered, if administrative capability were to evolve to bring “the details of social life and of individual existence” within His Majesty’s oversight? That world is now upon us. Today, the king concedes he certainly can do it, but assures us not to worry, he doesn’t really want to. …

 

Reminding us of Candy Crowley’s interference in one of last season’s debates, John Fund celebrates the GOP’s willingness to take control back from the media.

… It’s not controversial to note that presidential debates have long displayed real problems with fairness on the part of moderators and panelists. PBS anchor Jim Lehrer notes in a recent book, Tension City: Inside the Presidential Debates, that the panelists in one of the 1988 presidential debates between George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis pressured CNN moderator Bernard Shaw to withdraw or alter what became his famous question to Dukakis: Would he favor the death penalty if his wife, Kitty, were raped and murdered? Now-MSNBC anchor Andrea Mitchell and ABC’s Ann Compton confirmed to Lehrer that they had put pressure on Shaw, who is still peeved over the incident. “I’ve never confronted any of the three panelists,” Shaw said. “But I was outraged at the time that a journalist would try to talk a fellow journalist out of asking a question. I think you can tell I am still doing a burn over it. I just wouldn’t think of doing that.”

Old-school journalists such as Shaw would no doubt have wondered at the shenanigans of the 2012 campaign. During the final debate between President Obama and Mitt Romney, CNN moderator Candy Crowley stepped out of her role and took Obama’s side in a heated moment in the debate, attempting to correct Romney on a factual question about the Benghazi terrorist attack. She later had to admit that Romney had been more right than wrong in his answer. …

Last week’s NY Times’ report of chaos in the Clinton Foundation gets a déjà vu reaction from Maureen Dowd.

CLINTON nostalgia is being replaced by Clinton neuralgia.

Why is it that America’s roil family always seems better in abstract than in concrete? The closer it gets to running the world once more, the more you are reminded of all the things that bugged you the last time around.

The Clintons’ neediness, their sense of what they are owed in material terms for their public service, their assumption that they’re entitled to everyone’s money.

Are we about to put the “For Rent” sign back on the Lincoln Bedroom?

If Americans are worried about money in politics, there is no larger concern than the Clintons, who are cosseted in a world where rich people endlessly scratch the backs of rich people.

They have a Wile E. Coyote problem; something is always blowing up. Just when the Clintons are supposed to be floating above it all, on a dignified cloud of do-gooding leading into 2016, pop-pop-pop, little explosions go off everywhere, reminding us of the troubling connections and values they drag around.

There’s the continuing grotesque spectacle of Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin. And there’s the sketchy involvement of the Clintons’ most prolific fund-raiser, Terry McAuliffe, and Hillary’s brother Tony Rodham in a venture, GreenTech Automotive; it’s under federal investigation and causing fireworks in Virginia, where McAuliffe is running for governor. …

Last week was the 10th anniversary of the great blackout in the NorthEast. Popular Mechanics explains why we haven’t had a repeat.

… So why haven’t we had a major power outage since then? For one thing, power companies are now forced to prune their trees thanks to the Energy Policy Act of 2005. But the other major factor is a technological advance. According to Matt Wakefield of the Electric Power Research Institute, most power transmission companies have now installed high-tech synchrophasors, which allow them to detect problems in transmission lines and reroute electricity around trouble spots. The synchophasors work by giving real-time feedback on power flows and voltage and transmitting the data back to power companies.

“While we will always have local and regional power outrages because of things like weather,” Wakefield says, “these synchrophasors mean that these rolling blackouts that can affect large regions of the country at once are much less likely.”  …

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Andrew Malcolm thinks hedging and waffling helped make Egypt worse.

Major powers like the United States have many ways to attempt to influence the actions of other countries — money, of course, humanitarian and military aid, personal and official contacts, sanctions, the media. None guarantee success.

But one thing guarantees failure: Hedging, Waffling, Whatever you want to call a foggy policy. And that is exactly what President Obama and his team have followed regarding Egypt and beyond. And now — and for perhaps years to come — the United States is paying the price for his Amateur Hour.

It’s yet another facet of the Obama Doctrine of Failure in the Middle East.

Iran–Levy international sanctions to cripple the economy to force abandonment of its nuclear weapons development. That didn’t work, so maybe more will.

Libya–Bomb the bejesus out of the dictator’s army to help the rebels topple him, which worked great. A mob murdered him, saved a trial. But what filled the vacuum? Chaos as militias war, generating another potential lawless homeland, a mini-Afghanistan, for al Qaeda & Co. to flourish.

Syria–This time international sanctions will surely work to oust Bashir al-Assad. Except not. He has Russian help. Should we help the rebels? Which ones? OK, we’ll send weapons, even though it’s too late.

Then comes Egypt–The crown jewel of American diplomatic ineptitude, the site of Obama’s grandiose 2009 address to the Muslim world promising a new beginning. …

However, Peter Wehner thinks the situation was hopeless anyway.

As readers of this site know, I’m more than willing to criticize President Obama when I think that facts warrant it. And for the record, I believe that his policies toward the Middle East have often been inept and demonstrably unsuccessful, and they’ve certainly fallen short of the “new beginning” he promised in Cairo in 2009.

That said, it’s also important to recognize that even if Barack Obama had done everything right, things in Egypt might be roughly where they are today. It may be the case that the capacity of the United States to influence events in Egypt was intrinsically limited. The popular movement to overthrow Hosni Mubarak, after all, was organic; it was not driven by American policy. There’s nothing we could have done to save Mubarak’s rule. And in fact the Obama administration itself stuck with Mubarak until very nearly the end of his rule.

Once the Muslim Brotherhood took over, our ability to dictate how Morsi governed was limited as well, despite the huge aid we give to Egypt. Several administrations attempted to pressure Mubarak, after all, to ease up on his authoritarian ways, with little to show for it. Mr. Morsi was an even tougher nut to crack.

As for what to do now, the issues seem to me to be complex and difficult to sort through. Would it be wise to cut off aid to the Egyptian military after yesterday’s massacres? If we do, won’t that diminish our leverage in the future and alienate the current leadership? As LBJ is purported to have said, they may be bastards–but at least they’re our bastards (at least in comparison to the Muslim Brotherhood).

On the flip side, if we don’t cut off aid, doesn’t that undermine our professed commitment to human rights, free elections and the rule of law? And as Max Boot asks, hasn’t the crackdown demonstrated that we have very little leverage to lose? If we can’t influence the Egyptian military, shouldn’t we at least stand for American principles? …

Jonathan Tobin is not as kind to the administration.

President Obama resorted to one of his favorite rhetorical memes yesterday when he complained that both supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood and the military government in Egypt that toppled the Islamists from power last month are criticizing him. As he likes to do on domestic issues when criticizing his opponents and pretends to be the only adult in the room, the president is trying to carve out room in the center of the Egypt controversy by condemning the government’s actions against Brotherhood demonstrators and suspending joint military exercises but not cutting off U.S. aid.

Yet unlike those domestic disputes, in which most of the mainstream media buys into Obama’s conceit, it isn’t working this time. Indeed, not only is the president viewed with contempt and anger by both sides in what is rapidly assuming the look of a civil war inside Egypt, but he’s also getting backtalk from liberal outlets that normally echo administration talking points. Hence, the editorial page of the New York Times is pressuring the president to cut off aid and even publishing a screed from a Brotherhood supporter this morning. Even stronger was a piece in Politico that said bluntly that he had “chosen America’s interests over its values — and the pragmatists in his administration over the human-rights idealists.”

But the problem with U.S. policy toward Egypt isn’t that he has made such a choice. It’s that he’s never made a choice at all. In fact, by raising the heat on the military government and abusing it publicly at a time when it is locked in a death struggle with a totalitarian movement bent on power, he’s not defending U.S. interests or the country’s values. …

Charles Krauthammer asks if the administration can write its own laws.

As a reaction to the crack epidemic of the 1980s, many federal drug laws carry strict mandatory sentences. This has stirred unease in Congress and sparked a bipartisan effort to revise and relax some of the more draconian laws.

Traditionally — meaning before Barack Obama — that’s how laws were changed: We have a problem, we hold hearings, we find some new arrangement ratified by Congress and signed by the president.

That was then. On Monday, Attorney General Eric Holder, a liberal in a hurry, ordered all U.S. attorneys to simply stop charging nonviolent, non-gang-related drug defendants with crimes that, while fitting the offense, carry mandatory sentences. Find some lesser, non-triggering charge. How might you do that? Withhold evidence — for example, the amount of dope involved.

In other words, evade the law, by deceiving the court if necessary. “If the companies that I represent in federal criminal cases” did that, said former deputy attorney general George Terwilliger, “they could be charged with a felony.”

But such niceties must not stand in the way of an administration’s agenda. Indeed, the very next day, it was revealed that the administration had unilaterally waived Obamacare’s cap on a patient’s annual out-of-pocket expenses — a one-year exemption for selected health insurers that is nowhere permitted in the law. It was simply decreed by an obscure Labor Department regulation.

Which followed a presidentially directed 70-plus percent subsidy for the insurance premiums paid by congressmen and their personal staffs — under a law that denies subsidies for anyone that well-off.

Which came just a month after the administration’s equally lawless suspension of one of the cornerstones of Obamacare: the employer mandate. …

Power Line links to a similar column by George Will.

George Will served his apprenticeship in journalism as the Washington editor of National Review from 1972-1978. For his first two years on the job he drove NR readers nuts with his biweekly columns mercilessly exposing the crimes and deceit of the friends of Richard Nixon in the Watergate escapades. In his history of National Review, former NR senior editor Jeffrey Hart describes Will in mid-1973: “National Review‘s new Washington columnist George Will began to perfect the style of political comment that combined relentless logic with understated scorn for felons and fools and would make him famous.”

Hart mentions Will’s treatment of Spiro Agnew in particular: “His handling of the upcoming Spiro Agnew scandal would alienate some at National Review as too severe a way to treat a friend, but it was also just, and it impressed a national audience with his integrity.”

Today Will addresses the case of Barack Obama. He compares and contrasts Obama with Nixon, adjudging Obama as in some respects worse than Nixon. That’s a powerful judgment powerfully rendered, and I think the context of Will’s career adds to its heft.

Here’s the Will column.

President Obama’s increasingly grandiose claims for presidential power are inversely proportional to his shriveling presidency. Desperation fuels arrogance as, barely 200 days into the 1,462 days of his second term, his pantry of excuses for failure is bare, his domestic agenda is nonexistent and his foreign policy of empty rhetorical deadlines and red lines is floundering. And at last week’s news conference he offered inconvenience as a justification for illegality.

Explaining his decision to unilaterally rewrite the Affordable Care Act (ACA), he said: “I didn’t simply choose to” ignore the statutory requirement for beginning in 2014 the employer mandate to provide employees with health care. No, “this was in consultation with businesses.”

He continued: “In a normal political environment, it would have been easier for me to simply call up the speaker and say, you know what, this is a tweak that doesn’t go to the essence of the law. . . . It looks like there may be some better ways to do this, let’s make a technical change to the law. That would be the normal thing that I would prefer to do. But we’re not in a normal atmosphere around here when it comes to Obamacare. We did have the executive authority to do so, and we did so.”

Serving as props in the scripted charade of White House news conferences, journalists did not ask the pertinent question: “Where does the Constitution confer upon presidents the ‘executive authority’ to ignore the separation of powers by revising laws?” The question could have elicited an Obama rarity: brevity. Because there is no such authority. …

Tim Stanley of the Telegraph, UK notes the NY Times take down of the Clinton Foundation.

Is the New York Times being guest edited by Rush Limbaugh? Today it runs with a fascinating takedown of the Clinton Foundation – that vast vanity project that conservatives are wary of criticising for being seen to attack a body that tries to do good. But the liberal NYT has no such scruples. The killer quote is this:

“For all of its successes, the Clinton Foundation had become a sprawling concern, supervised by a rotating board of old Clinton hands, vulnerable to distraction and threatened by conflicts of interest. It ran multimillion-dollar deficits for several years, despite vast amounts of money flowing in.”

Over a year ago Bill Clinton met with some aides and lawyers to review the Foundation’s progress and concluded that it was a mess. Well, many political start-ups can be, especially when their sole selling point is the big name of their founder (the queues are short at the Dan Quayle Vice Presidential Learning Center). But what complicated this review – what made its findings more politically devastating – is that the Clinton Foundation has become about more than just Bill. Now both daughter Chelsea and wife, and likely presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton have taken on major roles and, in the words of the NYT “efforts to insulate the foundation from potential conflicts have highlighted just how difficult it can be to disentangle the Clintons’ charity work from Mr Clinton’s moneymaking ventures and Mrs Clinton’s political future.” Oh, they’re entangled alright.

The NYT runs the scoop in its usual balanced, inoffensive way – but the problem jumps right off the page. The Clintons have never been able to separate the impulses to help others and to help themselves, turning noble philanthropic ventures into glitzy, costly promos for some future campaign (can you remember a time in human history when a Clinton wasn’t running for office?). And their “Ain’t I Great?!” ethos attracts the rich and powerful with such naked abandon that it ends up compromising whatever moral crusade they happen to have endorsed that month. …

More on the abuse of civil-forfeiture laws from Human Events.

SACRAMENTO — The federal agents who cracked down on the illegal distribution of alcoholic beverages traditionally were called “revenuers.” I always liked the simple honesty of the term, given that the main goal of the revenuers was, as the name implied, to track down moonshining scofflaws who didn’t pay their taxes.

Federal agents long-ago shed that title, but sometimes it seems as if federal law is more about collecting revenues than anything more ennobling.

At issue are civil-forfeiture laws, which allow officials to seize property that may have been used in a crime even if the owner has not been convicted or even charged with anything. The lure of revenues, some say, has distorted police priorities as money-hungry agencies think more about grabbing property than they do about fairly applying the law. An ongoing case in Southern California illustrates the problem.

In 2003, Tony Jalali and his wife, Morgan, purchased a small office building in Anaheim. They paid it off and have managed it as an income property that would fund their retirement. The couple rented offices to an insurance agent, a dental practice, an auto wholesaler and, to the chagrin of Anaheim officials, to two clinics that dispensed medical marijuana.

Upset at the proliferation of such clinics in their city, Anaheim officials called in the feds for help in stamping them out. Instead of accusing the couple of breaking the law, the federal government filed a forfeiture case against the couple’s property (United States of America vs. Real Property Located at 2601 W. Ball Road) claiming that a building valued around $1.5 million is now rightly the government’s because illegal activity allegedly took place on its premises after an undercover officer purchased $37 in marijuana from one of the dispensaries. The Jalalis say they were never given any other notice that having such tenants was inappropriate. …

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Brit historian, Paul Johnson, argues the case for nonintervention in foreign affairs. An international version of Daniel P. Moynihan’s idea of “benign neglect”.

A superpower with an emergency strike force, big airlift capacity and air superiority is always tempted to intervene in the internal affairs of Third World countries.

It looks so simple, especially for the U.S., which has a hyperactive media, noisy democratic institutions that clamor for “human rights” and a long tradition of intervention for humanitarian reasons. The Third World, especially the Muslim world, abounds in messy government crises in which mobs try to take control, troops open fire and people get killed. Congress and the media instantly call for a U.S. response, and the President finds his finger hovering over the action button.

It’s all too easy and satisfying to press that button. Troop carriers hurtle through the air, and presidential orders are obeyed instantly, producing impressive results. But after overthrowing a “wicked” Third World government, then what?

That is when the real problems begin. Small at first, they grow progressively larger—and are unending. Does anyone honestly believe that American intervention has solved the Iraq crisis? Or the Afghanistan crisis? Or that it ever will?

Cast your mind back to the 1950s, the last time U.S. policy was in the hands of an experienced and crafty general, who knew well the foolish advice military men often give civil authorities and could see through the machinations of the hydra-headed creature he baptized “the military-industrial complex.” General Dwight D. Eisenhower was President from 1953-61, a time when America’s superiority over the rest of the world was far greater than it is today. He received countless invitations and demands for U.S. intervention but always refused them. Only once, in 1958 and at the request of Lebanon’s president, Camille Chamun, did Eisenhower agree to station troops for a short while. He withdrew them as soon as possible, three months later, without having fired a shot. …

And Joel Kotkin, while watching the collusion between the likes of Google and Face Book with NSA, suggests ways to limit their powers.

For a generation, most Americans, whatever their politics, have largely admired Silicon Valley as an exemplar of enlightened free-market capitalism. Yet, increasingly, the one-time folk heroes are beginning to appear more like a digital version of President George W. Bush’s “axis of evil.” In terms of threats to freedom and privacy, we now may have more to fear from techies in Palo Alto than the infinitely less-competent retro-Reds in North Korea.

Once, we saw the potential unsurpassed human liberation available through information technology. However, Silicon Valley, as shown in the NSA scandal, increasingly has become intimately tied to the surveillance state. Technology has enabled powerful firms – including Verizon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Google – to channel everyone’s email and cellphone calls to the national security apparatus.

“It’s as bad as reading your diary,” Joss Wright, a researcher with the Oxford Internet Institute, recently told the Associated Press, adding, “It’s far worse than reading your diary. Because you don’t write everything in your diary.”

Nor does the snooping relate only to national security. If my emails to friends and family arguably constitute a potential threat to national security, that’s one thing. The massive monitoring and largely unapproved tapping into our data for profit is quite another.

Google, which, in the first half of 2012, took in more advertising dollars than all U.S. magazines and newspapers combined, has amassed an impressive list of privacy violations, notes the Huffington Post. Even the innocent-seeming Gmail service is used to collect and sell information; Google’s crew in Palo Alto may know more about the casual user than most of us suspect.

Even Apple, arguably the most iconic Silicon Valley firm, has been hauled in front of courts for alleged privacy violations. For its part, Consumer Reports recently detailed Facebook’s pervasive privacy breaches, including misuse of information as detailed as health conditions, details an insurer could use against you, when someone is going out of town (convenient for burglars), as well as information pertaining to everything from sexual orientation to religious and ethnic affiliation.

Despite ritual denials about such invasions of privacy, the new communications moguls have little reason to stop, and lots of financial reasons to continue. As for concerns over privacy, the new oligarchs take something of a blasé attitude. Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman, in 2009 responded to concerns over privacy with this gem: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”  …

 

… The new Valley elite are simply the latest to refine and exploit information technology for their own, often enormous, personal benefit. Nothing wrong with making money, to be sure, but this ambition is no different than those of Cornelius Vanderbilt, E.H. Harriman, J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford and Thomas Watson. Each innovated in a key industry, established oligarchic control and became fantastically rich.

But even by the standards of bygone moguls, the new oligarchs’ wealth has not been widely shared. Big Oil and the Big Three automakers created hundreds of thousands of jobs for a wide range of workers. In contrast, the tech oligarchs’ contributions to American employment are relatively negligible.

Google, for example, employs 50,000 people; Facebook, 4,600; Twitter, less than a thousand, while GM employs 200,000; Ford, 164,000; and Exxon, more than 100,000. Even in the current boom, new job creation has been relatively insipid. From 1959-71, Silicon Valley produced 100,000 tech jobs; by 1990 it generated an additional 150,000 and, in the 1990s boom, another 170,000. After losing more than 108,000 high-tech jobs from 2000-08, there has been a net gain of no more than 20,000 to 30,000 positions since 2007.

The geographical area enriched by the oligarchs has also narrowed. …

 

… These changes will require both Left and Right to change their attitudes. Progressives, for example, have tended to embrace the Valley’s population for its generally “liberal” views on social issues and the environment. They have largely ignored the industry’s poor record on hiring non-Asian minorities and the lavish, energy-consuming lifestyles of the oligarchs themselves.

Some on the left are seeing the light. Britain’s left-leaning Guardian newspaper has been in the forefront unveiling the NSA scandals and the complicity in them of the tech giants. Credit belongs to the EU, which, particularly in contrast with our government, has been asking the toughest questions about loss of privacy and the dangers of oligopolistic control. With Barack Obama secure in the White House, some American leftists have also begun to recognize the extreme inequality that has accompanied, and likely been worsened by, the ascendency of the digital aristocracy.

Conservatives, for their part, can only face up to the new “axis of evil” by stepping outside their ideology strictures and instinctive embrace of wealth. The increasingly monopolistic nature of the high-tech community, and its widespread disregard for the privacy of the individual, should concern conservatives, as it would have the framers of the Constitution.

What needs to be accepted, by both conservatives and liberals, is that privacy matters, as does the threat posed to democracy by oligarchy. Until people focus on the potential for evil before us and discuss ways to curb abuses, this small and largely irresponsible class, likely in league with government, will usher in not the promised cornucopia but a gilded-age reign of Big Brother.

Keeping up with IRS’ Lois Lerner, Eliana Johnson tells us how she used personal email for government business. 

Embattled Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner sent official documents from her government e-mail address to a personal account, according to House Oversight Committee chairman Darrell Issa and his colleague, Ohio congressman Jim Jordan. 

“This raises some serious questions concerning your use of a non-official e-mail account to conduct official business,” the GOP lawmakers wrote in a letter to Lerner demanding all documents from her non-official account for the period between January 2008 and the present. “Additional documents related to the Committee’s investigation may exist in these non-official accounts over which you have some control, and the lack of access to this information prevents the Committee from fully assessing your actions,” they explained. Issa and Jordan are requesting that Lerner produce the documents by August 27. 

The use of personal e-mail accounts to conduct government work also has the potential to impede federal-records requests by the public because personal accounts are not archived by the government. Controversy erupted, for example, over former EPA administrator Lisa Jackson’s use of a government account under the name Richard Windsor which, like a personal account, would not be captured by records requests relating to Jackson. …

Independent Institute catches Bono making some sense.

… Just recently drawing upon his Christian faith (and possibly the economics influence of Professor Ayittey?), in a speech at GeorgetownUniversity, Bono altered his economic and political views and declared that only capitalism can end poverty.

“Aid is just a stopgap,” he said. “Commerce [and] entrepreneurial capitalism take more people out of poverty than aid. We need Africa to become an economic powerhouse.” …

James Pethokoukis agrees with Bono.

Lots of attention being paid to this quote from U2′s Bono:

“Aid is just a stopgap,” he said. “Commerce [and] entrepreneurial capitalism take more people out of poverty than aid. We need Africa to become an economic powerhouse.”

The above chart is from Gapminder and shows China’s per capita income growth since 1800 vs. that of the US and the UK. What happened to China toward the end of the 20th century? Well, it started doing what the America and Britain began doing some 200 years earlier. China started embracing what Bono calls entrepreneurial capitalism. Or as economist Deirdre McCloskey puts it:

“The Big Economic Story of our times has not been the Great Recession of 2007–2009, unpleasant though it was.  … The Big Economic Story of our own times is that the Chinese in 1978 and then the Indians in 1991 adopted liberal ideas in the economy, and came to attribute a dignity and a liberty to the bourgeoisie formerly denied. And then China and India exploded in economic growth.  … And contrary to the usual declarations of the economists since Adam Smith or Karl Marx, the Biggest Economic Story was not caused by trade or investment or exploitation. It was caused by ideas. The idea of bourgeois dignity and liberty led to a rise of real income per head in 2010 prices from about $3 a day in 1800 worldwide to over $100 in places that have accepted the Bourgeois Deal and its creative destruction.”

It’s August, so we have to deal with those who think the bombing of Hiroshima was a mistake. Michael Barone has it this year.

I couldn’t disagree more strongly with my Washington Examiner colleague Timothy Carney when he argues that we should not have dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My reading of the history of World War II has convinced me that Japan would not have surrendered if the bombs had not been dropped; even after that some in the military tried to prevent the Emperor from surrendering. American military leaders predicted that an invasion of Japan would have produced 1 million Americans killed or wounded. The Japanese had fought fiercely in Okinawa in the spring of 1945; 100,000 Americans and Japanese died in this one small island.

It’s worth reading this 1981 New Republic article by literary scholar and World War II infantryman Paul Fussell, who was scheduled to fight in Japan. So was the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had enlisted in the Navy in 1945. “Was going to be sent to Japan,” he once told me. “Would have died!” …

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Thomas Sowell asks if the left is serious about educating minority students.

Two recent events — one on the east coast and one on the west coast — raise painful questions about whether we are really serious when we say that we want better education for minority children.

One of these events was an announcement by Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., that it plans on August 19th to begin “an entire week of activities to celebrate the grand opening of our new $160 million state-of-the-art school building.”

The painful irony in all this is that the original DunbarHigh School building, which opened in 1916, housed a school with a record of high academic achievements for generations of black students, despite the inadequacies of the building and the inadequacies of the financial support that the school received.

By contrast, today’s DunbarHigh School is just another ghetto school with abysmal standards, despite Washington’s record of having some of the country’s highest levels of money spent per pupil — and some of the lowest test score results.

Housing an educational disaster in an expensive new building is all too typical of what political incentives produce.

We pay a lot of lip service to educational excellence. But too many institutions and individuals that have produced good educational results for minority students have not only failed to get support, but have even been undermined.

A recent example on the west coast is a charter school operation in Oakland called the American Indian Model Schools. The high school part of this operation has been ranked among the best high schools in the nation. Its students’ test scores rank first in its district and fourth in the state of California.

But the California State Board of Education announced plans to shut down this charter school — immediately. Its students would have had to attend inferior public schools this September, except that a challenge in court stopped this sudden shutdown. …

Eliana Johnson keeps after new IRS information.

… E-mail correspondence unearthed by the House Ways and Means Committee reveals that Lois Lerner, the figure at the center of the scandal, may have committed a felony by divulging information about a conservative group to the Federal Election Commission, in an incident that dates back at least to 2008, before President Obama took office. Though some conservatives have eagerly sought evidence that Obama’s White House instigated the IRS’s targeting of tea-party groups, the latest evidence suggests that an anti-conservative bias may instead be an endemic feature of the federal bureaucracy. And now, an FEC official is raising the specter of systemic bias at that agency, too, calling the techniques its lawyers employ a “much more sophisticated way” of discriminating against conservative groups than those used by the IRS.

“When we spoke last July, you had told us that the American Future Fund had not received an exemption letter from the IRS,” an FEC attorney wrote in a February 2009 e-mail to Lerner.

But Section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code provides that both “return information” and “taxpayer return information” are strictly confidential. An IRS source tells National Review Online that, within the agency, disclosing the information that Lerner appears to have provided is considered “a violation of Section 6103.”

That’s a felony punishable by up to $5,000 in fines or five years in prison. If found guilty of such a violation, Lerner, who has been on paid administrative leave since May, would also lose her job: “If such offense is committed by any officer or employee of the United States,” the law reads, he shall “be dismissed from office or discharged from employment upon conviction for such offense.”

Tax-law experts, however, disagree about whether Lerner’s apparent disclosure was a violation of Section 6103. Steven Willis, a professor of tax law at the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law, argues that it was. The law “does not allow for disclosure of pending applications,” Willis says, and though he acknowledges that the law is a “technicality,” he maintains that Lerner’s violation is something more serious. “In her position as director of Exempt Organizations, Ms. Lerner would surely have been aware of section 6103,” Willis tells me. “She would have had responsibility to ensure that employees who reported to her not violate the sections.” Further, her role as a senior IRS official “adds to the seriousness.”

However, it’s not clear that Lerner disclosed anything that could not have been inferred from information otherwise available to the FEC. …

Jennifer Rubin posts on the president’s defense of his lawlessness.

… no president is empowered to ignore parts of laws, even ones he dubs to be outside the “core” of legislation. The president should have been challenged at the press conference. Congress should not allow its job of making and amending legislation to be usurped by the president, whose theory would allow a President Chris Christie or President Scott Walker to announce he was unilaterally halting the individual mandate or the medical device tax.

The president’s penchant for authoritarianism has not been limited to Obamacare. He has also altered immigration law and  gone after the work requirement in welfare legislation. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (Va.) has put together a handy compendium of these power grabs. Couple those with his recess appointments and excessive use of executive privilege to deny Congress the ability to conduct oversight and you have a president attempting to exercise unprecedented powers.

The left is convulsed over the president’s enforcement of duly passed anti-terror legislation that is subject to both judicial and legislative oversight. Yet when it comes to their favorite domestic initiatives, they muster no concern about an out-of-control executive. They should keep this in mind when the next GOP president comes along.

The left loves housing density and Joel Kotkin knows why.

Among university professors, government planners and mainstream pundits there is little doubt that the best city is the densest one. This notion is also supported by a wide number of politically connected developers, who see in the cramming of Americans into ever smaller spaces an opportunity for vast, often taxpayer-subsidized, profiteering.

More recently density advocates span a much-discussed study of geographic variations in upward mobility as suggesting that living in a spread-out city hurts children’s prospects in life. “Sprawl may be killing Horatio Alger,” quipped economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.

Yet the study actually found the highest rates of upward mobility not in dense cities, but in relatively spread-out places like Salt Lake City, small cities of the Great Plains such as Bismarck, N.D.; Yankton, S.D.; and Pecos, Texas — all showed bottom to top mobility rates more than double New York City. And we shouldn’t forget the success story of Bakersfield, Calif., a city Columbia University urban planning professor David King wryly labeled “a poster child for sprawl.” Rather than an ode to bigness, notes demographer Wendell Cox, the study found that commuting zones (similar to metropolitan areas) with populations under 100,000 — smaller cities that tend to be sprawled by nature  —  have the highest average upward income mobility.

“Sprawl” did not kill Detroit, as Krugman suggests in his previously mentioned column, the city did that largely to itself. Another like-minded critic, historian Steven Conn,  blames the auto industry for the city’s problems, perhaps not recognizing Detroit would be little more than a more southerly Duluth without it.

There are at least three major problems with the thesis that density is an unabashed good. First, and foremost, Census and survey data reveal that most people do not want to live cheek to jowl if they can avoid it. Second, most of the attractive highest-density areas also have impossibly high home prices relative to incomes and low levels of homeownership. And third, and perhaps most important, dense places tend to be regarded as poor places for raising families. In simple terms, a dense future is likely to be a largely childless one. …

Lat night humor from Andy Malcolm.

Leno: President Obama and the Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras met in the White House. Obama and the Prime Minister of Greece talking about the economy. If that isn’t the blind leading the blind.

Conan: The NFL is cracking down this year on excessive celebrations. Players are being told not to show off too much after a touchdown, a sack or a murder.

Fallon: The New York City Education Dept. says only 26% of students passed the English portion of the latest standardized test. On the bright side, they’re too bad at math also to know how bad that is.

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John Steele Gordon explains one of the reasons the health care bill was so poorly written. We also learn one of the reasons compromise is so difficult.

Obamacare, enacted more than three years ago, has been unraveling for over a year.  And there’s a good reason for that: it was never intended to become law at all.

Ordinarily one house of Congress passes a bill and the other house then substantially amends that bill or writes its own from scratch. No one worries too much about the actual language in these bills because they eventually go to a conference committee made up of both senators and representatives. There, the differences are ironed out and legislative draftsmen put the conference bill into final shape. That’s when they worry about the exact language, cross the T’s, dot the I’s, and reconcile conflicting provisions. After both houses pass this final, cleaned up legislation, it goes to the president for signing and becomes law.

But that process was aborted in this case. The Senate passed its version, full of sloppy language, impossible mandates, and contradictory provisions, on Christmas Eve 2009. It could do so because the Democrats at that point had a 60-vote, filibuster-proof majority.

But then, the people of Massachusetts stunned the political world by electing a Republican to Teddy Kennedy’s old Senate seat in January 2010. Bye-bye filibuster-proof majority. If the House didn’t pass the exact same bill the Senate had passed, the two bills would have to be reconciled and the final bill sent back to the Senate, where the Republicans now could—and certainly would—filibuster it.

There were only two choices: have the House—where the majority has total control—pass the Senate bill with all its sloppiness, or cut the Republicans in on the deal sufficiently to pick up a couple of Senate Republicans. This being Obama’s Washington, of course, they opted to pass a crudely drafted, legislative horror show into law.

Now these political chickens are coming home to roost. …

 

… But why is there not a normal, let’s-get-the-country’s-business-done political atmosphere in Washington these days? Could it have something to do with a president who says, in a scheduled press conference, such things as:

“Now, I think the really interesting question is why it is that my friends in the other party have made the idea of preventing these people from getting health care their holy grail, their number-one priority. The one unifying principle in the Republican Party at the moment is making sure that 30 million people don’t have health care and, presumably, repealing all those benefits I just mentioned — kids staying on their parents’ plan; seniors getting discounts on their prescription drugs; I guess a return to lifetime limits on insurance; people with preexisting conditions continuing to be blocked from being able to get health insurance.”

Republicans, of course, don’t oppose any of those provisions, except, perhaps, for 26-year-old “kids” on their parents’ health insurance. It is pure, unadulterated, unadorned, bald-faced political slander by the president of the United States against the party that controls one house of Congress. It is also political stupidity of a very high order.

Barack Obama is, by far, the most viciously partisan president in American history. Other presidents have been partisan, often deeply so, but were careful to take the high road so as to keep open lines of communication with the other party, without which governance cannot be successful in a democracy. Not Barack Obama.  His incompetence in everything political except winning elections is now costing him (and, inevitably, us) big time.

History will not treat this man kindly.

John Hayward says a new “consult with business leaders clause” has been found in the Constitution. 

President Obama’s bizarre press conference on Friday produced a number of memorably loopy moments, but none surpassed this alleged Constitutional scholar’s discovery of the “consultation with business leaders” clause in the Constitution, which gives Presidents limitless power to break the law, provided some unspecified number of business leaders approves.

This is the same press conference where Obama compared the controversial universal domestic surveillance programs of the National Security Agency with his wife checking up on him to make sure he did the dishes, yes.  This is the press conference where he invented a new “core al-Qaeda” subdivision, never mentioned once during his endless “al-Qaeda is on the run” football spiking over the death of Osama bin Laden during the 2012 campaign.  Detroit is dead after struggling with a fifty-year case of terminal liberalism, and al-Qaeda has America on the run, but rest assured, bin Laden sleeps with the dishes.

Nevertheless, the stuff about the Business Leader Clause was more significant.  It’s a real window into the way this lawless President views his limitless executive power, and the servile relationship of the American people to their wise ruling class.   The old chestnut about conservatism versus liberalism asks if we are a people with a government, or a government with a people.  But to Barack Obama, America is an almighty White House with a vestigial legislature, hot-wired to a few big cities, isolated in a dark sea of ignorant flyover-country child-citizens who must occasionally be told fanciful things to keep them under control.

This is what the President said, on the subject of his illegal modification of the Affordable Care Act to roll the employer mandate back by a year:

With respect to health care, I didn’t simply choose to delay this on my own. This was in consultation with businesses all across the country, many of whom are supportive of the Affordable Care Act, but — and who — many of whom, by the way, are already providing health insurance to their employees but were concerned about the operational details of changing their HR operations if they’ve got a lot of employees, which could be costly for them, and them suggesting that there may be easier ways to do this. …

National Review piece on more lawless behavior from the president.

America has a two-party system. But it’s not Republicans versus Democrats. It’s the ruling class — Republicans and Democrats — against everyone else. Consider how President Obama just gave Congress its very own Obamacare waiver.

Obamacare includes a provision that should cost each member of Congress and each staffer $5,000 to $11,000 per year. Needless to say, the ruling class was not pleased.

Congress wasn’t about to try to exempt itself from this provision explicitly, though. If John Q. Congressman voted to give himself an Obamacare waiver that his constituents don’t get, he wouldn’t be John Q. Congressman much longer. What’s an aristocrat to do?

On July 30, I predicted that, even though he had no authority to do so, President Obama would waive that provision at taxpayers’ expense. On August 1, he ignobly obliged the aristocracy by decreeing we peasants give each member and staffer $5,000 or $11,000, depending on whether they want self-only or family coverage. It’s good to be king.

The president’s supporters, like courtesans of old, are trying to quell a peasant uprising by denying there were any special favors. The denials ring hollow. …

John Hinderaker wonders if insulting Putin is “smart” diplomacy.

Remember the good old days when the Obama administration promised “smart diplomacy?” Hillary Clinton mocked the Bush administration for not cozying up sufficiently to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and presented the Russians with a “reset” button to demonstrate that from now on, things would be better. Right.

Now the administration is feuding with Putin over Edward Snowden. It is a bad sort of feud, because the Russians hold all the cards, in the person of Snowden. Whatever Snowden knows they can easily learn, and at this point there is nothing we can do about it. So in his press conference today, Obama lashed out against Putin:

“I don’t have a bad personal relationship with Putin. When we have conversations, they’re candid, they’re blunt; oftentimes, they’re constructive. I know the press likes to focus on body language and he’s got that kind of slouch, looking like the bored kid in the back of the classroom.”

Maybe directing gratuitous insults toward rival world leaders is a good strategy, when you are dealing from a position of weakness. Maybe, but I doubt it. Although I can see how it could be tempting. But we certainly have come a long way from the early days of the “Hope and Change” administration.

Prosecutorial overreach in Tennessee becomes columnist overreach by Nicholas Kristoff.  

IF you want to understand all that is wrong with America’s criminal justice system, take a look at the nightmare experienced by Edward Young.

Young, now 43, was convicted of several burglaries as a young man but then resolved that he would turn his life around. Released from prison in 1996, he married, worked six days a week, and raised four children in Hixson, Tenn.

Then a neighbor died, and his widow, Neva Mumpower, asked Young to help sell her husband’s belongings. He later found, mixed in among them, seven shotgun shells, and he put them aside so that his children wouldn’t find them.

“He was trying to help me out,” Mumpower told me. “My husband was a pack rat, and I was trying to clear things out.”

Then Young became a suspect in burglaries at storage facilities and vehicles in the area, and the police searched his home and found the forgotten shotgun shells as well as some stolen goods. The United States attorney in Chattanooga prosecuted Young under a federal law that bars ex-felons from possessing guns or ammunition. In this case, under the Armed Career Criminal Act, that meant a 15-year minimum sentence.

The United States attorney, William Killian, went after Young — even though none of Young’s past crimes involved a gun, even though Young had no shotgun or other weapon to go with the seven shells, and even though, by all accounts, he had no idea that he was violating the law when he helped Mrs. Mumpower sell her husband’s belongings. …

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Read the first half of Mark Steyn’s column on the Hasan trial in Texas, and you will wonder if there is any chance our country can survive.

On December 7, 1941, the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor was attacked. Three years, eight months, and eight days later, the Japanese surrendered. These days, America’s military moves at a more leisurely pace. On November 5, 2009, another U.S. base, FortHood, was attacked — by one man standing on a table, screaming “Allahu akbar!” and opening fire. Three years, nine months, and one day later, his court-martial finally got under way.

The intervening third-of-a-decade-and-more has apparently been taken up by such vital legal questions as the fullness of beard Major Hasan is permitted to sport in court. This is not a joke: See “Judge Ousted in Fort Hood Shooting Case amid Beard Debacle” (CBS News). Army regulations require soldiers to be clean-shaven. The judge, Colonel Gregory Gross, ruled Hasan’s beard in contempt, fined him $1,000, and said he would be forcibly shaved if he showed up that hirsute next time. At which point Hasan went to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, which ruled that Colonel Gross’s pogonophobia raised questions about his impartiality, and removed him. He’s the first judge in the history of American jurisprudence to be kicked off a trial because of a “beard debacle.” The new judge, Colonel Tara Osborn, agreed that Hasan’s beard was a violation of regulations, but “said she won’t hold it against him.”

The U.S. Army seems disinclined to hold anything against him, especially the 13 corpses plus an unborn baby. Major Hasan fired his lawyers, presumably because they were trying to get him off — on the grounds that he’d had a Twinkie beforehand, or his beard don’t fit so you must acquit, or some such. As a self-respecting jihadist, Major Hasan quite reasonably resented being portrayed as just another all-American loon gone postal. So he sacked his defense team, only to have the court appoint a standby defense team just in case there were any arcane precedents and obscure case law he needed clarification on. I know that’s the way your big-time F. Lee Bailey types would play it, but it doesn’t seem to be Major Hasan’s style. On the very first day of the trial, he stood up and told the jury that “the evidence will clearly show that I am the shooter.” Later, in one of his few courtroom interventions, he insisted that it be put on the record that “the alleged murder weapon” was, in fact, his. The trial then came to a halt when the standby defense team objected to the judge that Major Hasan’s defense strategy (yes, I did it; gimme a blindfold, cigarette, and tell the virgins here I come) would result in his conviction and execution. 

Major Hasan is a Virginia-born army psychiatrist and a recipient of the Pentagon’s Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, which seems fair enough, since he certainly served in it, albeit for the other side. Most Americans think he’s nuts. He thinks Americans are nuts. It’s a closer call than you’d think. In the immediate aftermath of his attack, the U.S. media, following their iron-clad rule that “Allahu akbar” is Arabic for “Nothing to see here,” did their best to pass off Major Hasan as the first known victim of pre-Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. “It comes at a time when the stress of combat has affected so many soldiers,” fretted Andrew Bast in a report the now defunct Newsweek headlined, “A Symptom of a Military on the Brink.”

Major Hasan has never been in combat. He is not, in fact, a soldier. He is a shrink. The soldiers in this story are the victims, some 45 of them. And the only reason a doctor can gun down nearly four dozen trained warriors (he was eventually interrupted by a civilian police officer, Sergeant Kimberly Munley, with a 9mm Beretta) is that soldiers on base are forbidden from carrying weapons. That’s to say, under a 1993 directive a U.S. military base is effectively a gun-free zone, just like a Connecticut grade school. That’s a useful tip: If you’re mentally ill and looking to shoot up a movie theater at the next Batman premiere, try the local barracks — there’s less chance of anyone firing back. …

John Fund notes Norway’s turn to common sense. Maybe it will be a place to escape too.

… “Oil has turned Norway from a sleepy, largely rural economy into an economic powerhouse,” says Norwegian businessman Olaf Halvorssen. “So much money comes in to the government that Norway has largely escaped the trimming of the welfare state that many other European countries are going through.”

But more and more people recognize that the oil wealth won’t last forever, and a real debate is just starting in this country of 4.9 million people over what direction its economy should go. Norway will be holding elections for Parliament on September 9, just two weeks before Germany votes. If polls taken over the last year are accurate, the eight-year-old Labor-party government of Jens Stoltenberg is headed for a landslide defeat.

Normally, you would think it would be a shoo-in for reelection. Labor’s social democrats have long thought of themselves as the natural party of government — Labor has been the leading party in Norway for all but 16 of the last 78 years. While much of Europe is wracked by recession, Norway’s economy grew by 3 percent last year, and the unemployment rate is only 3.5 percent. Norway’s GDP per capita is now over $60,000 a year.

But Norwegians appear likely to elect a conservative coalition government for the first time in over a decade. Polls show the Conservative party leading with 32 percent of the vote, which should give it 58 seats in the 169-seat parliament, a dramatic increase from 2005, when it won only 23 seats. The Labor party has about 30 percent of the vote, and its left-wing allied parties are floundering. The Progress party — a populist party that supports low taxes and stricter limits on immigration, and that worries about Muslim extremism – has about 16 percent of the vote, and it and the Conservatives, together with their smaller allies, look to have a clear majority in the new Parliament. …

For another look at our upside down world, Debra Saunders has a look at pay scales at UC.

UC Davis hired a associate chancellor for strategic communications, at an annual salary of $260,000, according to this Fresno Bee story.  $260,000? That’s almost $100,000 more than the state pays Gov. Jerry Brown. It’s also a higher salary than UC Davis paid to Luanne Lawrence’s predecessors, who had different titles. …

Science News reports on studies showing talking on cell phones may not cause more crashes. Very interesting methodology in the study.

For almost 20 years, it has been a wide-held belief that talking on a cellphone while driving is dangerous and leads to more accidents. However, new research from CarnegieMellonUniversity and the London School of Economics and Political Science suggests that talking on a cellphone while driving does not increase crash risk. Published in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, the study uses data from a major cellphone provider and accident reports to contradict previous findings that connected cellphone use to increased crash risk. Such findings include the influential 1997 paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, which concluded that cellphone use by drivers increased crash risk by a factor of 4.3 — effectively equating its danger to that of illicit levels of alcohol. The findings also raise doubts about the traditional cost-benefit analyses used by states that have, or are, implementing cellphone-driving bans as a way to promote safety.

“Using a cellphone while driving may be distracting, but it does not lead to higher crash risk in the setting we examined,” said Saurabh Bhargava, assistant professor of social and decision sciences in CMU’s Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences. “While our findings may strike many as counterintuitive, our results are precise enough to statistically call into question the effects typically found in the academic literature. Our study differs from most prior work in that it leverages a naturally occurring experiment in a real-world context.” …

Bloomberg News says “modest” homes in Manhattan (those under $3 million) have never been harder to buy.

With $1 million to spend and no need for a mortgage, Laiyan Wong expected to be able to easily buy a two-bedroom apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. What she didn’t anticipate was how much competition she’d have.

Wong viewed more than 10 apartments in two months, gradually increasing her budget to $1.5 million as it became clear that others were looking for similar properties amid a plummeting supply of homes in her price range.

“I made four bids and was outbid each time,” said Wong, a trader at an investment bank, who eventually got a mortgage and paid $1.6 million for a condo that was about to go under contract to someone else. “You have to be willing to make a decision in a few minutes and overpay the asking price.”

Manhattanites with budgets that would buy mansions in most of America are discovering it’s tough to find even a two-bedroom apartment in New York as the inventory of homes shrinks. The number of available units for less than $3 million — those generally considered nonluxury — has plunged by the most on record, creating a shortage that’s unlikely to be alleviated any time soon as developers focus on ultra high-end condos that have set price records by wealthy investors.

Listings for nonluxury apartments, encompassing about 90 percent of the Manhattan market, have fallen by more than 36 percent year-over-year in each of the last three quarters, the biggest declines in 12 years of recordkeeping, according to data from New York appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. By contrast, inventory in the top 10 percent of the market by price fell only 3.9 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier. …

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Charles Krauthammer points out the language distortions of the administration.

Jen Psaki, blameless State Department spokeswoman, explained that the hasty evacuation of our embassy in Yemen was not an evacuation but “a reduction in staff.” This proved a problem because the Yemeni government had already announced (and denounced) the “evacuation” — the word normal folks use for the panicky ordering of people onto planes headed out of the country.

Thus continues the administration’s penchant for wordplay, the bending of language to fit a political need. In Janet Napolitano’s famous formulation, terror attacks are now “man-caused disasters.” And the “global war on terror” is no more. It’s now an “overseas contingency operation.”

Nidal Hasan proudly tells a military court that he, a soldier of Allah, killed 13 American soldiers in the name of jihad. But the massacre remains officially classified as an act not of terrorism but of “workplace violence.”

The U.S. ambassador to Libya and three others are killed in an al-Qaeda-affiliated terror attack — and for days it is waved off as nothing more than a spontaneous demonstration gone bad. After all, famously declared Hillary Clinton, what difference does it make?

Well, it makes a difference, first, because truth is a virtue. Second, because if you keep lying to the American people, they may seriously question whether anything you say — for example, about the benign nature of NSA surveillance — is not another self-serving lie. …

Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College tells the truth and gets into trouble. Spencer Amaral, Hillsdale senior writes a defense in The American Spectator.

When I recently heard that the president of my school, HillsdaleCollege, was in hot water for making racist remarks at a state hearing on education, I was stunned.

But upon learning the facts, it was immediately obvious that this was simply another case of liberal scandal-mongers scraping the bottom of the barrel to try to discredit one of the nation’s finest — and most conservative — colleges.

Hillsdale College President Dr. Larry Arnn was speaking at a Michigan Department of Education hearing in Lansing last Wednesday on his opposition to Common Core curriculum (which should be the real story here, but we’ve conveniently managed to cut that out of the conversation). Arnn presented his argument against state interference in education, and included a story of state officials visiting HillsdaleCollege in 1998 to inspect the school’s “racial diversity.” Arnn was outraged – as am I – that the state would act in such a blatantly race-based manner. Not to be Mr. Obvious here, but to have bureaucrats walking around the campus of a top-tier college with clipboards, taking notes on the skin color of the students they see, is by definition racist because it doesn’t recognize a person’s character or individuality, but only the color of their skin.

Arnn sought to express disgust at the backwards and dehumanizing actions of the state officials, which were revealed when he later received a letter from the Michigan Department of Education. The letter, he said, notified him that HillsdaleCollege “violated the standards for diversity because we didn’t have enough dark ones, I guess, is what they meant.”

“To that I told them, we are probably the first college in human history, certainly one of them, founded with a charter that says we will take black and white men and women without any discrimination,” Arnn said. …

According to Ilya Somin in Volokh, The New Yorker had a piece on asset forfeiture abuse. Or course, being the New Yorker they found some things to like in the public safety goobers out of control.

… Despite such abuses, New Yorker writer Sarah Stillman writes that “The basic principle behind asset forfeiture is appealing. It enables authorities to confiscate cash or property obtained through illicit means, and, in many states, funnel the proceeds directly into the fight against crime.” I disagree. The idea that government can seize your property without ever having to prove that you committed a crime is deeply unjust, and creates dangerous perverse incentives for police, especially in cases where they or the local governments they work for get to keep the assets seized. The Texas jurisdiction discussed in Stillman’s article is particularly egregious, since it focuses its abusive behavior on out-of-town drivers who have little or no political leverage in the area, and face unusually high costs if they choose to contest the seizures.

A variety of reforms could help diminish asset forfeiture abuse. For example, police could be banned from keeping the proceeds, and state and local governments should give owners the right to contest seizures quickly and cheaply. In some states, current arrangements allow the authorities to hold forfeited property for many months without giving the owner any opportunity to challenge the seizure, thereby violating the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Ultimately, however, the best solution is to abolish civil asset forfeiture completely. …

Speaking of out of control public safety goobers, Dr. Sanjay Gupta has come to the conclusion he needs to reverse his position against medical marijuana. A position, mind you, he reached listening to DEA propaganda. Today, Sunday 8/11 at 8:00 you can see his CNN documentary titled “Weed.”

Over the last year, I have been working on a new documentary called “Weed.” The title “Weed” may sound cavalier, but the content is not.

I traveled around the world to interview medical leaders, experts, growers and patients. I spoke candidly to them, asking tough questions. What I found was stunning.

Long before I began this project, I had steadily reviewed the scientific literature on medical marijuana from the United States and thought it was fairly unimpressive. Reading these papers five years ago, it was hard to make a case for medicinal marijuana. I even wrote about this in a TIME magazine article, back in 2009, titled “Why I would Vote No on Pot.”

Well, I am here to apologize.

I apologize because I didn’t look hard enough, until now. I didn’t look far enough. I didn’t review papers from smaller labs in other countries doing some remarkable research, and I was too dismissive of the loud chorus of legitimate patients whose symptoms improved on cannabis.

Instead, I lumped them with the high-visibility malingerers, just looking to get high. I mistakenly believed the Drug Enforcement Agency listed marijuana as a schedule 1 substance because of sound scientific proof. Surely, they must have quality reasoning as to why marijuana is in the category of the most dangerous drugs that have “no accepted medicinal use and a high potential for abuse.”

They didn’t have the science to support that claim, and I now know that when it comes to marijuana neither of those things are true. It doesn’t have a high potential for abuse, and there are very legitimate medical applications. In fact, sometimes marijuana is the only thing that works. Take the case of Charlotte Figi, who I met in Colorado. She started having seizures soon after birth. By age 3, she was having 300 a week, despite being on seven different medications. Medical marijuana has calmed her brain, limiting her seizures to 2 or 3 per month.

Ray Kurzweil, Director of Engineering at Google, has a blog. A recent post touted the brain saving attributes of chocolate. Pickerhead would rather they’d praised bacon.

Drinking two cups of hot chocolate a day may help older people keep their brains healthy and their thinking skills sharp, according to a study published in the August 7, 2013, issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

The study involved 60 people with an average age of 73 who did not have dementia. The participants drank two cups of hot cocoa per day for 30 days and did not consume any other chocolate during the study. They were given tests of memory and thinking skills. They also had ultrasounds tests to measure the amount of blood flow to the brain during the tests.

“We’re learning more about blood flow in the brain and its effect on thinking skills,” said study author Farzaneh A. Sorond, MD, PhD, of HarvardMedicalSchool in Boston and a member of the AmericanAcademy of Neurology. “As different areas of the brain need more energy to complete their tasks, they also need greater blood flow. This relationship, called neurovascular coupling, may play an important role in diseases such as Alzheimer’s.”

Of the 60 participants, 18 had impaired blood flow at the start of the study. Those people had an 8.3-percent improvement in the blood flow to the working areas of the brain by the end of the study, while there was no improvement for those who started out with regular blood flow. …

Andy Borowitz reports Jeff Bezos of Amazon says he clicked on Washington Post by mistake.

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, told reporters today that his reported purchase of the Washington Post was a “gigantic mix-up,” explaining that he had clicked on the newspaper by mistake.

“I guess I was just kind of browsing through their website and not paying close attention to what I was doing,” he said. “No way did I intend to buy anything.”

Mr. Bezos said he had been oblivious to his online shopping error until earlier today, when he saw an unusual charge for two hundred and fifty million dollars on his American Express statement.

After investigating with the credit-card company, he was informed that he had been charged for the purchase price of the entire Washington Post, which, he said, was “pure craziness.”

“No way in hell would I buy the Washington Post,” he said. “I don’t even read the Washington Post.”

Mr. Bezos said he had been on the phone with the Post’s customer service for the better part of the day trying to unwind his mistaken purchase, but so far “they’ve really been giving me the runaround.”

According to Mr. Bezos, “I keep telling them, I don’t know how it got in my cart. I don’t want it. It’s like they’re making it impossible to return it.”

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Kevin Williamson wrote a powerful essay about the president’s place as the front man for the bureaucracy. Williamson says he shows this by his …

… utterly predictable approach to domestic politics: appoint a panel of credentialed experts. His faith in the powers of pedigreed professionals is apparently absolute. Consider his hallmark achievement, the Affordable Care Act, the centerpiece of which is the appointment of a committee, the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), the mission of which is to achieve targeted savings in Medicare without reducing the scope or quality of care. How that is to be achieved was contemplated in detail neither by the lawmakers who wrote the health-care bill nor by the president himself. But they did pay a great deal of attention to the processes touching IPAB: For example, if that committee of experts fails to achieve the demanded savings, then the ball is passed to . . . a new committee of experts, this one under the guidance of the secretary of health and human services. IPAB’s powers are nearly plenipotentiary: Its proposals, like a presidential veto, require a supermajority of Congress to be overridden.

IPAB is the most dramatic example of President Obama’s approach to government by expert decree, but much of the rest of his domestic program, from the Dodd-Frank financial-reform law to his economic agenda, is substantially similar. In total, it amounts to that fundamental transformation of American society that President Obama promised as a candidate: but instead of the new birth of hope and change, it is the transformation of a constitutional republic operating under laws passed by democratically accountable legislators into a servile nation under the management of an unaccountable administrative state. The real import of Barack Obama’s political career will be felt long after he leaves office, in the form of a permanently expanded state that is more assertive of its own interests and more ruthless in punishing its enemies. At times, he has advanced this project abetted by congressional Democrats, as with the health-care law’s investiture of extraordinary powers in the executive bureaucracy, but he also has advanced it without legislative assistance — and, more troubling still, in plain violation of the law. President Obama and his admirers choose to call this “pragmatism,” but what it is is a mild expression of totalitarianism, under which the interests of the country are conflated with those of the president’s administration and his party. Barack Obama is the first president of the democracy that John Adams warned us about.

Democracy never lasts long,” Adams famously said. “It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide.” For liberal regimes, a very common starting point on the road to serfdom is the over-delegation of legislative powers to the executive. France very nearly ended up in a permanent dictatorship as a result of that error, and was spared that fate mostly by good luck and Charles de Gaulle’s patriotism. Long before she declared her infamous state of emergency, Indira Gandhi had been centralizing power in the prime minister’s office, and India was spared a permanent dictatorship only by her political miscalculation and her dynasty-minded son’s having gotten himself killed in a plane wreck. Salazar in Portugal, Austria under Dollfuss, similar stories. But the United States is not going to fall for a strongman government. Instead of delegating power to a would-be president-for-life, we delegate it to a bureaucracy-without-death. You do not need to install a dictator when you’ve already had a politically supercharged permanent bureaucracy in place for 40 years or more. As is made clear by everything from campaign donations to the IRS jihad, the bureaucracy is the Left, and the Left is the bureaucracy. Elections will be held, politicians will come and go, but if you expand the power of the bureaucracy, you expand the power of the Left, of the managers and minions who share Barack Obama’s view of the world. Barack Obama isn’t the leader of the free world; he’s the front man for the permanent bureaucracy, the smiley-face mask hiding the pitiless yawning maw of total politics. …

Luckily we end with Andy Malcolm’s late night humor because the next item from Steve Malanga about the debt owed by states and localities will make you cry.

Maria Pappas, the treasurer of Cook County, Illinois, got tired of being asked why local taxes kept rising. Betting that the answer involved the debt that state and local governments were accumulating, she began a quest to figure out how much county residents owed. It wasn’t easy. In some jurisdictions, officials said that they didn’t know; in others, they stonewalled. Pappas’s first report, issued in 2010, estimated the total state and local debt at $56 billion for the county’s 5.6 million residents. Two years later, after further investigation, the figure had risen to a frightening $140 billion, shocking residents and officials alike. “Nobody knew the numbers because local governments don’t like to show how badly they are doing,” Pappas observed.

Since Pappas began her project to tally CookCounty’s hidden debt, she has found lots of company. Across America, elected officials, taxpayer groups, and other researchers have launched a forensic accounting of state and municipal debt, and their fact-finding mission is rewriting the country’s balance sheet. Just a few years ago, most experts estimated that state and local governments owed about $2.5 trillion, mostly in the form of municipal bonds and other debt securities. But late last year, the States Project, a joint venture of Harvard’s Institute of Politics and the University of Pennsylvania’s Fels Institute of Government, projected that if you also count promises made to retired government workers and money borrowed without taxpayer approval, the figure might be higher than $7 trillion.

Most states have restrictions on debt and prohibitions against running deficits. But these rules have been no match for state and local governments, which have exploited loopholes and employed deceptive accounting standards in order to keep running up debt. The jaw-dropping costs of these evasions have already started to weigh on budgets; as the burden grows heavier, taxpayers may decide that it’s time for a new fiscal revolt. 

Most state constitutions and many local-government charters regulate public debt precisely because of past abuses. In the early nineteenth century, after New York built the Erie Canal with borrowed funds, other states rushed to make similar debt-financed investments in toll roads, bridges, and canals—projects designed to take advantage of an expanding economy. But when the nation’s economy fell into a deep recession in 1837, many of the projects failed, and tax revenues cratered as well, prompting eight states and territories to default on their debt. Stung by losses, European markets stopped lending even to solvent American states. The debacle inspired a sharp reevaluation of the role of state governments, with voters looking “more skeptically” on legislative borrowing, wrote political scientist Alasdair Roberts in 2010 in the academic journal Intereconomics. A member of New York’s 1846 constitutional convention even warned that “unless some check was placed upon this dangerous power to contract debt, representative government could not long endure.” Over a 15-year period, 19 states wrote debt limitations into their constitutions.

Since then, the history of state and local debt has been a tug-of-war between those struggling to keep governments from overextending themselves and elected officials seeking legal loopholes for further debt spending. …

 

… Though New York’s constitution requires that voters approve any new government debt, only 5 percent of the state’s $63 billion in outstanding borrowing has received voter authorization, down from 10 percent a decade ago. Meantime, the cost of servicing that debt has risen by an average of 9.4 percent annually. Partly because of such unsanctioned borrowing, New Yorkers bear the nation’s second-highest per-capita load of state debt, says New York’s comptroller. The state is still paying off what it owes from the infamous 1991 Attica prison deal, in which New York, trying to close a budget deficit, “sold” the facility to one of its independent authorities, which borrowed the money to pay for it. New York also still counts on its books debt from the 1970s bailout of New York City, which, thanks to refinancing, it won’t pay off until 2033.

Other New York deals engineered without voter say-so include a $2.7 billion bond offering in 2003, backed by 25 years’ worth of revenues from the state’s gigantic settlement with tobacco companies. To circumvent borrowing limits, the state created an independent corporation to issue the bonds and then used the money from the bond sale to close a budget deficit—instantly consuming most of the tobacco settlement, which now had to be used to pay off the debt. Legislators engineer such borrowing because they aren’t confident that voters would agree to new debt: of the seven bond offerings that Empire State voters have considered over the past 25 years, four went down to defeat.

Thanks to its low state debt, Texas enjoys a reputation for budgetary restraint. Yet as Texas comptroller Susan Combs found to her dismay, the state’s towns, cities, counties, and school districts have racked up the second-highest per-capita local debt in the nation, behind only New York’s spendthrift municipalities. The total, nearly $8,000 per resident, is more than seven times higher than Texas’s per-capita state debt. …

 

… Reformers should also seek to get rid of the many loopholes that state legislators use to get around debt-limit rules. In particular, states should be banned from assuming debt through independent authorities or by direct appropriation of the legislature. Reform should also cap state-supported debt by tying it to some flexible measure of economic or revenue growth, such as state personal income, rather than just stating a dollar limit.

Reformers should strive, too, to end governments’ use of debt to balance budgets, perhaps by introducing a requirement that all taxpayer-supported debt be used for capital projects, such as schools, roads, and bridges. Such structures endure for decades, so it’s reasonable to ask future residents to contribute to their construction through debt payments. By contrast, bonds floated to close a particular year’s budget, pledging to the bondholders that they’ll be paid with future lottery, toll, or tobacco revenues, give today’s residents a benefit at future residents’ expense.

There’s no single cure for the debt crisis afflicting state and local governments. But unless taxpayers start pulling harder in that everlasting tug-of-war, they can expect to keep losing ground.

Andrew Malcolm with late night humor. And he added a feature; he asked for tweets to honor the president’s birthday.  

Conan: Bill Clinton is very upset with Anthony Weiner comparing his sexting to Clinton’s affair with Monica. Bill Clinton said, “Real men cheat in person.”

Fallon: I just read that 25% of toddlers in America know how to use an iPad. While 100% of toddlers in China know how to make one.

@Brock2120    To honor Pres. Obama’s birthday, I’m going to fail at something and blame it on the rich.

@texasman2008   I’m going to hide and seal all my school records.

@Brock2120       My final act of celebrating Obama’s birthday was to throw a baseball like a girl.

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Smithsonian Magazine published the 8th grade exam from a county in North Central Kentucky. You will have to follow the link to see the complete exam.

In the early years of the 20th century, the students in Bullitt County, Kentucky, were asked to clear a test that many full-fledged adults would likely be hard-pressed to pass today. The Bullitt County Genealogical Society has a copy of this exam, reproduced below—a mix of math and science and reading and writing and questions on oddly specific factoids–preserved in their museum in the county courthouse.

But just think for a moment: Did you know where Montenegro was when you were 12? Do you know now? (Hint: it’s just across the Adriatic Sea from Italy. You know where the Adriatic Sea is, right?)

Or what about this question, which the examiners of BullittCounty deemed necessary knowledge: “Through what waters would a vessel pass in going from England through the Suez Canal to Manila?” The Bullitt genealogical society has an answer sheet if you want to try the test, but really, this question is just a doozie:

A ship going from England to Manilla by way of the Suez Canal would pass through (perhaps) the English Channel, the North Atlantic Ocean, Bay of Biscay (possibly), Strait of Gibraltar, Mediterranean Sea, Suez Canal, Red Sea, Gulf of Aden/Arabian Sea, Indian Ocean, Gulf of Thailand (may have been called Gulf of Siam at that time), South China Sea.

Eighth graders needed to know about patent rights, the relative size of the liver and mountain range geography. They had to be able to put together an argument for studying physiology. Though some of it is useful, much of the test amounts of little more than an assessment of random factoids. …

James Carafano writes on the president’s problem with history. Perhaps, comments Glenn Reynolds, he gets his history lessons from Howard Zinn.

Whatever the opposite of a charm offensive is, President Obama is on it.

In Chicago on July 24, Obama delivered an hour-long speech in which he complained [3] that “with this endless parade of distractions and political posturing and phony scandals, Washington has taken its eye off the ball.” The mother of one of the four Americans murdered at the U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi immediately objected [4]. “He’s wrong. My son is dead. How could that be phony?”

A short while later, Obama was at it again.

Describing an Oval Office visit with the Vietnamese president Truong Tan Song, Mr. Obama reported [5]: “We discussed the fact that Ho Chi Minh was actually inspired by the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and the words of Thomas Jefferson.”

That assertion registered pretty high on the gaffe meter. Noted [6] the editorial team at Investor’s Business Daily, “Few comparisons have been as odious as the one offered by the president linking one of the great mass murderers of history to one of America’s Founding Fathers and authors of our liberty.”

It’s alarming when presidents engage in the practice of sloppy history—especially sloppy war history. …

More guffaws about the president’s lack of history knowledge from Larry Schweikart and Burt Folsom. Schweikart is from Dayton, and Folsom is from HillsdaleCollege. 

For almost five years now, President Obama has been making the argument that government “investments” in infrastructure are crucial to economic recovery. “Now we used to have the best infrastructure in the world here in America,” the president lamented in 2011. “So how can we now sit back and let China build the best railroads? And let Europe build the best highways? And have Singapore build a nicer airport?”

In his recent economic speeches in Illinois, Missouri, Florida and Tennessee, the president again made a pitch for government spending for transportation and “putting people back to work rebuilding America’s infrastructure.” Create the infrastructure, in other words, and the jobs will come.

History says it doesn’t work like that. Henry Ford and dozens of other auto makers put a car in almost every garage decades before the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act in 1956. The success of the car created a demand for roads. The government didn’t build highways, and then Ford decided to create the Model T. Instead, the highways came as a byproduct of the entrepreneurial genius of Ford and others.

Moreover, the makers of autos, tires and headlights began building roads privately long before any state or the federal government got involved. The Lincoln Highway, the first transcontinental highway for cars, pieced together from new and existing roads in 1913, was conceived and partly built by entrepreneurs—Henry Joy of Packard Motor Car Co., Frank Seiberling of Goodyear and Carl Fisher, a maker of headlights and founder of the Indy 500.

Railroads are another example of the infrastructure-follows-entrepreneurship rule. Before the 1860s, almost all railroads were privately financed and built. One exception was in Michigan, where the state tried to build two railroads but lost money doing so, and thus happily sold both to private owners in 1846. …

For another history lesson, the NY Post has located Tawana Brawley and has the story of a court in rural Surry County, Virginia that has garnished her wages. We have the added bonus of a period photo of a fat Al Sharpton.

Twenty-five years after accusing an innocent man of rape, Tawana Brawley is finally paying for her lies.

Last week, 10 checks totaling $3,764.61 were delivered to ex-prosecutor Steven Pagones — the first payments Brawley has made since a court determined in 1998 that she defamed him with her vicious hoax.

A Virginia court this year ordered the money garnisheed from six months of Brawley’s wages as a nurse there.

She still owes Pagones $431,000 in damages. And she remains defiantly unapologetic.

“It’s a long time coming,” said Pagones, 52, who to this day is more interested in extracting a confession from Brawley than cash.

“Every week, she’ll think of me,” he told The Post. “And every week, she can think about how she has a way out — she can simply tell the truth.”

Brawley’s advisers in the infamous race-baiting case — the Rev. Al Sharpton, and attorneys C. Vernon Mason and Alton Maddox — have already paid, or are paying, their defamation debt. But Brawley, 41, had eluded punishment. …