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You know our job creation is terrible when even the NY Times finds something wrong with the obama ‘recovery.’

The American economy may be the world’s biggest, but when it comes to job creation since the recession hit at the end of 2007, it is far from a leader.

Indeed, contrary to the widespread view that the United States is an island of relative prosperity in a global sea of economic torpor, employment in several other nations has bounced back more quickly, according to a new analysis by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The government reported Friday that the nation added 175,000 jobs in May, continuing a 32-month run of job gains. The unemployment rate moved up slightly to 7.6 percent, from 7.5 percent in April.

But overall employment in the United States remained 2.1 percent below where it was at the end of 2007, according to the statistics bureau. By comparison, over the same period, between December 2007 and March 2013, the number of jobs was up 8.1 percent in Australia; Germany, the biggest economy in the troubled euro zone, has managed a 5.8 percent gain in employment.

“The United States is way below where it should be,” said Lawrence F. Katz, a professor of economics at Harvard. “We had a massive downturn and a tepid recovery.”

Still, Friday’s jobs report appeared to be just what Wall Street was hoping for. Major stock market indexes jumped by 1.3 percent as traders bet that the modest employment gains and the uptick in joblessness meant that the Federal Reserve would be forced to keep pumping money into the economy in a bid to stimulate greater growth. …

John Hinderaker posts on the Times’ angst, and the fact our performance lags Canada and MEXICO!

We are now nearly five years into the Age of Obama, and I think pretty much everyone understands that, economically speaking, the record is poor. If you think unprecedented levels of unemployment and poverty, declining labor force participation, booming food stamp use and so on are the signs of a healthy economy, then you should be satisfied with the Obama administration. Otherwise, not.

It must have hurt the New York Times to report this, but report it they did: “Many Rival Nations Surge Past the U.S. in Adding New Jobs.”

[C]ontrary to the widespread view that the United States is an island of relative prosperity in a global sea of economic torpor, employment in several other nations has bounced back more quickly, according to a new analysis by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Where might that “widespread view” have come from? The Times takes no responsibility. …

… So how does the current recovery in the U.S. stack up, compared with the same period of time in Canada and Mexico?

Using consistent data on the United States, Canada and Mexico, I plotted GDP growth for the three countries on a quarterly basis from first quarter of 2010 to the present. That timing is significant, because in all three countries the recession was over by 2010 and recovery was in progress. So what we are comparing is the strength of the recovery in the three adjacent countries. This chart shows the quarterly increase in GDP from 2010 Q1 through Q1 of 2013:

As you can see, on a quarter by quarter basis, the U.S. has lagged behind Canada and, especially, Mexico. …

IBD Editors on the missing 7.6 million jobs.

Although somewhat better than expected, the 175,000 net jobs created in May continues the historically tepid jobs growth trend that has come to characterize the now four-year-old economic recovery.

The result has been continued high unemployment, a vast pool of long-term jobless, and an unprecedented number of people who’ve dropped out of the labor force.

Highlighting the weakness of the May report is the fact that the number of unemployed climbed by nearly the same amount as jobs created — 101,000 — nudging the unemployment rate up to 7.6%.

As a result, there are still 2.4 million fewer people working than there were in January 2008, the previous jobs peak. And since the recovery started in June 2009, the number of jobs has increased a mere 3.9%, well below the post-World War II average of 9.7%.

In fact, had this jobs recovery merely kept pace with the average of the previous 10, there would be 7.6 million more people working today, and the unemployment rate would be less than half its current level. …

Sherman Frederick of the Las Vegas Review-Journal has more on the economy.

… But how bad is it, really?

Up until very recently, this was hard to quantify and thus became in large part a political argument. Today, however, enough time has passed that economists now have data points to scientifically put President Barack Obama’s economic policy in its proper place.

On the old legacy-o-meter, things aren’t looking good for Obama and his supporters, who so desperately wanted him to succeed.

I’m tempted to compare Obama’s performance on the economy to this year’s Phoenix Suns basketball team. But that might be too harsh — on the Suns.

The Suns were a crummy basketball team this season, for sure. They were pathetic from start to finish. But when things were not going well, they at least changed things up to get a better outcome. The Suns finished ahead of Cleveland and Charlotte. Had they suited up their old star, Connie Hawkins, they might have finished ahead of a few other teams, too.

President Obama, meanwhile, kept the same economic game plan and failed policies in place for 4½ years. Clear evidence is mounting to show that Obama’s stubbornness (or shall we call it ignorance) might earn him the title of Worst Economic President Ever. …

Michael Strain of American.com has another way to look at the lack of recovery.

The two numbers that will get the most attention, by far, from today’s jobs report are 7.6 and 175,000. In May, the unemployment rate increased just a bit to 7.6%, and employers added 175,000 nonfarm payroll jobs. The basic story of the labor market recovery remains the same: it is steady but too slow.

But I encourage you to pay attention to three other numbers which, to my mind, are much more important than 7.6 and 175,000. They are 2.4, 4.4., and 0.4.

We still have 2.4 million fewer jobs than when the recession officially began 66 months ago. Relative to previous downturns, this performance is quite bad.

We still have 4.4 million workers who have been unemployed for six months or longer. This is a very large number. Outside this downturn, the previous post-war record was under 3 million, back in the 1980s. Over 37% of the total unemployed are long-term unemployed. The previous post-war record, also back in the 1980s, was a comparatively low 26%.

When the Great Recession began in December 2007, 62.7% of the working-age population was employed; today it is a staggeringly lower 58.6%. The share of the working-age population with jobs has increased by only 0.4 percentage points since its low point in the official recovery. Though it doesn’t get much attention, many labor economists prefer the employment-to-population ratio as the best measure of the broad health of the labor market. That this measure has improved so little indicates that the economy is creating just a few more jobs than are needed to keep up with population growth. But this is not enough. We need to create enough jobs to handle the growth of the working-age population and to recover the jobs lost in the Great Recession. To put it simply, we are not succeeding. …

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Charles Krauthammer on the results in Syria of the United States having an irresolute and irresponsible president.

On Wednesday, Qusair fell to the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria. Qusair is a strategic town that connects Damascus with Assad’s Alawite heartland on the Mediterranean, with its ports and Russian naval base. It’s a major strategic shift. Assad’s forces can now advance on rebel-dominated areas in central and northern Syria, including Aleppo.

For the rebels, it’s a devastating loss of territory, morale and their supply corridor to Lebanon. No one knows if this reversal of fortune will be the last, but everyone knows that Assad now has the upper hand.

What altered the tide of battle was brazen outside intervention. A hardened, well-trained, well-armed Hezbollah force — from the terrorist Shiite group that dominates Lebanon and answers to Iran — crossed into Syria and drove the rebels out of Qusair, which Syrian artillery has left a smoking ruin.

This is a huge victory not just for Tehran but also for Moscow, which sustains Assad in power and prizes its warm-water port at Tartus, Russia’s only military base outside of the former Soviet Union. Vladimir Putin has stationed a dozen or more Russian warships offshore, further protecting his strategic outpost and his Syrian client.

The losers? NATO-member Turkey, the major supporter of the rebels; Jordan, America’s closest Arab ally, now drowning in half a million Syrian refugees; and America’s Gulf allies, principal weapons suppliers to the rebels.

And the United States, whose bystander president, having declared that Assad must go, that he has lost all legitimacy and that his fall is just a matter of time, is looking not just feckless but clueless. …

Jennifer Rubin says Sue and Sam are unlikely to challenge their boss with any original thoughts.

I am under no illusion that Samantha Power or Susan Rice will convince the president to act in Syria or make regime change in Iran our policy or make improved human rights a condition for improved relations with China, Russia or any other country on the planet.

Susan Rice earned her stripes saying the most ludicrous things on national television because the White House wanted her to. Speak truth to power? You’ve got the wrong gal.

Nothing personal to Power, but a United Nations ambassador doesn’t make national security policy and isn’t responsible for much. (Hence, the lunacy of having Rice opine on national television on Benghazi, Libya.) We have had great ones (e.g. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Jeane Kirkpatrick, John Bolton) who spoken up for the United States and defended our values and our allies. We’ve had rotten ones who were less than competent and/or craved consensus with tyrannical regimes (e.g. Bill Richardson, Andrew Young, Rice). The good ones were put there by presidents who had a grip on national security and the bad ones by those who slept through history (ignoring the rise of al-Qaeda) or who hadn’t a clue about how to wield American power. In short, U.N. ambassadors have been mirrors of, not beacons for the presidents they served. …

Spengler, in the person of David Goldman says Muslim civil wars stem from a crisis of civilization.

Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum (where I am associate fellow) replies this morning to Bret Stephens‘ June 3rd Wall Street Journal column, “The Muslim Civil War: Standing by while the Sunnis and Shiites fight it out invites disaster.” The Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, when the Reagan administration quietly encouraged the two sides to fight themselves to bloody exhaustion, did America no good, Stephens argues:

“In short, a long intra-Islamic war left nobody safer, wealthier or wiser. Nor did it leave the West morally untainted. The U.S. embraced Saddam Hussein as a counterweight to Iran, and later tried to ply Iran with secret arms in exchange for the release of hostages. Patrolling the Strait of Hormuz, the USS Vincennes mistakenly shot down an Iranian jetliner over the Gulf, killing 290 civilians. Inaction only provides moral safe harbor when there’s no possibility of action.”

Today, he adds, there comes “the whispered suggestion: If one branch of Islam wants to be at war with another branch for a few years — or decades — so much the better for the non-Islamic world. Mass civilian casualties in Aleppo or Homs is their tragedy, not ours. It does not implicate us morally. And it probably benefits us strategically, not least by redirecting jihadist energies away from the West.” This is not a good thing for the West, but a bad thing, he concludes. Pipes and Stephens are both friends of mine, and both have a point (although I come down on Pipes’ side of the argument). It might be helpful to expand the context of the discussion.

I agree with Stephens that it is a bad thing. It not only a bad thing: it is a horrifying thing. The moral impact on the West of unrestrained slaughter and numberless atrocities flooding YouTube for years to come is incalculable, as I wrote in a May 20 essay, “Syria’s Madness and Ours.” If Syria looks bad, wait until Pakistan breaks down. The relevant questions, though, are 1) why are Sunnis and Shi’ites slaughtering each other in Syria at this particular moment in history, and 2) what (if anything) can we do about it?

Part of the answer to the first question is that Syria (like Egypt) as presently constituted simply is not viable as a country. Iraq might be viable, because it has enough oil to subsidize a largely uneducated, pre-modern population. As an economist and risk analyst (I ran Credit Strategy for Credit Suisse and all fixed income research for Bank of America), I do not believe that there is any way to stabilize either country. In the medium term, Turkey will lose national viability as well. I outlined some of the reasons for this view in my 2011 book How Civilizations Die (and why Islam is Dying, Too).

Globalization ruins countries. It has done so for centuries. Tinpot dictatorships that keep their people in poverty the better to maintain political control will break down at some point. Mexico broke down during the 1970s and 1980s; the Mexican currency collapsed, the savings of the middle class were wiped out, and the economy shut down. In 1982 I wrote an evaluation of the Mexican economy for Norman Bailey, then director of plans at the National Security Council and special assistant to President Reagan. I saw a crash coming, and no way to to prevent it.

Three things prevented Mexico from dissolving into civil war (as it did during the teens of the past century at the cost of a million lives, or one out of seven Mexicans). One was the ability of Mexicans to migrate to the United States, which absorbed perhaps a fifth of the Mexican population. The second was the emergence of the drug cartels as an alternative source of employment for up to half a million people, and generating between $18 and $39 billion of annual profits. And the third is the fact that Mexico produces its own food most years. When the currencies of the Latin American banana republics collapsed, there was always enough food to maintain minimum caloric consumption. Not so in Egypt, which imports half its food and is flat broke. Egypt and Syria are banana republics but without the bananas (Daniel Pipes assures me that Egypt does grow bananas, and he personally has eaten them, but they are not grown in sufficient quantity to meet the country’s caloric deficit). Turkey was the supposed Muslim model for democracy and prosperity under moderate Islam. That idea, which I disputed for years, has gotten tarnished during the past week.

Israeli analysts have understood this from the outset. Two years ago (in an essay entitled “Israel the winner in the Arab revolts“) I quoted an Israeli study of the collapse of Syrian agriculture preceding the civil war: …

 

… If we had a Syrian elite dedicated to modernization, free markets, and opportunity, we could have an economic recovery in Syria. But the country is locked into suppurating backwardness precisely because the dominant culture holds back individual initiative and enterprise. The longstanding hatreds among Sunnis and Shi’ites, and Kurds and Druze and Arabs, turn into a fight to the death as the ground shrinks beneath them. The pre-modern culture demands proofs of group loyalty in the form of atrocities which bind the combatants to an all-or-nothing outcome. The Sunni rebels appear quite as enthusiastic in their perpetration of atrocities as does the disgusting Assad government.

What are we supposed to do in the face of such horrors? I am against putting American boots on the ground. As I wrote in the cited May 20 essay, “Westerners cannot deal with this kind of warfare. The United States does not have and cannot train soldiers capable of intervening in the Syrian civil war. Short of raising a foreign legion on the French colonial model, America should keep its military personnel at a distance from a war fought with the instruments of horror.”

The most urgent thing to do, in my judgment, is to eliminate the malignant influence of Iran …

For lighter fare, how about an interview with one of Pickerhead’s favorites; Carl Hiaasen.

Carl Hiaasen’s latest book, “Bad Monkey,” begins when a couple of tourists on a fishing trip reel in a human arm. It’s just a typical day in South Florida, the setting for Mr. Hiaasen’s best-selling novels, which both satirize and celebrate the state that he’s called home for almost all of his 60 years.

The colorful coterie of characters in Mr. Hiaasen’s new book (to be published Tuesday) includes a voodoo queen, a kinky coroner and the author’s usual assortment of corrupt politicians. He tells the story in such a matter-of-fact way that he could be reporting it—which, in fact, he did. Most of the book’s events are inspired by real places and true stories. As a longtime reporter, Mr. Hiaasen knows that reality is often stranger than fiction, especially in Florida.

“It’s not an exaggeration to say this is the most corrupt place in the country,” he says with delight.

“Bad Monkey” deals with a former cop’s quest for redemption against the backdrop of South Florida’s real-world scandals—from the Russian underworld in the Florida Keys to fugitives who escape to the Bahamas. This afternoon in late April, however, Mr. Hiaasen is relaxing in a decidedly different milieu. He’s sitting in his living room, decorated in soothing blues and soft beiges, in a two-story house on a quiet corner of Vero Beach, Fla., just across the street from the ocean. …

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Niall Ferguson chronicles how our country has degenerated.

… Seven years of data suggest that most of the world’s countries are successfully making it easier to do business: The total number of days it takes to carry out the seven procedures has come down, in some cases very substantially. In only around 20 countries has the total duration of dealing with “red tape” gone up. The sixth-worst case is none other than the U.S., where the total number of days has increased by 18% to 433. Other members of the bottom 10, using this metric, are Zimbabwe, Burundi and Yemen (though their absolute numbers are of course much higher).

Why is it getting harder to do business in America? Part of the answer is excessively complex legislation. A prime example is the 848-page Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of July 2010 (otherwise known as the Dodd-Frank Act), which, among other things, required that regulators create 243 rules, conduct 67 studies and issue 22 periodic reports. Comparable in its complexity is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (906 pages), which is also in the process of spawning thousands of pages of regulation. You don’t have to be opposed to tighter financial regulation or universal health care to recognize that something is wrong with laws so elaborate that almost no one affected has the time or the will to read them.

Who benefits from the growth of complex and cumbersome regulation? The answer is: lawyers, not forgetting lobbyists and compliance departments. For complexity is not the friend of the little man. It is the friend of the deep pocket. It is the friend of cronyism.

We used to have the rule of law. Now it is tempting to say we have the rule of lawyers, which is something different. For the lawyers can also make money even in the absence of complex legislation.

It has long been recognized that the U.S. tort system is exceptionally expensive. Indeed, tort reform is something few people will openly argue against. Yet the plague of class-action lawsuits continues unabated. Regular customers of Southwest Airlines recently received this email: “Did you receive a Southwest Airlines drink coupon through the purchase of a Business Select ticket prior to August 1, 2010, and never redeem it? If yes, a legal Settlement provides a Replacement Drink Voucher, entitling you to a free drink aboard a Southwest flight, for every such drink coupon you did not redeem.”

This is not the product of the imagination of some modern-day Charles Dickens. It is a document arising from the class-action case, In re Southwest Airlines Voucher Litigation, No. 11-cv-8176, which came before Judge Matthew F. Kennelly of the District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. As the circular explains: “This Action arose out of Southwest’s decision, effective August 1, 2010, to only accept drink coupons received by Business Select customers with the purchase of a Business Select ticket on the date of the ticketed travel. The Plaintiffs in this case allege Southwest, in making that decision, breached its contract with Class Members who previously received drink coupons,” etc.

As often happens in such cases, Southwest decided to settle out of court. Recipients of the email will have been nonplused to learn that the settlement “will provide Replacement Drink Vouchers to Class Members who submit timely and valid Claim Forms.” One wonders how many have bothered.

Cui bono? The answer is, of course, the lawyers representing the plaintiffs. Having initially pitched for “up to $7 million in fees, costs and expenses,” these ingenious jurists settled for fees of $3 million “plus costs not to exceed $30,000″ from Southwest. …

Mark Steyn on the real problem at the IRS. 

… It took Congressman Trey Gowdy of South Carolina to get to the heart of the matter: “With all due respect, this is not a training issue,” he said. “This cannot be solved with another webinar. . . . We can adopt all the recommendations you can possibly conceive of. I just say it strikes me — and maybe it’s just me — but it strikes me as a cultural, systemic, character, moral issue.”

He’s right. If you don’t instinctively know it’s wrong to stay in $3,500-a-night hotel rooms at public expense, a revised conference-accommodations-guidelines manual isn’t going to fix the real problem.

So we know the IRS is corrupt. What happens then when an ambitious government understands it can yoke that corruption to its political needs? What’s striking as the revelations multiply and metastasize is that at no point does any IRS official appear to have raised objections. If any of them understood that what they were doing was wrong, they kept it to themselves. When Nixon tried to sic the IRS on a few powerful political enemies, the IRS told him to take a hike. When Obama’s courtiers tried to sic the IRS on thousands of ordinary American citizens, the agency went along, and very enthusiastically. This is a scale of depravity hitherto unknown to the tax authorities of the United States, and for that reason alone they should be disarmed and disbanded — and rebuilt from scratch with far more circumscribed powers.

Here’s another congressional-subcommittee transcript highlight of the week. Senator Mark Kirk of Illinois asks the attorney general if he’s spying on members of Congress and thereby giving the executive branch leverage over the legislative branch. Eric Holder answers:

“With all due respect, senator, I don’t think this is an appropriate setting for me to discuss that issue.”

Senator Kirk responded that “the correct answer would be, ‘No, we stayed within our lane and I’m assuring you we did not spy on members of Congress.’” For some reason, the attorney general felt unable to say that. So I think we all know what the answer to the original question really is.

Holder had another great contribution to the epitaph of the Republic this week. He went on TV to explain that he didn’t really regard Fox News’s James Rosen as a “co-conspirator” but had to pretend he did to the judge in order to get the judge to cough up the warrant. So rest easy, America! Your chief law officer was telling the truth when he said he hadn’t lied to Congress because in fact he’d been lying when he said he told the truth to the judge.

If you lie to one of Holder’s minions, you go to jail: They tossed Martha Stewart in the slammer for being insufficiently truthful to a low-level employee of the attorney general’s. But the attorney general can apparently lie willy-nilly to judges and/or Congress. …

Peter Wehner says it is now obvious that some cannot be trusted with power.

… My views on President Obama are such that very little would surprise me in terms of the ethical lines he would cross in order to gain and maintain political power.

That may seem like an overly harsh judgment, so let me take a moment to explain what I mean. I have become convinced, based on what I would argue is the increasing weight of the evidence, that Mr. Obama is a man whose sense of mission, his arrogance and self-righteousness, and his belief in the malevolence of his enemies might well lead him and his administration to act in ways that would seem to him to be justified at the time but, in fact, are wholly inappropriate.

I would include as evidence to support my assertion the president’s routine slander of his opponents, his serially misleading statements (including flat-out falsehoods about the lethal attacks on the Benghazi consulate), the IRS scandal and the public signals the president sent to that agency over the years, the unprecedented targeting of journalists by the Department of Justice and the attorney general’s nasty little habit of misleading Congress, Mr. Obama’s unusually dishonest campaign against Mitt Romney, and his overall contempt for the rule of law. He just doesn’t think that rules should apply to him, that he is above all that. Those who see themselves as world-historical figures tend to do that. …

Paul Mirengoff says one way or another, Holder lied.

… Just as damning, if not more so, is Holder’s concession that he “played” the court that granted DOJ’s application regarding Rosen. According to NBC’s account of the interview, “Holder explained that the [co-conspirator] phrasing was necessary in order to get a search warrant.”

The posted video of the interview bears this out. Holder says that various laws and guidelines “force” the government to call reporters criminals. But because reporters aren’t really criminals when they are just doing their job, the laws and guidelines need to be changed.

That may be. Nonetheless, Holder has admitted that he and his agents told a court that Rosen was a “co-conspirator” not because he believed Rosen was a criminal, but because DOJ needed to use the language of criminality to obtain the desired warrant.

As Bill Otis says, “if mere expediency [has] replaced basic truth-telling as the standard for what the Attorney General tells the court” then “there is more, not less, reason for [Holder] to resign.” …

Two Steyns in a day. Here’s a good Corner post.

I was chugging along buying Jack Dunphy’s argument on the NSA business, “A Small Price To Pay,” until I got to this bit:

There are people living in the United States right now, many, many of them, who are no less committed to jihad than the Tsarnaev brothers or Nidal Hassan.

Well, how’d that happen? How did all these Tsarnaevs-in-waiting wind up living in the United States? They were let in by the government, and many of them were let in in the years since 9/11, when we were supposedly on permanent “orange alert.” The same bureaucracy that takes the terror threat so seriously that it needs the phone and Internet records of hundreds of millions of law-abiding persons would never dream of doing a little more pre-screening in its immigration system — by, say, according a graduate of a Yemeni madrassah a little more scrutiny than a Slovene or Fijian. The president has unilaterally suspended the immigration laws of the United States, and his attorney general prosecutes those states such as Arizona who remain quaintly attached to them. The ID three of the 9/11 hijackers acquired in the 7-Eleven parking lot in Falls Church, Virginia and used to board the plane that day is part of a vast ongoing subversion of American sovereignty with which many states and so-called “sanctuary cities” actively collude.

As for Major Hasan, who needs surveillance? He put “Soldier of Allah” on his business card and gave a PowerPoint presentation to his military colleagues on what he’d like to do to infidels — and nobody said a word, lest they got tied up in sensitivity-training hell for six months.

Jack will forgive me when I say this is less good cop/bad cop than no cop/bad cop. Because the formal, visible state has been neutered by political correctness, the dark, furtive shadow state has to expand massively to make, in secret, the judgment calls that can no longer be made in public. That’s not an arrangement that is likely to end well.

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Fred Barnes chronicles the decline of this presidency. 

John Dos Passos, the novelist and historian, once said: “Often things you think are just beginning are coming to an end.” His observation was made in the 1960s. But it’s true today of Barack Obama‘s presidency and the promise of a bright future for his second term.

Mr. Obama’s re-election stirred grand expectations. The vote heralded a new liberal era, or so it was claimed. His victory was said to reflect ideological, cultural and demographic trends that could keep Democrats in the majority for years to come. His second four years in the White House would be just the beginning.

Now, six months later, the Obama administration is in an unexpected and sharp state of decline. Mr. Obama has little influence on Congress. His presidency has no theme. He pivots nervously from issue to issue. What there is of an Obama agenda consists, at the moment, of leftovers from his first term or proposals that he failed to emphasize in his re-election campaign and thus have practically no chance of passage.

Congressional Republicans neither trust nor fear the president. And Democrats on Capitol Hill, to whom Mr. Obama has never been close, have grown leery of him. In the Senate, Democrats complain privately about his interference with the biggest domestic policy matter of 2013, immigration reform. His effect, the senators believe, can only be to weaken the fragile bipartisan coalition for reform and make passage of major legislation more perilous.

The Obama breakdown was not caused by the trio of scandals—IRS, Justice Department, Benghazi—now confronting the president. The decline preceded them. It’s the result of what Mr. Obama did in his first term, during the campaign and in the two months following his re-election. …

Peter Wehner posts on two polls that suggest the American public is finally getting the picture. 

Two new polls–one from Bloomberg National Poll, the other from the Wall Street Journal/NBC News–show a clear erosion in the public’s trust in Barack Obama’s honest and integrity.

Nearly half of those surveyed–47 percent–believe the president isn’t telling the truth when he says he didn’t know the IRS was giving extra scrutiny to the applications of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status. More than half–55 percent–say the IRS actions raise questions about the administration’s “overall honesty and integrity.” Fifty-eight percent believe the administration’s handling of the Benghazi consulate attacks raises questions about the honesty of the White House, while the same number say the Department of Justice’s subpoenaing of reporter e-mails and phone records in its leak investigations raise concerns.

For roughly half the public to believe Mr. Obama is lying at this relatively early stage in the congressional investigation is quite high, especially since at this point there’s no direct evidence showing the president knew about these scandals prior to May of this year. (Which isn’t to say the IRS and the Treasury Department didn’t know about the IRS’s nefarious activities long before the 2012 election or that the White House chief of staff and White House counsel didn’t know about the scandal prior to when Obama says he learned of it.)

This could well have a corrosive effect on the Obama presidency. …

Remember Stephanie Cutter the white house political operative with the barely contained sneer? She was the one who claimed Romney was a felon. Turns out she was one of those meeting with the IRS head when he visited the executive mansion 157 times. Hot Air has the story.

Noted liar Stephanie Cutter is making the media rounds, furnishing Douglas Shulman with an alibi for many of those White House meetings he attended during President Obama’s first term — far more visits than most cabinet secretaries logged.  Cutter insists that Shulman’s frequent presence at 1600 Pennsylvania isn’t the least bit “nefarious” because he was there to attend Obamacare implementation planning sessions.  She knows this, she says, because she was in the room: …

Jeff Jacoby on the boom in Washington, DC while the rest of the country suffers.

Give Stephen Fuller credit for this much: He’s willing to admit he was wrong.

During the debate leading up to the federal budget sequester, Fuller was a voice of doom. An economist at GeorgeMasonUniversity and the director of its Center for Regional Analysis, he predicted that sequestration would be especially calamitous for Washington, D.C., and its surroundings. If Congress didn’t stop the automatic spending cuts from going into effect, Fuller warned last year, the Washington area was headed for a “devastating recession.” Some 450,000 jobs, many of them in the private sector, would be wiped out in Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia.

“It’s something you don’t even want to draw a picture of because it’s too scary,” he said in a radio interview last summer. In January he described the sequester’s impact on the national capital region as an “end-of-the-world kind of hit.”

But the world hasn’t ended. Not even in Washington.

In the months since President Obama signed the order to cut federal outlays by $85 billion, the Washington Post reported last week, the region has added 40,000 jobs. “Income-tax receipts have surged in Virginia, beating expectations. Few government contractors have laid off workers.” There is no sign of the economic hellfire and brimstone foretold by Fuller, who says it’s a “surprise” to him that Washington’s economy is still booming. “We’ve done better than I expected,” he confessed.

The real surprise is that anyone is still surprised by the affluence of the Washington area. …

According to the Christian Science Monitor, the Ft.Hood shooter’s defense may have undermined the claim his crime was a type of “work place violence.”

The admission by Army Maj. Nidal Hasan on Tuesday that he attacked Fort Hood in 2009 in defense of “the leadership of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the Taliban” has suddenly undermined the Obama administration’s previous contention that the murders of 13 soldiers at the Texas base constituted an act of “workplace violence.”

Hasan’s legal argument, which is being considered by the judge, Col. Tara Osborn, may reignite the political furor over how the Obama administration has classified the shootings, as well as arguments about whether the mass shootings constituted the first major Islamic jihadist attack on the US after 9/11. As recently as May 23, President Obama said no “large-scale” terrorism attacks on the homeland have occurred on his watch.

Officials at the US Department of Defense have said there isn’t enough evidence to put Hasan on trial for an act of terrorism, and they have worried that such a claim could undermine the Army major’s right to a fair trial.

Critics argue that the FortHood incident has not been characterized as a jihadist attack in part to give the Obama administration political and policy cover. Moreover, they add, the Obama position works to the detriment of shooting victims, which includes the 32 wounded and the families of those killed. Victims would have been eligible for combat compensation under US law if the Pentagon had classified Hasan not as a murderous US Army psychiatrist but rather as an enemy combatant or an “associated force” under the Military Commissions Act of 2006, they say. …

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Jonathan Tobin notices some hypocrisy.

One of the keynotes of President Obama’s foreign policy throughout his first term has been an attempt to pay lip service to the Arab Spring protests against authoritarian regimes throughout the Muslim world. Those sentiments were not matched with strategies that were designed to enhance the efforts of those who were advocating more freedom or even to ward off the unintended consequences of the unrest, such as the rise of Islamist parties like Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. Yet in spite of those failures the president has never stopped trying to pose as a friend of Arab liberty even if he did nothing to help that cause. But the recent demonstrations in Turkey have exposed Obama’s policies in a way that perhaps no other development has done.

By continuing to support the Turkish ruling party, as it now becomes the subject of anger from its citizens, the administration is showing its true colors. If Obama is not prepared to criticize his friend who heads up the government in Ankara the way he has done other regimes that came under fire, then it shows that the talk about democracy was just so much hot air and that when push comes to shove, the president would rather befriend an Islamist ruler than embrace the pleas of the Turkish people for change. …

Jennifer Rubin posts on the new job for Susan Rice – national security adviser. Pickerhead thinks this is a good thing. She can be on the lookout for any more videos that might inflame the arab street.

Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, who leapt from dishonest talking points to out and out falsehoods (it was a spontaneous attack sparked by an anti-Muslim narrative!) on the Benghazi attack, gets her reward today — a promotion to national security adviser. She’ll not need Senate confirmation, but her appointment should not halt efforts to subpoena her for her conduct as ambassador to the U.N. It is noteworthy that President Obama did not have the nerve to nominate her for secretary of state, where she would have faced an onslaught of questions about her infamous Sunday talk show performance

The move is an in-your-face insult to Congress, to the Americans killed in Benghazi and their families and another instance of utterly incompetent, dishonest loyalists getting the really big jobs (e.g. Chuck Hagel). Rice was, of course, front and center in the do-nothing approach to the Rwandan genocide during the Clinton administration. She delivered a blistering diatribe against Israel after being obliged to veto a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israel for housing construction. In other words, she is the perfect choice for a president who has misread almost every foreign policy dilemma, has had a prickly relationship with Israel and doesn’t give a fig about genocide in Syria. …

Megan McArdle takes on the subject of all the IRS head’s visits to the white house.

Last week, conservatives were saying that former IRS head Douglas Shulman had been to the White House 118 times, while his predecessor had visited the Bush era White House only once.  I didn’t write about it because I idly assumed that this reflected some underlying change in administration management style or legislative priorities; perhaps, for example, he’d been there talking about Obamacare implementation and changes in tax enforcement.  

But the Daily Caller has now compiled a list of White House visits by various administration officials, and Shulman sure does seem to visit a lot more than other folks.  

If Obamacare was driving this, I’d expect to see Kathleen Sebelius had had more visits than Shulman.  (Interesting that, in fact, the Commerce Secretary goes to the White House more than the Secretary of HHS.)  If it was tax policy, I’d expect to have seen Geithner there more often.  

I think the administration needs to explain this.  Not because I think that Obama called Doug Shulman into his office to tell him to persecute the Tea Party.  That explanation is unlikely for all sorts of reasons:  …

John Hayward comments in Human Events.

In the early days of the IRS scandal, Douglas Shulman – who was IRS Commissioner during the period when the abuses of power against conservative and Tea Party groups began – was asked why he spent so much time at the White House.  With the arrogant condescension we’ve all grown to know and love from his corrupt agency, Shulman claimed it had a lot to do with the White House Easter Egg roll.

In a more serious vein, Shulman also mentioned consulting with the White House about tax policy changes, the IRS budget, and other sundry matters… none of which goes very far toward explaining why he felt the need to visit the White House over a hundred times.

At the time, it was thought Shulman had visited the White House 118 times over the course of two years, which is probably more work than the Easter Bunny puts into planning for Easter eggs.  But now the Daily Caller has gone through the White House visitor logs and discovered Shulman made a total of 157 visits during the Obama Administration, which is far more than the number of recorded visits from any Cabinet official.  For example, Shulman’s boss, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, only made 48 recorded visits.

And there might be even more Shulman visits to the White House yet to be revealed, because not all of the records covering his tenure as IRS commissioner have been released yet.

This is not normal for IRS commissioners.  Shulman’s predecessor, Mark Everson, only visited the Bush White House once during four years.  What, no Easter Egg roll?  No extensive discussions of tax policy changes?

We’ve had many occasions to play the “what if a Republican did it?” game throughout the Obama years, but this time it’s really mind-blowing to reverse the political polarity of the scandal and imagine the reaction.  Suppose the IRS was caught giving rough treatment to liberal groups – let’s say liberal minority groups – right before an election where the defeated Democrat challenger’s base didn’t show up in the expected numbers.  Suppose we had powerful congressional Republicans on the record urging the IRS to go after these groups.  Imagine the IRS commissioner was found to be making incredibly frequent visits to the White House throughout the scandal.

J. Christian Adams spotted another frequent visitor.

The big news today is that IRS head Doug Schulman visited the White House a stunning 157 times during the time a policy targeting the Tea Party was developed.  But Schulman isn’t the only non-cabinet member from administration to visit the White House an extraordinary number of times.  So did truth-challenged and Senate-stalled Labor Department nominee Tom Perez.

The Daily Caller study of the White House visitor logs demonstrates that Perez was the third overall most frequent visitor to the White House, just behind Deputy Commerce Secretary Rebecca Blank.  Perez visited the White House 83 times during a period in which he overrode the recommendations of career Justice Department lawyers to preclear South Carolina voter ID under the Voting Rights Act and blocked Texas Voter ID. 

During the same period, Perez allowed the nation’s voter rolls to become bloated with millions of dead voters by refusing to bring any cases under Section 8 of the Motor Voter law.  This federal law requires states to maintain clean voter rolls before federal elections.  Instead, millions of dead and ineligible voters were allowed by Perez to remain on the rolls for the November 2012 election because his radical ideology prevented him from enforcing the law. 

The Perez nomination is currently stalled in the Senate with Republicans vowing to block the nomination for multiple reasons, including Perez’s inability to tell the truth under oath, a defect shared by his boss Eric Holder. …

Walter Russell Mead on the further collapse of Detroit.

Desperation has hit a new low in Detroit.

Last week, Emergency Manager (and bankruptcy lawyer) Kevyn Orr decided to list the holdings of the Detroit Institute of Arts among the city’s assets in preparation for a possible bankruptcy. If the city goes through with it, it could be forced to sell off any of its assets—which now include the museum’s collection.

Museum administrators are outraged, but the choice may be keeping the art or paying for vital public services. According to Orr, the city has “long-term obligations of at least $15 billion, unsustainable cash flow shortages and miserably low credit ratings that make it difficult to borrow.” But as the WSJ reports, the city may not have a choice: …

P. J. O’Rourke had an item in the Weekly Standard about the decline of NASA. It was titled “Obama’s Asteroid’ and it is 2,300 words. Too long for us today, but you needed to see this about the value of space exploration. Follow the link if you wish to read it all. 

… The words “Space Age” have a quaint, nostalgic tone—sitting on midcentury modern furniture watching The Jetsons. But get out of the butterfly chair and fold the rabbit ears on the Philco—you’re living in the Space Age.

Without the space industry all those dishes hanging off window sills, receiving HD television reception and providing high-speed Internet connection in even the most remote corners of the world, would be just so many woks gone wrong.

Without the space industry, the only way you could use your satellite phone to communicate with someone would be by bonking him on the head with it. And satellite phones aren’t even big enough anymore to be very useful for that.

Meteorological predictions would be Grandpa’s mutterings about how his joints ache. There would have been no forewarning of Superstorm Sandy, and former members of the Jersey Shore cast might have been blown all the way to Canandaigua. What a natural disaster that would have been for New York’s Finger Lakes region.

Your GPS would be an old coot perched on your dashboard, chewing a stalk of hay. “Git on over to Old Pike Road. ’Cept they call it County Route 738 nowadays. An’ turn left where the Hendersons’ barn burned down in ’63.”

Air traffic control is largely satellite dependent. Absent satellites, when you’re squeezed into the middle seat on a flight to Orlando, you might not just wish you were dead, you might get that way.

And you couldn’t go to Google Earth to find out whether your neighbors are raising pigs in a backyard pen. You’d have to take a stepladder and peek over the fence. Nope, just dirty kids and a very dilapidated swing set. …

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Mark Steyn has come up with the ‘Lois Lerner’ Defense.

… I am an immigrant to this great land, and I love it, but I will make a small observation from my years in the United States which I hope won’t be taken the wrong way: Like citizens of almost all Western democracies in the 21st century, Americans are overly deferential to bureaucracy, but, in my observation, they are uniquely fearful of the state’s tax collectors to a degree I have never seen with Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs in London or equivalent agencies in Paris, Ottawa, Rome, Canberra. The IRS has, in American terms, extraordinary powers. It was, for example, amusing to see Lois Lerner plead the Fifth Amendment and exercise her constitutional right not to put herself at risk of self-incrimination. As the great Walter Williams pointed out the other day, every single American waives his Fifth Amendment rights every time he signs that tax return on April 15. Americans are fearless if some guy pulls some stunt in a shopping mall, but an IRS assault is brutal and unending. Many activists faded away, and the media began writing stories about how the Tea Party had peaked; they were over; they wouldn’t be a factor in 2012. And so it proved. As Rush Limbaugh pointed out the other day, the plan worked.

But, of course, there was no plan, was there? So let’s take Obama at his word that he had no idea all this was going on. In that case, he might like to take the lead in calling for the abolition of a corrupt agency and its grotesque tax code, and their replacement by a bureaucracy with more limited powers commensurate with a free society and a simplified tax regime with lower rates and thus fewer bewildering, mercurial “exemptions” that make the citizenry dependent on the caprices of Ms. Lerner and her colleagues. That’s a prize worth fighting for. In the meantime, the next time the IRS call you up with demands for this and demands for that, simply tell them, “I am filing the Lois Lerner defense,” and then say as she did to Congress “I have not done anything wrong. And I will not answer any questions.” Every man his own Lois Lerner!

We can thank Lily Tomlin for this quote; “No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up.” Which is how many felt when learning the IRS has become an arm of the democrat party.  Peggy Noonan explains what a serious wound this malfeasance will become to our country.

… this scandal is different and distinctive. The abuse was systemic—from the sheer number of targets and the extent of each targeting we know many workers had to be involved, many higher-ups, multiple offices. It was ideological and partisan—only those presumed to be of one political view were targeted. It has a single unifying pattern: The most vivid abuses took place in the years leading up to the president’s 2012 re-election effort. And in the end several were trying to cover it all up, including the head of the IRS, who lied to Congress about it, and the head of the tax-exempt unit, Lois Lerner, who managed to lie even in her public acknowledgment of impropriety.

It wasn’t a one-off. It wasn’t a president losing his temper with some steel executives. There was no enemies list, unless you consider half the country to be your enemies.

It is considered a bit of a faux pas to point this out, but what we are talking about in part is a Democratic president, a largely Democratic professional administrative class in Washington, and an IRS whose workers belong to a union whose political action committee gave roughly 95% of its political contributions last year to Democrats.

Tim Carney had a remarkable piece in the Washington Examiner this week in which he looked for campaign contributions from the IRS Cincinnati office. “In the 2012 election, every donation traceable to this office went to President Obama or liberal Sen. Sherrod Brown.” An IRS employee said in an email to Mr. Carney, “Do you think people willing to sacrifice lucrative private sector careers to work in tax administration . . . are genuinely going to support the party directed by Grover Norquist?” Mr. Carney noted that one of his IRS correspondents had an interesting detail on his social media profile. He belongs to a Facebook group called “Target the Shutdown at the Tea Party States.” It advised the president, during the 2011 debt-ceiling fight: “For instance, shut down air traffic control at airports in Norfolk, Tampa, Nashville.”

Wow. I guess that was target practice. …

… when a scandal is systemic, ideological and focused on political ends, it will not just magically end. Agencies such as the IRS are part of what Jonathan Turley this week called a “massive administrative state,” one built with many protections and much autonomy.

If it is not forced to change, it will not.

Which gets us to the part about imagination. What does it mean when half the country—literally half the country—understands that the revenue-gathering arm of its federal government is politically corrupt, sees them as targets, and will shoot at them if they try to raise their heads? That is the kind of thing that can kill a country, letting half its citizens believe that they no longer have full political rights. …

You cannot watch these people too closely. Stuart Taylor tells us about a little known slush fund hiding in the affordable care act. You know, the one we have to pass to find out what’s it it.

A little-noticed part of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act channels some $12.5 billion into a vaguely defined “Prevention and Public Health Fund” over the next decade–and some of that money is going for everything from massage therapists who offer “calming techniques,” to groups advocating higher state and local taxes on tobacco and soda, and stricter zoning restrictions on fast-food restaurants.

The program, which is run by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has raised alarms among congressional critics, who call it a “slush fund,” because the department can spend the money as it sees fit and without going through the congressional appropriations process. The sums involved are vast. By 2022, the department will be able to spend $2 billion per year at its sole discretion. In perpetuity.

What makes the Prevention and Public Health Fund controversial is its multibillion-dollar size, its unending nature (the fund never expires), and its vague spending mandate: any program designed “to improve health and help restrain the rate of, growth” of health-care costs.  That can include anything from “pickleball” (a racquet sport) in Carteret County, N.C. to Zumba (a dance fitness program), kayaking and kickboxing in Waco, TX.

“It’s totally crazy to give the executive branch $2 billion a year ad infinitum to spend as they wish,” said budget expert Jim Capretta of the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center. “Congress has the power of the purse, the purpose of which is to insure that the Executive branch is using taxpayer resources as Congress specified.”

The concerns are as diverse as the critics. The HHS Inspector General, in a 2012 “alert,” was concerned that the payments to third-party groups came dangerously close to taxpayer-funded lobbying. While current law bars lobbying with federal money, Obama administration officials and Republican lawmakers differ on where lawful “education” ends and illicit “lobbying” begins.  Nor have federal courts defined “lobbying” for the purposes of this fund. A health and Human Services (HHS) department spokesman denies that any laws were broken and the inspector general is continuing to investigate.

Republicans in both the House of Representatives and Senate have complained that much of the spending seems politically motivated and are alarmed that some of the federal money went to groups who described their own activities as contacting state, city and county lawmakers to urge higher taxes on high-calorie sodas and tobacco, or to call for bans on fast-food restaurants within 1,000-feet of a school, or total bans on smoking in outdoor venues, such as beaches or parks. In a May 9 letter to HHS Secretary Sebelius, Rep. Fred Upton (R,Mich) wrote that HHS grants “appear to fund lobbying activities contrary to the laws, regulations, and guidance governing the use of federal funds.” His letter included the latest in a series of requests for more documents and complaints about responses to previous requests.

Left wing freak from Kentucky who bugged Mitch McConnell’s office has doubled down. Legal Insurrection has the story.  

A Progress Kentucky volunteer who was at the center of a story involving the secret recording of Senator Mitch McConnell’s campaign meeting earlier this year has publicly admitted to making the recording, and he says that his attorney has been contacted by an assistant US Attorney about the matter.

Curtis Morrison, a founder and volunteer for Progress Kentucky, admitted to making the recording in a self-confession of sorts today at Salon.com.

From ABC News (via AP):

“A Kentucky man has admitted to secretly recording a private campaign meeting between Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell and his aides earlier this year.

Curtis Morrison of Louisville made the admission Friday in a first-person account posted on Salon.com, where he also said an assistant U.S. attorney has notified his attorney that a grand jury will consider bringing charges next Friday.

A spokeswoman said the U.S. attorney’s office in Louisville would not comment. It was unclear who was representing Morrison. Morrison declined to comment via email Friday.” …

Der Spiegel has pictures of the world’s largest ship. It can hold 16,000 containers.

The twin sister of the world’s largest container ship was set for inauguration in the German port of Hamburg on Thursday.  

At 396 meters (1,300 feet) long, the mammoth vessel can carry some 16,000 shipping containers, and will frequently travel to the northern German city. Dubbed the Alexander von Humboldt, it was made by French shipbuilder CMA CGM in the image of the Marco Polo, which was inaugurated in December 2012 — making both boats the largest in the world. …

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Because he knows London so well, Theodore Dalrymple provides needed background on the attack in Woolwich.

A witness to the brutal hacking death of a British soldier, Lee Rigby, a few hundred yards from his barracks in London, had the presence of mind to record the explanatory statement of one of the perpetrators, Michael Adebolajo, on his phone immediately after the crime. What Adebolajo said—his hand bloody from the attack and still holding the meat cleaver with which he carried it out—was revealing, as were his manner and body language. Together, they showed him to be the product of the utterly charmless, aggressive, and crude street culture of the less favored parts of London. The intonation of his speech was pure South London, as was the resentful tone of thwarted entitlement and its consequent self-righteousness. His every gesture was pure South London; the predatory lope with which he crossed the road after speaking into the camera was pure South London.

Adebolajo was born in London of Nigerian parents who were devout Christians. He did not learn his manners from them, therefore, but from the society around him. At one point in his life, his parents moved away from London in an attempt to separate him from bad—which is to say, criminal—influences. Adebolajo had joined a gang that stole phones from pedestrians.

It is not true that the society in which he lived offered him no opportunity for personal betterment. Adebolajo was for a time a student at GreenwichUniversity, graduation from which, whatever the real value of the education it offered him, would have improved his chances in the job market, especially in the public sector. But it was at the university that he encountered radical Islam, that ideology that simultaneously succors people with an existential grudge against the world and flatters their inflated and inflamed self-importance. It also successfully squares the adolescent circle: the need both to conform to a peer group and to rebel against society. …

Charles Krauthammer takes on Dear Follower’s Dorothy Doctrine.

… But the ultimate expression of Obama’s Dorothy Doctrine is Guantanamo. It must close. Must, mind you.

Okay. Let’s accept the dubious proposition that the Yemeni prisoners could be sent home without coming back to fight us. And that others could be convicted in court and put in U.S. prisons.

Now the rub. Obama openly admits that “even after we take these steps, one issue will remain — just how to deal with those Gitmo detainees who we know have participated in dangerous plots or attacks but who cannot be prosecuted.”

Well, yes. That’s always been the problem with Gitmo. It’s not a question of geography. The issue is indefinite detention — whether at Gitmo, a Colorado supermax or St. Helena.

Can’t try ’em, can’t release ’em. Having posed the central question, what is Obama’s answer? “I am confident that this legacy problem can be resolved.”

That’s it! I kid you not. He’s had four-plus years to think this one through — and he openly admits he’s got no answer.

Because there is none. Hence the need for Gitmo. Other wars end, at which point prisoners are repatriated. But in this war, the other side has no intention of surrender or armistice. They will fight until the caliphate is established or until jihadism is as utterly defeated as fascism and communism. That’s the reason — the only reason — for the detention conundrum. There is no solution to indefinite detention when the detainees are committed to indefinite war.

Obama’s fantasies are twinned. He can no more wish away the detention than he can the war.

We were defenseless on 9/11 because, despite Osama bin Laden’s open written declaration of war in 1996, we pretended for years that no war against us had even begun. Obama would return us to pre-9/11 defenselessness — casting Islamist terror as a law-enforcement issue and removing the legal basis for treating it as armed conflict — by pretending that the war is over.

It’s enough to make you weep.

Pajamas Media asks if Thomas Perez will again try to maneuver around a definitive ruling by the Supreme Court. 

One of the administration’s favorite legal theories, “disparate impact,” may get taken up again by the Supreme Court. Will the administration try to engineer some kind of payoff to take the issue away from the Court — again?

In June 2012, the town of Mount Holly, N.J., petitioned the Supreme Court to review the legitimacy of racial discrimination claims premised solely on a disparate impact theory under the Fair Housing Act. Under this theory, a policy — such as requiring high credit scores for loans — can be completely neutral, but if it yields a disparate impact on a particular racial or gender group, an institution using that policy can be held liable for discrimination. In other words, an entity can be found to have discriminated even if it didn’t actually intend to discriminate.

Thomas Perez, the assistant attorney general for Civil Rights at the Justice Department and President Obama’s nominee to be Labor secretary, has used disparate impact to extort huge settlements from the financial industry under the Fair Housing Act (FHA).

Here, MountHolly is alleged to have discriminated simply because it wanted to redevelop and rebuild a rundown housing development in a high-crime area where almost half the residents are black. Thus, the rebuilding plan would have had a statistically larger impact on black residents than white residents.

The issue of whether a mere disparate impact claim violates the FHA, or whether the more rigorous standard of intentional discrimination is required was before the Supreme Court last year. In that case, Magner v. Gallagher, the city of St. Paul, MN, was accused of violating the FHA because it aggressively enforced the health and safety provisions of its housing code. Slumlords sued the city, claiming that enforcement had a disparate impact because the majority of their tenants were racial minorities.

In other words, they were using the FHA to obstruct the city’s attempt to improve the horrible living conditions of poor families. …

Bart Hinkle of the Richmond Times-Dispatch wonders why a constitutional law professor is so dismissive of the document.

… If the IRS’ treatment of tea party groups were an isolated story, you could swallow the explanation that a few low-level bureaucrats went rogue. But that account does not explain why the EPA has been far more generous to freedom-of-information requests from liberal groups than from conservatives. Or why, shortly after the Obama campaign slimed Romney supporter Frank VanderSloot as a disreputable fellow, he was audited three times — twice by the IRS and once by the Labor Department. Or why, after Texas resident Catherine Engelbrecht started a tea party group, she received scrutiny not just from the IRS but also from the FBI. And OSHA. And, just for good measure, the ATF. Or why the IRS took 17 months to respond to an initial tax-exempt status application from the conservative Wyoming Policy Institute. Or why it shared confidential files from conservative groups with the liberal ProPublica. Or why …

Enough on the First Amendment. The president also has tried with considerable vigor to undermine the Second, and has succeeded in subverting the Fourth: Under Obama, who has gone to court to defend warrantless wiretaps he once condemned, warrantless “pen register” and “trap-and-trace” monitoring has soared to unprecedented heights.

In 2011, the president signed a reauthorization of the Patriot Act with just one regret: Congress approved an extension of only one year, while Obama wanted three. He signed into law a defense reauthorization bill allowing the indefinite detention, without charge, of American citizens, thereby gutting the principle of habeas corpus. Granted, he issued an executive order promising not to exercise that power. But the order does not constrain future presidents or, technically, even him.

From a civil-liberties perspective, Obama has carried forward nearly every one of the war on terror powers that led liberals to denounce George W. Bush as a goose-stepping fascist, and in fact has made many of them worse. When he retires from public life, perhaps he will return to teaching the Constitution. That should be much easier work — given how little of it there will be left.

It is not like this was unforeseen. We have here a October 2008 column by Mark Tapscott suggesting obama would try for a Caracas on the Potomac. 

Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama gave us another preview this week of how he will deal with critics if he is elected to the White House when he kicked three newspapers that endorsed John McCain off of his press plane. Merely terminating access, however,is likely to look tame compared to what Obama has in store for his critics after he takes the oath of office.

PREDICTION: Within six months of moving into the Oval Office, Obama’s multiple moves to silence critics in the media and elsewhere will lead to Washington, D.C. becoming the Caracas on the Potomac.

There were multiple signs before The Washington Times, New York Post and Dallas Morning News got the boot. Hugo Chavez has long used mob intimidation to pressure opposition forces into submission. Obama has made a limited use of the same tactic, as when National Review’s Stanley Kurtz began some potentially damaging reporting about the Democratic nominee’s long relationship with unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist bombers William Ayers and wife Bernadine Dohrn.

In retaliation, the Obama campaign issued a call-to-censor alert to its supporters, especially against Milt Rosenberg, a long-time and highly respected Chicago radio host who invited Kurtz to discuss his reporting on air. The Obama campaign declined to provide an official to share the program and rebut Kurtz. Instead, hundreds of callers did what they were instructed to do by the Obama campaign – they jammed the station’s phone lines with protest calls demanding that Kurtz be silenced and accusing the show’s host of lowering journalism standards.     

The Obama campaign had done the same thing a few weeks earlier when Rosenberg had as a guest another Obama critic, …

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Andrew Malcolm kicks off Eric Holder Day.

… Two weeks ago today Holder was giving testy testimony to the House committee.

He told members he found his questioning to be “shameful” and “unacceptable” and at one point the unelected official upbraided the committee, “You may not like me, but I am the attorney general.”

Which, of course, was a keen grasp of the obvious because that’s why he was testifying before the legislative branch, which has this constitutional role to play. And remember, Holder is the first-ever attorney general to be cited for contempt of Congress. He may not like them, but they are elected.

So, things weren’t going too well. A sympathetic Democrat representative named Hank Johnson of Georgia tried to help Holder. He yielded his last couple of minutes as a gift to Holder to talk freely. Here’s what lawyer Holder volunteered:

“In regard to potential prosecution of the press for the disclosure of material — this is not something I’ve ever been involved in, heard of, or would think would be wise policy.”

“Not something I’ve ever been involved in” or “heard of.” Also, not “wise policy.”

Now, here’s the really big problem for the country’s top law enforcement officer: It looks like he was lying through that nice mustache to Congress.

Turns out, NBC News discovered Holder’s signature was on the FBI documents seeking a search warrant to get inside Rosen’s life. Like most Americans, we’re not lawyers. But signing a court document would pretty clearly require Holder to have heard of the document he was signing, right? And signing it would also seem to laymen’s eyes to involve the signer, even in Chicago. …

Jonathan Turley has seen enough of Eric Holder. 

Recently, Attorney General Eric Holder appeared before the House Judiciary Committee to answer questions about the administration’s sweeping surveillance of journalists with the Associated Press. In the greatest attack on the free press in decades, the Justice Department seized phone records for reporters and editors in at least three AP offices as well as its office in the House of Representatives. Holder, however, proceeded to claim absolute and blissful ignorance of the investigation, even failing to recall when or how he recused himself.

Yet, this was only the latest attack on the news media under Holder’s leadership. Despite his record, he expressed surprise at the hearing that the head of the Republican National Committee had called for his resignation. After all, Holder pointed out, he did nothing. That is, of course, precisely the point. Unlike the head of the RNC, I am neither a Republican nor conservative, and I believe Holder should be fired.

Holder’s refusal to accept responsibility for the AP investigation was something of a change for the political insider. His value to President Obama has been his absolute loyalty. Holder is what we call a “sin eater” inside the Beltway — high-ranking associates who shield presidents from responsibility for their actions. Richard Nixon had H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. Ronald Reagan had Oliver North and Robert “Bud” McFarlane. George W. Bush had the ultimate sin eater: Dick Cheney, who seemed to have an insatiable appetite for sins to eat. …

Paul Mirengoff of Power Line says Holder has a history of imprecise testimony.

When President Obama nominated Eric Holder for Attorney General, the Republican establishment was not displeased. As I wrote at the time, “most members of that establishment feel more comfortable with their fellow Washington insider than they do with taking their chances on an Obama nominee to be named later.”

At Power Line, though, we had major concerns about Holder. Prominent among them was his lack of honesty. For one thing, we doubted Holder’s testimony to the Senate that, when he pushed through the pardon of Marc Rich, he didn’t know Rich had assisted America’s enemies, including Iran, or that Rich’s wife had donated large sums to Democratic and Clinton interests. If Holder truly was as ignorant as he claims to have been, we argued, it was because he didn’t want to know. President Clinton wanted the pardon and Holder wanted to get it accomplished.

Holder’s implausible denials were rendered even more doubtful by the obstructionist efforts of Senate Democrats on his behalf. …

Michael Gerson says Eric Holder is good at one thing.

… Holder has one particular, highly developed skill: a talent for loyalty. And this is designed to please an audience of one. But Obama’s continued trust in his besieged attorney general has radiating effects. The review of Justice Department abuses relating to the press is being conducted by . . . Holder. A special counsel in this case would be appointed by . . . Holder. The FBI probe of the IRS scandal was ordered by . . . Holder. In all these cases, the restoration of public trust depends on an attorney general worthy of public trust.

During his recent Naval Academy commencement address, Obama said: “It’s no secret that in recent decades many Americans have lost confidence in many of the institutions that help shape our society and our democracy. But I suggest to you today that institutions do not fail in a vacuum. Institutions are made up of people, individuals. And we’ve seen how the actions of a few can undermine the integrity of those institutions.”

Mr. President, meet your attorney general.

Rich Lowry has more on Holder.

President Barack Obama has been mocked for learning about untoward conduct in his administration from the press. But he’s on the ball compared with his attorney general, who wouldn’t know about his own poor judgment without reading about it in the papers. Let’s hope he has a Google alert set for “Eric Holder.”

The website the Daily Beast interviewed the attorney general and Justice Department officials for a piece about how the AG is holding up in the firestorm over two controversial Justice Department leak investigations, one into the Associated Press, the other into Fox News reporter James Rosen

The Daily Beast piece pinpoints when Eric Holder had a crisis of conscience leading him to question his leak-investigating ways. The Washington Post had made inquiries at the Justice Department about the investigation into Rosen stemming from a 2009 leak, and the department’s press office had begun to ready itself for the storm. For Eric Holder, though, “the gravity of the situation didn’t fully sink in until Monday morning when he read the Post’s front-page story, sitting at his kitchen table.” …

Peter Wehner says Holder should and will resign, but the real problem is Dear Follower.

… Now, I’d prefer for Mr. Holder to resign, if only because I’d prefer that a man who misled Congress regarding his role in secretly monitoring the private e-mails of Fox’s James Rosen and for his role in the Fast and Furious operation (for which he was held in contempt of Congress)–a man who is self-righteous as well inept–not be attorney general of the United States. But whether Holder stays or goes is, if not exactly beside the point, not the central issue involved here.

What matters is that we have an administration that had contempt for the rule of law and believes it is right and proper to use the power of the federal government to target, intimidate, and silence its political opponents. That has been happening since nearly the beginning of the Obama Era. Eric Holder is not the generator of this culture of intimidation and corruption; he is merely one of its executioners. The real problem with the Obama administration begins at the top. Getting rid of Eric Holder may be a good idea. But it won’t solve the deeper pathologies of this presidency.

Peter Wehner calls it their “Damascus road experiences.”

We’re seeing some remarkable conversions occur before our very eyes. Take David Axelrod, who was President Obama’s top political adviser in the White House.

For years Axelrod, along with Anita Dunn and others, led a Nixonian campaign to discredit and delegitimize Fox News. Yet now Axelrod is angst-ridden and aggrieved at the Justice Department’s surveillance of a Fox News reporter, James Rosen, telling MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that he finds all of this “disturbing.”

“I do think there are real issues regarding the relationship with the media on this leak matter,” according to Axelrod. “The notion of naming a journalist as a co-conspirator for receiving information is something that I find very disturbing.”

Mr. Axelrod’s professed solidarity with Fox News is touching. But a few of us thought the effort back in 2009 to target Fox was disturbing, too – and we went on to predict that it would lead to something that looks very much like what has occurred: the abuse of government power to intimidate people Team Obama viewed as a threat.

Speaking of the scales falling from their eyes, we’re now asked to believe that Attorney General Eric Holder, is “beginning to feel a creeping sense of personal remorse” for his role in authorizing a search warrant that named James Rosen as an “aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator” in a crime. A very well developed sense of right and wrong, combined with the fear that he might have committed perjury in his Congressional testimony, will do that to a fellow.

We’re seeing a variation of this with the IRS scandal. The president and Democrats are falling all over themselves condemning the abuse of power by the IRS. But what they conveniently forget is their role in creating a climate that allowed the abuse to flourish. After all, when the DNC runs ads accusing pro-Republican groups of “stealing our democracy,” when the president of the United States suggests they are breaking the law, and when senior Democratic Senators write letters (see here) to the IRS requesting that it survey major nonprofits involved in political campaign activity for their possible “violation of tax laws,” what you are bound to get is what we now have.

The president and his top aides gave clear guidance as to which properties needed to be targeted and provided the accelerants to get a fire burning. And now they profess being shocked that arson was going on.

How stupid do they think we are?

John Steele Gordon posts on the ominous differences in how IRS Commissioners have gone about their jobs.

The Washington Examiner reported on Monday that Mark Everson, Commissioner of Internal Revenue from 2003 to 2007, during the Bush administration, visited the White House exactly once while in office. Indeed he felt like he’d “moved to Siberia” so out of the ordinary political loop was he. But Douglas Shulman, Commissioner from 2008 to 2012, during the Obama administration, visited the White House 118 times just in 2010 and 2011. His successor, Steven Miller, also visited “numerous” times.

The Commissioner of Internal Revenue is a managerial position, not a policy-making one, although his input on the practical realities of tax collection and how the IRS is structured might well be very useful if the President was planning a big push on tax reform. But no such push has been forthcoming. Obama’s sole interest in the tax code has been to raise rates on high earners. So what was the commissioner doing going to the White House more than once a week on average? …

Lisa Myers of NBC News reports senior administration officials, including Lois Lerner, have been part of the IRS inquisition of conservative groups.

Additional scrutiny of conservative organizations’ activities by the IRS did not solely originate in the agency’s Cincinnati office, with requests for information coming from other offices and often bearing the signatures of higher-ups at the agency, according to attorneys representing some of the targeted groups. At least one letter requesting information about one of the groups bears the signature of Lois Lerner, the suspended director of the IRS Exempt Organizations department in Washington.

Jay Sekulow, an attorney representing 27 conservative political advocacy organizations that applied to the Internal Revenue Service for tax-exempt status, provided some of the letters to NBC News.  He said the groups’ contacts with the IRS prove that the practices went beyond a few “front line” employees in the Cincinnati office, as the IRS has maintained.

“We’ve dealt with 15 agents, including tax law specialists — that’s lawyers — from four different offices, including (the) Treasury (Department) in Washington, D.C.,” Sekulow said. “So the idea that this is a couple of rogue agents in Cincinnati is not correct.”

Among the letters were several that bore return IRS addresses other than Cincinnati, including “Department of the Treasury / Internal Revenue Service / Washington, D.C.,” and the signatures of IRS officials higher up the chain. Two letters with ”Department of the Treasury / Internal Revenue Service / Washington, D.C.” letterhead were signed by “Tax Law Specialist(s)” from Exempt Organizations Technical Group 1 and Technical Group 2. Lerner’s signature, which appeared to be a stamp rather than an actual signature, appeared on a letter requesting additional information from the Ohio Liberty Council Corp. …

The cartoonists have a Holder Day too.

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MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute) reports on a Saudi pundit’s assessment of Dear Follower.

“The problem of U.S. President Barack Obama can be summed up in a single word: hesitation. The man is short-sighted, confused and diffident. It seems that the gist of his policy is disagreeing with every position of his predecessor, George W. Bush, and that is quarrelsomeness, not policy.

“This assessment of Obama’s policy is not voiced only by his Republican rivals in the U.S., or by those who hate some [aspects] of his global [foreign] policy, but also by some proponents of his own school of thought, like the well-known American author David Ignatius, who recently wrote a critique of the Obama administration’s policy that was not confined to foreign [policy] affairs… Summarizing the problematic aspects of  Obama’s conduct, he said that the public is more afraid of a weak administration than a strong one!

“We are not talking [only] about harsh critics of this administration, inside or outside the U.S. This is apparent from a recent article by Lebanese-American writer Fuad ‘Ajami, who slammed Obama for his feebleness, his lack of leadership, and his inability to take bold decisions under difficult circumstances, especially when it comes to his position on the Syrian catastrophe. Nor is it only Republicans who attack [Obama]. [Criticism is also voiced] by people who were overjoyed by the arrival [in the White House] of a black Harvard graduate with African and Islamic roots, the son of Hussein Obama. [They expected him] to have a better understanding of the Islamic and Arab societies and their nature. But eventually, as the helplessness of the international community  [to address the situation] in Syria increased due to the [conduct of] the U.S. and Obama, it became apparent that this man is unable to lead and that he hides his failure and ignorance behind a lot of hypothetical talk about red, green and purple lines…” …

… “This leads us to a frustrating conclusion about Obama’s precise and rigid implementation of his bad and superficial policy of retreating [from the Middle East] at any cost, even in the face of new developments. [We must conclude that] this is not a skilled statesman and politician with creative solutions, but an ordinary academic who repeats meaningless slogans and does not possess the political sensitivity to give each factor the weight it deserves, to take bold [action] when necessary and to refrain [from action] when necessary…”

John Podhoretz has a column on the Attorney General PlaceHolder’s remorse about his policies. We’ll have more next week on Holder who finally is circling the drain. We first heard of him when he couldn’t find anything wrong with Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich early in 2001.

Attorney General Eric Holder says (or had his flunkies say) he only understood the severity of his own actions against Fox News reporter James Rosen when he was sitting at his breakfast table reading The Washington Post on a Monday morning.

Yes, that’s what he told the Daily Beast, which did him the inestimable favor of not crumpling to the ground in hysterical peals of laughter.

For one thing, the story about the Rosen subpoena was released on the Post’s Web site the day before. To believe the tale about Holder and the breakfast table, you have to believe no one told him about it on that Sunday.

If you buy that, fella, I have a CitiBike rack to sell you.

Besides which, given that Holder approved the subpoena on Rosen’s records back in 2010, and that his department had to go to three judges before it could find one who’d execute it, the whole story smells to high heaven.

The Justice Department knew it was breaking new ground with its action in the Rosen case, and you don’t forget it when you do something unprecedented.

But Holder isn’t breaking new ground with his denials here. He’s merely following his boss’s fascinating habit of acting as though policies for which he is responsible have nothing to do with him. …

A treat today is a piece from American.com on Eric Hoffer; Longshoreman Philosopher.

Hardly anyone had heard of Eric Hoffer when his first book, The True Believer, was published in 1951. In fact, when Harper & Brothers was considering accepting it, they asked Norman Thomas, the former presidential candidate for the Socialist Party, to go and see Hoffer. They wanted to verify that he really existed and was what he claimed to be — a longshoreman in San Francisco. No one at the publishing house had seen him or even spoken to him on the telephone. (Hoffer never had a phone except in the last year of his life.) Furthermore, Hoffer’s book was written in an abstract and intellectual style rarely encountered on the waterfront.

Norman Thomas’s son, Evan Thomas (father of the present-day journalist in Washington), was a senior editor at Harper & Brothers (later Harper & Row). Hoffer, according to his own oft-told story, had mailed the manuscript of The True Believer to Harper in a brown paper parcel, without making a copy first. He said he didn’t worry about losing it because he had rewritten it so many times that he knew it by heart.

Norman Thomas vouched for Hoffer, who spoke with a strong German accent. He had joined the longshoremen in 1943, when he was already in his mid-forties. In normal times, Hoffer later wrote, the Longshoreman’s Union was as hard to join as an aristocratic club. But the military draft had shrunk the available manpower and Hoffer was accepted. The boss of the Longshoremen’s Union was Harry Bridges, an Australian whom Congress had tried to deport as a Communist. Hoffer admired Bridges’s ability but not his ideology. At the end of his life he said that he “never spoke a word to Bridges.”

As a class, intellectuals are aristocratic in temperament and seek power for themselves.

In The True Believer Hoffer said that “faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves” — a serviceable summary of the book. It was published to considerable acclaim, with the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune joining in. The San Francisco Examiner always maintained good relations with Hoffer and later published his newspaper column, but the San Francisco Chronicle retained a curious and lifelong animosity toward its homegrown author.

Hoffer went on to write nine more books, all of them short. …

Andrew Malcolm tops off our week with late night humor.

Fallon: At a recent fundraiser Obama noted a shortage of common sense in Washington. Then, the people who had just paid $5,000 per plate applauded.

Leno: Not looking good for President Obama with all these scandals. Today, his teleprompter took the Fifth.

Conan: A new report says someone close to Obama knew about the IRS scandal and kept his mouth shut. In other words, we can rule out Joe Biden.

Letterman: President Obama says, “Sorry, I’ve been out of the loop.” VP Joe Biden says, “Wait a minute. I’m supposed to be the one out of the loop.”

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Mark Steyn cares to post on London’s barbarians.

On Wednesday, Drummer Lee Rigby of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, a man who had served Queen and country honorably in the hell of HelmandProvince in Afghanistan, emerged from his barracks on Wellington Street, named after the Duke thereof, in southeast London. Minutes later, he was hacked to death in broad daylight and in full view of onlookers by two men with machetes who crowed “Allahu Akbar!” as they dumped his carcass in the middle of the street like so much roadkill.

As grotesque as this act of savagery was, the aftermath was even more unsettling. The perpetrators did not, as the Tsarnaev brothers did in Boston, attempt to escape. Instead, they held court in the street, gloating over their trophy, and flagged down a London bus to demand the passengers record their triumph on film. As the crowd of bystanders swelled, the remarkably urbane savages posed for photographs with the remains of their victim while discoursing on the iniquities of Britain toward the Muslim world. Having killed Drummer Rigby, they were killing time: it took 20 minutes for the somnolent British constabulary to show up. And so television viewers were treated to the spectacle of a young man, speaking in the vowels of south London, chatting calmly with his “fellow Britons” about his geopolitical grievances and apologizing to the ladies present for any discomfort his beheading of Drummer Rigby might have caused them, all while drenched in blood and still wielding his cleaver.

If you’re thinking of getting steamed over all that, don’t. Simon Jenkins, the former editor of The Times of London, cautioned against “mass hysteria” over “mundane acts of violence.”

That’s easy for him to say. Woolwich is an unfashionable part of town, and Sir Simon is unlikely to find himself there on an afternoon stroll. Drummer Rigby had less choice in the matter. Being jumped by barbarians with machetes is certainly “mundane” in Somalia and Sudan, but it’s the sort of thing that would once have been considered somewhat unusual on a sunny afternoon in south London – at least as unusual as, say, blowing up 8-year-old boys at the Boston Marathon. It was “mundane” only in the sense that, as at weddings and kindergarten concerts, the reflexive reaction of everybody present was to get out their cellphones and start filming. …

Ayaan Hirsi Ali too. 

I’ve seen this before. A Muslim terrorist slays a non-Muslim citizen in the West, and representatives of the Muslim community rush to dissociate themselves and their faith from the horror. After British soldier Lee Rigby was hacked to death last week in Woolwich in south London, Julie Siddiqi, representing the Islamic Society of Britain, quickly stepped before the microphones to attest that all good Muslims were “sickened” by the attack, “just like everyone else.”

This happens every time. Muslim men wearing suits and ties, or women wearing stylish headscarves, are sent out to reassure the world that these attacks have no place in real Islam, that they are aberrations and corruptions of the true faith.

But then what to make of Omar Bakri? He too claims to speak for the true faith, though he was unavailable for cameras in England last week because the Islamist group he founded, Al-Muhajiroun, was banned in Britain in 2010. Instead, he talked to the media from Tripoli in northern Lebanon, where he now lives. Michael Adebolajo—the accused Woolwich killer who was seen on a video at the scene of the murder, talking to the camera while displaying his bloody hands and a meat cleaver—was Bakri’s student a decade ago, before his group was banned. “A quiet man, very shy, asking lots of questions about Islam,” Bakri recalled last week. The teacher was impressed to see in the grisly video how far his shy disciple had come, “standing firm, courageous, brave. Not running away.”

Bakri also told the press: “The Prophet said an infidel and his killer will not meet in Hell. That’s a beautiful saying. May God reward [Adebolajo] for his actions . . . I don’t see it as a crime as far as Islam is concerned.”

The question requiring an answer at this moment in history is clear: Which group of leaders really speaks for Islam? The officially approved spokesmen for the “Muslim community”? Or the manic street preachers of political Islam, who indoctrinate, encourage and train the killers—and then bless their bloodshed? …

Bret Stephens interviews a Chinese fan of Frederick Hayek.

In the spring of 1959, Yang Jisheng, then an 18-year-old scholarship student at a boarding school in China’s HubeiProvince, got an unexpected visit from a childhood friend. “Your father is starving to death!” the friend told him. “Hurry back, and take some rice if you can.”

Granted leave from his school, Mr. Yang rushed to his family farm. “The elm tree in front of our house had been reduced to a barkless trunk,” he recalled, “and even its roots had been dug up.” Entering his home, he found his father “half-reclined on his bed, his eyes sunken and lifeless, his face gaunt, the skin creased and flaccid . . . I was shocked with the realization that the term skin and bones referred to something so horrible and cruel.”

Mr. Yang’s father would die within three days. Yet it would take years before Mr. Yang learned that what happened to his father was not an isolated incident. He was one of the 36 million Chinese who succumbed to famine between 1958 and 1962.

It would take years more for him to realize that the source of all the suffering was not nature: There were no major droughts or floods in China in the famine years. Rather, the cause was man, and one man in particular: Mao Zedong, the Great Helmsman, whose visage still stares down on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square from atop the gates of the Forbidden City.

Mr. Yang went on to make his career, first as a journalist and senior editor with the Xinhua News Agency, then as a historian whose unflinching scholarship has brought him into increasing conflict with the Communist Party—of which he nonetheless remains a member. Now 72 and a resident of Beijing, he’s in New York this month to receive the Manhattan Institute’s Hayek Prize for “Tombstone,” his painstakingly researched, definitive history of the famine. On a visit to the Journal’s headquarters, his affinity for the prize’s namesake becomes clear.

“This book had a huge impact on me,” he says, holding up his dog-eared Chinese translation of Friedrich Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom.” Hayek’s book, he explains, was originally translated into Chinese in 1962 as “an ‘internal reference’ for top leaders,” meaning it was forbidden fruit to everyone else. Only in 1997 was a redacted translation made publicly available, complete with an editor’s preface denouncing Hayek as “not in line with the facts,” and “conceptually mixed up.” …

The Economist celebrates the shipping container.

THE humble shipping container is a powerful antidote to economic pessimism and fears of slowing innovation. Although only a simple metal box, it has transformed global trade. In fact, new research suggests that the container has been more of a driver of globalisation than all trade agreements in the past 50 years taken together.

Containerisation is a testament to the power of process innovation. In the 1950s the world’s ports still did business much as they had for centuries. When ships moored, hordes of longshoremen unloaded “break bulk” cargo crammed into the hold. They then squeezed outbound cargo in as efficiently as possible in a game of maritime Tetris. The process was expensive and slow; most ships spent much more time tied up than plying the seas. And theft was rampant: a dock worker was said to earn “$20 a day and all the Scotch you could carry home.

Containerisation changed everything. It was the brainchild of Malcom McLean, an American trucking magnate. He reckoned that big savings could be had by packing goods in uniform containers that could easily be moved between lorry and ship. When he tallied the costs from the inaugural journey of his first prototype container ship in 1956, he found that they came in at just $0.16 per tonne to load—compared with $5.83 per tonne for loose cargo on a standard ship. Containerisation quickly conquered the world: between 1966 and 1983 the share of countries with container ports rose from about 1% to nearly 90%, coinciding with a take-off in global trade (see chart). …