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Joe Klein of Time roughs up the administration again.

The Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups is outrageous. Those who did this should be fired immediately. That’s obvious.

It continues a slovenly week for Barack Obama. The President has been very proud of the absence of scandal in his administration, and rightly so. The inability of his opponents to find any significant corruption in the historic $800 billion stimulus package was a real achievement, given the speed of the payout. None of his top aides have been caught up in taking bribes while in office–although their race through the revolving door into lucrative private sector positions is well beyond nauseating.

As in most presidencies, there have been an awful lot of political hacks populating the mid-reaches of this Administration. In the Obama instance, these have shown an anachronistic, pre-Clinton liberal bias when it comes to the rules and regulations governing many of our safety net programs, like social security disability. And now they have violated one of the more sacred rules of our democracy: you do not use the tax code to punish your opponents.

Lois G. Lerner, the IRS official who oversees tax-exempt groups, said the “absolutely inappropriate” actions by “front-line people” were not driven by partisan motives.

Does anyone actually believe this?

Yet again, we have an example of Democrats simply not managing the government properly and with discipline. This is just poisonous at a time of skepticism about the efficacy of government. And the President should know this: the absence of scandal is not the presence of competence. His unwillingness to concentrate–and I mean concentrate obsessively–on making sure that government is managed efficiently will be part of his legacy.

Previous Presidents, including great ones like Roosevelt, have used the IRS against their enemies. But I don’t think Barack Obama ever wanted to be on the same page as Richard Nixon. In this specific case, he now is.

Michael Barone asks if Hillary and barack believed their Benghazi baloney. 

What were President Barack Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton thinking? Why did they keep pitching the line that the Sept. 11, 2012 Benghazi attack that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans started as a spontaneous protest against an anti-Muslim video?

One possible explanation is confusion. There was such an attack on our embassy in Cairo earlier that day that fit that description.

When Hillary Clinton on Sept. 14 talked of a “mob” and “violent attacks” over the caskets of the Americans slain in Benghazi, she could have been referring to the attacks in Cairo. In that case she would not exactly be lying, as many have charged.

But she would have been misleading people, quite possibly intentionally. We know she assured one victim’s father, Charles Wood, that “we’re going to prosecute that person that made the video.”

Not entirely successfully, by the way. “I knew she was lying,” Woods said after the House committee hearing on Benghazi last week.

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that Clinton was knowingly attempting to mislead. She certainly knows the difference between Cairo and Benghazi.

And it’s undisputed that Gregory Hicks, the No. 2 man in our Libya embassy, reported that it was an “attack” on Sept. 11. That was the word he heard in his last conversation with Chris Stevens. …

Boston Globe tells us where some of the bogus “studies” came from.

A prominent Dutch social psychologist who once claimed to have shown that the very act of thinking about eating meat makes people behave more selfishly has been found to have faked data throughout much of his career.

In one of the worst cases of scientific fraud on record in the Netherlands, a review committee made up of some of the country’s top scientists has found that University of Tilburg Prof. Diederik Stapel systematically falsified data to achieve the results he wanted.

The university has fired the 45-year-old Stapel and plans to file fraud charges against him, university spokesman Walther Verhoeven said Thursday.

Stapel acknowledged in a statement the accusations were largely true.

“I have manipulated study data and fabricated investigations,” he wrote in an open letter published by De Volkskrant newspaper this week. “I realize that via this behavior I have left my direct colleagues stunned and angry and put my field, social psychology, in a poor light.” …

Ann Coulter defends John Lott, the author of “More Guns; Less Crime.”

You can tell the conservatives liberals fear most because they start being automatically referred to as “discredited.” Ask Sen. Ted Cruz. But no one is called “discredited” by liberals more often than the inestimable economist John Lott, author of the groundbreaking book More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws .

Lott’s economic analysis of the effect of concealed-carry laws on violent crime is the most thoroughly vetted study in the history of economics, perhaps in the history of the world.

Some nut Dutch professor produces dozens of gag studies purportedly finding that thinking about red meat makes people selfish and that litter leads to racism — and no one bothers to see if he even administered questionnaires before drawing these grand conclusions about humanity.

But Lott’s decades-long studies of concealed-carry laws have been probed, poked and re-examined dozens of times. (Most of all by Lott himself, who has continuously re-run the numbers controlling for thousands of factors.)

Tellingly, Lott immediately makes all his underlying data and computer analyses available to critics — unlike, say, the critics. He has sent his data and work to 120 researchers around the world. By now, there have been 29 peer-reviewed studies of Lott’s work on the effect of concealed-carry laws.

Eighteen confirm Lott’s results, showing a statistically significant reduction in crime after concealed-carry laws are enacted. Ten show no harm, but no significant reduction in crime. Only one peer-reviewed study even purported to show any negative effect: a temporary increase in aggravated assaults. Then it turned out this was based on a flawed analysis by a liberal activist professor: John Donohue, whose name keeps popping up in all fake studies purporting to debunk Lott. …

According to a BBC report, the risk of skin cancer is more than overcome by the healthy effects of sunshine. 

The health benefits of exposing skin to sunlight may far outweigh the risk of developing skin cancer, according to scientists.

EdinburghUniversity research suggests sunlight helps reduce blood pressure, cutting heart attack and stroke risks and even prolonging life.

UV rays were found to release a compound that lowers blood pressure.

Researchers said more studies would be carried out to determine if it is time to reconsider advice on skin exposure.

Heart disease and stroke linked to high blood pressure are estimated to lead to about 80 times more deaths than those from skin cancer in the UK. …

WSJ reviews a book on the bird watcher’s holy grail.

She’s there in a 1957-era ornithologist’s film, tossing her springy curled crest, whacking away at scaly pine bark and hitching vigorously up a tree. She is an imperial woodpecker, the largest woodpecker who ever lived: almost 2 feet tall; jet black and snow white, with a staring doll’s eye, a Kewpie crest and an oversize bone-colored bill, stuck like an awl in a surprised-looking face. And she is, sadly, one of the last of her kind: No one has spotted an imperial woodpecker in the half-century since the film was made.

Even though Tim Gallagher reported seeing an ivory-billed woodpecker, the imperial woodpecker’s northern cousin, fly across Arkansas’s Bayou De View in 2004 (and wrote a 2006 book, “The Grail Bird,” about his quest), you’re aware from the get-go that his hunt for the imperial woodpecker in Mexico won’t be a saga of discovery. There won’t be a photo of an oversize, pied woodpecker on the book’s cover, just an artist’s rendering. Instead, “Imperial Dreams” is more along the lines of Peter Matthiessen’s “The Snow Leopard.” It’s yearning, put into words and wistfully unrequited. …

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Mark Steyn attributes Benghazi to lack of character.

Shortly before last November’s election I took part in a Fox News documentary on Benghazi, whose other participants included the former governor of New Hampshire John Sununu. Making chit-chat while the camera crew were setting up, Governor Sununu said to me that in his view Benghazi mattered because it was “a question of character.” That’s correct. On a question of foreign policy or counterterrorism strategy, men of good faith can make the wrong decisions. But a failure of character corrodes the integrity of the state.

That’s why career diplomat Gregory Hicks’s testimony was so damning — not so much for the new facts as for what those facts revealed about the leaders of this republic. In this space in January, I noted that Hillary Clinton had denied ever seeing Ambassador Stevens’s warnings about deteriorating security in Libya on the grounds that “1.43 million cables come to my office” — and she can’t be expected to see all of them, or any. Once Ambassador Stevens was in his flag-draped coffin listening to her eulogy for him at Andrews Air Force Base, he was her bestest friend in the world — it was all “Chris this” and “Chris that,” as if they’d known each other since third grade. But up till that point he was just one of 1.43 million close personal friends of Hillary trying in vain to get her ear.

Now we know that at 8 p.m. Eastern time on the last night of Stevens’s life, his deputy in Libya spoke to Secretary Clinton and informed her of the attack in Benghazi and the fact that the ambassador was now missing. An hour later, Gregory Hicks received a call from the then–Libyan prime minister, Abdurrahim el-Keib, informing him that Stevens was dead. Hicks immediately called Washington. It was 9 p.m. Eastern time, or 3 a.m. in Libya. Remember the Clinton presidential team’s most famous campaign ad? About how Hillary would be ready to take that 3 a.m. call? Four years later, the phone rings, and Secretary Clinton’s not there. She doesn’t call Hicks back that evening. Or the following day.

Are murdered ambassadors like those 1.43 million cables she doesn’t read? Just too many of them to keep track of? No. Only six had been killed in the history of the republic — seven, if you include Arnold Raphel, who perished in General Zia’s somewhat mysterious plane crash in Pakistan in 1988. Before that you have to go back to Adolph Dubs, who died during a kidnapping attempt in Kabul in 1979. So we have here a once-in-a-third-of-a-century event. And at 3 a.m. Libyan time on September 12 it’s still unfolding, with its outcome unclear. Hicks is now America’s head man in the country, and the cabinet secretary to whom he reports says, “Leave a message after the tone and I’ll get back to you before the end of the week.” Just to underline the difference here: Libya’s head of government calls Hicks, but nobody who matters in his own government can be bothered to.

What was Secretary Clinton doing that was more important? What was the president doing? Aside, that is, from resting up for his big Vegas campaign event. A real government would be scrambling furiously to see what it could do to rescue its people. It’s easy, afterwards, to say that nothing would have made any difference. But, at the time Deputy Chief Hicks was calling 9-1-1 and getting executive-branch voicemail, nobody in Washington knew how long it would last. A terrorist attack isn’t like a soccer game, over in 90 minutes. If it is a sport, it’s more like a tennis match: Whether it’s all over in three sets or goes to five depends on how hard the other guy pushes back. The government of the United States took the extremely strange decision to lose in straight sets. …

IBD Editors on the Clinton intimidation of Gregory Hicks.

The secretary of state in the most transparent administration in history has her chief of staff warn a Benghazi whistle-blower to not spill the beans on Benghazi to a U.S. congressman.

In the course of the career of Hillary Clinton’s husband, William Jefferson Clinton, there were handlers delegated to deal with what were famously called “bimbo eruptions,” past dalliances that might impede his political career.

Now on her own politically, Mrs. Clinton apparently has her own handlers, paid for by the U.S. taxpayer, to deal with what we’ll call “Benghazi eruptions.” Those who know the truth and are willing to speak it must be dealt with by intimidation.

One of the things we learned during Wednesday’s hearings from Greg Hicks, the deputy chief of mission in Libya and a career foreign service officer for 22 years, is that after he talked to investigators about Benghazi, he received a searing phone reprimand from a very angry Cheryl Mills, who happened to be the chief of staff to his boss, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

In the State Department, when Cheryl Mills calls, you pick up the phone. She’s been one of the Clintons’ right-hand men, so to speak, for decades. She worked in Bill’s White House legal office, then as counsel to Hillary’s presidential campaign, and then became chief of staff at State when Hillary was appointed secretary. She knows how to help handle “eruptions, ” bimbo or otherwise. …

Michael Barone says colleges have learned how the market works.

.. Now the higher education bubble has burst. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that that the average “tuition discount rate” offered incoming freshmen last fall by private colleges and universities has reached an all-time high of 45 percent.

At the same time, their “sticker price” tuitions have increased by the smallest amount in the last dozen years. Tuitions for in-state students at public four-year colleges and universities also increased by the smallest amount during that period.

Applicants are negotiating bigger discounts than they used to. Market competition has kicked in.

What has happened is that in a recessionary and sluggish economy potential customers have been figuring out that a college diploma may not be a good investment — particularly if it entails six-figure college loan debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.

The Millennial Generation that voted so heavily for Barack Obama — 66 to 32 percent in 2008, 60 to 37 percent in 2012 — has had a hard time finding jobs, even with diplomas in hand. Especially if their degrees are in gender studies or similar fields beloved of academics.

In even worse condition are those students who never get a degree, a disproportionate number of whom are blacks and Hispanics admitted under affirmative action programs who prove unable to keep up with the pace of instruction at schools where most students enter much better prepared.

We see in higher education something like what we saw in housing. Government programs aimed at increasing college education and homeownership, particularly among minorities, turn out to hurt many of the intended beneficiaries.

The intentions of the people who created these programs were good. The results? Well, not so much. …

Der Spiegel tells us about the plight of the African lion.

It’s a Sunday in South Africa, and on the green lawn of the Weltevrede Lion Farm, arms reach for a white animal that could double for a cuddly stuffed animal. Visitors are being allowed to pet Lisa, an eight-week-old lion cub with unusual coloring.

Lisa was two weeks old when she was taken from her mother. “To make them manageable you have to do this,” explains Christiaan, who is leading visitors on a tour of the grounds.

When cubs are born here, on this lion farm in Vrystaat, a province of South Africa, “each employee is assigned to bottle-feed one of them,” says Christiaan. “You can buy a cub for 40,000 rand (€3,400, or $4,455).” A delighted visitor asks whether she can take a lion baby into her room at night. It can be arranged, promises the guide.

Lisa’s father, a grown specimen with a stately mane who lives in the enclosure, can be had for about €20,000. Roughly 2,000 lions are kept in captivity in Vrystaat alone, where they are bred for a practice called “canned hunting.” It’s a diversion that executives at major German companies have been known to enjoy.

The king of the animals has fallen on hard times in his own kingdom. “In all of South Africa, there are almost as many lions behind bars as in the wild,” says Fiona Miles of the Vrystaat chapter of the international animal rights group Four Paws, which has been unsuccessful in its efforts to protest the hunting of animals that are somewhat tame and are sometimes even drugged to keep them calm. “As a first step to ban canned hunting,” Miles is calling for a moratorium on the breeding of lions.

Across the entire continent, the large African predator, a symbol of strength and majesty, is threatened with decline. Outside fenced enclosures, there is hardly any room left for Panthera leo. Scientists and conservationists warn that the king of the steppes has lost much of his habitat in the last 50 years. …

WSJ OpEd defends carbon dioxide. 

Of all of the world’s chemical compounds, none has a worse reputation than carbon dioxide. Thanks to the single-minded demonization of this natural and essential atmospheric gas by advocates of government control of energy production, the conventional wisdom about carbon dioxide is that it is a dangerous pollutant. That’s simply not the case. Contrary to what some would have us believe, increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will benefit the increasing population on the planet by increasing agricultural productivity.

The cessation of observed global warming for the past decade or so has shown how exaggerated NASA’s and most other computer predictions of human-caused warming have been—and how little correlation warming has with concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide. As many scientists have pointed out, variations in global temperature correlate much better with solar activity and with complicated cycles of the oceans and atmosphere. There isn’t the slightest evidence that more carbon dioxide has caused more extreme weather.

The current levels of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere, approaching 400 parts per million, are low by the standards of geological and plant evolutionary history. Levels were 3,000 ppm, or more, until the Paleogene period (beginning about 65 million years ago). For most plants, and for the animals and humans that use them, more carbon dioxide, far from being a “pollutant” in need of reduction, would be a benefit. This is already widely recognized by operators of commercial greenhouses, who artificially increase the carbon dioxide levels to 1,000 ppm or more to improve the growth and quality of their plants. …

… We know that carbon dioxide has been a much larger fraction of the earth’s atmosphere than it is today, and the geological record shows that life flourished on land and in the oceans during those times. The incredible list of supposed horrors that increasing carbon dioxide will bring the world is pure belief disguised as science.

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Jeffery Tucker at Laissez Faire Today on how government wrecked the gas can. 

The gas gauge broke. There was no smartphone app to tell me how much was left, so I ran out. I had to call the local gas station to give me enough to get on my way. The gruff but lovable attendant arrived in his truck and started to pour gas in my car’s tank. And pour. And pour.

“Hmmm, I just hate how slow these gas cans are these days,” he grumbled. “There’s no vent on them.”

That sound of frustration in this guy’s voice was strangely familiar, the grumble that comes when something that used to work but doesn’t work anymore, for some odd reason we can’t identify.

I’m pretty alert to such problems these days. Soap doesn’t work. Toilets don’t flush. Clothes washers don’t clean. Light bulbs don’t illuminate. Refrigerators break too soon. Paint discolors. Lawnmowers have to be hacked. It’s all caused by idiotic government regulations that are wrecking our lives one consumer product at a time, all in ways we hardly notice.

It’s like the barbarian invasions that wrecked Rome, taking away the gains we’ve made in bettering our lives. It’s the bureaucrats’ way of reminding market producers and consumers who is in charge.

Surely, the gas can is protected. It’s just a can, for goodness sake. Yet he was right. This one doesn’t have a vent. Who would make a can without a vent unless it was done under duress? After all, everyone knows to vent anything that pours. Otherwise, it doesn’t pour right and is likely to spill.

It took one quick search. The whole trend began in (wait for it) California. …

ObamaBS gets derision from Charles Krauthammer.

You know you’re in trouble when you can’t even get your walk-back story straight. Stung by the worldwide derision that met President Obama’s fudging and fumbling of his chemical-weapons red line in Syria, the White House leaked to the New York Times that Obama’s initial statement had been unprepared, unscripted and therefore unserious.

The next day Jay Carney said precisely the opposite: “Red line” was intended and deliberate.

Which is it? Who knows? Perhaps Obama used the term last August to look tough, sound like a real world leader, never expecting that Syria would do something so crazy. He would have it both ways: sound decisive but never have to deliver.

Or perhaps he thought that Syria might actually use chemical weapons one day, at which point he would think of something.

So far he’s thought of nothing. Instead he’s backed himself into a corner: Be forced into a war he is firmly resolved to avoid, or lose credibility, which for a superpower on whose word relies the safety of a dozen allies is not just embarrassing but dangerous.

In his recent rambling news conference, Obama said that he needed certainty about the crossing of the red line to keep the “international community” behind him. This is absurd. The “international community” is a fiction, especially in Syria. Russia, Iran and Hezbollah are calling the shots.

Nor, he averred, could he act until he could be sure of everything down to the “chain of custody” of the sarin gas.

What is this? “CSI: Damascus”? …

Neo-Neocon posts on speechwriters in the administration who get rewarded with real jobs where they are out of their depth.

Several people have mentioned Ben Rhodes in connection with the Benghazi debacle (just Google “Ben Rhodes Benghazi” and you’ll find plenty of the speculation). It’s not at all clear how much responsibility Rhodes had for the decisions during the Benghazi attack and the spin afterward. But what is clear is that Rhodes is one of Obama’s many advisors who lack anything remotely connected with expertise, except in the art of politics and speechwriting. Despite this, for Obama Rhodes doesn’t just write about foreign policy, he helps to make it.

Rhodes’ resume is singularly unimpressive, except after he was tapped by Obama to write for him and then to somehow be a foreign policy “expert.” Rhodes is hardly unique in the Obama administration for having this sort of background. The president seems to prefer to have people around him with even less experience and expertise than he has, which is saying something. …

Scott Johnson of Power Line quotes David Gelernter on Benghazi revelations.

… It is the Democratic Party that’s on trial today; and to a lesser extent, America’s mainstream media.  For Democrats (and especially Democratic senators) it is put-up-or-shut-up time: are they Democrats or Americans first?  Obviously their first instinct was to defend the Democratic administration.  Republicans would have done the same.  But starting with the Hayes story on the Rice propaganda points (and the neo-Soviet process that turned them from truth to lies), and then the Issa hearing Wednesday (and a recent ABC news piece focusing again on the phonied-up talking points), no honest observer can fail to suspect this administration of doing unspeakable things.  It is Congress’s duty to find out the truth.

How would Republicans act if a GOP administration were under this sort of cloud?  We know exactly how.  It was the radically partisan Edward Kennedy who proposed that a senate select committee investigate Watergate—but in February 1973, the Senate voted unanimously to create that committee.  Republican Senator Howard Baker was vice chairman, and asked the key question: ”What did the president know and when did he know it?”  Which Democratic senator will ask that question today, now that the issue isn’t breaking-and-entering but lying about four murders, including the murder of an American ambassador? …

Jennifer Rubin says this is pointing toward Hillary.

… To begin with, the very compelling witness Gregory Hicks explained to lawmakers that the YouTube video lampooning Muhammad was a non-event; rather, he understood the assault on the Benghazi consulate to be a terrorist attack and briefed Clinton that night. There was no confusion about the attack in that sense. The “spontaneous demonstration” story line did not come from people on the ground or from the intelligence community (who knew from the get-go that al-Qaeda linked operatives were involved). It came from senior administration officials.

Hicks, the State Department’s deputy chief of mission in Libya, asked Beth Jones, the acting assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs, why U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice was pinning the incident on the YouTube video. He said he was told not to ask questions.

Then there is the matter of the rescue forces. Among others, then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta testified in February that no forces were called and none were told to stand down. The testimony yesterday tells us that isn’t true. (That may have been a correct military judgment, but we’ll never know.) The forces from Aviano Air Base in Italy and a second team of special forces in Tripoli were told to stand down, according to Hicks. He said the military personnel there were “furious. [A military officer told Hicks,] ‘This is the first time in my career that a diplomat has more balls than somebody in the military.’ ” Mark Thompson, the State Department’s deputy coordinator for counterterrorism, also testified, “I was told this was not the right time to deploy the team.”

In the wake of the attack, Hicks testified, he was told not to speak with a congressional delegation visiting Libya. After he participated in a classified briefing without a State Department lawyer present, Cheryl Mills, Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff and sometimes called Hillary’s alter ego at State, contacted Gregory Hicks and told him she was “very upset.” …

This has become so serious for the administration, they are losing The New Yorker. 

It’s a cliché, of course, but it really is true: in Washington, every scandal has a crime and a coverup. The ongoing debate about the attack on the United States facility in Benghazi where four Americans were killed, and the Obama Administration’s response to it, is no exception. For a long time, it seemed like the idea of a coverup was just a Republican obsession. But now there is something to it.

On Friday, ABC News’s Jonathan Karl revealed the details of the editing process for the C.I.A.’s talking points about the attack, including the edits themselves and some of the reasons a State Department spokeswoman gave for requesting those edits. It’s striking to see the twelve different iterations that the talking points went through before they were released to Congress and to United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice, who used them in Sunday show appearances that became a central focus of Republicans’ criticism of the Administration’s public response to the attacks. Over the course of about twenty-four hours, the remarks evolved from something specific and fairly detailed into a bland, vague mush.

From the very beginning of the editing process, the talking points contained the erroneous assertion that the attack was “spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and evolved.” That’s an important fact, because the right has always criticized the Administration based on the suggestion that the C.I.A. and the State Department, contrary to what they said, knew that the attack was not spontaneous and not an outgrowth of a demonstration. But everything else about the changes that were made is problematic. …

According to Mary Kissel of WSJ’s Political Diary, the Thomas Perez LaborSec nomination might be in trouble.

Are the political winds starting to shift against labor secretary nominee Thomas Perez? Senate Republicans delayed a vote on his nomination Wednesday on a procedural technicality. The hearing is now expected to be held next week. But the more surprising news is that Rep. Elijah Cummings, a Maryland Democrat, called Wednesday for Mr. Perez to comply with a subpoena of his personal email account.

Until now, Democrats have denounced the House investigation into a legal quid pro quo that Mr. Perez negotiated with the City of St. Paul, Minn., last year, in his role as the Justice Department’s civil-rights chief. …

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Debra Saunders writes on “extortion in the skies.”

This week, the Obama administration furloughed 14,500 air traffic controllers — staffers will lose two days of work per month — ostensibly to comply with the 2011 Budget Control Act’s $85 billion in sequester cuts this year. The Federal Aviation Administration’s share is $637 million. So expect delays at the airport. That’s the idea, but it didn’t have to be.

The Obama administration has chosen to hold airline travel hostage in its never-ending effort to extort further tax increases from the GOP.

The administration argues that its hands are tied. By law, the FAA must cut spending across the board. Many lawmakers and industry leaders disagree, as air traffic controllers are “essential employees.” But to make absolutely sure, GOP senators have proposed legislation to allow the administration to prioritize cuts. For weeks, the White House has wanted no part of that. …

Jennifer Rubin has “10 reasons why it is a no good rotten second term.”

It’s been a rough year so far for the president, and it could get worse:

1. President Obama wound up ratifying all but a sliver of the Bush tax cuts.

2. He exaggerated, got caught exaggerating and lost on the sequestration implementation.

3. Now he’s backing down from the latest punish-the-public gambit. (The Associated Press reports: “Under pressure, the White House signaled Wednesday it might accept legislation eliminating Federal Aviation Administration furloughs blamed for lengthy flight delays for airline passengers, while leaving the rest of $85 billion in across-the-board spending cuts in place. The disclosure came as sentiment grew among Senate Democrats as well as Republicans for legislation to ease the impact of the cuts on the FAA, possibly by loosening restrictions on agency spending.”)

4. He lost on gun control. …

Jim Geraghty writes in National Review about the high costs of the education of a president.

… Time and again, we hear anecdotes of the president angered, befuddled, and frustrated that the policies implemented in the beginning of his presidency, with a compliant Congress, haven’t generated the results he promised. But very little seems to change, other than a bit of fuming at aides behind closed doors.

President Obama was surprised to learn, in discussions with economic adviser Christina Romer, that large-scale investment in infrastructure and clean-energy projects wouldn’t create enormous numbers of new jobs.

In a December 2010 meeting with economic advisors, he “boiled over” with frustration that his housing policies hadn’t helped struggling homeowners like he promised.

When federal program after federal program fails to generate the desired result, it’s not crazy talk to become at least a little skeptical of the latest pledges and promises and idealistic visions.

But Democrats often speak as if the Right’s skepticism of the government’s problem-solving ability is driven by some sort of abstract ideological theory. It’s not. It’s usually built upon hard experiences. Human behavior isn’t predictable, particularly their interactions with the government. Unintended consequences pile up like a car crash.

That pattern is depressingly predictable: Someone in government comes up with some laudable goal, and announces some new program. After the press conference, when the cameras and microphones are away, implementing the idea proves more complicated than the press-conference announcement made it seem. Deadlines get missed. Costs turn out much higher than expected.  Bureaucratic inertia begins to exert the gravitational pull of a black hole.

Perhaps it is the nature of the modern presidency that the Oval Office’s occupant glides from photo-op to photo-op, and never spend too much time getting entangled in the messy work of actually making his policies live up to his promises. Certainly that’s the pattern for this president; even in this non-campaign year, the schedule is heavy with campaign-style rallies on gun-control initiatives here, a DCCC fundraiser there, then off to a tour of a national laboratory. He flits from issue to issue; to judge from his remarks and his schedule, the health-care issue is resolved and our system’s problems are fixed. Maybe White House press secretary Jay Carney will get a question about the exchanges or the electronic records system, which he’ll defuse with another defensive, meandering word salad.

Implementing Obamacare? That’s for somebody else to worry about.

Andrew Malcolm kicks off a section on the rehabilitation of George W.

Fifty-one months of an Obama presidency seem like an eternity of speeches, photo ops, fundraisers, soaring debt, stagnant job growth, blame games and did we mention speeches?

In historical context, however, it’s the snap of a finger. Which makes it somewhat surprising that already Americans are quietly rehabilitating President George W. Bush’s image in their own minds. This despite Bush’s virtual disappearance from the political scene since Jan. 20, 2009, save for a brief promotion tour for his book, “Decision Points.”

You’re about to hear a whole lot more about Bush, at least briefly, with Thursday’s dedication of his presidential library at Laura Bush’s alma mater, Southern Methodist University in Dallas. By custom, all former presidents will attend.

President Obama will also be there, although he’s blamed Republican Bush for just about everything that’s gone wrong during these long 1,554 days, except Obama’s miserable NCAA tournament brackets. First, of course, to make the trip worthwhile, Democrat Obama will do another political fundraiser in Dallas.

Remember those iconic billboards that went up during the great ObamaCare legislative con? A smiling Bush waving with the caption, “Miss Me Yet?” Well, apparently more people do. ABC News and the Washington Post came out early this morning with a new poll timed to the library dedication. …

Peter Wehner has more on W.

… In fact, over the last 40 years and eight presidencies, only two presidents have kept spending below 20 percent of GDP in even a single year: George W. Bush did it in six of his eight fiscal years; Bill Clinton in four. Barack Obama has averaged 24 percent of GDP spending so far; and even his optimistic budget projections don’t have the U.S. getting close to 20 percent again. Ever. As another reference point: during fiscal years 1981-88, the Reagan years, federal spending averaged over 22 percent of GDP. Just in case anyone is interested in it.

But I wanted to focus on one other comment that former Prime Minister Blair made, which is that Bush continues to believe that the world is safer without Saddam Hussein in power and added: “When you see what is happening in Syria today, the sense of that argument is evident. . . . What it does is just make clear that these decisions are very difficult. If you intervene, it can be very tough. If you don’t intervene, it can also be very tough.”

There is in Blair’s comments both wisdom and nuance, which is often lacking in those who comment on presidents and public officials and who themselves have never been in positions of influence in government. Having been on both sides of things, let me just say it’s easier to tweet about policy than it is to implement policy; and it’s more effortless to comment on unfolding events from the comfort of a television studio or from behind a microphone than to make decisions in the Oval Office.

George W. Bush, over the course of eight eventful years, made literally thousands of decisions. Under enormous pressure and facing tremendous challenges–during his years as president, Bush faced the worst attack on the American homeland in our history, two wars, the worst natural disaster in our history, and a financial collapse unlike any since the Great Depression–he got the vast majority of them right. And every day he was president–even when he got decisions wrong–he dignified the office. …

Karl Rove on his old boss.

… Mr. Bush ran in 2000 promising to restore honor and dignity to the presidency. He took seriously the example of John Adams, whose words to his wife Abigail are etched over the fireplace in the State Dining Room in the White House: “I pray heaven to bestow the best of blessing on this house, and on all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof!”

In his biography of Harry Truman, David McCullough wrote that CBS newscaster Eric Sevareid “would say nearly forty years later of Truman, ‘I am not sure he was right about the atomic bomb, or even Korea. But remembering him reminds people what a man in that office ought to be like. It’s character, just character. He stands like a rock in memory now.’ “

Character is what is being celebrated in Dallas this week.

Abby Thernstrom reviews a book on Manhattan’s Little Red School and affiliated high school – Elizabeth Irwin.

… Author Dina Hampton does not deny the schools’ dedication to political indoctrination. The students, she writes, “grew up in a counter-culture hothouse steeped in progressive pedagogy and radical politics.” At assemblies, everyone would stand to sing the “Negro National Anthem” (“Lift Every Voice and Sing”) instead of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” Social studies, taught by “a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist,” formed the core of the curriculum, “with emphasis placed on the exploration of oppressed cultures.” The school took students on field trips searching for the downtrodden proletariat (my description, not Hampton’s). They stayed away from ordinary workers—most of whom would have been violently anti-Communist, of course—but met instead with those on strike or laboring as migrant workers; they toured Pennsylvania steel mills and coal mines. 

I was an Elisabeth Irwin student in the early 1950s, and I remember clearly the curriculum and those politically heavy-handed trips. But neither made the intended impression on me, for reasons I don’t entirely know—except that I was always terrible at listening to my elders.

Hampton provides little information about the school itself. But Little Red’s subtitle, Three Passionate Lives Through the Sixties and Beyond, offers those lives as her subject. They are Tom Hurwitz, Angela Davis, and Elliott Abrams. Hurwitz and Davis were both in the class of 1961; Abrams graduated in 1965. Hampton views all three as “radicals,” a term of endearment, but only when speaking of those on the left. Amazingly, she equates the radicalism of the Black Panthers, the Weathermen, and the CPUSA with the views of Jeane Kirkpatrick, Henry Jackson, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Nathan Glazer, and Irving Kristol—members of what she calls the “radical neoconservative movement that came to power with the Reagan administration.” 

Elliott Abrams was clearly included to make the story ostensibly fair and balanced; but Davis and Hurwitz are heroes, while Abrams is conservative and, thus, a villain. …

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Andrew Malcolm calls our attention to the funeral of Margaret Thatcher. Follow his link and you can hear the sermon by Rev. Richard Chartres.

Britain staged the funeral of former British Prime Minister and staunch American ally Margaret Thatcher the other day. It contained almost all the pomp and circumstance you’d expect from the Brits.

They skipped the RAF flyover at the request of Thatcher, a conservative thrift even in death. We wrote here about that impressive day, including its regrettably classless dismissal by America’s highest-ranking South Sider. It’s as if Obama already knows and resents how much more she accomplished as a leader from the front than he can ever dream of from his chosen position behind.

You can watch the entire Thatcher funeral video here. And we have another one below too. As the baroness’ remains were being cremated Wednesday, the Marathon Finish Line bombings in Boston were completely distracting this country.

Now that the threat of these lethal culprits is over, we wanted to devote a few quiet minutes on this Sunday to ruminate over something that struck us about the Thatcher funeral. British pageantry aside, we were quite taken by the language in general of the service–the music, hymns and gospel–in the exquisite 17th-century St. Paul’s Cathedral of Sir Christopher Wren.

And more specifically by the sermon of Bishop Richard Chartres. He has a richly-deserved reputation for elocution, diction and simplicity/clarity of presentation. …

Nile Gardiner has more on Lady Thatcher’s funeral.

I have just returned to Washington from London where I attended the funeral of Lady Thatcher. Many Telegraph writers have described the deeply moving and truly beautiful service held at St. Paul’s Cathedral. It was a fitting farewell to a great leader who dedicated her life to serving her country and fighting for freedom, both at home and abroad.

On a personal note, it was a final farewell to my former boss and mentor, for whom I worked in her private office in Belgravia. I was with Lady Thatcher for some of the final years of her public life, and owe her an immense debt of gratitude. She was extraordinarily kind and compassionate towards her staff, and looked after those who worked for her as though they were part of her own family. She was a leader of great principle and integrity, selfless in her dedication to the British people, and remarkably humble for someone who had achieved so much in her life. She will be missed beyond words by those who knew her, and her death leaves a huge void in Britain and on the world stage. …

James Pethokoukis posts a chart everyone should understand.

It’s sad that the case for economic growth needs to be made. But it seems that too many people have lost sight of why growth is good as they fret about issues such as the environment and inequality (both of which growth actually helps).

In response, AEI’s Values & Capitalism series has published a little book, Economic Growth: Unleashing the Potential of Human Flourishing, that explores the benefits of growth and addresses common concerns regarding how growth impacts the poor, the environment, and culture.

Think about it: In real terms, the average income of Americans over the past two centuries went from $2,000 per person to $50,000. Here is the book’s formula for growth: …

Matthew Continetti on the president’s worst week yet.

… The combination of policy success and coddling by the media was sure to affect the president’s judgment. His ego never has been what one could call petite. “Phil, what’s my name,” the president is said to have asked his legislative director one day in the first term. “President Obama,” the aide replied. And Obama said, “Of course I’m feeling lucky.”

Such words are usually delivered at the moment in the play when Nemesis appears onstage, ready to correct the hubris of a tragic hero. And though Obama is neither a tragic figure nor a heroic one, he definitely suffers from a case of misplaced confidence. He clearly assumed that the power of his oratory, his charisma, and national shock at the horror in Newtown, Conn., would allow him to sign the first significant gun legislation in a quarter of a century. He was wrong.

The president entered the gunfight with three priorities: reinstating the assault weapons ban, banning high-capacity magazines,and universal background checks. By the beginning of this week it was clear that the assault weapons and high-capacity magazine amendments could not pass the Senate and that the background check language would have to be riddled with loopholes and concessions to have any chance. The amendment cobbled together by Sens. Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) and Pat Toomey (R., Pa.) was a misshapen shadow of the original proposal.The president hoped it would earn the requisite 60 votes. It did not.

Hence the genuine frustration and anger the president displayed Wednesday evening during his statement on the failure of his gun initiatives. Obama’s words may have been a futile protest directed at the Senate and the NRA, but they also carried the weight of shock at his own inability to convince four Democratic senators to support Manchin-Toomey. Once more, in Obama’s view, “politics” had conspired to frustrate his will. But even he would have to acknowledge that this happened only because he chose to fight over gun control.

The public did not want a fight. It has consistently prioritized the economy and the deficit over gun control. Nor had Obama campaigned on gun regulations in 2012. If there was any substance to his reelection, it was the promise he made in the Des Moines Register interview to push for amnesty for illegal immigrants. But the president went ahead anyway, deluded by the polls and by the misperception that the politics of the gun issue had changed.

And so any objective spectator would have to ask: What exactly has the president accomplished in the first 100 days of his second term? And here the only answer can be that Obama won Chuck Hagel confirmation as secretary of defense despite only four Republican senators voting for him and having Hagel recant all of the positions that endeared him to the antiwar left and right. Some accomplishment. …

Boston Herald tells us the Tsarnaev’s were funded by Massachusetts welfare. We live in a country that not only cannot defend itself, but goes one step further and finances those who attack it. 

Marathon bombings mastermind Tamerlan Tsarnaev was living on taxpayer-funded state welfare benefits even as he was delving deep into the world of radical anti-American Islamism, the Herald has learned.

State officials confirmed last night that Tsarnaev, slain in a raging gun battle with police last Friday, was receiving benefits along with his wife, Katherine Russell Tsarnaev, and their 3-year-old daughter. The state’s Executive Office of Health and Human Services said those benefits ended in 2012 when the couple stopped meeting income eligibility limits. Russell Tsarnaev’s attorney has claimed Katherine — who had converted to Islam — was working up to 80 hours a week as a home health aide while Tsarnaev stayed at home.

In addition, both of Tsarnaev’s parents received benefits, and accused brother bombers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan were recipients through their parents when they were younger, according to the state.

The news raises questions over whether Tsarnaev financed his radicalization on taxpayer money.

And ABC News notes Mom Tsarnaev has outstanding warrants for shoplifting $1,600 of clothing from Lord and Taylor. By all means, lets make sure we ease up on immigration. It is working so well for us.  However this helps us enjoy the irony that it was security video recorded by the Lord & Taylor store that provided the information that led to the capture of the bombers.  

The mother of accused Boston Marathon bombers has continued to defend her two sons from her home in Dagestan, Russia, but if she attempts to return to the United States to bury her older son, or care for the boy that remains hospitalized, she could face arrest on an outstanding warrant for shoplifting.

The clerk of the Natick District Court confirmed to ABC News that Zubeidat Tsarnaev, failed to appear at a court hearing on October 25, 2012 to resolve charges that she stole $1,600 worth of garments from a nearby Lord & Taylor department store. …

The NY Times reports on Denmark’s struggle to rein in welfare costs.

It began as a stunt intended to prove that hardship and poverty still existed in this small, wealthy country, but it backfired badly. Visit a single mother of two on welfare, a liberal member of Parliament goaded a skeptical political opponent, see for yourself how hard it is.

It turned out, however, that life on welfare was not so hard. The 36-year-old single mother, given the pseudonym “Carina” in the news media, had more money to spend than many of the country’s full-time workers. All told, she was getting about $2,700 a month, and she had been on welfare since she was 16.

In past years, Danes might have shrugged off the case, finding Carina more pitiable than anything else. But even before her story was in the headlines 16 months ago, they were deeply engaged in a debate about whether their beloved welfare state, perhaps Europe’s most generous, had become too rich, undermining the country’s work ethic. Carina helped tip the scales.

With little fuss or political protest — or notice abroad — Denmark has been at work overhauling entitlements, trying to prod Danes into working more or longer or both. While much of southern Europe has been racked by strikes and protests as its creditors force austerity measures, Denmark still has a coveted AAA bond rating.

But Denmark’s long-term outlook is troubling. The population is aging, and in many regions of the country people without jobs now outnumber those with them.

Some of that is a result of a depressed economy. But many experts say a more basic problem is the proportion of Danes who are not participating in the work force at all — be they dawdling university students, young pensioners or welfare recipients like Carina who lean on hefty government support. …

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Mark Steyn on last week’s events.

This has been a strange and deadly week in America. On Monday, two bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon, the first successful terrorist attack on a civilian target on American soil since 9/11. And yet a mere two days later,

Boston’s death toll was surpassed by a freak fertilizer accident at a small town in Texas.

In America, all atrocities are not equal: Minutes after the Senate declined to support so-called gun control in the wake of the Newtown massacre, the president rushed ill-advisedly on air to give a whiny, petulant performance predicated on the proposition that one man’s mass infanticide should call into question the constitutional right to bear arms. Simultaneously, the media remain terrified that another man’s mass infanticide might lead you gullible rubes to question the constitutional right to abortion, …

… The politicization of mass murder found its perfect expression in one of those near-parodic pieces to which the more tortured self-loathing dweebs of the fin de civilisation West are prone. As the headline in Salon put it, “Let’s Hope the BostonMarathon Bomber Is a White American.” David Sirota is himself a white American, but he finds it less discomforting to his Princess Fluffy Bunny worldview to see his compatriots as knuckle-dragging nutjobs rather than confront all the apparent real-world contradictions of the diversity quilt. He had a lot of support for his general predisposition. “The thinking, as we have been reporting, is that this is a domestic extremist attack,” declared Dina Temple-Raston, NPR’s “counterterrorism correspondent.” “Officials are leaning that way largely because of the timing of the attack. April is a big month for anti-government and right-wing individuals. There’s the Columbine anniversary, there’s Hitler’s birthday, there’s the Oklahoma City bombing, the assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco.” Miss Temple-Raston was born in my mother’s homeland of Belgium, where, alas, there were more than a few fellows willing to wish the Führer happy birthday back when he was still around to thank you for it. But it was news to me it was such a red-letter day in the BayState. Who knew? At NPR, “counterterrorism” seems to mean countering any suggestion that this might be terrorism from you know, the usual suspects. …

Ed Morrissey reports on the shocking fact that neither of the Tsarnaev brothers had a gun permit.

Take some comfort in the fact that this will almost certainly be the last dumb meme in the gun-rights debate for a long time to come.  After the Tsarnaev brothers allegedly planted bombs at the Boston Marathon, shot a cop to death in an ambush, and then wounded several more in a gun battle, the fact that the two didn’t have Massachusetts handgun permits has apparently made national news:

“The two brothers suspected in the Boston Marathon bombings, who police say engaged in a gun battle with officers early Friday after a frenzied manhunt, were not licensed to own guns in the towns where they lived, authorities said on Sunday.

In the confrontation with police on the streets of a Boston suburb, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were armed with handguns, at least one rifle and several explosive devices, authorities say.

But neither brother appears to have been legally entitled to own or carry firearms where they lived, a fact that may add to the national debate over current gun laws. Last week, the U.S. Senate rejected a bill to expand background checks on gun purchases, legislation that opponents argued would do nothing to stop criminals from buying guns illegally.”

And which last week proved. Criminals rarely go to the trouble of applying for gun permits because (a) previous convictions would keep them from getting one anyway, and/or (b) they don’t want to establish paper trails to themselves for police to find.  Criminals, especially those who want to commit high-profile crimes, usually steal their weapons (or buy them illegally, as Reuters notes) and discard them after the crimes so that investigators can’t tie them to the weapons. …

Jay Nordlinger posts that David Axelrod believes the president thinks the bombing was related to Tax Day.

David Axelrod said something interesting after the terror in Boston. (He is the president’s chief political strategist.) He said the president was connecting the bombing to Tax Day.

Friday night, I was sitting in a concert hall. The critic sitting behind me was saying to his friend, “I assumed this was right-wing domestic terror. It happened on Tax Day.”

The other week, a U.S. Army instructor issued a list of threats — a list headed “Religious Extremism.” At the top of the list was “Evangelical Christianity (U.S./Christian).”

Two years ago, Mayor Bloomberg in New York guessed that the Times Square terrorist was opposed to Obamacare.

I thought of something last week (and if you heard me say it on my podcast with Mona Charen, forgive the repetition). When Kennedy was assassinated, the speculation was that this was right-wingers. JohnTower’s family had to be evacuated. He was leading the Goldwater operation, I believe, and there were death threats against his family.

Then it transpired that the killer was a Communist. And a prominent liberal said, “Now our grief can be pure.”

In my view, American education — the weight of the culture — has done something sick to many American minds. If the country cannot recognize the threats against it — specifically Muslim extremism — it probably can’t defend itself. …

Roger Simon posts on the Salon expectations about the bombers. 

When you write about titanic events in progress, you risk appearing a fool. Nevertheless I have some strong feelings this morning with Dzhokar Tsarnaev still at large that I cannot resist spelling out.

Over the last few days I have wanted to write about an article published by David Sirota on Salon, which was commented on admirably by my colleagues Roger Kimball and Richard Fernandez. Sirota wrote to express his hope that the Boston Bombers would be white Americans, because otherwise our putative race-hatred of Muslims or people of color of any sort would be enhanced. It’s all about “white skin privilege,” doncha know?

Today Sirota seems like an imbecile (well, he did before), but I would venture to say he doesn’t know why. So I will spell it out for him:  the War on Terror (euphemism alert) is not about skin color. It is about ideology, Islamic ideology.

The Tsarnaevs are white people in the purest sense. They are Caucasians from the Caucasus, of all things, but they believe in Allah — do or die, apparently.

Too young for the civil rights movement, Sirota is an adherent of an ultra-bourgeois nostalgia for racism that hides under the ludicrous rubric “progressive.” It’s laughable, but it’s also sad and dangerous. …

… The Islamic people of the world need a reformation in the most extraordinary way. Ignoring that, as do the Sirotas of our culture, will not help it happen.

Interesting Chechen background by Stephen Green at VodkaPundit.

Starting back in the early ’60s, Colin McEvedy wrote a remarkable series of historical atlases for Penguin Books. Each covered a particular era and a particular area, usually Europe. And each map was exactly alike — except the borders. And every two-page spread was set up the same way: a map on the right-hand page, and explanatory text on the left. McEvedy’s writing style was that of an avuncular Oxford dean: friendly, warm, and knowing.

Later revisions of his work have more maps, but McEvedy’s words — those wonderful words! — had been tramped down by the boot of political correctness. But used copies of the original editions aren’t too hard to find. I highly recommend them, and still read the whole series every few years.

All of this comes to mind because of the craziness in Boston today, straight outta Caucasus.

To understand why, here’s one of McEvedy’s maps from The Penguin Atlas of Recent History, with “recent history” in his estimation being everything in Europe since Napoleon:

Look closely at the right hand side of the map in Tsarist Russia. There, in the northern Caucasus in the Krasnodar-Maykop region, you’ll see a bit of “Russian” territory indicated by a dotted line. If you can’t read it at this scale, it’s labeled “Unsubdued Circassians.” The territory is within the Russia Empire, but the Tsar’s writ did not run there. “Unsubdued” was how the Russians found the area when they took it from the Turks in the 1820s. And that’s how it stayed until the Soviets really clamped the lid down a century later.

It’s no coincidence that as the Soviet Union began to fall apart in the mid-to-late ’80s, the first violence to erupt was in the Caucasus. It’s a crazy patchwork of ethnicities and religions, everybody with legitimate grievances against everybody else.

We need two more maps to really see it. …

Andrew Malcolm has late night humor.

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Before items about “public service” miscreants, how about some good news? WSJ had an article this weekend on Boeing’s 787 battery fix.

… By the end of the first week on the ground, Boeing “had 500 engineers dedicated to understanding” the complex technical issues, Mike Sinnett, the 787′s chief engineer, said last month.

Their next focus was to try to pinpoint the specific cause of internal battery short circuits, and develop a targeted engineering solution. Boeing teamed up with government investigators from the U.S. and Japan, but the goal remained elusive.

With both batteries from the incidents badly burned, frustrated experts acknowledged that a bevy of sophisticated tests produced inconclusive results. Mr. Sinnett and his bosses changed course again.

Boeing and its Japanese battery supplier, GS Yuasa Corp. shifted to crafting wide-ranging internal battery fixes aimed at combating a variety of potential causes. They included placing additional insulation around individual power cells within the battery, while more closely monitoring voltage fluctuations. Inspections at the factory, before batteries are assembled and shipped, also were tightened substantially.

The FAA and Mr. LaHood demanded additional safeguards, according to people familiar with the government’s deliberations. That is when Boeing engineers ratcheted up efforts to fine-tune the concept of a containment box, which they asserted amounted to a virtually foolproof solution.

The box serves several purposes: withstanding higher temperatures than the old design, and keeping dangerous chemicals from leaking. It also vents smoke outside the plane, and in the event of overheating automatically sucks oxygen from the battery. That is intended to snuff out any fire in a fraction of a second.

Boeing invested some “200,000 hours of engineering, design, analysis and testing” in the ultimate package of fixes, Ray Conner, head of Boeing’s commercial airplane unit, said last month. But even with its much-publicized battery woes, Mr. Conner called the 787 “far safer than anything that has been produced” by aircraft makers. …

Craig Pirrong says this president is no LBJ.

Obama threw a grand mal temper tantrum yesterday in the Rose Garden, lashing out at those he holds responsible for the defeat of the lame, completely symbolic, and utterly ineffectual gun legislation in the Senate.  Such a paradox.   According to Obama, the proposals are wildly popular, not to mention the epitome of “common sense.” (Note: whenever anyone asserts something is “common sense” it’s because they can’t muster a rational argument in its favor.)  Nonetheless, they went down in flames in the Senate.  And they would have had zero chance in the House.  How can that circle be squared?  According to Obama-the malign influence of the gun lobby.

In essence, Obama was admitting that he is no match for Wayne LaPierre.  How pathetic is that?

Obama can’t even get his own party completely on board, let alone Republicans.

Somewhere, probably in hell, LBJ is shaking his head in disbelief. …

Ann Althouse says the second term is not starting out well.

1. It’s been so bad that the media dropped their erstwhile foible of talking about everything that happens in terms of what it means for Obama. And here it is, the first lap of his new term, when there’s more reason than usual to talk about how things are working out for the President.

2. Obama made gun control his big issue leading into the new term. He tried so hard to deploy his speaking skills to channel the nation’s emotion after the Sandy Hook massacre, and in the end he couldn’t even wrangle all of the Democrats in the Senate, and he was reduced yesterday to surrounding himself with human vessels of tragedy and “a scowling Vice President Biden” and pronounce it “all in all…  a pretty shameful day for Washington.” …

 

… 9. What’s happening with Obamacare? That was the achievement of Obama’s first term. If there’s one thing he ought to do with this second term, it’s make sure that thing gets implemented in a way that works with some degree of smoothness, at least enough that — when people finally notice what’s been in the works for so long —  we don’t freak out entirely. But: “A senior Democratic senator who helped write President Barack Obama’s health care law stunned administration officials Wednesday, saying openly he thinks it’s headed for a ‘train wreck’ because of bumbling implementation.’”

Speaking of obamacare, John Fund caught HHS spending millions on PR in an effort to “put lipstick on the obamacare pig.”

The Department of Health and Human Services has just handed out a $3.1 million PR contract to improve the public image of Obamacare. Advertising Age reports that the firm Weber Shandwick will help “roll out a campaign to convince skeptical — or simply confused — Americans the Affordable Care Act is good for them and convince them to enroll in a health plan.”

Obama officials insist the ads won’t be political, but critics recall that just before the 2010 midterm election, HHS spent $3.2 million on “educational” TV ads praising Obamacare. The spots featured the late actor Andy Griffith, a favorite of seniors, who told his fellow retirees that “more good things are coming” from Medicare. But FactCheck, a nonpartisan project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, noted that the ads made no mention of the dramatic cuts to 10 million Medicare Advantage recipients, who are likely to see their privately managed care scaled back. “The words in this ad ring hollow, and the promise that ‘benefits will remain the same’ is just as fictional as the town of Mayberry was when Griffith played the local sheriff,” FactCheck concluded in July 2010.

Indeed, the facts today are that Obamacare remains as unpopular now as when it was passed in 2010, and Democrats are increasingly worried it will return to haunt them in the midterm election next year, the first to take place after the stepped-up implementation of the law. …

Karl Rove has more. 

In congressional testimony last week, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius blamed Republican governors for her department’s failure to create a “model exchange” where consumers could shop for health-insurance coverage in states that don’t set up their own exchange.

Nice try, but GOP governors aren’t the problem. Team Obama’s tendency to blame someone else for its shortcomings is tiresome. The Affordable Care Act requires HHS to operate exchanges in states that won’t operate their own. Since the act became law in March 2010, it has been abundantly clear that the agency would have to deploy a model exchange. It is Ms. Sebelius’s fault there isn’t one.

There is more to this failure. Even exchanges organized by Democratic and Republican governors may not be functioning by the health-law’s Oct. 1 deadline, because HHS has been slow with guidance and approvals.

Last month Gary Cohen, an official with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services who oversees technology for the exchanges, told members of America’s Health Insurance Plans (a trade association) that he was “pretty nervous” about implementation. He hoped enrollment is “not a third world experience.” …

Now we learn from Hot Air, a union official has called for repeal.

Labor unions largely came out swinging in favor of ObamaCare’s passage in 2010, but many have been growing increasingly wary of ObamaCare’s incoming provisions, fearing that the law’s requirements will raise the costs of health plans for unions members and make them less competitive compared to non-unionized workers. On Tuesday, one such labor union that initially backed the health care overhaul became the first union to officially revoke their support for the law. Ouch. …

Yuval Levin makes some suggestions as to how the GOP should proceed as the train wreck becomes more obvious.

As the calamity that is Obamacare unfolds upon the country, champions of genuine, market-based health-care reform will need to manage a careful balance: As Ramesh and I suggested in NR earlier this month, the conceptual and practical foundations of the law mean that it cannot be tinkered into harmlessness (let alone into a good system) but must be replaced with a different approach built on different foundations. Yet the fact that President Obama will be in office through 2016 means that no wholesale reform is likely to become law during that time. So Republicans need to find ways to highlight the law’s failures and put before the public their alternative vision and the policies that vision implies. Reforming Obamacare isn’t a workable option, but replacing it will have to begin with small steps where such steps are possible.

I think House Republicans have provided a modest but useful example of what that can look like with their bill to take money out of Obamacare’s “Prevention and Public Health Fund” (which is basically a slush fund used to pay for propaganda efforts on behalf of the law and to fill assorted implementation funding gaps created by the law’s haphazard design) and use it instead to allow more people with pre-existing conditions to make use of a high-risk pool to buy private insurance. …

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John Murtagh, a victim of Kathy Boudin’s 1960′s bombing spree, asks if the Marathon bomber will get a teaching job at Columbia.

Somewhere near Boston early Monday morning, he packed a bomb in a bag. It was by all accounts relatively crude — a pressure cooker, explosives, some wires, ball bearings and nails . . . nails which, hours later, doctors would struggle to remove from the flesh of bleeding victims.

His motive is unclear. His intent is not: It was to maximize injury, suffering, pain, trauma and, yes, death.

Perhaps Monday’s bomber will be caught, perhaps not.

Perhaps Monday’s bomber will be offered a teaching job at ColumbiaUniversity.

Forty-three years ago last month, Kathy Boudin, now a professor at Columbia but then a member of the Weather Underground, escaped an explosion at a bomb factory operated in a townhouse in Greenwich Village. The story is familiar to people of a certain age.

Three weeks earlier, Boudin’s Weathermen had firebombed a private home in Upper Manhattan with Molotov cocktails. Their target was my father, a New York state Supreme Court justice. The rest of the family, was presumably, an afterthought. I was 9 at the time, only a year older than the youngest victim in Boston.

One of Boudin’s colleagues, Cathy Wilkerson, related in her memoir that the Weathermen were disappointed with the minimal effects of the bombs at my home. They decided to use dynamite the next time and bought a large quantity along with fuses, metal pipes and, yes, nails. The group designated as its next target a dance at an Officer’s Club at Fort Dix, NJ.

Despite the misgivings of some, it is reported that Kathy Boudin urged the use of “anti-personnel bombs.” In other words, she wanted to kill people not just damage property. Before they could act, her fellows were killed in the townhouse explosion. The townhouse itself collapsed; Boudin fled. …

Peter Wehner provides a petulant president post.

In a Rose Garden statement in the aftermath of his failure to persuade the Senate to move on any of his gun control proposals, the president raged, Lear-like, against his opponents. It was a rather unpleasant mix–one part petulance and two parts anger.

In the course of his outburst, the president said this:

“I’ve heard folks say that having the families of victims lobby for this legislation was somehow misplaced.  “A prop,” somebody called them.  “Emotional blackmail,” some outlet said.  Are they serious?  Do we really think that thousands of families whose lives have been shattered by gun violence don’t have a right to weigh in on this issue?  Do we think their emotions, their loss is not relevant to this debate? So all in all, this was a pretty shameful day for Washington.” 

The unidentified “outlet” who used the phrase “emotional blackmail” was Charles Krauthammer, who on Fox News’s Special Report with Bret Baier said this about the background checks:

“The question is: Would it have had any effect on Newtown? If you’re going to make all of these emotional appeals – you’re saying you’re betraying the families — you’ve got to show how if this had been law it would’ve stopped Newtown. It would not have. It’s irrelevant. 
I wouldn’t have objected, I might’ve gone the way of McCain or Toomey on this, but it’s a kind of emotional blackmail as a way of saying, “You have to do it for the children.” Not if there’s no logic in this. And that I think is what’s wrong with the demagoguery that we heard out of the president on this issue.”

Krauthammer is once again right and the president is once again wrong. (At some point the president and his White House will discover that it’s not in their interest to get into a debate with Krauthammer. White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer can explain why.)

What Mr. Obama has been attempting to do throughout this gun control debate is to build his case based on a false premise, which is that the laws he’s proposing would have stopped the mass killing in Newtown. The families of the Newtown massacre are being used by the president in an effort to frame the issue this way: If you’re with Obama, you’re on the side of saving innocent children from mass killings–and if you’re against Obama, you have the blood of the children of Newtown on your hands. …

Jennifer Rubin has more.

Had a Republican president lashed out as petulantly as President Obama did yesterday after the defeat of the background check amendment, calling his opponents liars and stooges of special interests (“shameful” is a really harsh thing to say about the red-state Dems who jumped ship), the mainstream press would have been all over him. (Out of control! Lost his cool! Unpresidential!) But, because most of the press also was incensed at the defeat of anti-gun legislation, his performance was barely criticized.

The refusal to take on entitlement reform doesn’t earn Democrats the “coward” label from the press. “Cowardly,” for example might apply when Democratic supporters of Israel believe that Chuck Hagel is anti-Israel but vote for him anyway for fear of offending the White House. Those obvious examples of political timidity don’t earn the media’s ire because that cowardice leads to results they like. Refusing to rebuke one’s own constituents to vote for a feel-good measure for the opposition is many things (“survival instinct,” “politics as usual,” etc.), but it hardly is as despicable as the media chorus would have you believe.

It’s rich, really, that the fellow who rammed through Obamacare in the face of public opposition with a load of malarkey (Keep your insurance. Won’t add a dime to the deficit. No taxes on the middle class.) would lash out in this fashion.

For this outburst, Obama was surrounded by the Newtown parents, which was telling. He put his muscle behind background checks, which even anti-gun crusader Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) admits had nothing to do with Newtown. (To those lefties who retort “So what?” the response is, “Then stop hiding behind the Newtown parents.”) …

IBD Editors think congress reflected the people’s will in the gun control debate.

… Turns out that our republic is working the way it’s supposed to. A Gallup poll asking what’s the most important problem facing the country shows why what the president is trying to do is indeed a “heavy lift” — only 4% in both April and March cited “guns/gun control,” down from 6% in February.

The “economy in general” at 24%, “unemployment/jobs” at 18%, “dissatisfaction with government” at 16% and “federal budget deficit/federal debt” at 11% all dwarfed concerns about guns. And the problems of “health care,” three years after ObamaCare was passed, and “ethical/moral/family decline” are both more worrisome to the public than gun control. …

Toby Harnden writes on the president in thrall to the CIA killing machine.

ONE balmy evening, Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, was relaxing with his family on his father-in-law’s rooftop in the village of Zanghara, south Waziristan.

Two miles above, a Predator drone trained an infrared camera on him as he lay on his back and was joined by his wife and uncle. The images were so clear that it could be seen that the ailing Mehsud was receiving an intravenous drip.

Moments later two Hellfire missiles were launched from the Predator. Once the dust had cleared, all that was left of Mehsud was a bloody torso. Eleven others, including his wife and mother-in-law, had also died.

Mehsud’s death, in August 2009, caused barely a ripple in Washington, but it was extraordinary because he was an enemy of Pakistan, not America.

CIA lawyers had struggled to get approval to kill him but, under pressure from Pakistan, had made the case that he could be added to the “kill list” because the Pakistani Taliban sheltered al-Qaeda operatives. In the US capital some described the strike as a “goodwill kill”.

The incident is recounted in a new book, The Way of the Knife, by Mark Mazzetti. It details how the CIA has got back into the killing business over the past dozen years and how President Barack Obama fell under the spell of the spy agency.

The man who ran as a liberal, anti-war candidate has brushed away concerns about the attacks. During one meeting he responded to a request for an expansion of America’s drone fleet by saying: “The CIA gets what the CIA wants!” …

Amity Shlaes warns about the “tax grope.”

First comes Tax Day, then comes the Tax Grope.

That is the attitude of Americans toward tax authorities. Citizens have resigned themselves to the new rates, official and public, that will apply this year to long-agreed-upon definitions of taxable income. Traditional income is fair game.

The taxpayer is alert, though, to something else: future arbitrary impingement by a tax authority in an unexpected way. Sometimes the intrusion comes from an expected party, more uncomfortable and irritating than fatal. But sometimes, the intrusion shocks either by its scale or because it comes as a total surprise.

The grope image goes back to the revolutionary pamphleteer Thomas Paine, who wrote of “the Greedy Hand of government.” Back in the 1960s the business writer John Brooks sketched out the grope concept further, writing of the intruding taxing authority approaching as an unwanted suitor, with a “ghastly expression of benignity.”

The most obvious recent grope has been overseas: the garnishment of bank accounts in Cyprus. The depositors simply didn’t expect to pay for the euro’s failings from this part of their fiscal selves. Another Cyprus-related tax grab is a levy just proposed by the German government’s senior economics advisers on those who own valuable houses in countries that ask for bailouts. When, say, an Englishman bought his villa in Portugal, he probably expected to pay taxes on the vacation home, but not this extra surcharge.

Budget Portents

Portents of possible impingements on Americans are evident, too, in President Barack Obama’s budget.

Steve Hayward asks how many ways CA can be stupid.

Beating up on California these days is easier than snatching lunch money from the pocket protector of a skinny near-sighted kid.  But why should Victor Davis Hanson have all the fun?  And besides, now that I’m back in my home state after a decade away, the decay is palpable, like roads suffering from obvious “deferred maintenance” to unfinished housing tracts, etc. So what are the main problems facing California right now? 

 

If you’re the ex-Governator, it’s—wait for it now—climate change!  Ah-nold calls it California’s “silent disaster,” and it is nice of him to help us distinguish it from the very noisy and visible disaster that was his governorship.  Can’t he just stick with making saggy superhero movies?  (I mean, have you seen those surreptitious National Enquirer photos of what he looks like these days with his shirt off?  He needs more chest prosthetics these days than Riccardo Montalban in The Wrath of Khan.) …

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The Wall Street Journal divines the backstory of the selection of the Pope.

On Feb. 27, a mild, dewy morning, Alitalia Flight 681 landed at Leonardo da Vinci airport in Rome after 13 hours in the air. A balding man with gray-white wisps of thin hair stepped out of coach class. He wore thick-rimmed brown glasses, black orthopedic shoes and a dark overcoat. He had a slight limp, and his back was stiff from the long flight. His belly was a bit swollen, due to many decades of cortisone treatments to help him breathe after he had lost part of a lung as a young man. No one could see the silver pectoral cross he wore under his coat, though it was the symbol of his authority.

Back home in Buenos Aires, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was a prominent figure, the highest-ranking Catholic prelate in his country and to many a beloved figure known especially for his work in the city’s teeming slums. Here he was one of 115 cardinals converging on Vatican City for important business: the election of a new leader for the Catholic Church. …

 

… Some princes of the church believed Cardinal Bergoglio, at 76, was probably too old to become pope, especially after Benedict XVI had specifically cited his age and frailty as reasons for his resignation. “We came into this whole process thinking: The next pope has to be vigorous and therefore probably younger,” said Cardinal George. “So there you have a man who isn’t young. He’s 76 years old. The question is: Does he still have vigor?”

Two days after the dinner, however, something clicked. And it happened in the span of four minutes—the length of Cardinal Bergoglio’s speech when it was his turn to address the General Congregation. On March 7, the Argentine took out a sheet of white paper bearing notes written in tiny tight script. They were bullet-pointed.

Many cardinals had focused their speeches on specific issues, whether it was strategies for evangelization or progress reports on Vatican finances. Cardinal Bergoglio, however, wanted to talk about the elephant in the room: the long-term future of the church and its recent history of failure. From its start, Pope Benedict’s papacy had been focused on reinforcing Catholicism’s identity, particularly in Europe, its historic home. Amid a collapse of the church’s influence and following in Europe, the German pontiff had called on Catholics to hunker down and cultivate a “creative minority” whose embrace of doctrine was sound enough to resist the pull of secular trends across the continent. That message, however, had been overshadowed by the explosion of sexual-abuse allegations across Europe and rampant infighting in the Vatican ranks.

The notes on Cardinal Bergoglio’s sheet were written in his native Spanish. And he could easily have delivered the remarks in Spanish—19 of the cardinals voting in the conclave came from Spanish-speaking countries and a team of Vatican translators was on hand to provide simultaneous translations in at least four other languages.

But he spoke in Italian, the language cardinals most commonly use inside Vatican City and the native tongue of Italy’s 28 voting-age cardinals, the most of any single nation. He wanted to be understood, loud and clear. The leaders of the Catholic Church, our very selves, Cardinal Bergoglio warned, had become too focused on its inner life. The church was navel-gazing. The church was too self-referential.

“When the church is self-referential,” he said, “inadvertently, she believes she has her own light; she ceases to be the mysterium lunae and gives way to that very serious evil, spiritual worldliness.”

Roman Catholicism, he said, needed to shift its focus outward, to the world beyond Vatican City walls, to the outside. The new pope “must be a man who, from the contemplation and adoration of Jesus Christ, helps the church to go out to the existential peripheries, that helps her to be the fruitful mother, who gains life from the sweet and comforting joy of evangelizing.”

The word he used, periferia in Italian, literally translates into “the periphery” or “the edge.” But to Italian ears, periferia is also a term loaded with heavy socioeconomic connotations. It is on the periphery of Italian cities, and most European ones, that the working-class poor live, many of them immigrants. The core mission of the church wasn’t self-examination, the cardinal said. It was getting in touch with the everyday problems of a global flock, most of whom were battling poverty and the indignities of socioeconomic injustice. …

Thomas Sowell would like some facts to intrude into the gun control debate.

Amid all the heated, emotional advocacy of gun control, have you ever heard even one person present convincing hard evidence that tighter gun control laws have in fact reduced murders?

Think about all the states, communities within states, as well as foreign countries, that have either tight gun control laws or loose or non-existent gun control laws. With so many variations and so many sources of evidence available, surely there would be some compelling evidence somewhere if tighter gun control laws actually reduced the murder rate.

And if tighter gun control laws don’t actually reduce the murder rate, then why are we being stampeded toward such laws after every shooting that gets media attention?

Have the media outlets that you follow ever even mentioned that some studies have produced evidence that murder rates tend to be higher in places with tight gun control laws?

The dirty little secret is that gun control laws do not actually control guns. They disarm law-abiding citizens, making them more vulnerable to criminals, who remain armed in disregard of such laws.

In England, armed crimes skyrocketed as legal gun ownership almost vanished under increasingly severe gun control laws in the late 20th century. (See the book “Guns and Violence” by Joyce Lee Malcolm). But gun control has become one of those fact-free crusades, based on assumptions, emotions and rhetoric. …

Streetwise Professor catches John Kerry trying to be part of the gun debate.

There have been some embarrassing Secretaries of State.  Warren Christopher comes to mind.  But I am hard pressed to name one more embarrassing than John Kerry.  They say he looks French, and damned if he isn’t trying to act the part, with his current World Wide Surrender Tour and all.  He has basically begged the NoKos and the Iranians to play nice, despite threats of launching thermonuclear war, and he and Obama make me cringe with their attempts to pacify Putin over the Magnitsky List.  John “Kick Me” Kerry seems an apt sobriquet.

But he totally topped himself when he blamed dropping numbers of Japanese students in the US on . . . guns.  No.  Seriously:

“Students in other countries assessing where to study abroad are increasingly scared of coming to the United States because of gun violence, the nation’s top diplomat said Monday.

Speaking with CNN foreign affairs correspondent Jill Dougherty in Tokyo, Secretary of State John Kerry said he’d discussed the situation with officials there who said students felt unsafe in the United States.

“We had an interesting discussion about why fewer students are coming to, particularly from Japan, to study in the United States, and one of the responses I got from our officials from conversations with parents here is that they’re actually scared. They think they’re not safe in the United States and so they don’t come,” Kerry said.”

So the statement about “other countries” is based on one: Japan.  And that is based on “responses I got from our officials from conversations with parents” rather than actual, you know, data.

But note: fewer Japanese are studying abroad overall.  The drop is not confined to the US.  Because, well, there are fewer college-aged Japanese.  Go to Japan-it’s an old, old society.  And because the Japanese economy stinks. …

American Spectator with more on the problems implementing the health-care law. 

As a rule, I avoid the weekly news magazines. They are filled with bad fiction disguised as “reporting,” and if I really feel the need to read mediocre prose I can always rely on the work of America’s growing horde of creative-writing professors. Nonetheless, I recently stumbled across a post in Time’s Swampland blog titled, “Obamacare Incompetence,” and succumbed to morbid curiosity. It seems that Joe Klein, a usually reliable Democrat hack, is deeply unhappy with the slow and clumsy implementation of the “Affordable Care Act.”

Klein’s post focuses primarily on the implosion of Obamacare’s exchanges. Pointing out that the President’s apparatchiks squandered three full years during which they should have been hard at work preparing for the advent of these insurance “marketplaces,” Klein laments their failure to do so with the following piece of Solomonic wisdom: “This is a really bad sign.” Indeed it is. And Klein isn’t the only advocate of Obamacare to finally notice that this hopelessly Byzantine health care “reform” law is an implementation nightmare.

Even the Secretary of Health & Human Services (HHS) has admitted as much. But, whereas Klein correctly assigns responsibility to the President, Commissar Sebelius places the blame on evil Republicans: “It is very difficult when people live in a state where there is a daily declaration, ‘We will not participate in the law.’” Other Democrats have been more candid. Senator Jay Rockefeller, who played an important role in getting the law passed, called Obamacare “so complicated that if it isn’t done right the first time, it will just simply get worse.”

And it most emphatically isn’t getting done right the first time. …

Obama continues his ignorant animus towards Great Britain. Power Line posts on Thatcher’s funeral.

We mourn the passing of Margaret Thatcher, but President Obama is not exactly choked up. Like us, he puts her in the same category as Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan, but in Obama’s scheme of things, that’s a bad place to be. Over at NRO Charles Cooke observes:

“The news that the Obama administration will sit out Mrs. Thatcher’s funeral, sending from the current crop only the charge d’affaires from the U.S. embassy in London, is disappointing. It seems that a seminal figure in Western history will be allocated the same level of functionary that was sent to mourn Hugo Chávez.

This is peculiar in and of itself, but especially so when one considers that senior officals have been readily dispatched by the administration for funerals past. The prime minister of Ethiopia was judged sufficiently important to deserve Susan Rice’s attendance, among others. The president sent Hillary to Vaclav Havel’s farewell, and also to send off the president of Ghana. Joe Biden led the delegation to a Saudi royal funeral. And Obama personally attended Polish president Lech Kaczynski’s. While she was first lady, Hillary Clinton attended the funeral of Princess Diana in 1997. …”

More from Jason Riley of WSJ.

Eleven serving heads of state attended the ceremonial funeral in London Wednesday for former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. And despite the fact the Britain has long been America’s closest European ally, President Obama was not among them. Nor were any senior members of his administration.

Instead, the White House sent two former secretaries of state, George Schultz and James Baker. Democrats in Congress also did their part to play down the significance of Thatcher’s achievements. A Senate resolution honoring the Iron Lady passed this week only after the removal of several paragraphs that New Jersey’s Robert Menendez—the chairman Foreign Relations Committee—found objectionable.

According to the Daily Caller, one of the nixed passages read: “Baroness Margaret Thatcher in 1984 survived an assassination attempt by the Irish Republican Army in Brighton, United Kingdom, and declared that ‘all attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail.’”

Other language removed read: “Whereas Baroness Margaret Thatcher in 1982 led United Kingdom efforts to liberate the Falkland Islands after they had been illegally invaded and occupied by the Government of Argentina.”

The British have taken note of the snubs. “This is poor show, as a quick history lesson will prove,” wrote the Spectator of London, a British magazine. “US senators were slow to authorise President Reagan’s attack on the late and unlamented ‘Mad Dog’ of the Middle East [Libya's Moammar Gadhafi]. But the Gipper wasn’t worried because the Iron Lady allowed the assault to be launched from these shores. That’s friendship, honourable senators.”

And it’s a friendship that Thatcher apparently respected more than does our president and his party. She was among the 36 current and former heads of state who attended a service for Ronald Reagan after his death in 2004.

Paul Greenberg enjoyed being compared to H. L. Mencken.

A friend and critic here in Little Rock — well, definitely a critic and I hope he’s still a friend — submitted a guest column not long ago reciting my many sins. (Whose sins are few?) And we were happy to run it on the op-ed page of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, which we like to think of Arkansas’ Newspaper. It says so right on the front page. To cap off his encyclopedic review of my faults as an editor, columnist, gadfly and sorry excuse for a human being in general, our guest writer ended his philippic by comparing me to . . . H. L Mencken.

For that alone I am much indebted to my friend/critic, The Hon. Robert L. Brown, a now-retired justice of the state’s Supreme Court. Modesty should forbid, but I can’t help quoting from his climactic peroration:

“It will come as no surprise to anyone that Greenberg wants to stir the pot and sell newspapers. But in this fashion, he becomes a major purveyor of the rancor that afflicts this country, from Washington, D.C., to Little Rock. . . . In short, it is Paul Greenberg who is a major part of the problem, just as his mentor, H.L. Mencken, was when he reveled in describing Arkansas as a hillbilly backwater and did what he could to make Arkansas a laughingstock. He, too, sold newspapers.”

My first impulse on reading that comparison was to clip it out, have it framed, and hang it on my office wall next to my Mencken Award from the Baltimore Sun back in the long-ago year 1987. …

… Ever since I learned that our legislators here in Arkansas had once passed a formal resolution denouncing H.L. Mencken, my not-so-secret ambition has been to win an official, certified, duly passed and recorded resolution of censure from the legislature. Instead, I get only a denunciation from a former justice of the state Supreme Court. Ah, well, a man has to settle for what he can get in this life.

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Matthew Continetti figures out we are in the middle of the Bloomberg Presidency.

… Rather than pursue his American Jobs Act with anything approaching vigor, or authorize a no-brainer such as the Keystone XL Pipeline, or try new approaches that might conceivably attract Republican support, Obama chose the social issues, with an eye to changing control of the House in 2014. His current agenda embodies perfectly the concerns and worldview of the wealthy men and women who fund his party. Republicans are not the only ones affected by “donor-ism.” Guns and immigration are perennial favorites of the Bloomberg set—the class of liberal rich that fatuously believes it is somehow “above politics.” This isn’t the beginning of Obama’s second term. It’s the beginning of Bloomberg’s first one.

The Bloomberg style has several distinctive features. The first is a complete indifference to or dismissal of middle class concerns. In this view, it matters less that the middle class is enjoying full employment or economic independence or a modicum of social mobility or even action on issues it finds important, and more that it has access to government benefits generous enough to shut it up.

Recall that in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy Bloomberg was far more interested in seeing the Yuppie-filled New York City Marathon take place, and in linking the storm to apocalyptic climate change, than in mobilizing the combined forces of municipal and state and federal government to take care of the white working class on Staten Island and in the Rockaways. Similarly, Barack Obama has nothing new to say on the economy or deficit, but delivers speech after speech on gun regulations that would not have stopped the Sandy Hook massacre, while his allies in the Senate work to import low-wage labor on the one hand and high-end Silicon Valley labor on the other. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the nation hopes for better days.

Another hallmark of the Bloomberg style is its insufferable condescension. One need only have heard the tiniest whine of a Bloomberg speech to know what I’m talking about. The preening attitude of superiority manifests itself in a form of moral blackmail. Adversaries of the Bloomberg-Obama agenda are not simply mistaken. There is, it is implied, something wrong with them personally.

Opponents of superfluous gun regulations are viewed as accessories after the fact to the latest mass shooting. Opponents of an immigration amnesty are either racist or nativist or cruel. Skeptics of the relevance or efficacy of efforts to halt climate change are “denialists” similar to the cranks who say the Holocaust did not happen. “The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence,” wrote Oscar Wilde. That is a fair description of American political discourse in the age of Bloomberg and Obama, when the rich and liberal exploit pity, shame, and guilt to further their agenda.

What makes the Bloomberg method so insidious is its hold over the media. The vast majority of “content producers” for print and digital and television subscribe to the agenda of rich liberals because they are either part of that class, or wish to be part of it one day, or are directly employed by the companies controlled or likely to be controlled by its members, including the billionaire mayor, who spends much of his time at his $10 million Bermuda mansion.

Kim Strassel devotes a column to the slimy Terry McAuliffe and his run for VA governor. 

Turn over any green-energy rock, and wiggling underneath will be the usual creepy mix of political favoritism and taxpayer-funded handouts. Add to this the Clintons, Mississippi and a murky visa program, and you’ve got a particularly ripe political embarrassment for Terry McAuliffe.

Everyone remember The Macker? Best Friend of Bill. Chairman of Hillary’s 2008 presidential campaign. Famed money-tree shaker. Former Democratic Party chief. Failed 2009 contender for the Virginia governorship but now back as the party’s nominee for that position in this fall’s election. Oh—and in Mr. McAuliffe’s words—”a Virginia businessman” intent on “creating jobs.”

Or at least that was the image Mr. McAuliffe sought to portray in 2009, when he became chairman of a car company called GreenTech Automotive, with plans to produce golf-cart sized electric vehicles. The former DNC chief is no stranger to moneymaking, having once used a friendly union pension fund to spin a $100 investment in a Florida land deal into $2.45 million. GreenTech, however, was designed to shed the moneyman image and to reposition Mr. McAuliffe as a (clean) job creator the way Mark Warner and Bob McDonnell used their pro-business credentials to win office in Virginia.

To this end, Mr. McAuliffe got out the political Rolodex and went on the money hunt. …

More from the editors at the Examiner. 

How did Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic Party’s choice to run for governor in Virginia in 2013, get so rich? His first job out of college was with President Carter’s 1980 re-election campaign where he rose to be national finance director at the age of 22. Then, after graduating from law school, McAuliffe helped found the Federal City National Bank in 1985. Three short years later, the bank’s board elected McAuliffe chairman, making him the youngest elected chairman of a federally chartered bank in the history of the United States.

Now why would a tiny young bank elect a campaign-worker-turned-law student with no banking experience president of the operation? Maybe it was because McAuliffe immediately roped in big business from politicians like then-presidential candidate Richard Gephardt, then-House Majority Whip Tony Coelho and then-Speaker of the House Jim Wright.

By 1992, McAuliffe was inducing Democratic-friendly union pension funds into investing millions of union member dollars in his Florida real estate company. Not all those loans got repaid, however. After McAuliffe’s real estate company failed to pay one $6 million loan from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the Department of Labor sued. It claimed the pension trustees improperly invested with McAuliffe since they should have known the loan would never be repaid. In 2001, those trustees were forced to pay the union $4.95 million in restitution. McAuliffe got off scot-free. …

The Atlantic has an interesting piece on the job search problems of the “long-term unemployed.” The article needs better focus and a good editor, but the methodology of the research is good and the results are discouraging.

… But just how bad is it for the long-term unemployed? Ghayad ran a follow-up field experiment to find out. In a new working paper, he sent out 4800 fictitious resumes to 600 job openings, with 3600 of them for fake unemployed people. Among those 3600, he varied how long they’d been out of work, how often they’d switched jobs, and whether they had any industry experience. Everything else was kept constant. The mocked-up resumes were all male, all had randomly-selected (and racially ambiguous) names, and all had similar education backgrounds. The question was which of them would get callbacks. 

 

It turns out long-term unemployment is much scarier than you could possibly imagine. 

 

The results are equal parts unsurprising and terrifying. Employers prefer applicants who haven’t been out of work for very long, applicants who have industry experience, and applicants who haven’t moved between jobs that much. But how long you’ve been out of work trumps those other factors. As you can see in the chart below from Ghayad’s paper, people with relevant experience (red) who had been out of work for six months or longer got called back less than people without relevant experience (blue) who’d been out of work shorter. 
Look at that again. As long as you’ve been out of work for less than six months, you can get called back even if you don’t have experience. But after you’ve been out of work for six months, it doesn’t matter what experience you have. Quite literally. …

Late night humor from Andrew Malcolm.