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The only good news coming out of Washington continues to be the Redskins. A lot of that interest is centered on their extraordinary quarterback Robert Griffin III who was drafted just this year. Sunday, WaPo had a page one profile of Griffin that shows how he, a rookie, became the undisputed leader of a team of veterans.

… Griffin, the son of two retired Army sergeants, had come into the Redskins’ organization as the equivalent of a five-star general — with a $21.1 million contract and four national television commercials before he had taken his first professional snap. But he was going to conduct himself like a private.

“My strategy was to come in and try to lead by example first,” Griffin said recently. “Being a rookie, you don’t want to come in talking right away. You can rub a lot of guys the wrong way. . . . One thing you can’t do as a leader is come out and say you’re the leader.”

Some eight months after he first walked through the doors of their practice facility, Griffin has the Redskins — a last-place team each of the previous four seasons — on the verge of the playoffs. A win over Dallas on Sunday would cement the team’s first division title in 13 years and earn the Redskins a home playoff game next weekend. Named to the NFL Pro Bowl team on Wednesday, Griffin is also a leading candidate for rookie of the year.

And there is little doubt, with all due respect to veteran linebacker London Fletcher, that the Redskins are Griffin’s team now. He wears a captain’s “C” on his chest, an extraordinary honor for a rookie, bestowed upon him at midseason. Especially on offense, but increasingly across the entire locker room, the Redskins take their cues from the 22-year-old superstar with the preternatural confidence.

“Everybody gets in line behind him and says, ‘Take us to the promised land,’ ” wide receiver Santana Moss, a 12-year veteran, said after last Sunday’s win over Philadelphia. “I know it sounds funny saying that, but he shows what it takes every day to get to where he’s trying to get by how he prepares. It shows up on the field on Sundays. There’s no question you want that guy to be a captain.”

You could argue, in fact, that Griffin’s greatest individual achievement this year isn’t the 104.1 passer rating that ranks second in the NFL, or the 752 rushing yards, which ranks first among quarterbacks, but the way in which he has altered the culture of the Redskins’ locker room. He has lifted it up with his overwhelming force of belief, rather than being dragged down by the weight of all the losing that met him when he arrived.

“His expectation of winning and playing great is a huge influence in here,” said veteran tight end Chris Cooley. “It’s been a drastic change of culture, and you could say Robert has been the biggest part of that. He’s a natural leader. When he talks, people listen — and people believe. No one said, ‘Okay, you’re the quarterback, so we’re going to listen to what you say.’ You build that trust. …

… Part of Griffin’s challenge was to break through that callousness and get teammates to rediscover the primal but dormant competitiveness inside them, a task made even more difficult by the culture of losing that had become entrenched around the Redskins. But while that culture perplexed Griffin in the beginning, according to people close to him, ultimately it was no match for the force of his personality.

“When you have a guy like that leading your team who is so excited to play — who wants to go out and do big things and take this team places it hasn’t been in years, it’s so easy to be excited with him,” long snapper Nick Sundberg said. “His attitude is extremely contagious.”

“His will to win,” said tight end Niles Paul, “is never-ending.”

The first major benchmark in Griffin’s ascension to the Redskins’ leadership throne may have been the win at New Orleans in his NFL regular season debut. It was one thing to make jaw-dropping plays in practice, or even in the preseason, and yet another thing do it in games that count — especially in a notoriously difficult place to win such as the Superdome.

“I think I earned their belief after the first preseason game, and I think I got their trust after the first regular season game,” Griffin said. “Because your work and your work ethic can only speak so much, but once you go out and do it in a game and you perform in the clutch, and you win a big season-opener like we did against the Saints, that’s when you can really earn guys’ trust.” …

.. The captain’s patch is about four inches tall, a white “C” above four stars. One of the stars on Griffin’s No. 10 jersey is gold — indicating his first year as a captain — and the other three are white. In subsequent years, more stars will turn to gold, and eventually in year four, the “C” itself will be gold, as it is on the No. 59 uniform of Fletcher, the Redskins’ longest-serving captain.

The patch was sewn on Griffin’s uniform by a tailor in Falls Church whom the Redskins use as a contractor, and was unseen by the quarterback himself until he arrived at FedEx Field on Nov. 18, the day of the Eagles game, and saw his jersey hanging in his locker.

“Words can’t describe what it means to be captain,” Griffin told ESPN’s Jon Gruden in a taping prior to the Redskins’ Monday Night Football appearance. “It shows me they truly believe in me.”

The extraordinary gesture — Redskins Coach Mike Shanahan, who has been in the NFL since 1984, is among those who can’t recall another example of a rookie being named a team captain — was the result of a vote by Griffin’s offensive teammates, and it came at a critical time for the Redskins, after their bye week, with the team’s record sitting at 3-6 following three straight losses. It also came two days after Griffin welcomed his teammates back from the break with a stirring speech about how there was still time to turn the season around.

By that time, Griffin had gradually taken on a more outwardly vocal position as a team leader, and his teammates had begun to view him as such. One particularly meaningful moment came after the concussion he suffered Oct. 7 against Atlanta, when he failed to get down quick enough near the sideline and was leveled by an oncoming linebacker. The next day, at RedskinsPark, Griffin apologized to his teammates for being so careless, and vowed not to let it happen again — a gesture that left some of them shaking their heads.

“He’s six or seven years ahead of what I’ve seen from anyone in our locker room, in terms of his status in the locker room, his ability to control a football team, his leadership,” said Cooley. “If you forget for a second that he’s a rookie, it doesn’t mean anything to you. You’re like, ‘Yeah, this guy is awesome. He’s the leader.’ But then you step back and think he’s only 22. He’s been in the NFL for six months. I mean, it blows me away.”

It is an intangible skill — the ability to possess humility and self-confidence in equal proportions — one that has tripped up countless other would-be leaders in professional sports.

“He’s got an aura about him. He just exudes confidence,” Sundberg said. “Without even saying a word, we know he’s going to go get the job done. It spreads to all of us. It’s something that’s vastly different from a year ago. His attitude, his want-to, above all else is what’s leading us.” …

The author of the above, Dave Sheinin, also wrote about Griffin back in July as the Skins were just getting into camp.

The moment required all of Robert Griffin III’s many intangible skills — his impeccable sense of timing, his penchant for the dramatic, his preternatural confidence, his heart-melting charm. He waited patiently until everyone at the dinner table seemed absorbed in conversation, then rose silently to his feet.

It was March 20 in Waco, Tex., in a private back room at the 135 Prime steakhouse, and Griffin and his family were having dinner with the top brass of the Washington Redskins: owner Daniel Snyder, Coach Mike Shanahan, offensive coordinator Kyle Shanahan and General Manager Bruce Allen.

The next day, at Baylor’s pro day, would be the first time Griffin, the Baylor quarterback and Heisman Trophy winner, would throw passes in front of NFL personnel before the April 25 draft, for which the Redskins held the No. 2 overall pick.

At first, no one at the table seemed to notice as Griffin — trying to be casual, as if he was merely too warm — stood and began to remove his green Adidas hoodie. But then the others caught a glimpse of what he was wearing underneath: a burgundy, official NFL-issue T-shirt, with a large Redskins logo on the front.

The bold statement, which Griffin later acknowledged was “premeditated,” sent the room into spasms of laughter and applause. The Redskins’ brass seemed shocked, considering the draft was still five weeks away, the 22-year-old Griffin had yet to throw for them and there was still some uncertainty over what the Indianapolis Colts would do with the No. 1 overall pick. But they seemed blown away by the gesture. His mission accomplished, Griffin flashed his now-famous, toothy smile and sat back down.

“What if you had gotten the days mixed up,” Snyder, with a smile, leaned over and asked Griffin, “and worn a Colts shirt by mistake?”

Griffin laughed, he later recalled, but he was dead serious about his message: I want to be a Redskin.

“I wanted to show them where my mind was, where my heart was,” he said later. “I knew my pro day was going to go extremely well, [but] I didn’t want to make [the Colts] want me. I wasn’t going to play that game.”

The process of making Griffin a Redskin began on March 10, when the team traded four high-round draft picks to the St. Louis Rams to move up to the No. 2 spot in the draft, and became official Wednesday morning, when he signed his name to a four-year, $21.1 million contract in an office at Redskins Park in Ashburn, a week before the opening of training camp.

But that night in Waco, some four months ago, was when Griffin became a Redskin at heart. What followed — a dazzling performance at Baylor’s pro day, the draft itself and the signing of his contract — seemed like mere formalities. …

… The first thing Griffin noticed about the playbook was how huge it was — a three-ring binder, five inches thick, stuffed nearly full with pages. White with a Redskins logo on the front, its contents were tabbed for easy flipping and divided into chapters — cadences, snap counts, protections, plays, red zone offense, two-minute offense and more.

“They wanted to throw the whole offense at me, just so I could see — these are the possibilities,” Griffin said. “They wanted to confuse me. They wanted to make things hard, to see what I could handle.”

The Redskins had drafted another quarterback, Michigan State’s Kirk Cousins, in April, a decision widely criticized by analysts on ESPN and the NFL Network, but it gave Griffin a natural study partner.

During much of May, the rookies roomed together at a suites hotel a mile and a half from RedskinsPark, where they spent most of their evenings in their living room, on opposite sides of a coffee table, poring over their playbooks and taking nightly quizzes.

The quizzes, devised by Kyle Shanahan and quarterbacks coach Matt LaFleur, were designed to reinforce material in the playbook, not unlike the tests conceived by high school math teachers.

“It was just making sure we knew the route combinations, the protections,” Griffin said. “What was paramount was that you get it in your brain — it’s stuck there, so you can pull from it. It’s stuff like, ‘What protection do you have on 24-Jet?’ Some of [the answers] don’t come to you immediately, so you look them up in the playbook and write them down, and that makes you learn it.

“They were long quizzes, play after play after play. What’s your protection on that play? What’s your ‘hot’ on this play? What’s your primary read? What do you do against this coverage, [or] against that coverage? It’s an extreme attention to detail, and I loved it.”

The quizzes weren’t graded, but each morning Shanahan and LaFleur went over them and corrected the answers Griffin and Cousins had gotten wrong, making sure the young quarterbacks knew the right answers — and why they were the right answers.

On the practice field, the first thing Griffin would do after running every play — from the simplest handoff to the most complex throw — was to confer briefly with Kyle Shanahan, who would ask Griffin what he saw: What coverage was the defense in? Where were the safeties? Did all your receivers run the right routes?

The Shanahans appeared genuinely stunned by Griffin’s aptitude. Mike Shanahan noted the lack of a single busted play or wrong formation during the entire three-day rookie camp — Griffin’s first practices under the Redskins’ scheme.

“I don’t think I’ve ever had that [happen] in any minicamps I’ve been involved in,” he said. “. . . Very few people can take as much verbiage. It’s like learning a new language. Some people are able to pick it up very quickly and [others can’t]. Robert was able to pick it up very quickly, and it showed on the field.”

In early May, when Griffin arrived at RedskinsPark for his first day of work at rookie minicamp, he made his way to the locker room to discover that he had been placed next to linebacker London Fletcher, the 37-year-old veteran who is the team’s unquestioned spiritual leader. The placement was not accidental. …

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Mark Steyn says David Gregory made a point about our many stupid laws when Gregory was making a point about a stupid law he supports.

A week ago on NBC’s “Meet The Press,” David Gregory brandished on screen a high-capacity magazine. To most media experts, a “high-capacity magazine” means an ad-stuffed double-issue of Vanity Fair with the triple-page perfume-scented pullouts. But apparently in America’s gun-nut gun culture of gun-crazed gun kooks, it’s something else entirely, and it was this latter kind that Mr. Gregory produced in order to taunt Wayne LaPierre of the NRA. As the poster child for America’s gun-crazed gun-kook gun culture, Mr. LaPierre would probably have been more scared by the host waving around a headily perfumed Vanity Fair. But that was merely NBC’s first miscalculation. It seems a high-capacity magazine is illegal in the District of Columbia, and the flagrant breach of D.C. gun laws is now under investigation by the police.

This is, declared NYU professor Jay Rosen, “the dumbest media story of 2012.” Why? Because, as CNN’s Howard Kurtz breezily put it, everybody knows David Gregory wasn’t “planning to commit any crimes.”

So what? Neither are the overwhelming majority of his fellow high-capacity-magazine-owning Americans. Yet they’re expected to know, as they drive around visiting friends and family over Christmas, the various and contradictory gun laws in different jurisdictions. “Ignorantia juris non excusat” is one of the oldest concepts in civilized society: ignorance of the law is no excuse. Back when there was a modest and proportionate number of laws, that was just about do-able. But in today’s America there are laws against everything, and any one of us at any time is unknowingly in breach of dozens of them. And, in this case, NBC was informed by the D.C. police that it would be illegal to show the thing on TV, and they went ahead and did it, anyway: You’ll never take me alive, copper! You’ll have to pry my high-capacity magazine from my cold dead fingers! When the D.C. SWAT team, the FBI and the ATF take out NBC News, and the whole building goes up in one almighty fireball, David Gregory will be the crazed loon up on the roof like Jimmy Cagney in “White Heat”: “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!” At last, some actual must-see TV on that lousy network.

But, even if we’re denied that pleasure, the “dumbest media story of 2012″ is actually rather instructive. David Gregory intended to demonstrate what he regards as the absurdity of America’s lax gun laws. Instead, he’s demonstrating the ever-greater absurdity of America’s non-lax laws. His investigation, prosecution, and a sentence of 20-to-30 years with eligibility for parole after 10 (assuming Mothers Against High-Capacity Magazines don’t object) would teach a far more useful lesson than whatever he thought he was doing by waving that clip under LaPierre’s nose. …

… This is all modern life is. Ernest Hemingway had a six-toed cat. The cat begat. (Eat your heart out, Doctor Seuss.) So descendants of his six-toed cat still live at the Hemingway home in Key West. Tourists visit the property. Thus, the Department of Agriculture is insisting that the six-toed cats are an “animal exhibit” like the tigers at the zoo, and therefore come under federal regulation requiring each to be housed in an individual compound with “elevated resting surfaces,” “electric wire,” and a night watchman. Should David Gregory be treated more leniently than a domestic cat just because when Obama tickles his tummy he licks the president’s hand and purrs contentedly?

There are two possible resolutions: Gregory can call in a favor from some Obama consigliere who’ll lean on the cops to disappear the whole thing. If he does that, he’ll be contributing to the remorseless assault on a bedrock principle of free societies – equality before the law. Laws either apply to all of us or none of us. If they apply only to some, they’re not laws but caprices – and all tyranny is capricious.

Or he can embrace the role in which fate has cast him. Sometimes a society becomes too stupid to survive. Eleven-year-old girls fined for rescuing woodpeckers, serving Marines put on the no-fly list, and fifth-generation family cats being ordered into separate compounds with “electric wire” fencing can all testify to how near that point America is. But nothing “raises awareness” like a celebrity spokesman. Step forward, David Gregory! Dare the prosecutor to go for the death penalty – and let’s make your ammo the non-shot heard round the world!

Steve Hayward of Power Line says renewable energy is still breaking wind.

The federal budget is not the only thing looking at dropping off a fiscal cliff.  One of the loose ends caught in the whole mess is the renewal of the “production tax credit” (PTC) for wind power, a supposedly “temporary” measure to help the industry get on its feet, but which, like wartime rent control, somehow becomes a permanent necessity to “save jobs” now.  The wind industry is currently lobbying Congress furiously to extend the PTC, which currently costs taxpayers $1 billion a year.

But the lobbying crusade isn’t going very well.  In fact, the head of the wind rent-seeking lobby, Denise Bode of the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), abruptly resigned recently when her most proposal to extend the PTC came with a $12 billion annual price tag.  Lisa Linowes reports over on the indispensable Master Resource blog:

“When Representative Pat Tiberi (R-OH), chairman of the House Select Revenue Measures Subcommittee asked AWEA in April to present a proposal for phasing-out the PTC, the trade group ignored the question. The idea of a phase-out fell outside the limits of their campaign messaging and thus, outside their ability to respond. Last week, the pressure for a proposal reached a peak and AWEA threw together a six-year, front-loaded extension with a price tag in the tens of billions of dollars.

The sheer ridiculousness of the proposal outraged Congressional members and may well have changed the debate. It’s NO coincidence that within 24-hours of AWEA’s poorly received proposal, Denise Bode bailed. A move that sudden suggests the industry thinks it’s better off without her and probably without AWEA’s inflexible, out-of-touch campaign.”

Even the Washington Post has come out against renewing the PTC.  Here’s my suggestion: the American Wind Energy Association should change its name to the Fatuous Attempt to Rob Taxpayers, or FART for short. …

David Zuriwak, a serious reporter, has a go at Chelsea Clinton’s journalist creds.

I know there are questions on my beat larger and more pressing than who’s worse as a TV journalist, Chelsea Clinton or Jenna Bush Hager, the presidentially-connected, pretend correspondents at NBC News. But I continue to be fascinated by a network news division putting someone as outrageously unqualified as Clinton on a prime-time newsmagazine. I watched her again last week in a softer-than-soft piece on a weight loss program started by Pastor Rick Warren at his Saddleback Church, and I can say with absolute certainty that she has not improved one lick in the last year.

 

In fact, I think she is worse than when she started this job for which NBC News President Steve Capus said “it’s as if she had been preparing her whole life.” That’s why I read with such fascination a piece at Politico this week suggesting Clinton was ready for the “next act” in her life. Here’s the nut graph: “Family friends and supporters says Chelsea Clinton, who has evolved from a frizzy-haired little girl in the White House to a self-assured public figure in her own right, is ready to play an increasingly larger role in the national debate and may emerge as a pre-2016 surrogate of sorts as her mom mulls her future plans.”

 

The piece is filled with quotes from those family friends and supporters describing Clinton as “incredibly articulate and human…charmingly personal while at the same time substantively deep.” If true, it’s amazing how none of that manages to work its way into her on-air work for NBC with such programs as Rock Center.

 

In the Warren piece, for example, …

Above the Law Blog posts about a serious program to reduce education costs. No, it is not legal education. They’re content to keep abusing their customers.

If you talk to legal educators for long enough, you might start to think that they are trying their best. You might start to think that there is no other way they can approach the training of lawyers. You might even start to think that they are more concerned with education then with bilking law students for all they’re worth.

Don’t believe it. Law schools are involved in a straight cash grab, and it turns out the we only need to look towards our nation’s medical schools to see how things look when schools are more concerned with the profession than profits.

It turns out that a very prestigious medical school is looking to trim a year off of the education — because doing so will reduce student debt and encourage young doctors to go into underserved fields….

The New York Times has a great article about a new pilot program at NYU Medical School. The plan is to reduce the number of years it takes to go through med school from four years down to three: …

Chicago has made it to 500 homicides for 2012. This from the city that gave us obama and valerie jarrett. Trib has the story,

Chicago reached “a tragic number” today, according to Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy: Its homicide total for the year hit 500, the highest annual total since 2008.

The city’s latest homicide occurred around 9 p.m. Thursday when Nathaniel T. Jackson, 40, an alleged gang member with a lengthy arrest record, was gunned down outside a store in the Austin neighborhood.

As of Thursday night, homicides were up 17 percent over last year in Chicago and shootings had increased by 11 percent, according to police statistics. Earlier this fall, Chicago already exceeded the number of homicides that occurred last year, but this is the first time the city has had 500 or more murders since the 512 in 2008. …

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Ann Althouse spotted a worthy quote from Thomas Sowell.

After watching a documentary about the tragic story of Jonestown, I was struck by the utterly unthinking way that so many people put themselves completely at the mercy of a glib and warped man, who led them to degradation and destruction. And I could not help thinking of the parallel with the way we put a glib and warped man in the White House

Here are some of Sowell’s Random Thoughts from that column.

… Some people seem to think that, if life is not fair, then the answer is to turn more of the nation’s resources over to politicians — who will, of course, then spend these resources in ways that increase the politicians’ chances of getting reelected. …

The annual outbursts of intolerance toward any display of traditional Christmas scenes, or even daring to call a Christmas tree by its name, show that today’s liberals are by no means liberal. Behind the mist of their lofty words, the totalitarian mindset shows through. …

If you don’t want to have a gun in your home or in your school, that’s your choice. But don’t be such a damn fool as to advertise to the whole world that you are in “a gun-free environment” where you are a helpless target for any homicidal fiend who is armed. Is it worth a human life to be a politically correct moral exhibitionist? …

The more I study the history of intellectuals, the more they seem like a wrecking crew, dismantling civilization bit by bit — replacing what works with what sounds good. …

Ed Morrissey reminds us of a Nicholas Kristof column that should not be forgotten. It is a column about how children are abused by America’s care brigades.

There are few columnists in the US that regularly speak to poverty and exploitation as consistently and as effectively as Nicholas Kristof. The New York Times columnist regularly travels the world, landing in places that most people would work hard to avoid, to highlight atrocities committed against the most vulnerable.  While conservatives might balk at Kristof’s conclusions and policy preferences – as I often do – there is no question about his commitment and honesty in speaking on behalf of the downtrodden.

That context is what made Kristof’s column last week all the more remarkable. Instead of traveling to Somalia or another war-torn piece of geography to find poverty and a lack of response, Kristof went to Appalachia to see what poverty looks like in the US, and how government programs respond to it.  His conclusion should make people across the political spectrum sit up and take notice:

“This is painful for a liberal to admit, but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency. Our poverty programs do rescue many people, but other times they backfire.”

Kristof finds a number of cases where well-intentioned social-service programs produce perverse incentives that work to keep people in poverty rather than lift them out.  Briefly, from a column that should be read carefully in full, those examples include a financial incentive to keep children illiterate, welfare benefits that punish marriage, and the ease in which children move from poverty programs to disability programs as adults. 

The result, as Kristof discovered to his discomfiture, is precisely the kind of institutionalized poverty and dependency that safety-net programs produce when designed or expanded poorly. From a societal point of view, it’s a form of child abuse. …

And Richard Vedder reminds us how the caring folks in the academy serve themselves.

Major university presidents, supported by their governing boards that typically they have wrapped around their fingers, behave often like Marie Antoinette (“Let them eat cake”) or Leona Helmsley (“only little people pay taxes.”) The most recent outrage is the revelation by Jack Stripling of the Chronicle of Higher Education that 25 of the 50 highest paid university presidents have their income taxes paid by the school. These presidents, who typically are left-of-center rent-seekers, constantly beg the federal government for more money. Most of them no doubt fervently support President Obama’s campaign to tax successful people more, even though they are amongst the few high-income Americans that simply do not pay taxes -no “alternative minimum tax” for them.

This is objectionable at multiple levels. First, of course, is the issue of equity. Is it right for 99.999 percent of Americans to face tax obligations, but not a privileged academic aristocracy -the top .001 percent? Within higher education, why should the janitor cleaning the president’s office pay literally infinitely more in tax than his boss? It puts the Warren Buffet and his secretary analogy to shame. …

Todd Zywicki thinks the problems at universities start with the trustees.

The gruesome sexual abuse scandal and cover-up within PennState’s football program that exploded during fall 2011 rocked the conscience of a community, spawned a raft of criminal indictments of university officials, and ended the careers of the university’s storied football coach Joe Paterno and the university’s long-serving president.

The severity of the depravity at PennState renders the incident nearly unique. But the response of the university’s leadership—to downplay and cover-up the allegations—is not.

Based on my experience serving as an independent trustee on the Dartmouth Board of Trustees and my academic study of higher education governance, I believe that the cowardly response of PennState’s leadership is consistent with how many university boards today would respond. I submit that the core principle animating the modern university is a fundamental dishonesty that subverts its core mission. Although the events at PennState are extreme, they merely magnify the smaller dishonesty and lack of integrity that characterize the modern university.

The purpose of this two-part essay is to sketch the basis for my provocative claim and explain how this situation came to be. I will also offer some tentative suggestions as to how to rectify it.

Evidence of the myriad dishonesties that illustrate the core of the modern university is manifest.  Some of the evidence is systemic and some is anecdotal evidence that illustrates deeper truths. Consider some examples. …

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Ann Coulter says we know how to stop school shootings.

… Only one public policy has ever been shown to reduce the death rate from such crimes: concealed-carry laws.

The effect of concealed-carry laws in deterring mass public shootings was even greater than the impact of such laws on the murder rate generally.

Someone planning to commit a single murder in a concealed-carry state only has to weigh the odds of one person being armed. But a criminal planning to commit murder in a public place has to worry that anyone in the entire area might have a gun.

You will notice that most multiple-victim shootings occur in “gun-free zones” — even within states that have concealed-carry laws: public schools, churches, Sikh temples, post offices, the movie theater where James Holmes committed mass murder, and the Portland, Ore., mall where a nut starting gunning down shoppers a few weeks ago.

Guns were banned in all these places. Mass killers may be crazy, but they’re not stupid.

If the deterrent effect of concealed-carry laws seems surprising to you, that’s because the media hide stories of armed citizens stopping mass shooters. At the Portland shooting, for example, no explanation was given for the amazing fact that the assailant managed to kill only two people in the mall during the busy Christmas season.

It turns out, concealed-carry-holder Nick Meli hadn’t noticed that the mall was a gun-free zone. He pointed his (otherwise legal) gun at the shooter as he paused to reload, and the next shot was the attempted mass murderer killing himself. (Meli aimed, but didn’t shoot, because there were bystanders behind the shooter.)

In a nonsense “study” going around the Internet right now, Mother Jones magazine claims to have produced its own study of all public shootings in the last 30 years and concludes: “In not a single case was the killing stopped by a civilian using a gun.” …

Instapundit show how we protect our smooth-talking idiots.

Andrew Malcolm says obama outsourced the important gun stuff to – Joe Biden? So maybe the president is in on the joke.

At Sunday’s memorial service for the 26 innocent Newtown shooting victims, President Obama told a tearful crowd:

“In the coming weeks, I will use whatever power this office holds to engage my fellow citizens–from law enforcement to mental health professionals to parents and educators–in an effort aimed at preventing more tragedies like this.”

Turns out ”whatever power this office holds” is just the ability to tell Joe “BFD” Biden to come up with some ideas by late next month.

At the top of a short mid-week news conference, as the funerals continued in Connecticut, Obama said he would move quickly soon to do something to help prevent or reduce gun violence among more than 311 million Americans. (Scroll down for C-SPAN video of the session.)

Although Obama simultaneously admitted that any real changes of significance will have little to do with government or Washington and ”must begin inside the home and inside our hearts.”

Obama made no mention of actually improving enforcement of existing gun control laws.

Nor did the Democrat president explain why in the interests of reducing gun violence, he’s claimed executive privilege to stall congressional investigators seeking access to documents and e-mails involving his administration’s notorious Fast and Furious gun-running operation. That operation supplied Mexican drug dealers with hundreds of weapons used on both sides of the border to violently kill scores of people. …

WSJ OpEd celebrates the demise of iMap from Apple.

It’s not often that maps make headlines, but they’ve been doing so with some regularity lately. Last week, tens of millions of iPhone users found that they could suddenly leave their homes again without getting either lost or cross. This was because Google finally released an app containing its own (fairly brilliant) mapping system. Google Maps had been sorely missed for several months, ever since Apple booted it in favor of the company’s own inadequate alternative—a cartographic dud blamed for everything from deleting Shakespeare’s birthplace to stranding Australian travelers in a desolate national park 43 miles away from their actual destination. As one Twitter wag declared: “I wouldn’t trade my Apple Maps for all the tea in Cuba.”

Among cartographic misfirings, the disaster of Apple Maps is rather minor compared to the history of map mistakes.

There was one potential bright spot, though: Among the many mistakes found in Apple Maps was a rather elegant solution to the continuing dispute between Japan and China over the Senkaku islands. Japan controls them; China claims them. Apple Maps, when released, simply duplicated the islands, with two sets shown side-by-side—one for Japan, one for China. Win-win. (At least until the software update.) Call it diplomacy by digital dunderheadedness.

As some may recall, it was not so long ago that we got around by using maps that folded. Occasionally, if we wanted a truly global picture of our place in the world, we would pull shoulder-dislocating atlases from shelves. The world was bigger back then. Experience and cheaper travel have rendered it small, but nothing has shrunk the world more than digital mapping. …

Even Slate is on to the sick narcissistic One. You have to wonder if the speech writers are in on this joke too. Do they get the giggles writing this stuff?

Someone needs to tell Barack Obama—it must get particularly confusing this time of year—that his own birth is not Year One, the date around which all other events are understood. His much-noted, self-referential tic was on cringe-worthy display Friday when the president gave his eulogy for the late Sen. Daniel Inouye, who served in Congress for half a century representing Obama’s birth state of Hawaii.

Inouye was a Japanese-American war hero (he lost an arm in World War II, destroying his dream of becoming a surgeon), and as a senator he served on the Watergate committee, helped rewrite our intelligence charter after scandals, and was chairman of the Senate committee that investigated the Iran-Contra affair. It’s the kind of material any eulogist could use to give a moving sense of the man and his accomplishment. But President Barack Obama’s remarks at Inouye’s funeral service were a bizarre twirl around his own personal Kodak carousel.

Obama likes to see events through the lens of his own life’s chronology. Thus we learn that Inouye was elected to the Senate when Obama was 2 years old. Now you could make this relevant by describing how Inouye worked to send federal dollars (you don’t have to call it “pork” at a funeral) to transform Hawaii’s roads and schools, for example, so that the Hawaii Obama grew up in had the kind of facilities people on the mainland had long taken for granted. But no, we simply learn that Inouye was Obama’s senator until he left the state to go to college—something apparently more momentous than anything Inouye did during his decades in office. …

Weekly Standard with more on this.

… Obama also mentioned the heroic life of Inouye. “And so we remember a man who inspired all of us with his courage, and moved us with his compassion, that inspired us with his integrity, and who taught so many of us — including a young kid growing up in Hawaii –– that America has a place for everyone,” Obama concluded.

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Der Spiegel writes about drone pilots. Not withstanding the disapproval from the Germans, you will learn a lot about drone operations.

For more than five years, Brandon Bryant worked in an oblong, windowless container about the size of a trailer, where the air-conditioning was kept at 17 degrees Celsius (63 degrees Fahrenheit) and, for security reasons, the door couldn’t be opened. Bryant and his coworkers sat in front of 14 computer monitors and four keyboards. When Bryant pressed a button in New Mexico, someone died on the other side of the world.

The container is filled with the humming of computers. It’s the brain of a drone, known as a cockpit in Air Force parlance. But the pilots in the container aren’t flying through the air. They’re just sitting at the controls.

Bryant was one of them, and he remembers one incident very clearly when a Predator drone was circling in a figure-eight pattern in the sky above Afghanistan, more than 10,000 kilometers (6,250 miles) away. There was a flat-roofed house made of mud, with a shed used to hold goats in the crosshairs, as Bryant recalls. When he received the order to fire, he pressed a button with his left hand and marked the roof with a laser. The pilot sitting next to him pressed the trigger on a joystick, causing the drone to launch a Hellfire missile. There were 16 seconds left until impact.

“These moments are like in slow motion,” he says today. Images taken with an infrared camera attached to the drone appeared on his monitor, transmitted by satellite, with a two-to-five-second time delay.

With seven seconds left to go, there was no one to be seen on the ground. Bryant could still have diverted the missile at that point. Then it was down to three seconds. Bryant felt as if he had to count each individual pixel on the monitor. Suddenly a child walked around the corner, he says.

Second zero was the moment in which Bryant’s digital world collided with the real one in a village between Baghlan and Mazar-e-Sharif.

Bryant saw a flash on the screen: the explosion. Parts of the building collapsed. The child had disappeared. Bryant had a sick feeling in his stomach.

“Did we just kill a kid?” he asked the man sitting next to him.

“Yeah, I guess that was a kid,” the pilot replied.

“Was that a kid?” they wrote into a chat window on the monitor.

Then, someone they didn’t know answered, someone sitting in a military command center somewhere in the world who had observed their attack. “No. That was a dog,” the person wrote.

They reviewed the scene on video. A dog on two legs? …

And for a holiday treat, Sal Monella does the Don Imus version of the Night Before Chistmas.

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It amazes that Michigan, of all places, has become a right to work state. Today’s Pickings provides background to that victory. First, Reuters has an analysis.

LANSING, Michigan (Reuters) – As a trained aerospace engineer, Patrick Colbeck applied his penchant for data analysis and “systematic approach” to his new job in early 2011: a Michigan state senator, recently elected and keen to create jobs in the faded industrial powerhouse.

Those skills paid off handsomely for the first-term Republican this week as Governor Rick Snyder signed into law bills co-sponsored by Colbeck that ban mandatory union membership, making Michigan the nation’s 24th right-to-work state.

From outside Michigan Republican circles, it appeared that the Republican drive to weaken unions came out of the blue – proposed, passed and signed in a mere six days.

But the transformation had been in the making since March 2011 when Colbeck and a fellow freshman, state Representative Mike Shirkey, first seriously considered legislation to ban mandatory collection of union dues as a condition of employment in Michigan. Such was their zeal, they even went to union halls to make their pitch and were treated “respectfully,” Colbeck said.

The upstarts were flirting with the once unthinkable, limiting union rights in a state that is the home of the heavily unionized U.S. auto industry and the birthplace of the nation’s richest union, the United Auto Workers. For many Americans, Michigan is the state that defines organized labor.

But in a convergence of methodical planning and patient alliance building – the “systematic approach” – the reformers were on a roll, one that establishment Michigan Republicans came to embrace and promised to bankroll.

Republicans executed a plan – the timing, the language of the bills, the media strategy, and perhaps most importantly, the behind-the-scenes lobbying of top Republicans including Snyder.

They knew they would likely face an acrimonious battle of the kind they had seen over the last two years in the neighboring state of Wisconsin between Republican Governor Scott Walker and unions. Operating in plain sight but often overlooked, they worked to put the necessary building blocks in place. …

Kimberley Strassel says if the unions want to find someone to blame for the Michigan loss, they have to look at their own ranks.

A suggestion to those union folk protesting Michigan’s new right-to-work law: All future complaints might prove better addressed to one Lafe Solomon, care of the National Labor Relations Board, Washington, D.C. Blind copy to President Barack Obama.

Mr. Solomon, remember, is the pro-union lawyer whom Mr. Obama recess-appointed in 2010 as general counsel of the NLRB, the federal agency governing union relations. Big Labor had helped give Mr. Obama his first election victory, and Mr. Solomon was one of the president’s gifts back to the unions.

The general counsel wasted no time in making good on the president’s debts, penning legal opinions favorable to the union cause. But his big-time moment came in April 2011, when he issued an unfair labor practice complaint against Boeing, BA -0.40%for the heinous crime of deliberately choosing to locate a plant in a state (South Carolina) that doesn’t allow unions to require workers to either join a union or pay union dues.

Prior to the Solomon complaint, the right-to-work movement had been stuck in idle. The U.S. hadn’t witnessed a state vote for right to work in more than a decade, when Oklahoma in 2001 became the 22nd state to do so. The Solomon bombshell blew the issue back onto the national scene. Americans who had never heard of right to work were provided proof (in the form of Mr. Solomon’s complaint) that such laws really did serve to pull businesses away from other states and create jobs. Why else would unions be complaining?

That public awareness of the benefits of right to work, in a time of economic struggle, was all the groundwork GOP legislatures needed to once again take up the cause. New Hampshire last year passed right-to-work legislation (though it was vetoed by a Democratic governor). Indiana became the 23rd right-to-work state in February. Michigan makes 24. According to the National Right to Work Committee, 19 states have introduced right-to-work legislation since the beginning of the 2011 legislative session—the most in decades. Many thanks, Mr. Solomon. …

Jennifer Rubin nominates Michigan Governor Rick Snyder as distinguished pol of the week.

No politician made more of an impact last week than Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R). NBC News reported on his support for and signing of right-to-work legislation: “The impact of Michigan’s decision will be felt far beyond the borders of the once-staunchly pro-union state. Even though the ranks of union workers have been dwindling across the nation, the influence of big unions is still felt from the halls of government to corporate board rooms, and their clout affects everything from the economy to the political field. But the rising number of right-to-work states could further drain that influence.” 

Until this Snyder has been regarded as a mild-mannered former businessman known for work on good governance and education. He has for the most part stayed out of the national limelight, even at the Republican National Convention, where he preferred to talk about his state’s progress instead of favorite-son nominee Mitt Romney.

But in taking on organized labor he simultaneously improved his state’s economic climate dramatically, dealt a blow to the Democratic Party, which has been addicted to Big Labor’s money for years, and showed how liberty and opportunity can work as the GOP’s calling cards. In defending his move Snyder deployed his tell-tale calm and emphasis on job -creation. In an interview (beginning at the 2:00 mark) his appeal to worker fairness and customer service (both for government and labor unions) struck the tone that so many Republicans find difficult to muster.

He is a model for Republican governance, reform and rhetoric. Well done, Governor.

In Bloomberg News, Shikha Dalmia explains labor’s options.

It seemed to happen in a flash. A cradle of the U.S. labor movement became the 24th state to adopt right-to-work laws, when Republican Governor Rick Snyder of Michigan signed legislation on Tuesday banning mandatory union dues.

The unions barely had time to muster one big protest in the state capital after the Republican-controlled Legislature approved the bills last week. Today they are preparing for a long war to recover from this huge blow to their power.

Labor has two options now that its ability to extract mandatory dues from workers as a condition for employment is gone. It can fight the law or try to persuade workers to voluntarily pay up.

Union bosses aren’t accustomed to the second approach, so until the next elections in 2014 they can be expected to try everything to overturn the law and to stop the right-to-work fever from spreading to neighboring states.

Legal analysts say labor’s first tactic will be to obtain a court injunction to stop the law from being carried out on grounds that its exemption for public-safety workers — firefighters and police officers — violates the U.S. Constitution’s equal-protection guarantees. Unions have managed to persuade a Wisconsin judge to rule against a similar law by Republican Governor Scott Walker that ended mandatory dues deductions from the paychecks of public employees. The ruling is widely expected to be overturned on appeal. …

Seth Mandel points out that even George McGovern was worried about the anti-labor aspects of union power grabs.

The extent to which George McGovern, who died in late October, was identified with American liberalism itself can be seen in headlines of his various obituaries. CNN’s headline called him an “unabashed liberal voice”; PBS went with “Liberal Icon”; the New York Times chose “Prairie Liberal” (though the online edition dropped the word “prairie”); and the Nation called him a “Touchstone of Liberalism.” The Nation obit, written by John Nichols, proclaimed McGovern, the 1972 Democratic presidential nominee, “the most progressive nominee ever selected by the Democratic Party.”

McGovern, then, possessed unimpeachable liberal credentials. Yet four years before McGovern passed, the liberal blog site Firedoglake was ready to send him packing, and used the occasion to call McGovern perhaps the nastiest insult in the liberal lexicon: “Wal-Mart Lover.” What could have prompted such spite? McGovern, though a committed liberal through and through, was concerned about the growing and coercive power of unions. He felt the need to speak out against the Democrats’ proposed anti-choice legislation, card-check. McGovern chastised his party for its extremism in the Wall Street Journal: …

To start off the humor section, Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit explains why good labor goons are hard to come by these days.

So the public employee unions have been on the defensive across the nation, and they’ve been losing battles in state capitols from Wisconsin, to Ohio, to Tennessee.

Although there have been some violent incidents and death threats, overall, despite the talk from many right-leaning pundits about “union goons,” the actual danger posed by the union members appears to have been very small by labor-historical standards. Apparently, you just can’t get good goons nowadays.

And that makes sense. In the old days of the labor movement, the unionized industries were, you know, actual industries, involving miners, steelworkers and the like. And those are trades that foster exactly the qualities you need in good goons.

Why? Because they’re very dangerous activities that put a premium on teamwork. (Even in totalitarian countries, people know that it’s dangerous to get the miners upset.) …

… But miners and steelworkers are one thing. When the public employees of, say, Wisconsin hit the streets, it looked more like a bunch of disgruntled DMV clerks and graduate teaching assistants, because, well, that’s what it was.

Though they displayed more creativity in signage than you might expect from steelworkers, overall, they brought pretty much the same work habits to their protests that they bring to their jobs. (Sleeping in the capitol? Pretty much what they do at the office.) …

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Talk about timely, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote for the Atlantic on guns and gun control before the latest carnage. The gun-control nannies and ninnies are out in force now so it is nice to have a leftist ask these questions, “But what if, in fact, the reverse is true? Mightn’t allowing more law-abiding private citizens to carry concealed weapons—when combined with other forms of stringent gun regulation—actually reduce gun violence”?  This is long, so it makes up all of Pickings today.

… There are ways, of course, to make it at least marginally more difficult for the criminally minded, for the dangerously mentally ill, and for the suicidal to buy guns and ammunition. The gun-show loophole could be closed. Longer waiting periods might stop some suicides. Mental-health professionals could be encouraged—or mandated—to report patients they suspect shouldn’t own guns to the FBI-supervised National Instant Criminal Background Check System, although this would generate fierce opposition from doctors and patients. Background checks, which are conducted by licensed gun shops, have stopped almost 1 million people from buying guns at these stores since 1998. (No one knows, of course, how many of these people gave up their search for a gun, and how many simply went to a gun show or found another way to acquire a weapon.)

Other measures could be taken as well. Drum-style magazines like the kind James Holmes had that night in Aurora, which can hold up to 100 rounds of ammunition and which make continuous firing easy, have no reasonable civilian purpose, and their sale could be restricted without violating the Second Amendment rights of individual gun owners.

But these gun-control efforts, while noble, would only have a modest impact on the rate of gun violence in America.

Why?

Because it’s too late.

There are an estimated 280 million to 300 million guns in private hands in America—many legally owned, many not. Each year, more than 4 million new guns enter the market. This level of gun saturation has occurred not because the anti-gun lobby has been consistently outflanked by its adversaries in the National Rifle Association, though it has been. The NRA is quite obviously a powerful organization, but like many effective pressure groups, it is powerful in good part because so many Americans are predisposed to agree with its basic message.

America’s level of gun ownership means that even if the Supreme Court—which ruled in 2008 that the Second Amendment gives citizens the individual right to own firearms, as gun advocates have long insisted—suddenly reversed itself and ruled that the individual ownership of handguns was illegal, there would be no practical way for a democratic country to locate and seize those guns. …

… Even the leading advocacy group for stricter gun laws, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, has given up the struggle to convince the courts, and the public, that the Constitution grants only members of a militia the right to bear arms. “I’m happy to consider the debate on the Second Amendment closed,” Dan Gross, the Brady Campaign’s president, told me recently. “Reopening that debate is not what we should be doing. We have to respect the fact that a lot of decent, law-abiding people believe in gun ownership.”

Which raises a question: When even anti-gun activists believe that the debate over private gun ownership is closed; when it is too late to reduce the number of guns in private hands—and since only the naive think that legislation will prevent more than a modest number of the criminally minded, and the mentally deranged, from acquiring a gun in a country absolutely inundated with weapons—could it be that an effective way to combat guns is with more guns?

Today, more than 8 million vetted and (depending on the state) trained law-abiding citizens possess state-issued “concealed carry” handgun permits, which allow them to carry a concealed handgun or other weapon in public. Anti-gun activists believe the expansion of concealed-carry permits represents a serious threat to public order. But what if, in fact, the reverse is true? Mightn’t allowing more law-abiding private citizens to carry concealed weapons—when combined with other forms of stringent gun regulation—actually reduce gun violence?

This thought has been with me for nearly two decades. …

… In 1997, a disturbed high-school student named Luke Woodham stabbed his mother and then shot and killed two people at PearlHigh School in Pearl, Mississippi. He then began driving toward a nearby junior high to continue his shooting spree, but the assistant principal of the high school, Joel Myrick, aimed a pistol he kept in his truck at Woodham, causing him to veer off the road. Myrick then put his pistol to Woodham’s neck and disarmed him. On January 16, 2002, a disgruntled former student at the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, Virginia, had killed three people, including the school’s dean, when two students, both off-duty law-enforcement officers, retrieved their weapons and pointed them at the shooter, who ended his killing spree and surrendered. In December 2007, a man armed with a semiautomatic rifle and two pistols entered the NewLifeChurch in Colorado Springs and killed two teenage girls before a church member, Jeanne Assam—a former Minneapolis police officer and a volunteer church security guard—shot and wounded the gunman, who then killed himself. …

… It is an unexamined assumption on the part of gun-control activists that the possession of a firearm by a law-abiding person will almost axiomatically cause that person to fire it at another human being in a moment of stress. Dave Kopel, the research director of the libertarian-leaning Independence Institute, in Denver, posits that opposition to gun ownership is ideological, not rational. “I use gay marriage as an analogue,” he said. “Some people say they are against gay marriage because they think it leads to worse outcomes for kids. Now, let’s say in 2020 all the social-science evidence has it that the kids of gay families turn out fine. Some people will still say they’re against it, not for reasons of social science, but for reasons of faith. That’s what you have here in the gun issue.”

There is no proof to support the idea that concealed-carry permit holders create more violence in society than would otherwise occur; they may, in fact, reduce it. According to Adam Winkler, a law professor at UCLA and the author of Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America, permit holders in the U.S. commit crimes at a rate lower than that of the general population. “We don’t see much bloodshed from concealed-carry permit holders, because they are law-abiding people,” Winkler said. “That’s not to say that permit holders don’t commit crimes, but they do so at a lower rate than the general population. People who seek to obtain permits are likely to be people who respect the law.” According to John Lott, an economist and a gun-rights advocate who maintains that gun ownership by law-abiding citizens helps curtail crime, the crime rate among concealed-carry permit holders is lower than the crime rate among police officers.

Today, the number of concealed-carry permits is the highest it’s ever been, at 8 million, and the homicide rate is the lowest it’s been in four decades—less than half what it was 20 years ago. (The number of people allowed to carry concealed weapons is actually considerably higher than 8 million, because residents of Vermont, Wyoming, Arizona, Alaska, and parts of Montana do not need government permission to carry their personal firearms. These states have what Second Amendment absolutists refer to as “constitutional carry,” meaning, in essence, that the Second Amendment is their permit.)

Many gun-rights advocates see a link between an increasingly armed public and a decreasing crime rate. “I think effective law enforcement has had the biggest impact on crime rates, but I think concealed carry has something to do with it. We’ve seen an explosion in the number of people licensed to carry,” Lott told me. “You can deter criminality through longer sentencing, and you deter criminality by making it riskier for people to commit crimes. And one way to make it riskier is to create the impression among the criminal population that the law-abiding citizen they want to target may have a gun.”

Crime statistics in Britain, where guns are much scarcer, bear this out. Gary Kleck, a criminologist at FloridaStateUniversity, wrote in his 1991 book, Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America, that only 13 percent of burglaries in America occur when the occupant is home. In Britain, so-called hot burglaries account for about 45 percent of all break-ins. Kleck and others attribute America’s low rate of occupied-home burglaries to fear among criminals that homeowners might be armed. (A survey of almost 2,000 convicted U.S. felons, conducted by the criminologists Peter Rossi and James D. Wright in the late ’80s, concluded that burglars are more afraid of armed homeowners than they are of arrest by the police.) …

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Slate’s Josh Levin shows how NFL Commissioner Goodell was sacked.

When Roger Goodell appointed Paul Tagliabue to hear the Saints’ bounty appeal, the players fought to get the ex-NFL commissioner to recuse himself. There was no way, they thought, that Tagliabue would kneecap his successor, invalidating the suspensions that Goodell had pronounced from his unassailable lair atop Commissioner Mountain. But on Tuesday, Tagliabue sided, amazingly, against the man sitting behind his old desk, vacating the suspensions of four current and former Saints. Though he affirmed many of Goodell’s original findings of player misconduct, this is the equivalent of a teacher writing “nice job” in the margin of a D paper. Goodell got it wrong in every way that matters. He conducted an unfair investigation that reached bad conclusions based on faulty evidence, then crowed sanctimoniously about his findings. Now, at last, this story has the ending it deserves, with the power-hungry commissioner undone by his quest to demonstrate just how powerful he can be. …

… Tagliabue also implies that Goodell’s self-righteousness trumped sanity with regard to Hargrove and Smith. The former was suspended eight games (later reduced to seven) for denying the existence of a bounty program—something his coaches urged him to do. But as Roger Goodell saw it, Hargrove was guilty of the worst crime of all: lying to Roger Goodell. Yes, Michael Vick was guilty of leading a dogfighting ring. But as a league source explained to Yahoo’s Jason Cole in 2007, “Where [Vick] is in the most trouble is that he lied to the commissioner.”

More than anything else, his hardline stance on honesty reveals that Goodell sees himself as a parent rather than a jurist. It’s important that a kid tell his mom and dad the truth, and he should be grounded for another couple of days if he doesn’t fess up to breaking that lamp. It’s not always the best strategy for a defendant to say everything he knows, however, and he shouldn’t get put away just because he pleads not guilty. As Tagliabue writes, “In my forty years of association with the NFL, I am aware of many instances of denials in disciplinary proceedings that proved to be false, but I cannot recall any suspension for such fabrication.” (In the document’s most hilarious twist, Tagliabue also notes that Brett Favre was fined, not suspended, for obstructing a league investigation into his sexting practices. As a consequence, Goodell wildly over-punished Hargrove for obstructing an investigation into a bounty on Brett Favre.)

Smith was suspended in part because of his role as a “defensive leader.” Once again, this is a vengeful paternalism masquerading as principle. “I am not aware of previous League discipline that similarly rested on whether or not a player was a team leader,” Tagliabue writes, dismantling the Goodelian precept of “you’re older and you should have known better.” …

…When he first announced the Saints’ transgressions, Goodell noted that he was most concerned with “player safety and competitive integrity.” But what Paul Tagliabue’s ruling reveals, as the Saints look back at the wreckage of their season, is that there’s a much bigger threat to the NFL’s competitive integrity than a bounty program: It’s a commissioner who’s out to make examples of people for defying his authority.

 

Bloomberg News says California is the worst, but other states are almost as bad. The saddest part of obama’s wasted stimulus is he allowed many states to avoid the results of their excesses.

… Payroll data compiled by Bloomberg on 1.4 million public employees in the 12 most populous states show that California has set a pattern of lax management, inefficient operations and out-of-control costs. From coast to coast, states are cutting funding for schools, public safety and the poor as they struggle with fallout left by politicians who made pay-and-pension promises that taxpayers couldn’t afford.

“It was completely avoidable,” said David Crane, a public-policy lecturer at StanfordUniversity.

“All it took was for political leaders to think more about the general population and the future, rather than their political futures,” said Crane, a Democrat who worked as an economic adviser to former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican. “Citizens should be mad as hell, and they shouldn’t take it anymore.”

Across the U.S., such compensation policies have contributed to state budget shortfalls of $500 billion in the past four years and prompted some governors, including Republican Scott Walker of Wisconsin, to strip most government employees of collective-bargaining rights and take other steps to limit payroll spending.

In California, Governor Jerry Brown hasn’t curbed overtime expenses that lead the 12 largest states or limited payments for accumulated vacation time that allowed one employee to collect $609,000 at retirement in 2011. The 74-year-old Democrat has continued requiring workers to take an unpaid day off each month, which could burden the state with new costs in the future.

Last year, Brown waived a cap on accrued leave for prison guards while granting them additional paid days off. California’s liability for the unused leave of its state workers has more than doubled in eight years, to $3.9 billion in 2011, from $1.4 billion in 2003, according to the state’s annual financial reports.

“It’s outrageous what public employees in California receive in compensation and benefits,” said Lanny Ebenstein, who heads the California Center for Public Policy, a Santa Barbara-based research institution critical of public payrolls.

“Until public employee compensation and benefits are brought in line, there will be no answer to the fiscal shortfalls that California governments at every level face,” he said.

Among the largest states, almost every category of worker has participated in the pay bonanza. Britt Harris, chief investment officer at the Teacher Retirement System of Texas, last year collected $1 million — including his $480,000 salary and two years of bonuses — more than four times what Republican Governor Rick Perry received. Pension managers in Ohio and Virginia made up to $678,000 and $660,000, respectively, according to the data, which Bloomberg obtained using public- record requests. In an interview, Harris said public pension pay must be competitive with the private sector to attract top investment talent.

Psychiatrists were among the highest-paid employees in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and New Jersey, with total compensation $270,000 to $327,000 for top earners. State police officers in Pennsylvania collected checks as big as $190,000 for unused vacation and personal leave as they retired young enough to start second careers, while Virginia paid active officers as much as $109,000 in overtime alone, the data show.

The numbers are even larger in California, where a state psychiatrist was paid $822,000, a highway patrol officer collected $484,000 in pay and pension benefits and 17 employees got checks of more than $200,000 for unused vacation and leave. The best-paid staff in other states earned far less for the same work, according to the data.

Rising employee expenses are crowding out other priorities for state and local governments and draining resources for college tuition, health care, public safety, schools and other services, Schwarzenegger said in an e-mailed response to questions.

“California spends most of its money on salaries, retirement payments, health care benefits for government workers, and other compensation,” said Schwarzenegger, 65, who replaced Davis as governor. “State revenues are up more than 50 percent over the past 10 years, but still we’ve had to cut spending on services because so much of that revenue increase went to increases in compensation and benefits.”  …

If the above from Bloomberg makes you want to cry, here’s late night humor from Andrew Malcolm.

Leno: President Obama met with tribal Indian chiefs the other day. They gave him his own Indian name: “Running Deficits.”

Conan: New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie visited the White House. President Obama told him, “I’d invite you to lunch, but the deficit is already too high.”

Letterman: So 86-year-old Hugh Hefner is engaged again to his 26-year-old girlfriend. Hef said, “I’ve fallen for her–and I can’t get up.”

Leno: We’ve been talking about 86-year-old Hugh Hefner marrying his 26-year-old girlfriend. She’s very romantic. She says her dream is someday to take Hef to the beach. And scatter his ashes right there.

Fallon: A new survey finds “Sophia” and “Aiden” were the most popular baby names this year. The least popular baby name was “Kim Jong Sandusky.”

Leno: Good news: Prince William and his wife Kate are expecting a baby. Bad news: Prince Harry is planning the baby shower for Vegas.

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Bret Stephens on why Susan Rice is the perfect candidate for SecState under this administration. She has a record of failure almost as complete as the president’s. Perhaps she can be the next US president. American voters like failures.

The trouble with a newspaper column lies in the word limit. Last week, I wrote about some of Susan Rice‘s diplomatic misadventures in Africa during her years in the Clinton administration: Rwanda, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo. But there wasn’t enough space to get to them all.

And Sierra Leone deserves a column of its own.

On June 8, 1999, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Ms. Rice, then the assistant secretary of state for African affairs, delivered testimony on a range of issues, and little Sierra Leone was high on the list. An elected civilian government led by a former British barrister named Ahmad Kabbah had been under siege for years by a rebel group known as the Revolutionary United Front, led by a Libyan-trained guerrilla named Foday Sankoh. Events were coming to a head.

Even by the standards of Africa in the 1990s, the RUF set a high bar for brutality. Its soldiers were mostly children, abducted from their parents, fed on a diet of cocaine and speed. Its funding came from blood diamonds. It was internationally famous for chopping off the limbs of its victims. Its military campaigns bore such names as “Operation No Living Thing.”

In January 1999, six months before Ms. Rice’s Senate testimony, the RUF laid siege to the capital city of Freetown. “The RUF burned down houses with their occupants still inside, hacked off limbs, gouged out eyes with knives, raped children, and gunned down scores of people in the street,” wrote Ryan Lizza in the New Republic. “In three weeks, the RUF killed some 6,000 people, mostly civilians.”

What to do with a group like this? The Clinton administration had an idea. Initiate a peace process. …

… It would be tempting to blame Rev. Jackson for the debacle that would soon follow. But as Ms. Rice was keen to insist in her Senate testimony that June, it was the Africa hands at the State Department who were doing most of the heavy lifting.

“It’s been through active U.S. diplomacy behind the scenes,” she explained. “It hasn’t gotten a great deal of press coverage, that we and others saw the rebels and the government of Sierra Leone come to the negotiating table just a couple of weeks ago, in the context of a negotiated cease-fire, in which the United States played an important role.” …

… Three months later, the RUF took 500 U.N. peacekeepers as hostages and was again threatening Freetown. Lomé had become a dead letter. The State Department sought to send Rev. Jackson again to the region, but he was so detested that his trip had to be canceled. The U.N.’s Kofi Annan begged for Britain’s help. Tony Blair obliged him.

“Over a number of weeks,” Mr. Blair recalls in his memoirs, British troops “did indeed sort out the RUF. . . . The RUF leader Foday Sankoh was arrested, and during the following months there was a buildup of the international presence, a collapse of the rebels and over time a program of comprehensive disarmament. . . . The country’s democracy was saved.”

Today Mr. Blair is a national hero in Sierra Leone. As for Ms. Rice and the administration she represented, history will deliver its own verdict.

Jennifer Rubin explores three aspects of obama foreign policy failures.

The president has tried to convince the American people, our allies and our foes that the (Afghan) war could be conducted with less than optimal numbers of troops and with a strict timetable. That just isn’t so. He is now faced with a dilemma: Continue in lock-step with his emphatic 2014 withdrawal date or rethink his approach. At some point, it is hard to justify the no-man’s land (neither aiming for victory nor departing promptly) in which young men and women continue to die. If we aren’t going to win, why prolong the agony?

Then there is Syria. The Associated Press reports: “The Obama administration is declaring a Syrian rebel group with alleged ties to al-Qaida as a terrorist organization. It’s an effort to blunt the influence of extremists as the U.S. steps up cooperation with the Syrian opposition. The State Department’s action blocks Jabhat al-Nusra’s assets in the U.S. and bars Americans from doing business with the group.”

We are racing to catch up to events, trying to forestall the influence of jihadists who moved to fill in the vacuum while the United States did virtually nothing to assist the non-al-Qaeda elements of the Syrian opposition. Now, it is all a muddle, and trying to extract bad elements from less bad elements is a difficult task. Moreover, what have we got to offer the preferable elements within the opposition? The president has said we won’t give them arms. Once again, his indecision has allowed the situation (not merely the casualty toll) to worsen, leaving us with less leverage and fewer options. 

And last, there is Iran.

The NY Post has a great story about two WW II pilots; one American, one German. Click here for interviews with the pilots.

On Dec. 20, 1943, a young American bomber pilot named Charlie Brown found himself somewhere over Germany, struggling to keep his plane aloft with just one of its four engines still working. They were returning from their first mission as a unit, the successful bombing of a German munitions factory. Of his crew members, one was dead and six wounded, and 2nd Lt. Brown was alone in his cockpit, the three unharmed men tending to the others. Brown’s B-17 had been attacked by 15 German planes and left for dead, and Brown himself had been knocked out in the assault, regaining consciousness in just enough time to pull the plane out of a near-fatal nose dive.

None of that was as shocking as the German pilot now suddenly to his right.

Brown thought he was hallucinating. He did that thing you see people do in movies: He closed his eyes and shook his head no. He looked, again, out the co-pilot’s window. Again, the lone German was still there, and now it was worse. He’d flown over to Brown’s left and was frantic: pointing, mouthing things that Brown couldn’t begin to comprehend, making these wild gestures, exaggerating his expressions like a cartoon character.

Brown, already in shock, was freshly shot through with fear. What was this guy up to?

He craned his neck and yelled back for his top gunner, screamed at him to get up in his turret and shoot this guy out of the sky. Before Brown’s gunner could squeeze off his first round, the German did something even weirder: He looked Brown in the eye and gave him a salute. Then he peeled away.

What just happened? That question would haunt Brown for more than 40 years, long after he married and left the service and resettled in Miami, long after he had expected the nightmares about the German to stop and just learned to live with them.

“A Higher Call,” the new book by Adam Makos with Larry Alexander, tells the incredible true story of these two pilots. Franz Stigler was 26 when he was conscripted into Hitler’s Luftwaffe in 1942, a former commercial airline pilot whose father and brother had both died while serving their country. Stigler had been assigned to Squadron 4 of the German air force, and was initially stationed in Libya. …

What the latest scam college administrators have for fleecing their customers? College Fix has the answer.

While many wealthy university presidents favor high taxes, many of them don’t pay taxes on their own income. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, half of the nation’s 50 highest-paid college presidents had their taxes paid for them by the universities they lead.

As a group, university presidents are generally outspoken advocates of tax-and-spend, big-government liberalism. That’s not surprising in light of the liberal bent of academia, as well as the fact that most large universities survive on tens or even hundreds of millions of government grants and federal aid dollars.

They want you to pay high taxes so that the government can pass the money to their institutions. But they don’t pay taxes out of their own pockets, despite their huge salaries.

“Among the 50 highest-paid private-college presidents in 2010, half led institutions that provided top executives with cash to cover taxes on bonuses and other benefits, a Chronicle analysis has found. This practice, known as “grossing up,” has fallen out of fashion at many publicly traded companies, where boards have decided the perk is simply not worth the shareholder outrage it can invite.” …

NY Times OpEd exposes another college fraud.

LAST month The Chronicle of Higher Education published a damning investigation of college athletes across the nation who were maintaining their eligibility by taking cheap, easy online courses from an obscure junior college.

In just 10 days, academically deficient players could earn three credits and an easy “A” from Western Oklahoma State College for courses like “Microcomputer Applications” (opening folders in Windows) or “Nutrition” (stating whether or not the students used vitamins). The Chronicle quoted one Big Ten academic adviser as saying, “You jump online, finish in a week and half, get your grade posted, and you’re bowl-eligible.”

On the face of it, this is another sad but familiar story of the big-money intercollegiate-athletics complex corrupting the ivory tower. But it also reveals a larger, more pervasive problem: there are no meaningful standards of academic quality in higher education. And the more colleges and universities move their courses online, the more severe the problem gets.

Much attention has been paid to for-profit colleges that offer degrees online while exploiting federal student-loan programs and saddling ill-prepared students with debt. But nearly all of the institutions caught up in the 10-day credit dodge exposed by The Chronicle were public, nonprofit institutions. And both the credit-givers, like Western Oklahoma, and the sports machines at the other end of the transaction, like FloridaStateUniversity, were doing nothing illegal. …

Click on WORD for full content

WORD

John Hinderaker posts in Power Line on the administration that will live in infamy.

There was a time when people assumed that if America’s future was under attack, it must come from a foreign source–like, say, Japan at Pearl Harbor. Those days are long gone. Now, our decline is no one’s fault but our own. We elect leaders who are ignorant of America’s history and contemptuous of its values. The currency in which this ignorance and contempt is expressed is government spending. I am not sure I can fully explain the logic, but those who are filled with hatred for the first 200 years of American history want–for some reason–America’s government to accumulate ever more power and to spend unprecedented amounts of money. Does that make sense? Seemingly not, but it is the world in which we live: the entity that is most bent on destroying the private economy of the United States of America, until recently the envy of the world, is our own government. … 

… I have spent some time thinking about this, and it is hard to find a precedent: when, in human history, has the government of any nation consciously set out to weaken that country? Sure, it has been done by accident from time to time, but on purpose? If you can think of any precedent for the Obama administration, please let it be known in the comments.

Mark Steyn on the continuing embarrassment of our spendthrift president and government.

From the New York Daily News:

“Snooki Gives Kate Middleton Advice On Being A New Parent.”

Great! Maybe Kate could return the favor and give Snooki and her fellow Americans some advice. About fiscal prudence, for example. Say what you like about a high-living, big-spending, bloated, decadent parasitical, wastrel monarchy, but, compared to the citizen-executive of a republic of limited government, it’s a bargain. So, while the lovely Duchess of Cambridge nurses her baby bump, the equally radiant President of the United States nurses his ever more swollen debt belly. He and his family are about to jet off on their Christmas vacation to watch America slide off the fiscal cliff from the luxury beach resort of Kailua. The cost to taxpayers of flying one man, his wife, two daughters and a dog to Hawaii is estimated at $3,639,622. For purposes of comparison, the total bill for flying the entire Royal Family (Queen, princes, dukes, the works) around the world for a year is £4.7 million – or about enough for two Obama vacations.

According to the USAF, in 2010 Air Force One cost American taxpayers $181,757 per flight hour. According to the Royal Canadian Air Force, in 2011 the CC-150 Polaris military transport that flew William and Kate from Vancouver to Los Angeles cost Her Majesty’s Canadian subjects $15,505 per hour – or about 8/100ths of the cost.

Unlike a republic, monarchy in a democratic age means you can’t go around queening it. That RCAF boneshaker has a shower the size of a phone booth, yet the Duchess of Cambridge looked almost as glamorous as Snooki when she emerged onto the steps at LAX. That’s probably because Canada’s 437 Squadron decided to splash out on new bedding for the royal tour. Amanda Heron was dispatched to the local mall in Trenton, Ontario, and returned with a pale blue and white comforter and matching pillows. Is there no end to the grotesque indulgence of these over-pampered royal deadbeats? “I found a beautiful set,” said Master-Corporal Heron. “It was such a great price I bought one for myself.”

Nevertheless, Canadian journalists and politicians bitched and whined about the cost of this disgusting jet-set lifestyle nonstop throughout the tour. At the conclusion of their official visit to California, Their Royal Highnesses flew on to Heathrow with their vast entourage of, er, seven people – and the ingrate whining Canadians passed the baton to their fellow ingrate whiners across the Atlantic. As the Daily Mail in London reported, “High Fliers: Prince William and his wife Kate spend an incredible £52,000 on the one-way flight from L.A. to London for themselves and their seven-strong entourage.” Incredible! For £52,000, you couldn’t take the president from Washington to a state visit to an ice cream parlor in a Maryland suburb. Obama flew Air Force One from Washington to Williamsburg, Va., requiring a wide-bodied transatlantic jet that holds 500 people to ferry him a distance of a little over 100 miles. And, unlike their British and Canadian counterparts, the American media are entirely at ease with it.

Just for the record, William and Kate actually spent an “incredible” £51,410 – or about $80,000 – for nine business-class tickets on British Airways to Heathrow. At the check-in desk at Los Angeles, BA graciously offered the Duke and Duchess an upgrade to first class. By now you’re probably revolted by this glimpse of disgusting monarchical excess, so, if it’s any consolation, halfway through the flight the cabin’s entertainment consoles failed and, along with other first-class passengers, Their Highnesses were offered a £200 voucher toward the cost of their next flight, which they declined.

By contrast, in a republic governed by “we, the people,” when the President of the United States wishes to watch a film, there are two full-time movie projectionists who live at the White House and are on call round the clock, in case he’s overcome by a sudden urge to watch Esther Williams in “Dangerous When Wet” (1953) at two in the morning. Does one of them accompany the First Family on Air Force One? If the movie fails halfway across the Pacific, will the President and First Lady each be offered a two-million dollar voucher in compensation? …

Previously Pickings readers have been treated to a Thomas Boswell piece on the Redskins new QB – Robert Griffin III. Now the Washington Post has profiled Kyle Shanahan the offensive coordinator who is watching over Griffin in his first year in the NFL. Sunday’s injury to RG3 and the subsequent victory lead by back-up quarterback Kirk Cousins highlights Shanahan’s effectiveness. Good background here for understanding the management of a football team. Besides, it is nice to have something out of DC that is not an overhyped fraud.

Kyle Shanahan stands in his office at RedskinsPark, flipping through the 154 gridded pages of a brown composition book.

It’s rare that this pad, more a football journal for the Washington Redskins’ 32-year-old offensive coordinator, is beyond a few yards away. It’s with him at the team facility, at home, in his SUV. In this one and the stack on the bottom shelf behind him — filled and filed away throughout the season — he draws plays and leaves himself notes, working through situations and what-if scenarios each week.

“Just scribbles,” he says of the stream-of-consciousness elements that form the Redskins’ weekly game plan.

These days, anything is possible, and any idea is worth scrawling on these pages. Shanahan was given a gift this past offseason, a supremely talented rookie quarterback named Robert Griffin III, and with it a chance to reclaim his career. The previous two seasons had been disappointing, and a young star in coaching had lost his shine. He clashed two years ago with quarterback Donovan McNabb. Last year, Shanahan’s offense struggled with two unremarkable quarterbacks.

The difficulties amplified a notion that has chased and bothered Shanahan throughout much of his life: that he’s only been successful, at making varsity teams years ago or in this corner office in Ashburn, because he’s been trading off the name of his father, Redskins Coach Mike Shanahan.

“I want to prove to people,” Kyle says, “that that’s not the case.”

For years, he distanced himself from his dad, running from perception and trying to validate his own ability – to himself as much as anyone.

His father has guided him, but Kyle says his successes are his own – as a player at the University of Texas, then later as a young assistant coach, and, with Houston in 2008, at the time the National Football League’s youngest coordinator.

“He’s so much further along than I was,” says Mike Shanahan, who took his first head coaching job at age 35. “It’s not even close.”

As the Redskins return to playoff relevance, riding an unpredictable and thrilling offense to a three-game winning streak, Shanahan’s creativity has attracted some of the spotlight. There are believers in his influence, and there are doubters. Some suggest he represents the next generation of coaching genius.

“One of the real bright young minds in this business,” University of Texas Coach Mack Brown says.

Others could say that a man who rode his dad’s coattails this far is now just riding someone else’s momentum – this time a 22-year-old phenomenon – to national prominence. But even some of Shanahan’s critics are beginning to believe.

“From year one till now, he’s better than what he was,” says Brian Mitchell, a local media personality and former Redskins player. “Has he arrived? I’m not going to say completely.”

This much, though, is clear: With most any possibility alive, Kyle Shanahan has the chance to do something remarkable. It starts by putting pen to paper, then watching all those scribbles come to life. …

… Their first meeting was in February at the NFL Scouting Combine. Robert Griffin III remembers Kyle grilling him about offenses. Kyle recalls being impressed with Griffin’s responses.

A month later, Mike Shanahan and General Manager Bruce Allen were preparing a defining draft gamble: trading three first-round picks to move up to No. 2 overall. The target was either Andrew Luck or Griffin. They asked Kyle what he thought.

“I want him,” Kyle recalls telling them about Griffin. “I was never going to say no.”

He says he didn’t think about his own career; rather, he saw Griffin as a major upgrade at the team’s most vital position. Still, those closest to Kyle knew he had perhaps the most to gain from a transcendent, NFL-ready quarterback.

“You guys will grow together,” Mike says he told his son.

When Indianapolis selected Luck at No. 1, Washington didn’t hesitate. The Redskins had their quarterback.

But a new challenge emerged: The offense Kyle had honed required a pocket passer, and it was Griffin’s mobility that made him special. This time, however, he wouldn’t force a quarterback to accommodate his scheme; he would design plays to fit Griffin, taking advantage of his speed and easing him toward becoming an elite passer.

The process was taxing, but his father’s words again echoed in Kyle’s mind: work and time. He spent hours last spring studying video of zone-read offenses: Cam Newton in Carolina, Tim Tebow in Denver, Vince Young in Tennessee. He also did what he’d done in Tampa Bay, scanning defenses for weaknesses. Kyle didn’t interview other coaches or watch college film; he only wanted to see how it worked in the NFL.

“It kind of rejuvenated me,” he says.

The days turned to weeks, then months. Some days were better than others.

“I’d be like, ‘Man, I’m done with this.’ ” he says. “Then we would do something different, and I’d be like, ‘All right, this could work.’ ”

Kyle admits that he had no idea whether this offense, which relied on pre-snap motion, a reliable running game and an avoidance of turnovers, would succeed. It was asking a lot of a rookie.

“Now, everything is good,” Griffin says, months after those first meetings. “We know the system, he knows how I learn things and how to get me in the right situations. But at first, it was a grind.”

“As a coordinator, I’m seeing him use everything he has; use all the tools around him,” Redskins wide receiver Santana Moss adds.

In the regular season’s first week, Griffin and Kyle led the Redskins to a 40-32 win against the New Orleans Saints. Their comfort grew from there, Kyle tinkering and Griffin adapting.

Washington is now 6-6, with an offense ranked seventh in the league. In Monday night’s win against the New York Giants, Kyle and Griffin showed a diverse, methodical approach that didn’t abandon the run, wasn’t one-dimensional and showcased the marriage of Kyle’s ideas and Griffin’s abilities.

From that has come trust. …