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In an article buried in the NY Times, we have a another peek at the disgusting pay scales American universities are showering on their execs. You know, the ones who went into academia as a form of “public service.”

President Obama’s nominee to lead the Treasury Department, Jacob J. Lew, got a $685,000 severance payment when he left a top post at New York University in 2006 to take a job at Citigroup.

The payment, which a university official acknowledged on Monday, is considered unusual by outside experts in benefits and raises questions about why a tax-exempt university would give a large exit bonus to an executive who was departing voluntarily.

The payment was not disclosed in the university’s publicly available tax records, and it is receiving scrutiny from Senate Republicans as they consider Mr. Lew’s nomination, which is expected to come up for a vote in the Finance Committee on Tuesday.

At the time of his departure, Mr. Lew had been executive vice president at N.Y.U. He had typically earned $700,000 to $800,000 a year since his hiring in 2001, and sometimes more, according to the university’s tax records.

He also received mortgages of roughly $1.5 million through the school as a perquisite — $440,000 of which was forgiven by the university over time.

University officials defended the additional lump-sum payment, which was not required by his original employment contract, citing Mr. Lew’s role in addressing some of the university’s major problems at the time.

While severance payments are not unheard-of among universities, they are more typical when executives of long standing are ushered out. They can also be required by employment contracts, like the $1.2 million that Pennsylvania State University’s former president, Graham B. Spanier, received when he departed amid a child sexual abuse scandal in the football program.

But Mr. Lew’s exit was amicable. The revelations about his pay are not the first to raise questions about how tax-exempt, nonprofit groups in the state shower largess on their top officials. …

Bob Woodward calls obama’s petulance ”a kind of madness.” Politico has the story.

The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward attacked President Barack Obama on Wednesday, saying the commander-in-chief’s decision not to deploy an aircraft carrier because of budget cuts is “a kind of madness.”

“Can you imagine Ronald Reagan sitting there and saying, ‘Oh, by the way, I can’t do this because of some budget document?’” Woodward said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

“Or George W. Bush saying, ‘You know, I’m not going to invade Iraq because I can’t get the aircraft carriers I need’ or even Bill Clinton saying, ‘You know, I’m not going to attack Saddam Hussein’s intelligence headquarters,’ as he did when Clinton was president because of some budget document?” Woodward added. “Under the Constitution, the president is commander-in-chief and employs the force. And so we now have the president going out because of this piece of paper and this agreement. ‘I can’t do what I need to do to protect the country.’ That’s a kind of madness that I haven’t seen in a long time.”

The Pentagon announced earlier this month the U.S.S. Harry Truman, which was supposed to leave for the Persian Gulf, will remain stateside due to budget concerns. The sequester, which will cut billions in defense spending, is scheduled to hit on Friday.

Woodward has become an unlikely conservative hero in recent days for calling out the administration over whether Obama had “moved the goal posts”’ in negotiations over the sequester.

Craig Pirrong at Streetwise Professor has more on the administration’s negotiating style.

Obama is playing the sequester game for all it is worth, by regaling the country with horror stories of what will happen if the sequester goes into effect.  All he needs is a flashlight held under his chin while sitting by a campfire.

The prudent response to a need to cut spending due to a tightening of a budget constraint is to find the least important things, and cut those first.  But Obama is not interested in being prudent.  He is interested in being political.  He is using the sequester as part of his war to the knife with House Republicans, and hence is going with the Washington Monument Strategy on Steroids, and focusing cutbacks on the most visible and vital services.  For instance: furloughing TSA personnel.  I am scheduled to fly to visit my parents on the day the sequester kicks in.  Oh freaking joy.  I say furlough them all.  Forever.  But no, we’ll get all of the stupid procedures with fewer people to implement them-and no doubt they will be under orders to work to rule to make the process as inefficient and painful as possible. Another for instance: releasing illegal aliens detained in prison. I could go on. But you get the point. It’s all about making the most painful and most visible and most inconveniencing cuts, all for political advantage. The man has no shame. This is not about executive leadership or stewardship. It is about Goebbels-esque propaganda theater. …

Marty Peretz expects little good will come out of the president’s trip to Israel.

Last week President Obama announced he will finally visit Israel. But there’s no guarantee that it will be a pleasant trip. And it certainly will not be if he lectures the Israelis yet again about what they owe the Palestinians. After all, the Arabs of Palestine could have had, like the Jews, a state pursuant to the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan (which sanctioned for the Arabs a bigger state than the Jewish one that was  offered) and then again after the 1967 Six-Day War. Instead the Arab League responded to Israeli peace overtures with the Khartoum declaration of the “three nos” of the Arab Solidarity Charter: “no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it.”

Comparisons will inevitably be drawn between Obama’s 2009 trip to Cairo and his impending one to Jerusalem. His fanciful Cairo speech—delivered with no evident recognition that each and every one of the Arab countries was at that moment on the precipice of chaos—was a shoddy and slippery job, historically so misleading on so many matters that one can hardly attribute it to innocent error. Granted, some of this had to do with the president’s own ignorant romanticization of Islam and the Arabs. Some of it was sheer invention, like his treatment of U.S. diplomacy during the late-18th- and early-19th-century Barbary Wars as a prelude to a long-term peace between Muslim principalities and America and his taking on for the American people sins against Muslims, like prohibiting the wearing of the hijab, which are actually not issues in the U.S. Largely, the speech could have been not an oration but an indictment of the United State before the International Court of Justice. Does the Internal Revenue Service really discriminate against Islamic charities, as he claimed?

It is not even four years since Obama’s counterhistoric discourse. But already two years back, with the beginning of the dreamily named Arab Spring, his version and vision of these societies had degraded into real human and social wreckage. Of course, the happy chimera still holds as a liberal canonical truth. …

Even the NY Times is throwing up over the president’s $500,000 sale of access. Jonathan Tobin has the story. 

To say that Barack Obama has never practiced what he preached about campaign finance reform is the understatement of the century. The president rode to office and then was re-elected with the help of a massive influx of private cash, all the while saying that money was the root of all political evil. He routinely denounces the wealthy and the influence of big business while taking their money and selling access to the White House to the same Wall Street moguls to whom he accuses Republicans of being in thrall.

Even when practiced at such Olympian levels, hypocrisy is not against the law. Thus the news that a new pro-Obama 501(c)(4), organized by the rump of the Obama re-election campaign, is gearing up to not only advocate for the president’s policies but to reward donors with access to the White House and the president himself is not so much a question of legality but a matter of setting a new low in ethical standards. As even the New York Times noted in an article published this weekend, the access sale being conducted by the president’s Organizing for Action group crosses a line that most groups that similarly label themselves as educational rather than political don’t:

“Giving or raising $500,000 or more puts donors on a national advisory board for Mr. Obama’s group and the privilege of attending quarterly meetings with the president, along with other meetings at the White House. Moreover, the new cash demands on Mr. Obama’s top donors and bundlers come as many of them are angling for appointments to administration jobs or ambassadorships. …

Many traditional advocacy organizations, including the Sierra Club and the National Rifle Association, are set up as social welfare groups, or 501(c)(4)’s in tax parlance. But unlike those groups, Organizing for Action appears to be an extension of the administration, stocked with alumni of Mr. Obama’s White House and campaign teams and devoted solely to the president’s second-term agenda.” …

More on this from Ed Morrissey.

… Clearly, the White House and President Obama object to having the wealthy influence elections with their cash. When it comes to influencing the government, however, that’s a different story. The New York Times’ Nick Confessore reported over the weekend that Obama’s former presidential campaign-turned-activist group, Organizing for America (OFA), has begun a fundraising drive and wants to attract big donors. And it has something to sell — access to the president and seats on an advisory panel.

Half of the funding for OFA is expected to come from wealthy donors, each pledging to raise and/or donate $500,000 to kick into the tax-exempt “social welfare group.” Obama’s aides will appear at fundraising events for OFA, which should raise eyebrows on its own. But the benefit of the big-ticket donations should drop jaws as well as raise eyebrows:

“Giving or raising $500,000 or more puts donors on a national advisory board for Mr. Obama’s group and the privilege of attending quarterly meetings with the president, along with other meetings at the White House,” Confessore reports. “Moreover, the new cash demands on Mr. Obama’s top donors and bundlers come as many of them are angling for appointments to administration jobs or ambassadorships.”

There is nothing new about selling ambassadorships, not in this administration or that of any American president in recent memory. Ambassadorships have long been a perk for donors and cronies, especially to countries with lower strategic value. The outright sale of seats for meetings at the White House is something very new, however, and amounts to a form of simony at the Church of Hope and Change. …

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Rich Karlgaard, publisher of Forbes, was in the Journal with concerns about whether Wal-Mart’s February numbers might indicate the next recession.

• The expiration of the payroll-tax cut will continue to hurt. Wal-Mart’s customers aren’t thriving, and they will sorely miss that $80 lost per month. The average American family of four earns around $50,000 in annual income. The income of Wal-Mart households is thinner yet, with analysts typically pegging it around $45,000. Incomes in this range have stagnated and lost ground to inflation in 2011 and 2012.

• Food prices are rising faster than overall inflation. Inflation is the great hidden tax, especially when it hits essentials like food. Core inflation is running at about 2%, but the U.S. Department of Agriculture predicts that food prices will be up 3%-4% in 2013. This will nip at Wal-Mart customers and Wal-Mart itself, which now gets half of its U.S. revenue from groceries.

Will Wal-Mart eat the inflation and hurt its profit, or will it pass it onto its customers and risk driving them away? Food inflation presents no good choices.

• Gas prices are up 30 cents a gallon in 2013. History says that gas hikes always hurt Wal-Mart (and other big-box stores such as Lowe’s). Back in spring 2011, Wal-Mart’s sales slumped for several months as gas prices rose to nearly $4 a gallon. Here’s an obvious fact that isn’t always obvious to pundits who live in large cities: To get to nearly all of Wal-Mart’s more than 4,000 American stores, one must drive—usually several miles to the edge of town or outer suburb.

• Wal-Mart shoppers have a higher unemployment rate than the national average. An Advertising Age study from 2003 showed that only 23% of Wal-Mart shoppers had a four-year college degree. The degree-less are suffering in today’s economy. As of January, their unemployment rate was 8.1%, while the national average was 7.9%. Worse, the employment-to-population ratio among this group is only 54%, as compared with 62% in the general population.

Robert Samuelson writes on the true national debt.

How big is the national debt?

You’d think this would be an easy question. Surely we know how much the government owes. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. The true national debt could be triple the conventional estimate, anywhere from $11 trillion to $31 trillion by my reckoning. The differences mostly reflect explicit and implicit “off-budget” federal loan guarantees. In another economic downturn, these could result in large losses that would be brought “on budget” and worsen already huge deficits. That’s the danger.

My purpose is not to scare or sensationalize. It’s simply to illuminate the problem. Broadly conceived, the national debt covers all debts for which the federal government assumes final responsibility. For politicians, the appeal of “off-budget” programs is that they allow the pleasure of spending without the pain of taxing. But they also create massive exposure for government.

Let’s see why. …

And Jennifer Rubin on our lack of fiscal leadership.

The president’s hysteria may have reached a point of diminishing returns. His parade of horribles is like his Hollywood friends’ movies — too many catastrophes, too much yelling and zero common sense.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) criticizes the president:

“The President continues to put forward a false choice on the sequester. Today, the President’s Homeland Security Secretary insisted we will have to cut vital homeland security functions if we don’t go along with another tax hike. This is clearly a false choice. There are smarter ways to cut Washington spending that will protect our national security and keep our economy growing. That is why I sponsored, and the House twice passed, legislation to replace the President’s harmful sequester cuts with smarter, more responsible savings. Many of these ideas were drawn from some of the President’s own proposals, which he now rejects unless they’re coupled with more tax hikes”

He is not alone in his frustration with a president egging on panic. The Post editorial board recognizes the nub of the problem: “From the start, and increasingly in his second term, Mr. Obama has presented entitlement reform as something he would do grudgingly, as a favor to the opposition, when he should be explaining to the American people — and to his party — why it is an urgent national need.” …

Joel Kotkin with population growth figures for economic regions.

Since 2000, the Intermountain West’s population has grown by 20%, the ThirdCoast’s by 14%, the long-depopulating Great Plains by over 14%, and the Southeast by 13%. Population in the rest of the U.S. has grown barely 7%. Last year, the largest net recipients of domestic migrants were Texas and Florida, which between them gained 150,000. The biggest losers? New York, New Jersey, Illinois and California.

As a result, the corridors are home to most of America’s fastest-growing big cities, including Charlotte, Raleigh, Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Salt Lake City, Oklahoma City and Denver. Critically for the economic and political future, the growth corridor seems particularly appealing to young families with children.

Cities such as Raleigh, Charlotte, Austin, Dallas and Houston enjoy among the country’s fastest growth rates in the under-15 population. That demographic is on the wane in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco. Immigrants, too, flock to once-unfamiliar places like Nashville, Charlotte and Oklahoma City. Houston and Dallas already have more new immigrants per capita than Boston, Philadelphia, Seattle and Chicago.

Coastal-city boosters suggest that what they lose in numbers they make up for in “quality” migration. “The Feet are moving south and west while the Brains are moving toward coastal cities,” Derek Thompson wrote a few years ago in The Atlantic. Yet over the past decade, the number of people with bachelor’s degrees grew by a remarkable 50% in Austin and Charlotte and by over 30% in Tampa, Houston, Dallas and Atlanta—a far greater percentage growth rate than in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago or New York.

Raleigh, Austin, Denver and Salt Lake City have all become high-tech hubs. Charlotte is now the country’s second-largest financial center. Houston isn’t only the world’s energy capital but also boasts the world’s largest medical center and, along with Dallas, has become a major corporate and global transportation hub.

The corridors’ growing success is a testament to the resiliency and adaptability of the American economy. It also challenges the established coastal states and cities to reconsider their current high-tax, high-regulation climates if they would like to join the growth party.

Peter Wehner has a good example of why The New Yorker magazine is not worth reading anymore. 

In his piece about the Academy Awards, the New Yorker’s David Denby wrote this:

“I can’t give up my feeling that people are approving of their own tears when they respond to “Les Misérables.” After all, Michael Gerson, George Bush’s principal speechwriter, wrote an entire column in the Washington Post about how much he cried at “Les Mis.” But how much did the Bush Administration do for the downtrodden? I can’t think of a better definition of sentimentality—an emotion disconnected from what one actually is and does—than effusions like Gerson’s.”

This is a sneering ignorance. Even a liberal film critic should be familiar with President Bush’s 2003 announcement of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the largest program in history to fight a single disease. The plan included a massive increase in funding–$15 billion over five years–to promote prevention, treatment, and compassionate care, mainly in Africa. Many were skeptical that large-scale AIDS treatment was even possible in the developing world. But studies show that PEPFAR is estimated to have saved 1.2 million lives between 2003-2007. The most recent data show that the number of AIDS-related deaths in sub-Saharan Africa has fallen by about a third. 

“The substantial life expectancy afforded by widespread access to cART [combination antiretroviral therapy] underscores the fact that HIV diagnosis and treatment in resource-limited settings should no longer be considered a death sentence,” according to Dr. Edward Mills, who helped oversee a large-scale analysis of life expectancy outcomes in Africa for HIV patients. “Instead, HIV-infected people should plan and prepare for a long and fulfilling life.”

“PEPFAR is changing the course of the AIDS epidemic,” according to Dr. Peter Piot, former executive director of the Joint United Nations Programm on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS).

The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief was among George W. Bush’s finest hours–and for the record, Michael Gerson was one of the main advocates for PEPFAR in the Bush White House.

It takes a particularly confused and cynical individual to dismiss as “sentimentality” one of the most humane and effective enterprises in our lifetime. PEPFAR is certainly a more unambiguous success, and has saved many more lives, than the War on Poverty.

I can’t think of a better example of moral idiocy–of words disconnected from what reality actually is and what people have done–than columns like Denby’s. 

He should stick to movie reviews.

Andrew Malcolm has late night humor.

Conan: The fifth Die Hard movie was No. 1 at the Box office last weekend. It features Bruce Willis trying to rescue people from a Carnival Cruise.

Letterman: The Academy Awards were on Sunday. ‘Les Miserables’ has so many nominations. It’s a musical about a Carnival Cruise.

Leno: Gas is so expensive even Lindsay Lohan can’t afford to drive anymore. She needs three friends to push her car into somebody else’s …

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Jonathan Tobin writes on the Bob Woodward column featured in Sunday’s Pickings. 

Something interesting happened this weekend in Washington. After weeks of the mainstream media acting as President Obama’s echo chamber when he blamed the impending sequester budget cuts as being solely the fault of the Republicans, an icon of the liberal press finally did what the rest of the capital’s journalists should have been doing all along. The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward has written an op-ed drawing on the research and reporting he compiled when writing his book The Price of Politics. He explains that not only was the sequester the brainchild of the White House and not the GOP, but that in asserting that any deal to avert the draconian cuts it will exact requires new tax increases, the president is making a new unreasonable demand that moves the goalposts of the negotiations. Doing that may be clever politics but it is, contrary to the rhetoric of the Democrats, anything but balanced.

Some in the media have treated the question of who deserves the blame for the sequester as irrelevant or, more to the point, a distraction from the president’s campaign that they support to pressure Republicans to fold and accept more tax increases. But, as Woodward (who supports the president’s liberal line about taxes) points out, determining the origin of the sequester is anything but trivial: …

Dittos says Peter Wehner.

I want to add to what Jonathan wrote about Bob Woodward calling out the White House for misrepresenting its role in sequestration and “moving the goalposts” in order to get its way.

Mr. Woodward is clearly sympathetic to President Obama’s approach; he’s said as much. (“Obama’s call for a balanced approach is reasonable,” Woodward writes, “and he makes a strong case that those in the top income brackets could and should pay more.”) But Woodward has enough integrity as a journalist not to allow a willful distortion to go unchecked and unchallenged.

Many in the elite media–NBC’s Chuck Todd prominently among them—have made a concerted effort to downplay the role of paternity when it comes to the sequestration idea. (Todd declared, “Of all the dumb things Washington does, this ‘who started it’ argument has proven to be one of the dumber ones, especially since we’re so close to the actual cuts going into place.”)

But this is a ludicrous position. Any journalist worth his salt must know that for a president to eviscerate a “brutal” idea that his own White House championed and that the president himself approved of is a big story. And you can be sure Chuck Todd would think so, and treat it as such, if the president was George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan instead of Barack Obama. 

In any event, we only know about the White House’s role because of Woodward’s book The Price of Politics. And now Woodward himself is holding the White House accountable for disfiguring the truth.

I don’t always agree with Mr. Woodward’s judgments, and I’ve expressed those differences publicly. I’m also aware of the fact that it’s fashionable among some, including some conservatives, to disparage Woodward. But the truth is that he’s a monumentally important figure in the history of journalism. His books have genuine historical value. He’s not afraid to take on either Republican or Democratic presidents. And whatever his own political views are, he is first and foremost a reporter, and an awfully good one. Which he’s showed once again, in this most recent dust-up with the White House.

Heather Mac Donald on poverty and guns in Chicago and New York.

President Barack Obama recently went to Chicago to promote his poverty and gun violence initiatives and actually spoke a good deal of truth. “There’s no more important ingredient for success, nothing that would be more important for us reducing violence than strong, stable families, which means we should do more to promote marriage and encourage fatherhood,” he said. Reiterating a line from his State of the Union speech, he observed: “What makes you a man is not the ability to make a child; it’s the courage to raise one.” And though he paid the obligatory tribute to single mothers, he added with remarkable candor: “I wish I had had a father who was around and involved.” 

What Obama didn’t say also came as a relief. In the worst of all possible worlds, he could have trotted out hackneyed poverty and racism themes from the academy—that biased law enforcement and an “epidemic” of incarceration, for example, are harming what would otherwise be law-abiding inner-city communities. Unfortunately, the president’s deputies are pursuing policies informed by such ideas behind the scenes, but at least Obama is not putting the power of the presidential bully pulpit behind them. 

Had Obama left it at that, he would have made an important contribution to public discourse. But though he rightly recognized the distinction between civil society and government (“When a child opens fire on another child, there is a hole in that child’s heart that government can’t fill”), he came to Chicago bristling with big government programs that threaten to cancel out his personal responsibility theme. The administration is promoting an initiative called “Promise Zones,” based on a concept that has been endlessly flogged by liberal foundations: that if we can just form “collaboratives” to coordinate the existing morass of taxpayer-funded social service agencies and programs, we will achieve a breakthrough in the self-defeating behaviors that cause poverty today. The Ford Foundation’s Grey Areas program in New Haven in the 1960s was a progenitor of this idea (and the seedbed for the War on Poverty); more recently the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s New Futures collaborative bombed spectacularly. 

Paradoxically, streamlining social service delivery requires adding yet more agencies to the existing mix: …

James Delingpole of the Telegraph, UK, reflects on the SOTU claims about global warming.

Earlier this week in his State of the Union address President Obama made some observations on climate change so brimming with falsehoods I’m surprised his nose didn’t fall off.

It really doesn’t matter where he himself was deliberately lying or whether he was merely lending the gravitas of his office to the deliberate lies of others. The point is that the President of the USA has access to any number of fact checkers and advisers and if he stands up and addresses the nation with a farrago of complete untruths then the buck stops with him. This dissembling and mendacity becomes all the more culpable when it forms the basis of major public policy decisions which will have a serious impact on people’s lives in the US and beyond.

So why this snake-oil salesman being allowed to get away with it? …

Also in Telegraph, UK, Peter Foster says the endless campaign is getting tiresome.

… It is not even a month since inauguration day, and the ‘don’t blame me’ strategy is already starting to look old. Mr Obama is supposed to be the executive arm of government, but on one level these events simply advertise his own impotence.

The narrative out there is that all this campaigning will lead to a Democrat blitz that re-takes the House in the 2014 mid-term elections, leaving Mr Obama to defy the usual trajectory of second term presidents and end his second term with a wave of legislative achievements.

But for all that fighting talk and 2014 strategy memos flying round the Democrat caucus, when you start doing the electoral math (they need 17 seats and only four lean Democrat) and this Democrat electoral fantasy looks a distant prospect, indeed.

Which leaves us with a blowhard president who doesn’t appear to have a plan, other than protect his own personal, lecture-circuit legacy as an honourable guy, who tried. …

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Jennifer Rubin says Hagel shows contempt for the senate. 

Chuck Hagel and his White House handlers have apparently decided that the best tactic for their bloodied nominee is to stonewall the Senate. We’ve seen that his approval rating is going down over time. Every speech that turns up adds fuel to the fire of his opponents and reveals a man with animosity toward our most reliable ally in the Middle East.

That means that he refuses to supply information on a long list of investments, will not make accessible his speeches in the last five years (e.g. a 2011 speech at Cameron University) and is denying information about the groups and foreign countries supporting him and/or his organizations (e.g. Atlantic Council). As of this writing he hasn’t even responded to Sen. Lindsey Graham’s inquiry as to whether he accused Israel of approaching “apartheid” and called Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu a “radical.”

An aide to a GOP senator tells me, “Hagel told Senator Levin during his nomination hearing that ‘Everything that is out there that we can find we’ll make every effort to get it and provide it.’” That didn’t happen, however. “Hagel’s flip-flop from his pledge to Senator Levin and stonewalling by his White House handlers reflects a not so thinly veiled contempt for the Senate’s advice and consent responsibilities,” the aide says.

Today, for the first time in the Hagel proceedings, the liberal B’nai Brith put out a statement, nearly encouraging the Senate to delay the vote: …

Dan Senor in The Weekly Standard notes the risks of having a defense secretary with the same amount of experience as the president.

In September 1993, Secretary of Defense Les Aspin received a request from the U.S. commander in Somalia for extra tanks, armored vehicles, and AC-130 Spectre gunships to support U.S. operations in Mogadishu. Aspin refused the request. The White House was not involved in the decision. Days later, 18 U.S. soldiers were killed in Mogadishu, some 84 were wounded, two U.S. choppers were shot down, and one pilot was captured. Aspin, who later conceded he had erred in denying the commander’s request, appeared weak when responding to detailed questions during a congressional hearing. His resignation followed less than a year into his hapless tour running the Pentagon.

Myriad concerns have been raised about Chuck Hagel, President Obama’s nominee for defense secretary, including his voting record, impolitic statements, two unremarkable Senate terms, scant management experience, and embarrassing performance at his confirmation hearing last month. Yet Hagel’s defenders dismiss these concerns because, they argue, the important decisions are made at the White House, by the president and his team.

“After all,” said Senate Armed Services Committee member Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), “the president is the one who sets policy.” White House press secretary Jay Carney is similarly sanguine that Hagel “will implement all of the president’s policies with regard to the Defense Department.” Indeed, at last month’s committee hearing Hagel himself said, “I won’t be in a policy-making position.” Fear not, Hagel’s defenders say, Secretary Hagel won’t be given keys to the car.

This view wildly understates the role of America’s most important cabinet officer. Much of a defense secretary’s work is at his own discretion. He is responsible for military budgets and procurement, personnel promotions, public diplomacy, the Pentagon’s relations with defense ministries and militaries around the world, tactical military movements, and most force deployments. When a commander asks for an additional unit or capability—as with Les Aspin in Somalia, with Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates in Iraq and Afghanistan, and even with Leon Panetta in Benghazi—the request lands on the secretary’s desk. And more often than not, it is the secretary, not the president, who makes the call. …

Peter Kirsanow on the prospects of putting in SecDef office a figurative Caligula’s horse.

Chuck Hagel easily proved himself unfit to be secretary of defense during his nomination hearing. Not only was he ignorant of fundamental aspects of the job, but his positions on some of the critical defense issues of the day are preposterous if not dangerous. No one disputes that his performance at the hearing was the worst and most embarrassing of any nominee for any prominent position in memory.

Yet by all reports he will be our next secretary of defense.

Why?

The explanation heard most frequently from senators and pundits alike is a robotic “the president is entitled to his nominee unless there’s some special circumstance.” If this isn’t such a circumstance, what is? How unqualified for a position must someone be before the confirmation process is no longer a rubber stamp?

This nomination, to a position that’s not exactly inconsequential, is an insult. Confirmation of a man so demonstrably unfit for this office is an insult.

This is what the political class thinks of us, that we will accept mediocrity as our due and not complain or even question.

The president should be asked why he couldn’t find anyone better. Senators should be asked whether the traditions of the Senate are more important than the nation’s defense. Unfortunately, they won’t be asked and, if asked, they won’t answer. They’ve got to move on to the latest “crisis” they’ve manufactured. And the press corps is too busy keeping score to tackle substance.

Just because they’re laughing in Tehran, Pyongyang, Moscow, and some hovel in Mali doesn’t mean this nomination is funny.

David Ignatius says the new cabinet will be the president’s.

… Obama has some big problems coming at him in foreign policy, starting with Syria and Iran. Both will require a delicate mix of pressure and diplomacy. To get the balance right, Obama will need a creative policy debate where advisers “think outside the box,” to use the management cliche.

Presidents always say that they want that kind of open debate, and Obama handles it better than most. But by assembling a team where all the top players are going in the same direction, he is perilously close to groupthink.

As bad as Hagel is, he still can’t top Joe Biden according to Seth Mandel.

… Ed Morrissey points out that Biden’s recent exhortation to Americans to buy and fire into the air a double-barrel shotgun for defense was pretty terrible legal advice, as well as counterproductive from a safety standpoint:

Anyone who has gone through a firearms safety course knows this basic rule: Never fire a “warning shot” into the air — especially when it means you have to reload immediately, as you would with two blasts from a double-barreled shotgun; you’ve just effectively disarmed yourself.

But more to the point, it ignores the physics of the ammunition.  What goes up must come down, and when it does, it can kill — and often does….

Morrissey goes on to quote today’s U.S. News and World Report story explaining that “this specific behavior has been the cause of many negligent homicides over the years,” according to a gun-rights activist. It would land the unfortunate soul who took the vice president’s exceedingly unsafe and ill-conceived advice in big legal trouble: “aggravated menacing, a felony, and reckless endangering in the first degree,” according to the story.

Morrissey closes with a fair question:

If Biden doesn’t have the common sense to understand any of the above, let alone all of the above, why should anyone trust his efforts to rewrite gun laws that limit our legal rights to self-defense?

The good news on that front is that Biden would “write” gun legislation about as much as Obama “wrote” health care reform legislation. That is to say, he wouldn’t write a word of it, and probably wouldn’t actually know what’s in it without a neat, one-page talking point summary provided by the same people who have to periodically go before the public and remind people how thoroughly dangerous–and at times, illegal–it is to follow the advice of their vice president.

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Roger Simon posts on Kerry’s first speech. 

I can’t say I was surprised when I read, via a Drudge link, that John Kerry made his first foreign policy speech as secretary of State on the heavyweight scientific subject of climate change (the perils thereof, of course).

But I did have a chuckle, remembering that sometime during or after the 2004 presidential campaign it was revealed that Kerry did even more poorly at Yale than the supposedly dopey George W. Bush. In fact, the former Massachusetts senator received four “Ds” in his freshman year, including one in geology.

Many of us will recall that geology, often known as “Rocks for Jocks,” was the preferred method of fulfilling the college science requirement for those challenged in that area. But a “D” was still pretty disgraceful. I know, having attended Dartmouth and Yale in the same era. (I wasn’t the greatest student, but I was a lot better than Kerry or Bush without a whole lot of effort.)

We can assume that our new Sec’y of State is not a science whiz. Nevertheless, Mr. Kerry is apparently certain that anthropogenic global warming is a great danger to the human race and should be the object of a major international effort.

Why does he think so? Because he assumes the vast majority of scientists say so, I would imagine. And also because that’s what the bien pensant think and there is no one more orthodox in his views than John Kerry. …

More on the Kerry speech from Nile Gardiner. 

Late night host Jay Leno had a good punch line back in November when speculation was mounting that John Kerry might be the next Secretary of Defense. “Apparently this is part of America’s new defense strategy to bore our enemies to death,” quipped Leno. His second joke of the evening was even better: “the economy is so bad, MSNBC had to lay off 300 Obama spokesmen.” His third though was probably the best: “the economy is so bad, President Obama sent Susan Rice out to defend it.” (hat tip: The Daily Slog)

Kerry has ended up in Foggy Bottom instead of the Pentagon, but if President Obama’s plan is to bore America’s allies to death he’s clearly succeeding. The former Senator’s first speech as Secretary of State, delivered earlier today at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, was so excruciating that students were probably pleading to be released. It has to be one of the dullest lectures on record by a senior U.S. official, making Madeleine Albright’s speeches sound like the Gettysburg Address in comparison. Not only was it exceptionally lethargic, it was also full of badly written clichés put together by a speechwriting team that would be better suited to penning obituaries for The New York Times.

Here is a snippet, with the immortal line, “there is no longer anything foreign about foreign policy.” ..

Bob Woodward writes on the sequester lies from the president and Jack Lew.

… White House press secretary Jay Carney shifted position and accepted sequester paternity.

“The sequester was something that was discussed,” Carney said. Walking back the earlier statements, he added carefully, “and as has been reported, it was an idea that the White House put forward.”

This was an acknowledgment that the president and Lew had been wrong.

Why does this matter?

First, months of White House dissembling further eroded any semblance of trust between Obama and congressional Republicans. (The Republicans are by no means blameless and have had their own episodes of denial and bald-faced message management.)

Second, Lew testified during his confirmation hearing that the Republicans would not go along with new revenue in the portion of the deficit-reduction plan that became the sequester. Reinforcing Lew’s point, a senior White House official said Friday, “The sequester was an option we were forced to take because the Republicans would not do tax increases.”

In fact, the final deal reached between Vice President Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in 2011 included an agreement that there would be no tax increases in the sequester in exchange for what the president was insisting on: an agreement that the nation’s debt ceiling would be increased for 18 months, so Obama would not have to go through another such negotiation in 2012, when he was running for reelection.

So when the president asks that a substitute for the sequester include not just spending cuts but also new revenue, he is moving the goal posts. His call for a balanced approach is reasonable, and he makes a strong case that those in the top income brackets could and should pay more. But that was not the deal he made.

Speaking of Jack Lew, Bloomberg columnist Jonathan Weil posts on the stink coming from his Citigroup contract.

Lew was director of the Office of Management and Budget during President Bill Clinton’s administration, after which he worked at New YorkUniversity as an executive and a professor. He joined Citigroup in 2006 as chief operating officer of its global wealth-management division. Lew was recommended by former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who at the time was chairman of Citigroup’s executive committee. (There seems to be an unwritten rule that every Treasury secretary must have deep ties to Rubin.) He became chief operating officer of the bank’s alternative-investments unit in January 2008.

Lew’s employment agreement with Citigroup said his “guaranteed incentive and retention award” wouldn’t be paid if he quit his job, with limited exceptions. One was if he left Citigroup “as a result of your acceptance of a full-time high level position with the United States government or regulatory body.” This applied if he left “prior to the payment of any incentive and retention award for performance year 2008 or thereafter.” Such an award wasn’t guaranteed but would be consistent with the company’s practice, the document said.

A similar provision concerned his stock-based compensation. If Lew left in 2008 or afterward to accept a high-level U.S. government position, all of his outstanding equity awards, including restricted stock, would vest immediately, the document said. Alternatively, Citigroup had the option of paying Lew the cash equivalent of any shares he forfeited upon leaving. The terms didn’t mention other kinds of public-service work, such as a midlevel U.S. government job, a position in municipal or state government, or working at a nonprofit organization such as a university.

Lew stood to receive $250,001 to $500,000 worth of accelerated restricted Citigroup stock when he left the company, according to a disclosure report he filed in January 2009. The same document listed $1.1 million of “salary and discretionary cash comp” from Citigroup. Lew said at last week’s hearing that his salary for 2008 was $350,000.

Lew was named a deputy secretary of State in 2009, Office of Management and Budget director again in 2010, and then became President Barack Obama’s chief of staff in 2012. Now he’s up for Treasury secretary, where he would play a critical role in overseeing the U.S.’s financial industry and rescuing it should another crisis ensue. Citigroup couldn’t have planned this better if it tried, which raises the natural question: Did it try?

When I asked Citigroup what its rationale was for including the government-service exception, a spokeswoman, Danielle Romero-Apsilos, said: “Citi routinely accommodates individuals who wish to leave the firm to pursue a position in government or nonprofit sector.” I pointed out that the contract terms I was asking about didn’t mention anything about a nonprofit, but she declined to elaborate on her statement.

More about Jack Lew’s lewd history from David Harsanyi.

… But there five reasons, at least, why Lew should be disqualified.

One: Lew has no compunction about misleading you.

Lew, a “master” of budgets and all things finance according to the president, has on several occasions lied to the American people to assist the president politically. Not average misrepresentations or partisan evasions, but blatant lies.

When asked on NBC’s “Meet the Press” in early 2012 how many days it had been since Senate Democrats passed a budget — over a thousand days for anyone counting at the time – Lew said this: “One of the things about the United States Senate that I think the American people have realized is that it takes 60, not 50, votes to pass something.”

It doesn’t take 60 votes, as Lew, a man Obama says has “deep and devout faith,” knows well. The 60-vote threshold doesn’t come into play on budgets.

Lew then repeated this contention on CNN’s “State of the Union,” saying: “But we also need to be honest. You can’t pass a budget in the Senate of the United States without 60 votes and you can’t get 60 votes without bipartisan support. So unless Republicans are willing to work with Democrats in the Senate, Harry Reid is not going to be able to get a budget passed.” We need to be honest? If Lew is unable to understand basic procedure he has no business in the cabinet, and if he does comprehend, then Senate has no business confirming a political so willing to mislead the American people to the Treasury.

Two: Lew personally benefited from the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression. …

Here’s something for Oscar night. Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit writes a WSJ OpEd on state film subsidies. 

At the Democratic National Convention last year, actress Eva Longoria called for higher taxes on America’s rich. Her take: “The Eva Longoria who worked at Wendy’s flipping burgers—she needed a tax break. But the Eva Longoria who works on movie sets does not.”

Actually, nowadays an Eva Longoria who flipped burgers would probably qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit and get a check from the government rather than pay taxes. It’s the movie set where she works these days that may well be getting the tax break.

With campaign season over, you’re not likely to hear stars bringing up taxes at this weekend’s Academy Awards show. But the tax man ought to come out and take a bow anyway. Of the nine “Best Picture” nominees in 2012, for example, five were filmed on location in states where the production company received financial incentives, including “The Help” (in Mississippi) and “Moneyball” (in California). Virginia gave $3.5 million to this year’s Oscar-nominated “Lincoln.”

Such state incentives are widespread, and often substantial, but they don’t do much to attract jobs. About $1.5 billion in tax credits and exemptions, grants, waived fees and other financial inducements went to the film industry in 2010, according to data analyzed by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Politicians like to offer this largess because they get photo-ops with celebrities, but the economic payoff is minuscule. GeorgeMasonUniversity’s Adam Thierer has called this “a growing cronyism fiasco” and noted that the number of states involved skyrocketed to 45 in 2009 from five in 2002. …

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Jennifer Rubin posts on a Sunday debate between George Will and Newt Gingrich on the president’s right to an awful defense secretary. Pickerhead thinks it is good to have a clear match between the two. At the beginning of this administration the well qualified Bob Gates was clearly mismatched. Now we can watch as the fools compliment each other. Rubin disagrees.

… we’ve never had a nominee for a top national security post with so many problems in his record, possessing so little acumen and so incapable of responding sensibly to Senate committee members. Usually, if the president has goofed in nominating such a character, he pulls the nomination. This president has not. In such an instance, the obligation to protect the Constitution from enemies, foreign and domestic, falls to the Senate.

The GOP senators need to keep in mind that the phrase is not to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, unless I have to block someone unfit to run the Pentagon.” There is no “comity” exception to their oath, and they risk losing their own standing as defenders of defense by rubber-stamping what Ruth Marcus (on the same roundtable) rightly called an “appalling” performance. (“I was going to go with execrable, but I’ll settle for appalling. It was an appalling performance.”)

Really, why have hearings if you can turn in a performance such as Hagel’s and still get the job?

Melody Petersen, a reporter for the Orange County Register, reveals the details of the capital appreciation notes being issued by CA school districts. Pickings of February 12th led with the story of these frauds with this headline – The NY Times says the spirit of barack obama lives in CA school districts.

In early 2008, residents of Placentia and Yorba Linda approved a $200 million school construction bond after reading those fliers and being assured repeatedly that “their money will be spent wisely.”

What happened instead was that Measure A led to a debt so large and long lasting that it mortgaged the future of their children’s children.

With no public discussion, the school board had hired George K. Baum & Co. and its staff of political strategists to help push the measure through so the district could continue an ambitious building spree.

After the election, the board allowed the bank to sell some of the costliest bonds ever issued by a California public agency. Just one $22 million borrowing from 2011 will cost taxpayers nearly 13 times that amount – $280 million – to repay.

Those bonds, known to Wall Street traders as capital appreciation bonds, are like a loan for which no principal or interest payments are made for 35 years. Interest is charged on a growing pile of unpaid interest, causing the balance to balloon.

“It’s another method of pushing debt to future generations,” said state Treasurer Bill Lockyer, who compares the bonds to “payday loans.”

“I just don’t understand how these board members got away with this,” said Alexandria Coronado, a former member of the Orange County Board of Education. “These people need to be recalled.”

Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified is hardly alone. Bankers from Stone & Youngberg, Piper Jaffray and other firms have traveled all over California in recent years, pushing capital appreciation bonds as a tool to vault over legal debt limits. Hundreds of school districts, including 14 in OrangeCounty, signed up.

But Baum’s deals stand out. According to an analysis of data from the state treasurer’s office, Baum has issued more than 60 capital appreciation bonds for California school districts since 2007, including the single most expensive such loan. That debt – $283,612 borrowed by San BernardinoCounty’s Rim of the World – will cost future taxpayers 23 times the principal. …

… “Who borrows money thinking you don’t have to even begin to pay interest for 20 years?” asked Kevin Graves of LakeArrowhead, whose two children graduated from Rim of the World. “The board members knew what they were doing. They did it because there were no consequences.”

The story of how Baum pushed California schools into complex bond deals that charged payments to future taxpayers is one of naïve public officials, sophisticated financiers, and laws, rules and guidelines ignored: …

 

… They designed capital appreciation bonds so the district could receive funds but pay nothing until 2031. Most of the money – both principal and interest – is not due until the six-year period ending in 2049 – 38 years after the bonds were sold.

Capital appreciation bonds, or CABs, have been used in government financing for decades. Experts say they can be useful in cases where a government expects sharply higher revenues in the future, but needs money upfront to build a project. For example, a school district in a fast-growing community where large tracts of homes are planned might use such debt to build a school.

But recently, investment banks have promoted these delayed-payment bonds to California schools that do not expect such a homebuilding boom. Executives have told school officials that they need not worry about the higher debt payments in the future. They predict that real estate values will appreciate faster in the future, keeping tax rates from escalating.

“Long-term CABs help a school district better manage its annual tax by shifting debt payments to future years when assessed values are likely to be higher,” advises Stone & Youngberg, a San Francisco investment bank, in an online guide for California schools.

At the same time, Wall Street analysts have been promoting these bonds to investors.

In June 2011, Vikram Rai, an analyst at Citigroup, advised the bank’s clients to invest in capital appreciation bonds issued by California schools because of their high interest rate. Rai said last fall that the bonds were so attractive that even foreign investors were buying them.

The result of Wall Street’s promotion: an increasing demand and supply of the bonds that have benefited banks and investors while costing future Californians billions. …

Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.

Letterman: The Westminster Dog Show was in town this week. Very exciting. The winning dog got a blue ribbon and a toilet full of champagne.

Leno: When you think about it, Tiger Woods and President Obama have something in common. Both got in trouble because of their stimulus package. 

Letterman: Show of hands, everyone. How many of you watched President Obama’s State of the Union speech just for the commercials?

Leno: President Obama visited a pre-school in Georgia the other day. And all the kids had the same question, “Shouldn’t you be working?”

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Outside Magazine with the story on The HMS Bounty replica that sank during hurricane Sandy. This is long, so instead of learning about fools in DC, we concentrate on other fools. When foolish on the water, you get to pay for it quickly. When foolish in DC, it takes longer to create a disaster

On the night of Sunday, October 28, 2012, Coast Guard lieutenant Wes McIntosh and the crew of his C-130 transport plane were holed up in a hotel room at North Carolina’s Raleigh-DurhamAirport. They’d been relocated there the day before, after winds from Hurricane Sandy had forced runway closings at their base in ElizabethCity. The seven-man flight crew congregated around the TV, flipping between Sunday Night Football and the Weather Channel.

It was nine o’clock, and the Denver Broncos had just taken the lead over the New Orleans Saints when McIntosh’s phone rang: the Coast Guard’s North Carolina Sector Field Office—the regional command center in Wilmington—had received a distress email from Tracie Simonin, director of the HMS Bounty Organization. The 180-foot, three-masted ship, a replica of the famous 18th-century vessel, had lost power and was taking on water somewhere near Hatteras Canyon, a treacherous section of the Atlantic roughly 90 miles southeast of the Outer Banks.

No one knew the ship’s exact position or what kind of shape it—or its 16-member crew—was in. Since the captain’s initial email to Simonin at 8:45, the ship’s onboard electronics had failed, and communication was possible only by hand radio, the range of which is limited to line of sight. Storm conditions had intensified beyond the capabilities of the Coast Guard’s cutters and even its Jayhawk helicopters, so the Sector Field Office issued an urgent marine bulletin requesting Samaritan assistance from the handful of vessels still in the region. Only the Torm Rosetta, a 30,000-ton Danish oil tanker, was in hailing range. But it reported back that conditions were too dangerous to respond.

As far as hurricanes go, Sandy was not particularly powerful—on the weekend of October 28, it was fluctuating between hurricane and tropical-storm status—but it made up for that in size and complexity. Sandy would ultimately cover 1.8 million square miles and take on characteristics of what meteorologists call a hybrid storm: in this case, part hurricane, part nor’easter. The Bounty’s last known position—about 100 miles off Cape Fear around noon—put the vessel right in the worst of it, with winds at 60 knots and pelting rain severe enough to render even a large wooden ship invisible on radar. Sending the C-130 was risky, but Coast Guard officials hoped McIntosh could get close enough to establish communication and assess the situation. Once weather conditions allowed, rescue choppers could fly out from ElizabethCity if need be.

The plane took off from Raleigh around 11 p.m. Before long its anti-icing system failed, forcing McIntosh to fly below 7,000 feet. Then the weather radar malfunctioned. McIntosh and his co-pilot, Mike Myers, were now flying using visual flight rules in zero-visibility conditions. Wearing night-vision goggles to help them pick through layers of clouds, they descended to 1,000 feet. Then to 500 feet—right into the brunt of the storm.

By now it was just after midnight. While McIntosh struggled to steer, Myers searched for the Bounty. “I kept asking Mike, ‘What do you see? What do you see?’” McIntosh recalls. Finally, Myers shot back, “I see a giant pirate ship in the middle of a hurricane.”

The plane initiated a sharp circle so the flight crew could get a better look. The Bounty was listing at a 45-degree angle, its starboard side all but submerged. Waves the size of two-story houses crashed over the hull. …

 

…As the drama of the Bounty’s final hours unfolded on CNN and the Weather Channel, seamen and landlubbers alike were asking the same question: what was a square-rigged ship doing in the middle of a hurricane—a storm that had been forecast for days? Sailors pointed fingers at the captain, Robin Walbridge, insisting that his poor judgment and bravado were to blame. It’s true that Walbridge had tempted fate before. In each instance, some combination of skill and luck had returned the ship home safely.

But the full answer to why the Bounty sank was much more complex than a captain’s rash decision. It was a story decades in the making, a veritable opera of near misses and fantastic schemes involving a dogged captain, a fiercely loyal crew, and an owner who was looking to sell. And in the ship’s last act, an unlikely new character had emerged: a young woman with Down syndrome who, perhaps inconceivably, held the key to the Bounty’s future. …

 

… Keeping a tall ship up to snuff takes a very deep pocketbook, for everything from repairing wooden hulls and canvas sails to maintaining the generators, engines, and navigation systems hidden inside the ships’ historical exteriors. Hansen declined requests for interviews, but one thing is certain: the Bounty proved burdensome from the start. Before he bought it, Coast Guard inspectors estimated it was taking on 20 to 40 gallons of water a minute. Its brokers say it was more like 30,000 gallons an hour—enough to fill an Olympic-size swimming pool every day. When the bilge pumps failed in September 2001, it took the entire Fall River Fire Department, under the supervision of the Coast Guard, to save the ship. Hansen towed it to Boothbay Harbor, Maine, where it underwent the first of three overhauls, none of them substantial enough to receive Coast Guard classification as a passenger vessel.

And so, as Daniel Parrott, a captain and the author of the 2004 book Tall Ships Down, explained to me, the Bounty operated on the fringe of the tall-ship world, a kind of counter-culture in which vessels try to eke out a profit as what the Coast Guard classifies as moored attractions vessels, which in most cases are prohibited from carrying passengers unless they enlist as crew. The Bounty starred as a merchant ship in two Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Its website advertised sail-training and summer-camp programs, though it was classified to do neither. And according to one former crew member, it sometimes did take on volunteer passengers, including youth groups and corporate teams.

But mostly, Walbridge and his crew made do with what little income the ship fetched through $10-a-head tours, stopping in about 25 ports in the Great Lakes and along the Eastern seaboard each summer—with occasional trips to the West Coast and Europe—then wintering in Florida, Texas, or Puerto Rico. Sometimes, one of the crew told me, they had to use cash from the day’s till to buy groceries. Another crew member, Doug Faunt, said that it was not uncommon for the Bounty to have to wait to dock until more money had been freed up on the ship’s credit card. …

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Michael Barone on the “gangster government.”

… There are other examples. For several years the Obama administration has refused to obey a law requiring the president’s budget to be submitted on a certain date. As budget director, Treasury nominee Jack Lew refused to obey the law requiring him to issue a report in response to the trustees’ report on Medicare.

During the 2012 campaign the Pentagon told defense contractors not to inform employees that they may be laid off if the sequester took effect as required by the WARN Act.

They were even told that the government would pay any fines for not complying. What law authorizes that?

Similarly, the Department of Health and Human Services has stated that the federal government can fund health insurance exchanges run by the feds for states that refuse to create their own exchanges. But nowhere does the Democrats’ hastily crafted Obamacare legislation say that.

In spring 2009 we got our first glimmers of this modus operandi. In arranging the Chrysler bankruptcy administration, officials brushed aside the rights of secured creditors in order to pay off the United Auto Workers.

University of Pennsylvania law professor David Skeel pointed out that this violated the standard rules of bankruptcy law established, interestingly, during the New Deal.

“We have just seen an episode of gangster government,” I wrote at the time. “It is likely to be a continuing series.”

It looks like that’s one prediction I got right. This president, like all his predecessors since Woodrow Wilson started delivering these speeches in person, looks magnificent in the temple where laws are made. But he doesn’t seem to consider himself bound by them.

John Fund writes on someone who would not run a gangster government – Dr. Ben Carson.

Dr. Ben Carson, a renowned pediatric neurosurgeon who helped lead the first surgery separating twins joined at the head, has received a fair amount of attention in his 61 years. But none of it before begins to compare to the response he has gotten since he spoke at the February 7 National Prayer Breakfast with President Obama sitting five feet away.

While most of his remarks were motivational or spiritual, he made some pointed political comments about the need for freer markets in health care and a less complicated tax code that includes a flat tax. He also issued a warning that the U.S. was in danger of following the path of ancient Rome’s “moral decay and fiscal irresponsibility.”

“The response has been overwhelming,” Carson told me in an interview this week from his office at JohnsHopkinsUniversity in Baltimore. He had just come from taping an hour-long panel discussion with opinion leaders that will air on Fox News tonight at 9 p.m. He can’t count how many people have urged him to run for office in the past week. The Wall Street Journal editorial page even ran a headline, “Ben Carson for President.”

But as much as he appreciates the media attention to his message, he says the “most touching responses to my speech have come from elderly Americans, who told me they had given up on our nation, and now they feel that maybe there’s a chance.”  Carson insists that he’s a member of no political party. “If I were part of one, it would be called the ‘Logic party,’ and it would be dedicated to commonsense approaches we all should be able to see.” Among them would be “recognizing that our debt is so great we have got to stop digging the hole and spend less.”

As for health care, he says it’s imperative not to further damage the doctor-patient relationship. “The key is to cut out the middleman and empower both doctor and patient with information about what things cost,” he tells me. …

Jack Kelly has more about Dr. Carson.

The longest 27 minutes of Barack Obama’s presidency may have come at the National Prayer Breakfast Feb. 7 as he listened to Benjamin Carson’s keynote address, thinks John Giokaris of Policymic.com.

Without saying a word critical of the president, Dr. Carson eviscerated the core assumptions of the Obama administration. He spoke eloquently about individual responsibility, the consequences of moral decay and soaring debt, the sinfulness of class envy and the pernicious effects of political correctness.

“From the look on his face, it was obvious Obama was none too pleased,” said columnist David Limbaugh.

It must have been especially galling to have his premises challenged by an African-American of such sterling character and profound accomplishment.

Ben Carson was reared in inner-city Detroit by a mother who made time to parent despite working 18-hour days. She restricted her sons’ TV watching, wouldn’t let them play outside until they’d done their homework, required them to read two books a week. …

Joel Kotkin says blue states have doubled down on their suicide strategy.

Whatever President Obama proposes in his State of the Union for the economy, it is likely to fall victim to the predictable Washington gridlock. But a far more significant economic policy debate in America is taking place among the states, and the likely outcome may determine the country’s course in the post-Obama era.

On one side are the blue states, who believe that higher taxes are not only just, but also the road to stronger economic growth. This is somewhat ironic, since, as we pointed out earlier, higher taxes on the “rich” would seem to hurt their economies more, given their high concentration of high-income earners. However, showing themselves to be gluttons for punishment, many of these states have decided to double down on high taxes, raising their rates to unprecedented levels.

This cascade of higher income taxes started in 2011 when Illinois, arguably the big state with the weakest economy, and the lowest bond ratings, raised income taxes by 66% and business taxes by 46%. Over the past year several other Democratic state governments have pushed through income tax increases, notably California, which raised the tax rate on people with annual income over $1 million to 13.3%, the highest in the nation. And now it appears that Massachusetts and Minnesota are about to raise their taxes as well.

This is happening at the same time that some red states — notably Kansas and Louisiana — are looking at lowering income tax rates by shifting to rely more on consumption or sales tax revenues. Some red states don’t have income taxes — notably Florida, Texas and Tennessee — and most of those who do are holding the line. Red state leaders, most notably Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, are placing their bets on  expanding their economies, which would create new taxpayers, boost consumer spending and expand collections of sales taxes.

The contrast with the blue states — not so much those who voted for Obama, but those controlled totally by Democrats — could not be clearer. They appear to have chosen an economic path that essentially penalizes their own middle and upper-middle class residents, believing that keeping up public spending, including on public employee pensions, represents the best way to boost their economy.

Yet the gambit of raising state income taxes could not be coming at a worse time. …

Naomi Schaefer Riley, ever willing to challenge accepted thinking, has topped herself by suggesting the college essay on entrance applications is turning kids into narcissists like the president.

… The common application, which is now accepted by more than 500 colleges, is the best example of how the admissions process has become an exercise in encouraging 17-year-olds’ narcissism. Also new this year, rising high-school seniors will be allotted 650 words in which to indulge themselves. Was that because the 500 they have been given previously just didn’t do these topics justice?

The college essay as absurdist self-reflection isn’t new. When I applied to MiddleburyCollege some two decades ago, I was asked to answer the question: “What’s the worst advice you’ve ever received?”

Alas, this was no passing fad. “Many people involved in the admissions enterprise believe — or want to believe — that personal essays are essential,” Eric Hoover of the Chronicle of Higher Education wrote in a blog post after interviewing a number of admissions officers. “As long as students are free to write autobiographical vignettes and creative riffs on quirky topics, then nobody can say the process is just about numbers, which it often is.”

Well, often it’s not. More and more colleges are dropping the SAT requirement. Measures of every sort of diversity — race, geography, religion, sexual orientation — compete with grade-point averages.

It’s discouraging enough that colleges have increasingly discounted hard measures in favor of essays, which are often “edited” by the adults in their lives. Hoover interviewed Danya Berry, a member of the common application’s panel of counselors, who said the essay requirements are a way to measure writing skills: “If you can’t write a succinct, five-paragraph essay, you’re not going to succeed in college.”

Fair enough. Yet the essays themselves don’t ask college students to do the least bit of critical thinking. They are merely exercises in what Twitter users label #humblebrags.

Of course, this generation of social-media-savvy teens already excels at trying to show how each moment of their lives is filled with significance. There is no need to encourage it. How about asking applicants about a favorite author? Sure, it’s possible it will become an exercise in how reading “Old Yeller” (does anyone read that anymore?) reminded you of the death of your pet turtle. But it’s also possible that it will make you offer some insights beyond your own, no doubt fascinating, autobiography. …

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Mark Steyn writes on the state of the union address and its magical fairyland budgeting.

“I’m also issuing a new goal for America,” declared President Obama at his “State of the Union” on Tuesday. We’ll come to the particular “goal” he “issued” momentarily, but before we do, consider that formulation: Did you know the president of the United States is now in the business of “issuing goals” for his subjects to live up to?

Strange how the monarchical urge persists even in a republic two-and-a-third centuries old. …

… But the president’s sonorous, gaseous banalities did serve notice that the Republicans don’t want to get too far behind on his “goals.” He’s right that Washington “moves forward” like a pantomime horse lurching awkwardly across the stage and with the Republicans always playing the rear end. A “bipartisan” agreement means that the Democrats get what they want now and Republicans at some distant far-off date. Try it: New taxes and government programs now, alleged deficit reduction of $2.5 trillion a decade hence. Illegal immigrant amnesty now, alleged rigorous border enforcement the day after tomorrow. Washington has settled into a comfortable pattern: instant gratification for spending binges that do nothing for any of the problems they purport to be solving, assuaged by meaningless commitments to start the 12-step program next year, or next decade or next century. No other big spender among the advanced democracies lies to itself about the gulf between its appetites and its self-discipline.

“Tonight, let’s declare,” declared the president, “that in the wealthiest nation on Earth…” Whoa, hold it right there. The “wealthiest nation on Earth” is actually the Brokest Nation in History. But don’t worry: “Nothing I’m proposing tonight should increase our deficit by a single dime.”

“Should”? Consciously or not, the president is telling us his State of the Union show is a crock, and he knows it. Under Magical Fairyland budgeting, Obama-sized government “shouldn’t” increase our debt. Yet, mysteriously it does. Every time. Because, in a political culture institutionally incapable of course correction, that’s just the way it is.

Jennifer Rubin follows the scent of the idea Chuck Hagel was nominated out of spite.

The notion that the Senate owes some deference to the president with regard to nominees is qualified by two considerations. First, the advice and consent requirement of the Constitution must mean something, for otherwise the president could simply appoint whomever he wanted. And second, the deference assumes the president in good faith believes his nominee is the best person for the job. However, when the latter is admittedly not the case then no deference is owed. Indeed, there is an obligation to block an unqualified nominee.

The liberals and uninformed mainstream reporters (but I repeat myself) have gotten into the habit of calling the hold-up in Chuck Hagel’s confirmation unprecedented. That is factually wrong.

But what is unprecedented is to appoint a high national security official because the president is peeved about someone else. Politico reports:

“The president feels personally invested in the nomination of Hagel. The Nebraska Republican is one of the few politicians he’s truly friendly with, and Obama plans to see the fight through, barring some major unforeseen development. Democrats close to the White House say the typically cool-headed Obama has expressed flashes of real anger at what he sees as a politically motivated GOP fishing expedition that already netted his first choice for secretary of state — U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice. …

… Obama — ticked off by Rice’s treatment and still emboldened by his convincing victory over Mitt Romney — courted confrontation when he tapped Hagel. …”

If true, this is outlandish. The president would imperil national security out of spite? The lions may be lying down with lambs today, but on this Jonathan Chait is dead on: “I would argue that, if you’re really upset at the unfair attacks on Susan Rice, then nominate Susan Rice. Picking a fight on some other candidate is a pretty strange way of defending Susan Rice’s reputation.” …

WSJ Editors opine on the president’s war against young blacks. It is beyond understanding how anyone can assign to this little man any great amount of intelligence. Raising the minimum wage will directly hurt the employment prospects of black teens, yet this preening tool of the unions proposes just such a thing.

… The damage from a minimum wage hike depends on the overall labor market. If the job market is buoyant, as it is in the fracking boomtown of Williston, N.D., fast-food workers may already make more than $9 an hour. But when the jobless rate is high, as it still is in California and New York, the increase punishes minority youth in particular.

That is what happened during the last series of wage hikes to $7.25 from $5.15 that started in July 2007 as the economy was headed toward recession. The last increase hit in July 2009 just after the recession ended, and as the nearby chart shows, the jobless rate jumped for teens and black teens especially. For black teens, the rate has remained close to 40% and was still 37.8% in January.

A study by economists William Even of MiamiUniversity and David Macpherson of TrinityUniversity concludes that in the 21 states where the full 40% wage increase took effect, “the consequences of the minimum wage for black young adults without a diploma were actually worse than the consequences of the Great Recession.”

William Dunkelberg, chief economist for the National Federation of Independent Business, says that after the July 2009 increase 600,000 teen jobs disappeared in the next six months even as GDP expanded. In the previous six months, when the economy was still shrinking, half as many teen jobs were lost. The overall teen jobless rate was still 23.4% last month, which means demand for unskilled workers is low even at $7.25 an hour. Demand will be lower at $9.

Mr. Obama’s economists know all this, but then the minimum wage has nothing to do with poverty or unemployment. It’s a political play to reward unions and box in Republicans. The minimum wage polls well because Americans naturally want everyone to make more money, and the damage in forgone jobs isn’t obvious.

It’d be nice to think that some Republicans, even one, would make the moral case that the minimum wage hurts the poorest workers. But both Presidents Bush, 41 and 43, went along with increases and so did the Newt Gingrich Congress in 1996. Mr. Obama knows that history. Republicans may fold again to take the issue off the table in 2014, but it’s a tragedy that those who will suffer the most are Mr. Obama’s most ardent supporters.

The Financial Times reports on changes to an English town where Amazon now occupies a warehouse the size of ‘nine football pitches.’

Between a sooty power station and a brown canal on the edge of a small English town, there is a building that seems as if it should be somewhere else. An enormous long blue box, it looks like a smear of summer sky on the damp industrial landscape.

Inside, hundreds of people in orange vests are pushing trolleys around a space the size of nine football pitches, glancing down at the screens of their handheld satnav computers for directions on where to walk next and what to pick up when they get there. They do not dawdle – the devices in their hands are also measuring their productivity in real time. They might each walk between seven and 15 miles today. It is almost Christmas and the people working in this building, together with those in seven others like it across the country, are dispatching a truck filled with parcels every three minutes or so. Before they can go home at the end of their eight-hour shift, or go to the canteen for their 30-minute break, they must walk through a set of airport-style security scanners to prove they are not stealing anything. They also walk past a life-sized cardboard image of a cheery blonde woman in an orange vest. “This is the best job I have ever had!” says a speech bubble near her head.

If you could slice the world in half right here, you could read the history of this town called Rugeley in the layers. Below the ground are the shafts and tunnels of the coal mine that fed the power station and was once the local economy’s beating heart. Above the ground are the trolleys and computers of Amazon, the global online retailer that has taken its place.

As online shopping explodes in Britain, helping to push traditional retailers such as HMV out of business, more and more jobs are moving from high-street shops into warehouses like this one. Under pressure from politicians and the public over its tax arrangements, Amazon has tried to stress how many jobs it is creating across the country at a time of economic malaise. The undisputed behemoth of the online retail world has invested more than £1bn in its UK operations and announced last year that it would open another three warehouses over the next two years and create 2,000 more permanent jobs. Amazon even had a quote from David Cameron, the prime minister, in its September press release. “This is great news, not only for those individuals who will find work, but for the UK economy,” he said.

People in Rugeley, Staffordshire, felt exactly the same way in the summer of 2011 when they heard Amazon was going to occupy the empty blue warehouse on the site of the old coal mine. It seemed like this was the town’s chance to reinvent itself after decades of economic decline. But as they have had a taste of its “jobs of the future”, their excitement has died down. Most people are still glad Amazon has come, believing that any sort of work is better than no work at all, but many have been taken aback by the conditions and bitterly disappointed by the insecurity of much of the employment on offer. …

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The drone war is defended by Charles Krauthammer.

… In war, the ultimate authority is always the commander in chief and those in the lawful chain of command to whom he has delegated such authority.

This looks troubling. Obama sitting alone in the Oval Office deciding which individuals to kill. But how is that different from Lyndon Johnson sitting in his office choosing bombing targets in North Vietnam?

Moreover, we firebombed entire cities in World War II. Who chose? Commanders under the ultimate authority of the president. No judicial review, no outside legislative committee, no secret court, no authority above the president.

Okay, you say. But today’s war is entirely different: no front line, no end in sight.

So what? It’s the jihadists who decided to make the world a battlefield and to wage war in perpetuity. Until they abandon the field, what choice do we have but to carry the fight to them?

We have our principles and precedents for lawful warmaking, and a growing body of case law for the more vexing complexities of the present war — for example, the treatment of suspected terrorists apprehended on U.S. soil. The courts having granted them varying degrees of habeas corpus protection, it is clear that termination by drone (a measure far more severe than detention) would be forbidden — unless Congress and the courts decide otherwise, which, short of a Taliban invasion from New Brunswick, is inconceivable.

Now, for those who believe that the war on terror is not war but law enforcement, (a) I concede that they will find the foregoing analysis to be useless and (b) I assert that they are living on a different and distant planet.

For us earthlings, on the other hand, the case for Obama’s drone war is strong. Pity that his Justice Department couldn’t make it.

Megan McArdle suggests ways to think about the minimum wage.

It’s easy to see why Barack Obama wants to raise the minimum wage.  It’s popular with his base.  It’s popular with unions, who dislike competition with low-wage labor.  And it doesn’t cost the government anything except the cost of printing some new posters telling people what the minimum wage is.  

But is it a good policy idea?  

The three main considerations are the same as for any economic policy: who does it help?  Who does it hurt?  And what is the effect on growth?  

It’s obvious who benefits from a higher minimum wage: people who get minimum wage jobs.  In theory, it may also boost the incomes of people who are making near the minimum wage, as employers raise those wages to ensure that these are “better than minimum wage jobs”—though in this labor market, I wouldn’t bet on it.  

But who are the people in minimum wage jobs?  This is primarily being sold as a poverty-fighting tool, so it would help to know how many of the people making it are poor.  

The answer seems to be no; most of the people making the minimum wage are not living in households below the poverty line.  Over half the people earning minimum wage are below the age of 25; for them, this is not likely to be a permanent condition, but a first rung on the income ladder. Many are students or entry level workers who are part of established households with higher earners.  

Older minimum wage workers are probably more likely to be poor, but on average, they’re not.  To be sure, they’re unlikely to be wealthy–this workforce will be predominantly drawn from near-poor and lower-middle-class households.  Undoubtedly, they have uses for the extra money.  But it will not specifically lift people out of poverty, because most of the people earning minimum wage aren’t in poverty now.  

That’s who it helps.  Who does it hurt?

Ironically, minimum wage workers. …

New York’s Grand Central Station turned 100 last week. John Steele Gordon celebrates.

One hundred years ago this week, the largest railroad station in the world officially opened for business after 10 years of construction. Today, Grand Central Terminal serves upward of 500,000 people a day and is, without doubt, the most famous railroad station on the planet.

It has been the setting for history. Winston Churchill spoke there shortly after Pearl Harbor. Six thousand people once turned out to see a former president of the New York Stock Exchange, convicted of embezzlement, board a train headed to Sing Sing Prison. Countless movies (“North by Northwest” and “Superman” are two of the most famous) have been shot there.

And it all began with a disaster. In January 1902, an engineer, blinded by the smoke from coal-burning locomotives in the tunnel under Park Avenue, slammed into a train ahead of him and 15 people died. The state decreed that steam-powered locomotives would be banned from Manhattan no later than July 1, 1908, and so the New York Central Railroad had to do something.

While many in the railroad’s management saw only a great expense, the chief engineer, William Wilgus, thought large and saw a great commercial opportunity.

While they party up above, a huge cavern that Grand Central Station would fit inside, has been dug 16 stories below Grand Central.  Daily Mail, UK has the story of the huge underground multi-level station that will tie together Long Island Railroad trains, the new 2nd Avenue Subway on the East side of Manhattan, and the new line that will run west to the Hudson River from Grand Central.

Buried 16 stories beneath Grand Central Terminal a new commuter rail is being blasted and tunneled out of solid bedrock as part of an audacious $15 billion development that will span 14 miles throughout the city.

The grand concourse, seen at a massive eight stories high surrounded by dripping stone walls and lapping puddles, will provide more floor space than New Orleans’ Superdome stadium when finished.

It is just one of three monumental projects underway beneath New York City’s streets to expand what’s already the nation’s biggest mass transit system transporting 5 million riders a day.

But even with blasting and machinery grinding through the rock day and night, most New Yorkers are blithely unaware of the construction or the eerie underworld that includes a 160-foot cavern, miles of tunnels and watery, gravel-filled pits. …

… Together, the three projects will cost an estimated $15 billion.

And when they’re all completed, estimated for 2019, they will bring subway and commuter rail service to vast, underserved stretches of the city, particularly the far East and West sides of Manhattan.

‘They’ll be a game-changer for New Yorkers,’ says Horodniceanu. …