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Here’s something good; Bloomberg News reports the radiation dangers from the Fukushima explosions have proven to be less deadly than expected.

It is two years since Japan’s 9.0- magnitude earthquake, one so powerful it shifted the position of the Earth’s figure axis by as much as 6 inches and moved Honshu, Japan’s main island, 8 feet eastward. The tsunami generated by the earthquake obliterated towns, drowned almost 20,000 people and left more than 300,000 homeless. Everyone living within 15 miles of Fukushima was evacuated; many are still in temporary housing. Some will never be able to return home.

More than 300,000 buildings were destroyed and another million damaged, including four reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on the northeast coast. The earthquake caused the immediate shutdown of this and three other nuclear-power facilities. …

… And what of the lasting threat from radiation? Remarkably, outside the immediate area of Fukushima, this is hardly a problem at all. Although the crippled nuclear reactors themselves still pose a danger, no one, including personnel who worked in the buildings, died from radiation exposure. Most experts agree that future health risks from the released radiation, notably radioactive iodine-131 and cesiums-134 and – 137, are extremely small and likely to be undetectable.

Even considering the upper boundary of estimated effects, there is unlikely to be any detectable increase in cancers in Japan, Asia or the world except close to the facility, according to a World Health Organization report. There will almost certainly be no increase in birth defects or genetic abnormalities from radiation.

Even in the most contaminated areas, any increase in cancer risk will be small. …

Bloomberg had the good news, The Independent, UK with some of the bad.

Britain’s health system could slip back by 200 years unless the “catastrophic threat” of antibiotic resistance is successfully tackled, the Government’s Chief Medical Officer warns today.

In her first annual report, Dame Sally Davies says the problem of microbes becoming increasingly resistant to the most powerful drugs should be ranked alongside terrorism and climate change on the list of critical risks to the nation.

The growing ineffectiveness of many antibiotics against infection is being compounded by a “discovery void”, as few new compounds are being developed to take their place. Dame Sally calls for a string of actions to tackle the threat, which is likely to include tighter restrictions on how GPs prescribe antibiotics for their patients.

Declaring that in 20 years’ time even minor surgery may lead to death through untreatable infection, she warns: “This is a growing problem, and if we don’t get it right, we will find ourselves in a health system not dissimilar from the early 19th century.”

Although the problem of antibiotic or antimicrobial resistance has long been recognised, Dame Sally has chosen to give it new prominence, urging that the level of threat it represents to the nation as a whole needs to be sharply re-evaluated. “I knew about antimicrobial resistance as a doctor, but I hadn’t realised how bad it was or how fast it is growing,” she said. …

More bad news from Bjorn Lomborg who tells us the dirty little secrets of electric cars.

Electric cars are promoted as the chic harbinger of an environmentally benign future. Ads assure us of “zero emissions,” and President Obama has promised a million on the road by 2015. With sales for 2012 coming in at about 50,000, that million-car figure is a pipe dream. Consumers remain wary of the cars’ limited range, higher price and the logistics of battery-charging. But for those who do own an electric car, at least there is the consolation that it’s truly green, right? Not really.

For proponents such as the actor and activist Leonardo DiCaprio, the main argument is that their electric cars—whether it’s a $100,000 Fisker Karma (Mr. DiCaprio’s ride) or a $28,000 Nissan Leaf—don’t contribute to global warming. And, sure, electric cars don’t emit carbon-dioxide on the road. But the energy used for their manufacture and continual battery charges certainly does—far more than most people realize.

A 2012 comprehensive life-cycle analysis in Journal of Industrial Ecology shows that almost half the lifetime carbon-dioxide emissions from an electric car come from the energy used to produce the car, especially the battery. The mining of lithium, for instance, is a less than green activity. By contrast, the manufacture of a gas-powered car accounts for 17% of its lifetime carbon-dioxide emissions. When an electric car rolls off the production line, it has already been responsible for 30,000 pounds of carbon-dioxide emission. The amount for making a conventional car: 14,000 pounds. …

This is rich. The bien pensants in CA are trying to figure out how they can get oil revenue without oil exploration and drilling. Bloomberg has the story.

The only thing California’s environmentally friendly Democratic legislators prefer to regulating private industry is spending public dollars. So it’s fascinating to watch them struggle with an unfolding dilemma.

The state can tap into a gusher of new revenue only if legislators resist the muscular green lobby and allow oil companies to take advantage of vast petroleum reserves in the Monterey Shale geologic formation that runs south and east from San Francisco.

The federal government, which auctioned drilling leases in a portion of the Monterey Shale late last year, estimates that the formation holds more than 15 billion barrels of oil.

A Bloomberg report in December said that’s 64 percent of all estimated U.S. shale oil reserves and double the amount in North Dakota’s Bakken Shale and Texas’ Eagle Ford Shale combined.

The lure is enormous, but so is the likely pushback in a state where leaders are trying to craft a myopic alternative future based on subsidized “green jobs.” Historically oil-rich California has fallen to fourth in oil production in the U.S. (behind Texas, North Dakota and Alaska). …

Minyanville says we’ve seen a stock market like this before.

The stock market rally since the beginning of the year is seemingly relentless.  Regardless of whether the market-related news is good or bad, stocks seem to fight their way higher day after day.  This should not be mistaken as a signal for optimism about the US economic outlook, however.  Instead, the recent rally is purely the byproduct of aggressive monetary stimulus from the US Federal Reserve.  And recent history has shown that such rallies do not necessarily continue forever.

At the beginning of the year, the Fed added the purchase of US Treasuries to its latest QE3 stimulus program.  It has been no coincidence that the market has subsequently rallied almost without interruption ever since, as the stimulus program effectively amounts to the Fed dropping off a $4.5 billion bag of cash on the doorsteps of US banks each and every trading day.  Thus far, this cash has leaked its way into the stock market.  But such preferences can change at a moment’s notice. …

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Mark Steyn on drone warfare.

Is it really far-fetched to foresee the Department of Justice deploying drones to the Ruby Ridges and Wacos of the 2020s?

I shall leave it to others to argue the legal and constitutional questions surrounding drones, but they are not without practical application. For the past couple of years, Janet Napolitano, the Secretary of Homeland Security, has had Predator drones patrolling the U.S. border. No, silly, not the southern border. The northern one. You gotta be able to prioritize, right? At Derby Line, Vt., the international frontier runs through the middle of the town library and its second-floor opera house. If memory serves, the stage and the best seats are in Canada, but the concession stand and the cheap seats are in America. Despite the zealots of Homeland Security’s best efforts at afflicting residents of this cross-border community with ever more obstacles to daily life, I don’t recall seeing any Predator drones hovering over Non-Fiction E-L. But, if there are, I’m sure they’re entirely capable of identifying which delinquent borrower is a Quebecer and which a Vermonter before dispatching a Hellfire missile to vaporize him in front of the Large Print Romance shelves.

I’m a long, long way from Rand Paul’s view of the world (I’m basically a 19th century imperialist a hundred years past sell-by date), but I’m far from sanguine about America’s drone fever. For all its advantages to this administration – no awkward prisoners to be housed at Gitmo, no military casualties for the evening news – the unheard, unseen, unmanned drone raining down death from the skies confirms for those on the receiving end al-Qaida’s critique of its enemies: as they see it, we have the best technology and the worst will; we choose aerial assassination and its attendant collateral damage because we are risk-averse, and so remote, antiseptic, long-distance, computer-programmed warfare is all that we can bear. Our technological strength betrays our psychological weakness. …

IBD Editors on the jobs report.

Who can complain about nearly a quarter-million jobs created in February? Until, that is, you learn that more people left the labor force than got new jobs, continuing a long-term trend under President Obama.

The White House, which is always quick to caution about reading too much into a bad monthly jobs report, was eager to tout the February numbers as evidence that the nearly four-year-old recovery is finally “gaining traction.”

Why not celebrate? The economy added 236,000 jobs and the unemployment rate dropped to 7.7%, the lowest it’s been since December 2008.

It was also one of those rare occasions under President Obama when an economic indicator actually outperformed expectations. But while everyone welcomes good news on the jobs front after years of sluggish-to-nonexistent growth, the country is still a long, long way from “mission accomplished.”

If anything, there are still some deeply troubling signs in the labor force that the February numbers have not dispelled. While the country gained 236,000 jobs, the ranks of those not in the labor force — people who don’t have a job and stopped looking — swelled by 296,000. …

James Pethokoukis too.

The headline numbers show a decent month for the US labor market in February. Nonfarm payrolls rose by 236,000 last month (246,000 in the private sector), the Labor Department said, beating economist expectations of 160,000. And the jobless rate fell to 7.7%, the lowest since December 2008, from 7.9% in January.

Now here’s some of what those headline numbers miss:

1. In January 2009, Team Obama economists predicted that the unemployment rate by 2013 would be 5.1% (and the economy would be booming at 4% annual growth). Heck, even without the stimulus, they thought the jobless rate would be down to 5.5%. That’s a big miss.

2. The labor force participation rate fell again as potential workers stopped looking for work. If the LFP rate was just where it was a year ago, in February 2012, the official unemployment rate would 8.3%. And if the LFP rate was where it was in January 2009, the unemployment rate would be 10.8%. Does the the aging of the US workforce make that 2009 number less relevant? Probably. But have demographics changed that radically over the past 12 months? Doubtful. …

Theodore Dalrymple slam-dunks Paul Ehrlich.

John Maddox (1925 – 2009) was for many years the editor of Nature, one of the two most important general science journals in the world. In 1972 he published a broadside against the radical pessimism then very prevalent with the title The Doomsday Syndrome: An Assault on Pessimism. In this book, which makes interesting reading today, Maddox attacked the propensity of scientists such as Paul Ehrlich and Barry Commoner to project current trends indefinitely into the future and to conclude therefrom that catastrophe must sooner or later (usually sooner) result.

Ehrlich – who is still predicting catastrophe with as much confidence as if all that he had predicted for the recent past had actually come to pass – famously, or infamously, asserted in his neo-Malthusian book, The Population Bomb, published in 1968, that the battle to feed mankind was over and that hundreds of millions of people would inevitably starve to death in the 1970s, irrespective of what anyone did to try to avoid it.

His prediction was not borne out; forty years later the greatest nutritional problem in the world is probably obesity caused by over-eating. But like those persons on the fringe of religion who predict that the world will beyond peradventure end on a certain date but whose faith is quite unshaken by the failure of that wicked world to conform to their righteous prophecies, so Professor Ehrlich continues to assert that really he was right all along: merely that he mistook the date of the great reckoning. …

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The left brought out the useful idiots on the occasion of Hugo’s death. IBD Editors say contrary to Jimmy Carter, Chavez was no help to the poor.

The left is out in force, bleating its praise for deceased Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez as a champion of the poor. It’s a big lie. Fact is, Chavez hurt the poor, not just in Venezuela, but all over the world.

Chavez’s death from cancer Tuesday set off a chorus of wailing from the left’s politicos, media and movie stars, hailing Chavez as a friend of the poor.

“President Chavez cared deeply about the poor,” declared Citizens Energy President Joe Kennedy, who’s made it his business to distribute Chavez’s oil handouts to the poor to help the dictator’s political ends.

“His legacy in his nation, and in the hemisphere,” said Rep. Jose Serrano, a Bronx Democrat, will be “a better life for the poor and downtrodden.”

Chavez’s “positive legacies,” said forever-naive ex-President Jimmy Carter, was for “the gains made for the poor and vulnerable.” …

More from Slate.

… What has Chávez bequeathed his fellow Venezuelans? The hard facts are unmistakable: The oil-rich South American country is in shambles. It has one of the world’s highest rates of inflation, largest fiscal deficits, and fastest growing debts. Despite a boom in oil prices, the country’s infrastructure is in disrepair—power outages and rolling blackouts are common—and it is more dependent on crude exports than when Chávez arrived. Venezuela is the only member of OPEC that suffers from shortages of staples such as flour, milk, and sugar. Crime and violence skyrocketed during Chávez’s years. On an average weekend, more people are killed in Caracas than in Baghdad and Kabul combined. (In 2009, there were 19,133 murders in Venezuela, more than four times the number of a decade earlier.) When the grisly statistics failed to improve, the Venezuelan government simply stopped publishing the figures.  

The political ideology Chávez left behind, Chavismo, was a demonstrable failure for the Venezuelan people, but it is not as if it ever failed Chávez himself. Despite his government’s poor showing, the Comandante’s platform secured him another six years in office, with a decisive 11-point victory, only five months ago. Will Maduro, Chávez’s handpicked successor, and his other cronies be able to pick up where the former president left off?

His successors would be in better shape if Chávez had been a typical South American strongman. But he wasn’t just another caudillo who stuffed ballot boxes and rounded up his enemies. As I describe in my book The Dictator’s Learning Curve, Chávez’s rule was far more sophisticated than such heavy-handed regimes. Like many authoritarian leaders, Chávez centralized power for his own use. Not long after taking office in 1999, he controlled every branch of government, the armed forces, the central bank, the state-owned oil company, most of the media, and any private sector business he chose to expropriate. But Venezuela never experienced massive human rights abuses. Dissidents didn’t disappear in the night, and for all Chavez’s professed love for Fidel Castro, his regime was never as repressive as Castro’s tropical dictatorship. …

Seth Mandel has the story of one of Kerry’s first disasters at State.

Yesterday, Samuel Tadros reported in the Weekly Standard that John Kerry was handling his transition to running the State Department about as adroitly as one would imagine. He had an idea, and Foggy Bottom sent out a press release excitedly announcing that First Lady Michelle Obama was going to enthusiastically partake in this idea. The State Department would confer Women of Courage awards on several worthy recipients. Unfortunately, one of them happened to have a bad habit, apparently, of proclaiming viciously anti-Semitic hate speech on Twitter and was pretty happy, according to her timeline, about the September 11 terror attacks. Tadros wrote:

On July 18 of last year, after five Israeli tourists and a Bulgarian bus driver were killed a suicide bombing attack, Ibrahim jubilantly tweeted: “An explosion on a bus carrying Israelis in Burgas airport in Bulgaria on the Black Sea. Today is a very sweet day with a lot of very sweet news.” …

Henry Payne of the Detroit News says Bob Woodward has learned about “the Chicago Way.”

The Media Church of the Holy Obama quickly excommunicated Watergate icon and journalist Bob Woodward last week when he suggested the Obama administration threatened him after he revealed the anti-sequester White House had originated the sequester idea. But Woodward’s accusation rings true because it echoes other accounts of the ex-Illinois senator’s “Chicago Way” tactics.

Exhibit A is the 2009 Detroit Auto Bailout and the administration’s threats against Chrysler bondholders that refused to knuckle under to Obama’s plot to favor his Big Labor cronies.

The administration has treated obstacles to its agenda with ruthless tactics. In April 2009, that agenda was to hand an outsized, 55 percent majority interest of embattled Chrysler to the United Auto Workers in a government-orchestrated bankruptcy. But by law secured creditors are first in line in bankruptcy, and bondholders — representing their working-class pension clients — refused to accept Obama’s unfair deal for a measly 29 cents on their investment dollar.

Send in the muscle.

“One of my clients was directly threatened by the White House and in essence compelled to withdraw its opposition to the deal under threat that the full force of the White House press corps would destroy its reputation if it continued to fight,” said Tom Lauria, lawyer for Perella Weinberg investment firm, on Frank Beckmann’s Detroit radio program. …”

Someone has to do it. Higher Ed Chronicle tells the story of NYU’s Dr. Garbage who wrote the book on collecting.

… Picking Up, which is due out this month from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, explains that seniority determines almost everything about a sanitation employee’s work life—whether he gets the choice assignments and the best overtime opportunities, where he falls in the bidding for vacation time (about 95 percent of sanitation workers are men, Ms. Nagle says). The book also decodes, among many other things, the tags arrayed in clear slots inside the big window between the inner office and the garage. That’s “the board”—an at-a-glance representation of which workers are assigned to which trucks on which routes, who is home sick, which trucks are out of service, and so forth.

Ms. Nagle describes the book, which was written for a general audience, as “an introduction to the most important work force in the city,” but for an introduction to trash collection and snow removal it is delightfully erudite and entertaining, quoting a Richard Wilbur poem here and sending you to the dictionary there, to look up “susurrus” (as in “the susurrus of its machinery”). It’s also funny, naming the four seasons from a sanitation worker’s perspective: spring, maggot, leaf, and night plow, the last being the November-to-April span when half the department is on night shift in case snow starts falling.

The book even includes a glossary, titled “How to Speak Sanitation.” The term “mongo,” for instance, is both noun and verb, referring to either “objects plucked/rescued from the trash” or, as a verb, to what is also known as “hopper shopping.” Once, when Ms. Nagle was working out of Manhattan 7, she and a partner who ranked as the third-best mongo collector in the district found in the trash “a flimsy pair of black-and-gold women’s stretch pants by Armani” that were in good shape and still had the price tag attached—$1,325. They were several sizes too small for a woman as tall as Ms. Nagle, so her partner gave them to a waitress at a diner he sometimes patronized.

“What do you dream to teach that no one else teaches?” an NYU administrator asked Ms. Nagle not long after she went to work there. The answer, it turned out, was trash, a fascination she traces to a garbage dump she encountered on a family camping trip when she was 10. In the past two decades, she has studied trash, loaded it onto trucks and dumped it out, written about it, led seminars devoted to it, become known as “Dr. Garbage,” and earned her chief’s windbreaker as the first DSNY anthropologist (an unpaid position, by the way). …

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Vanity Fair with an excerpt from Zev Chafets biography of Roger Ailes.

… For months, Roger Ailes and I had been meeting regularly at Fox News headquarters in Midtown Manhattan, at his home in PutnamCounty, and at public and private gatherings. In that time I got a closer look at Roger Ailes than any journalist who doesn’t work for him ever has. He is plainspoken, wryly profane, caustic, and above all competitive, whether he is relating how he told NBC not to name its cable channel MSNBC (“M.S. is a damn disease”) or, in an appearance before a student audience, trying to recall the name of a CNN anchor “named after a prison.” (Soledad O’Brien.) Ailes, in his years as a political consultant, created images for a living, and his own narrative is constructed from the sturdy materials of American mythology. In our first meeting, he said he had dug ditches as a kid and would be happy to go back to it if the whole media-empire thing ever fell apart. Ailes is no more likely than I am to dig ditches (and a lot less likely to need to), but I got his point. He is a blue-collar guy from a factory town in Ohio who has stayed close to his roots. After I had known him for a while I asked what he would do if he were president of the United States. He said that he would sign no legislation, create no new regulations, and allow the country to return to its natural, best self, which he locates, with modest social amendments, somewhere in midwestern America circa 1955.

Ailes and Rupert Murdoch are very respectful of each other. Ailes credits Murdoch with realizing that there was a niche audience (“half the country,” as Charles Krauthammer, a Fox contributor, drily put it) for a cable news network with a conservative perspective. Murdoch, for his part, assured me that he doesn’t dictate editorial decisions. “I defer to Roger,” he said. “I have ideas that Roger can accept or not. As long as things are going well … ”

One moment of tension occurred in 2010, when Matthew Freud, the husband of Murdoch’s daughter Elisabeth and a powerful British public-relations executive, told The New York Times that “I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes’s horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder, and every other global media business aspires to.” A spokesman for Murdoch replied that his son-in-law had been speaking for himself, and that Murdoch was “proud of Roger Ailes and Fox News.” Ailes mocked Freud in an interview in the Los Angeles Times, saying he couldn’t pick the British flack out of a lineup and suggesting that he (a descendant of Sigmund Freud’s) “needed to see a psychiatrist.”

Murdoch often drops by Ailes’s office to joke and gossip about politics. “Roger and I have a close personal friendship,” he told me. Ailes agrees—up to a point.

“Does Rupert like me? I think so, but it doesn’t matter. When I go up to the magic room in the sky every three months, if my numbers are right, I get to live. If not, I’m killed. Our relationship isn’t about love—it’s about arithmetic. Survival means hitting your numbers. I’ve met or exceeded mine in 56 straight quarters. The reason is: I treat Rupert’s money like it is mine.”

One day during the 2012 primary season, Newt Gingrich complained that Fox News’s support for Mitt Romney was responsible for Gingrich’s poor showing. Rick Santorum had made a similar claim when he dropped out of the race. Gingrich and Santorum had been Fox commentators before getting into the race, and Ailes found their complaints self-serving and disloyal. Brian Lewis, his spokesman, asked Ailes for guidance on how to respond to Newt. “Brush him back,” Ailes said. “He’s a sore loser and if he had won he would have been a sore winner.” Lewis nodded.

Ailes was silent for a moment and then added, “Newt’s a prick.” …

Matthew Continetti covers the causes and results of the sequester flap.

… The sequester has yet to cause tremendous panic and consternation anywhere but in the executive branch, the congressional Democratic caucus, and, needless to say, MSNBC. And suddenly those Republicans for whom the president had no use, the old out-of-touch white men who were on their way to the dustbin of history, became bizarrely relevant. On Wednesday Obama invited Republican senators, including his old nemesis John McCain, to dinner at the Jefferson Hotel. On Thursday, Paul Ryan lunched at the White House.

What happened? Well, it may be that the president’s approval rating has been steadily sinking. It may be that economic growth is at a standstill despite the record performance of the Dow. It may be that the administration has found itself on defense on questions of civil liberties and campaign finance.

But I think the larger problem is that Obama, like reelected presidents before him, bought into the myth of the mandate. He over-interpreted the results of a personal victory in a status-quo election. Winning tax increases as part of the fiscal cliff deal boosted his already ridiculously oversized confidence. But he turned out to be wrong. And conservatives and Republicans might as well revel in this moment, before we figure out a way to spoil it.

“The American people do not give mandates,” Stanford political scientist Morris Fiorina notes in an article in the current American Interest, “America’s Missing Moderates.” “They hire parties provisionally and grant them a probationary period to prove their worth. A major electoral victory by the out party generally says no more than ‘for heaven’s sake, do something different.’” Such was the case in 2006, 2008, and 2010.

A victory by the incumbent party is less easy to interpret. President George W. Bush won reelection by 51 percent in 2004, but his “political capital” vanished as he moved to privatize Social Security and failed to secure Iraq. Obama won with 51 percent in 2012. His political capital seems to be diminishing quickly, as well. …

Joel Kotkin sings the praises of the material boys.

Something strange happened on the road to our much-celebrated post-industrial utopia. The real winners of the global economy have turned out to be not the creative types or the data junkies, but the material boys: countries, states and companies that have perfected the art of physical production in agriculture, energy and, remarkably, manufacturing.

The strongest economies of the high-income world (Norway, Canada, Australia, some Persian Gulf countries) produce oil and gas, coal, industrial minerals or food for the expanding global marketplace. The greatest success story, China, has based its rise largely on manufacturing. Brazil has been powered by a trifecta of higher energy production, a strong industrial sector and the highest volume of agricultural exports after the United States.

Things are really looking up for the material boys here in North America. Over the past decade, the strongest regional economies (as measured by GDP, job and wage growth) have overwhelmingly been those that produces material goods. This includes large swaths of the Great Plains, the GulfCoast and the Intermountain West, three regions that, as I point out in a recent Manhattan Institute study, have withstood the great recession far better than the rest of the country.

Today virtually all the “material boy” states now boast unemployment well below the national average; the lowest are the Dakotas, Wyoming and Nebraska. Texas, the biggest of the U.S. material boys, boasts an unemployment rate around 6%, well below California (nearly 10%) and New York (8%). One key reason: While Texas has created over 180,000 generally well-paid energy jobs over the past decade, California, with abundant energy reserves, has generated barely one-tenth as many. New York, despite ample potential in impoverished upstate areas, largely has disdained developing its energy sector.

These realities contrast greatly with the conventional wisdom that with the rise of the information age, the application of “brains” to abstract concepts, images and media would come to trump the “brawn” of producers, a thesis advanced influentially in 1973 by Daniel Bell in The Coming of Post Industrial Society. More recently Thomas Friedman has cited the East Asian countries such as Taiwan and Japan as suggesting that a lack of natural resources actually sparks innovation and economic health, while too great a concentration generally hinders progress.

So how is it that the rubes, with their grease-stained hands, reeking of the smell of manure or chemical fertilizers, have outperformed the darlings of the information age? …

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Der Spiegel on the drug war we are losing. The existence of Aruba as a transit point reminds of the days Pickerhead went there to windsurf and purchased some used boards from a sail site. They ended up at US Customs at the Norfolk airport. The inspector said he would have to drill some holes in the boards and wondered if that was a problem. I said I had to refinish the non-slip coating anyway, so go ahead. “In that case,” he said, “take them and get out of here.”

… The longer Popeye talks — about his murders, the drug war and the havoc he and Escobar wreaked and that is currently being repeated in Mexico — the less important my prepared questions about this war become. I realize that I might as well throw away my notepad, because it all boils down to one question: How can we stop people like you, Popeye?

He pauses for a moment before saying: “People like me can’t be stopped. It’s a war. They lose men, and we lose men. They lose their scruples, and we never had any. In the end, you’ll even blow up an aircraft because you believe the Colombian president is on board. I don’t know what you have to do. Maybe sell cocaine in pharmacies. I’ve been in prison for 20 years, but you will never win this war when there is so much money to be made. Never.”

I’m sitting face to face with a killer: Popeye, an evil product of hell. And I’m afraid that the killer could be right.

The drug war is the longest war in recent history, underway for more than 40 years. It is a never-ending struggle against a $500 billion (€378 billion) industry. …

 

… To this day, the war on drugs is being waged against anyone who comes into contact with cocaine, marijuana or other illegal drugs. It is being fought against coca farmers in Colombia, poppy growers in Afghanistan and drug mules who smuggle drugs by the kilogram (2.2 pounds), sometimes concealed in their stomachs. It is being fought against crystal meth labs in Eastern Europe, kids addicted to crack cocaine in Los Angeles and people who are caught with a gram of marijuana in their pockets, just as it is being fought against the drug cartels in Mexico and killers like Popeye. There is almost no place on earth today where the war is not being waged. Indeed, the war on drugs is as global as McDonald’s.

In 2010, about 200 million people took illegal drugs. The numbers have remained relatively constant for years, as has the estimated annual volume of drugs produced worldwide: 40,000 tons of marijuana, 800 tons of cocaine and 500 tons of heroin. What has increased, however, is the cost of this endless war.

In the early 1970s, the Nixon administration pumped about $100 million into drug control. Today, under President Barack Obama, that figure is $15 billion — more than 30 times as much when adjusted for inflation. There is even a rough estimate of the direct and indirect costs of the 40-plus years of the drug war: $1 trillion in the United States alone.

In Mexico, some 60,000 people have died in the drug war in the last six years. US prisons are full of marijuana smokers, the Taliban in Afghanistan still use drug money to pay for their weapons, and experts say China is the drug country of the future. …

 

… A new way of thinking is beginning to take root: If a war can’t be won, and if the enemy has remained invincible for 40 years, why not take the peaceful approach?

German officials take a decidedly cool stance toward these developments. No top politician with a major German party is about to call for a new drug policy or even the legalization of marijuana. Drugs are not a winning issue, because it’s too easy to get burned.

Martin Lindner, the deputy head of the pro-business Free Democrats in the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, recently triggered a scandal when he lit up a joint on a talk show. The headline of a recent cover story in the Berliner Kurier daily newspaper read: “Has Martin Lindner gone off the deep end?” …

 

… The drug trade is a straightforward business. The farther the product is removed from the coca plantation, and the closer it comes to some party in Los Angeles or Berlin, the higher the price. The final price has nothing to do with actual costs, which make up only a miniscule percentage of it.

Most of the purchase price consists of a sort of risk premium: the amount the dealer collects in return for the risk of ending up in prison. In other words, it includes an insane profit margin that can only exist because the product is banned.

Since the costs are irrelevant, the amount of cocaine that General Pérez confiscated is also practically irrelevant. From the standpoint of the dealers who have just lost almost two tons of drugs, this only means that, since the police are being vigilant, it’s time to increase the price of our product.

The demand for narcotics is what is known as “inelastic.” No matter how cheap heroin is, most people won’t buy it, regardless of the price. But addicts will always pay. They have no choice, or else they wouldn’t be addicts. To them, it doesn’t matter what the drugs cost.

That’s the economy of drugs. …

Debra Saunders writes about the few times the president has shown an interest in the drug war.

… On Dec. 12, when Time magazine interviewed Obama for its 2012 “Person of the Year” piece, Obama mentioned a New York Times story that ran that day about Stephanie George, a nonviolent offender sentenced to life without parole when she was 27. Her federal judge described George’s criminal role as “a girlfriend and bag holder and money holder but not” an active drug dealer as he lamented a federal mandatory-minimum-sentencing system that forced him to sentence George to life against his better judgment.

When Time reporters asked the president if he would push for alternative sentencing, Obama brought up the George story as he noted that social scientists were looking for “smarter, better ways – and cheaper ways” of sentencing nonviolent offenders. It makes sense for them to do so, Obama said, but: “I think this is one of those things where I don’t think you should anticipate that I’m leading with an issue like this.” It’s not on his to-do list.

Julie Stewart of Families Against Mandatory Minimums is appalled. She thinks the president should look at nonviolent drug offenders who served 20 years and are in their 40s and ask: “If they have served 20 years and are in their 40s, what are we doing keeping them there until they die? These are not people who are dangerous to society.”

Then there’s Clarence Aaron, a first-time nonviolent drug offender who is serving life without parole for a first-time nonviolent drug offense in 1993. The Washington Post/Pro Publica reported that Obama’s pardon attorney failed to inform predecessor George W. Bush that Aaron’s U.S. attorney and judge no longer oppose a presidential commutation – yet Obama keeps him on the job.

Why hasn’t Obama commuted Aaron’s sentence? …

… if the president doesn’t want to take any risk in the exercise of mercy, he should be honest and furlough the pardon staff permanently. Then, at least, the president could spare federal prosecutors and counterterrorism operatives from furloughs.

By the way, the pardon power is the rare executive power Obama can exercise unilaterally. Mercy is a fine concept but if an action does not fan the flames of partisan rancor, this president cannot be bothered.

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Jennifer Rubin reacts to a VP comment.

At the American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy gathering this morning, Vice President Biden unintentionally said something insightful. It was, however, very unfavorable to his boss.

In declaring that “all politics is personal,” Biden got to the nub of what the AIPAC members in the room and the larger pro-Israel community is worried about: No matter what Biden (or for that matter President Obama) says, Obama’s own relationship with the prime minister is so contemptuous, and his instincts reveal a fair amount of animus toward the elected government of Israel, that one wonders about the importance of all those words. And in choosing Chuck Hagel to run the Defense Department, the president selected someone personally antagonistic toward Israel, showing how little concerned about that relationship the president is. In other words, if all politics is personal, the Jewish State is in real trouble.

Biden’s admonition is also relevant to Obama’s conduct on domestic policy. Former New York Times editor Bill Keller writes:

“For weeks he has been playing the game political scientists call “Fireman First.” That’s when scaremongering politicians threaten to cut the most essential services. …

Peter Wehner on what we learned in the sequester fight.

… To summarize, then: The president has spoken in the harshest possible terms about an idea he and his White House originated and signed into law. He has used apocalyptic language leading up to the sequestration–and then, as the sequestration cuts began, lectured us that “this is not going to be an apocalypse” as “some people have said.” And Mr. Obama has warned about the devastating nature of the cuts even as he has opposed efforts to make the cuts less devastating.

That’s quite a hat trick.

Will the president pay a political price for this fairly remarkable (and empirically demonstrable) record of dishonesty, inconsistency, and hypocrisy, to say nothing of inflicting unnecessary pain on the country he was elected to serve? I would think so, but I really don’t know.

What I do know is that the sequestration fight has once again shown us that Barack Obama has a defective public character and a post-modern attitude toward truth. He simply makes things up as he goes along. It looks to me that there are few things he will not do, and fewer things he will not say, in order to undermine his opponents and advance his progressive cause. That is something that is deeply injurious to American politics and America itself.

And how about this from the Corner on Monday.

On MSNBC this afternoon, Tom Brokaw surprisingly declared that he thought “Speaker Boehner is right” in blaming the implementation of the sequester on the president and the Democratic Senate. He also criticized the president for his lack of leadership: “The president, by my lights, spent entirely too much time the last two weeks campaigning, in effect, out around the country, lining up that Saturday Night Live parody.” Brokaw suggested that “he ought to have been maybe at Camp David with Boehner and members of his team” and Democratic representatives.

 

Michael Barone wonders if we are stuck in a low-growth economy. We are as long as we have this president.

Low growth may be here to stay.” That’s the dispiriting headline on one of Megan McArdle’s latest blogposts. Most Americans grew up in a country in which economic growth averaged nearly 4%. Now it seems like we’re stuck in an era—or at least a half-decade—in which growth has averaged 2%. That may not sound like much difference. But it is. Thanks to compound interest, 2% annual growth produces something like 19% growth over a decade, while 4% annual growth produces 48% growth over a decade. With 4% growth most people experience earnings increases over time and few people experience earnings decreases. With 2% growth lots of people experience earnings decreases and many fewer experience earnings increases—which tend to be smaller.

McArdle makes reference to Tyler Cowen’s e-book (now available in dead tree form) The Great Stagnation, which argues that we haven’t been having much in the way of productivity-increasing technological developments lately. And she paints a picture of the consequences for public policy if the new normal turns out to be the new normal—and it’s not a pretty one.

Just as in our larger body politic, as corruption increases, the academy has become less free. Bruce Thornton of the Hoover Institution writes on the death of free speech on college campuses.

Thanks to unconstitutional university speech codes, students are losing their intellectual edge.

The value of the university once lay in its providing a nurturing space for what English poet and essayist Matthew Arnold called “the free play of the mind upon all subjects,” which would foster the “instinct prompting [the mind] to try to know the best that is known and thought in the world, irrespective of practice, politics, and everything of the kind.”

Critical to these enterprises is the notion of academic freedom––the ability to study, teach, and talk about subjects, no matter how controversial, without fear of retribution or censorship. For only by discussing openly a wide range of subjects can the liberally educated mind “make the best prevail,” as Arnold put it, and turn “a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically.”

Those days are long gone in American universities today, as Greg Lukianoff’s Unlearning Liberty, a dismal catalogue of campus censorship and enforced conformity, documents. On American campuses, “differences of opinion are not viewed as opportunities to learn or to think through ideas,” Lukianoff writes. “Dissent is regarded as a nuisance at best, and sometimes as an outright threat.” His lively book is at once a relentless exposure of the intellectual intolerance institutionalized in higher education, and a passionate defense of the value of free thought and expression.

Lukianoff is an attorney, self-proclaimed “liberal-leaning atheist,” and president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which for more than a decade has exposed unconstitutional campus speech codes and defended those who have fallen afoul of them. Despite those efforts, higher education’s assault on the First Amendment right to speech continues to subvert the goal of liberal education, drying up Arnold’s “stream of fresh and free thought” and reinforcing, rather than challenging, the “stock notions and habits” of progressive orthodoxy. …

Illustrative of yet another failure by college administrators, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel says student debt has tripled since 2004.

Total student debt has nearly tripled over the past eight years, according to a new report from the New York Federal Reserve.

The number of borrowers and the average balance per person have grown, along with the number of borrowers past due on student loan payments, the report found.

Total student debt stands at $966 billion as of the fourth quarter of 2012, the N.Y. Fed said in press materials, with a 70% increase in both the number of borrowers and the average balance per person. The overall number of borrowers past due on student loan payments has grown from under 10% in 2004 to 17% in 2012.

Fewer people with student loans are buying homes, according to data in the report. Of borrowers ages 25 to 30 who are taking out new mortgages, the percentage of those with student debt has fallen by half, from nearly 9% in 2005 to just above 4% in 2012.

“The higher burden of student loans and higher delinquencies may affect borrowers’ access to other types of credit and the performance of other debt,” the fed report concluded. …

Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.

Conan: A toilet flooded the lobby where the Oscars were being held. So, the show won an Oscar for “Best Portrayal of a Carnival Cruise.”

Fallon: The online college the University of Phoenix could lose its license because of questionable billing policies. Which makes sense when you find out they got their accounting degree from the University of Phoenix.

Conan: New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has now officially reversed his opposition to ObamaCare. Of course, safety regulations require that whenever Chris Christie reverses himself, he must go “BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP!”

Expanding the humor section, Dilbert makes a stock market call.

Small investors are piling into the stock market with an enthusiasm we haven’t seen in years. That’s never a good sign. Meanwhile, many financial experts with their charts and graphs say there is no doubt – none whatsoever – that we’re heading toward a “correction” that will be a big one.  But of course we have plenty of other experts with their own charts and graphs saying the stock market is still a good bet.

Remind me why anyone trusts financial experts?

What you need is a cartoonist to tell you how to invest. My prediction is that there will be a correction of 20% or more sometime in 2013. That will be followed by a jerky climb for the next several months back to wherever the stock was before the fall. …

 

Then defends it.

… The 20% estimate is based on the fact that 20 is a big round number and more likely to happen than 30%. I don’t like to over-think these things. 
 
My reasoning is that the people at the highest levels of finance are brilliant people who chose a profession with the credibility of astrology. And they know it. Then they sell their advice to people who don’t know it. So that’s your cast of characters. 
 
Now consider that the characters – who are literally geniuses in many cases – have an immense financial motive, opportunity, and a near-zero risk of getting caught. How do you think that plays out?

We can only give a guess of the odds that the market is being manipulated. So I ask myself: How often does the fox leave the hen house because he feels that taking an egg would be wrong?
 
If you have a different answer from mine, I applaud your faith in human nature. …

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David Harsanyi has written a new book – Obama’s Four Horsemen.

… The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse? The Book of Revelation? Fire? Brimstone? Armageddon? The Last Judgment?

Really, David? Yes, really.

As metaphors go, it’s an entirely apt one. To begin with, Conquest, Famine, War, Death—the four horsemen of the Obama Era— are coming, and they are coming in the form of a national debt disaster, an epidemic of government dependence, an erosion of our world standing, and a nihilistic view about the value of human life. If our federal government had been inclined to do anything to avoid these impending catastrophes—and I’m not sure it ever was—that day has now passed. Barack Obama’s reelection ensures we’ll be deal- ing with some level of societal instability and economic calamity in the future. No, these calamities won’t transform us into Bangladesh, and they won’t mean the United States will cease to exist. They will only mean that this particular iteration of the United States will be no more.

Change, of course, doesn’t always imply impending disaster. Americans seldom accept that terrible events can befall them. We have solid reasons not to. Truth is, I have always been somewhat of a utopian regarding our prospects. I operated under the rosy assumption that our free markets, individual liberty, technological superiority, astonishing wealth, and Constitutional protections (however eroded they may have become) would allow us to adapt to or over- come nearly anything—recessions; wars; terror attacks; demographic shifts; environmental disaster; and, the most treacherous of all threats, Washington. Regrettably, I underestimated Washington.

President Barack Obama didn’t invent the impending disasters America faces—not our debt problem, not our welfare state—but he did accelerate nearly every one of them. It’s not only that the president’s progressive politics have battered economic dynamism, ham- strung capitalism, and discredited the importance of meritocracy; it’s that, in the Obama era, the relationship between the average American citizen and his government has been transformed forever into something unhealthy.

Using frightening religious symbolism in this political argument also makes sense because Obama has consistently portrayed his political aims as the great moral cause of our time, one that pits the highway to hell forces of decency and empathy against the self-serving profiteers of the old guard. His central case for government’s existence rests on the notion that the state is society’s moral center, the engine of prosperity, and the arbiter of fairness. Obama treats government as a theocrat treats his Church—but he’s got an army and the Internal Revenue Service to ensure your participation. …

As long as there is a Texas, there is hope. City Journal on the growth machine there.

The American economy has had little to cheer about since the 2008 financial meltdown and the resulting recession. Recovery has been feeble, and many states continue to struggle. One bright spot in the general gloom, however, is Texas, which began shining long before 2008. Not only has Texas created jobs at a stunning rate; it has also—pace critics like the New York Times’s Paul Krugman—created lots of good jobs. Indeed, the rest of the nation could turn to the LoneStarState as a model for dynamic growth, as a close look at employment data shows.

The first thing to point out is that Texan job creation has far outpaced the national average. The number of jobs in Texas has grown by a truly impressive 31.5 percent since 1995, compared with just 12 percent nationwide, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data (see Figure One). Texas has also lapped California, an important economic rival and the only state with a larger population. The Texas employment situation after the financial crisis was far less spectacular, of course, with the number of jobs growing just 2.4 percent from 2009 through 2011. But that was still six times the anemic 0.4 percent growth rate of the overall American economy. 

The National Establishment Time-Series (NETS) Database, which provides detailed information on job creation and loss for firms headquartered in each state, can tell us more about Texas’s employment growth. NETS data are divided into two periods—the first from 1995 to 2002, the second from 2002 to 2009. During the 2002–09 period, small businesses of fewer than ten employees were the Texas employment engine, adding nearly 800,000 new jobs; of those, about three-quarters were in firms with two to nine employees, as Figure Two indicates. Larger Texas companies—those with 500 or more employees—lost a significant number of jobs over this span, and medium-size firms likewise shrank, trends that also showed up on the national level.

Figure Three, shifting back to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, shows that many of the new Texas jobs paid well. Indeed, Texas did comparatively better than the rest of the United States from 2002 through 2011. For industries paying over 150 percent of the average American wage, Texas could claim 216,000 extra jobs; the rest of the country added 495,000. In other words, the LoneStarState, with 8 percent of the U.S. population, created nearly a third of the country’s highest-paying positions. Texas also added 49,000 positions paying 125 percent to 150 percent of the U.S. average; the rest of the country lost 174,000 jobs in that category. As Figure Four shows, two sectors in which Texas employment did particularly well during the same period were natural-resource extraction (in fact, the state gained 80 percent of all new jobs in the country in that field) and professional, scientific, and technical positions. Both job categories boast average wages far higher than the national overall average. As happens whenever an economy grows, Texas also added hundreds of thousands of positions in food services, health care, and other lower-paid fields, in addition to the more lucrative jobs. Texas did lose 10,000 construction jobs, but that was a modest downturn, in light of the massive national slowdown in building caused by the crisis of 2008. …

Smithsonian Magazine on the true life story that inspired Moby Dick.

In July of 1852, a 32-year-old novelist named Herman Melville had high hopes for his new novel, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, despite the book’s mixed reviews and tepid sales. That month he took a steamer to Nantucket for his first visit to the Massachusetts island, home port of his novel’s mythic protagonist, Captain Ahab, and his ship, the Pequod. Like a tourist, Melville met local dignitaries, dined out and took in the sights of the village he had previously only imagined.

And on his last day on Nantucket he met the broken-down 60-year-old man who had captained the Essex, the ship that had been attacked and sunk by a sperm whale in an 1820 incident that had inspired Melville’s novel. Captain George Pollard Jr. was just 29 years old when the Essex went down, and he survived and returned to Nantucket to captain a second whaling ship, Two Brothers. But when that ship wrecked on a coral reef two years later, the captain was marked as unlucky at sea—a “Jonah”—and no owner would trust a ship to him again. Pollard lived out his remaining years on land, as the village night watchman.

Melville had written about Pollard briefly in Moby-Dick, and only with regard to the whale sinking his ship. During his visit, Melville later wrote, the two merely “exchanged some words.” But Melville knew Pollard’s ordeal at sea did not end with the sinking of the Essex, and he was not about to evoke the horrific memories that the captain surely carried with him. “To the islanders he was a nobody,” Melville wrote, “to me, the most impressive man, tho’ wholly unassuming, even humble—that I ever encountered.”

Pollard had told the full story to fellow captains over a dinner shortly after his rescue from the Essex ordeal, and to a missionary named George Bennet. To Bennet, the tale was like a confession. Certainly, it was grim: 92 days and sleepless nights at sea in a leaking boat with no food, his surviving crew going mad beneath the unforgiving sun, eventual cannibalism and the harrowing fate of two teenage boys, including Pollard’s first cousin, Owen Coffin. “But I can tell you no more—my head is on fire at the recollection,” Pollard told the missionary. “I hardly know what I say.” …

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NY Times reports on Holocaust research that shows the Nazi horrors were more widespread than previously thought. Something else for Iranians to deny.

THIRTEEN years ago, researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum began the grim task of documenting all the ghettos, slave labor sites, concentration camps and killing factories that the Nazis set up throughout Europe.

What they have found so far has shocked even scholars steeped in the history of the Holocaust.

The researchers have cataloged some 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe, spanning German-controlled areas from France to Russia and Germany itself, during Hitler’s reign of brutality from 1933 to 1945.

The figure is so staggering that even fellow Holocaust scholars had to make sure they had heard it correctly when the lead researchers previewed their findings at an academic forum in late January at the German Historical Institute in Washington.

“The numbers are so much higher than what we originally thought,” Hartmut Berghoff, director of the institute, said in an interview after learning of the new data.

“We knew before how horrible life in the camps and ghettos was,” he said, “but the numbers are unbelievable.”

The documented camps include not only “killing centers” but also thousands of forced labor camps, where prisoners manufactured war supplies; prisoner-of-war camps; sites euphemistically named “care” centers, where pregnant women were forced to have abortions or their babies were killed after birth; and brothels, where women were coerced into having sex with German military personnel. …

… The numbers astound: 30,000 slave labor camps; 1,150 Jewish ghettos; 980 concentration camps; 1,000 prisoner-of-war camps; 500 brothels filled with sex slaves; and thousands of other camps used for euthanizing the elderly and infirm, performing forced abortions, “Germanizing” prisoners or transporting victims to killing centers.

In Berlin alone, researchers have documented some 3,000 camps and so-called Jew houses, while Hamburg held 1,300 sites.

Dr. Dean, a co-researcher, said the findings left no doubt in his mind that many German citizens, despite the frequent claims of ignorance after the war, must have known about the widespread existence of the Nazi camps at the time.

“You literally could not go anywhere in Germany without running into forced labor camps, P.O.W. camps, concentration camps,” he said. “They were everywhere.”

The Holocaust and the horrors of Soviet Russia are examples of totalitarian governments run amuck. Thomas Sowell shows us how our governments create disasters too.

John Stuart Mill’s classic essay “On Liberty” gives reasons why some people should not be taking over other people’s decisions about their own lives. But Professor Cass Sunstein of Harvard has given reasons to the contrary. He cites research showing “that people make a lot of mistakes, and that those mistakes can prove extremely damaging.”

Professor Sunstein is undoubtedly correct that “people make a lot of mistakes.” Most of us can look back over our own lives and see many mistakes, including some that were very damaging.

What Cass Sunstein does not tell us is what sort of creatures, other than people, are going to override our mistaken decisions for us. That is the key flaw in the theory and agenda of the left.

Implicit in the wide range of efforts on the left to get government to take over more of our decisions for us is the assumption that there is some superior class of people who are either wiser or nobler than the rest of us.

Yes, we all make mistakes. But do governments not make bigger and more catastrophic mistakes?

Think about the First World War, from which nations on both sides ended up worse off than before, after an unprecedented carnage that killed substantial fractions of whole younger generations and left millions starving amid the rubble of war.

Think about the Holocaust, and about other government slaughters of even more millions of innocent men, women and children under Communist governments in the Soviet Union and China.

Even in the United States, government policies in the 1930s led to crops being plowed under, thousands of little pigs being slaughtered and buried, and milk being poured down sewers, at a time when many Americans were suffering from hunger and diseases caused by malnutrition.

The Great Depression of the 1930s, in which millions of people were plunged into poverty in even the most prosperous nations, was needlessly prolonged by government policies now recognized in retrospect as foolish and irresponsible. …

Since the $44 Billion cut from sequestration is going to bring the world to an end, Mark Steyn has an idea.

… maybe it would be easier to reinstate this critical $44 billion and cut the other $3.8 trillion, which is apparently responsible for nothing other than Harry Reid’s beloved federally funded cowboy poetry festival and the cost of the dress uniforms for the military detachment accompanying the First Lady at her Oscars appearance. Congresswoman Maxine Waters, ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee, warned of “over 170 million jobs that could be lost” thanks to the sequester. There are only 135 million jobs in America, but the sequester gods are so powerful they can eliminate every job in Canada, Britain and Germany, too. Why, because of this weekend’s looming Mayan Apocalypse, President Obama declined to deploy a carrier to the Persian Gulf, concerned that it might be left on the other side of the planet, completely sequestered with no fuel to limp back home and insufficient stores in the mess hall larder to cook up federally compliant slop. So, when the mullahs go nuclear and drop the big one on Tel Aviv, it will be the fault of the Republicans for failing to agree to a prudent, balanced, fiscally responsible plan – like the Senate’s latest deficit reduction proposal, which, as is traditional, increases the deficit (by $7 billion).

It’s not just the U.S. fleet and air traffic control and clean water that have been swept into the garbage can of history by Sequestageddon, but even the most venerable Beltway colossus. In time the Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble, but surely Bob Woodward is here to stay – or so we thought until he ventured some very mild criticism of the president’s negotiating technique, which appears to be a cross between a suicide-bomber and Cleavon Little taking himself hostage in “Blazing Saddles.” In a flash, Woodward’s four decades of loyal service were forgotten, and the court eunuchs of the Obama media turned on their own: He’s about one news cycle away from being revealed as on the take from the Koch brothers and the real father of Trig Palin. …

… Can you pierce the mists of time and go back all the way to the year 2007? Back then, federal spending was 40 percent lower than it is today. In a mere half-decade, has all that 40 percent gravy become so indispensable to the general welfare that not even a teensy-weensy sliver of it can be cut?

If you really believe that, then America is going to die, and a gullible citizenry willing to give this laughable charade the time of day will bear ultimate responsibility. We have seen the boobs, and they are us.

Jennifer Rubin wonders if there is any chance the media will hold the president’s feet to the fire.

The White House’s behavior throughout the sequester process has been baffling to some. Until Friday’s news conference mainstream media never showed much skepticism about the reams of scare stories being passed around. And if not for Bob Woodward, not a single news outlet would have reported the origin of the sequester. (Think about the level of negligence involved on that point alone.) Whether on account of bias or ineptitude, media haven’t been very good at extracting the truth until quite recently.

The Post’s Glenn Kessler added the final Pinocchios on Friday to the treasure trove the White House has racked up. He found that the president’s claim that janitors and security guards at the Capitol would get a pay cut to be patently false:

“Obama’s remarks continue the administration’s pattern of overstating the potential impact of the sequester, which we have explored this week. But this error is particularly bad — and nerve-wracking to the janitors and security guards who were misled by the president’s comments.

We originally thought this was maybe a Two Pinocchio rating, but in light of the AOC memo and the confirmation that security guards will not face a pay cut, nothing in Obama’s statement came close to being correct.”

There is no delicate way to put this: The president repeatedly has not told the truth, and the vast majority of the press corps hasn’t bothered to point this out. I’m not sure which is worse — a president so indifferent to the truth or media so derelict in their obligation to find out and report the facts.

So let us give the media some help. In the days that follow they should be asking a raft of questions, including these: …

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Nile Gardiner brings his British readers an update on our thuggish president. 

Thomas Hobbes wrote that the life of man is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Today’s White House definitely isn’t poor, lavishly feeding off the wealth of the American taxpayer, and the current presidency certainly isn’t short, with nearly four more years to run. But it is undeniably nasty and brutish, as veteran Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward has found after questioning President Obama’s narrative on the sequester issue.

Woodward, one of two reporters who broke the Watergate story that led to Richard Nixon’s downfall (immortalised in the 1976 Oscar winner All The President’s Men), has revealed to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that the White House warned him that he would “regret” his recent remarks on the sequester, made in a Washington Post column. (Read the exchange of emails between White House economic adviser Gene Sperling and Woodward posted by Politico here.) Woodward is hardly a conservative, and has been at the heart of the liberal media establishment for decades. He is, however, not afraid of challenging the status quo, as he did with his 2010 book Obama’s Wars. Woodward is not alone. Lanny Davis, another liberal columnist and former special counsel to Bill Clinton, who has penned several pieces critical of Obama’s policies, has also spoken out against similar White House tactics. …

Gardiner quoted Michael Barone at length from an October 2008 article. Here’s Barone now suggesting the president is only interested in politics, not governing.

Do we have a president or a perpetual candidate? It’s not an entirely unfair question.

Even as Barack Obama was warning of the dreadful consequences of the budget sequester looming on March 1, he spent days away from Washington, apparently out of touch with Democratic as well as Republican congressional leaders.

In the meantime, Obama fans were lobbing verbal grenades at none other than the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward.

His offense: He’s continuing to make it clear, as he did in his book “The Price of Politics,” that it was Obama’s then-chief of staff and now Treasury Secretary Jack Lew who first proposed the dreaded sequester.

This inconvenient fact threatens to interfere with the ready-for-teleprompter narrative that the Republicans want to cut aid to preschoolers in order to save tax breaks for corporate jets.

It appears that Obama prefers delivering such messages to crowds of adoring supporters over actually governing.

His theory seemed to be that if he kicked his job approval rating up a few points, Republicans would agree to the revenue increases he is promoting, just as they agreed to a tax rate increase in the “fiscal cliff” showdown.

But his job rating continues to hover just above 50 percent. That’s not nearly high enough to compel cooperation.

In addition, his campaign rhetoric undercuts his credibility with politicians of the opposite party and perhaps of his own. …

Debra Saunders wonders if the Woodward kerfuffle will be a watershed event.

There is a rule in Politics 2013 that’s evident in the flap about a White House aide who may or may not have threatened Washington Post veteran reporter Bob Woodward. The rule: The more superficial the brouhaha, the bigger its impact.

What public figures say is more important than what they do, because cable TV and political blogs can cover a mud-fight more cheaply and more easily than a real story.

Quick synopsis: Woodward has reported doggedly on the White House’s role in putting “sequestration” cuts – $85 billion this year – in the 2011 Budget Control Act. Last week, as Woodward was writing that President Obama was moving the goal post in negotiations on those cuts, a White House aide yelled at him on the phone for half an hour, Woodward says. Economic adviser Gene Sperling later sent him an e-mail to apologize for raising his voice. Sperling also wrote, “I think you will regret staking out that claim.”

The White House says no threat was intended. I believe that. I also see why Woodward might perceive the exchanges as a threat – not to harm him physically, but to deny him access. Without access, Woodward cannot write best-selling books.

Why am I writing about what Ron Fournier, National Journal editor-in-chief, described as “a silly distraction to a major problem” – Washington’s failure to lead under a budget deadline? Because this could be a turning point: the moment the White House press corps starts pushing back. …

Jonathan Tobin with similar thoughts. 

A week ago, the White House was absolutely sure that its position on the sequester would prevail and that the Republicans would soon be surrendering on the president’s demands for even more new taxes in order to avoid the implementation of the draconian across-the-board budget cuts. Most of the press, backed by polls that showed the unpopularity of Republicans, agreed. But the discussion has shifted a bit in the last few days and the administration’s confidence in its ability to prevail in this political struggle has to be slightly shaken, even if they are not publicly admitting it. Part of the president’s problem is that the attempts of the secretaries of transportation and homeland security to scare the public about airport delays and the border if the sequester went ahead sounded fake and appeared to be politically motivated. But just as important was the intervention into the debate of an icon of liberal journalism: the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward.

Woodward’s op-ed reminded the public that the sequester was the White House’s idea and that any attempt to include a request for more taxes into the discussion of putting it off was “moving the goalposts.” While seemingly just one voice among many talking heads, the Woodward assertions touched a nerve in the White House and set off a furious back-and-forth argument that betrayed the administration’s sensitivity to criticism as well as a thuggish intolerance for anyone who would try to alter their hand-crafted narrative about the issue. …

Jennifer Rubin with more.

Now that we have reached sequester reality one wonders if it, like the Mayan calendar hoax, will disappear with a shrug or whether voters will become irate over the scare tactics and egregious waste of tax payer dollars that continues. Fiscal conservatives are greatly helped by a number of revelations.

First and foremost, the voters have seen President Obama at his very worst. The Post editorial board observes, “Washington has reached a strange place indeed when the opposition party offers the president more control over spending — and he refuses it.” If the GOP is on the ball they will remind voters of this day in and day out. If nothing else, it may dissuade the White House from finding “horror” stories. For each one the Republicans’ reply is simply, “President Obama chose to inflict this pain.”

It is also the case that the obnoxious sense of entitlement of public employees has been exposed. The Post’s Marc Fisher describes the outrage government workers feel at the prospect of furloughs, cut backs or unemployment. In a neighborhood of $700,000 homes (a far cry from the average American’s neighborhood) he finds this sort of reaction to the sequester:

“It’s an extremely threatening and highly insulting condition to find myself in,” said a NationalDefenseUniversity professor who lives in Mantua and spoke on the condition of anonymity because of his high-level security clearance. “It’s one thing to hear the constant negative drumbeat directed at federal workers from people outside Washington. It’s another thing to have the threat of denial of livelihood.”

Have these people not a clue what the rest of the country has been going through? …

Peter Wehner, who worked in the White House, says all this starts at the top.

… Having worked in the White House for seven years, I recognize things can get heated between the press and the president and his staff. But this goes far beyond anything I ever witnessed and certainly anything I ever personally experienced. (I tended to have civil and cordial relations with members of the press during my tenure in the White House.)

Mr. Fournier’s experience is, I think, a good barometer of the cast of mind of the Obamacons. They are a rather thuggish, thin-skinned group who tend to view criticisms as a declaration of war. Many of them seem to view their opponents as enemies. As Fournier’s account shows, they routinely upbraid and insult reporters. Which is why I found his conclusion to be a bit puzzling. “This can’t be what Obama wants,” Fournier writes. “He must not know how thin-skinned and close-minded his staff can be to criticism.”

I actually believe this conduct can be what Mr. Obama wants. He is himself quite thin-skinned and closed-minded, so it makes perfect sense for his staff to be as well. And while the press coverage they get often ranges from favorable to fawning, it is never good enough for them. The job of intimidation is a full-time one, after all, and it clearly works with some journalists.

One of the extraordinary talents the president has is projecting an image of decency and civility while giving home to staffers who are known for being abusive and threatening.

It’s perfectly appropriate to judge a president by his White House staff. And Ron Fournier has done us the favor of lifting the curtain, just a bit, on this one.

It isn’t a pretty sight.

Seth Mandel points out who’s losing this skirmish.

… They’ve seen this play before, and they believe life goes on. As Jonathan mentioned, the press’s reaction to this debate has been to push back a bit on the White House, first with regard to Bob Woodward and now with the Post accusing the president, and those who echo his pronouncements, of “melodrama.” And it also marks a shift on the Republican side. The GOP has often fallen into the president’s PR traps and allowed him to effectively divide their ranks, then step back and watch them point fingers at each other. There was even (overblown) talk of a mutiny against Speaker John Boehner when the new Congress took office.

But this time, the Republicans are putting up a much more unified front, and calling the president’s bluff. It’s a shift Obama ignores at his own peril. Clinton, after all, was still relevant–he was running for re-election. Obama has already put that victory behind him–and, it seems, may have squandered the momentum and political capital that came with it.

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Nile Gardiner brings his British readers an update on our thuggish president. 

Thomas Hobbes wrote that the life of man is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Today’s White House definitely isn’t poor, lavishly feeding off the wealth of the American taxpayer, and the current presidency certainly isn’t short, with nearly four more years to run. But it is undeniably nasty and brutish, as veteran Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward has found after questioning President Obama’s narrative on the sequester issue.

Woodward, one of two reporters who broke the Watergate story that led to Richard Nixon’s downfall (immortalised in the 1976 Oscar winner All The President’s Men), has revealed to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that the White House warned him that he would “regret” his recent remarks on the sequester, made in a Washington Post column. (Read the exchange of emails between White House economic adviser Gene Sperling and Woodward posted by Politico here.) Woodward is hardly a conservative, and has been at the heart of the liberal media establishment for decades. He is, however, not afraid of challenging the status quo, as he did with his 2010 book Obama’s Wars. Woodward is not alone. Lanny Davis, another liberal columnist and former special counsel to Bill Clinton, who has penned several pieces critical of Obama’s policies, has also spoken out against similar White House tactics. …

Gardiner quoted Michael Barone at length from an October 2008 article. Here’s Barone now suggesting the president is only interested in politics, not governing.

Do we have a president or a perpetual candidate? It’s not an entirely unfair question.

Even as Barack Obama was warning of the dreadful consequences of the budget sequester looming on March 1, he spent days away from Washington, apparently out of touch with Democratic as well as Republican congressional leaders.

In the meantime, Obama fans were lobbing verbal grenades at none other than the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward.

His offense: He’s continuing to make it clear, as he did in his book “The Price of Politics,” that it was Obama’s then-chief of staff and now Treasury Secretary Jack Lew who first proposed the dreaded sequester.

This inconvenient fact threatens to interfere with the ready-for-teleprompter narrative that the Republicans want to cut aid to preschoolers in order to save tax breaks for corporate jets.

It appears that Obama prefers delivering such messages to crowds of adoring supporters over actually governing.

His theory seemed to be that if he kicked his job approval rating up a few points, Republicans would agree to the revenue increases he is promoting, just as they agreed to a tax rate increase in the “fiscal cliff” showdown.

But his job rating continues to hover just above 50 percent. That’s not nearly high enough to compel cooperation.

In addition, his campaign rhetoric undercuts his credibility with politicians of the opposite party and perhaps of his own. …

Debra Saunders wonders if the Woodward kerfuffle will be a watershed event.

There is a rule in Politics 2013 that’s evident in the flap about a White House aide who may or may not have threatened Washington Post veteran reporter Bob Woodward. The rule: The more superficial the brouhaha, the bigger its impact.

What public figures say is more important than what they do, because cable TV and political blogs can cover a mud-fight more cheaply and more easily than a real story.

Quick synopsis: Woodward has reported doggedly on the White House’s role in putting “sequestration” cuts – $85 billion this year – in the 2011 Budget Control Act. Last week, as Woodward was writing that President Obama was moving the goal post in negotiations on those cuts, a White House aide yelled at him on the phone for half an hour, Woodward says. Economic adviser Gene Sperling later sent him an e-mail to apologize for raising his voice. Sperling also wrote, “I think you will regret staking out that claim.”

The White House says no threat was intended. I believe that. I also see why Woodward might perceive the exchanges as a threat – not to harm him physically, but to deny him access. Without access, Woodward cannot write best-selling books.

Why am I writing about what Ron Fournier, National Journal editor-in-chief, described as “a silly distraction to a major problem” – Washington’s failure to lead under a budget deadline? Because this could be a turning point: the moment the White House press corps starts pushing back. …

Jonathan Tobin with similar thoughts. 

A week ago, the White House was absolutely sure that its position on the sequester would prevail and that the Republicans would soon be surrendering on the president’s demands for even more new taxes in order to avoid the implementation of the draconian across-the-board budget cuts. Most of the press, backed by polls that showed the unpopularity of Republicans, agreed. But the discussion has shifted a bit in the last few days and the administration’s confidence in its ability to prevail in this political struggle has to be slightly shaken, even if they are not publicly admitting it. Part of the president’s problem is that the attempts of the secretaries of transportation and homeland security to scare the public about airport delays and the border if the sequester went ahead sounded fake and appeared to be politically motivated. But just as important was the intervention into the debate of an icon of liberal journalism: the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward.

Woodward’s op-ed reminded the public that the sequester was the White House’s idea and that any attempt to include a request for more taxes into the discussion of putting it off was “moving the goalposts.” While seemingly just one voice among many talking heads, the Woodward assertions touched a nerve in the White House and set off a furious back-and-forth argument that betrayed the administration’s sensitivity to criticism as well as a thuggish intolerance for anyone who would try to alter their hand-crafted narrative about the issue. …

Jennifer Rubin with more.

Now that we have reached sequester reality one wonders if it, like the Mayan calendar hoax, will disappear with a shrug or whether voters will become irate over the scare tactics and egregious waste of tax payer dollars that continues. Fiscal conservatives are greatly helped by a number of revelations.

First and foremost, the voters have seen President Obama at his very worst. The Post editorial board observes, “Washington has reached a strange place indeed when the opposition party offers the president more control over spending — and he refuses it.” If the GOP is on the ball they will remind voters of this day in and day out. If nothing else, it may dissuade the White House from finding “horror” stories. For each one the Republicans’ reply is simply, “President Obama chose to inflict this pain.”

It is also the case that the obnoxious sense of entitlement of public employees has been exposed. The Post’s Marc Fisher describes the outrage government workers feel at the prospect of furloughs, cut backs or unemployment. In a neighborhood of $700,000 homes (a far cry from the average American’s neighborhood) he finds this sort of reaction to the sequester:

“It’s an extremely threatening and highly insulting condition to find myself in,” said a NationalDefenseUniversity professor who lives in Mantua and spoke on the condition of anonymity because of his high-level security clearance. “It’s one thing to hear the constant negative drumbeat directed at federal workers from people outside Washington. It’s another thing to have the threat of denial of livelihood.”

Have these people not a clue what the rest of the country has been going through? …

Peter Wehner, who worked in the White House, says all this starts at the top.

… Having worked in the White House for seven years, I recognize things can get heated between the press and the president and his staff. But this goes far beyond anything I ever witnessed and certainly anything I ever personally experienced. (I tended to have civil and cordial relations with members of the press during my tenure in the White House.)

Mr. Fournier’s experience is, I think, a good barometer of the cast of mind of the Obamacons. They are a rather thuggish, thin-skinned group who tend to view criticisms as a declaration of war. Many of them seem to view their opponents as enemies. As Fournier’s account shows, they routinely upbraid and insult reporters. Which is why I found his conclusion to be a bit puzzling. “This can’t be what Obama wants,” Fournier writes. “He must not know how thin-skinned and close-minded his staff can be to criticism.”

I actually believe this conduct can be what Mr. Obama wants. He is himself quite thin-skinned and closed-minded, so it makes perfect sense for his staff to be as well. And while the press coverage they get often ranges from favorable to fawning, it is never good enough for them. The job of intimidation is a full-time one, after all, and it clearly works with some journalists.

One of the extraordinary talents the president has is projecting an image of decency and civility while giving home to staffers who are known for being abusive and threatening.

It’s perfectly appropriate to judge a president by his White House staff. And Ron Fournier has done us the favor of lifting the curtain, just a bit, on this one.

It isn’t a pretty sight.

Seth Mandel points out who’s losing this skirmish.

… They’ve seen this play before, and they believe life goes on. As Jonathan mentioned, the press’s reaction to this debate has been to push back a bit on the White House, first with regard to Bob Woodward and now with the Post accusing the president, and those who echo his pronouncements, of “melodrama.” And it also marks a shift on the Republican side. The GOP has often fallen into the president’s PR traps and allowed him to effectively divide their ranks, then step back and watch them point fingers at each other. There was even (overblown) talk of a mutiny against Speaker John Boehner when the new Congress took office.

But this time, the Republicans are putting up a much more unified front, and calling the president’s bluff. It’s a shift Obama ignores at his own peril. Clinton, after all, was still relevant–he was running for re-election. Obama has already put that victory behind him–and, it seems, may have squandered the momentum and political capital that came with it.