Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andrew Malcolm tops off our week with late night humor.

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

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

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

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

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Mark Steyn cares to post on London’s barbarians.

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

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

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

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

Ayaan Hirsi Ali too. 

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

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

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

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

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

Bret Stephens interviews a Chinese fan of Frederick Hayek.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Economist celebrates the shipping container.

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

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

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

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Charles Krauthammer gets to the creator and cheerleader.

… Does the IRS scandal go all the way up to the top? As of now, doubtful. It’s nearly inconceivable that anyone would be stupid enough to have given such a politically fatal directive from the White House (although admittedly the bar is rapidly falling).

But when some bureaucrat is looking for cues from above, it matters when the president of the United States denounces the Supreme Court decision that allowed the proliferation of 501(c)(4)s and specifically calls the resulting “special interest groups” running ads to help Republicans “not just a threat to Democrats — that’s a threat to our democracy.” It’s especially telling when it comes amid letters from Democratic senators to the IRS urging aggressive scrutiny of 501(c)(4) applications.

A White House can powerfully shape other perceptions as well. For years the administration has conducted a concerted campaign to demonize Fox News (disclosure: for which I am a commentator), delegitimizing it as a news organization, even urging its ostracism. Then (surprise!) its own Justice Department takes the unprecedented step of naming a Fox reporteras a co-conspirator in a leak case — when no reporter has ever been prosecuted for merely soliciting information — in order to invade his and Fox’s private and journalistic communications.

No one goes to jail for creating such a climate of intolerance. Nor is it a crime to incessantly claim that those who offer this president opposition and push-back — Republicans, tea partyers, Fox News, whoever dares resist the sycophantic thrill-up-my-leg media adulation — do so only for “politics,” power and pure partisanship, while the Dear Leader devotes himself exclusively to the nation, the middle class, the good and just.

It’s not unlawful to run an ad hominem presidency. It’s merely shameful. The great rhetorical specialty of this president has been his unrelenting attribution of bad faith to those who disagree with him. He acts on principle; they from the basest of instincts.

Well then, why not harass them? Why not ask the content of their prayers? Why not read their e-mail? Why not give them especially horrible customer service? …

Jennifer Rubin knows the core problem.

… It is alarming to think that the government lawyers are apparently running the government, making new law (e.g. journalism is criminal) and shielding the president from knowledge of important matters so he later can’t be accused of wrongdoing. The notion expressed on behalf of the White House counsel that the president should be walled off from controversy sounds like the advice of a personal lawyer worried about his own liability, not a lawyer employed by the American people to ensure, among other things, that the laws are faithfully executed. (It also defies the first rule of any executive: No surprises. One can’t imagine a chief executive, the secretary of Treasury or any other boss saying, “Please let me be surprised about a huge controversy by the reading about it in the newspapers!”)

It is frightful to imagine that Obama has set up a system in which non-elected lawyers run the government. If that is what he’s done, it is both unprecedented and entirely unacceptable.

Kimberley Strassel says all this started right at the get-go with these creeps. These lawyers will be the end of our freedoms. Instead of a respect for the law, they abuse the law.

The White House insists President Obama is “outraged” by the “inappropriate” targeting and harassment of conservative groups. If true, it’s a remarkable turnaround for a man who helped pioneer those tactics.

On Aug. 21, 2008, the conservative American Issues Project ran an ad highlighting ties between candidate Obama and Bill Ayers, formerly of the Weather Underground. The Obama campaign and supporters were furious, and they pressured TV stations to pull the ad—a common-enough tactic in such ad spats.

What came next was not common. Bob Bauer, general counsel for the campaign (and later general counsel for the White House), on the same day wrote to the criminal division of the Justice Department, demanding an investigation into AIP, “its officers and directors,” and its “anonymous donors.” Mr. Bauer claimed that the nonprofit, as a 501(c)(4), was committing a “knowing and willful violation” of election law, and wanted “action to enforce against criminal violations.”

AIP gave Justice a full explanation as to why it was not in violation. It said that it operated exactly as liberal groups like Naral Pro-Choice did. It noted that it had disclosed its donor, Texas businessman Harold Simmons. Mr. Bauer’s response was a second letter to Justice calling for the prosecution of Mr. Simmons. He sent a third letter on Sept. 8, again smearing the “sham” AIP’s “illegal electoral purpose.”

Also on Sept. 8, Mr. Bauer complained to the Federal Election Commission about AIP and Mr. Simmons. He demanded that AIP turn over certain tax documents to his campaign (his right under IRS law), then sent a letter to AIP further hounding it for confidential information (to which he had no legal right).

The Bauer onslaught was a big part of a new liberal strategy to thwart the rise of conservative groups. …

Andrew Malcolm notices the attempt to make us look at the next “shiny thing.”

Nice try by President Obama to change the national subject of intense public discussion from his serial scandals to his war — no, wait — he prefers “fight” against terrorism.

In an hour-long speech of nearly 7,000 words, interrupted by a persistent heckler, the former Real Good Talker reminded his audience at the NationalDefenseUniversity, whose mission is to study war, that the United States has “constitutional principles” that have survived many wars during more than two centuries. No kidding.

And that ”having fought for our independence, we know a price must be paid for freedom.”

Strange words indeed coming out of the mouth of an alleged constitutional law lecturer and president whose Internal Revenue Service has been illegally targeting and intimidating Americans of a certain contrary political persuasion.

Or whose F.B.I. has been checking the communications of professional journalists despite the First Amendment and labeling one of them a criminal co-conspirator in order to access his private communications and his parents’ home phone.

None of which this chief executive admits to knowing anything about because he’s apparently out of the loop on everything except the successes of SEAL Team 6. …

Peter Wehner sees the irony.

What a perfect Barack Obama moment.

Yesterday in a major address the president said, “I am troubled by the possibility that leak investigations may chill the investigative journalism that holds government accountable. Journalists should not be at legal risk for doing their jobs.” He went on to say he was calling on Congress to pass a media shield law and had raised the issue with Attorney General Eric Holder, “who shares my concern.”

The very same day we learned, courtesy of NBC News, that the very same Attorney General Eric Holder signed off on a search warrant that identified Fox News reporter James Rosen as a “possible co-conspirator” in violations of the Espionage Act and authorized seizure of his private emails. Just a week ago the president expressed “complete confidence” in Mr. Holder.

So we have the president of the United States complaining about leak investigations that may chill investigative journalism at virtually the same moment we learned his attorney general decided to treat routine newsgathering efforts by a Fox News reporter as evidence of criminality. (For the record, the president has shown no concern over past leaks of far more sensitive intelligence information–but information that portrayed him in a flattering light.)

The president speaks as if he’s living in an alternate reality, expressing solidarity with the press even as his administration is engaging in Nixon-like actions against it. 

You can’t make this stuff up. 

And, Andy Borowitz at the New Yorker spotted this:

In a dramatic departure from existing White House procedures, President Obama requested today that his staff start cc’ing him on stuff.

“Look, I know a lot of you think I’m really busy and you don’t want to bother me,” the President reportedly told his staff in an Oval Office meeting. “But cc me anyway. It’s good for me to keep up on what’s going on around here.”

“It’s not good when I turn on the news and they’re talking about something at the White House and I’m like, whoa, when did that happen?” Mr. Obama added. “I think cc’ing me would go a long way toward fixing that.”

“Maybe put a Post-It note on your computer saying, ‘CC POTUS,’ so you don’t forget,” he said as the meeting broke up.

Afterward, the President told aides that he “felt really good” about the meeting and was “really looking forward to people looping me in on stuff.”

But Mr. Obama’s mood soured later in the day, sources say, when his e-mail address was left off a message bearing the subject line, “Things the Treasury Dept. Is Planning to Do.”

Mr. Obama hastily reconvened his staff, telling them, “Look, maybe I didn’t make myself clear. That’s just the kind of thing I should have been cc’d on. Even Biden got that one. Could one of you please forward it to me?”

As of press time, Mr. Obama had not yet received the e-mail.

Steve Hayward praises a slow learner.

There’s this much to be said in praise of Jonathan Turley, professor of “public interest law” at GeorgeWashingtonUniversityLawSchool, and frequent bobblehead on cable TV shows: at least he isn’t a supercilious smug-mugger like Jeffrey Toobin.  In addition, unlike Toobin, Turley often gets things right.

But come on man, you’re only just discovering now that the federal administrative bureaucracy—the “fourth branch of government”—has become problematic?  From Turley’s article today in the Washington Post: …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Change of pace day. No Washington horrors.

Current Cicada concepts from Scientific American 

All the hoopla over the 17-year cicadas, set to emerge any day now in the Northeast, has so far missed one of the greatest facts about them. Sure, it’s no surprise for grand gatherings of male animals to get together and sing their hearts out. Frogs do it, crickets do it, and we all know that humans do it. In animals it’s called a lek, in humans it’s called a rock band, and these words basically mean the same thing.

That’s what we thought 17-year cicadas were up to—they emerge only in these rare prime-numbered years after slowly growing underground to live just a few weeks high in the trees to sing, fly, mate and die. The females are just attracted to all this noise and mating then happens.

That’s as much of the story as we knew until seventeen years ago, when John Cooley and David Marshall discovered that in fact these remarkable insects have a three-part complex mating ritual, where the males begin with the distinctive “phaaaaarooooah” sound, but don’t stop there. They are only encouraged to move on when the females make a tiny flick of their wings, which leads them on to a second sound, “phaaaroah phaaaroah phaaaroah” and then after a second wing flick, the males move on to a third sound, “te te te te te te te te te” and only after all three sounds does he climb aboard and mating begins.

Two hundred years studying periodical cicadas and no one had ever noticed this until these two young scientists figured it out seventeen years ago and wrote their dissertations revealing a mating ritual far more complicated than that engaged in by any other insect. …

Free Republic tells us the story of one of China’s environmental disasters.

Back in the 1950s, China was going through its Great Leap Forward, an effort to transform China from a largely agrarian nation to a thriving industrial Marxist powerhouse. These sweeping (and often brutal) reforms, touched virtually every facet of Chinese life — and as one particular episode in China’s history points out, the animal kingdom was also far from immune. In 1958, China ordered the extermination of several pests, including sparrows — an ill-fated campaign that eventually led to catastrophe.

The Four Pests campaign

Chinese leader Mao Zedong initiated the Four Pests campaign after reaching the conclusion that several blights needed to be exterminated — namely mosquitoes, flies, rats, and sparrows. While many people nowadays would regard tampering with the ecosystem in such a radical way as a shockingly irresponsible idea, this was a classic case of something appearing like a good idea at the time. And according to environmental activist Dai Qing, “Mao knew nothing about animals. He didn’t want to discuss his plan or listen to experts. He just decided that the ‘four pests’ should be killed.”  

Moreover, the idea fit in quite well with Mao’s hard-line totalitarian Communist ideology. Marx himself was far from an environmentalist, proclaiming that nature should be fully exploited by humans for production purposes (a legacy which may explain China’s poor environmental track record to this very day).

Now, while the Chinese citizens were called upon to wage war against all four of these pests, the government was particularly annoyed by the sparrow, or more specifically, the Eurasian Tree Sparrow. The Chinese were having a rough go of it as it was, adapting to collectivization and the re-invention of farming, so they felt particularly victimized by this bird which had a particular fondness for eating grain seeds. Chinese scientists had calculated that each sparrow consumed 4.5kg of grain each year — and that for every million sparrows killed, there would be food for 60,000 people. Armed with this information, Mao launched the Great Sparrow Campaign to address the problem. …

What-If posts on human being’s unique throwing abilities. The sport of baseball uses skills we needed so we could live and prosper as a species.

Humans are good at throwing things. In fact, we’re great at it; no other animal can throw stuff like we can.

It’s true that chimpanzees hurl feces (and, on rare occasions, stones), but they’re not nearly as accurate or precise as humans.[1][2] Antlions throw sand, but they don’t aim it. Archerfish hunt insects by throwing water droplets, but they use specialized mouths instead of arms. Horned lizards shoot jets of blood from their eyes for distances of up to five feet. I don’t know why they do this because whenever I reach the phrase “shoot jets of blood from their eyes” in an article I just stop there and stare at it until I need to lie down.

So while there are other animals that use projectiles, we’re just about the only animal that can grab a random object and reliably nail a target. In fact, we’re so good at it that some researchers have suggested rock-throwing played a central role in the evolution of the modern human brain.[3][4]

Throwing is hard. In order to deliver a baseball to a batter, a pitcher has to release the ball at exactly the right point in the throw. A timing error of half a millisecond in either direction is enough to cause the ball to miss the strike zone.[5]

To put that in perspective, it takes about five milliseconds for the fastest nerve impulse to travel the length of the arm.[6] That means that when your arm is still rotating toward the correct position, the signal to release the ball is already at your wrist. In terms of timing, this is like a drummer dropping a drumstick from the 10th story and hitting a drum on the ground on the correct beat. …

Next time you think you need a healthy snack, go to the freezer and get some ice cream. Seriously! Dig this from Nature Magazine.

Late in the morning on 20 February, more than 200 people packed an auditorium at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts. The purpose of the event, according to its organizers, was to explain why a new study about weight and death was absolutely wrong.

The report, a meta-analysis of 97 studies including 2.88 million people, had been released on 2 January in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)1. A team led by Katherine Flegal, an epidemiologist at the National Center for Health Statistics in Hyattsville, Maryland, reported that people deemed ‘overweight’ by international standards were 6% less likely to die than were those of ‘normal’ weight over the same time period.

The result seemed to counter decades of advice to avoid even modest weight gain, provoking coverage in most major news outlets — and a hostile backlash from some public-health experts. “This study is really a pile of rubbish, and no one should waste their time reading it,” said Walter Willett, a leading nutrition and epidemiology researcher at the Harvard school, in a radio interview. Willett later organized the Harvard symposium — where speakers lined up to critique Flegal’s study — to counteract that coverage and highlight what he and his colleagues saw as problems with the paper. “The Flegal paper was so flawed, so misleading and so confusing to so many people, we thought it really would be important to dig down more deeply,” Willett says.

But many researchers accept Flegal’s results and see them as just the latest report illustrating what is known as the obesity paradox. Being overweight increases a person’s risk of diabetes, heart disease, cancer and many other chronic illnesses. But these studies suggest that for some people — particularly those who are middle-aged or older, or already sick — a bit of extra weight is not particularly harmful, and may even be helpful. (Being so overweight as to be classed obese, however, is almost always associated with poor health outcomes.) …

And we have some beautiful pictures from Earth Science Picture of the Day.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Michael Graham notices the differences in the way we hear about the president “being updated throughout the night.”

What’s the difference between keeping President Obama “updated throughout the night” on a deadly terrorist attack in Benghazi and keeping him “updated throughout the night” on a deadly tornado in Oklahoma?

The president could have actually done something about Benghazi.

Have you been watching the president the past 36 hours or so? Lots of photos of him calling officials in Oklahoma, offering federal help. Speeches in front of the camera expressing his condolences to the tornado victims and pledging to rebuild.

“Our prayers are with the people of Oklahoma today,” Obama said yesterday, “and we’ll back up those prayers with deeds for as long as it takes.”

Now that’s a president.

So where was this guy the night of the pre-planned al-Qaeda attack in Benghazi that lasted seven hours and killed four Americans?

That’s a “largely irrelevant fact,” White House hack Dan Pfeiffer told Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday. …

Jonah Goldberg thinks the “idiot defense” is a good tactic.

Although there’s still a great deal to be learned about the scandals and controversies swirling around the White House like so many ominous dorsal fins in the surf, the nature of President Obama’s bind is becoming clear. The best defenses of his administration require undermining the rationale for his presidency.

“We’re portrayed by Republicans as either being lying or idiots. It’s actually closer to us being idiots.” So far, this is the administration’s best defense.

It was offered to CBS News’ Sharyl Attkisson by an anonymous aide involved in the White House’s disastrous response to the attacks in Benghazi, Libya.

Well-intentioned human error rarely gets the credit it deserves. …

… Meanwhile, Obama insists that he is outraged. And, if sincere, that’s nice. But so what? What the president seems to have never fully understood is that the Founders were smarter than he is or that the American people aren’t as dumb as he thinks we are. His outrage is beside the point.

A free people will have legitimate differences on questions of policy. A government as vast as ours is — never mind as vast Obama wants it to be — is destined to abuse its power, particularly in a climate where a savior-president is incessantly delegitimizing dissent (and journalistic scrutiny). Government officials will behave like idiots sometimes, not because they are individually dumb but because a government that takes on too much will make an idiot out of anyone who thinks there’s no limit to what it can do. That alone is good reason to fear tyranny. Indeed, it would be idiotic not to.

Andrew Malcolm reminds us of some of the obama sleaze.

The standard rule for handling bad news in politics is to get it all out at once. Take your hits for a news cycle, two or three. And then try to move on.

The conventional wisdom has been that the worst thing to do is allow the bad news to dribble out, poison drop by poison drop, for days, weeks, even months.

Yet that is precisely what Barack Obama has done — and continues to do in his current epidemic of embarrassments — over a decade of controversies and scandals. The amazing thing is, so far, it’s worked like a charm. So, why should he change?

Ignore it. Dismiss it. Dissemble it to death. Didn’t know about it. Point at others. Have others point at others. Have others suggest the criticism is really racial. Stay aloof. Stretch the whole thing out as long as possible. Then call every ensuing question old news, that you’ve discussed it many times. Hope the problem goes away.

And, by golly, usually it has for Obama.

Whether that will work this time in the face of three major, simultaneous scandals and the independent investigations certain to grow from them remains an open question. Will the Chicago Democrat skate again? Or will the events, the lies, the half-truths, the cover-ups forever stain his once-historical presidential legacy?

Barack Obama is no stranger to scandal. Here’s a recap of a few: …

National Journal’s Ron Fournier is having a hard time stomaching the administration lies. 

“You and others have said that no one in the White House knew about IRS actions before getting the heads up on the inspector general’s report last month,” George Stephanopoulos told senior White House adviser Dan Pfeiffer on Sunday. “Are you absolutely sure of that?”

“Yes,” Pfeiffer replied.

Do you believe him?

Knowing the consequences that would befall the Obama administration if the White House or Obama’s reelection campaign knew in real time that the IRS was targeting conservatives, I desperately want to believe Pfeiffer. I’ve known him for years. I like him. He’s never lied to me.

But Pfeiffer is part of an institution that has demonstrated an inability and/or unwillingness to tell the full truth about the IRS scandal and a spate of other controversies. The White House can’t be trusted.

That depressing conclusion (not unique to the Obama White House, sadly) was driven home Monday when spokesman Jay Carney used his daily briefing to announce that presidential advisers knew more about the IRS scandal a bit sooner than previously disclosed. …

Alan Dershowitz says Lois Lerner can be held in contempt. NewsMax has the story.

Lois Lerner, the Internal Revenue Service’s embattled director of Exempt Organizations, could be held in contempt of court and jailed for refusing to testify before Congress, civil-rights lawyer Alan Dershowitz says. 

“She’s in trouble. She can be held in contempt,” Dershowitz told “the Steve Malzberg Show” on Newsmax TV.

“Congress . . . can actually hold you in contempt and put you in the Congressional jail.”

Lerner, grilled Wednesday on the IRS’ targeting of conservative organizations, invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination — but not before insisting “I have done nothing wrong.”

Her brief statement of innocence has opened a legal Pandora’s Box, according to Dershowitz. …

Paul Mirengoff at Power Line is not so sure.

… Lerner’s denial of guilt was extremely general. It involved no statements about specific facts. In that sense, it seemed more analogous to a plea of “not guilty” (though there are no pleas at a congressional committee hearing) than to substantive testimony.

Does this mean that she didn’t waive the Fifth Amendment after all? To me, it seems like a close question.

That’s also the conclusion reached by Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy. Kerr contacted a list of criminal procedure professors that, he says, includes some serious Fifth Amendment experts. The result?

Opinions were somewhat mixed, but I think it’s fair to say that the bulk of responders thought that Lerner had not actually testified because she gave no statements about the facts of what happened. If that view is right, Lerner successfully invoked her Fifth Amendment rights and cannot be called again. But this was not a unanimous view, it was not based on the full transcript, and there are no cases that seem to be directly on point.

Since the question is unsettled and probably close, it seems to me that Lerner was not well-served today by her counsel, however well-connected to the Obama administration it may be.

Breitbart notes this from Jay Leno.

… the White House has admitted that President Obama’s chief of staff had advanced warning the IRS was targeting conservative groups but never told the president. Well, President Obama says the first time he heard about the IRS scandal and the AP phone records scandal, first time he heard about it was from the media. See, that’s why President Obama holds press conferences: not to explain what’s going on, to find out what’s going on. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Roger L. Simon thinks Benghazi is a very serious story.

… The Benghazi scandal is more disturbing than just lying about a terror attack to get reelected. And that’s pretty disturbing, considering the lies were made directly to the families of the victims. (cf. Hillary Clinton telling Charles Woods, one of the dead SEALS’ father, they were going to get the guy who made that video and revenge his son’s death.)

The Benghazi scandal, in all probability, would not have happened if the administration and/or the State Department took the War on Terror seriously or even, dare I say it, put the words terrorism and Islamic together in a sentence. But that would break a thousand narratives in the mind of Barack Obama, from his childhood with Frank Marshall Davis until now and back.

So now he is riding the whirlwind. The question is, will he carry us (and Western Civ) with him?

In a long winded piece for the Journal’s Best of the Web, James Taranto agrees, but goes further into the other scandals. 

Democracy is in peril: That is an emerging theme of the liberal left’s response to the Obama scandals. The argument misses the point, no doubt deliberately. What we are witnessing now is not a crisis of democracy but a crisis of authority. The administrative state, in thrall to a decadent cultural elite, has lost the consent of the governed.

“After a week of scandal obsession during which the nation’s capital and the media virtually ignored the problems most voters care about–jobs, incomes, growth, opportunity, education–it’s worth asking if there is something especially flawed about our democracy,” declares the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne.

He goes through a partisan litany of complaints–”a radicalization of conservative politics, over-the-top mistrust of President Obama on the right, high-tech gerrymandering in the House and a Senate snarled by non-constitutional super-majority requirements”–but makes no mention of the abuses of power by the Internal Revenue Service and the Justice Department. He does hint at Benghazi, in his concluding paragraph, but only to pooh-pooh it:

Since World War II, bouts of economic growth have allowed democracies to buy their way out of trouble. One can hope this will happen again–and soon. In the meantime, politicians might contemplate their obligations to stewardship of the democratic ideal. They could begin by pondering what an unemployed 28-year-old makes of a ruling elite that expends so much energy feuding over how bureaucrats rewrote a set of talking points.

But if the purpose of that rewriting was, as it appears to have been, to deceive voters and bolster the president’s re-election prospects, then it was a subversion of democracy.

And the IRS scandal was a subversion of democracy on a massive scale. The most fearsome and coercive arm of the administrative state embarked on a systematic effort to suppress citizen dissent against the party in power. Thomas Friedman is famous for musing that he wishes America could be China for a day. It turns out we’ve been China for a while. …

Some of the grown-ups in the media are getting the message. Eugene Robinson at WaPo and Howard Fineman at HuffPo have weighed in. Here’s the money grafs from Robinson.

The Obama administration has no business rummaging through journalists’ phone records, perusing their e-mails and tracking their movements in an attempt to keep them from gathering news. This heavy-handed business isn’t chilling, it’s just plain cold.

It also may well be unconstitutional. In my reading, the First Amendment prohibition against “abridging the freedom . . . of the press” should rule out secretly obtaining two months’ worth of the personal and professional phone records of Associated Press reporters and editors, including calls to and from the main AP phone number at the House press gallery in the Capitol. Yet this is what the Justice Department did.

The unwarranted snooping, which was revealed last week, would be troubling enough if it were an isolated incident. But it is part of a pattern that threatens to redefine investigative reporting as criminal behavior. …

And from Howard Fineman.

So far, voters don’t seem to be abandoning President Barack Obama over controversies gripping the Beltway world. But White House aides are tempting fate with their reluctant, piecemeal and contradictory disclosures of what they knew and when they knew it, especially about a report on the Internal Revenue Service’s 18-month effort to target tea party and other conservative groups for special scrutiny.

The aides either have forgotten or are unable to implement the basic lesson of scandal control in Washington: Get the full story out — all of it — as fast as you can before your critics accuse you of a cover-up or worse.

It’s been only a week since the president told the world that he had learned about the “outrageous” actions of the IRS’ Cincinnati office from “news reports” on May 10. We now know that those reports stemmed from a disclosure the administration had planned and that, in fact, “senior officials” in the White House knew the essence of a damning inspector general’s report on the matter as early as April 24.

From the start, the White House’s response on this potentially explosive matter has been grudging at best and, in retrospect, ignorant or arrogant or both. …

Jennifer Rubin says the public is getting the message about Benghazi.

The spin that the American people aren’t interested in Benghazi or that it’s only Republicans who think something is fishy isn’t faring too well in a plethora of … polls.

The GOP figures on all these are off the charts (vs. the administration). But independents are much more like GOP voters than Dems. In some cases, they view the president more harshly.

The newest Post/ABC poll finds: “Last year’s deadly attack on a diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, is shaping up as a real political problem for President Obama, with concern extending well beyond the conservative base. More than half of Americans say his administration is trying to cover up the facts of the attack.” Asked if the White House is engaged in a cover-up, 56 percent of Republicans and 60 percent of independents say yes. …

And Ms. Rubin shows how the media are turning against the miscreants.

The Obama administration has a particularly ineffective and ham-handed approach to the media. It has launched an unprecedented attack on journalists, going so far as to label James Rosen’s ordinary newsgathering as criminal. It sought from its first days in office to delegitimize Fox News and limit its press access. It has evaded, delivered half-truths (and smaller fractions) and tried to frustrate mainstream reporters. But as the White House is falling down around its ears, the administration calls in lefty journalists for a private meeting. This is the distillation of  “you’re either with us or against us.”

The strategy is not going so well. Mainstream reporters are lashing out at Jay Carney in the briefing room, while the reporting is generally hard-hitting on the full range of White House scandals. And a chunk of left-of-center pundits is scathing. Dan Pfeiffer’s outing on Sunday was generally panned and earned the White House another four Pinocchios.

Ryan Lizza has added to the reporting on the Rosen case, explaining:

Ronald C. Machen, Jr., the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, who is prosecuting the case, has seized records associated with two phone numbers at the White House, at least five numbers associated with Fox News, and one that has the same area code and exchange as Rosen’s personal-cell-phone number (the last four numbers are redacted).

In all, Ronald C. Machen, Jr., the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, has seized records associated with over thirty different phone numbers. ..

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

John Fund explains the three signs of a “cover-up.”

The late columnist William Safire once said that a good clue that someone in Washington was engaged in “an artful dodge,” i.e., a cover-up, was that they used the phrase “mistakes were made.” Safire defined it as a “passive-evasive way of acknowledging error while distancing the speaker from responsibility for it.” 

The phrase became infamous when both Richard Nixon and Ron Ziegler, his press secretary, deployed it to explain away Watergate without explaining who did what and when or whether any ill motive was involved.

Astonishingly, the Internal Revenue Service resurrected the Nixonian expression within hours of its clumsy revelation that it had targeted tea-party groups and other organizations with “patriot” or “9/12” in their names. “Mistakes were made initially,” the official IRS statement on May 10 read, implying that the mistakes ended after a short “initial” period. We now know that the scandal and cover-up unfolded over a three-year period, and the IRS publicly acknowledged them only after the 2012 election was safely past.

Here are some other clues that a Washington cover-up is going on.

1. No one seems to be able to name the players.
Last week, former acting IRS commissioner Steven Miller claimed he had identified “rogue” employees at the IRS’s Cincinnati office who were at the center of the scandal. But an IRS staffer at the Cincinnati office at the center of the scandal told the Washington Post this week: “Everything comes from the top. We don’t have any authority to make those decisions without someone signing off on them. There has to be a directive.”

Perhaps that’s why on Friday, Miller had this exchange during his House testimony with Representative Kevin Brady (R., Texas) .

Brady: “Who is responsible for targeting these individuals?”

Miller: “I don’t have names for you.” …

Michael Barone claims the IRS and AP scandals will have a chilling effect on free speech. 

Chilling effect. That’s the term lawyers and judges use to describe the result of government actions that deter people from exercising their right of free speech.

There have been plenty of examples in the past 10 days.

The Obama administration’s Justice Department issued a sweeping demand for two months of office, cellular and home telephone records from multiple Associated Press reporters and editors to investigate an alleged breach of national security.

The AP story in question, on a foiled terrorist plot, had been withheld for days at the request of the CIA. It finally went out on the wire on a Monday, after the AP was told that administration spokesmen would officially announce it the next day.

That tends to undercut Attorney General Eric Holder’s claim that the story was based on one of “the top two or three most serious leaks that I have ever seen” and “put the American people at risk, and that is not hyperbole.”  …

Jennifer Rubin says Dan Pfeiffer’s weekend efforts were the worse attempts at damage control ever.

… So far, the administration isn’t fooling anyone. Most high-profile mainstream journalists now concede that both the underlying scandals and the defense are problematic. (Ron Fournier: “The problem with this scandal, and it actually relates to the other ones that we’ll talk about later, is when you’re in a position of government and saying, ‘We’re not corrupt, we’re just incompetent,’ that’s a bad place to be. . . What unites all these things is it undermines the credibility of the administration and the president in a competence of government.”)

Democrats  on oversight committees who were willing to carry some water for the White House on Benghazi appear entirely unwilling to do so both on the IRS scandal (in which Congress was arguably misled) and the Associated Press (which strikes at liberals’ media allies).

Pfeiffer’s outing, if nothing else, suggests that the White House is entirely tone deaf, is unaware that its excuses sound as bad as the offenses and is unable to conceal its  desperation in trying to paint this as all the GOP’s fault.

A president actually in command of his administration would bring in a new chief of staff and new communications personnel, and figure out how to at least appear interested in getting to the bottom of these issues. It is the only way to allow himself a sliver of a chance to keep moving forward on his agenda. But then again, his agenda may be irrelevant at this point.

David Harsanyi wonders why Justice was bugging FOX News reporters since the administration has been saying FOX isn’t really a news organization. 

We now know that the Justice Department kept exceptionally close tabs on Fox News reporter James Rosen in 2010, following his trips in and out of the State Department, hacking his personal emails and phone calls. Normal newsgathering activities are being treated as criminal activities by the White House.  But consider what the same White House had to say about Fox News back in 2009.

You might remember the concerted effort by White House officials to brand the right-leaning Fox News as a bogus news outlet, unworthy of attention. I’m not talking administration partners like Media Matters or Think Progress, but high ranking officials.

There was Anita Dunn, then communications director, who attempted to defang Fox coverage of the White House by claiming:

“They are — they’re widely viewed as, you know, part of the Republican Party. Take their talking points and put them on the air. Take their opposition research and put them on the air, and that’s fine. But let’s not pretend they’re a news network the way CNN is.” …

Ron Fournier who was quoted above by Jennifer Rubin writes in the National Journal about how obama can restore the public’s trust and rescue his presidency. Why the hell would we want to see that done? The article is a good example of how worried the media have become.

Swamped in controversies, President Obama and his slow-footed team are essentially telling the American public, “We’re not crooked. We’re just incompetent.”

The IRS targeting conservatives, the Justice Department snooping at The Associated Press, the State Department injecting politics into Benghazi, the military covering up sexual assaults, and the Department of Veterans Affairs leaving heroes in health care limbo – each of these so-called scandals share two traits.

First, there is some element of “spin,” the cynical art of telling just enough of the truth to avoid political embarrassment. Obfuscation and demagogy, the dirty tools of political quackery that Obama pledged to purge from Washington, enjoy top-shelf status at his White House.

Second, there is almost comical bungling. While denying involvement in high crimes and misdemeanors, the Obama administration appears to be pleading guilty to lesser crimes of bureaucratic incompetence.  But that is an unsustainable position for a president who wants Americans to believe again in the power and grace of good government, particularly as it relates to the implementation of Obamacare. …

 

A new bio of Thatcher is reviewed by Daniel Hannan. Remember him? He’s the guy who said Gordon Brown was the “devalued Prime Minister of a devalued government.” 

All Britons remember where they were when Margaret Thatcher resigned in 1990. It was our equivalent of the Kennedy assassination—events that, curiously enough, both fell on Nov. 22. No British politician in living memory had provoked such strong feelings. At Thatcher’s funeral in April, 23 years after she left office and a decade after her last intervention in public life, the battles she had so enjoyed were re-enacted: Many threw flowers before her coffin, while a few, their faces twisted in unfeigned loathing, yelled abuse.

 

The funeral was a reminder of what conviction politics looks like. These days, our leaders consult their pollsters, weigh their words, fret about how they are coming across. Margaret Thatcher, as Charles Moore shows in the magisterial first volume of his authorized biography, had a healthy interest in public opinion, but she never lost sight of where she wanted to go. While others drifted with the current, she was like a shark swimming only forward: focused, patriotic, slightly humorless and needing remarkably little sleep.

These were, happily, just the attributes that the times demanded. It is hard to convey the sheer wretchedness of the nation she was elected to govern in May 1979. Since World War II, Britons had seen their empire vanish, their standing deteriorate, their credit expire. Successive governments had inflated away their debts, with a disastrous effect on competitiveness and productivity.

By the mid-1970s, the U.K. had reached its lowest point. These were the years of double-digit inflation, of power cuts, of shortages. There were constant strikes, and trade-union leaders were better known household names than elected ministers. A Conservative government—a government of which Thatcher was the despairing education minister—was reduced to passing laws regulating prices and incomes. …

Andrew Malcolm has late night humor

Leno: So many scandals now for President Obama–IRS, AP. You know it’s really bad when Obama says, ‘Hey, let’s talk about Benghazi.’

Letterman: Reporters were all over Obama at his news conference. But Obama did pretty well. He’d been listening to their phone conversations.

Conan: A new movie coming about Bill and Hillary Clinton’s early years together. The movie has a happy ending, and then Hillary walks in.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Mark Steyn knows how our government works.

Speaking at OhioStateUniversity this month, Barack Obama urged students to pay no attention to those paranoid types who “incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity.” Oddly enough, in recent days the most compelling testimony for this view of government has come from the president himself, who insists, with a straight face, that he had no idea that the Internal Revenue Service had spent two years targeting his political enemies until he “learned about it from the same news reports that I think most people learned about this.” Like you, all he knows is what he reads in the papers. Which is odd, because his Justice Department is bugging those same papers, so you’d think he’d at least get a bit of a heads-up. But no doubt the fact that he’s wiretapping the Associated Press was also entirely unknown to him until he read about it in the Associated Press. There is a “President of the United States” and a “Government of the United States,” but, despite a certain superficial similarity in their names, they are entirely unrelated, like Beyoncé Knowles and Admiral Sir Charles Knowles. One golfs, reads the prompter, parties with Jay-Z, and guests on the “Pimp With A Limp” show, and the other audits you, bugs your telephone line and leaks your confidential tax records. But they’re two completely separate sinister entities. So it’s preposterous to describe Obama as Nixonian: Beyoncé wouldn’t have given Nixon the time of day.

If you believe this, there’s a shovel-ready infrastructure project in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you. In April last year, the Obama campaign identified by name eight Romney donors as “a group of wealthy individuals with less than reputable records. Quite a few have been on the wrong side of the law, others have made profits at the expense of so many Americans, and still others are donating to help ensure Romney puts beneficial policies in place for them.” That week, Kimberley Strassel began her Wall Street Journal column thus:

“Try this thought experiment: You decide to donate money to Mitt Romney. You want change in the Oval Office, so you engage in your democratic right to send a check.

“Several days later, President Barack Obama, the most powerful man on the planet, singles you out by name. … The message from the man who controls the Justice Department (which can indict you) the SEC (which can fine you), and the IRS (which can audit you), is clear: You made a mistake donating that money.” …

John Kass says you can find out how DC works by looking at Chicago.

The Internal Revenue Service scandal now devouring the Obama administration — the outrageous use of the federal taxing authority to target tea party and other conservatives — certainly makes for meaty partisan politics.

But this scandal is about more than partisanship. It’s bigger than whether the Republicans win or the Democrats lose.

It’s even bigger than President Barack Obama. Yes, bigger than Obama.

It is opening American eyes to the fundamental relationship between free people and those who govern them. This one is about the Republic and whether we can keep it.

And it started me thinking of years ago, of my father and my uncle in Chicago and how government muscle really works.

Because if you want to understand The Chicago Way of things in Washington these days, with the guys from Chicago in charge of the White House and the federal leviathan, there’s one place you start:

You start in Chicago. …

And Charles Krauthammer knows the administration interest in the Benghazi cover story.

… the overriding political interest was the need to protect the president’s campaign claim, his main foreign policy plank, that al-Qaeda was vanquished and the tide of war receding.

But then things got worse — the coverup needed its own coverup. On Nov. 28, press secretary Jay Carney told the media that State and the White House edited nothing but a single trivial word. When the e-mail trail later revealed this to be false, Carney doubled down. Last Friday, he repeated that the CIA itself made the edits after the normal input from various agencies.

That was a bridge too far for even the heretofore supine mainstream media. The CIA may have typed the final edits. But the orders came from on high. You cannot tell a room full of journalists that when your editor tells you to strike four paragraphs from your text — and you do — there were no edits because you are the one who turned in the final copy.

The Clintonian wordplay doesn’t stop with Benghazi. Four days after the IRS announced that it discriminated against conservative organizations, Carney said repeatedly in his daily briefing that, if true, the president would be outraged.

If? By then, the IRS had not only admitted the grievous misconduct but apologized for it — and the president was speaking in the conditional.

This could be the first case in presidential history of subjunctive outrage. (It turned into ostensibly real outrage upon later release of the Inspector Generalreport.) Add that to the conditional truths — ever changing, ever fading — of Benghazi, and you have a major credibility crisis.

Note to the White House: Try the truth. It’s easier to memorize.

NewsBusters says Bob Scheiffer at Face the Nation was not happy Sunday when he laid into Dan Pfeiffer, the latest administration flack. 

… But with all of these things, when these things happen, you seem to send out officials many times who don’t even seem to know what has happened. And I use as an example of that Susan Rice who had no connection whatsoever to the events that took place in Benghazi, and yet she was sent out, appeared on this broadcast, and other Sunday broadcasts, five days after it happens, and I’m not here to get in an argument with you about who changed which word in the talking points and all that. The bottom line is what she told the American people that day bore no resemblance to what had happened on the ground in an incident where four Americans were killed. …

… But what I’m saying to you is that was just PR. That was just a PR plan to send out somebody who didn’t know anything about what had happened. Why did you do that? Why didn’t the Secretary of State come and tell us what they knew and if he knew nothing say, “We don’t know yet?” Why didn’t the White House Chief of Staff come out? I mean I would, and I mean this as no disrespect to you, why are you here today? Why isn’t the White House Chief of Staff here to tell us what happened? …

And Jennifer Rubin is happy someone in the media is interested in Benghazi.

… Bob Woodward says, “I would not dismiss Benghazi,” as the president has tried to do. Blanket announcements by the media or the White House that it is a made up scandal with no attempt to wrestle with the nitty-gritty facts, the executive inattention and the strategic negligence aren’t compelling. For one thing, it is cause for concern when the administration can admit in private such gross errors yet no one will admit that publicly. If nothing else, it is a scandal that we still don’t know what the president was doing, how we left our people as sitting ducks and why so many people who should have known better could have come up with a cock and bull story, for which, by the way, they never came forward to tell us that what they had said had been wrong.

Come to think of it, there is one big difference between Benghazi and Watergate. In the latter, the press was interested and determined to get to the truth, not content to say, “Nixon has enemies.” In the former, the lack of curiosity if not skepticism is a sign how far we’ve come from a truly aggressive, independent media to act as a check on government.

Even left winger Andy Borowitz is making fun.

President Obama used his weekly radio address on Saturday to reassure the American people that he has “played no role whatsoever” in the U.S. government over the past four years.

“Right now, many of you are angry at the government, and no one is angrier than I am,” he said. “Quite frankly, I am glad that I have had no involvement in such an organization.”

The President’s outrage only increased, he said, when he “recently became aware of a part of that government called the Department of Justice.”

“The more I learn about the activities of these individuals, the more certain I am that I would not want to be associated with them,” he said. “They sound like bad news.”

Mr. Obama closed his address by indicating that beginning next week he would enforce what he called a “zero tolerance policy on governing.”

“If I find that any members of my Administration have had any intimate knowledge of, or involvement in, the workings of the United States government, they will be dealt with accordingly,” he said.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Richard Epstein chronicles the problems with the Affordable Care Act.  

The ACA’s new marketplaces are said to allow ordinary individuals to shop for their own policies. This modest goal sounds easy, but it is not. As the current rules demand, all enrollment must be possible online, in person, by phone, fax, and mail. In addition to a website, the exchanges must provide “culturally and linguistically appropriate assistance,” along with a navigator program to promote public awareness. They must offer seamless linkage with other public initiatives, and accurate information on premium tax credits and cost-sharing subsidies, all under a program whose key provisions are not yet fully worked out. Already, HHS has distributed over $3.6 billion to states for implementation, with more to come.

Yet for all of these Herculean efforts, at present, only 18 states have opted to create their own exchanges, and seven are planning for a partnership exchange in cooperation with the federal government. A whopping 26 states have defaulted on their option, leaving the feds to pick up the pieces. Similarly, only 29 states have opted into the ACA’s Medicaid extension program, even though it promises substantial federal support early on. Twenty states have already opted out of the program and two are weighing their options.

At this point, the total administrative burden on the federal government has massively increased. Yet neither the federal government nor the states have the human or financial resources to discharge these tasks in a timely fashion, making it highly unlikely that these exchanges will be up and running by January 1, 2014. To achieve that goal, the various private participants on the exchanges must design and post their policies by October 1, 2013.

Unfortunately, these private insurers cannot do their part unless they have enough information to accurately price the “essential minimum conditions” required under the ACA. At present, it is estimated that only around 2 percent of the current plans meet the ACA’s outsized legislative ambitions. Nor can the federal government set up, all at once, the federal exchanges that are needed to make this system work. Similarly, the tepid reception to the Medicaid extension program only stretches scarce government resources. With each passing day, it becomes clearer that the entire process is backing up.

Then there is the matter of the initial 21-page enrollment form that the Department of Health and Human Services first released to the public. The President’s speech crowed that HHS has compressed that form to 3 pages, making it shorter, analogous to private enrollment forms. Yet like everything else about the ACA, his point is a public relationships ruse that has already backfired. As Grace-Marie Turner has pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, much of the reduction in form length comes from shrinking the font, or from relegating key parts of the basic application to separate forms. Needless to say, HHS has just announced a $150 million grant for its navigation program to help people work their way through the now abbreviated form.

Gabriel Schoenfeld, who was in these pages often before he left Commentary and signed on to the Romney campaign, has written a book about how the loss came about.

Even before my new book, A Bad Day on the Romney Campaign: An Insider’s Account, went on sale and could be read, it was suggested to me by former colleagues in a series of e-mails, calls, and statements in the press that I would regret airing “dirty laundry” in public.

One top aide warned that I would become “permanently radioactive” and would never work in this town again. Others called me disreputable and disloyal — and those are among the kinder words directed my way. And then the smearing began, with Romney’s deputy campaign manager going so far as to state to Time that I was lying about being a “senior adviser” to the campaign, an attempt to discredit me readily disproven by the campaign’s own official documents.

Is this fierce reaction warranted? Am I wrong to speak up? Both questions raise interesting issues.

The ferocity, I believe, comes from fear. Throughout the campaign, the Romney organization was relatively successful in keeping its secrets to itself. Although the problems of the campaign were visible to the world, a code of silence prevailed, and continues to prevail, in its ranks. It exists for reasons of self-protection, to evade responsibility for a loss that was avoidable. Those warning me off publishing have not even read my book, but their anxiety about what I might say is a measure of how much they have to hide.

My book exposes incompetence, yes. Too often, incompetence is blithely excused in politics. “That’s how campaigns always are,” the experts assure us. For one, if the Republican party hopes to win, that lackadaisical attitude needs to change. Exposing incompetence is a start. …

Michael Barone says Benghazi and the IRS thuggery are just politics by other means. 

What do the Benghazi cover-up and the IRS scandal have in common? They were both about winning elections, under false pretenses.

Winning elections, after all, is something Barack Obama is good at. He obviously loves campaigning and delivering grand orations to enormous adoring crowds.

He loves it so much that he flew off to Las Vegas to campaign the day after the first murder of a U.S. ambassador in 33 years.

What actually happened in Benghazi was out of sync with the Obama campaign line. Osama bin Laden was dead. Al Qaeda was on the run. The global war on terror — well, don’t call it that anymore.

A deliberate effort to mislead the voters was launched. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, White House press secretary Jay Carney and the president himself talked about a spontaneous protest of an anti-Muslim video — even though no evidence of that came from Benghazi.

The White House and the State Department altered the CIA’s talking points — not just in one minor particular, as Carney claimed, but through 12 separate versions. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice, armed with the talking points, spoke sternly about a spontaneous protest and an anti-Muslim video on five Sunday interview shows.

The campaign trail press grilled Mitt Romney for his (impolitic) statement immediately after the attacks. Obama went on talk shows and peddled his line about an anti-Muslim video.

Debate moderator Candy Crowley came to Obama’s defense when he claimed that he had immediately stated that Benghazi was a terrorist attack — a claim Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler awarded four Pinocchios. …

Christian Science Monitor Blog says Bob Woodward thinks we should not ignore Benghazi.

Bob Woodward compared Benghazi to Watergate during a Friday morning appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

The famous Washington Post reporter and former antagonist of President Richard Nixon said the US government’s editing of talking points used by public officials in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks in Benghazi, Libya, is “a very serious issue.”

“I would not dismiss Benghazi,” Mr. Woodward said.

Woodward’s own main talking point was that he believed there are similarities between the process used to produce the Benghazi talking points and Nixon’s release of edited transcripts of the White House tapes.

Citing the lengthy e-mail chain detailing the production of the talking points, released by the Obama administration earlier this week, the Watergate press hero said that in the wake of the Libyan tragedy “everyone in the government is saying, ‘Oh, let’s not tell the public that terrorists were involved, people connected to Al Qaeda. Let’s not tell the public that there were warnings.’ ”

Forty years ago, Nixon went line by line through his tape transcripts and made his own edits.

“He personally went through them and said, ‘Let’s not tell this, let’s not show this,’ ” said Woodward on “Morning Joe.”

Nixon, of course, was trying to deflate the increasing public and congressional pressure for him to release the tapes themselves. He wasn’t successful. The tapes revealed the extent of his involvement with the Watergate break-in and subsequent cover up.

As to Benghazi, Woodward concluded that the edits “show the hydraulic pressure that was in the system not to tell the truth.”

WaPo reporters do a good job exposing Eric Holder’s lies that purported to explain and excuse the AP wiretaps.

For five days, reporters at the Associated Press had been sitting on a big scoop about a foiled al-Qaeda plot at the request of CIA officials. Then, in a hastily scheduled Monday morning meeting, the journalists were asked by agency officials to hold off on publishing the story for just one more day.

The CIA officials, who had initially cited national security concerns in an attempt to delay publication, no longer had those worries, according to individuals familiar with the exchange. Instead, the Obama administration was planning to announce the successful counterterrorism operation that Tuesday.

AP balked and proceeded to publish that Monday afternoon. Its May 2012 report is now at the center of a controversial and broad seizure of phone records of AP reporters’ home, office and cellphone lines. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said the unauthorized disclosure about an intelligence operation to stop al-Qaeda from detonating explosives aboard a U.S. airliner was among the most serious leaks he could remember, and justified secretly obtaining records from a handful of reporters and editors over a span of two months.

Now, some members of Congress and media advocates are questioning why the administration viewed the leak that led to the May 7 AP story as so grave.

The president’s top counterterrorism adviser at the time, John O. Brennan, had appeared on “Good Morning America” the following day to trumpet the successful operation. He said that because of the work of U.S. intelligence, the plot did not pose an active threat to the American public.

Holder said this week that the unauthorized disclosure “put the American people at risk.” …

Now for the important stuff. In a working class neighborhood south west of downtown Milwaukee is the Holler House Bar. Not your average bar, but one with its own entry in Wikipedia. Two notable things about the tavern are the bowling alleys (first in the nation, they say) and the patron’s bras shed and signed so they can be posted for posterity. Then government idiots got involved and told the owner, Marcy Skowronski to remove the “fire hazard” or face fines up to “$10,000 per day.” Typical government creeps. We can thank Jim Stingl of the Journal-Sentinel for the story with the happy ending. Sounds like the bar has lots of support. 

Stripped of the bras that decorated the tavern’s ceiling for nearly half a century, the Holler House looked mighty naked.

But on Thursday, justice was restored to the universe. A ridiculous city order to ban the bras as a fire hazard was rescinded.

“Oh my goodness, we won,” cried Marcy Skowronski, the always colorful 87-year-old owner of the south side bar. “We’re going to have a party to throw the bras back up.”

I’ll let Skowronski explain what happened when a city inspector stopped in recently.

“We’ve had bras hanging here for 45 years. It’s been a charm of the place. So here comes this gal, and she’s walking in here like Lady Astor’s pet horse, you know, and she says she wants those bras down because they’re a fire hazard. Now how can a bra be a fire hazard unless someone is wearing it? Honest to God.” …

… “We’ve got a bunch of crazy people who come in here,” Skowronski said.

But no crazier than the city’s short-lived ban on the frilly things they leave behind. 

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

When it comes to exposing administration incompetence, we are in a target rich environment. John Fund reviews the unfolding, cringe inducing, tales of government idiots. Pickerhead never begrudged the president’s golf rounds figuring if he was on the links that was less damage he could do to the country. Turns out though, he outsourced the presidency to Valerie Jarrett. It is easy to believe she was heavily involved in many of the things that have gone bad for this bunch of miscreants.

The recent spate of Washington scandals has some liberals finally confessing in public what many of them have said privately for a long time. The Obama administration is arrogant, insular, prone to intimidation of adversaries, and slovenly when it comes to seeing that rules are followed. Indeed, the Obama White House is a strange place, and it’s good that its operational model is now likely to be finally dissected by the media.

Joe Klein of Time magazine laments Obama’s “unwillingness to concentrate.”

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post tars him as a President Passerby who “seems to want no control over the actions of his administration.” Milbank warns that “he’s creating a power vacuum in which lower officials behave as though anything goes.” Comedian Jon Stewart says Obama’s government lacks real “managerial competence” and that the president is either Nixonian if he knew about the scandals in advance or a Mr. Magoo–style incompetent if he didn’t.

But it was Chris Matthews of MSNBC who cut even deeper in his Hardball show on Wednesday. A former speechwriter for President Carter, he wondered if Obama “really doesn’t want to be responsible day-to-day for running” the government. He savaged the White House for using “weird, spooky language” about “the building leadership” that must approve the Benghazi talking points. “I don’t understand the model of this administration: weak chiefs of staff afraid of other people in the White House. Some undisclosed role for Valerie Jarrett. Unclear, a lot of floating power in the White House, but no clear line of authority. …

Kimberley Strassel details how the IRS scandal started with the one.

Mr. Obama now professes shock and outrage that bureaucrats at the IRS did exactly what the president of the United States said was the right and honorable thing to do. “He put a target on our backs, and he’s now going to blame the people who are shooting at us?” asks Idaho businessman and longtime Republican donor Frank VanderSloot.

Mr. VanderSloot is the Obama target who in 2011 made a sizable donation to a group supporting Mitt Romney. In April 2012, an Obama campaign website named and slurred eight Romney donors. It tarred Mr. VanderSloot as a “wealthy individual” with a “less-than-reputable record.” Other donors were described as having been “on the wrong side of the law.”

This was the Obama version of the phone call—put out to every government investigator (and liberal activist) in the land.

Twelve days later, a man working for a political opposition-research firm called an Idaho courthouse for Mr. VanderSloot’s divorce records. In June, the IRS informed Mr. VanderSloot and his wife of an audit of two years of their taxes. In July, the Department of Labor informed him of an audit of the guest workers on his Idaho cattle ranch. In September, the IRS informed him of a second audit, of one of his businesses. Mr. VanderSloot, who had never been audited before, was subject to three in the four months after Mr. Obama teed him up for such scrutiny.

The last of these audits was only concluded in recent weeks. Not one resulted in a fine or penalty. But Mr. VanderSloot has been waiting more than 20 months for a sizable refund and estimates his legal bills are $80,000. That figure doesn’t account for what the president’s vilification has done to his business and reputation.

The Obama call for scrutiny wasn’t a mistake; it was the president’s strategy—one pursued throughout 2012. The way to limit Romney money was to intimidate donors from giving. Donate, and the president would at best tie you to Big Oil or Wall Street, at worst put your name in bold, and flag you as “less than reputable” to everyone who worked for him: the IRS, the SEC, the Justice Department. The president didn’t need a telephone; he had a megaphone.

Weekly Standard learned from NBC’s Lisa Meyer the IRS chose to hide the scandal until after the election.

NBC’s Lisa Myers reported this morning (Friday) that the IRS deliberately chose not to reveal that it had wrongly targeted conservative groups until after the 2012 presidential election:

The IRS commissioner “has known for at least a year that this was going on,” said Myers, “and that this had happened. And did he share any of that information with the White House? But even more importantly, Congress is going to ask him, why did you mislead us for an entire year? Members of Congress were saying conservatives are being targeted. What’s going on here? The IRS denied it. Then when — after these officials are briefed by the IG that this is going on, they don’t disclose it. In fact, the commissioner sent a letter to Congress in September on this subject and did not reveal this. Imagine if we — if you can — what would have happened if this fact came out in September 2012, in the middle of a presidential election? The terrain would have looked very different.”

Jennifer Rubin watched the latest press conference.

President Obama’s press conference in the rain was not a success, if by success, his supporters would mean an event which convinces anyone who doesn’t work for him that he’s getting ahead of the scandal deluge. The sight of a Marine holding an umbrella over his head only added to the weirdness of the event.

So what did we learn?

1. He has full confidence in Attorney General Eric Holder, the man who purportedly recused himself (whenever) without putting it in writing (whatever). When asked about the untrammeled snooping on Associated Press reporters and editors, Obama said he doesn’t talk about a “pending case” (except in numerous shootings, the IRS, etc., I suppose). He reiterated his intolerance of leaks. In other words, the great liberal icon is pleased (“no apologies”) with an investigation that went far beyond anything previously undertaken against a media outlet.

2. He’s going to get the Internal Revenue Service in tip-top shape. Still, it’s an independent agency and all. (The willingness to show he is in charge is undercut by his insistence he had no idea what was going on there.)

3. His lip-service to the importance of a free press that holds him “accountable” suggests the most important attribute he now has is shamelessness. …

Peter Wehner calls him the “ad hominem president.”

1. President Obama is once again engaging in what psychiatrists refer to as projection, in which people lay their worst attributes on others.

In this instance, the most hyper-partisan president in modern times is ascribing that trait to Congressional Republicans. What we’ve learned about Mr. Obama over the years is that he that while he is unusually inept at governing, he’s quite good at campaigning. He certainly enjoys it, having taken the concept of the Permanent Campaign beyond anything we’ve ever seen. It turns out it’s the only thing he does well—no human being in history has raised campaign cash quite like he has—and it’s all he seems interested in doing.

On some deep, subconscious level, though, Mr. Obama seems ashamed of the path he’s chosen. And so the president projects those traits he loathes in himself on to others. To give you a sense of how deep the malady runs, the president does more than merely project; he actually preaches against the very character flaws he himself cannot overcome.

2. The president can hardly go a day without impugning the motivations of his opponents. They never have honest differences with the president. Instead they are suffering from an illness (“fever”), cowardice (afraid of what Rush Limbaugh might say about them), and lack of patriotism (caring about elections rather than future generations). Mr. Obama is the ultimate ad hominem president. …

Dana Milbank called him “president passerby” and now he’s turned his sights on the placeHolder.

As the nation’s top law enforcement official, Eric Holder is privy to all kinds of sensitive information. But he seems to be proud of how little he knows.

Why didn’t his Justice Department inform the Associated Press, as the law requires, before pawing through reporters’ phone records?

“I do not know,” the attorney general told the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday afternoon, “why that was or was not done. I simply don’t have a factual basis to answer that question.”

Why didn’t the DOJ seek the AP’s cooperation, as the law also requires, before issuing subpoenas?

“I don’t know what happened there,” Holder replied. “I was recused from the case.”

Why, asked the committee’s chairman, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), was the whole matter handled in a manner that appears “contrary to the law and standard procedure”?

“I don’t have a factual basis to answer the questions that you have asked, because I was recused,” the attorney general said.

On and on Holder went: …

Jennifer Rubin on the Holder faux recusal.

Attorney General Eric Holder told the House Judiciary Committee he recused himself from the leak investigation involving sweeping surveillance of the Associated Press because he was a “fact witness,” meaning he had access to the classified data at issue and was questioned about it. But he can’t recall when he recused himself. And it wasn’t in writing. In one of the worst security leaks of which he is aware (he says), he never told the White House (he says) that he took himself out of the loop.

Remarkable really, even if true. John Yoo, who authored the enhanced interrogation memos in the Bush Justice Department and was widely criticized by the left for taking a broad view of executive power, was somewhat incredulous when I asked him about the Justice Department’s behavior. As for the paperless recusal, he told me, “There must be something in writing to at least the DAG [deputy attorney general].”

Former attorney general Michael Mukasey agreed, emailing me that ”it is inconceivable to me that you would not do it formally. Of course, you’d have to inform all the people who might otherwise have to contact you. Indeed, if you didn’t you might conceivably come into possession of information you should not have.” He added that “in the one case I can recall in which I recused myself I did it in writing. Hard to imagine how else you’d do it — shout ‘I recuse myself’ in your office? In the hall?”

But it is the unrestrained nature of investigation that is breathtaking, beyond anything Mukasey has seen, he told me. Yoo observed, “I cannot think of another example this broad that didn’t turn out to be unauthorized. The only comparable thing was cases where a court tried to get a journalist to reveal a source. But I cannot think of the actual monitoring of reporters and editors.” He added, “If something like that had ever come up during the Bush administration in my time at DOJ, I would have said it was unconstitutional.” …

As John Fund mentioned above, even Chris Matthews is starting to gag. Politico has the story.

President Obama “obviously likes giving speeches more than he does running the executive branch,” Chris Matthews said tonight.

Yes, you read that right: The MSNBC host who in 2008 felt a “thrill going up my leg” after hearing Obama speak has grown disenchanted. Tonight’s episode of Hardball saw Matthews delivering a rare, unforgiving grilling of the president as severe as anything that might appear on Fox News. …

You can’t make it up! ABC News tells us Sarah Hall Ingram, the IRS creep in charge of the tea party targeting, now runs the IRS health care office. Of course. 

The Internal Revenue Service official in charge of the tax-exempt organizations at the time when the unit targeted tea party groups now runs the IRS office responsible for the health care legislation.

Sarah Hall Ingram served as commissioner of the office responsible for tax-exempt organizations between 2009 and 2012. But Ingram has since left that part of the IRS and is now the director of the IRS’ Affordable Care Act office, the IRS confirmed to ABC News today.

Her successor, Joseph Grant, is taking the fall for misdeeds at the scandal-plagued unit between 2010 and 2012. …

And from the Examiner we learn Ingram got $100,000 in bonus over the last three years. 

Sarah Hall Ingram, the IRS executive in charge of the tax exempt division in 2010 when it began targeting conservative Tea Party, evangelical and pro-Israel groups for harrassment, got more than $100,000 in bonuses between 2009 and 2012.

More recently, Ingram was promoted to serve as director of the tax agency’s Obamacare program office, a position that put her in charge of the vast expansion of the IRS’ regulatory power and staffing in connection with federal health care, ABC reported earlier today. …