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Jeffery Tucker at Laissez Faire Today on how government wrecked the gas can.
The gas gauge broke. There was no smartphone app to tell me how much was left, so I ran out. I had to call the local gas station to give me enough to get on my way. The gruff but lovable attendant arrived in his truck and started to pour gas in my car’s tank. And pour. And pour.
“Hmmm, I just hate how slow these gas cans are these days,” he grumbled. “There’s no vent on them.”
That sound of frustration in this guy’s voice was strangely familiar, the grumble that comes when something that used to work but doesn’t work anymore, for some odd reason we can’t identify.
I’m pretty alert to such problems these days. Soap doesn’t work. Toilets don’t flush. Clothes washers don’t clean. Light bulbs don’t illuminate. Refrigerators break too soon. Paint discolors. Lawnmowers have to be hacked. It’s all caused by idiotic government regulations that are wrecking our lives one consumer product at a time, all in ways we hardly notice.
It’s like the barbarian invasions that wrecked Rome, taking away the gains we’ve made in bettering our lives. It’s the bureaucrats’ way of reminding market producers and consumers who is in charge.
Surely, the gas can is protected. It’s just a can, for goodness sake. Yet he was right. This one doesn’t have a vent. Who would make a can without a vent unless it was done under duress? After all, everyone knows to vent anything that pours. Otherwise, it doesn’t pour right and is likely to spill.
It took one quick search. The whole trend began in (wait for it) California. …
ObamaBS gets derision from Charles Krauthammer.
You know you’re in trouble when you can’t even get your walk-back story straight. Stung by the worldwide derision that met President Obama’s fudging and fumbling of his chemical-weapons red line in Syria, the White House leaked to the New York Times that Obama’s initial statement had been unprepared, unscripted and therefore unserious.
The next day Jay Carney said precisely the opposite: “Red line” was intended and deliberate.
Which is it? Who knows? Perhaps Obama used the term last August to look tough, sound like a real world leader, never expecting that Syria would do something so crazy. He would have it both ways: sound decisive but never have to deliver.
Or perhaps he thought that Syria might actually use chemical weapons one day, at which point he would think of something.
So far he’s thought of nothing. Instead he’s backed himself into a corner: Be forced into a war he is firmly resolved to avoid, or lose credibility, which for a superpower on whose word relies the safety of a dozen allies is not just embarrassing but dangerous.
In his recent rambling news conference, Obama said that he needed certainty about the crossing of the red line to keep the “international community” behind him. This is absurd. The “international community” is a fiction, especially in Syria. Russia, Iran and Hezbollah are calling the shots.
Nor, he averred, could he act until he could be sure of everything down to the “chain of custody” of the sarin gas.
What is this? “CSI: Damascus”? …
Neo-Neocon posts on speechwriters in the administration who get rewarded with real jobs where they are out of their depth.
Several people have mentioned Ben Rhodes in connection with the Benghazi debacle (just Google “Ben Rhodes Benghazi” and you’ll find plenty of the speculation). It’s not at all clear how much responsibility Rhodes had for the decisions during the Benghazi attack and the spin afterward. But what is clear is that Rhodes is one of Obama’s many advisors who lack anything remotely connected with expertise, except in the art of politics and speechwriting. Despite this, for Obama Rhodes doesn’t just write about foreign policy, he helps to make it.
Rhodes’ resume is singularly unimpressive, except after he was tapped by Obama to write for him and then to somehow be a foreign policy “expert.” Rhodes is hardly unique in the Obama administration for having this sort of background. The president seems to prefer to have people around him with even less experience and expertise than he has, which is saying something. …
Scott Johnson of Power Line quotes David Gelernter on Benghazi revelations.
… It is the Democratic Party that’s on trial today; and to a lesser extent, America’s mainstream media. For Democrats (and especially Democratic senators) it is put-up-or-shut-up time: are they Democrats or Americans first? Obviously their first instinct was to defend the Democratic administration. Republicans would have done the same. But starting with the Hayes story on the Rice propaganda points (and the neo-Soviet process that turned them from truth to lies), and then the Issa hearing Wednesday (and a recent ABC news piece focusing again on the phonied-up talking points), no honest observer can fail to suspect this administration of doing unspeakable things. It is Congress’s duty to find out the truth.
How would Republicans act if a GOP administration were under this sort of cloud? We know exactly how. It was the radically partisan Edward Kennedy who proposed that a senate select committee investigate Watergate—but in February 1973, the Senate voted unanimously to create that committee. Republican Senator Howard Baker was vice chairman, and asked the key question: ”What did the president know and when did he know it?” Which Democratic senator will ask that question today, now that the issue isn’t breaking-and-entering but lying about four murders, including the murder of an American ambassador? …
Jennifer Rubin says this is pointing toward Hillary.
… To begin with, the very compelling witness Gregory Hicks explained to lawmakers that the YouTube video lampooning Muhammad was a non-event; rather, he understood the assault on the Benghazi consulate to be a terrorist attack and briefed Clinton that night. There was no confusion about the attack in that sense. The “spontaneous demonstration” story line did not come from people on the ground or from the intelligence community (who knew from the get-go that al-Qaeda linked operatives were involved). It came from senior administration officials.
Hicks, the State Department’s deputy chief of mission in Libya, asked Beth Jones, the acting assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs, why U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice was pinning the incident on the YouTube video. He said he was told not to ask questions.
Then there is the matter of the rescue forces. Among others, then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta testified in February that no forces were called and none were told to stand down. The testimony yesterday tells us that isn’t true. (That may have been a correct military judgment, but we’ll never know.) The forces from Aviano Air Base in Italy and a second team of special forces in Tripoli were told to stand down, according to Hicks. He said the military personnel there were “furious. [A military officer told Hicks,] ‘This is the first time in my career that a diplomat has more balls than somebody in the military.’ ” Mark Thompson, the State Department’s deputy coordinator for counterterrorism, also testified, “I was told this was not the right time to deploy the team.”
In the wake of the attack, Hicks testified, he was told not to speak with a congressional delegation visiting Libya. After he participated in a classified briefing without a State Department lawyer present, Cheryl Mills, Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff and sometimes called Hillary’s alter ego at State, contacted Gregory Hicks and told him she was “very upset.” …
This has become so serious for the administration, they are losing The New Yorker.
It’s a cliché, of course, but it really is true: in Washington, every scandal has a crime and a coverup. The ongoing debate about the attack on the United States facility in Benghazi where four Americans were killed, and the Obama Administration’s response to it, is no exception. For a long time, it seemed like the idea of a coverup was just a Republican obsession. But now there is something to it.
On Friday, ABC News’s Jonathan Karl revealed the details of the editing process for the C.I.A.’s talking points about the attack, including the edits themselves and some of the reasons a State Department spokeswoman gave for requesting those edits. It’s striking to see the twelve different iterations that the talking points went through before they were released to Congress and to United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice, who used them in Sunday show appearances that became a central focus of Republicans’ criticism of the Administration’s public response to the attacks. Over the course of about twenty-four hours, the remarks evolved from something specific and fairly detailed into a bland, vague mush.
From the very beginning of the editing process, the talking points contained the erroneous assertion that the attack was “spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and evolved.” That’s an important fact, because the right has always criticized the Administration based on the suggestion that the C.I.A. and the State Department, contrary to what they said, knew that the attack was not spontaneous and not an outgrowth of a demonstration. But everything else about the changes that were made is problematic. …
According to Mary Kissel of WSJ’s Political Diary, the Thomas Perez LaborSec nomination might be in trouble.
Are the political winds starting to shift against labor secretary nominee Thomas Perez? Senate Republicans delayed a vote on his nomination Wednesday on a procedural technicality. The hearing is now expected to be held next week. But the more surprising news is that Rep. Elijah Cummings, a Maryland Democrat, called Wednesday for Mr. Perez to comply with a subpoena of his personal email account.
Until now, Democrats have denounced the House investigation into a legal quid pro quo that Mr. Perez negotiated with the City of St. Paul, Minn., last year, in his role as the Justice Department’s civil-rights chief. …