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Ross Douthat on the great disconnect between DC and the citizens. 

THIS January, as President Obama began his second term, the Pew Research Center asked Americans to list their policy priorities for 2013. Huge majorities cited jobs and the economy; sizable majorities cited health care costs and entitlement reform; more modest majorities cited fighting poverty and reforming the tax code. Down at the bottom of the list, with less than 40 percent support in each case, were gun control, immigration and climate change.

Yet six months later, the public’s non-priorities look like the entirety of the White House’s second-term agenda. The president’s failed push for background checks has given way to an ongoing push for immigration reform, and the administration is reportedly planning a sweeping regulatory push on carbon emissions this summer. Meanwhile, nobody expects much action on the issues that Americans actually wanted Washington to focus on: tax and entitlement reform have been back-burnered, and the plight of the unemployed seems to have dropped off the D.C. radar screen entirely.

In part, this disconnect between country and capital reflects the limits gridlock puts on governance. The ideological divides in Washington — between right and left, and between different factions within the House Republican caucus — make action on first-rank issues unusually difficult, so it’s natural that politicians would look for compromises on lower-priority debates instead.

That’s the generous way of looking at it, at least. The more cynical take is that D.C. gridlock has given the political class an excuse to ignore the country’s most pressing problem — a lack of decent jobs at decent wages, with a deeper social crisis at work underneath — and pursue its own pet causes instead.

Craig Pirrong has more on the foolishness from the administration this week.

Obama gave a big speech on the environment, and specifically climate change and CO2.  The left swooned. The right raged.

Me-meh.

Not that I like the content of the speech (if you can call what he said “content”)-more on this in a bit.  It’s just that presidential speeches tend to be long on promises and calls to action, and very short on follow through.  That’s doubly or triply true of Obama speeches.  Look at all his speeches on gun control, and how little that came from them.  Like nothing.  This is a little different, because he can actually direct the EPA to do some things, and nothing in the speech was dependent on legislative approval (which is revealing in itself). Moreover, even the EPA process will be long and drawn out, and its outcome uncertain.  Obama was equivocal on Keystone XL, basically setting out a set of criteria that he will use to evaluate it.  These criteria are so elastic that it is possible to use them to justify rejection or approval, and indeed, both sides said they were encouraged by Obama’s remarks.

Righties should actually like the speech.  The fact that Obama feels obliged to pander to his base should make them happy.  Hedge fund billionaire Thomas Steyer had made Keystone a litmus test for continued proggy support for Obama.  If he has to spend time, effort, and political capital to appease the Steyers of the world, righties should be pleased.

Insofar as the content, such as it is, goes, a couple of things jumped out.

The first is the condescending characterization of the state of the science on global warming.  The snide references to the “Flat Earth Society” and the like. …

Andrew Malcolm says of course he turns to globalony. Nothing else is working.

President Obama is running out of pivot points.

So many of his bright ideas have been busts. Or worse. Let’s see, the $1 trillion jobs stimulus package that was going to produce a gazillion jobs by today.

Now, Obama’s jobs plan is a laugh line for late-night comics. Jay Leno: “Obama told MorehouseCollege graduates they have bright futures ahead. Unless they want jobs. Then, they’re totally screwed.”

That policy reset with Russia? Obama gave up the Eastern European missile defense shield as a naive sign of good faith. Got no thanks. And now he can’t even convince the Russians to get the NSA leaker out of the transit lounge at Moscow’s airport. “Passenger Edward Snowden, please check at the KGB counter if you have a minute.”

ObamaCare? Collapsing under its own weight and fundraising scandal as Democrats run from any connection to it. When’s the last time you heard even its namesake tout its value?

Virtually everything the guy touches this year turns to Shinola. He went to OhioState, urged Americans to dismiss all this silly talk about evil government out to control lives. Days later, oops, here comes the infamous ongoing series of revelations about the Internal Revenue Service harassing Obama opponents, as other government agents coincidentally knock on doors.

But the nation’s chief executive didn’t know about it. …

… jobs aren’t really Obama’s thing. Never have been. If Obama can pit more Americans against more Americans — say, coal miners worried about disappearing jobs against indebted college students who can’t find any — that suits this Alinsky acolyte just fine.

The more social turbulence and distrust the better. The less faith Americans maintain in their once-revered institutions the better for someone who wants to transform them all into something else. And still has 1,304 long days to do the deed.

Bjørn Lomborg, author of Skeptical Environmentalist, thinks we need to worry about  economic growth.

… Obsession with doom-and-gloom scenarios distracts us from the real global threats. Poverty is one of the greatest killers of all, while easily curable diseases still claim 15 million lives every year–25 percent of all deaths.

The solution is economic growth. When lifted out of poverty, most people can afford to avoid infectious diseases. China has pulled more than 680 million people out of poverty in the last three decades, leading a worldwide poverty decline of almost 1 billion people. This has created massive improvements in health, longevity, and quality of life.

The four decades since The Limits of Growth have shown that we need more of it, not less. An expansion of trade, with estimated benefits exceeding $100 trillion annually toward the end of the century, would do thousands of times more good than timid feel-good policies that result from fear-mongering. But that requires abandoning an anti-growth mentality and using our enormous potential to create a brighter future. …

Jonathan Tobin asks if the Dems really want to wage a war on coal.

President Obama may think his speech today outlining an unprecedented package of measures aimed at stopping global warming will burnish his legacy. The set of executive orders announced today was exactly what his liberal base has been yearning for throughout his presidency, and the ideological tone of his speech must he highly satisfying for a president who enjoys dictating to what he considers his intellectual inferiors and despises working with a Congress that rejected these measures. But while liberals are cheering Obama’s far-reaching fiat, a lot of Democrats, especially in coal-producing states, must be far from happy.

The president’s orders that will impose new carbon emission levels on existing power plants will raise the price of energy for everyone and harm an already fragile economy that has struggled to maintain an anemic recovery. By itself that may prove to be a political liability for Democrats running in next year’s midterm elections even if by now most Americans have had their natural skepticism about global warming alarmism pounded out of them by an ideological media. But an all-too-candid Obama advisor may have made a crucial gaffe that could kill the president’s party in coal-producing states next year. …

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Last fall all the bien pensants made fun of Romney’s characterization of Russia as our number one enemy. Now Foreign Policy magazine has a piece titled “Romney Was Right.”

… Mitt Romney suffered much unfair criticism last fall when he called Russia “our number one geopolitical foe.” Russia remains a country of vast natural resources, much military capability — including parity with the United States in nuclear arms — and human capital of the very highest quality. These classic geopolitical indicators of inherent strength aside, Romney noted, the leaders of Russia have also made it clear that their interests often do not coincide with American policy preferences. Though the current furore over Moscow’s willingness to shelter the fugitive Edward Snowden is eye-catching, the resurgent rivalry is more evident, and more important, in the case of Syria, where Russia can derail any effort to obtain the blessing of the United Nations for military intervention and at the same time shore up the Assad regime with a wide range of weaponry.

A determined effort to understand Russian strategic thinking about the Syrian situation could pay real dividends in terms of pointing out Moscow’s true geopolitical strength on the world stage. In my view, Russian reasoning and aims regarding Syria are nested — in a manner somewhat like their many-in-one matryoshka dolls. The first layer of motivation must certainly be defined by a determination to avoid being snookered into giving even tacit permission — as happened in the case of Libya — for international military action against the Assad regime. Yet another concern must be about maintaining a naval toehold in the Mediterranean, as is provided for the Russians by the Syrian port of Tartous.

But in a larger strategic sense, Moscow may be looking at Syria as the western anchor of an anti-Sunni arc of friendly countries in what is — the American pivot to the Pacific notwithstanding — the most important region in the world. …

“The Age of American Impotence” according to Bret Stephens. 

At this writing, Edward J. Snowden, the fugitive National Security Agency contractor indicted on espionage charges, is in Moscow, where Vladimir Putin’s spokesman insists his government is powerless to detain him. “We have nothing to do with this story,” says Dmitri Peskov. “I don’t approve or disapprove plane tickets.”

Funny how Mr. Putin always seems to discover his inner civil libertarian when it’s an opportunity to humiliate the United States. When the Russian government wants someone off Russian soil, it either removes him from it or puts him under it. Just ask investor Bill Browder, who was declared persona non grata when he tried to land in Moscow in November 2005. Or think of Mr. Browder’s lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, murdered by Russian prison officials four years later.

Mr. Snowden arrived in Moscow from Hong Kong, where local officials refused a U.S. arrest request, supposedly on grounds it “did not fully comply with the legal requirements under Hong Kong law.” That’s funny, too, since Mr. Snowden had been staying in a Chinese government safe house before Beijing gave the order to ignore the U.S. request and let him go. …

… “America can’t do a damn thing against us” was a maxim of the Iranian revolution in its early days when America meant Jimmy Carter. Under President Obama, the new maxim could well be “America won’t do a damn thing.”

Which brings us back to the Snowden file. Speaking from India, Mr. Kerry offered a view on what it would mean for Russia to allow him to flee. “Disappointing,” said our 68th secretary of state. He added “there would be without any question some effect and impact on the relationship and consequences.”

Moscow must be trembling.

Peggy Noonan reminds us why the IRS scandal is not going away.

… Again, what is historic about this scandal, what makes it unique and uniquely dangerous, is that it is different in kind from previous IRS scandals. In the past it was always elite versus elite, power guys using the agency against other power guys. This scandal is different because it’s the elite versus the people. It is an entrenched and fearsome power versus regular citizens.

The scandal broke, of course, when Lois Lerner deviously planted a question at a Washington conference. She was trying to get out ahead of a forthcoming inspector general’s report that would reveal the targeting. She said that “our line people in Cincinnati who handled the applications” used “wrong” methods. Also “in some cases, cases sat around for a while.” The Cincinnati workers “sent some letters out that were far too broad,” in some cases even asking for contributors’ names. “That’s not appropriate.”

Since that day, the question has been: Was the targeting of conservative groups in fact the work of incompetent staffers in Cincinnati, or were higher-ups in the Washington office of the IRS involved? Ms. Lerner said it was all Cincinnati.

But then the information cascade began. The Washington Post interviewed Cincinnati IRS workers who said everything came from the top. The Wall Street Journal reported congressional investigators had been told by the workers that they had been directed from Washington. Word came that one applicant group, after receiving lengthy and intrusive requests for additional information, including donor names, received yet another letter asking for even more information—signed by Lois Lerner.

Catherine Engelbrecht of True the Vote, which sought tax-exempt status, recently came into possession of a copy of a 20-month-old letter from the IRS’s Taxpayer Advocate Service in Houston, acknowledging that her case had been assigned to an agent in Cincinnati. “He is waiting for a determination from their office in Washington,” the advocate said. The agent was “unable to give us a timeframe” on when determination would be made.

The evidence is overwhelming that the Washington office of the IRS was involved. But who in Washington? How high did it go, how many were involved, how exactly did they operate?

Those are the questions that remain to be answered. That’s what the investigations are about. …

Ron Fournier, mainstream liberal journalist, says a special prosecutor is needed.

… The White House and its allies declared the scandal over. Said David Axelrod, one of Obama’s longest-serving advisers, said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” show: “I think the implication that this was some sort of scheme is falling apart.”

Don’t buy it. Like Issa and the GOP, Democrats are jumping to convenient conclusions based on incomplete evidence and no credible investigation.

There is a hard truth that partisans won’t admit: Until more is known, we can’t implicate or exonerate anybody.

If forced to guess, I would say that the IRS and its White House masters are guilty of gross incompetence, but not corruption. I based that only on my personal knowledge of – and respect for – Obama and his team. But I shouldn’t have to guess. More importantly, most Americans don’t have a professional relationship with Obama and his team. Many don’t respect or trust government. They deserve what Obama promised nearly six weeks ago – accountability. They need a thorough investigation conducted by somebody other than demagogic Republicans and White House allies.

Somebody like …. a special prosecutor. …

Eliana Johnson from National Review has more.

The IRS’s release on Monday of an 83-page report attempting to explain its targeting of tea-party groups, coupled with Ways and Means Committee ranking member Sander Levin’s release of 14 “lookout lists” issued by the agency at various points between August 2010 and April of this year, have created an enormous amount of confusion about whether tea-party groups were in fact targeted, and, if so, whether progressive and liberal groups were targeted too. 

The documents are revealing, but they have been misinterpreted by many reporters, who are using them to demonstrate that groups across the ideological spectrum were flagged by IRS screeners. That is not the case. Several outlets have reported that the terms “Occupy” and “Israel” appeared on lists. Having reviewed all the lists posted by Levin, I have yet to see those terms. (I welcome corrections.)

The treatment of progressive groups cannot be equated to that of tea-party groups. …

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Max Boot starts our look at diplomatic humiliation.

Forget “Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?” The hottest real-time game in the world is: Where in the world is Edward Snowden? The rogue NSA techie—who, in the judgment of the NSA’s head, Gen. Keith Alexander, “has caused irreversible and significant damage to our country and to our allies”—has fled Hong Kong and wound up in Moscow. He was rumored to be heading to Ecuador via Havana but he didn’t make the Aeroflot flight he was expected to take, leaving a pack of journalists who bought tickets to photograph an empty seat. So presumably Snowden remains in Russia at least for the time being, with rumors swirling that Ecuador or possibly Venezuela remain his destination of choice. …

… It may well be that case that a Republican president—John McCain or Mitt Romney—would have had no more success in apprehending Snowden, but the equanimity with which other states rebuff our appeals for his apprehension makes clear that the U.S. is suffering a significant loss of respect. Quite simply, the U.S. is no more universally loved than it was prior to Obama’s ascension—and now we are less respected too. As anyone who consults Machiavelli will know, this is not a recipe for a prince’s success.

Peter Wehner notes the failure of “reset” diplomacy.

… The Syrian debacle comes in the aftermath of Obama scrapping in 2009 a missile-defense system the Poles and the Czech Republic had agreed to house despite Russian threats, as a way to pacify Putin. (“The U.S. reversal is likely to please Russia, which had fiercely opposed the plans,” CNN reported at the time.)

Add to that Putin’s support for Iran’s nuclear ambitions and his crackdown at home. (The Washington Post writes that in “an attempt to suppress swelling protests against his rigged reelection and the massively corrupt autocracy he presides over, Mr. Putin has launched what both Russian and Western human rights groups describe as the most intense and pervasive campaign of political repression since the downfall of the Soviet Union.”). Taken all together, you can see that the Obama “reset”–which at the dawn of the Obama administration was described as a “win-win” strategy for both nations–has been a rout for the Russians.

With the Snowden situation, Vladimir Putin seems intent not only defying America but embarrassing her. It turns out that an irresolute amateur like Barack Obama was the best thing that the brutal but determined Putin could have hoped for.

He’s cleaning Obama’s clock.

Power Line’s John Hinderaker sums up the last few weeks for the loser administration.

The goofy techie, of course, is Ed Snowden, and the question might seem hard to answer if the Obama administration’s incompetence were not on display for all to see. The international press, belatedly catching on to the fact that our president is a fool, is having fun with the U.S. Thus, Reuters headlines, with a snicker: “Questions turn to U.S. competence in Snowden saga.”

As well they might.

“The Obama administration has spent the past few weeks arguing it can wield power responsibly after Edward Snowden unveiled its sweeping spying programs. Now the administration must prove it can wield power effectively.”

Well, it certainly can domestically. Not only can it sic the IRS on its political opponents, it can buy whatever votes may be necessary with other people’s money. Dealing with foreign countries, where such powers come up short, is another story.

“As the 30-year-old leads the world’s lone superpower on a global game of hide and seek, U.S. government officials faced questions about whether they had botched the effort to extradite Snowden from Hong Kong to face charges related to his leak of classified information.”

Actually, they botched much more than that. How in the world could the NSA allow a random employee of a contractor, Booz Allen, who had been on the “job” for only a couple of months, such unfettered and apparently uncharted access to secret materials? The fact that the NSA did so is the best argument against that agency’s being a trustworthy custodian of Americans’ secrets.

“The latest wrinkle in the Snowden saga poses a different set of questions for an administration that has spent weeks fending off questions about whether it has abused its power to collect taxes, investigate criminal activity and fight terrorism.”

Abusive and incompetent! That’s Barack Obama. …

… Barack Obama has never been a real president. He has never led. He seems to view his job duties as an unfortunate distraction from golfing and partying with celebrities. How could anyone be surprised to learn that he is an inept, ineffective president? …

 

Jennifer Rubin sums it up.

President Obama’s foreign policy has taken on a pathetic quality. Russia ignores us on the return of Edward Snowden and on ending the rule of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. China ignores us on Snowden and on cyberterrorism. The Taliban ignores our demands as we flee Afghanistan (including not to allow terrorists to camp out there). Iran ignores us and proceeds with its nuclear weapons program. The Palestinian Authority ignores us in going to the United Nations for statehood and then firing Salam Fayyad.

To paraphrase Robert Kagan and Charles Krauthammer, decline is a choice and we have chosen it. It is remarkable that the president thought he could continue to remain relevant on the world stage after he “ended” (i.e. abandoned) wars, slashed defense, allowed Iran to run the negotiation schedule, kowtowed to the Chinese and cut the legs out from every ally from Poland and the Czech Republic (which lost anti-missile sites) to Israel (condemning its building and making Palestinian demands on bargaining the official policy of the United States).

As Kim Holmes puts it, “Overall, the defining characteristic of Obama’s foreign policy appears to be preventing overseas crises from distracting from his domestic agenda. He remains a committed liberal, at least in principle, but his foreign policy is highly influenced by political expediency, which causes him to want to avoid risking overseas interventions.” it is not so much “leading from behind” as it is hiding under the bed. …

For a change of pace, Barron’s test drives a Tesla, and then test drives the stock too. One didn’t fare well.

Google “Iron Man, Tony Stark” and within the first few results you’ll find Websites likening that superhero to Elon Musk, 41, the entrepreneur behind PayPal, the rocket maker SpaceX, and the electric-car sensation Tesla Motors. The comparison’s apt. Musk is smart and stylish, and he fights planetary threats like global warming by creating spacecraft and zero-emissions cars that shame NASA and the auto giants. He’s as rich as Iron Man’s armored billionaire, too. Tesla shares rocketed this year from $35 to $115 — lifting the Palo Alto auto start-up to a market value of $14 billion at May’s end — before easing back to a recent $102, where Musk’s quarter-interest in the company is still worth $3.4 billion.

It’s possible to admire Musk’s achievements, while still wondering if Tesla’s stock market fans are viewing its prospects through 3D glasses. The towering expectations now priced into the stock don’t account for the Grand Canyon leap that Tesla must make to reach its goal of cutting its car’s $90,000-plus sticker price in half. Electric-car batteries cost a heck of a lot, and today’s Tesla Model S owes its better-than-200-mile range to batteries costing tens of thousands of dollars. Industries and governments around the world have spent billions on battery research, but few expect to trim electric-car battery costs by more than 20%-30% by the planned 2016 launch of Tesla’s car for the Everyman. Perhaps Musk will confound the industry again, but if Tesla’s next-generation car can’t go the distance at half the price, its stock will head much lower.

One ingredient that fueled Tesla’s (ticker: TSLA) tripling this year was an epic squeeze of those comic-book villains who had doubted Musk and sold more than a third of free-trading Tesla shares short. That fuel seems spent, for the moment. Traders say that the recently unborrowable shares are available again and can be had for a single-digit interest rate, instead of last month’s 90% vig. With the shorts in retreat, Tesla should trade more in line with its fundamentals.

TESLA’S MODEL S SEDAN has won every car award in sight, and test drives by several Barron’s staffers convinced us the Model S deserves the accolades. …

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According to Breitbart, Bob Woodward thinks it is absurd to pass an immigration bill no one has read.

Legendary Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward criticized the “Gang of Eight” immigration bill process, and the new rush to pass the repackaged bill with the amendment from Sens. Bob Corker (R-TN) and John Hoeven (R-ND), on Fox News Sunday.

“You can’t have a Congress that is kind of going around picking this and picking that and that fails and that fails and this fails,” Woodward said in the online post-show panel of Fox News Sunday this weekend.

Woodward added that “when you pass complicated legislation and no one has really read the bill” then “the outcome is absurd.”

Woodward is the veteran journalist who, with Carl Bernstein, broke the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon, and has remained a force at the Post over the past several decades.

Steve Hayward takes a look at the bill.

I’m pretty sure it was my first Washington mentor, the great M. Stanton Evans, who told me—and perhaps originated—the famous story of a senior Senate aide explaining American democracy to a Russian visitor shortly after the Soviet Union broke apart in 1991.  The story is probably apocryphal, but like Xenophon’s re-telling of Cyrus the Great, or Machiavelli’s subtle mis-tellings of so many stories, it contains the “effectual truth” of the matter:

‘It’s true, we have a two-party system in America: The Evil Party, and the Stupid Party.  And every once and a while the Evil Party and the Stupid Party get together to pass something really evil and stupid.  That’s called “bipartisanship.” ‘

It would seem the perfect description of the Gang of Eight and immigration reform.  Please save us from bipartisan gangs.

Stan also taught me that whenever you hear about a bad piece of legislation under development in Congress, when you actually read the bill you invariably find out that it’s even worse than you imagined.  So Stan’s column a few days ago (I don’t have a link) notes:

“On first appraisal, the amnesty/immigration bill before the Senate looks pretty bad.  On a more careful comb-through, clause by clause, it looks much worse – like a complete disaster.  It also looks like a massive venture in deception. …”

Mickey Kaus has his metaphor for the bill.

I’ve been trying to think of the right metaphor for the giant Corker-Hoeven amendment, the one that is reportedly giving the Gang of 8′s immigration bill enough votes to pass the Senate. Sure, it’s a fig leaf–but a fig leaf is usually something insignificant-yet-real. This is something grandiose that’s a fraud.

The best I can come up with is this: A man comes into your restaurant. You recognize him–he’s a guy who ate a $100 meal last year and said he’d pay later, but he stiffed you. Now he’s back and wants another meal on credit. He senses you are wary and makes a new offer. “This time I’ll pay you … $2 million! How can you refuse? It’s 2 million dollars!”

You get the idea.  Just try and collect.

Similarly,  Schumer, Durbin & Co. have offered a deal to Corker, Hoeven, and conservatives. In essence, it’s this: You’ll immediately legalize 11 M immigrants who are unlawfully in the country. They’ll get work permits renewable ad infinitum–we call it “provisional,” but basically they’re in. Yes, we know that in 1986 we passed an amnesty and promised enforcement that never happened, but this time we promise to … militarize the Southern border! Hire 20,000 new agents! That’s the ticket. Double the Border Patrol! Spend $20 billion. Quadruple the budget.  Drones in the sky–triple the number of drones. Drones! Sensors on the ground!  700 miles of fence! 100% use of E-Verify! ”I don’t know what more to do, short of just shooting people,” says Gang of 8-er Lindsey Graham.

Just try and collect. …

The Atlantic posts on the increasing prison population. Another result of the foolish drug war.

The U.S. incarceration rate has more than quadrupled since 1980. It’s now the highest in the world, just ahead of Russia and Rwanda. …

… Why have U.S. incarceration rates skyrocketed? The answer is not rising crime rates. In fact, crime rates have actually dropped by more than a quarter over the past 40 years. Some look at these statistics and find confirmation of their view that expanding prison populations reduces crime rates. In fact, however, these same decreases have occurred even in places where incarceration rates have remained unchanged.

New sentencing guidelines have been a key factor. They have reduced judges’ discretion in determining who goes to jail and increased the amount of time convicts sentenced to jail spend there. A notable example is the so-called “three-strikes” law, which mandates sentences ranging from 25 years to life for many repeat offenders. Though championed as protecting the public, such sentences have resulted in long confinements for many non-violent offenders, who constitute half of all inmates.

Perhaps the single greatest contributor has been the so-called “war on drugs,” which has precipitated a 12-fold increase in the number of incarcerated drug offenders. About 1.5 million Americans are arrested each year for drug offenses, one-third of whom end up in prison. Many are repeat offenders caught with small quantities of relatively innocuous drugs, such as marijuana, a type of criminal activity often referred to as “victimless.”

Some sentencing laws seem little less than perverse. For example, in the 1980s, crack cocaine received a great deal of public attention. In response, the U.S. Congress passed legislation imposing a 100 to 1 sentencing ratio for possession of crack cocaine, as compared to its powdered form. That is, someone carrying 5 grams of crack cocaine would get the same sentence as someone carrying 500 grams of powdered cocaine. From a medical point of view, this makes little sense. …

WSJ has the lowdown on America’s Cup spying.

The America’s Cup, which begins in San Francisco July 4, isn’t just sailing’s most prestigious competition. It is also a showcase for the most shamelessly conspicuous spy operation in professional sports.

From San Francisco’s waterfront, it’s impossible to miss the teams practicing on their 13-story-tall yachts—and the fleet of enemy spy vessels trailing them. Onboard the powerboats, which sport their teams’ logos, are photographers with $10,000 Nikon lenses trying to shoot pictures of something the other guys don’t want them to see: a shorter sail, a lighter foil, a modified rudder.

Reconnaissance in the Cup is about as old as the 162-year-old competition itself, and it’s especially crucial this year because the four teams are racing largely untested, state-of-the-art yachts. The squads spy on each other to avoid missing technological breakthroughs and to learn their opponents’ racing strategy.

“Sometimes you get caught up in your own processes and you want to think outside the box,” said Cameron, the New Zealand team photographer. “Those guys”—the competition—”are thinking completely outside the box.”

Espionage has already permeated this Cup. New Zealand coach Rod Davis said that in November, his team needed to test a new foil, which elevates a boat’s hull above water so the boat goes faster. The problem: An Oracle spy boat was lurking outside their Auckland dock.

The solution was to prepare two yachts. One had the new foil. The other didn’t. Both left dock, but the sailors on the new-foil boat pretended to suffer a breakdown. The decoy sailed off and Oracle took the bait, Davis said, leaving the first yacht to test the foil. …

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Mark Steyn on the trip to Europe.

Descending from the heavens for the G-8 summit at beautiful Lough Erne this week, President Obama caused some amusement to his British hosts. The chancellor of the Exchequer had been invited to give a presentation to the assembled heads of government on the matter of tax avoidance (one of the big items on the agenda, for those of you who think what the IRS could really use right now is even more enforcement powers). The president evidently enjoyed it. Thrice, he piped up to say how much he agreed with Jeffrey, eventually concluding the presentation with the words, “Thank you, Jeffrey.”

Unfortunately, the chancellor of the Exchequer is a bloke called George Osborne, not Jeffrey Osborne.

Obama subsequently apologized for confusing George with Jeffrey, who was a popular vocal artiste back in the ’80s when Obama was dating his composite girlfriend and making composite whoopee to the composite remix of Jeffrey Osborne’s 1982 smoocheroo, “On the Wings of Love.”

I suppose it might have been worse. When Angela Merkel proposed a toast to a strong West, he could have assumed that was the name of Kim and Kanye’s new baby. …

While the president is busy being a citizen of the world, his economy is proving a disaster for those he claims to want to help. NY Times OpEd has some examples.

In a working-class neighborhood in Lowell, Mass., in early 2009, I sat across the table from Diana, then 24, in the kitchen of her mother’s house. Diana had planned to graduate from college, marry, buy a home in the suburbs and have kids, a dog and a cat by the time she was 30. But she had recently dropped out of a nearby private university after two years of study and with nearly $80,000 in student loans. Now she worked at Dunkin’ Donuts.

“With college,” she explained, “I would have had to wait five years to get a degree, and once I get that, who knows if I will be working and if I would find something I wanted to do. I don’t want to be a cop or anything. I don’t know what to do with it. My manager says some people are born to make coffee, and I guess I was born to make coffee.”

Young working-class men and women like Diana are trying to figure out what it means to be an adult in a world of disappearing jobs, soaring education costs and shrinking social support networks. Today, only 20 percent of men and women between 18 and 29 are married. They live at home longer, spend more years in college, change jobs more frequently and start families later.

For more affluent young adults, this may look a lot like freedom. But for the hundred-some working-class 20- and 30-somethings I interviewed between 2008 and 2010 in Lowell and Richmond, Va., at gas stations, fast-food chains, community colleges and temp agencies, the view is very different. …

Mark Helprin writes about the degradation of our armed forces. 

In the rush to paper over its delinquencies in the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, the Obama administration seems unaware that its failures are fundamental rather than merely anomalous. They are, unfortunately, a portent of the future.

On March 26, this newspaper reported that “In the wake of the attack, the military has examined how to improve its rapid response forces,” specifically by “adding special operations teams of roughly 10 troops to ships carrying larger Marine Expeditionary Units.” MEUs shipborne in amphibious ready groups usually number 2,200 Marines in special forces, reconnaissance, armored reconnaissance, armor, amphibious assault, infantry, artillery, engineer and aviation battalions, companies and platoons. They can get over the beach fast, and they fight like hell.

On March 21, 2011, during Operation Odyssey Dawn, an American F-15 went down in Libya. Immediately after the Mayday, the 26th MEU started rescue operations from the USS Kearsarge, and a short time later two of its Harrier fighter jets, two CH 53 helicopters, and two MV 22 Ospreys were at the scene, with more than a hundred Marines. Hundreds more might easily have arrived if required. Forces like this could have shattered the assault in Benghazi in minutes. Adding 10 men to such echelons rich in special forces would have little relevance. Fine in itself, the proposal is an obfuscation. The issue is not the composition of already capable MEUs but rather that one was not available when the attack took place. …

And while the government’s ability to protect us has diminished, the government’s ability to protect itself has exploded. HuffPo has the story.

Want to make money on the drug war? Start a company that builds military equipment, then sell that gear to local police departments. Thanks to the generation-long trend toward more militarized police forces, there’s now massive and growing market for private companies to outfit your neighborhood cops with gear that’s more appropriate for a battlefield.

Some of this is decades-old news. For over 25 years, the Pentagon has been supplying surplus military equipment to police agencies across the country, largely in the name of fighting the drug war. In fact, in as early as 1968 Congress passed a law authorizing the military to share gear with domestic police agencies. But it was in 1987 that Washington really formalized the practice, with a law instructing the Secretary of Defense and the U.S. Attorney General to notify local law enforcement agencies each year about what surplus gear was available. The law established an office in the Pentagon specifically to facilitate such transfers, and Congress even set up an 800 number that sheriffs and police chiefs could call to inquire about the stuff they could get. The bill also instructed the General Services Administration to produce a catalog from which police agencies could make their Christmas lists. …

… By 1989, fully-armed Guard troops were stationed in front of suspected drug houses in a series of drug raids in Portland. In Kentucky, local residents grew so enraged at Guard sweeps in low-flying helicopters, they blew up a Kentucky police radio tower. In Oklahoma, Guard troops dressed in battle garb rappelled down from helicopters and fanned out into rural areas in search of pot plants to uproot. Guard troops would later tell USA Today Some would later tell media outlets they were told to exaggerate their haul in order to boost federal funding for future efforts. …

Cool pictures from Amusing Planet of grass covered tram tracks in Europe.

Tram tracks on many European cities are lined with grass, a practice that probably started in the 1980’s to bring greenery back to city space and at the same time, provide habitable zone for numerous insects and invertebrates. These swaths of green provide a host of benefits to any urban area, like reduce urban heat island effect, provide a permeable surface for storm water to infiltrate, reduce pollution and absorb noise generated by the grinding of metal wheels on metal tracks. Not to mention, they look incredibly good in comparison to concrete or asphalt.

Green tracks have become increasingly popular in Europe and can be seen in pretty much every major European cities from Barcelona to Frankfurt, Milan, St-Etienne and Strasbourg.

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Our national embarrassment went to Berlin last week. Jennifer Rubin starts our look at the speech he gave.

One hardly knows where to begin when it comes to President Obama’s speech at the Brandenburg Gate, but I will start with an overarching point. There is no reason — with Iran edging closer to nuclear weapons capability; jihadism on the march in the Middle East; China engaging in cyberterrorism; and Bashar al-Assad continuing his mass murder with Iran’s and Russia’s assistance — for the president to be talking about nuclear arms reduction. This is the triumph of ego and cluelessness over common sense. His speech has nothing to do with the multiple threats and challenges we face. It seems he has nothing useful to offer on our real problems so he’ll go back to an oldie-but-really-bad-idea from his college days — a nuclear freeze. (This is what comes from the White House running national security policy rather than anyone with a modicum of appreciation for the world as it is.)

That said, I’ll be more specific about the speech’s faults. There are more, but I will focus on 10 of them:

1. “Today, 60 years after they rose up against oppression, we remember the East German heroes of June 17th. When the wall finally came down, it was their dreams that were fulfilled. Their strength and their passion, their enduring example remind us that for all the power of militaries, for all the authority of governments, it is citizens who choose whether to be defined by a wall, or whether to tear it down.“ The president frequently leaves out what brought down that wall — the West’s determination over decades not to relent against the Soviets. I know it’s incompatible with his agenda, but to leave the Soviets, the Americans and the Cold War out of the equation is absurd. …

Andrew Malcolm has his thoughts.

This was not the moment he was looking for.

Barack Obama returned to Berlin Wednesday to give a speech where he originally wanted to appear back in 2008, the Brandenburg Gate. He was a mere candidate then and German Chancellor Angela Merkel vetoed the event as too political for the historic site.

So, the 2008 Obama campaign took its $800,000 and staged his speech elsewhere before about 200,000 Berliners, none of whom could vote in the U.S. election. But it looked great on TV back home.

No doubt every American remembers where they were and what they were doing that July day when they first realized that Barack Hussein Obama was a messiah. Or thought he was. He gave a speech that melted his adoring media, what became known among several people as his “moment” speech. Obama said that word 16 times.

“People of Berlin, people of the world,” the ex-state senator intoned on that long-ago day, “This is our moment. This is our time.”

Well, what a difference 1,791 days makes. American presidents often travel abroad to change the subject from troubles at home. In Obama’s case, things like serial scandals involving the IRS, the FBI, the State Department, the Justice Department and still unexplained lack of security and emergency response that got four Americans killed in Benghazi.

And presidents go to Berlin to say famous things. Ronald Reagan: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” John Kennedy: “Ich bin ein Berliner!” (I am a Berliner.)

But there Obama was Wednesday before a foreign invitation-only audience 1/50th the size of 2008. To the distant crowd watching him behind a thick bullet-proof glass barrier, Obama was a diminished stick figure. …

Scott Johnson at Power Line notes George Will’s take.

Reading Obama’s speeches is a little like reading New York Times editorials. They don’t withstand close scrutiny, but that’s the least of it. They should be accompanied by a warning that they may be hazardous to your health. They kill brain cells.

George Will suffers through Obama’s speech at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin so that we don’t have to. Will takes up the arms control thread in Obama’s speech.

Arms control is only one theme in a desultory speech full of bromides that act as a general anesthetic on the conscious mind. Virtually everything in the speech is off. If Obama praised apple pie, he would do so in a way that would make you think there must be a strong case against it if you could only concentrate on what he is saying. …

Here’s George Will.

The question of whether Barack Obama’s second term will be a failure was answered in the affirmative before his Berlin debacle, which has recast the question, which now is: Will this term be silly, even scary in its detachment from reality? …

… In Northern Ireland before going to Berlin, Obama sat next to Putin, whose demeanor and body language when he is in Obama’s presence radiate disdain. There Obama said: “With respect to Syria, we do have differing perspectives on the problem, but we share an interest in reducing the violence.” Differing perspectives?

Obama wants to reduce the violence by coaxing Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, who is winning the war, to attend a conference at which he negotiates the surrender of his power. Putin wants to reduce the violence by helping — with lavish materiel assistance and by preventing diplomacy that interferes — Assad complete the destruction of his enemies.

Napoleon said: “If you start to take Vienna — take Vienna.” Douglas MacArthur said that all military disasters can be explained by two words: “Too late.” Regarding Syria, Obama is tentative and, if he insists on the folly of intervening, tardy. He is giving Putin a golden opportunity to humiliate the nation responsible for the “catastrophe.” In a contest between a dilettante and a dictator, bet on the latter.

Obama’s vanity is a wonder of the world that never loses its power to astonish, but really: Is everyone in his orbit too lost in raptures of admiration to warn him against delivering a speech soggy with banalities and bromides in a city that remembers John Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” and Ronald Reagan’s “Tear down this wall”? With German Chancellor Angela Merkel sitting nearby, Obama began his Berlin speech: “As I’ve said, Angela and I don’t exactly look like previous German and American leaders.” He has indeed said that, too, before, at least about himself. It was mildly amusing in Berlin in 2008, but hardly a Noel Coward-like witticism worth recycling.

His look is just not that interesting. And after being pointless in Berlin, neither is he, other than for the surrealism of his second term.

Bill Kristol’s turn.

… Half a century ago, President Kennedy declared, “All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words ‘Ich bin ein Berliner!’ ” A quarter-century ago, President Reagan challenged the general secretary of the Soviet Union: “Come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev​—​Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” President Obama, by contrast, declared nothing notable and challenged no one powerful. With the Berlin Wall down and the Cold War won, the president of
the United States talked at length and had nothing to say.

It would be too harsh, perhaps, to say that Obama’s remarks served only to ratify the judgment rendered the week before by Bill Clinton: that President Obama is pretty much “a total wuss.” It wouldn’t be too harsh to say of Obama’s foreign policy what Winston Churchill said in 1936 about the Stanley Baldwin government: He is “decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.” …

We close today with Power Line’s post on “Our Dimwitted President.”

President Obama seems incapable of going abroad without embarrassing himself. Via InstaPundit, we learn that when he was in the U.K., Obama couldn’t keep Chancellor George Osborne’s name straight. Obama repeatedly called him “Jeffrey.” The repeated gaffe became so obvious that Obama apologized:

According to the Sun and the Financial Times, Mr Obama apologised to the chancellor for calling him Jeffrey three times during the meeting – saying: “I’m sorry, man. I must have confused you with my favourite R&B singer”.

That would be this Jeffrey Osborne. The real Jeffrey Osborne was excited to hear about the mishap, and George Osborne was gracious about it. But good grief: the first obligation of a diplomat is to keep track of whom he is speaking to. One can imagine the hilarity if George W. Bush had referred to Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and Prime Minister during his administration, as “James Brown,” confusing the Prime Minister with his favorite R&B singer. Or perhaps, given Bush’s musical tastes, Sawyer Brown, or Zac Brown. Would such a gaffe have been laughed off? I doubt it.

Speaking of embarrassments, Telegraph, UK with Hagel’s latest.

Chuck Hagel, the US defence secretary, has apologised to a professor of Indian descent after jokingly asking if he was a member of the Taliban.

Mr Hagel’s spokesman insisted the offhand remark, which came after a speech at the University of Nebraska on Wednesday, was not meant to refer to anyone in the audience or to the professor’s Indian heritage.

At Wednesday’s event, after discussing prospects for talks with the Taliban insurgency, Hagel waited for another question and pointed to the back of the hall, saying:

“OK, so who has a – way up in the back there. You’re not a member of the Taliban are you?”

His attempt at humour appeared to fall flat, judging by the long pause that followed, according to a video of the event broadcast by the Pentagon channel. …

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Jennifer Rubin posts on the president’s disappearing act.

There are certainly different styles of leadership. But President Obama is suffering the results of poor choices (passing a huge new entitlement on a party-line vote) and of what can only be described as a lack of courage.

Brit Hume says it as well as anyone: “When the issues are difficult and the options unappetizing he tends simply to go away.”

Obama practically disappeared from the scene (no calls to Cabinet officials, no convening in the Situation Room) on the night of the Benghazi, Libya, attack. He seems more concerned on the NSA flap with distancing himself from conservatives whom he loathes (“I am not Dick Cheney”) and in Syria on protecting his self-image (he ends wars, doesn’t start them) than in taking the heat from Democrats. When coverage is not glowing, he becomes cranky with the media (as does his spokesman). He is most at ease campaigning before a crowd (whether it is an election or not) when he can accuse opponents of ill-will and flail away at straw men with no interruption. …

Turns out Israel has green weenie frauds too. Caroline Glick tells us about an electric car company with the hubris to call itself – Better Place. Then she writes about oil discovered in Israel.

… To summarize, the government gave Better Place a massive tax break. Investors poured $840 million into the company. The media showered the company in fabulous free PR.

And in four years, it only managed to sell 900 cars.

That tells you something about economics.

The iron rule of supply and demand is foolproof.

If the price is too high, people won’t buy your product. And if the ticket price of being the pioneers in a risky market, of having to go out of your way to get to the battery swap stations, and of swapping your battery three to four times more often than you have to fill up your gas tank is the same as the price of a normal car, then no one will want to be a pioneer. And no one did.

Indeed, according to Channel 2, more than a hundred of the 900 owners of Better Place cars worked for the company. And the majority of the other owners purchased the electric car as a second or third car. …

USA Today with an OpEd providing another example of why you don’t want to start a business in this country. 

As a mother of three who has struggled to stick to a family budget, I know the frustration parents feel as they watch children grow out of brand new clothes seemingly overnight. That’s why in 1997, I started a kids’ clothing consignment business, a little like the ones that are everywhere now but also a little different.

What started as a small family business operating out of our home has grown to 22 states. Now, though, it might all turn out to be illegal, thanks to the bureaucratic thinking of the Department of Labor.

Help a mother out

The business model that parents thought was an innovation, but that Labor sees as a menace, is simple but effective. You might have heard of it: cooperation.

We rent a large space for a few days, say an unused department store. Parents with clothes and children’s items to sell sign up online, enter their items into a computerized tracking system and choose their sale price. Then they bring the clothes and other items to the sale location, label them with preprinted price tags and display the clothes. Parents keep 70%; we keep 30%. It is easier than a garage sale, makes more money for parents, and shoppers efficiently find good deals.

A big part of our success are the hundreds of parents — both consignors and shoppers — who voluntarily work brief shifts to help set up before the sale starts. In exchange, these parents get to shop first with more choices and better merchandise.

In January, though, the Department of Labor noticed all this cooperation going on. Months later, investigators concluded that volunteers are “employees” under the Fair Labor Standards Act.

This means paying the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, filling out IRS paperwork and complying with who-knows-what other rules. And all for a pop-up business that lasts days. …

City Journal article notes the changes to women’s magazines.

Some of the most venerable brands in your grocery store sit not on the shelf but on the checkout line, where magazines like Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Redbook have been reflecting women’s lives for decades. From one month to the next, little seems to vary; the celebrity interviews and fashion spreads blend into one another, creating the impression of a seamless, unchanging world.

Yet if you compare the women’s magazines of today with their counterparts of 50 years ago, you’ll find it impossible to miss how dramatically different they are—and how daily life has transformed along with them. For example, in 1963, Good Housekeeping could report that 40 percent of its readers were in the workforce; by 2010, roughly 75 percent of women aged 25 to 54 were. In 1963, the average age of first marriage for women hovered around 20.5; by 2012, it had risen to 26.6. Clearly, women’s lives have changed enormously. But a historical journey through the checkout racks suggests that they haven’t always changed in the ways you’d think.

Start with something that hasn’t changed: American women’s obsession with their figures. The January 1963 Redbook featured a cover line on a 10-DAY DIET TO HELP YOU RECOVER FROM THE HOLIDAYS; the February 2013 issue cajoles readers to “get to your best weight ever” and promises “the plan and the push you need.” The April 1963 Ladies’ Home Journal pledged ideas on how to “dine well on 300 calories”; the February 2013 issue offers a more cheerful take on weight control: “Yay! Retire your fat pants forever.” One shudders to think of the pounds lost and gained over five decades of readership.

Given current obesity rates, the readers of women’s magazines were probably thinner in 1963. But their magazines weren’t. Flip through the weighty 50-year-old issues, and you’ll soon feel, literally, a massive cultural shift in what women expect from their periodicals. In 1963, consuming a magazine could take days. Early that year, Good Housekeeping serialized Daphne du Maurier’s novel of the French Revolution, The Glass-Blowers, cramming much of it into a mere three issues. In May, GH ran a large portion of Edmund Fuller’s novel The Corridor, a feat that required stretching the magazine to 274 text-heavy pages. Redbook’s March 1963 issue featured Hortense Calisher’s novel Textures of Life and five short stories, a level of fiction ambition that even The New Yorker rarely attempts now. There is verse, too. At one point, a dense page of du Maurier’s text makes room for Catherine MacChesney’s “From the Window,” letting Good Housekeeping readers experience poetry and prose at the same time. Marion Lineaweaver’s ode to the coming spring in LHJ (“The wind is milk / So perfectly fresh, cool / Smooth on the tongue”) was one of six poems in the March 1963 issue alone. …

MS Magazine writer, and anti-gun activist, decides to carry a gun for a month.

My hands are shaking; my adrenaline is surging.

No, it’s not from the latte I just inhaled or because this is the first time in two years I’ve been in a Starbucks since declaring a boycott on its open-carry gun policy.

What’s got me jittery this morning is the 9mm Glock that’s holstered on my hip. Me, lead gun policy protester at the 2010 Starbuck’s shareholder meeting. Me, a board member of the Brady Campaign. Me, the author of a book about the impact of gun violence, Beyond the Bullet.

Yes, I bought a handgun and will carry it everywhere I go over the next 30 days. I have four rules: Carry it with me at all times, follow the laws of my state, only do what is minimally required for permits, licensing, purchasing and carrying, and finally be prepared to use it for protecting myself at home or in public.

Why? Following the Newtown massacre in December, the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre, told the country, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”  I wondered what would it be like to be that good guy with a gun? What would it be like to get that gun, live with that gun, be out and about with that gun. Finally, what happens when you don’t want that gun any more?

I decided to find out. …

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Niall Ferguson on the Regulated States of America.

In “Democracy in America,” published in 1833, Alexis de Tocqueville marveled at the way Americans preferred voluntary association to government regulation. “The inhabitant of the United States,” he wrote, “has only a defiant and restive regard for social authority and he appeals to it . . . only when he cannot do without it.”

Unlike Frenchmen, he continued, who instinctively looked to the state to provide economic and social order, Americans relied on their own efforts. “In the United States, they associate for the goals of public security, of commerce and industry, of morality and religion. There is nothing the human will despairs of attaining by the free action of the collective power of individuals.”

What especially amazed Tocqueville was the sheer range of nongovernmental organizations Americans formed: “Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations . . . but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small; Americans use associations to give fetes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools.”

Tocqueville would not recognize America today. Indeed, so completely has associational life collapsed, and so enormously has the state grown, that he would be forced to conclude that, at some point between 1833 and 2013, France must have conquered the United States. …

Voting present yet again, the administration is now in a Keystone fix according to Kim Strassel. 

If President Obama once thought it politically savvy to kick the Keystone XL pipeline decision down the road, he’s surely ruing that strategy today. The delay has allowed the environmental community to elevate the project into a litmus test of his environmental fealty—so much so that some of Mr. Obama’s biggest supporters are now vowing to turn his base against him if he moves ahead with a win-win project that will boost the economy.

The ultimatum was expressed clearly in an open letter to Mr. Obama on June 3 from Thomas Steyer, the billionaire climate activist. Mr. Steyer has been a loyal Obama ally, speaking at the Democratic National Convention in 2012 and donating generously to the president and his party.

In his letter, Mr. Steyer nonetheless made clear that he and his NextGen political action committee will turn their force on the president if he approves Keystone. …

According to the Weekly Standard and the NY Times, President Present laid an egg in Berlin today.

The White House pool report reveals that only 6,000 will be in attendance for Obama’s Berlin speech today:

The stage for the president’s speech is set up on the East side of the Brandenburg Gate, in the old East Berlin. The sun is pounding down and there are around 6,000 invited guests according to German authorities. There are bleachers set up either side of the square, with a big two storey riser facing the stage which has a row of bullet proof glass and 12 US, German and EU flags and the grand backdrop of the Gate. There is a large standing crowd between the bleachers.

Last time around, when Obama delivered a speech in Berlin in the 2008 presidential campaign, when he was still a senator, 200,000 folks came out to see him.

UPDATE: The pool reporter says only 4,500 were present for Obama’s speech:

Crowd count at the Brandenburg Gate speech was 4,500 according to Elmar Jakobs. …

Bloomberg News reveals how college sports are subsidized by students.

As parents and students struggle to keep up with rising college tuition and take on greater burdens of debt, universities are being challenged to justify the ballooning athletic fees they tack on to the bill.

In the 2010-11 academic year, the 227 public institutions in Division 1 of the National Collegiate Athletic Association collected more than $2 billion in athletic fees from their students — or an average of more than $500 per enrollee — according to research by Jeff Smith at the University of South Carolina Upstate.

These fees, which can exceed $1,000 a year, are often itemized as a “student activity” or “general” expense. That may explain why separate research, by David Ridpath of Ohio University, found that students were only dimly aware of the extent of the fees, and weren’t pleased once they found out how much they were paying.

Worse yet, institutions with high proportions of poorer students carrying substantial education debt appeared to be charging the highest fees. While all students must pay the costs of maintaining athletic programs, few actually benefit from the services they subsidize. In this sense, the fees are comparable to a regressive tax — and one that is more onerous for lower-income students than for the more affluent, who are able to attend schools where athletic fees are lower.

For the six public schools in the Big South conference, Smith shows that the average athletic fee was $1,512, about 25 times more than the average $61 paid by students at the Big Ten conference schools. … 

And the Gothamist reveals how NYU profs have their housing subsidized by students.

NYU students pay at least $40,000 in tuition (and over $10,000 for on-campus housing-PDF) for the academic year—an insane amount. But it makes sense when you consider that NYU not only forgives mortgages for star professors but also helps buy vacation houses for star professors and other esteemed administrators.

The NY Times has the depressing details today. For instance, NYU President John Sexton has a place on Fire Island—”an elegant modern beach house that extends across three lots… bought with a $600,000 loan from an N.Y.U. foundation that eventually grew to be $1 million, according to Suffolk County land records.” …

Late night humor from Andrew Malcolm.

Fallon: Last week Obama asked China’s president to stop spying on Americans. And the Chinese leader responded, “You first.”

Conan: Everyone please turn off your phones. I’ve got some jokes I don’t want the government to hear.

Leno: Eliot Spitzer and John Edwards both have birthdays the other day. Which explains why no strippers were available for other parties.

NBC News Cosmic Log with an ode to duct tape.

Over the past half a century, duct tape has been keeping NASA’s astronauts alive, putting airplanes back together, making race cars speedier and patching up millions of fix-it projects. It’s even been used to remove warts. But the makers of duct tape aren’t resting on their sticky, gray laurels: On the contrary, engineers and designers are adding some new twists to the decades-old standby.

“Ten years ago, I used to hear kids say, ‘Oh, my dad uses that to fix everything,’” Scott Sommers, director of marketing for ShurTech Brands, told NBC News. “Now I hear the dads say, ‘Oh, my kids make everything out of that stuff.’”

ShurTech makes one of the best-known brands of duct tape, known as Duck Tape, and is the motive force behind this weekend’s Duct Tape Festival in Avon, Ohio, the company’s corporate headquarters. The annual event is scheduled to coincide with Father’s Day — which is apt, considering how many dads have gotten out of a tough fix thanks to those silvery rolls of adhesive.

“I hope that women never find out about duct tape,” humorist Dave Barry joked, “because once they do, men will no longer serve any useful purpose.” …

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Mark Steyn says the digital superstate is useless when it matters.

Every time I go on his show, my radio pal Hugh Hewitt asks me why congressional Republicans aren’t doing more to insist that the GOP suicide note known as “the immigration deal” include a requirement for a border fence. I don’t like to tell Hugh that, if they ever get around to building the fence, it won’t be to keep the foreigners out but to keep you guys in.

I jest, but only very slightly and only because the government doesn’t build much of anything these days – except for that vast complex five times the size of the Capitol the NSA is throwing up in Utah to house everybody’s data on everything everyone’s ever done with anyone ever.

A few weeks after 9/11, when government was hastily retooling its 1970s hijacking procedures for the new century, I wrote a column for The National Post of Canada and various other publications that, if you’re so interested, is preserved in my anthology “The Face Of The Tiger.” It began by noting the observation of President Bush’s Transportation Secretary, Norman Mineta, that if “a 70-year-old white woman from Vero Beach, Florida” and “a Muslim young man” were in line to board a flight, he hoped there would be no difference in the scrutiny to which each would be subjected.

The TSA was then barely a twinkle in Norm’s eye, and in that long ago primitive era it would have seemed absurd to people that one day in America it would be entirely routine for wheelchair-bound nonagenarians to remove leg braces before boarding a plane or for kindergartners to stand patiently as three middle-age latex-gloved officials poke around their genitals. Back then, the idea that everybody is a suspect still seemed slightly crazy. As I wrote in my column, “I’d love to see Norm get his own cop show:

“‘Capt. Mineta, the witness says the serial rapist’s about 5’10″ with a thin mustache and a scar down his right cheek.’

“‘Okay, Sergeant, I want you to pull everyone in.’

“‘Pardon me?’

“‘Everyone. Men, women, children. We’ll start in the Bronx and work our way through to Staten Island. What matters here is that we not appear to be looking for people who appear to look like the appearance of the people we’re looking for. …

J. Christian Adams explains why the Arizona voting rights decision was a big win for the right.

Something perverse happened after the Supreme Court’s decision today invalidating citizenship-verification requirements in Arizona for registrants who use the federal voter registration form. The Left knows they lost most of the battle, but are still claiming victory. That’s what they do. Election-integrity proponents and the states are saying they lost, but don’t realize they really won.

The Left wins even when they lose, and conservatives are often bewildered and outfoxed in the election-process game.

Earlier today, I called the decision a nothingburger. After re-reading the case and reflecting a bit more, it’s clear that the decision was a disaster for the Left and their victory cackles are hollow — and they know it.

Worse, conservatives dooms-dayers who have never litigated a single National Voter Registration Act case have taken to the airwaves, describing the case as a disaster which invites illegal-alien voting.

In the last year, I’ve litigated five NVRA cases and worked on the preemption issues for years, and there is more to cheer in today’s opinion than there is to bemoan. Those complaining about the opinion don’t understand what the Left’s goal was in this case: total federal preemption. On that score, Justice Scalia foiled them; indeed, the decision today was a huge war won, even if the small Arizona battle was lost.

From my time in the Justice Department Voting Section, I can remember intimately the wars over some of the preemption issues decided today. …

Streetwise Professor caught a Putin rant.

At a reception on the occasion of Russia Day, Putin held court, and talked about . . . the United States. After awarding the State Prize to Sergei Nikulin, head of the bureau that designed a new nuclear missile designed specifically to defeat US missile defenses, Putin launched into a disquisition on American history:

Pooling together traditional Soviet-time propaganda clichés, Putin recalled the US “genocide” of Native Americans, slavery and racial segregation that is still, according to Putin, very much evident in the United States today. Putin deplored the US nuclear bombing of Japanese cities in 1945 and expressed doubt that Soviet dictator Josef Stalin would have dropped an atom bomb on Nazi Germany if the USSR obtained nuclear weapons in 1945, when an overall victory was already assured. After expressing his “personal opinion” that Americans and their leaders are worse than Stalin, Putin acknowledged that the US is basically a democratic country, built on the principle of individual rights and freedoms, whereas Russian society is built on “collectivism,” which makes it fundamentally different. The Russian national soul, according to Putin, is eternal and directly connected to God, unlike, apparently, the pragmatic American one—“so it is very hard for us to understand each other, but it is possible sometimes”.

Russian soul, blah blah blah.  Interesting, that, during a week when a survey was released showing that Russians were among the least religiously observant people in the world. And as Felgenhauer notes, rather than being a narod united in collective solidarity, Russian society is atomized: the Russian social capital account is heavily overdrawn.  In other words, Putin’s characterization of Russia is a crock.

We are so in Putin’s head.  He is obsessed with the US.  Can you imagine any US president discussing, say, Russian conquests in the Caucasus, or Central Asia?

There is one part of Putin’s remarks that is particularly outrageous:  ”Putin deplored the US nuclear bombing of Japanese cities in 1945 and expressed doubt that Soviet dictator Josef Stalin would have dropped an atom bomb on Nazi Germany if the USSR obtained nuclear weapons in 1945, when an overall victory was already assured.”

That is more than a crock: it is an ahistorical outrage. …

Streetwise Professor also posts on Putin’s theft of Bob Kraft’s Super Bowl ring.

Vladimir Putin has done some outlandish things, but I think this takes the trophy.  Or the ring.  The Super Bowl Ring.

You might recall that Kraft in 2005 joined a cadre of businessmen to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg. The Patriots owner walked into that meeting with a jewel-laced Super Bowl XXXIX ring on his finger, but left empty-handed.

“I showed the president my most recent Super Bowl ring,” Kraft said at the time, per The Boston Globe. Putin “was clearly taken with its uniqueness … at that point, I decided to give him the ring as a symbol of the respect and admiration that I have for the Russian people and the leadership of President Putin.”

Not so fast. Kraft now admits Putin nabbed the ring — worth upwards of $25,000 — without his consent.

“I took out the ring and showed it to (Putin),” Kraft said this week, per the New York Post. “And he put it on and he goes, ‘I can kill someone with this ring,’ I put my hand out and he put it in his pocket, and three KGB guys got around him and walked out.”

That’s the head of the Party (and State) of Crooks and Thieves: leading by example!

The only thing that is worse than Putin’s in-your-face thievery is the Bush administration’s craven response:

Kraft kept his wits about him and complied with a call from the White House, in which a George W. Bush handler told him: “ ’It would really be in the best interest of U.S.-Soviet relations if you meant to give the ring as a present.’ “

FFS. No wonder Putin thinks he can get away with about anything when dealing with the US.  Because he can. I think he tries this stuff to see what he can get away with.  He gets away with it . . . so he pushes it even more.  He’ll keep pushing until someone pushes back.

Here’s my idea.  Have Ray Lewis let Putin hold his Super Bowl ring, and pray that Putin tries to pocket it. And we can make money off this by putting it all on pay-per-view.

Marc Perry celebrates the internal combustion engine.

The automobile stands as an enduring symbol of mobility and opportunity in America — and of innovation that’s at the core of our nation’s economic strength and prosperity.

Yet the conventional gasoline-powered engine is sometimes disparaged and treated as if it’s yesterday’s technology. Listening to politicians, environmentalists and media pundits, you might think that the gas engine is inefficient and old-fashioned, a relic of the past that ought to be replaced by alternative automotive technologies like electric cars and plug-in hybrids.

But a good look at the latest advances in the gasoline-powered engine — and those on the horizon — jars this opinion, and the surge in U.S. oil production from shale drilling further refutes the idea that conventional engines are old technology.

Already powering more than 230 million cars in the United States, internal combustion engines have the potential to become substantially more efficient, while providing economic and environmental benefits that extend well beyond the money consumers save at the pump.

Imagine if your car uses advanced computing to control fuel injection far more precisely than before, improving the fuel efficiency of big cars by more than 15 percent. Or what if your car is able to knock another 30 percent off fuel consumption — and corresponding greenhouse-gas emissions — by partly cooling hot exhaust gas before it is pumped into the engine?

Diesel engines, which are more efficient than gasoline engines, might also take off in the U.S. …

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Big treat today. Readers will learn what an algorithm is. No, it is not a dismaying vision of Al Gore dancing the Macarena.  An algorithm is a way to use data to spot correlations and then organize and initiate responses. Today they are made more capable and important because massive computing power has become inexpensive and plentiful. Intelligent Life a subsidiary publication of The Economist endeavors to explain;

… An algorithm, at its most basic, is not a mysterious sciencey bit at all; it is simply a decision-making process. It is a flow chart, a computer program that can stretch to pages of code or is as simple as “If x is greater than y, then choose z”.

What has changed is what algorithms are doing. The first algorithm was created in the ninth century by the Arabic scholar Al Khwarizami—from whose name the word is a corruption. Ever since, they have been mechanistic, rational procedures that interact with mechanistic, rational systems. Today, though, they are beginning to interact with humans. The advantage is obvious. Drawing in more data than any human ever could, they spot correlations that no human would. The drawbacks are only slowly becoming apparent. …

… Last year Target, a marketing company, yet again proved the power of algorithms, in a startling way. Its software tracks purchases to predict habits. Using this, it chooses which coupons to send customers. It seemed to have gone wrong when it began sending a teenage girl coupons for nappies (diapers), much to the anger of her father, who made an official complaint. A little later, the New York Times reported that the father had phoned the company to apologise. “It turns out,” he said, “there have been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of.” He was going to be a grandfather—and an algorithm knew before he did. …

NY Post tells us how NYU kowtows to Chinese communists.

NYU isn’t letting a pesky thing like human rights stand in the way of its expansion in China.

The university has booted a blind Chinese political dissident from its campus under pressure from the Communist government as it builds a coveted branch in Shanghai, sources told The Post.

Chen Guangcheng has been at NYU since May 2012, when he made a dramatic escape from his oppressive homeland with the help of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

But school brass has told him to get out by the end of this month, the sources said.

Chen’s presence at the school didn’t sit well with the Chinese bureaucrats who signed off on the permits for NYU’s expansion there, the sources said.

“The big problem is that NYU is very compromised by the fact they are working very closely with the Chinese to establish a university,” according to one New York-based professor familiar with Chen’s situation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. …

Michael Barone catches MSNBC being ignorant. OK, you ask, what else is new?

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, who seems like a nice person, got caught making a huge historical mistake; he said George Wallace, the Alabama Governor who defied a desegregation order 50 years ago, was a Republican. Nope. He was a Democrat and ran in the Democratic presidential primaries in 1964, 1972 and 1976; he also ran for president as a third party candidate in 1968. Hayes either didn’t know that–surprisingly for a political commentator–or temporarily and perhaps conveniently forgot it. Or maybe he just figures that all political villains are Republicans. In any case he apologized for what he, appropriately, called a “stupid, inexcusable, historically illiterate mistake.”

Here’s another fact he and others may want to keep in mind as we remember the climactic events of the civil rights movement 50 years ago: Bull Connor, the Birmingham police commissioner who turned fire hoses and police dogs on peaceful civil rights demonstrators, was a Democrat too. In fact, he was Democratic National Committeeman from Alabama, at a time when each state and territory had just one male and one female member on the Democratic National Committee.

One more reminder: President John Kennedy’s endorsement 50 years ago this month of what became the Civil Rights Act of 1964 came in the third year of his presidency, in response to events in Birmingham and elsewhere; previously he had been reluctant to raise the issue for fear he would antagonize Southern Democratic officeholders and voters. Some on the left evidently want to depict the civil rights battle as a struggle between benificent Democrats and evil Republicans. It was no such thing.

Another fool from MSNBC gets a look from Roger Simon.

A few days ago, MSNBC commentator Martin Bashir, in high dudgeon, accused critics of the IRS scandal of racism toward Barack Obama. I’m not going to rehearse the number of black conservatives — including intellects of the stature of Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele — who would then be racists, or even go into my own personal story as a white civil rights worker in the South in the sixties (I’m older than Bashir) and how insulting it would be to people like me to be lumped in as racists because we object to the president’s policies.

Never mind the massive declines in racism in our (and other Anglo-Saxon) societies documented in a recent Pew Poll and never mind the late Andrew Breitbart’s offer of one hundred thousand dollars for evidence of the use of the n-word by even one of tens of thousands of Tea Party demonstrators for which not a single bid came forward.

What interests me is why people like Bashir maintain this need to brand anyone even vaguely to the right as racist. It’s almost a disorder worthy of classification in the DSM-5 — PRDS: Projective Racist Derangement Syndrome.

Actually, I don’t think it’s quite that sick, although it does have definite pathological aspects. A more obvious motivation is old-fashioned fear. …