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Peter Wehner on the administration that gives answers that are the “least untruthful.” 

Talk about collapsing standards. When Barack Obama ran for office, his promise wasn’t that he’d simply improve our politics; he would transform them. He would appoint men and women of unblemished integrity who would serve the public interest. Mr. Obama would hold people accountable. He boasted in 2010 that he had put in place the toughest ethics rules in history. His administration would be the most transparent in history. And all of this would restore faith and trust in government. 

That was then. Let me tell you about now. 

James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, clearly mislead Congress when in March of this year Clapper was asked by Senator Ron Wyden, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”

“No, sir,” Clapper responded.

“It does not?” Wyden asked again.

“Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly.”

That statement was false, since we know that the NSA has collected phone records of millions of Americans. 

And so what is Mr. Clapper’s excuse? Try this one on for size. The New York Times reports that in an interview on Sunday with NBC News, Mr. Clapper acknowledged that his answer had been problematic, calling it “the least untruthful” answer he could give. 

That phrase–what Clapper said is “the least untruthful” answer he could give–should live on in scandal lore. …

Daniel Henninger on the same theme. 

Here is Barack Obama commenting last Friday on the National Security Agency’s antiterrorist surveillance programs: “We’ve got congressional oversight and judicial oversight. And if people can’t trust not only the executive branch but also don’t trust Congress and don’t trust federal judges to make sure that we’re abiding by the Constitution, due process and rule of law, then we’re going to have some problems here.”

Uh-huh.

Herewith a partial list of political groups that said they were subjected to over-the-top audits by the Internal Revenue Service:

Greenwich Tea Party Patriots, Greater Phoenix Tea PartyPatriots, Laurens County Tea Party, Northeast Tarrant Tea Party, Myrtle Beach Tea Party, Albuquerque Tea Party, San Antonio Tea Party, Richmond Tea Party, Manassas Tea Party, Honolulu Tea Party, Waco Tea Party, Chattanooga Tea Party and American Patriots Against Government Excess.

What that target list shows is there was never one “tea party.” It was collections of citizens spontaneously gathering all over the country under one easy-to-remember name. Their purpose was to do politics. For that, their government hit them hard.

In January the pollsters at the PewResearchCenter reported that for the first time a majority of Americans—53%—now agree that “the federal government threatens your own personal rights and freedoms.”

This is far beyond concerns about the size of government. A majority of people now see the government of Madison, Jefferson and Franklin as a direct, personal threat.

So yes, we have “some problems” here. …

Mark Steyn with a Corner post.

When the IRS is accused of “targeting,” don’t assume they’re speaking metaphorically. From Politico:

As chairman of the House Homeland Security oversight subcommittee, [Jeff] Duncan (R-S.C.) toured a federal law enforcement facility in late May and noticed agents training with the semi-automatic weapons at a firing range. They identified themselves as IRS, he said.

“When I left there, it’s been bugging me for weeks now, why IRS agents are training with a semi-automatic rifle AR-15, which has stand-off capability,” Duncan told POLITICO. “Are Americans that much of a target that you need that kind of capability..?

“I think Americans raise eyebrows when you tell them that IRS agents are training with a type of weapon that has stand-off capability. It’s not like they’re carrying a sidearm and they knock on someone’s door and say, ‘You’re evading your taxes,’” Duncan said.

A bureaucracy is bad. A politicized bureaucracy is worse. A paramilitary politicized bureaucracy is nuts. And, in fact, evil. There is no reason in a civilized society why the Deputy Assistant Commissioner of Paperwork should have his own SEAL Team Six. …

George Will says Lois Lerner is the “scowling face of the state.”

As soon as the Constitution permitted him to run for Congress, Al Salvi did. In 1986, just 26 and fresh from the University of Illinois law school, he sank $1,000 of his own money, which was most of his money, into his campaign to unseat an incumbent Democratic congressman. Salvi studied for the bar exam during meals at campaign dinners.

He lost his campaign. Today, however, he should be invited to Congress to testify about what happened 10 years later, when he was a prosperous lawyer and won the Republican Senate nomination to run against a Democratic congressman named Dick Durbin.

In the fall of 1996, at the campaign’s climax, Democrats filed with the Federal Election Commission charges against Salvi’s campaign alleging campaign finance violations. These charges dominated the campaign’s closing days. Salvi spoke by telephone with the head of the FEC’s Enforcement Division, who he remembers saying: “Promise me you will never run for office again, and we’ll drop this case.” He was speaking to Lois Lerner.

After losing to Durbin, Salvi spent four years and $100,000 fighting the FEC, on whose behalf FBI agents visited his elderly mother demanding to know, concerning her $2,000 contribution to her son’s campaign, where she got “that kind of money.” When the second of two federal courts held that the charges against Salvi were spurious, the lawyer arguing for the FEC was Lois Lerner.

More recently, she has been head of the IRS Exempt Organizations Division, which has used its powers of delay, harassment and extortion to suppress political participation. For example, it has told an Iowa right-to-life group that it would get tax-exempt status if it would promise not to picket Planned Parenthood clinics. …

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit wrote a WSJ column about IRS abuse in May 2009. 

Barack Obama owes his presidency in no small part to the power of rhetoric. It’s too bad he doesn’t appreciate the damage that loose talk can do to America’s tax system, even as exploding federal deficits make revenues more important than ever.

At his Arizona State University commencement speech last Wednesday, Mr. Obama noted that ASU had refused to grant him an honorary degree, citing his lack of experience, and the controversy this had caused. He then demonstrated ASU’s point by remarking, “I really thought this was much ado about nothing, but I do think we all learned an important lesson. I learned never again to pick another team over the Sun Devils in my NCAA brackets. . . . President [Michael] Crowe and the Board of Regents will soon learn all about being audited by the IRS.”

Just a joke about the power of the presidency. Made by Jay Leno it might have been funny. But as told by Mr. Obama, the actual president of the United States, it’s hard to see the humor. Surely he’s aware that other presidents, most notably Richard Nixon, have abused the power of the Internal Revenue Service to harass their political opponents. But that abuse generated a powerful backlash and with good reason. Should the IRS come to be seen as just a bunch of enforcers for whoever is in political power, the result would be an enormous loss of legitimacy for the tax system. …

The Economist reports on a carbon fiber cable invented in Finland for elevator shafts. It will allow more sky to be scraped because at 100 or so floors, the weight of the steel cable began to be a height limiting factor. Economics will still be in play though as there are limits to the amount of each floor’s space that can be dedicated to elevator shafts. One solution was the sky lobbies used in the World Trade Center which saw three cars in one shaft.

WHEN Elisha Otis stood on a platform at the 1854 World Fair in New York and ordered an axeman to cut the rope used to hoist him aloft, he changed cityscapes for ever. To the amazement of the crowd his new safety lift dropped only a few inches before being held by an automatic braking system. This gave people the confidence to use what Americans insist on calling elevators. That confidence allowed buildings to rise higher and higher.

They could soon go higher still, as a result of another breakthrough in lift technology. This week Kone, a Finnish liftmaker, announced that after a decade of development at its laboratory in Lohja, which sits above a 333-metre-deep mineshaft which the firm uses as a test bed, it has devised a system that should be able to raise an elevator a kilometre (3,300 feet) or more. This is twice as far as the things can go at present. Since the effectiveness of lifts is one of the main constraints on the height of buildings, Kone’s technology—which replaces the steel cables from which lift cars are currently suspended with ones made of carbon fibres—could result in buildings truly worthy of the name “skyscraper”. …

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Eliana Johnson of National Review says it is time to stop blaming the IRS scandals on “rogue” agents.

We can officially dispense with the notion that the targeting of tea-party groups began when a couple of rogue agents in the Internal Revenue Service’s Cincinnati office set out to streamline their work.

The heart of the effort to target tea-party and other conservative groups, we are learning, occurred in Washington, and that is likely why five D.C.-based IRS officials who are connected to the targeting have retired, resigned, been replaced, or been put on administrative leave, since news of the scandal broke in mid May. They include Holly Paz, who last week, according to an IRS source, was replaced as director of Rulings and Agreements, the division that oversaw the targeting of conservative groups; Washington lawyer Carter Hull, who is accused of micromanaging the processing of tea-party cases, and who, according to IRS sources, requested his retirement package on March 12; the commissioner of the agency’s Tax Exempt and Government Entities division, Joseph Grant, who retired on June 3; former IRS commissioner Steven Miller, who resigned days after news of the scandal broke; and the director of the IRS’s Exempt Organizations division, Lois Lerner, who was placed on administrative leave only after refusing to tender her resignation, according to Iowa’s Chuck Grassley. All five are or were based in the IRS’s headquarters on Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C.

The testimony of Cincinnati-based IRS employees released last week by the House Oversight Committee helps explain why so many employees in D.C. who are associated with the current scandal are quietly departing the scene. We have learned that the controversial and inappropriate “lookout” list created in the Cincinnati office was probably compiled as a response to requests from Washington for tea-party files. One Cincinnati employee, Gary Muthert, told the committee that he began singling out tea-party applications at the request of a supervisor who told him that “Washington, D.C., wanted some cases.” Muthert, sources say, was a member of the group that screened all applications for tax exemptions and passed those identified as tea-party applications along to specialists for extra scrutiny. He sent seven tea-party applications to Washington in May 2010, according to interview transcripts, because his manager told him that “Washington, D.C., wanted seven.”

Thus, it was IRS employees in Washington, according to Muthert, who ordered agents in the Cincinnati office to focus their attention on the applications of tea-party groups. …

Johnson’s IRS contacts want us to know Lois Lerner is still logging on to the IRS computer system.

Lois Lerner, the Internal Revenue Service’s director of Exempt Organizations currently on paid leave, has not had any of her computer access restricted since she abdicated her responsibilities, according to an IRS source with knowledge of the situation. 

Lerner was placed on administrative leave on May 21 after refusing to tender her resignation, and logged into the IRS’s computer system using her agency computer as recently as June 4, the source tells me. She has the ability to access the same information that was available to her before she was placed on leave. …

Ann Coulter provides tips on following the IRS probe.

Instead of showing endless loops of IRS employees wasting taxpayer dollars line-dancing — Breaking news: Government employees waste millions of your dollars every single day! — I think it would be more useful for the public to hear a few crucial facts about the exploding scandal at the Internal Revenue Service.

At Tuesday’s congressional hearings on the IRS, witnesses provided shocking details about the agency’s abuse of conservative groups.

The IRS leaked the donor list of The National Organization for Marriage to their political opponents, the pro-gay-marriage Human Rights Campaign. This is not idle speculation: The documents had an internal IRS stamp on them. The list of names was then published on a number of liberal websites and NOW’s donors were harassed.

The IRS demanded that all members of the Coalition for Life of Iowa swear under penalty of perjury that they wouldn’t pray, picket or protest outside of Planned Parenthood. They were also asked to provide details of their prayer meetings. …

Slate contributor says the real NSA scandal is how the randomly educated, poorly qualified, Snowden was given top-secret access.

Edward Snowden sounds like a thoughtful, patriotic young man, and I’m sure glad he blew the whistle on the NSA’s surveillance programs. But the more I learned about him this afternoon, the angrier I became. Wait, him? The NSA trusted its most sensitive documents to this guy? And now, after it has just proven itself so inept at handling its own information, the agency still wants us to believe that it can securely hold on to all of our data? Oy vey!

According to the Guardian, Snowden is a 29-year-old high school dropout who trained for the Army Special Forces before an injury forced him to leave the military. His IT credentials are apparently limited to a few “computer” classes he took at a community college in order to get his high school equivalency degree—courses that he did not complete. His first job at the NSA was as a security guard. Then, amazingly, he moved up the ranks of the United States’ national security infrastructure: …

Just to remind us how corrupt our elected representatives are, George Will writes on sugar subsidies.

The steamboat conveying Andrew Jackson up the Ohio River toward his tumultuous 1829 inauguration had brooms lashed to its bow, symbolizing Old Hickory’s vow to clean up Washington. But sweeping out Washington’s Augean stables, like painting the Golden GateBridge, is steady work, so steady it never ends. Neither do the policies that cosset sugar producers.

These immortal measures just received the Senate’s benediction because they illustrate the only law Washington can be counted on to respect. It is the law of dispersed costs but concentrated benefits.

The provisions by which Washington transfers wealth from 316 million American consumers to a few thousand sugar producers are part of a “temporary” commodity support program created during the Great Depression. Not even the New Deal could prolong the Depression forever. It ended. But sugar protectionism is forever. The Senate recently voted 54 to 45 against even mild reforms of the baroque architecture of protections for producers of sugar cane and sugar beets. …

It is not a big thing, but Volokh Conspiracy has a post illustrating the same thing.

I noticed two anecdotes about the late Sen. Frank Lautenberg, both of which were meant to be complimentary but in fact speak volumes about the petty corruption of our political class and how inured to it we’ve become. The first was told by a friend of his who was at a conference of Jewish philanthropists in Israel with Lautenberg on 9/11. Lautenberg “used his pull as a former senator” to get everyone an early flight back to the U.S. so they could rejoin their families. The second, told by Vice-President Biden at Lautenberg’s funeral, related how Biden was once hustling to make an Amtrak train to Delaware, but was told by Amtrak staff, “don’t worry we’re holding the train for Sen. Lautenberg” (who was a big political supporter of Amtrak).

Now, as corruption goes, this is minor stuff. But I’m more disturbed that rather than the rich and powerful (Lautenberg’s friends in Israel and Biden) being embarrassed that Lautenberg (mis)used his influence to inconvenience others on behalf of himself and his friends, they tout these stories in eulogizing them, as if we should all be glad that a (former!) Senator has the “clout” to help his friends at the expense of those less connected. Bleh!

UPDATE: How much more I would have admired Lautenberg if his friends could relate that “we begged him to use his clout as a former Senator to get us back to our families, but Frank was adamant that his friends and acquaintances were no more important than anyone else trying to get back home, and that he wouldn’t abuse his status as former senator on our behalf.”

There is some good news around. Money writes on the increase of known reserves of gas and oil. Or course, our governments will find a way to create problems there.

The Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration has upgraded its estimates of global oil reserves by 11% after scouring 41 countries and finding a lot more “technically recoverable” shale oil and shale gas than it did the last time it filed a similar report, in 2011.

Since then, the EIA’s shale gas estimates alone have jumped by 10% and its estimate of gas reserves has soared by 47%. The U.S., China and Argentina are all largely responsible for the upticks in shale oil and gas numbers, while Russia’s shale oil stockpile and Algeria’s shale gas resources also place them among the EIA’s top four potential producers in each category. …

A change of pace with a report in the NY Times about the expanded range of mountain lions.

The great migration began perhaps 40 years ago. From strongholds in the Rocky Mountains and Texas, young males headed east, seeking female companionship and new places to settle.

The emigrants were about seven feet long, nose to tail, and weighed up to 160 pounds. Given a dietary choice, they preferred deer, but would eat almost anything that moved: elk, bighorn sheep, wild horses, beaver, even porcupines. Left free for an evening, they were capable of killing a dozen domestic sheep before dawn, eating their fill and leaving the rest for the buzzards. They were also known to attack humans on occasion.

Long ago the Inca called them puma, but today — though they belong to only one species — they have many names. In Arizona they are known as mountain lions; in Florida they are panthers, and elsewhere in the South they are called painters. When they roamed New England, they were called catamounts. In much of the Midwest they are known as cougars, and that is the name everyone understands.

Until relatively recently, they were mainly a memory. All but exterminated east of the Rockies by 1900, they were treated as “varmints” in most Western states until the late ’60s and could be shot on sight. In Maine, the last catamount was killed in 1938.

But today Puma concolor is back on the prowl. That is one of the great success stories in wildlife conservation, but also a source of concern among biologists and other advocates, for their increasing numbers make them harder to manage — and harder for people to tolerate. No reliable estimate exists for the cougar population at its lowest point, before the 1970s, but there are now believed to be more than 30,000 in North America. They have recolonized the Black Hills of South Dakota, the North Dakota Badlands and the Pine Ridge country of northwestern Nebraska. …

Andrew Malcolm tops off our week with his recap of late night humor.

Fallon: Celebrity chef Paula Deen just released her own line of butter. When asked what you should put it on, Deen said, “Who said you have to put it on anything?”

Leno: Russian President Putin and his wife are divorcing. He gets the house in Moscow. She gets to live in Siberia.

Fallon: That Florida Powerball winner is 84 years old. Other people in Florida were like, “Figures it would go to some kid.”

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Glenn Reynolds notes the common thread to the DC scandals. 

“How ironic is that? We wanted a president that listens to all Americans — now we have one.” That was Jay Leno’s take on the Obama administration’s expanding NSA spying scandal, which has gone beyond Verizon phone records to include Google, Facebook, Yahoo and just about all the other major tech companies except, apparently, for Twitter.

The NSA spying scandal goes deep, and the Obama administration’s only upside is that the furor over its poking into Americans’ private business on a wholesale basis will distract people from the furor over the use of the IRS and other federal agencies to target political enemies — and even donors to Republican causes — and the furor over the Benghazi screwup and subsequent lies (scapegoated filmmaker Nakoula is still in jail), the furor over the “Fast And Furious” gunrunning scandal that left literally scores of Mexicans dead, the scandal over the DOJ’s poking into phone records of journalists (and their parents), HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ shakedown of companies she regulates for “donations” to pay for ObamaCare implementation that Congress has refused to fund, the Pigford scandal where the Treasury Department’s “Judgment Fund” appears to have been raided for political purposes — well, it’s getting to where you need a scorecard to keep up.

But, in fact, there’s a common theme in all of these scandals: Abuse of power. …

David Brooks reviews an interesting book. Interesting in that it reveals and displays the unhappiness of the American left at a point in time before we learned about the massive data-mining undertaken by the government. Interesting also in that it is written in the narrative style of the “USA Trilogy” by John Dos Passos.

… Packer rarely comes out and says what he thinks. This is a book of nearly pure narrative, and his meanings are embedded in the way he portrays people, those he likes (outsiders) and those he doesn’t (bankers, the political class). There are some passages of outright analysis in this book to show that America is “unwinding,” that the structures of everyday life are crumbling, that the nation’s leaders have “abandoned their posts,” that the void has been filled with “the default force in American life, organized money.” But I doubt the analytic passages together would fill more than a few ­pages of this 434-page book.

The stories that do fill its ­pages are beautifully reported. There are a few dominating figures who pop in and out, like Jeff Connaughton, the perfect political No. 2, who in the early 1980s hitched his wagon to Joe Biden and became an aide, a fund-raiser, a lobbyist and a Washington insider. But during the financial crisis Connaughton grew disillusioned with politics, and he gives Packer an absolutely brutal portrait of Biden as a coldblooded operator, a staff-abuser and a people-user, who cares about nothing but his own presidential ambitions. (This portrait is cartoonishly overdrawn.)

There is Dean Price, a young go-getter who opened a chain of truck stops and then fell for some crackpot suggestions that the world was about to run out of oil and moved off into ­biodiesel. After being the political flavor of the month for a while with his ­speeches on energy, he was charged with not paying his taxes, his company tanked and things ended badly.

There is Tammy Thomas, a woman from Youngstown, Ohio, who worked hard in the city’s auto parts plants and took an early retirement buyout as the local economy crumbled around her. She lost a large chunk of her savings in a Ponzi scheme. Outraged at the changes around her, she has become an activist and community organizer.

To repeat, Packer does an outstanding job with these stories. “The Unwinding” offers vivid snapshots of people who have experienced a loss of faith. As a way of understanding contemporary America, these examples are tantalizing. But they are also frustrating. The book is supposed to have social, economic and political implications, but there is no actual sociology, economics or political analysis in it.

By “the unwinding,” Packer is really referring to three large transformations, which have each been the subject of an enormous amount of research and analysis. The first is the stagnation of middle-class wages and widening inequality. Depending on which analyst you read, this has to do with the changing nature of the information-age labor market, changing family structures, rising health care costs, the decline of unions or the failure of education levels to keep up with technology.

The second is the crushing recession that began in 2008. Depending on which analyst you read, this was caused by global capital imbalances, bad Federal Reserve policy, greed on Wall Street, faulty risk-assessment models or the insane belief that housing prices would go on rising forever.

The third transformation is the unraveling of the national fabric. Depending on which analyst you read, this is either a gigantic problem (marriage rates are collapsing; some measures of social connection are on the decline) or not a gigantic problem (crime rates are plummeting, some measures of social connection are improving).

Packer wants us to understand these transformations, but ultimately, narrative and anecdotes are not enough. They need to be complemented with evidence from these long-running debates and embedded in a theoretical framework and worldview. …

The above by David Brooks reviewing a book by the New Yorker’s George Packer is a good illustration of why the American left cannot understand the damage done by the current administration. To see how things might be different, and we could once again have an economy that could generate as many as one million jobs in a month as it did during the recovery of the Reagan Presidency we have Forbes contributor, Carl Schramm, who makes the moral case for policies that foster growth.

… The moral implications of non-recovery causes Washington to look culpable for human costs that politicians would just as soon not consider.  In every recession or slow-growth situation, every one of them, the poor pay a higher price. Just the same, in most recoveries the poor do better than the rich.  Think about it.  Right now well off people hardly know that recession-like conditions persist.  In fact, the incomes of the top one percent have climbed steadily through the last few years.

Poorer Americans, including black people, have had to deal with the problem of chronic unemployment and retreat entirely from the labor force. How is it that advocates for the poor don’t really seem to understand that when our economy doesn’t grow there is no possible way that poverty will ever be reduced?  Perhaps it’s because the poor are now permanently attended to by the profession of community advocates.

In America, even as the world uses the American model of entrepreneurial capitalism to push back poverty, we have institutionalized poverty as an intractable social condition!  The ideological solution is to take from the rich despite the tautological reality that their invested capital creates all the new jobs.  If you don’t think the poor can or want to work, that they should be permanent wards of the state, and you wrap yourself in the feel-good pop-morality of “social justice,” what other solution can you reach?  Tragically, America’s cadre of public policy professionals seems to believe the poor will always be with us, at pretty much the same percent of population, no matter what.  Thank goodness China, India and, now, countries in Africa don’t buy this assumption!

Where in the rhetoric of those who advocate for the poor does one ever hear of the eradication of poverty outright through the expansion of minority entrepreneurship and the growing up of scale businesses?  The notion that somehow entrepreneurial capitalism is not what the poor could use to their benefit is bolstered by a set of memes that serve to make growth itself somehow morally questionable.  Experts in community activism and social work, as well as some philanthropic supporters and growing numbers of college students, appear to believe that it is better that people live in an eco-friendly static state of near-poverty than be cogs in the destruction of the environment that is the inevitable (but not really true) cost of economic growth.

In a confused world of economic policy there is only one true north – growth!  Growth means the expansion of human welfare at home.  Public policy that is not first and foremost focused on economic expansion of our own economy imposes unnecessary and horrific costs on individuals, most importantly the poor, right here in America.

Here’s how old Pickerhead is. When traveling from Rhode Island to Valley Forge for the 1957 Boy Scout Jamboree, he can remember the train stopping periodically for ice for the air conditioning system. CNN has a story on the man who helped create the ice business in America.

Frederic Tudor not only introduced the world to cold glasses of water on hot summer days, he created a thirst people never realized they had.

In 1805, two wealthy brothers from Boston, Massachusetts, were at a family picnic, enjoying the rare luxuries of cold beverages and ice cream.

They joked about how their chilled refreshments would be the envy of all the colonists sweating in the West Indies.

It was a passing remark, but it stuck with one of the brothers. His name was Frederic Tudor, and 30 years later, he would ship nearly 200 tons of ice halfway around the globe to become the “Ice King.”

 

Ice man cometh

Nothing in Tudor’s early years indicated that he would invent an industry.

He had the pedigree to attend Harvard but dropped out of school at the age of 13.

After loafing for a few years, he retired to his family’s country estate to hunt, fish, and play at farming.

When his brother, William, quipped that they should harvest ice from the estate’s pond and sell it in the West Indies, Frederic took the notion seriously. After all, he had little else to do. …

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You know our job creation is terrible when even the NY Times finds something wrong with the obama ‘recovery.’

The American economy may be the world’s biggest, but when it comes to job creation since the recession hit at the end of 2007, it is far from a leader.

Indeed, contrary to the widespread view that the United States is an island of relative prosperity in a global sea of economic torpor, employment in several other nations has bounced back more quickly, according to a new analysis by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The government reported Friday that the nation added 175,000 jobs in May, continuing a 32-month run of job gains. The unemployment rate moved up slightly to 7.6 percent, from 7.5 percent in April.

But overall employment in the United States remained 2.1 percent below where it was at the end of 2007, according to the statistics bureau. By comparison, over the same period, between December 2007 and March 2013, the number of jobs was up 8.1 percent in Australia; Germany, the biggest economy in the troubled euro zone, has managed a 5.8 percent gain in employment.

“The United States is way below where it should be,” said Lawrence F. Katz, a professor of economics at Harvard. “We had a massive downturn and a tepid recovery.”

Still, Friday’s jobs report appeared to be just what Wall Street was hoping for. Major stock market indexes jumped by 1.3 percent as traders bet that the modest employment gains and the uptick in joblessness meant that the Federal Reserve would be forced to keep pumping money into the economy in a bid to stimulate greater growth. …

John Hinderaker posts on the Times’ angst, and the fact our performance lags Canada and MEXICO!

We are now nearly five years into the Age of Obama, and I think pretty much everyone understands that, economically speaking, the record is poor. If you think unprecedented levels of unemployment and poverty, declining labor force participation, booming food stamp use and so on are the signs of a healthy economy, then you should be satisfied with the Obama administration. Otherwise, not.

It must have hurt the New York Times to report this, but report it they did: “Many Rival Nations Surge Past the U.S. in Adding New Jobs.”

[C]ontrary to the widespread view that the United States is an island of relative prosperity in a global sea of economic torpor, employment in several other nations has bounced back more quickly, according to a new analysis by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Where might that “widespread view” have come from? The Times takes no responsibility. …

… So how does the current recovery in the U.S. stack up, compared with the same period of time in Canada and Mexico?

Using consistent data on the United States, Canada and Mexico, I plotted GDP growth for the three countries on a quarterly basis from first quarter of 2010 to the present. That timing is significant, because in all three countries the recession was over by 2010 and recovery was in progress. So what we are comparing is the strength of the recovery in the three adjacent countries. This chart shows the quarterly increase in GDP from 2010 Q1 through Q1 of 2013:

As you can see, on a quarter by quarter basis, the U.S. has lagged behind Canada and, especially, Mexico. …

IBD Editors on the missing 7.6 million jobs.

Although somewhat better than expected, the 175,000 net jobs created in May continues the historically tepid jobs growth trend that has come to characterize the now four-year-old economic recovery.

The result has been continued high unemployment, a vast pool of long-term jobless, and an unprecedented number of people who’ve dropped out of the labor force.

Highlighting the weakness of the May report is the fact that the number of unemployed climbed by nearly the same amount as jobs created — 101,000 — nudging the unemployment rate up to 7.6%.

As a result, there are still 2.4 million fewer people working than there were in January 2008, the previous jobs peak. And since the recovery started in June 2009, the number of jobs has increased a mere 3.9%, well below the post-World War II average of 9.7%.

In fact, had this jobs recovery merely kept pace with the average of the previous 10, there would be 7.6 million more people working today, and the unemployment rate would be less than half its current level. …

Sherman Frederick of the Las Vegas Review-Journal has more on the economy.

… But how bad is it, really?

Up until very recently, this was hard to quantify and thus became in large part a political argument. Today, however, enough time has passed that economists now have data points to scientifically put President Barack Obama’s economic policy in its proper place.

On the old legacy-o-meter, things aren’t looking good for Obama and his supporters, who so desperately wanted him to succeed.

I’m tempted to compare Obama’s performance on the economy to this year’s Phoenix Suns basketball team. But that might be too harsh — on the Suns.

The Suns were a crummy basketball team this season, for sure. They were pathetic from start to finish. But when things were not going well, they at least changed things up to get a better outcome. The Suns finished ahead of Cleveland and Charlotte. Had they suited up their old star, Connie Hawkins, they might have finished ahead of a few other teams, too.

President Obama, meanwhile, kept the same economic game plan and failed policies in place for 4½ years. Clear evidence is mounting to show that Obama’s stubbornness (or shall we call it ignorance) might earn him the title of Worst Economic President Ever. …

Michael Strain of American.com has another way to look at the lack of recovery.

The two numbers that will get the most attention, by far, from today’s jobs report are 7.6 and 175,000. In May, the unemployment rate increased just a bit to 7.6%, and employers added 175,000 nonfarm payroll jobs. The basic story of the labor market recovery remains the same: it is steady but too slow.

But I encourage you to pay attention to three other numbers which, to my mind, are much more important than 7.6 and 175,000. They are 2.4, 4.4., and 0.4.

We still have 2.4 million fewer jobs than when the recession officially began 66 months ago. Relative to previous downturns, this performance is quite bad.

We still have 4.4 million workers who have been unemployed for six months or longer. This is a very large number. Outside this downturn, the previous post-war record was under 3 million, back in the 1980s. Over 37% of the total unemployed are long-term unemployed. The previous post-war record, also back in the 1980s, was a comparatively low 26%.

When the Great Recession began in December 2007, 62.7% of the working-age population was employed; today it is a staggeringly lower 58.6%. The share of the working-age population with jobs has increased by only 0.4 percentage points since its low point in the official recovery. Though it doesn’t get much attention, many labor economists prefer the employment-to-population ratio as the best measure of the broad health of the labor market. That this measure has improved so little indicates that the economy is creating just a few more jobs than are needed to keep up with population growth. But this is not enough. We need to create enough jobs to handle the growth of the working-age population and to recover the jobs lost in the Great Recession. To put it simply, we are not succeeding. …

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Charles Krauthammer on the results in Syria of the United States having an irresolute and irresponsible president.

On Wednesday, Qusair fell to the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria. Qusair is a strategic town that connects Damascus with Assad’s Alawite heartland on the Mediterranean, with its ports and Russian naval base. It’s a major strategic shift. Assad’s forces can now advance on rebel-dominated areas in central and northern Syria, including Aleppo.

For the rebels, it’s a devastating loss of territory, morale and their supply corridor to Lebanon. No one knows if this reversal of fortune will be the last, but everyone knows that Assad now has the upper hand.

What altered the tide of battle was brazen outside intervention. A hardened, well-trained, well-armed Hezbollah force — from the terrorist Shiite group that dominates Lebanon and answers to Iran — crossed into Syria and drove the rebels out of Qusair, which Syrian artillery has left a smoking ruin.

This is a huge victory not just for Tehran but also for Moscow, which sustains Assad in power and prizes its warm-water port at Tartus, Russia’s only military base outside of the former Soviet Union. Vladimir Putin has stationed a dozen or more Russian warships offshore, further protecting his strategic outpost and his Syrian client.

The losers? NATO-member Turkey, the major supporter of the rebels; Jordan, America’s closest Arab ally, now drowning in half a million Syrian refugees; and America’s Gulf allies, principal weapons suppliers to the rebels.

And the United States, whose bystander president, having declared that Assad must go, that he has lost all legitimacy and that his fall is just a matter of time, is looking not just feckless but clueless. …

Jennifer Rubin says Sue and Sam are unlikely to challenge their boss with any original thoughts.

I am under no illusion that Samantha Power or Susan Rice will convince the president to act in Syria or make regime change in Iran our policy or make improved human rights a condition for improved relations with China, Russia or any other country on the planet.

Susan Rice earned her stripes saying the most ludicrous things on national television because the White House wanted her to. Speak truth to power? You’ve got the wrong gal.

Nothing personal to Power, but a United Nations ambassador doesn’t make national security policy and isn’t responsible for much. (Hence, the lunacy of having Rice opine on national television on Benghazi, Libya.) We have had great ones (e.g. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Jeane Kirkpatrick, John Bolton) who spoken up for the United States and defended our values and our allies. We’ve had rotten ones who were less than competent and/or craved consensus with tyrannical regimes (e.g. Bill Richardson, Andrew Young, Rice). The good ones were put there by presidents who had a grip on national security and the bad ones by those who slept through history (ignoring the rise of al-Qaeda) or who hadn’t a clue about how to wield American power. In short, U.N. ambassadors have been mirrors of, not beacons for the presidents they served. …

Spengler, in the person of David Goldman says Muslim civil wars stem from a crisis of civilization.

Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum (where I am associate fellow) replies this morning to Bret Stephens‘ June 3rd Wall Street Journal column, “The Muslim Civil War: Standing by while the Sunnis and Shiites fight it out invites disaster.” The Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, when the Reagan administration quietly encouraged the two sides to fight themselves to bloody exhaustion, did America no good, Stephens argues:

“In short, a long intra-Islamic war left nobody safer, wealthier or wiser. Nor did it leave the West morally untainted. The U.S. embraced Saddam Hussein as a counterweight to Iran, and later tried to ply Iran with secret arms in exchange for the release of hostages. Patrolling the Strait of Hormuz, the USS Vincennes mistakenly shot down an Iranian jetliner over the Gulf, killing 290 civilians. Inaction only provides moral safe harbor when there’s no possibility of action.”

Today, he adds, there comes “the whispered suggestion: If one branch of Islam wants to be at war with another branch for a few years — or decades — so much the better for the non-Islamic world. Mass civilian casualties in Aleppo or Homs is their tragedy, not ours. It does not implicate us morally. And it probably benefits us strategically, not least by redirecting jihadist energies away from the West.” This is not a good thing for the West, but a bad thing, he concludes. Pipes and Stephens are both friends of mine, and both have a point (although I come down on Pipes’ side of the argument). It might be helpful to expand the context of the discussion.

I agree with Stephens that it is a bad thing. It not only a bad thing: it is a horrifying thing. The moral impact on the West of unrestrained slaughter and numberless atrocities flooding YouTube for years to come is incalculable, as I wrote in a May 20 essay, “Syria’s Madness and Ours.” If Syria looks bad, wait until Pakistan breaks down. The relevant questions, though, are 1) why are Sunnis and Shi’ites slaughtering each other in Syria at this particular moment in history, and 2) what (if anything) can we do about it?

Part of the answer to the first question is that Syria (like Egypt) as presently constituted simply is not viable as a country. Iraq might be viable, because it has enough oil to subsidize a largely uneducated, pre-modern population. As an economist and risk analyst (I ran Credit Strategy for Credit Suisse and all fixed income research for Bank of America), I do not believe that there is any way to stabilize either country. In the medium term, Turkey will lose national viability as well. I outlined some of the reasons for this view in my 2011 book How Civilizations Die (and why Islam is Dying, Too).

Globalization ruins countries. It has done so for centuries. Tinpot dictatorships that keep their people in poverty the better to maintain political control will break down at some point. Mexico broke down during the 1970s and 1980s; the Mexican currency collapsed, the savings of the middle class were wiped out, and the economy shut down. In 1982 I wrote an evaluation of the Mexican economy for Norman Bailey, then director of plans at the National Security Council and special assistant to President Reagan. I saw a crash coming, and no way to to prevent it.

Three things prevented Mexico from dissolving into civil war (as it did during the teens of the past century at the cost of a million lives, or one out of seven Mexicans). One was the ability of Mexicans to migrate to the United States, which absorbed perhaps a fifth of the Mexican population. The second was the emergence of the drug cartels as an alternative source of employment for up to half a million people, and generating between $18 and $39 billion of annual profits. And the third is the fact that Mexico produces its own food most years. When the currencies of the Latin American banana republics collapsed, there was always enough food to maintain minimum caloric consumption. Not so in Egypt, which imports half its food and is flat broke. Egypt and Syria are banana republics but without the bananas (Daniel Pipes assures me that Egypt does grow bananas, and he personally has eaten them, but they are not grown in sufficient quantity to meet the country’s caloric deficit). Turkey was the supposed Muslim model for democracy and prosperity under moderate Islam. That idea, which I disputed for years, has gotten tarnished during the past week.

Israeli analysts have understood this from the outset. Two years ago (in an essay entitled “Israel the winner in the Arab revolts“) I quoted an Israeli study of the collapse of Syrian agriculture preceding the civil war: …

 

… If we had a Syrian elite dedicated to modernization, free markets, and opportunity, we could have an economic recovery in Syria. But the country is locked into suppurating backwardness precisely because the dominant culture holds back individual initiative and enterprise. The longstanding hatreds among Sunnis and Shi’ites, and Kurds and Druze and Arabs, turn into a fight to the death as the ground shrinks beneath them. The pre-modern culture demands proofs of group loyalty in the form of atrocities which bind the combatants to an all-or-nothing outcome. The Sunni rebels appear quite as enthusiastic in their perpetration of atrocities as does the disgusting Assad government.

What are we supposed to do in the face of such horrors? I am against putting American boots on the ground. As I wrote in the cited May 20 essay, “Westerners cannot deal with this kind of warfare. The United States does not have and cannot train soldiers capable of intervening in the Syrian civil war. Short of raising a foreign legion on the French colonial model, America should keep its military personnel at a distance from a war fought with the instruments of horror.”

The most urgent thing to do, in my judgment, is to eliminate the malignant influence of Iran …

For lighter fare, how about an interview with one of Pickerhead’s favorites; Carl Hiaasen.

Carl Hiaasen’s latest book, “Bad Monkey,” begins when a couple of tourists on a fishing trip reel in a human arm. It’s just a typical day in South Florida, the setting for Mr. Hiaasen’s best-selling novels, which both satirize and celebrate the state that he’s called home for almost all of his 60 years.

The colorful coterie of characters in Mr. Hiaasen’s new book (to be published Tuesday) includes a voodoo queen, a kinky coroner and the author’s usual assortment of corrupt politicians. He tells the story in such a matter-of-fact way that he could be reporting it—which, in fact, he did. Most of the book’s events are inspired by real places and true stories. As a longtime reporter, Mr. Hiaasen knows that reality is often stranger than fiction, especially in Florida.

“It’s not an exaggeration to say this is the most corrupt place in the country,” he says with delight.

“Bad Monkey” deals with a former cop’s quest for redemption against the backdrop of South Florida’s real-world scandals—from the Russian underworld in the Florida Keys to fugitives who escape to the Bahamas. This afternoon in late April, however, Mr. Hiaasen is relaxing in a decidedly different milieu. He’s sitting in his living room, decorated in soothing blues and soft beiges, in a two-story house on a quiet corner of Vero Beach, Fla., just across the street from the ocean. …

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Niall Ferguson chronicles how our country has degenerated.

… Seven years of data suggest that most of the world’s countries are successfully making it easier to do business: The total number of days it takes to carry out the seven procedures has come down, in some cases very substantially. In only around 20 countries has the total duration of dealing with “red tape” gone up. The sixth-worst case is none other than the U.S., where the total number of days has increased by 18% to 433. Other members of the bottom 10, using this metric, are Zimbabwe, Burundi and Yemen (though their absolute numbers are of course much higher).

Why is it getting harder to do business in America? Part of the answer is excessively complex legislation. A prime example is the 848-page Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of July 2010 (otherwise known as the Dodd-Frank Act), which, among other things, required that regulators create 243 rules, conduct 67 studies and issue 22 periodic reports. Comparable in its complexity is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (906 pages), which is also in the process of spawning thousands of pages of regulation. You don’t have to be opposed to tighter financial regulation or universal health care to recognize that something is wrong with laws so elaborate that almost no one affected has the time or the will to read them.

Who benefits from the growth of complex and cumbersome regulation? The answer is: lawyers, not forgetting lobbyists and compliance departments. For complexity is not the friend of the little man. It is the friend of the deep pocket. It is the friend of cronyism.

We used to have the rule of law. Now it is tempting to say we have the rule of lawyers, which is something different. For the lawyers can also make money even in the absence of complex legislation.

It has long been recognized that the U.S. tort system is exceptionally expensive. Indeed, tort reform is something few people will openly argue against. Yet the plague of class-action lawsuits continues unabated. Regular customers of Southwest Airlines recently received this email: “Did you receive a Southwest Airlines drink coupon through the purchase of a Business Select ticket prior to August 1, 2010, and never redeem it? If yes, a legal Settlement provides a Replacement Drink Voucher, entitling you to a free drink aboard a Southwest flight, for every such drink coupon you did not redeem.”

This is not the product of the imagination of some modern-day Charles Dickens. It is a document arising from the class-action case, In re Southwest Airlines Voucher Litigation, No. 11-cv-8176, which came before Judge Matthew F. Kennelly of the District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. As the circular explains: “This Action arose out of Southwest’s decision, effective August 1, 2010, to only accept drink coupons received by Business Select customers with the purchase of a Business Select ticket on the date of the ticketed travel. The Plaintiffs in this case allege Southwest, in making that decision, breached its contract with Class Members who previously received drink coupons,” etc.

As often happens in such cases, Southwest decided to settle out of court. Recipients of the email will have been nonplused to learn that the settlement “will provide Replacement Drink Vouchers to Class Members who submit timely and valid Claim Forms.” One wonders how many have bothered.

Cui bono? The answer is, of course, the lawyers representing the plaintiffs. Having initially pitched for “up to $7 million in fees, costs and expenses,” these ingenious jurists settled for fees of $3 million “plus costs not to exceed $30,000″ from Southwest. …

Mark Steyn on the real problem at the IRS. 

… It took Congressman Trey Gowdy of South Carolina to get to the heart of the matter: “With all due respect, this is not a training issue,” he said. “This cannot be solved with another webinar. . . . We can adopt all the recommendations you can possibly conceive of. I just say it strikes me — and maybe it’s just me — but it strikes me as a cultural, systemic, character, moral issue.”

He’s right. If you don’t instinctively know it’s wrong to stay in $3,500-a-night hotel rooms at public expense, a revised conference-accommodations-guidelines manual isn’t going to fix the real problem.

So we know the IRS is corrupt. What happens then when an ambitious government understands it can yoke that corruption to its political needs? What’s striking as the revelations multiply and metastasize is that at no point does any IRS official appear to have raised objections. If any of them understood that what they were doing was wrong, they kept it to themselves. When Nixon tried to sic the IRS on a few powerful political enemies, the IRS told him to take a hike. When Obama’s courtiers tried to sic the IRS on thousands of ordinary American citizens, the agency went along, and very enthusiastically. This is a scale of depravity hitherto unknown to the tax authorities of the United States, and for that reason alone they should be disarmed and disbanded — and rebuilt from scratch with far more circumscribed powers.

Here’s another congressional-subcommittee transcript highlight of the week. Senator Mark Kirk of Illinois asks the attorney general if he’s spying on members of Congress and thereby giving the executive branch leverage over the legislative branch. Eric Holder answers:

“With all due respect, senator, I don’t think this is an appropriate setting for me to discuss that issue.”

Senator Kirk responded that “the correct answer would be, ‘No, we stayed within our lane and I’m assuring you we did not spy on members of Congress.’” For some reason, the attorney general felt unable to say that. So I think we all know what the answer to the original question really is.

Holder had another great contribution to the epitaph of the Republic this week. He went on TV to explain that he didn’t really regard Fox News’s James Rosen as a “co-conspirator” but had to pretend he did to the judge in order to get the judge to cough up the warrant. So rest easy, America! Your chief law officer was telling the truth when he said he hadn’t lied to Congress because in fact he’d been lying when he said he told the truth to the judge.

If you lie to one of Holder’s minions, you go to jail: They tossed Martha Stewart in the slammer for being insufficiently truthful to a low-level employee of the attorney general’s. But the attorney general can apparently lie willy-nilly to judges and/or Congress. …

Peter Wehner says it is now obvious that some cannot be trusted with power.

… My views on President Obama are such that very little would surprise me in terms of the ethical lines he would cross in order to gain and maintain political power.

That may seem like an overly harsh judgment, so let me take a moment to explain what I mean. I have become convinced, based on what I would argue is the increasing weight of the evidence, that Mr. Obama is a man whose sense of mission, his arrogance and self-righteousness, and his belief in the malevolence of his enemies might well lead him and his administration to act in ways that would seem to him to be justified at the time but, in fact, are wholly inappropriate.

I would include as evidence to support my assertion the president’s routine slander of his opponents, his serially misleading statements (including flat-out falsehoods about the lethal attacks on the Benghazi consulate), the IRS scandal and the public signals the president sent to that agency over the years, the unprecedented targeting of journalists by the Department of Justice and the attorney general’s nasty little habit of misleading Congress, Mr. Obama’s unusually dishonest campaign against Mitt Romney, and his overall contempt for the rule of law. He just doesn’t think that rules should apply to him, that he is above all that. Those who see themselves as world-historical figures tend to do that. …

Paul Mirengoff says one way or another, Holder lied.

… Just as damning, if not more so, is Holder’s concession that he “played” the court that granted DOJ’s application regarding Rosen. According to NBC’s account of the interview, “Holder explained that the [co-conspirator] phrasing was necessary in order to get a search warrant.”

The posted video of the interview bears this out. Holder says that various laws and guidelines “force” the government to call reporters criminals. But because reporters aren’t really criminals when they are just doing their job, the laws and guidelines need to be changed.

That may be. Nonetheless, Holder has admitted that he and his agents told a court that Rosen was a “co-conspirator” not because he believed Rosen was a criminal, but because DOJ needed to use the language of criminality to obtain the desired warrant.

As Bill Otis says, “if mere expediency [has] replaced basic truth-telling as the standard for what the Attorney General tells the court” then “there is more, not less, reason for [Holder] to resign.” …

Two Steyns in a day. Here’s a good Corner post.

I was chugging along buying Jack Dunphy’s argument on the NSA business, “A Small Price To Pay,” until I got to this bit:

There are people living in the United States right now, many, many of them, who are no less committed to jihad than the Tsarnaev brothers or Nidal Hassan.

Well, how’d that happen? How did all these Tsarnaevs-in-waiting wind up living in the United States? They were let in by the government, and many of them were let in in the years since 9/11, when we were supposedly on permanent “orange alert.” The same bureaucracy that takes the terror threat so seriously that it needs the phone and Internet records of hundreds of millions of law-abiding persons would never dream of doing a little more pre-screening in its immigration system — by, say, according a graduate of a Yemeni madrassah a little more scrutiny than a Slovene or Fijian. The president has unilaterally suspended the immigration laws of the United States, and his attorney general prosecutes those states such as Arizona who remain quaintly attached to them. The ID three of the 9/11 hijackers acquired in the 7-Eleven parking lot in Falls Church, Virginia and used to board the plane that day is part of a vast ongoing subversion of American sovereignty with which many states and so-called “sanctuary cities” actively collude.

As for Major Hasan, who needs surveillance? He put “Soldier of Allah” on his business card and gave a PowerPoint presentation to his military colleagues on what he’d like to do to infidels — and nobody said a word, lest they got tied up in sensitivity-training hell for six months.

Jack will forgive me when I say this is less good cop/bad cop than no cop/bad cop. Because the formal, visible state has been neutered by political correctness, the dark, furtive shadow state has to expand massively to make, in secret, the judgment calls that can no longer be made in public. That’s not an arrangement that is likely to end well.

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Fred Barnes chronicles the decline of this presidency. 

John Dos Passos, the novelist and historian, once said: “Often things you think are just beginning are coming to an end.” His observation was made in the 1960s. But it’s true today of Barack Obama‘s presidency and the promise of a bright future for his second term.

Mr. Obama’s re-election stirred grand expectations. The vote heralded a new liberal era, or so it was claimed. His victory was said to reflect ideological, cultural and demographic trends that could keep Democrats in the majority for years to come. His second four years in the White House would be just the beginning.

Now, six months later, the Obama administration is in an unexpected and sharp state of decline. Mr. Obama has little influence on Congress. His presidency has no theme. He pivots nervously from issue to issue. What there is of an Obama agenda consists, at the moment, of leftovers from his first term or proposals that he failed to emphasize in his re-election campaign and thus have practically no chance of passage.

Congressional Republicans neither trust nor fear the president. And Democrats on Capitol Hill, to whom Mr. Obama has never been close, have grown leery of him. In the Senate, Democrats complain privately about his interference with the biggest domestic policy matter of 2013, immigration reform. His effect, the senators believe, can only be to weaken the fragile bipartisan coalition for reform and make passage of major legislation more perilous.

The Obama breakdown was not caused by the trio of scandals—IRS, Justice Department, Benghazi—now confronting the president. The decline preceded them. It’s the result of what Mr. Obama did in his first term, during the campaign and in the two months following his re-election. …

Peter Wehner posts on two polls that suggest the American public is finally getting the picture. 

Two new polls–one from Bloomberg National Poll, the other from the Wall Street Journal/NBC News–show a clear erosion in the public’s trust in Barack Obama’s honest and integrity.

Nearly half of those surveyed–47 percent–believe the president isn’t telling the truth when he says he didn’t know the IRS was giving extra scrutiny to the applications of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status. More than half–55 percent–say the IRS actions raise questions about the administration’s “overall honesty and integrity.” Fifty-eight percent believe the administration’s handling of the Benghazi consulate attacks raises questions about the honesty of the White House, while the same number say the Department of Justice’s subpoenaing of reporter e-mails and phone records in its leak investigations raise concerns.

For roughly half the public to believe Mr. Obama is lying at this relatively early stage in the congressional investigation is quite high, especially since at this point there’s no direct evidence showing the president knew about these scandals prior to May of this year. (Which isn’t to say the IRS and the Treasury Department didn’t know about the IRS’s nefarious activities long before the 2012 election or that the White House chief of staff and White House counsel didn’t know about the scandal prior to when Obama says he learned of it.)

This could well have a corrosive effect on the Obama presidency. …

Remember Stephanie Cutter the white house political operative with the barely contained sneer? She was the one who claimed Romney was a felon. Turns out she was one of those meeting with the IRS head when he visited the executive mansion 157 times. Hot Air has the story.

Noted liar Stephanie Cutter is making the media rounds, furnishing Douglas Shulman with an alibi for many of those White House meetings he attended during President Obama’s first term — far more visits than most cabinet secretaries logged.  Cutter insists that Shulman’s frequent presence at 1600 Pennsylvania isn’t the least bit “nefarious” because he was there to attend Obamacare implementation planning sessions.  She knows this, she says, because she was in the room: …

Jeff Jacoby on the boom in Washington, DC while the rest of the country suffers.

Give Stephen Fuller credit for this much: He’s willing to admit he was wrong.

During the debate leading up to the federal budget sequester, Fuller was a voice of doom. An economist at GeorgeMasonUniversity and the director of its Center for Regional Analysis, he predicted that sequestration would be especially calamitous for Washington, D.C., and its surroundings. If Congress didn’t stop the automatic spending cuts from going into effect, Fuller warned last year, the Washington area was headed for a “devastating recession.” Some 450,000 jobs, many of them in the private sector, would be wiped out in Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia.

“It’s something you don’t even want to draw a picture of because it’s too scary,” he said in a radio interview last summer. In January he described the sequester’s impact on the national capital region as an “end-of-the-world kind of hit.”

But the world hasn’t ended. Not even in Washington.

In the months since President Obama signed the order to cut federal outlays by $85 billion, the Washington Post reported last week, the region has added 40,000 jobs. “Income-tax receipts have surged in Virginia, beating expectations. Few government contractors have laid off workers.” There is no sign of the economic hellfire and brimstone foretold by Fuller, who says it’s a “surprise” to him that Washington’s economy is still booming. “We’ve done better than I expected,” he confessed.

The real surprise is that anyone is still surprised by the affluence of the Washington area. …

According to the Christian Science Monitor, the Ft.Hood shooter’s defense may have undermined the claim his crime was a type of “work place violence.”

The admission by Army Maj. Nidal Hasan on Tuesday that he attacked Fort Hood in 2009 in defense of “the leadership of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the Taliban” has suddenly undermined the Obama administration’s previous contention that the murders of 13 soldiers at the Texas base constituted an act of “workplace violence.”

Hasan’s legal argument, which is being considered by the judge, Col. Tara Osborn, may reignite the political furor over how the Obama administration has classified the shootings, as well as arguments about whether the mass shootings constituted the first major Islamic jihadist attack on the US after 9/11. As recently as May 23, President Obama said no “large-scale” terrorism attacks on the homeland have occurred on his watch.

Officials at the US Department of Defense have said there isn’t enough evidence to put Hasan on trial for an act of terrorism, and they have worried that such a claim could undermine the Army major’s right to a fair trial.

Critics argue that the FortHood incident has not been characterized as a jihadist attack in part to give the Obama administration political and policy cover. Moreover, they add, the Obama position works to the detriment of shooting victims, which includes the 32 wounded and the families of those killed. Victims would have been eligible for combat compensation under US law if the Pentagon had classified Hasan not as a murderous US Army psychiatrist but rather as an enemy combatant or an “associated force” under the Military Commissions Act of 2006, they say. …

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Jonathan Tobin notices some hypocrisy.

One of the keynotes of President Obama’s foreign policy throughout his first term has been an attempt to pay lip service to the Arab Spring protests against authoritarian regimes throughout the Muslim world. Those sentiments were not matched with strategies that were designed to enhance the efforts of those who were advocating more freedom or even to ward off the unintended consequences of the unrest, such as the rise of Islamist parties like Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. Yet in spite of those failures the president has never stopped trying to pose as a friend of Arab liberty even if he did nothing to help that cause. But the recent demonstrations in Turkey have exposed Obama’s policies in a way that perhaps no other development has done.

By continuing to support the Turkish ruling party, as it now becomes the subject of anger from its citizens, the administration is showing its true colors. If Obama is not prepared to criticize his friend who heads up the government in Ankara the way he has done other regimes that came under fire, then it shows that the talk about democracy was just so much hot air and that when push comes to shove, the president would rather befriend an Islamist ruler than embrace the pleas of the Turkish people for change. …

Jennifer Rubin posts on the new job for Susan Rice – national security adviser. Pickerhead thinks this is a good thing. She can be on the lookout for any more videos that might inflame the arab street.

Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, who leapt from dishonest talking points to out and out falsehoods (it was a spontaneous attack sparked by an anti-Muslim narrative!) on the Benghazi attack, gets her reward today — a promotion to national security adviser. She’ll not need Senate confirmation, but her appointment should not halt efforts to subpoena her for her conduct as ambassador to the U.N. It is noteworthy that President Obama did not have the nerve to nominate her for secretary of state, where she would have faced an onslaught of questions about her infamous Sunday talk show performance

The move is an in-your-face insult to Congress, to the Americans killed in Benghazi and their families and another instance of utterly incompetent, dishonest loyalists getting the really big jobs (e.g. Chuck Hagel). Rice was, of course, front and center in the do-nothing approach to the Rwandan genocide during the Clinton administration. She delivered a blistering diatribe against Israel after being obliged to veto a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israel for housing construction. In other words, she is the perfect choice for a president who has misread almost every foreign policy dilemma, has had a prickly relationship with Israel and doesn’t give a fig about genocide in Syria. …

Megan McArdle takes on the subject of all the IRS head’s visits to the white house.

Last week, conservatives were saying that former IRS head Douglas Shulman had been to the White House 118 times, while his predecessor had visited the Bush era White House only once.  I didn’t write about it because I idly assumed that this reflected some underlying change in administration management style or legislative priorities; perhaps, for example, he’d been there talking about Obamacare implementation and changes in tax enforcement.  

But the Daily Caller has now compiled a list of White House visits by various administration officials, and Shulman sure does seem to visit a lot more than other folks.  

If Obamacare was driving this, I’d expect to see Kathleen Sebelius had had more visits than Shulman.  (Interesting that, in fact, the Commerce Secretary goes to the White House more than the Secretary of HHS.)  If it was tax policy, I’d expect to have seen Geithner there more often.  

I think the administration needs to explain this.  Not because I think that Obama called Doug Shulman into his office to tell him to persecute the Tea Party.  That explanation is unlikely for all sorts of reasons:  …

John Hayward comments in Human Events.

In the early days of the IRS scandal, Douglas Shulman – who was IRS Commissioner during the period when the abuses of power against conservative and Tea Party groups began – was asked why he spent so much time at the White House.  With the arrogant condescension we’ve all grown to know and love from his corrupt agency, Shulman claimed it had a lot to do with the White House Easter Egg roll.

In a more serious vein, Shulman also mentioned consulting with the White House about tax policy changes, the IRS budget, and other sundry matters… none of which goes very far toward explaining why he felt the need to visit the White House over a hundred times.

At the time, it was thought Shulman had visited the White House 118 times over the course of two years, which is probably more work than the Easter Bunny puts into planning for Easter eggs.  But now the Daily Caller has gone through the White House visitor logs and discovered Shulman made a total of 157 visits during the Obama Administration, which is far more than the number of recorded visits from any Cabinet official.  For example, Shulman’s boss, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, only made 48 recorded visits.

And there might be even more Shulman visits to the White House yet to be revealed, because not all of the records covering his tenure as IRS commissioner have been released yet.

This is not normal for IRS commissioners.  Shulman’s predecessor, Mark Everson, only visited the Bush White House once during four years.  What, no Easter Egg roll?  No extensive discussions of tax policy changes?

We’ve had many occasions to play the “what if a Republican did it?” game throughout the Obama years, but this time it’s really mind-blowing to reverse the political polarity of the scandal and imagine the reaction.  Suppose the IRS was caught giving rough treatment to liberal groups – let’s say liberal minority groups – right before an election where the defeated Democrat challenger’s base didn’t show up in the expected numbers.  Suppose we had powerful congressional Republicans on the record urging the IRS to go after these groups.  Imagine the IRS commissioner was found to be making incredibly frequent visits to the White House throughout the scandal.

J. Christian Adams spotted another frequent visitor.

The big news today is that IRS head Doug Schulman visited the White House a stunning 157 times during the time a policy targeting the Tea Party was developed.  But Schulman isn’t the only non-cabinet member from administration to visit the White House an extraordinary number of times.  So did truth-challenged and Senate-stalled Labor Department nominee Tom Perez.

The Daily Caller study of the White House visitor logs demonstrates that Perez was the third overall most frequent visitor to the White House, just behind Deputy Commerce Secretary Rebecca Blank.  Perez visited the White House 83 times during a period in which he overrode the recommendations of career Justice Department lawyers to preclear South Carolina voter ID under the Voting Rights Act and blocked Texas Voter ID. 

During the same period, Perez allowed the nation’s voter rolls to become bloated with millions of dead voters by refusing to bring any cases under Section 8 of the Motor Voter law.  This federal law requires states to maintain clean voter rolls before federal elections.  Instead, millions of dead and ineligible voters were allowed by Perez to remain on the rolls for the November 2012 election because his radical ideology prevented him from enforcing the law. 

The Perez nomination is currently stalled in the Senate with Republicans vowing to block the nomination for multiple reasons, including Perez’s inability to tell the truth under oath, a defect shared by his boss Eric Holder. …

Walter Russell Mead on the further collapse of Detroit.

Desperation has hit a new low in Detroit.

Last week, Emergency Manager (and bankruptcy lawyer) Kevyn Orr decided to list the holdings of the Detroit Institute of Arts among the city’s assets in preparation for a possible bankruptcy. If the city goes through with it, it could be forced to sell off any of its assets—which now include the museum’s collection.

Museum administrators are outraged, but the choice may be keeping the art or paying for vital public services. According to Orr, the city has “long-term obligations of at least $15 billion, unsustainable cash flow shortages and miserably low credit ratings that make it difficult to borrow.” But as the WSJ reports, the city may not have a choice: …

P. J. O’Rourke had an item in the Weekly Standard about the decline of NASA. It was titled “Obama’s Asteroid’ and it is 2,300 words. Too long for us today, but you needed to see this about the value of space exploration. Follow the link if you wish to read it all. 

… The words “Space Age” have a quaint, nostalgic tone—sitting on midcentury modern furniture watching The Jetsons. But get out of the butterfly chair and fold the rabbit ears on the Philco—you’re living in the Space Age.

Without the space industry all those dishes hanging off window sills, receiving HD television reception and providing high-speed Internet connection in even the most remote corners of the world, would be just so many woks gone wrong.

Without the space industry, the only way you could use your satellite phone to communicate with someone would be by bonking him on the head with it. And satellite phones aren’t even big enough anymore to be very useful for that.

Meteorological predictions would be Grandpa’s mutterings about how his joints ache. There would have been no forewarning of Superstorm Sandy, and former members of the Jersey Shore cast might have been blown all the way to Canandaigua. What a natural disaster that would have been for New York’s Finger Lakes region.

Your GPS would be an old coot perched on your dashboard, chewing a stalk of hay. “Git on over to Old Pike Road. ’Cept they call it County Route 738 nowadays. An’ turn left where the Hendersons’ barn burned down in ’63.”

Air traffic control is largely satellite dependent. Absent satellites, when you’re squeezed into the middle seat on a flight to Orlando, you might not just wish you were dead, you might get that way.

And you couldn’t go to Google Earth to find out whether your neighbors are raising pigs in a backyard pen. You’d have to take a stepladder and peek over the fence. Nope, just dirty kids and a very dilapidated swing set. …

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Mark Steyn has come up with the ‘Lois Lerner’ Defense.

… I am an immigrant to this great land, and I love it, but I will make a small observation from my years in the United States which I hope won’t be taken the wrong way: Like citizens of almost all Western democracies in the 21st century, Americans are overly deferential to bureaucracy, but, in my observation, they are uniquely fearful of the state’s tax collectors to a degree I have never seen with Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs in London or equivalent agencies in Paris, Ottawa, Rome, Canberra. The IRS has, in American terms, extraordinary powers. It was, for example, amusing to see Lois Lerner plead the Fifth Amendment and exercise her constitutional right not to put herself at risk of self-incrimination. As the great Walter Williams pointed out the other day, every single American waives his Fifth Amendment rights every time he signs that tax return on April 15. Americans are fearless if some guy pulls some stunt in a shopping mall, but an IRS assault is brutal and unending. Many activists faded away, and the media began writing stories about how the Tea Party had peaked; they were over; they wouldn’t be a factor in 2012. And so it proved. As Rush Limbaugh pointed out the other day, the plan worked.

But, of course, there was no plan, was there? So let’s take Obama at his word that he had no idea all this was going on. In that case, he might like to take the lead in calling for the abolition of a corrupt agency and its grotesque tax code, and their replacement by a bureaucracy with more limited powers commensurate with a free society and a simplified tax regime with lower rates and thus fewer bewildering, mercurial “exemptions” that make the citizenry dependent on the caprices of Ms. Lerner and her colleagues. That’s a prize worth fighting for. In the meantime, the next time the IRS call you up with demands for this and demands for that, simply tell them, “I am filing the Lois Lerner defense,” and then say as she did to Congress “I have not done anything wrong. And I will not answer any questions.” Every man his own Lois Lerner!

We can thank Lily Tomlin for this quote; “No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up.” Which is how many felt when learning the IRS has become an arm of the democrat party.  Peggy Noonan explains what a serious wound this malfeasance will become to our country.

… this scandal is different and distinctive. The abuse was systemic—from the sheer number of targets and the extent of each targeting we know many workers had to be involved, many higher-ups, multiple offices. It was ideological and partisan—only those presumed to be of one political view were targeted. It has a single unifying pattern: The most vivid abuses took place in the years leading up to the president’s 2012 re-election effort. And in the end several were trying to cover it all up, including the head of the IRS, who lied to Congress about it, and the head of the tax-exempt unit, Lois Lerner, who managed to lie even in her public acknowledgment of impropriety.

It wasn’t a one-off. It wasn’t a president losing his temper with some steel executives. There was no enemies list, unless you consider half the country to be your enemies.

It is considered a bit of a faux pas to point this out, but what we are talking about in part is a Democratic president, a largely Democratic professional administrative class in Washington, and an IRS whose workers belong to a union whose political action committee gave roughly 95% of its political contributions last year to Democrats.

Tim Carney had a remarkable piece in the Washington Examiner this week in which he looked for campaign contributions from the IRS Cincinnati office. “In the 2012 election, every donation traceable to this office went to President Obama or liberal Sen. Sherrod Brown.” An IRS employee said in an email to Mr. Carney, “Do you think people willing to sacrifice lucrative private sector careers to work in tax administration . . . are genuinely going to support the party directed by Grover Norquist?” Mr. Carney noted that one of his IRS correspondents had an interesting detail on his social media profile. He belongs to a Facebook group called “Target the Shutdown at the Tea Party States.” It advised the president, during the 2011 debt-ceiling fight: “For instance, shut down air traffic control at airports in Norfolk, Tampa, Nashville.”

Wow. I guess that was target practice. …

… when a scandal is systemic, ideological and focused on political ends, it will not just magically end. Agencies such as the IRS are part of what Jonathan Turley this week called a “massive administrative state,” one built with many protections and much autonomy.

If it is not forced to change, it will not.

Which gets us to the part about imagination. What does it mean when half the country—literally half the country—understands that the revenue-gathering arm of its federal government is politically corrupt, sees them as targets, and will shoot at them if they try to raise their heads? That is the kind of thing that can kill a country, letting half its citizens believe that they no longer have full political rights. …

You cannot watch these people too closely. Stuart Taylor tells us about a little known slush fund hiding in the affordable care act. You know, the one we have to pass to find out what’s it it.

A little-noticed part of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act channels some $12.5 billion into a vaguely defined “Prevention and Public Health Fund” over the next decade–and some of that money is going for everything from massage therapists who offer “calming techniques,” to groups advocating higher state and local taxes on tobacco and soda, and stricter zoning restrictions on fast-food restaurants.

The program, which is run by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has raised alarms among congressional critics, who call it a “slush fund,” because the department can spend the money as it sees fit and without going through the congressional appropriations process. The sums involved are vast. By 2022, the department will be able to spend $2 billion per year at its sole discretion. In perpetuity.

What makes the Prevention and Public Health Fund controversial is its multibillion-dollar size, its unending nature (the fund never expires), and its vague spending mandate: any program designed “to improve health and help restrain the rate of, growth” of health-care costs.  That can include anything from “pickleball” (a racquet sport) in Carteret County, N.C. to Zumba (a dance fitness program), kayaking and kickboxing in Waco, TX.

“It’s totally crazy to give the executive branch $2 billion a year ad infinitum to spend as they wish,” said budget expert Jim Capretta of the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center. “Congress has the power of the purse, the purpose of which is to insure that the Executive branch is using taxpayer resources as Congress specified.”

The concerns are as diverse as the critics. The HHS Inspector General, in a 2012 “alert,” was concerned that the payments to third-party groups came dangerously close to taxpayer-funded lobbying. While current law bars lobbying with federal money, Obama administration officials and Republican lawmakers differ on where lawful “education” ends and illicit “lobbying” begins.  Nor have federal courts defined “lobbying” for the purposes of this fund. A health and Human Services (HHS) department spokesman denies that any laws were broken and the inspector general is continuing to investigate.

Republicans in both the House of Representatives and Senate have complained that much of the spending seems politically motivated and are alarmed that some of the federal money went to groups who described their own activities as contacting state, city and county lawmakers to urge higher taxes on high-calorie sodas and tobacco, or to call for bans on fast-food restaurants within 1,000-feet of a school, or total bans on smoking in outdoor venues, such as beaches or parks. In a May 9 letter to HHS Secretary Sebelius, Rep. Fred Upton (R,Mich) wrote that HHS grants “appear to fund lobbying activities contrary to the laws, regulations, and guidance governing the use of federal funds.” His letter included the latest in a series of requests for more documents and complaints about responses to previous requests.

Left wing freak from Kentucky who bugged Mitch McConnell’s office has doubled down. Legal Insurrection has the story.  

A Progress Kentucky volunteer who was at the center of a story involving the secret recording of Senator Mitch McConnell’s campaign meeting earlier this year has publicly admitted to making the recording, and he says that his attorney has been contacted by an assistant US Attorney about the matter.

Curtis Morrison, a founder and volunteer for Progress Kentucky, admitted to making the recording in a self-confession of sorts today at Salon.com.

From ABC News (via AP):

“A Kentucky man has admitted to secretly recording a private campaign meeting between Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell and his aides earlier this year.

Curtis Morrison of Louisville made the admission Friday in a first-person account posted on Salon.com, where he also said an assistant U.S. attorney has notified his attorney that a grand jury will consider bringing charges next Friday.

A spokeswoman said the U.S. attorney’s office in Louisville would not comment. It was unclear who was representing Morrison. Morrison declined to comment via email Friday.” …

Der Spiegel has pictures of the world’s largest ship. It can hold 16,000 containers.

The twin sister of the world’s largest container ship was set for inauguration in the German port of Hamburg on Thursday.  

At 396 meters (1,300 feet) long, the mammoth vessel can carry some 16,000 shipping containers, and will frequently travel to the northern German city. Dubbed the Alexander von Humboldt, it was made by French shipbuilder CMA CGM in the image of the Marco Polo, which was inaugurated in December 2012 — making both boats the largest in the world. …

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Because he knows London so well, Theodore Dalrymple provides needed background on the attack in Woolwich.

A witness to the brutal hacking death of a British soldier, Lee Rigby, a few hundred yards from his barracks in London, had the presence of mind to record the explanatory statement of one of the perpetrators, Michael Adebolajo, on his phone immediately after the crime. What Adebolajo said—his hand bloody from the attack and still holding the meat cleaver with which he carried it out—was revealing, as were his manner and body language. Together, they showed him to be the product of the utterly charmless, aggressive, and crude street culture of the less favored parts of London. The intonation of his speech was pure South London, as was the resentful tone of thwarted entitlement and its consequent self-righteousness. His every gesture was pure South London; the predatory lope with which he crossed the road after speaking into the camera was pure South London.

Adebolajo was born in London of Nigerian parents who were devout Christians. He did not learn his manners from them, therefore, but from the society around him. At one point in his life, his parents moved away from London in an attempt to separate him from bad—which is to say, criminal—influences. Adebolajo had joined a gang that stole phones from pedestrians.

It is not true that the society in which he lived offered him no opportunity for personal betterment. Adebolajo was for a time a student at GreenwichUniversity, graduation from which, whatever the real value of the education it offered him, would have improved his chances in the job market, especially in the public sector. But it was at the university that he encountered radical Islam, that ideology that simultaneously succors people with an existential grudge against the world and flatters their inflated and inflamed self-importance. It also successfully squares the adolescent circle: the need both to conform to a peer group and to rebel against society. …

Charles Krauthammer takes on Dear Follower’s Dorothy Doctrine.

… But the ultimate expression of Obama’s Dorothy Doctrine is Guantanamo. It must close. Must, mind you.

Okay. Let’s accept the dubious proposition that the Yemeni prisoners could be sent home without coming back to fight us. And that others could be convicted in court and put in U.S. prisons.

Now the rub. Obama openly admits that “even after we take these steps, one issue will remain — just how to deal with those Gitmo detainees who we know have participated in dangerous plots or attacks but who cannot be prosecuted.”

Well, yes. That’s always been the problem with Gitmo. It’s not a question of geography. The issue is indefinite detention — whether at Gitmo, a Colorado supermax or St. Helena.

Can’t try ’em, can’t release ’em. Having posed the central question, what is Obama’s answer? “I am confident that this legacy problem can be resolved.”

That’s it! I kid you not. He’s had four-plus years to think this one through — and he openly admits he’s got no answer.

Because there is none. Hence the need for Gitmo. Other wars end, at which point prisoners are repatriated. But in this war, the other side has no intention of surrender or armistice. They will fight until the caliphate is established or until jihadism is as utterly defeated as fascism and communism. That’s the reason — the only reason — for the detention conundrum. There is no solution to indefinite detention when the detainees are committed to indefinite war.

Obama’s fantasies are twinned. He can no more wish away the detention than he can the war.

We were defenseless on 9/11 because, despite Osama bin Laden’s open written declaration of war in 1996, we pretended for years that no war against us had even begun. Obama would return us to pre-9/11 defenselessness — casting Islamist terror as a law-enforcement issue and removing the legal basis for treating it as armed conflict — by pretending that the war is over.

It’s enough to make you weep.

Pajamas Media asks if Thomas Perez will again try to maneuver around a definitive ruling by the Supreme Court. 

One of the administration’s favorite legal theories, “disparate impact,” may get taken up again by the Supreme Court. Will the administration try to engineer some kind of payoff to take the issue away from the Court — again?

In June 2012, the town of Mount Holly, N.J., petitioned the Supreme Court to review the legitimacy of racial discrimination claims premised solely on a disparate impact theory under the Fair Housing Act. Under this theory, a policy — such as requiring high credit scores for loans — can be completely neutral, but if it yields a disparate impact on a particular racial or gender group, an institution using that policy can be held liable for discrimination. In other words, an entity can be found to have discriminated even if it didn’t actually intend to discriminate.

Thomas Perez, the assistant attorney general for Civil Rights at the Justice Department and President Obama’s nominee to be Labor secretary, has used disparate impact to extort huge settlements from the financial industry under the Fair Housing Act (FHA).

Here, MountHolly is alleged to have discriminated simply because it wanted to redevelop and rebuild a rundown housing development in a high-crime area where almost half the residents are black. Thus, the rebuilding plan would have had a statistically larger impact on black residents than white residents.

The issue of whether a mere disparate impact claim violates the FHA, or whether the more rigorous standard of intentional discrimination is required was before the Supreme Court last year. In that case, Magner v. Gallagher, the city of St. Paul, MN, was accused of violating the FHA because it aggressively enforced the health and safety provisions of its housing code. Slumlords sued the city, claiming that enforcement had a disparate impact because the majority of their tenants were racial minorities.

In other words, they were using the FHA to obstruct the city’s attempt to improve the horrible living conditions of poor families. …

Bart Hinkle of the Richmond Times-Dispatch wonders why a constitutional law professor is so dismissive of the document.

… If the IRS’ treatment of tea party groups were an isolated story, you could swallow the explanation that a few low-level bureaucrats went rogue. But that account does not explain why the EPA has been far more generous to freedom-of-information requests from liberal groups than from conservatives. Or why, shortly after the Obama campaign slimed Romney supporter Frank VanderSloot as a disreputable fellow, he was audited three times — twice by the IRS and once by the Labor Department. Or why, after Texas resident Catherine Engelbrecht started a tea party group, she received scrutiny not just from the IRS but also from the FBI. And OSHA. And, just for good measure, the ATF. Or why the IRS took 17 months to respond to an initial tax-exempt status application from the conservative Wyoming Policy Institute. Or why it shared confidential files from conservative groups with the liberal ProPublica. Or why …

Enough on the First Amendment. The president also has tried with considerable vigor to undermine the Second, and has succeeded in subverting the Fourth: Under Obama, who has gone to court to defend warrantless wiretaps he once condemned, warrantless “pen register” and “trap-and-trace” monitoring has soared to unprecedented heights.

In 2011, the president signed a reauthorization of the Patriot Act with just one regret: Congress approved an extension of only one year, while Obama wanted three. He signed into law a defense reauthorization bill allowing the indefinite detention, without charge, of American citizens, thereby gutting the principle of habeas corpus. Granted, he issued an executive order promising not to exercise that power. But the order does not constrain future presidents or, technically, even him.

From a civil-liberties perspective, Obama has carried forward nearly every one of the war on terror powers that led liberals to denounce George W. Bush as a goose-stepping fascist, and in fact has made many of them worse. When he retires from public life, perhaps he will return to teaching the Constitution. That should be much easier work — given how little of it there will be left.

It is not like this was unforeseen. We have here a October 2008 column by Mark Tapscott suggesting obama would try for a Caracas on the Potomac. 

Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama gave us another preview this week of how he will deal with critics if he is elected to the White House when he kicked three newspapers that endorsed John McCain off of his press plane. Merely terminating access, however,is likely to look tame compared to what Obama has in store for his critics after he takes the oath of office.

PREDICTION: Within six months of moving into the Oval Office, Obama’s multiple moves to silence critics in the media and elsewhere will lead to Washington, D.C. becoming the Caracas on the Potomac.

There were multiple signs before The Washington Times, New York Post and Dallas Morning News got the boot. Hugo Chavez has long used mob intimidation to pressure opposition forces into submission. Obama has made a limited use of the same tactic, as when National Review’s Stanley Kurtz began some potentially damaging reporting about the Democratic nominee’s long relationship with unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist bombers William Ayers and wife Bernadine Dohrn.

In retaliation, the Obama campaign issued a call-to-censor alert to its supporters, especially against Milt Rosenberg, a long-time and highly respected Chicago radio host who invited Kurtz to discuss his reporting on air. The Obama campaign declined to provide an official to share the program and rebut Kurtz. Instead, hundreds of callers did what they were instructed to do by the Obama campaign – they jammed the station’s phone lines with protest calls demanding that Kurtz be silenced and accusing the show’s host of lowering journalism standards.     

The Obama campaign had done the same thing a few weeks earlier when Rosenberg had as a guest another Obama critic, …