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Perhaps someday there will be an explanation why the worst environmental actors are governments. Examples would be anyplace in the former Soviet Union, nuclear weapons production sites in the United States, and now we learn about China in WSJ’s Saturday Essay, “China’s Bad Earth” from last weekend.

In Dapu, a rain-drenched rural outpost in the heart of China’s grain basket, a farmer grows crops that she wouldn’t dare to eat.

A state-backed chemicals factory next to her farm dumps wastewater directly into the local irrigation pond, she says, and turns it a florescent blue reminiscent of antifreeze. After walking around in the rice paddies, some farmers here have developed unexplained blisters on their feet.

“Nothing comes from these plants,” says the farmer, pointing past the irrigation pond to a handful of stunted rice shoots. She grows the rice, which can’t be sold because of its low quality, only in order to qualify for payments made by the factory owners to compensate for polluting the area. But the amount is only a fraction of what she used to earn when the land was healthy, she says. The plants look alive, “but they’re actually dead inside.”

The experiences of these farmers in Dapu, in central China’s Hunan province, highlight an emerging and critical front in China’s intensifying battle with pollution. For years, public attention has focused on the choking air and contaminated water that plague China’s ever-expanding cities. But a series of recent cases have highlighted the spread of pollution outside of urban areas, now encompassing vast swaths of countryside, including the agricultural heartland.

Estimates from state-affiliated researchers say that anywhere between 8% and 20% of China’s arable land, some 25 to 60 million acres, may now be contaminated with heavy metals. A loss of even 5% could be disastrous, taking China below the “red line” of 296 million acres of arable land that are currently needed, according to the government, to feed the country’s 1.35 billion people.

Rural China’s toxic turn is largely a consequence of two trends, say environmental researchers: the expansion of polluting industries into remote areas a safe distance from population centers, and heavy use of chemical fertilizers to meet the country’s mounting food needs. Both changes have been driven by the rapid pace of urbanization in a country that in 2012, for the first time in its long history, had more people living in cities than outside of them.

Yet the effort to keep urbanites comfortable and well-fed has also led to the poisoning of parts of the food chain, and some of the pollution is traveling back to the cities in a different—and for many, more frightening—guise. …

Richard Epstein posts on the president’s first “pivot to the economy” speech.

… The President’s speech at KnoxCollege needs some close deconstruction because it sheds harsh light on a problem that has dogged his domestic policy agenda from the beginning: intellectual rigidity. The President, who has never worked a day in the private sector, has no systematic view of the way in which businesses operate or economies grow. He never starts a discussion by asking how the basic laws of supply and demand operate, and shows no faith that markets are the best mechanism for bringing these two forces into equilibrium.

Because he does not understand rudimentary economics, he relies on anecdotes to make his argument. He notes, for example, that the Maytag plant that used to be in Galesburg is no longer in operation—it closed in 2004—but he never asks what set of forces made it untenable for the business to continue to operate there. He never mentions that Maytag’s relocation of its manufacturing operations to Mexico may have had something to do with a strong union presence or the dreadful economic climate in Illinois.

Unfortunately, our President rules out deregulation or lower taxes as a way to unleash productive forces in the country. Indeed, he is unable to grasp the simple point that the only engine of economic prosperity is an active market in which all parties benefit from voluntary exchange. Both taxes and regulation disrupt those exchanges, causing fewer exchanges to take place—and those which do occur have generated smaller gains than they should. The two-fold attraction of markets is that they foster better incentives for production as they lower administrative costs. Their comparative flexibility means that they have a capacity for self-correction that is lacking in a top-down regulatory framework that limits wages, prices, and the other conditions of voluntary exchange. …

… The President seems utterly incapable of seeing the downside to any of his policy choices. They are announced from on-high as all gain and no pain. In the face of stagnant growth, weak corporate earnings, and continued high unemployment, he shows not the slightest recognition that some of his programs might have gone amiss.

It is easy to see, therefore, why people have tuned out the President’s recent remarks. They have heard it all countless times before. So long as the President is trapped in his intellectual wonderland that puts redistribution first and regards deregulation and lower taxation as off limits, we as a nation will be trapped in the uneasy recovery that will continue to dog us no matter who is chosen to head the Federal Reserve.

Charles Krauthammer has words.

I find it astonishing that he goes around making speeches in which he deplores the state of the economy, the growing income inequality, chronic unemployment, staggering middle class income, and it’s as if he has been a bystander, as if he’s been out of the country for the last five years. It’s his economy; he’s the president.

He’s talking as if this is the Bush economy, I don’t know, the Eisenhower economy, and he just arrived in a boat and he discovers how bad the economy is. This is a result of the policies he instituted. He gave us the biggest stimulus in the history of the milky way, and he said it would jump start the economy. The result has been the slowest recovery, the worst recovery since World War II, and that is the root of all of the problems he’s talking about, the income inequality — the median income of the middle class of Americans has declined by 5% in his one term. So who’s responsible for that? Those were his policies. He talks about this in the abstract and he actually gets away with it in a way that I find absolutely astonishing, it’s magical. This is his economy and he’s pretending he’s just stumbled upon it. And the policies he proposes are exactly the ones he proposed and implemented in the first term. (Special Report, July 29, 2013)

In the speech on Tuesday, we heard the old meme about the minimum wage. Jason Riley posts on it.

… There continue to be better alternatives to minimum-wage increases, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, if the goal is to help the poor. But then, his rhetoric notwithstanding, Mr. Obama isn’t pushing for a higher minimum wage to help alleviate poverty. He’s advocating it, first and foremost, in deference to Big Labor. Unions like minimum-wages because they price people out of the labor force, and fewer workers means higher wages for their members. As Thomas Sowell, a student of Stigler’s at the University of Chicago, writes in “Basic Economics,” “Just as businesses seek to have government impose tariffs on imported goods that compete with their products, so labor unions use minimum wage laws as tariffs to force up the price of non-union labor that competes with their members for jobs.”

Mr. Obama wants a higher minimum wage because that’s what a key Democratic special interest wants. The impact on the poor is at best a secondary concern.

And while the president visited Chattanooga Tuesday, the local Times Free Press editorialized; ”Take your jobs plan and shove it, Mr. President: Your policies have harmed Chattanooga enough”   

… Welcome to Chattanooga, one of hundreds of cities throughout this great nation struggling to succeed in spite of your foolish policies that limit job creation, stifle economic growth and suffocate the entrepreneurial spirit.

Forgive us if you are not greeted with the same level of Southern hospitality that our area usually bestows on its distinguished guests. You see, we understand you are in town to share your umpteenth different job creation plan during your time in office. If it works as well as your other job creation programs, then thanks, but no thanks. We’d prefer you keep it to yourself.

That’s because your jobs creation plans so far have included a ridiculous government spending spree and punitive tax increase on job creators that were passed, as well as a minimum wage increase that, thankfully, was not. Economists — and regular folks with a basic understanding of math — understand that these are three of the most damaging policies imaginable when a country is mired in unemployment and starving for job growth.

Even though 64 percent of Chattanooga respondents said they would rather you hadn’t chosen to visit our fair city, according to a survey on the Times Free Press website, it’s probably good that you’re here. It will give you an opportunity to see the failure of your most comprehensive jobs plan to date, the disastrous stimulus scheme, up close and personal.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 helped fund the Gig to Nowhere project, a $552 million socialist-style experiment in government-owned Internet, cable and phone services orchestrated by EPB — Chattanooga’s government-owned electric monopoly. …

Rich Lowry has more on the execrable Howard Zinn.

… A People’s History is a book for high-school students not yet through their Holden Caulfield phase, for professors eager to subject their students to their own ideological enthusiasms, and for celebrities like Matt Damon, who has done so much to publicize it. If it is a revelation to you that we treated Native Americans poorly, and if you believe the Founding Fathers were a bunch of phonies, Zinn’s volume will strike you with the power of a thunderclap. And one day, maybe, you will grow up.

The caterwauling in the Daniels controversy about the importance of academic inquiry is particularly rich, given that Zinn didn’t believe in it. He had no use for objectivity and made history a venture in rummaging through the historical record to find whatever was most politically useful, without caring much about strict factual accuracy. “Knowing history is less about understanding the past than changing the future,” he said. He joined his propagandistic purpose to a moral obtuseness that refused to distinguish between the United States and its enemies, including Nazi Germany. …

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Tim Carney at the Examiner posts on why you should consider shopping at Sam’s Club rather than Costco.

If you’re a millionaire corporate bigwig using your wealth to influence elections, and using your company’s clout to influence legislation, President Obama might give you a tongue-lashing. Unless you’re a fundraiser and donor for the Obama Victory Fund, and your company’s lobbying agenda coincides with the White House’s — then Obama will give you a shout-out in a major economic address.

In his nationally televised speech Wednesday (last week), Obama sang the praises of retail giant Costco, whose founder Jim Sinegal gave Obama the maximum contribution in two elections and hosted fundraisers for his reelection. Costco has also lobbied for many of Obama’s legislative priorities, including higher minimum wage, Obamacare, and price controls on financial processing fees.

Given the company’s politics and tendency to seek profit through big government, Costco stands out as a model of Obamanomics. The money trail and the free advertising also give off a whiff of cronyism. …

There were a couple of good posts at Dilbert’s Blog on the reactions to the Zimmerman verdict.

… My understanding of the Trayvon Martin protests is that the participants would like the public to stop believing that young African-American males are crime-prone. The strategy for accomplishing this involves holding largely peaceful protests in which a small number of young African-American males are likely to be filmed by news crews wearing masks, breaking store windows, threatening innocent motorists, and getting arrested. That’s exactly what I watched on the news last night as Oakland was starting to heat up.

The trouble-makers are a small percentage of the protesters – maybe 1%. The problem is that the 1% gets the lion’s share of news coverage, thus reinforcing the racial bias that the peaceful protesters are trying to combat. In terms of managing the public’s impressions, the protests are an epic fail. …

Dilbert’s creator, Scott Adams, was so taken with one comment he posted it on the blog.

“When I buy a can of Coke, I see the label, and I know what to expect.

Stereotypes are wrong of course. But brands are good.

So if there are a bunch of people that dress a certain way, and act a certain way, they are creating a brand for themselves.

There’s a nerd brand. There’s a metro-sexual brand. There’s a jock brand, a cheerleader brand, a gothic brand… I can go on but of course you know what I mean.

Then there is a gangster brand.

This may be shocking, but if you dress like a gangster – talk like a gangster – and ride around in a car like a gangster, people are bound to pick up on the brand you’re showcasing. …”

David Garman and Sam Thernstrom report on Europe’s growing problems with power produced by renewables.

… Another challenge of Europe’s growing dependence on renewable energy is far more serious: the potential loss of reliable electrical supply. It’s one thing to ask consumers to pay more for cleaner energy; it’s another to force them to endure blackouts.

Since large amounts of electricity cannot be easily or inexpensively stored, it must be generated and delivered (“dispatched”) to meet the constantly changing demand for power. As millions of consumers turn electric lights and appliances on and off, power generators and grid operators must match supply to demand to ensure that current is moving across wires at the proper frequency to avoid power failures, brownouts and other problems.

Normally, this is fairly straightforward. Grid operators generally rely on coal and nuclear plants to meet baseload demand while modifying gas and hydroelectric power output to meet shifting demand. But electricity from wind and solar is variable and intermittent. Nature determines when and how much power will be generated from available capacity, so it is not necessarily “dispatchable” when needed.

When intermittent renewables are small players in the grid, they can be easily absorbed. But as they reach European levels of penetration, the strain begins to show. There are increasing reports of management challenges resulting from wind and solar across the European grid, including frequency fluctuations, voltage support issues, and inadvertent power flows. Anxious operators are concerned about potential blackouts. …

Gabriel Schoenfeld takes the time to remind us of Howard Zinn’s lack of scholarship.

… It is not that Zinn was a naked falsifier in the manner, say, of the historian and Holocaust denier David Irving. Rather, he was a mythmaker who was at constant pains to portray the American story as one long chronicle of exploitation, oppression and deceit. To Zinn, the dark strands of our country’s past — of which there is genuinely no shortage — became the only strands, all of them useful in telling a left-wing morality tale in which class interests always determine the development of ideas and control the course of events.

To take one example of how the grist emerges from Zinn’s historical mill, the political philosopher John Locke is introduced by Zinn with the observation that his “Second Treatise on Government,” which so heavily influenced our Founding Fathers, “talked about government and political rights, but ignored the existing inequalities in property” — an unsurprising fact when one notes that Locke was “a wealthy man, with investments in the silk trade and slave trade, income from loans and mortgages.”

To Zinn, the Great Depression of the 1930s is a demonstration that “the capitalist system was by its nature unsound: a system driven by the one overriding motive of corporate profit and therefore unstable, unpredictable and blind to human needs.” In this narrative, the safety net Franklin Roosevelt erected with the New Deal was not a step forward in constructing a more humane society, but simply a way “to stabilize the system for its own protection” and to avert :the alarming growth or spontaneous rebellion” that the crisis of capitalism had created. …

More from Paul Mirengoff at Power Line.

From time to time, we have noted President Obama’s lack of knowledge about American history. The most recent manifestation — his claim that Ho Chi Minh was inspired by America’s Founding Fathers — suggests that Obama’s ignorance is to some extent willful.

It is, in any event, not accidental. From Stanley Kurtz, we learn that Obama is a fan of the leftist historian Howard Zinn. Stanley cites this passage from James T. Kloppenberg’s book Reading Obama:

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that President Obama had a special interest in the views of an anti-American historian. And it is only mildly surprising that Americans elected a president with a special interest in those views. As the NRO editors warn: “From kindergarten through graduate school, American education is a sewer of left-wing ideology.”

Unless Mitch Daniels and others succeed in improving this state of affairs, the distorted Obama/Zinn view of America likely will prevail within a decade or two. And a self-hating America does not have a promising future.

Ilya Somin with a great post pointing to the Baptist/bootlegger alliance attempting to strangle marijuana legalization.

Public choice economist Bruce Yandle famously developed the concept of a “baptist-bootlegger coalition” to describe situations in which regulation is supported by a strange bedfellow alliance of groups who favor it for narrowly self-interested reasons and those who support it out of moral or ideological considerations. The paradigmatic example was the way in which Baptists (who opposed alcohol for religious reasons) and bootleggers (who wanted its sale to be illegal in order to protect their business interests) supported Prohibition in the 1920s. It looks like a similar alliance is emerging to oppose marijuana legalization:

Pot legalization activists are running into an unexpected and ironic opponent in their efforts to make cannabis legal: Big Marijuana. …

Late Night from Andy Malcolm.

Leno: Eliot Spitzer is now taking the moral high ground in his bid to become comptroller of New York City. He’s saying he’s not been with a prostitute in five years. New slogan: ‘Whore-Free since 2008.’

Fallon: Obama’s big speech on the economy. Really big! Longer than his State of the Union. He opened with 20 minutes of Anthony Weiner jokes.

Leno: In his economy speech President Obama said we’ve all been distracted by phony scandals. He prefers we be distracted by his phony recovery.

Fallon: Obama had a big retreat at Camp David the other day for all his Cabinet members and their families. Joe Biden couldn’t make it because he was in Asia. That’s because Obama told him the retreat was in Asia.

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Sheldon Richman at Reason with the lesson the president has never learned – the value of free markets.

… The marketplace, when it’s free of government privilege and regulation, lets us accomplish this to a remarkable degree. In doing so, it raises our living standards and creates an orderly environment, thanks to the price system, which coordinates and facilitates our plans.

Government throws this process out of whack. When politicians forcibly extract resources from us (through taxation) and borrow, they leave us less with which we can improve our lives through entrepreneurship, business formation, and the like. But, you may ask, aren’t the politicians’ projects worthwhile? Actually, many government projects are of zero value or worse. The costly global empire is beyond useless: it endangers us. Other projects might be useful, but — and this is key — we can’t be sure, because they are not subject to the market test.

If a private entrepreneur acquires resources in a quest for profit, she must create value for consumers or she will fail. The market’s profit-and-loss test will see to that. That test is administered by countless millions of consumers who are free to take or leave what the entrepreneur offers. This test is relayed back to the investors who lend money to entrepreneurs for productive ventures. They know that if the entrepreneur fails, they will also suffer losses. So they must scrutinize projects in terms of their potential, ultimately, to please free consumers.

The upshot is that consumers’ uncoerced actions signal (through prices and profit/loss) what pleases them and what does not. Suppliers must pay heed or face bankruptcy. This explains why markets, when not burdened by government privileges and arbitrary rules, work so well to raise living standards.

Note how government projects differ essentially from market projects. Politicians and bureaucrats obtain their money through force, not consensual mutual exchange. (What happens if you tell the IRS you don’t want to purchase its “services”?) Even the money obtained through voluntary loans is expected to be repaid with the taxpayers’ money. It’s taxation all the way down. …

Joel Kotkin points out the problems in the housing “recovery.”

… So while the housing recovery — and the prospect of higher prices — does offer some relief to existing homeowners, it’s having a negative impact further down the economic ladder. For the poorest Americans, nearly eight decades of extensive public subsidies have failed to solve their housing crisis. Given the financial straits of most American cities — particularly those like Detroit that need it the most — it’s unlikely the government can rescue households stressed by the cost of shelter.

As one might suspect, the problem is greatest in New York, New Jersey and California, say the Harvard researchers .In those three states 22% of households are paying more than 50% of pre-tax income for housing, while median home values and rents in these states are among the highest in the country. According to the Center for Housing Policy and National Housing Conference, 39% of working households in the Los Angeles metropolitan area spend more than half their income on housing, 35% in the San Francisco metro area and 31% in the New York area. All of these figures are much higher than the national rate of 24%, which itself is far from tolerable.

Other, poorer cities also suffer high rates of housing poverty not because they are so expensive but because their economies are bad. In the most distressed neighborhoods of Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland and Detroit, where vacancy rates top 20%, about 60% of vacant units are held off market, indicating they are in poor condition and likely a source of blight.

America’s emerging housing crisis is creating widespread hardship. This can be seen in the rise of families doubling up. Moving to flee high costs has emerged as a major trend, particularly among working-class families. For those who remain behind, it’s also a return to the kind of overcrowding we associate with early 20th century tenement living. …

John Fund says Detroit could raise $2.5 billion selling 38 artworks.

Everyone has an idea about how to handle bankrupt Detroit. Public-employee unions want a state or federal bailout. A liberal state-court judge in Lansing wants to block the bankruptcy because it might reduce government pensions — with no thought as to where the money to pay for them will come from. Supply-siders want to create “innovation zones” that would spur growth by reducing taxes and regulations in the inner city, but it would be years before that measure would have an effect.

What no one wants to do, apparently, is sell the city’s assets. The city has largely unused parks and waterfront property that could be opened to economic development. The DetroitHistoricalMuseum has a collection of 62 vehicles, including an 1870 Phaeton carriage and John Dodge’s 1919 coupe, that is worth millions. But the biggest sacred cow is the Detroit Institute of Art (DIA), one of the nation’s oldest and most valuable art museums. It has pieces by Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Andy Warhol, and Rembrandt. The Institute also owns William Randolph Hearst’s armor collection and the original puppet from the children’s TV show Howdy Doody.

The Detroit Free Press asked New York and Michigan art dealers to evaluate just a few of the 60,000 items in the Institute’s collection. The experts said the 38 pieces they looked over would fetch a minimum of $2.5 billion on the market, with each of several pieces worth $100 million or more. That would go a long way toward relieving the city’s long-term debt burden of $17 billion. …

The reputation of the IRS will take a long time to recover according to Peggy Noonan. 

In all the day-to-day of the IRS scandals I don’t think it’s been fully noticed that the overall reputation of the agency has suffered a collapse, the kind from which it can take a generation to recover fully. In the long term this will prove damaging to the national morale—what happens to a great nation when its people come to lack even rudimentary confidence in the decisions made by the revenue-gathering arm of its federal government?

It will also diminish the hope for faith in government, which whatever your politics is not a good thing. We need government, as we all know. Americans have a right to assume that while theirs may be deeply imperfect, it is not deeply corrupt. What harms trust in governmental institutions now will have reverberations in future administrations.

The scandals that have so damaged the agency took place in just the past few years, since the current administration began. It is not Republicans on the Hill or conservatives in the press who have revealed the agency as badly managed, political in its actions, and really quite crazily run. That information, or at least the early outlines of it, came from the agency’s own inspector general.

But the point is that it was all so recent. It doesn’t take long to crater a reputation. The conferences, seminars and boondoggles in which $49 million was spent, including the famous “Star Trek” parody video—all that happened between 2010 and 2012. The targeting of conservative groups, the IRS leadership’s public lies about it, the leaking of private tax information to liberal groups or journalists, the abuse of donor information—all that took place since the administration began, in 2009. Just this week, an inspector general report revealed excessive travel spending by a handful of IRS executives in 2011 and 2012.

All of it has produced the biggest IRS scandal since Watergate. Which makes it the second of only two truly huge scandals to be visited on the agency in its entire 100-year history. …

WSJ Political Diary with another great presidential appointment.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has run amok under chairwoman Jacqueline Berrien’s guidance, particularly in its extralegal push to expand civil-rights protections for the likes of murderers and rapists. So it’s welcome news to see state attorneys general shedding some light on the situation.

Nine Republican AGs, from states stretching from Montana to South Carolina, penned a letter to Ms. Berrien and the commission last week complaining about the “substantive position” the agency has taken against retailer Dollar General and a U.S. subsidiary of car maker BMW. The EEOC contends the companies broke federal law by using criminal background checks in employment decisions.

The AGs rip apart that legal theory, …

The greatest food in human history? Would you believe a double cheeseburger from McDonald’s? That’s what Kyle Smith says in the NY Post.

What is “the cheapest, most nutritious and bountiful food that has ever existed in human history” Hint: It has 390 calories. It contains 23g, or half a daily serving, of protein, plus 7% of daily fiber, 20% of daily calcium and so on.

Also, you can get it in 14,000 locations in the US and it usually costs $1. Presenting one of the unsung wonders of modern life, the McDonald’s McDouble cheeseburger.

The argument above was made by a commenter on the Freakonomics blog run by economics writer Stephen Dubner and professor Steven Leavitt, who co-wrote the million-selling books on the hidden side of everything.

Dubner mischievously built an episode of his highly amusing weekly podcast around the debate. Many huffy back-to-the-earth types wrote in to suggest the alternative meal of boiled lentils. Great idea. Now go open a restaurant called McBoiled Lentils and see how many customers line up.

But we all know fast food makes us fat, right? Not necessarily. …

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Charles Krauthammer explains the application of Stein’s Law to Detroit. And then to the country.

If there’s an iron rule in economics, it is Stein’s Law (named after Herb, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers): “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”

Detroit, for example, can no longer go on borrowing, spending, raising taxes and dangerously cutting such essential services as street lighting and police protection. So it stops. It goes bust.

Cause of death? Corruption, both legal and illegal, plus a classic case of reactionary liberalism in which the governing Democrats — there’s been no Republican mayor in half a century — simply refused to adapt to the straitened economic circumstances that followed the post-World War II auto boom.

Corruption of the criminal sort was legendary. The former mayor currently serving time engaged in a breathtaking range of fraud, extortion and racketeering. And he didn’t act alone. The legal corruption was the cozy symbiosis of Democratic politicians and powerful unions, especially the public-sector unions that gave money to elect the politicians who negotiated their contracts — with wildly unsustainable health and pension benefits.

When our great industrial competitors were digging out from the rubble of World War II, Detroit’s automakers ruled the world. Their imagined sense of inherent superiority bred complacency. Management grew increasingly bureaucratic and inflexible. Unions felt entitled to the extraordinary wages, benefits and work rules they’d bargained for in the fat years. In time, they all found themselves being overtaken by more efficient, more adaptable, more hungry foreign producers. …

Naomi Riley with more on the unintended consequences of student debt.

‘Help Jenna join the Convent!” A number of friends posted the link from fund-raising site YouCaring.com to Facebook, so I clicked. Jenna Andrews, it turns out, is a 30-year-old Catholic convert who’s trying to join the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne this fall. The Westchester-based order is devoted to caring for destitute cancer patients at the end of their lives. But it can’t accept Jenna until she pays off her $32,336 worth of student loans.

This is not a scam, folks. Last year, Georgetown’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate reported that a lot of seminary candidates are “too poor to take the vow of poverty”: Many religious institutions are rejecting candidates who have too much educational debt.

With undergraduate and, in some cases, divinity-degree debt multiplying into the six figures while clergy wages remain relatively low, it’s easy to understand why seminaries can’t bless this kind of borrowing.

Of course, it’s not just the religious being sent off course by student loans. Young people across America are putting off marriage and starting a family because they’re so weighed down by the collective $1 trillion in accumulated student debt. …

Noemie Emery says the racial grievance industry is getting old.

After the bombings at the Boston Marathon on April 15, a columnist at Salon expressed his wish for a Caucasian villain, and he did get his wish — not a blond, blue-eyed Nazi or Bull Connor wannabe, but a Chechen from the actual Caucasus, an immigrant, and a Muslim, and the deflation was visible.

After Gates-gate, when Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates was arrested and handcuffed in his own home by a white policeman James Crowley, whom Obama had said “acted stupidly,” white liberals and the race-grievance industry hoped they had found their Bull Connor wannabe, and were again disappointed.

And when George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin in Florida, they hoped again they had found a Germanic villain — and instead found a Hispanic, from a mixed racial background, with black ancestors, and who tutored black children.

In the face of all this, they became ultra-creative, with the New York Times calling Zimmerman a “white Hispanic,” a term they may have coined for this occasion, and NBC News doctored a tape to make him sound like a racist, for which it is facing an imminent lawsuit, which every sane person should hope it will lose.

The grievance industry complains about profiling, but it seems to do this itself without reservation, making the sizeable leap from prejudice — meaning “pre-judging” — to putting thoughts into other men’s heads. …

And Bill O’Reilly challenges Jerry Rivers to find a black leader who will address the problem of the disintegration of black families.

On Geraldo’s radio program today I told him to let me know when President Obama holds a press conference about the disintegration of the African-American family. I also asked Geraldo when a seminar on the damage hip hop and rap is doing to unsupervised children will be held by Sharpton and Jackson. I’m looking forward to that.

Perhaps at that seminar more positive entertainment might be encouraged and maybe an exposure like that would encourage President Obama not to invite people like Jay-Z to the White House when he is putting out dubious material that children are absorbing.

And finally I told Geraldo that I feel sorry for black kids who don’t have fathers and who were born into poverty because their mothers become impregnated at a young age without any resources. It is America’s shame and all politicians are responsible somewhat that we have not discouraged the astronomical out-of-wedlock birth rate in this country.

As we stated early this week that drives poverty, that drives crime. And that’s what’s causing the massive chaos in many black American precincts. …

The Examiner with the story you can’t make up. Federal employees want to make sure they’re not covered by obamacare. 

National Taxpayer Employee Union officials are giving members a form letter expressing concern…

IRS employees have a prominent role in Obamacare, but their union wants no part of the law.

National Treasury Employees Union officials are urging members to write their congressional representatives in opposition to receiving coverage through President Obama’s health care law. …

Pickerhead was thinking of ignoring the whole Weiner mess, but the cartoons were too good. As a way of introducing them we have a post from Roger Simon on the Dem’s war against women.

… Hillary Clinton has, more than anyone I can think of, led our culture to where it is now.

We all remember well Hillary in high dudgeon blaming her husband’s (serial, she knew well) adultery on the “vast right-wing conspiracy.” What kind of person does that? How disconnected is that from reality — how narcissistic, selfish and, well, sociopathic?

This is the same Hillary Clinton who told the father of fallen Benghazi SEAL Tyrone Woods — at his son’s funeral — that they were going to get that obscure and hapless filmmaker who made the dopey anti-Islam video, when all along she knew Tyrone and the others were the victims of an al-Qaeda-related terror attack. The word “entitlement” cannot encompass that behavior.

And she was, maybe still is, the mentor of Huma Abedin. The mind, as they say, boggles. And Huma, of course, is the daughter of a leader of the fundamentalist Muslim Sisterhood.

I cannot even begin to draw all the connections there. Maybe I don’t even want to know. Besides, Andy McCarthy has done it better than I ever could.

But one connection I will draw — the way Democratic liberals treat women is the same way they treat blacks… as coolies.

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A number of our favorites commented on the never ending “pivot to the economy.” Andrew Malcolm starts us off.

One way to look at President Obama’s latest speech tour beginning today:

‘President Obama takes his firm commitment to grow the American economy on the road today, stopping in Illinois and Missouri to urge creation of thousands of new jobs to continue expansion of the middle-class within the heartland and across this great nation.

“The President will deliver remarks at Knox College,” the White House announced with excitement, “to kick off a series of speeches that will lay out his vision for rebuilding an economy that puts the middle class and those fighting to join it front and center.”‘

Another way to look at Obama’s latest speech tour:

“Lord spare us, the nation’s most addicted campaigner heads out for — what? — the 84th time today to call on somebody to do something about the country’s stubbornly stagnant economy to finally create the hundreds of thousands of new jobs he and Joe promised more than four years ago when he started spending trillions of our dollars.

Obama has pivoted to the jobs meme so often since Jan. 20, 2009, that he needs new soles on his shoes. Remember when Scott Brown became the first Republican to win a Massachusetts Senate seat in four decades? Obama, who’d been pushing financial reform and ObamaCare, said he got that message loud and clear. He’d turn to j-o-b-s”.

According to Obama’s White House, which hosted the Louisville Cardinals NCAA champion basketball team Tuesday and will welcome the World Series San Francisco Giants next Monday, Republicans have taken their eye off the ball by not focusing on the country’s top challenge: Jobs.

Joe Biden, by the way, the three-letter J-O-B-S man appointed to oversee stimulus effectiveness, is off in India and Singapore these days doing something….

Before we go back to our guys, how about a certified liberal like Dana Milbank of WaPo.

“I don’t normally do this,” President Obama’s senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer wrote in the subject line of an e-mail blast to reporters Sunday night.

This was tantalizing. What would this top White House official be doing? Singing karaoke on the North Lawn? Getting a “POTUS” tattoo on his arm?

Reality was rather more prosaic. Pfeiffer was announcing the rollout of a series of economic speeches Obama would begin on Wednesday — roughly the 10th time the White House has made such a pivot to refocus on jobs and growth. What would set this one apart is that Obama would be reprising a speech he made eight years ago, when he first became a senator; Pfeiffer included a link to clips from that speech, set in part to mood music from the Canadian electronica group Kidstreet, the same music used in an Apple ad last year.

But even a reincarnated Steve Jobs would have trouble marketing this turkey: …

Here’s Byron York.

“Obama’s “new” direction is a repeat of something he has done many times in the past. At various points in his presidency — always with a backdrop of prolonged and painful unemployment — the president has directed his attention to non-economic issues, only to decide that he must “pivot” back to the economy in the face of declining poll numbers or an approaching election. Given that pattern, some Republicans found Obama’s latest move bitterly amusing.

“The president says he’s going to go out and ‘pivot’ back to jobs,” said House Speaker John Boehner Tuesday. “Well, welcome to the conversation, Mr. President. We’ve never left it.”…

Jennifer Rubin is not as polite.

… He is never so comfortable as when he is campaigning against government, assuming the posture of a professorial bystander in his own administration.

He protests that scandals are “phony,” but polls show otherwise, especially when it comes to the Internal Revenue Service. And, of course, the scandals would end more quickly if he ever came clean, disgorged all the information at the beginning and stuck to one story.

The Obama routine gets tiresome after five years. It seems not to dawn on him that his opponents don’t think his policy recommendations (new taxes, Obamacare) are good for the country. And the country on many issues agrees with them. To protest the Obama agenda is to cause “gridlock” and “play politics,” in his view.

One can imagine that the trio of speeches is intended to do little more than pump up Obama’s troops in advance of the fall budget fights. This has been his approach to governance from the get-go — rile his supporters, denigrate opponents and then complain to the voters. …

James Pethokoukis points out five job stats that did not get presidential mention.

3. About half of the jobs created during the first half of 2013, and a large majority of the jobs created in Q2 2013, appear to have been part-time jobs that offer employees as little as one hour of work per week, and up to 35 hours of work.

4. After falling from a recession high of 9.2 million to a post-recession low of 7.6 million at the end of Q1 2013, the number of people saying they are working part time because they can’t find full time work (part time for economic reasons) crept back up to 8.2 million, double pre-recession levels.

David Harsanyi says all this provides an opportunity for the GOP and they are blowing it.

… So what do Republicans do? Obama quipped that repealing Obamacare and cutting spending isn’t an economic plan. Well, actually it’s as good an economic plan Obama produced. This year, over 830,000 Americans are new part-time workers and 97,000 fewer of them have full-time positions. Poll after poll finds that small business are cutting back or hiring fewer full time workers due to Obamacare.  Other polls show Obamacare’s popularity decreasing as implementation ratchets up.

Yet, broadly speaking, he’s correct; there has to be more. Republicans offer no inspiring alternative. It is incomprehensible that the GOP hasn’t devised some palpable and bold 10-step economic plan (with some nifty title like “A Better Bargain”) that deals with crony capitalism, government overreach and economic growth. Even before the speech was given, Eric Cantor’s office was touting Republican alternatives to Obama’s non-plan. 1 – Urge the Democratic controlled Senate to join the House and Pass a Job Training Bill. 2 – Approve the Keystone Pipeline. 3 – Support the Bipartisan Effort to Expand Offshore Domestic Energy Production.

Seriously? That’s it? …

James Taranto calls it the “politics of contempt.”

… Obama’s speech was a dreadful, cliché-ridden piece of writing. Here’s our favorite bit: “Rather than reduce our deficits with a scalpel–by cutting programs we don’t need, fixing ones we do, and making government more efficient–this same group has insisted on leaving in place a meat cleaver called the sequester that has cost jobs, harmed growth, hurt our military, and gutted investments in American education and scientific and medical research that we need to make this country a magnet for good jobs.”

Because as Ben Franklin sagely observed, you can’t make a magnet with cloven meat.

But wait. It’s worse than that. He’s criticizing “this same group” for leaving in place a meat cleaver. What happens when you leave a cleaver in place? Nothing!

“With an endless parade of distractions, political posturing and phony scandals, Washington has taken its eye off the ball,” the president harrumphed. There’s an image for you. Where exactly is the ball relative to the parade route?

Also, which scandals exactly are “phony”? The biggest scandal is the one that raises serious questions about the legitimacy of Obama’s re-election. Here is what President Asterisk himself had to say on the subject way back on May 13: “If you’ve got the IRS operating in anything less than a neutral and non-partisan way, then that is outrageous, it is contrary to our traditions. And people have to be held accountable, and it’s got to be fixed. . . . I’ve got no patience with it. I will not tolerate it.”

We’re sure his outrage over the phony scandal was genuine. …

J. Christian Adams calls him President Alinsky.

You can take the community organizer out of the South Side, but you can’t take the community organizer out of the community organizer.

Today, America heard threats from the increasingly predictable President Alinsky.

“The position of the middle class will erode further,” Mr. Obama said. “Inequality will continue to increase, money’s power will distort our politics even more. Social tensions will rise, as various groups fight to hold on to what they have, start blaming somebody else for why their position isn’t improving. That’s not the America we know.”

This is standard-fare Das Kapital by Karl Marx.  Obama doesn’t even attempt to disguise it, leaving out only the original author’s name.  Obama merely adds the threat of social tensions.

For that, thank speech co-author Saul Alinsky. …

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Jennifer Rubin has many good posts. First is on the shrinking president.

The president heads for the campaign trail, but where there is work to be done he’s never seemed so feeble.

McClatchy reports:

“Stung by Americans’ persistent worries about the economy and a capital gripped by controversy and gridlock, President Barack Obama is suffering his lowest job approval numbers in nearly two years, according to a new McClatchy-Marist poll. . . . Obama will deliver the first of a series of speeches Wednesday aimed at offering his vision for boosting economic growth, even as the new poll found that just 37 percent of the respondents approved of his handling of the economy, while 56 percent disapproved.

Overall, the poll found Obama’s job approval at 41 percent last week, a sharp drop from April’s 50 percent and his worst showing in the poll since 39 percent in September 2011. Forty-eight percent disapproved in the latest poll, up from April’s 46 percent.”

But with the purpose of the speeches not to roll out new solutions but recycle rhetoric, there is no sign the president will address the underlying reality of his second term: He’s run out of policy ideas and political capital. …

Next she comments on his new economy road show.

It is no secret that we have yet to get the robust economy President Obama has been promising since he took office. …

… So what does the president do? He does what he does when things are going poorly: He hits the campaign trail with recycled rhetoric. The Post reports, “President Obama will deliver a series of speeches this week designed to push the economy, and his proposals to ensure its long-term growth, toward the center of the national political debate after months of focus on other issues.”

In the same don’t-think-I’m-responsible-for-anything tone the administration uses to deflect responsibility for most problems, the White House’s communication director pronounced, “The president thinks Washington has largely taken its eye off the ball on the most important issue facing the country.” Washington has, has it?

Maybe Obama’s useless crusade against guns, his prevaricating about the sequestration apocalypse, his European trip to deliver a no-nukes message, his Africa jaunt and his administration’s useless obsession with the “peace process” had something to do with it. …

Reacting to Chuck Hagel’s complaint about the administration’s sequester policy. Jennifer Rubin asks if anyone is in charge.  

He appeared Monday at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Louisville, Kentucky. After his introductory small talk he got to the nub of the matter:

“Sequestration is an irresponsible process, and it is terribly damaging.  I hope that our leaders in Washington will eventually come to policy resolution, a resolution that stops sequestration.  But all of us who have the responsibility of leading our Defense Department cannot lead the Department of Defense based on hope, based on “we think,” based on “maybe.” We have to prepare our institution for whatever comes.  To that end, these cuts are forcing us to make tough but necessary decisions to prioritize missions and capabilities around our core responsibility, which is the security of our country.”

We already know the White House was the source of the irresponsible process, but that was undertaken before Hagel arrived at the Pentagon. Fine, but why has he not gone to the president to make the case against what his predecessor calls “devastating” cuts? …

Rubin also notes the diminished democrat delight in obamacare.

When it comes to Obamacare, Republicans have the wind at their backs.

The Post reports:

“The landmark health-reform law passed in 2010 has never been very popular and always highly partisan, but a new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds that a group of once loyal Democrats has been steadily turning against Obamacare: Democrats who are ideologically moderate  or conservative.

Just after the law was passed in 2010, fully 74 percent of moderate and conservative Democrats supported the federal law making changes to the health-care system. But just 46 percent express support in the new poll, down 11 points in the past year. Liberal Democrats, by contrast, have continued to support the law at very high levels – 78 percent in the latest survey. Among the public at large, 42 percent support and 49 percent oppose the law, retreating from an even split at 47 percent apiece last July.”

This only adds to Republicans’ sense that the momentum is with them, if not for repealing Obamacare entirely then at least disabling it or using it to their advantage in the 2014 elections. …

Daniel Hannan writes in London Telegraph about Detroit. He says you thought Atlas Shrugged was fiction?

Look at this description of Detroit from today’s Observer:

“What isn’t dumped is stolen. Factories and homes have largely been stripped of anything of value, so thieves now target cars’ catalytic converters. Illiteracy runs at around 47%; half the adults in some areas are unemployed. In many neighbourhoods, the only sign of activity is a slow trudge to the liquor store.”

Now have a look at the uncannily prophetic description of Starnesville, a Mid-Western town in Ayn Rand’s dystopian novel, Atlas Shrugged. Starnesville had been home to the great Twentieth Century Motor Company, but declined as a result of socialism:

“A few houses still stood within the skeleton of what had once been an industrial town. Everything that could move, had moved away; but some human beings had remained. The empty structures were vertical rubble; they had been eaten, not by time, but by men: boards torn out at random, missing patches of roofs, holes left in gutted cellars. It looked as if blind hands had seized whatever fitted the need of the moment, with no concept of remaining in existence the next morning. …”

John Stossel on the stalled motor city.

MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry — the same TV commentator who said Americans need to stop raising kids as if they belong to individual families — had an extraordinary explanation for why the city of Detroit sought to declare bankruptcy last week: not enough government.

“This is what it looks like when government is small enough to drown in your bathtub, and it is not a pretty picture.” She says budget-cutting Republicans threaten to transform all of the U.S. into Detroit.

What? Detroit has been a “model city” for big-government! All Detroit’s mayors since 1962 were Democrats who were eager to micromanage. And spend. Detroit has the only utility tax in Michigan, and its income tax is the third-highest of any big city in America (only Philadelphia and Louisville take more, and they aren’t doing great, either).

Detroit’s automakers got billions in federal bailouts.

The Detroit News revealed that Detroit in 2011 had around twice as many municipal employees per capita as cities with comparable populations. The city water and sewer department employed a “horseshoer” even though it keeps no horses. …

Jonathan Tobin on why the left won’t face the facts of Detroit.

… The wake up call that Detroit is sending Americans is one Krugman and other liberals would like us to ignore because they are confident that the federal leviathan, controlled by Democrats and fed by liberal assumptions, will always be able to squeeze enough cash out of productive citizens to pay for the left’s follies. They won’t face the truth about this because to do so would require Americans to do some hard thinking about a society where virtually everyone has their snouts in the collective trough of big government and thereby is a stakeholder in its survival in its current form. But what Greece showed Europe and what Detroit tells Americans is that sooner or later the well of public funds will run dry if obligations to liberal constituent groups continue to grow unchecked. And when that happens it is exactly the little guys who are hurting in Detroit who will be forced to suffer for Krugman’s ideology.

Nicole Gelinas says Detroit should be a warning to NY City.

What a difference four decades makes. In the mid-’70s, New York City’s threat of bankruptcy was a horror that the state, feds and city ultimately avoided. Last week, Detroit declared bankruptcy because Michigan thought it was the best choice — and Washington stayed silent.

This change should spur New York’s own bondholders, public-sector workers and citizens to take a fresh look at our own financial burdens.

In 1975, Gotham couldn’t pay its bills. It went to Albany for help, and Albany went to Washington. Republican President Gerald Ford hemmed and hawed, but he came through.

Why? Then-Treasury Secretary Bill Simon said default would be “awful.” Fed chief Arthur Burns heard from Europe’s leaders — and relayed to Ford — that bankruptcy was “unthinkable.”

The city got its bailout and repaid its debt (or refinanced it — we still owe $2.1 billion from that era).

Today, there’s no chance Detroit will pay all — or even most — of the $18 billion it owes to bondholders and public-sector retirees. …

The Free Press provides an article that makes a nice segue from the Detroit mess to the humor section. Turns out the Detroit City Council passed a resolution supporting a federal investigation into the possibility there had been a civil rights violation by George Zimmerman. You just can’t make it up. Or as Lily Tomlin said, “No matter how cynical I get, I just can’t keep up.” 

The Detroit City Council on Tuesday unanimously passed a resolution calling for a federal investigation to see whether civil rights charges are warranted against George Zimmerman, who was acquitted July 13 of second-degree murder and manslaughter charges in the killing of Florida teen Trayvon Martin.

The resolution, sponsored by Councilwoman JoAnn Watson, sparked a discussion over the need for city leaders and others to focus more on violence in Detroit. …

Late night humor from Andrew Malcolm.

… Leno: President Obama tells school children his favorite food is broccoli. Hey, it’s one thing to lie to voters. But now, kids? C’mon, Mr. President!

Letterman: Edward Snowden still living in the Moscow Airport. Workers there are treating him well. Every night they leave a mint on his neck pillow.

Leno: The Pentagon says China will soon have submarine missiles capable of hitting anywhere in the US. No one will be safe, except people living near a Walmart.

Conan: Eliot Spitzer got the 4,000 signatures he needs to qualify for the New York City comptroller race by hiring people on Craigslist to help him. It was a big challenge, but if there’s one thing Spitzer knows how to do, it’s hire people on Craigslist.

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Mark Steyn is on the Detroit bankruptcy.

By the time Detroit declared bankruptcy, Americans were so inured to the throbbing dirge of Motown’s Greatest Hits — 40% of its street lamps don’t work; 210 of its 317 public parks have been closed; it takes an hour for police to respond to a 911 call; only a third of its ambulances are drivable; one-third of the city has been abandoned; the local realtor offers houses on sale for a buck and still finds no takers — Americans were so inured that the formal confirmation of a great city’s downfall was greeted with little more than a fatalistic shrug.

But it shouldn’t be. To achieve this level of devastation, you usually have to be invaded by a foreign power. In the War of 1812, when Detroit was taken by a remarkably small number of British troops without a shot being fired, Michigan’s Gov. Hull was said to have been panicked into surrender after drinking heavily.

Two centuries later, after an almighty 50-year bender, the city surrendered to itself.

The tunnel from Windsor, Ontario, to Detroit is now a border between First World and Third World — or, if you prefer, developed world and post-developed world.

To any American time-transported from the mid-20th century, the city’s implosion would be incredible. Were he to compare photographs of today’s Hiroshima with today’s Detroit, he would assume Japan won the Second World War after nuking Michigan. Detroit was the industrial powerhouse of America, the Arsenal of Democracy, and in 1960 the city with the highest per capita income in the land.

Half a century on, Detroit’s population has fallen by two thirds, and in terms of per capita income, many of the shrunken pool of capita have no income at all beyond EBT cards. …

Zero Hedge linked to a post titled “25 facts about Detroit will leave you shaking your head.” It appeared in The Economic Collapse Blog.

1) At this point, the city of Detroit owes money to more than 100,000 creditors.

2) Detroit is facing $20 billion in debt and unfunded liabilities.  That breaks down to more than $25,000 per resident.

3) Back in 1960, the city of Detroit actually had the highest per-capita income in the entire nation.

4) In 1950, there were about 296,000 manufacturing jobs in Detroit.  Today, there are less than 27,000.

5) Between December 2000 and December 2010, 48 percent of the manufacturing jobs in the state of Michigan were lost.

6) There are lots of houses available for sale in Detroitright now for $500 or less.

7) At this point, there are approximately 78,000 abandoned homes in the city.

8) About one-third of Detroit’s 140 square miles is either vacant or derelict.

9) An astounding 47 percent of the residents of the city of Detroit are functionally illiterate. …

NY Times has a fascinating story about goods transportation on the other side of the world. For thousands of years camel caravans moved goods between China and Europe. The route was discarded when ships started sailing the route. Changes in China though have driven manufacturers from coastal cities with high wages to interior cities. Shipping to the coast has increased the time to move goods to Europe. Hewlett Packard decided to use train routes through Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, Poland, etc. to reach distribution warehouses in Holland. They have succeeded in cutting the shipping time from five weeks to three.

Azamat Kulyenov, a 26-year-old train driver, slid the black-knobbed throttle forward, and the 1,800-ton express freight train, nearly a half-mile long, began rolling west across the vast, deserted grasslands of eastern Kazakhstan, leaving the Chinese border behind.

Dispatchers in the Kazakh border town of Dostyk gave this train priority over all other traffic, including passenger trains. Specially trained guards rode on board. Later in the trip, as the train traveled across desolate Eurasian steppes, guards toting AK-47 military assault rifles boarded the locomotive to keep watch for bandits who might try to drive alongside and rob the train. Sometimes, the guards would even sit on top of the steel shipping containers.

The train roughly follows the fabled Silk Road, the ancient route linking China and Europe that was used to transport spices, gems and, of course, silks before falling into disuse six centuries ago. Now the overland route is being resurrected for a new precious cargo: several million laptop computers and accessories made each year in China and bound for customers in European cities like London, Paris, Berlin and Rome.

Hewlett-Packard, the Silicon Valley electronics company, has pioneered the revival of a route famous in the West since the Roman Empire. For the last two years, the company has shipped laptops and accessories to stores in Europe with increasing frequency aboard express trains that cross Central Asia at a clip of 50 miles an hour. Initially an experiment run in summer months, H.P. is now dispatching trains on the nearly 7,000-mile route at least once a week, and up to three times a week when demand warrants. H.P. plans to ship by rail throughout the coming winter, having taken elaborate measures to protect the cargo from temperatures that can drop to 40 degrees below zero. …

… The Silk Road was never a single route, but a web of paths taken by caravans of camels and horses that began around 120 B.C., when Xi’an in west-central China — best known for its terra cotta warriors — was China’s capital. The caravans started across the deserts of western China, traveled through the mountain ranges along China’s western borders with what are now Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan and then journeyed across the sparsely populated steppes of Central Asia to the Caspian Sea and beyond.

These routes flourished through the Dark Ages and the early medieval period in Europe. But as maritime navigation expanded in the 1300s and 1400s, and as China’s political center shifted east to Beijing, China’s economic activity also moved toward the coast.

Today, the economic geography is changing again. …

… Tony Prophet, a senior vice president at H.P., said the company began thinking about a rail route west almost as soon as it started production in Chongqing. The company, Mr. Prophet said, was pursuing a strategy of moving products, not people: instead of encouraging a migration from inland provinces to coastal factories, H.P. would manufacture in the inland provinces and then ship the products from there.

To attract the company, the city built an extra runway at its airport long enough to accommodate Boeing 747 cargo jets. Airfreight to Europe takes only one week, including customs processing.

But persistently high oil prices made the cost of airfreight daunting — as much as seven times the cost of rail freight. H.P. was also concerned about the carbon emissions involved in airfreight, which are 30 times those of the rail or sea routes. …

… The train was punctual in reaching the Dzungarian Gate, a low, wide valley through the snow-capped mountain ranges that separates China and Kazakhstan. Chinese customs officers there opened documents that had been sealed since the shipment left Chongqing. For 49 of the 50 containers, the documents matched the cargo in every detail.

But for one of the laptop computer containers, the numbers didn’t match. The documents showed that the total weight of one container was 10,135 kilograms. But the scale showed that the container weighed 10,153 kilograms — a difference of just two digits, transposed accidentally.

Hours passed on the Kazakh side as H.P. and its shipping agents hustled to amend the paperwork, which was not easy because the error was discovered at the end of a workday. After thundering across China, through Xi’an, across a corner of the Gobi Desert and skirting the vast arid wastes of the Taklamakan Desert, where temperatures can hit 120 degrees, the train simply sat. For 26 hours.

Such extreme delays are unusual — H.P. managers say the longest previous delay was 10 hours, at the Belarus-Poland border. Sea shipments have sometimes been delayed up to three days because of bad weather and other problems.

H.P. has made strenuous efforts to keep the products moving, sending representatives to remote Central Asian border crossings to explain its plans, said Ronald Kleijwegt, the company’s director of logistics for Europe, the Mideast and Africa. …

… Once the problem of the transposed numbers was cleared up, the train crossed into Kazakhstan. An overhead crane and two cranes that looked like cottages on wheels lifted the H.P. containers off the Chinese train, and loaded them onto flat cars with wider wheel gauges in the rail yard in Dostyk on the Kazakh side of the border. Kazakhstan, Russia and Belarus, all traversed on the trip, have wide rails inherited from the Soviet rail system. China and Europe have narrower rails, so cargo transfers take several hours. …

… When the train reached the Belarus-Poland border, the containers had to be moved again to flat cars with a narrower wheel gauge. While 41 flat cars headed on across Europe right away, 9 more had to wait for a separate locomotive because the train would otherwise exceed European regulations for a freight train’s maximum length. The first train reached Duisburg, Germany, on July 3, or 19 days after the containers left Chongqing. Trucks then took the containers overnight to their final destination, H.P.’s European distribution center, in Oostrum, the Netherlands. …

… Mr. Prophet, the H.P. vice president, said that despite the occasional delays — like the 26 hours at the Kazakh border — the company still planned to shift more shipments from sea freight, and especially from airfreight, to rail. The journey to Europe can take as little as 18 or 19 days by rail, but to allow for delays, H.P. doesn’t plan for the train to arrive in fewer than 22 days, he noted.

Zhengzhou’s and DHL’s move to offer regularly scheduled rail service across Kazakhstan, not to mention the lengthening list of industries trying the route, suggests that despite the occasional customs delay, many companies now share H.P.’s view that the Silk Road has re-emerged as a viable transport route.

“They were all highly interested,” Mr. Kleijwegt of H.P. said, “but wanted to see someone else prove it.”

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Shelby Steele takes the civil rights leadership to task. 

The verdict that declared George Zimmerman not guilty of murdering Trayvon Martin was a traumatic event for America’s civil-rights establishment, and for many black elites across the media, government and academia. When you have grown used to American institutions being so intimidated by the prospect of black wrath that they invent mushy ideas like “diversity” and “inclusiveness” simply to escape that wrath, then the crisp reading of the law that the Zimmerman jury displayed comes as a shock.

On television in recent weeks you could see black leaders from every background congealing into a chorus of umbrage and complaint. But they weren’t so much outraged at a horrible injustice as they were affronted by the disregard of their own authority. The jury effectively said to them, “You won’t call the tune here. We will work within the law.”

Today’s black leadership pretty much lives off the fumes of moral authority that linger from its glory days in the 1950s and ’60s. The Zimmerman verdict lets us see this and feel a little embarrassed for them. Consider the pathos of a leadership that once transformed the nation now lusting for the conviction of the contrite and mortified George Zimmerman, as if a stint in prison for him would somehow assure more peace and security for black teenagers everywhere. This, despite the fact that nearly one black teenager a day is shot dead on the South Side of Chicago—to name only one city—by another black teenager. …

… One wants to scream at all those outraged at the Zimmerman verdict: Where is your outrage over the collapse of the black family? Today’s civil-rights leaders swat at mosquitoes like Zimmerman when they have gorillas on their back. Seventy-three percent of all black children are born without fathers married to their mothers. And you want to bring the nation to a standstill over George Zimmerman?

There are vast career opportunities, money and political power to be gleaned from the specter of Mr. Zimmerman as a racial profiler/murderer; but there is only hard and selfless work to be done in tackling an illegitimacy rate that threatens to consign blacks to something like permanent inferiority. If there is anything good to be drawn from the Zimmerman/Martin tragedy, it is only the further revelation of the corruption and irrelevance of today’s civil-rights leadership.

Now we’re finding out the IRS chief counsel met with the president two days before the new policy was announced towards Tea Parties. Daily Caller has the story.

The Obama appointee implicated in congressional testimony in the IRS targeting scandal met with President Obama in the White House two days before offering his colleagues a new set of advice on how to scrutinize tea party and conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.

IRS chief counsel William Wilkins, who was named in House Oversight testimony by retiring IRS agent Carter Hull as one of his supervisors in the improper targeting of conservative groups, met with Obama in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on April 23, 2012. Wilkins’ boss, then-IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman, visited the EisenhowerExecutiveOfficeBuilding on April 24, 2012, according to White House visitor logs.

On April 25, 2012, Wilkins’ office sent the exempt organizations determinations unit “additional comments on the draft guidance” for approving or denying tea party tax-exempt applications, according to the IRS inspector general’s report.

Jennifer Rubin with the skinny on the VA gubernatorial debate.

In a slugfest on Saturday, Virginia gubernatorial candidates Ken Cuccinelli and Terry McAuliffe faced off. Most voters still aren’t  paying attention to the race, but the face-off gave us a good sense of where the race is heading:

1. This is about each candidate’s flaws, not their policies. The Post noted: “Although McAuliffe and Cuccinelli have stark differences on policy, much of the debate focused on the personal — a preview of the largely negative, character-focused battle the two men will continue through November.”

2. McAuliffe is his own worst enemy, seemingly unable to stop exaggerating or even fabricating allegations. On the Star Scientific gift scandal, a problem for Cuccinelli turned into a McAuliffe stumble when he overreached. The Post cited the debate’s “most obvious misstep”: …

Pickerhead has been saying for years the public safety goobers are out of control. Radley Balko with a WSJ OpEd provides some examples. 

On Jan. 4 of last year, a local narcotics strike force conducted a raid on the Ogden, Utah, home of Matthew David Stewart at 8:40 p.m. The 12 officers were acting on a tip from Mr. Stewart’s former girlfriend, who said that he was growing marijuana in his basement. Mr. Stewart awoke, naked, to the sound of a battering ram taking down his door. Thinking that he was being invaded by criminals, as he later claimed, he grabbed his 9-millimeter Beretta pistol.

The police say that they knocked and identified themselves, though Mr. Stewart and his neighbors said they heard no such announcement. Mr. Stewart fired 31 rounds, the police more than 250. Six of the officers were wounded, and Officer Jared Francom was killed. Mr. Stewart himself was shot twice before he was arrested. He was charged with several crimes, including the murder of Officer Francom.

The police found 16 small marijuana plants in Mr. Stewart’s basement. There was no evidence that Mr. Stewart, a U.S. military veteran with no prior criminal record, was selling marijuana. Mr. Stewart’s father said that his son suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and may have smoked the marijuana to self-medicate.

Early this year, the Ogden city council heard complaints from dozens of citizens about the way drug warrants are served in the city. As for Mr. Stewart, his trial was scheduled for next April, and prosecutors were seeking the death penalty. But after losing a hearing last May on the legality of the search warrant, Mr. Stewart hanged himself in his jail cell.

The police tactics at issue in the Stewart case are no anomaly. Since the 1960s, in response to a range of perceived threats, law-enforcement agencies across the U.S., at every level of government, have been blurring the line between police officer and soldier. …

The Economist reports on open admission free online college courses and the challenge they mount to traditional universities.

DOTCOM mania was slow in coming to higher education, but now it has the venerable industry firmly in its grip. Since the launch early last year of Udacity and Coursera, two Silicon Valley start-ups offering free education through MOOCs, massive open online courses, the ivory towers of academia have been shaken to their foundations. University brands built in some cases over centuries have been forced to contemplate the possibility that information technology will rapidly make their existing business model obsolete. Meanwhile, the MOOCs have multiplied in number, resources and student recruitment—without yet having figured out a business model of their own.

Besides providing online courses to their own (generally fee-paying) students, universities have felt obliged to join the MOOC revolution to avoid being guillotined by it. Coursera has formed partnerships with 83 universities and colleges around the world, including many of America’s top-tier institutions. …

… Alison, an Irish provider of free, mostly vocational education founded in 2007, before MOOCs got their name, is generating plenty of revenue by selling advertising on its site. “Ads propelled radio and TV, why not education? There is a lot of misplaced snobbery in education about advertising,” says Mike Feerick, Alison’s founder.

Another important category of MOOC providers are publishers, says Rob Lytle of the Parthenon Group, a consultancy. He says firms like Pearson (part-owner of The Economist) that run educational businesses such as textbook-publishing may thrive by offering free MOOCs as a way to get people to buy their related paid content.

Besides the uncertainty over which business model, if any, will produce profits, there is disagreement over how big the market will be. Some see a zero- or negative-sum game, in which cheap online providers radically reduce the cost of higher education and drive many traditional institutions to the wall. Others believe this effect will be dwarfed by the dramatic increase in access to higher education that the MOOCs will bring. …

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We’re cursed with a president who can’t shut up. Jennifer Rubin has a couple of posts on his Zimmerman/Trayvon comments.

… Even his analysis of African Americans’ troubles seemed condescending and defensive:

“Now, this isn’t to say that the African American community is naïve about the fact that African American young men are disproportionately involved in the criminal justice system; that they’re disproportionately both victims and perpetrators of violence. It’s not to make excuses for that fact — although black folks do interpret the reasons for that in a historical context. They understand that some of the violence that takes place in poor black neighborhoods around the country is born out of a very violent past in this country, and that the poverty and dysfunction that we see in those communities can be traced to a very difficult history.”

The violent past is responsible? Perhaps Obama might concede that a breakdown in the family, a coarsening of the culture and a host of other facts might be responsible. But today was all about seeing things, you see, from the narrow perspective of race.

The president acknowledged partway through his remarks that the conversation about race he and his attorney general are urging is better done without politicians. Precisely. So why was he there? Anti-racial bias is at an all-time low, interracial marriage is rising and, as he pointed out, with each successive generation race becomes less of a big deal.

The presidency is not a parochial office, yet Obama fosters a view of America that says African Americans can’t help but see the country in terms of race. That is a sad and depressing view of our country. It suggests that African Americans can’t judge their fellow citizen individually, by the content of their character. It doesn’t require that we grow beyond the past or that we see things as they are now.

The president at the very end argued that “those of us in authority should be doing everything we can to encourage the better angels of our nature, as opposed to using these episodes to heighten divisions.” Too bad he doesn’t follow his own advice.

Ms. Rubin has more.

… Despite his background in constitutional law, the president seems to have little sense of the division between politics and law. It is all one big blur, and when convenient, legal cases are simply another opportunity to stir his base. He feels no compunction about running roughshod over defendants’ right to due process. Every case is just fodder for the cause of the moment, a way of winking at his base. (Yeah, we know he’s guilty. We’re on the same side.) And if the country is all the more polarized, well, so be it.

It is one and the same with Obama’s desire for Supreme Court justices who operate with “compassion.” Once again, the impartial administration of justice is sacrificed at the altar of progressive politics. Never mind that justices’ oath of office compels them to treat rich and poor alike.

General issues (race, gender, gun rights) don’t necessarily fit specific legal cases. We try individuals, not causes. Great societal issues should not displace the particular facts and law at issue in each case. (Hence the media infatuation with the “stand your ground” statute, which was entirely irrelevant in a case of simple self-defense.)

In this administration we have seen unprecedented efforts not, as the president lamely called for after the trial, to “widen the circle of compassion and understanding in our own communities,” but to tear them asunder. Someday maybe we’ll get that post-racial presidency.

Peter Wehner on why this trial and its aftermath is so discouraging.

… What we’re seeing from the left is post-modernism on full display. The facts, the truth and objective reality are subordinate to the progressive narrative. In this particular instance many liberals so want the killing of Trayvon Martin to be driven by bigotry–which would serve as both an indictment of racial attitudes in America and turn a horrible mistake into a “modern-day lynching”–that they will make it so, even if it requires twisting the truth into something unrecognizable. What matters, after all, is The Cause. And everything, including basic facts, must be bent to fit it. This kind of systematic deconstruction of truth is fairly common in college liberal arts courses all across America. But when it becomes the primary mode of interpretation in a murder trial, it is something else again.

Most of us, when we hear the words “justice must be done,” believe that what is right, reasonable, fair and in accordance with the facts be done. But some on the left have something else in mind. For them, justice is a tool in a larger political struggle, a means to an end. Justice can be at odds with reality if reality is at odds with liberalism. Which is why the efforts to turn the Zimmerman verdict into a racial miscarriage of justice is so discouraging and so damaging.

William Jacobsen says the Feds want Zimmerman any way they can get him.

This no longer is about George Zimmerman, it’s about a Department of Justice serving political interests.

There’s a reason we stand up for the rights of individuals like George Zimmerman against an overreaching State.

It’s not just about the individual.  It’s about all of us, and the reality that there but for fortune could go you or I.

The highly politicized Department of Justice desperately wants to bring federal charges to placate the race-agitators, and has joined in the witch hunt.

Via The Orlando Sentinel, DOJ solicits email tips in Zimmerman civil rights probe (h/t readers and commenters):

“The U.S. Department of Justice on Monday afternoon appealed to civil rights groups and community leaders, nationally and in Sanford, for help investigating whether a federal criminal case might be brought against George Zimmerman for the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, one advocate said.

The DOJ has also set up a public email address to take in tips on its civil rights investigation….”

Power Line gives us a view into the freak show in the Ivy League.

It should come as no surprise that some of the very worst rants about George Zimmerman’s acquittal are coming from an Ivy League professor. The competition is stiff, but will be hard-pressed to keep up with Anthea Butler, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

The Zimmerman verdict has caused Butler to conclude that God is “a white racist god with a problem” who “is carrying a gun and stalking young black men.”

There are conclusions Butler could have reached short of equating her caricature of Zimmerman with God. She could have settled for the less flamboyant view that there is no God. But flamboyance, one suspects, is what landed Butler the Ivy League gig and appearances on CNN and MSNBC.

Butler might also have concluded, years ago, that God is a black god with a problem who guns down young blacks. After all, there is a near-epidemic of shootings of young African-Americans by other African-Americans. …

The Daily Caller has more from this “professor.”

… As Campus Reform notes, Butler doubled down on her comments with a tweet on Monday saying, “y’all take care of the KKKlan Twitter egg avi’s till I return. I see my sheet they don’t like me calling out their racist god #toobad.”

She’s been tweeting incessantly since, mostly about elections in 2014 and how she blocks people from her Twitter feed.

At Rate My Professors, Butlerdoes not fare well. The sample size is small, but the reviews are abysmal.

“Pathetic,” reports one unhappy student. “This teacher is pathetically bad at her supposed job. Do not give this untalented instructor any more classes.”

Another student describes her as a “loudmouth idiot with crazy Don King hair” and “poorly substantiated and academically unsound” opinions. …

National Review piece on the crazy prosecutor at the center of the Zimmerman trial.

Angela Corey, by all accounts, is no Atticus Finch. She is “one hell of a trial lawyer,” says a Florida defense attorney who has known her for three decades — but the woman who has risen to national prominence as the “tough as nails” state attorney who prosecuted George Zimmerman is known for scorching the earth. And some of her prosecutorial conduct has been, well, troubling at best.

Corey, a Jacksonville native, took a degree in marketing from FloridaStateUniversity before pursuing her J.D. at the University of Florida. She became a Florida prosecutor in 1981 and tried everything from homicides to juvenile cases in the ensuing 26 years. In 2008, Corey was elected state attorney for Florida’s Fourth Judicial Circuit, taking over from Harry Shorstein — the four-term state attorney who had fired her from his office a year earlier, citing “long-term issues” regarding her supervisory performance.

When Corey came in, she cleaned house. Corey fired half of the office’s investigators, two-fifths of its victim advocates, a quarter of its 35 paralegals, and 48 other support staff — more than one-fifth of the office. Then she sent a letter to Florida’s senators demanding that they oppose Shorstein’s pending nomination as a U.S. attorney. “I told them he should not hold a position of authority in his community again, because of his penchant for using the grand jury for personal vendettas,” she wrote.

Corey knows about personal vendettas. They seem to be her specialty. When Ron Littlepage, a journalist for the Florida Times-Union, wrote a column criticizing her handling of the Christian Fernandez case — in which Corey chose to prosecute a twelve-year-old boy for first-degree murder, who wound up locked in solitary confinement in an adult jail prior to his court date — she “fired off a two-page, single-spaced letter on official state-attorney letterhead hinting at lawsuits for libel.”

And that was moderate. …

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Jonathan Tobin says the Egyptians are right to ignore advice coming from our government.

The Obama administration has been forced to navigate a difficult path in the past week. The fall of the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt has forced it to balance its rhetorical support of democracy with the necessity to acknowledge that the military coup that forced Mohamed Morsi from office was a product of a popular backlash against the Brotherhood’s excesses and drive for total power. But as much as Washington has slowly begun distancing itself from the strategy of embracing the Brotherhood that characterized U.S. policy for the past year, the president still can’t quite grasp the realities of the conflict in Cairo. The U.S. decision to pressure the military to release Islamists they have arrested, or to include them in a new government, is exactly the sort of tone deaf advice that has cratered America’s reputation in Egypt.

But the fact that the military is rejecting Obama’s advice and thereby endangering the more than $2 billion a year they get in U.S. aid shows just how out of touch the administration is with the reality on the ground. The administration is treading a bit more carefully on Egypt than it was a year ago, when they were strong-arming the army into letting the Brotherhood take over. But Obama and his foreign policy team need to wrap their brains around a basic truth that the Egyptian generals are forced to deal with: the conflict with a group like the Brotherhood is a zero-sum game. Allowing the Islamists freedom to organize or letting Morsi re-enter the government would merely give the Brotherhood a leg up in its effort to seize back the reins of power. And anyone, include the fools in the State Department and the White House, who thinks the Brotherhood will stop at anything once they gain back what they have lost, understands nothing about the movement. …

Good column from David Goldman on the problems of blacks. 

My earliest memory is looking up at a circle of black and white faces. I was seated in the living room of the family home in Edison Township, N.J., and the group I saw was the local chapter of the NAACP. My association with the civil rights movement goes back to the age of two. The year would have been 1953 or 1954, and my parents were left-wing activists, among the very few white people involved at the time. Their activism was deep. In 1950, my father drove from New York with a group of ColumbiaUniversity students to protest the impending execution of Willie McGee, a black man convicted and eventually electrocuted for the alleged rape of a white woman in Mississippi. I followed my parents’ example: in my senior year of high school I organized and led a student civil rights demonstration and marched next to Andrew Young. You can look it up.

I believe in civil rights as much now as I did then. That’s why it’s painful to watch the degeneration of the NAACP with its silly petition to persuade the Justice Department to bring a civil rights case against George Zimmerman. The leaders of what used to be a civil rights movement want to talk about everything but the main problem afflicting black people in the United States. That is the breakdown of the black family.

Just 29% of black women over the age of 15 were married in 2010, according to the Census Bureau’s comprehensive Current Population Survey. That compares to 54% of white women. At all ages, black women were about half as likely to be married as white women. That is an astonishing number.

The percentage of out-of-wedlock births has risen from 18% in 1980 to 40% in 2010. 29% of white births were non-marital, against 73% for black births. That’s nearly three-quarters of all black births. …

John Fund reports on progress in the IRS investigation.

Finally we may be getting somewhere in the IRS scandal involving the targeting and harassment of tea-party groups applying for tax exemptions. At Thursday’s House Government Reform and Oversight hearing, some names were at last attached to some of the IRS’s most questionable actions in the scandal.

Back in May, top IRS officials Steven Miller and Lois Lerner insisted that “rogue” agents in the Cincinnati office acted without direction from IRS headquarters in Washington. But Elizabeth Hofacre, who was the Cincinnati agent in charge of reviewing flagged tea-party applications, says she “had no autonomy or authority” to act on applications and so she simply sat on them. She blamed Carter Hull, an IRS lawyer in Washington, for the delays, saying that he directed her in how to treat problem cases but never gave her any feedback.

For his part, Hull said he had tried to tackle the growing pile of applications, but he was told they must first go through a multi-tier review that involved Lerner’s office and that of William Wilkins, the IRS’s chief counsel. Wilkins, a political appointee of President Obama’s, has been involved in Democratic politics as a staffer and campaign donor for over 30 years. Wilkins’s office did not have its first meeting with IRS officials on the tea-party applications until August 2011; at that point the applications had been pending for so long that it was decided that the IRS needed to demand updated information from the tea-party groups, further slowing down the process. Hull says that the behavior of IRS management during this whole process was “unusual.”

It’s taken nearly three months to begin to peel back the onion and discover the chain of command in the IRS scandal. …

Peggy Noonan adds some details.

… When the scandal broke two months ago, in May, IRS leadership in Washington claimed the harassment of tea-party and other conservative groups requesting tax-exempt status was confined to the Cincinnati office, where a few rogue workers bungled the application process. Lois Lerner, then the head of the exempt organizations unit in Washington, said “line people in Cincinnati” did work that was “not so fine.” They asked questions that “weren’t really necessary,” she claimed, and operated without “the appropriate level of sensitivity.” But the targeting was “not intentional.” Ousted acting commissioner Steven Miller also put it off on “people in Cincinnati.” They provided “horrible customer service.”

House investigators soon talked to workers in the Cincinnati office, who said everything they did came from Washington. Elizabeth Hofacre, in charge of processing tea-party applications in Cincinnati, told investigators that her work was overseen and directed by a lawyer in the IRS Washington office named Carter Hull.

Now comes Mr. Hull’s testimony. And like Ms. Hofacre, he pointed his finger upward. Mr. Hull—a 48-year IRS veteran and an expert on tax exemption law—told investigators that tea-party applications under his review were sent upstairs within the Washington office, at the direction of Lois Lerner.

In April 2010, Hull was assigned to scrutinize certain tea-party applications. He requested more information from the groups. After he received responses, he felt he knew enough to determine whether the applications should be approved or denied.

But his recommendations were not carried out.

Michael Seto, head of Mr. Hull’s unit, also spoke to investigators. He told them Lois Lerner made an unusual decision: Tea-party applications would undergo additional scrutiny—a multilayered review. …

The IRS is still a scandal and ethanol is still a boondoggle says Walter Russell Mead.

… This is a mess even before you consider the foibles of the source of the lion’s share of this ethanol: corn. Before the Renewable Fuel Standard set these arbitrarily high targets, the US used just 23 percent of its corn to produce ethanol. Last year 43 percent of our corn crops went towards producing the biofuel. That shift has driven up global prices for corn, starving the world’s poor and potentially fueling food riots. And to what end? Corn ethanol is categorized as a biofuel, but it doesn’t reduce emissions. Advanced biofuels produced from such sources as sugarcane and algae pass the green test, but they haven’t yet proven their commercial viability. …

Michael Walsh celebrates Jay Leno unbound.

… As Jay Leno nears the end of his nearly 22-year run as the host of The Tonight Show, the lantern-jawed comic with the thick Boston accent finds himself in an unusual predicament. Having won the War of Johnny Carson’s Succession (1992), successfully fended off a challenge from upstart Conan O’Brien during a brief interregnum (2009–10), and gracefully bowed to the inevitable with the accession of Jimmy Fallon to the late-night throne next year, Leno now finds himself cast in a new role: conservative hero.

Leno’s always played his politics, or lack of them, close to the vest, insisting that his job as host of The Tonight Show is business, not politics. And he’s right, of course. Hard as it may be for younger readers to believe, there was a time in this country when not everything was political, and you could get through one whole day at work without talking about #$%@BUSH!*&@ or Barry with your co-workers.

At the same time, comics used to play their historical role as jesters to the hilt, mocking the Kennedys at the height of Camelot (Vaughn Meader), whaling away at a scowling Tricky Dick (David Frye), impersonating a bumbling Gerald Ford (Chevy Chase) or an inarticulate George H. W. Bush (Dana Carvey). Reagan and Clinton also came in for substantial comic abuse during their administrations, and Will Ferrell made an entire cottage industry out of ridiculing George W. Bush.

And then, with the election of Barack Obama, it all stopped. Suddenly, there was nothing funny about the president of the United States — not his massive ego, his pomposity, his Bush-like inability to speak extemporaneously, his golf game, even his jump shot. “The only person that’s made jokes about President Obama in the last five years is him,” observed comic Colin Quinn. “He has to do it at the White House Correspondents Dinner. That’s how bad it’s gotten.”

Enter Leno Unbound. …

Whadaya know? Good advice from the NY Times – low tech mosquito deterrent.

… our friends had come up with a solution that saved us from having to deal with bug repellents or, worse, bites and itches.

On a low table, they set up a small electric fan, perhaps 12 inches high, that swept back and forth, sending a gentle breeze across the grassy area where people were sitting.

That was it. No citronella candles, no bug zappers, no DEET, nothing expensive or high-tech. Yet amazingly, it worked. As far as I could tell, no mosquitoes flew into the vicinity of the simulated wind; nobody was bitten.

As we left, I asked our hosts about the fan idea; they credited a mutual friend at the barbecue. He, in turn, paid tribute to a friend of his: Frank Swift, president of Swift Food Equipment Inc. in Philadelphia.

So I reached out to Mr. Swift, who replied by e-mail. “The solution came from trying to think like a bug,” he explained, “and realizing I don’t like flying into a 15 m.p.h. wind.”  …