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Mort Zuckerman drills into the jobs report. 

In recent months, Americans have heard reports out of Washington and in the media that the economy is looking up—that recovery from the Great Recession is gathering steam. If only it were true. The longest and worst recession since the end of World War II has been marked by the weakest recovery from any U.S. recession in that same period.

The jobless nature of the recovery is particularly unsettling. In June, the government’s Household Survey reported that since the start of the year, the number of people with jobs increased by 753,000—but there are jobs and then there are “jobs.” No fewer than 557,000 of these positions were only part-time. The survey also reported that in June full-time jobs declined by 240,000, while part-time jobs soared by 360,000 and have now reached an all-time high of 28,059,000—three million more part-time positions than when the recession began at the end of 2007.

That’s just for starters. The survey includes part-time workers who want full-time work but can’t get it, as well as those who want to work but have stopped looking. That puts the real unemployment rate for June at 14.3%, up from 13.8% in May.

The 7.6% unemployment figure so common in headlines these days is utterly misleading. An estimated 22 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed; they are virtually invisible and mostly excluded from unemployment calculations that garner headlines. …

More detail on the job disaster from Peter Ferrara at Forbes.

You would not have gotten the real story about the June unemployment report on the front page of any newspaper. If you can find a reporter who can think for himself or herself, he or she is a treasure who should be promoted to run the entire paper.

But since you are already here, the real story is available if you read on. There were no net full time jobs created last month. The number of full time jobs actually declined by at least 162,000 on net last month.

All of the net new jobs created last month were part time jobs. The Labor Department reported, “The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons…increased by 322,000 to 8.2 million in June. These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job.” (emphasis added).

That is why the Labor Department also reported that the U-6 unemployment rate, which includes these involuntary part-time workers, soared from 13.8% in May to 14.3% in June. That soaring unemployment suggests not recovery but renewed recession.

These part-time jobs replacing full time jobs helps to explain why middle class incomes have continued to decline throughout Obama’s Presidency. The middle class has lost the equivalent of one month’s income a year under President Obama, and with these employment trends, those declining living standards will continue.

Moreover, even counting this explosion of part-time jobs, Obama’s supposed recovery is sorely lagging. As we pointed out last week, in the 11 previous recessions since the Great Depression, the economy gained back all of the jobs lost during the recession in an average of 25 months from when the recession started. But today, we are 67 months after the recession started, and 49 months after it officially ended, and under what passes for economic policy under the smartest President ever, we still have not gained back all of the jobs lost during the recession. And, again, that is counting the explosion of part time jobs replacing full time jobs.

President Obama told us in his State of the Union Address this year, “A growing economy that creates good, middle class jobs – this must be the North Star that guides our efforts.” But, once again, the President’s words have not matched his deeds. …

Washington Free Beacon explains why the train wreck in QuebecProvince improves the arguments for the XL Pipeline.

The deadly explosion of a Canadian freight train could boost the case for the U.S. government’s approval of a controversial oil pipeline, which supporters say would reduce the risk of similar disasters in the future.

The disaster’s death toll is up to 13, and an additional 40 are missing since the train, which was carrying 72 tanker cars of crude oil, derailed and subsequently exploded in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, on Saturday.

Proponents of the Keystone XL Pipeline have noted that a rejection of the project by the Obama administration would likely mean additional crude oil transported by rail, and hence a heightened risk of future accidents.

“The train disaster in Quebec is a tragic example of how some means of transportation are more dangerous than others,” James Taylor, senior fellow for environmental policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said in an email.

The administration has repeatedly delayed its decision to approve or reject the pipeline. President Barack Obama recently said he would not approve the project unless it was determined to be carbon neutral, suggesting to some that he planned to reject it.

Proponents of the project say that outcome would make oil transportation more risky. …

Walter Russell Mead with more on the subject.

Tragedy struck in the idyllic town of Lac Megantic, Quebec this weekend. A 73-car oil-laden train derailed and exploded early Saturday. Five people died, and the crash site is still too hot—more than 50 hours later—to look for 40 missing people.

The implications of the accident extend much further than the small border town: crashes like this are why greens should be supporting the proposed Keystone XL pipeline.

Canada has a lot of oil. Much of that is trapped in Alberta’s oil sands, and it is of a particularly heavy and dirty-burning variety. But Canada does not have a lot of oil infrastructure. It lacks the pipelines and the refineries needed to take advantage of its bounty.

The proposed Keystone XL pipeline would solve this problem by bringing Canadian oil down to American refineries along the GulfCoast.

John Hinderaker hopes the Chinese government will not be as climate ignorant as ours is.

China is now the world’s number one emitter of carbon dioxide, so other countries are trying to browbeat it to fall into line with the CAGW (catastrophic anthropogenic global warming) theory. So the the ChineseAcademy of Sciences is taking up the global warming debate, which is more than you can say for similar professional organizations in the U.S. and Europe. The Science and Environmental Policy Project reports on what is going on in China; we can only hope that China will not choose to cripple its economy for the sake of purported climate benefits. SEPP proposes a list of questions that should be posed to those who want to put China in the alarmist camp:

“As mentioned earlier, the ChineseAcademy of Sciences is planning a September symposium in Beijing to rally the pro-IPCC arguments and try to convince their government that humans make an important contribution to global warming. In anticipation of this symposium, one would like to ask the organizers the following kinds of questions:

1. Can you explain why there has been no significant warming observed in the last 15 years — in spite of a rapid increase in the atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide?

2. Can one explain why the tropical atmosphere has shown no warming between 1979 and 2000 (ignoring the 1-yr long temperature spike of 1998, caused by a Super-El-Nino), and then again between 2002 and 2012-while models predict that the atmosphere should warm faster than the surface?

3. Can one explain why the Antarctic has been cooling, with Antarctic sea ice growing steadily–while models predict a global warming with most of the effects at high latitudes? …”

Since she has experience with bloated bureaucracies, Janet Napolitano will head the UC system. Richard Vedder has the story. 

… UC’s annual spending exceeds that of most state governments, amounting to roughly $100,000 for each of its students. Much of this is unrelated to instructional function. The university’s bureaucracy is famously monumental, centralized and costly: Aside from a full cohort of administrators and support staff at each of the 10 campuses, the central office in Oakland employs more than 2,000 workers, a staggering number (2,358 full-time employees, according to the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System). There are 10 “divisions” in the Office of the President, for example. Its “external relations” division lists more than 55 managerial-type employees on organizational charts, and that number doesn’t include support personnel. …

Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.

Conan: Elliot Spitzer, caught frequenting prostitutes a few years ago, is running for office again in New York. His campaign slogan- “Spitzer: Creating Jobs by the Hour.”

Conan: A new study finds drinking just three pints of beer a week permanently dulls the brain. So now you know: Never stop at just three.

Conan: A new report finds Mexico has replaced the U.S. as the world’s fattest nation. In fact, now Mexicans are trying to cross the border just to ask, “Are you going to finish that?”

Leno: Bad news for the ‘Lone Ranger.’ The movie could lose $150 million. In fact, it’s so bad that Tonto quit acting and has gone back to working at the casino.

Leno: Big turmoil in Egypt. The military took over. President Morsi is under house arrest and being forced to watch ‘The Lone Ranger.’ …

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Abigail Thernstrom nicely sums up the president’s Zimmerman actions.

Every American can make their own judgment about whether justice was served by the verdict in the George Zimmerman murder trial but one thing we should all recognize: President Obama’s interference in a local law enforcement matter was unprecedented and inappropriate, and he comes away from the case looking badly tarnished by his poor judgment.

“If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” the president said when asked about the case in the Rose Garden on March 23, 2012, after many had called for Zimmerman’s arrest but several weeks before he was charged. “When I think about this boy, I think about my own kids.”

In fact, if the president had a son, he would have been born to extraordinary privilege and raised with all the advantages of two very affluent and highly educated parents. He would have gone to tony private schools. His path in life would have been almost as dissimilar from Trayvon’s as one could imagine.

Yes, Obama’s hypothetical son and Trayvon would have shared the same brown skin color. Would that have made them interchangeable? Not unless all brown-skinned boys are the same. Does the president really believe that?

The president’s remarks created a clear impression that he was motivated by one of two factors, and we can only guess as to which, or what combination of the two, was at work here. One possibility is that this is merely another manifestation of the president’s well-known narcissism: No matter what the situation may be, it’s all about him. …

John Fund with more on the Zimmerman travesty. It’s worse than you thought.

The trial of George Zimmerman should be taught in law schools and elsewhere as a prime example of one of the most mishandled and politically motivated prosecutions in recent U.S. history. If we want to reserve the criminal-justice system for deciding guilt or innocence rather than for playing out social and racial grievances, it’s important to review the spectacle we just witnessed.

Recall that the investigation of Trayvon Martin’s shooting was taken out of the hands of local authorities and placed with an appointed special prosecutor named Angela Corey. She said her job was to rise above public pressure to indict Zimmerman, but within weeks she claimed her job was “to do justice for Trayvon Martin.” She quickly decided to charge Zimmerman with second-degree murder, a charge that may have satisfied public opinion but which required her to prove that the former Neighborhood Watch volunteer harbored ill will and spite against Trayvon Martin, whom he had never met until minutes before the shooting.

The Florida Bar’s rules state that the government’s attorneys shall “refrain from prosecuting a charge that the prosecutor knows is not supported by probable cause . . . [and] make timely disclosure to the defense of all evidence or information known to the prosecutor that tends to negate the guilt of the accused or mitigates the offense.”

Angela Corey flagrantly violated those standards. Her prosecutors waited months before giving the defense photos showing the extent of George Zimmerman’s injuries the night of the shooting. Ben Kruidbos, the information-technology director for the state attorney’s office, was shocked when he learned that prosecutors hadn’t turned over to the defense evidence of photos and text messages that Kruidbos had recovered from Martin’s cell phone. The photos included images of a pile of jewelry on a bed, underage nude females, marijuana, and a hand menacingly holding a semiautomatic weapon. …

American Spectator writes about the cover-up of Trayvon Martin’s crimes in a Miami high school. Another fraud from this country’s educators.

The February 2012 shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martion might never have happened if school officials in Miami-DadeCounty had not instituted an unofficial policy of treating crimes as school disciplinary infractions. Revelations that emerged from an internal affairs investigation explain why Martin was not arrested when caught at school with stolen jewelry in October 2011 or with marijuana in February 2012. Instead, the teenager was suspended from school, the last time just days before he was shot dead by George Zimmerman.

Trayvon Martin was not from Sanford, the town north of Orlando where he was shot in 2012 and where a jury acquitted Zimmerman of murder charges Saturday. Martin was from MiamiGardens, more than 200 miles away, and had come to Sanford to stay with his father’s girlfriend Brandy Green at her home in the townhouse community where Zimmerman was in charge of the neighborhood watch. Trayvon was staying with Green after he had been suspended for the second time in six months from KropHigh School in Miami-DadeCounty, where both his father, Tracy Martin, and mother, Sybrina Fulton, lived.

Both of Trayvon’s suspensions during his junior year at Krop High involved crimes that could have led to his prosecution as a juvenile offender. However, Chief Charles Hurley of the Miami-Dade School Police Department (MDSPD) in 2010 had implemented a policy that reduced the number of criminal reports, manipulating statistics to create the appearance of a reduction in crime within the school system. …

Pajamas Media posts on black kids in Baltimore beating up a Hispanic man yelling, “This is for Trayvon.” 

… A witness posted on Facebook that she saw the gang of young men chasing the victim before they caught up to him and started kicking and beating him. That witness wrote that the black males were shouting “This is for Trayvon!” as they beat the man.

If Eric Holder is still looking around for a hate crime to prosecute, Baltimore offers one. …

In case you have doubts The Economist has become an organ of the radical left, a post from the magazine’s Democracy in America Blog, is a good example of why reading The Economist on politics or economics is a waste of your time. Just in case their readers are thickheaded, the title was “Getting Away With It.”  Follow the link if you want to read it. We’re not going to soil Pickings with more of this.

… We know that Mr Zimmerman said Mr Martin knocked him down, punched him, slammed his head into the sidewalk, and that he shot Mr Martin in self-defence. (Mr Martin could not relate his side of the story, of course, and there were no other witnesses.) We also know that America is a country still divided by race and fond of guns, and that Mr Zimmerman cursed “punks” who “always get away”. …

… Now, I don’t know it, but I seriously doubt Mr Zimmerman needed to shoot Mr Martin, even if Mr Martin did attack him. And I seriously doubt Mr Martin would have been shot if he hadn’t been a black kid. In my heart of hearts, I too think Mr Zimmerman did something terribly wrong, and that this misdeed reflects a number of things that are terribly wrong in our culture. And I share the impulse to identify something in the criminal-justice system that, if fine-tuned, would have drilled down to the honest-to-god truth about the case and rendered perfect moral justice. …

… In Texas you can get away with shooting someone to death if they’re running away with your property. That’s insane, and it’s easy to see how a law like that rigs the system in favour of people with a lot of property—a class that remains disproportionately white and male. However, on the whole, our criminal-justice system is so frightfully racist because it’s too easy for prosecutors, not because it’s too hard. Of course, in a racist society, rules that help defendants are going to help the most privileged defendants the most, and that’s maddening. But that shouldn’t stop us from recognising that the least privileged, the most oppressed, the most discriminated against, are far and away most likely to stand accused. That’s why I suspect that a legal system making it harder for the likes of Mr Zimmerman to get away with it would be a system of even more outrageous racial inequity.

For apple fans, Mother Jones has a very long piece on long forgotten apple varities. We have a taste of the article for you. Follow the link if you want more.

Every fall at Maine’s Common Ground Country Fair, the Lollapalooza of sustainable agriculture, John Bunker sets out a display of eccentric apples. Last September, once again, they covered every possible size, shape, and color in the wide world of appleness. There was a gnarled little yellow thing called a Westfield Seek-No-Further; a purplish plum impostor called a Black Oxford; a massive, red-streaked WolfRiver; and one of Thomas Jefferson’s go-to fruits, the Esopus Spitzenburg. Bunker is known in Maine as “The Apple Whisperer,” or simply “The Apple Guy,” and, after laboring for years in semi-obscurity, he has never been in more demand. Through the catalog of Fedco Trees [1], a mail-order company he founded in Maine 30 years ago, Bunker has sown the seeds of a grassroots apple revolution.

All weekend long, I watched people gravitate to what Bunker (“Bunk” to his friends, a category that seems to include half the population of Maine) calls “the vibrational pull” of a table laden with bright apples. “Baldwin!” said a tiny old man with white hair and intermittent teeth, pointing to a brick-red apple that was one of America’s most important until the frigid winter of 1933-34 knocked it into obscurity. “That’s the best!”

A leathery blonde from the coast held up a Blue Pearmain in wonder. “Blue Peahmain,” she marveled. “My ma had one in her yahd.” …

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David Stockman, former Michigan congressman and Reagan budget director, takes no prisoners as he contemplates the lastest jobs report. Remember when everybody was so pleased with 195,000 new jobs created in June? Turns out 120,000 of those jobs were part-time jobs in restaurants, bars, hotels, retail, and temp agencies. Now we can call him President Part-Time.

No, last week’s jobs report was not “strong”. It was just another edition of the “born again” jobs scam that has been fueling the illusion of recovery during the entire post-crisis Bernanke Bubble. In fact, 120,000 or 62 percent of the June payroll gain consisted of part-time jobs in restaurants, bars, hotels, retail and temp agencies. The average pay check in this segment amounts to barely $20,000 per year, which is a sub-poverty level income for a family of four, and compares to upwards of $50,000 per year for goods producing jobs in the BLS survey.

Altogether, the government has reported 2.8 million of these part-time job gains since the Great Recession officially ended in June 2009, accounting for a predominant share of the ballyhooed pick-up of 5.3 million total jobs.  It goes without saying, however, that the principal of one-job-one-vote does not apply in economics. What matters are aggregate dollar earnings. On that front, the Commerce Department figures for total private wage and salary income are just plain punk. Nearly six years on from the December 2007 peak, real payroll disbursements are still down by nearly 1 percent. What kind of “recovery” is that about?

Measured on an income equivalent basis, then, a majority of the big rebound in the BLS headline number has consisted of “40 percent jobs”. Granted, these fractional jobs do provide a monthly feed to headline stalking HFT algos and the gist for the moronic jobs number guessing game conducted by unemployable Wall Street executives otherwise known as “street economists”. But not by a long shot do they prove that the Fed’s money printing spree is beginning to bear fruit, as claimed by the cheerleading section of the Wall Street Journal shortly after the BLS release.  

Indeed, once upon a time financial journalists actually worked for a living by digging for facts, rather than simply re-posting the spin issued by Washington’s various ministries of truth. In this instance, even a modicum of investigation by the WSJ would have revealed that the 2.8 million part-time jobs “created” since June 2009 reflect the rebirth of the very same 2.8 million jobs that were first generated between 2000 and 2007. That this obvious fact has been completely ignored is not surprising. After all,  the reigning doctrine in the Keynesian puzzle palace inhabited by officialdom and financial journalists alike, calls for digging and refilling economic holes as the national policy of first resort.

The BLS data exhibit this syndrome with uncanny exactitude. In early 2000 there were 34.7 million jobs in the part-time economy. In response to the dotcom crash, the Fed ignited the housing and credit bubbles via Greenspan’s 1% money experiment, causing a consumption boom fueled by home ATM withdrawals and other consumer borrowings.  Accordingly, activity rates in leisure and hospitality, retail and personal services (think yoga teachers and gardeners) temporarily soared, with the part-time job count climbing by the aforesaid 2.8 million by late 2007. But this peak of 37.2 million part time jobs was pure bubble economics— attested to by the fact that every single one of these new jobs vanished during the 18 months of bubble liquidation otherwise known as the Great Recession. Indeed, when the NBER declared the bottom in June 2009, the part-time job count stood at 34.5 million, a hair under where it started at the turn of the century. …

 

… In short, Fed policies are mangling the Main Street economy by disabling the pricing mechanism in all financial markets, diverting capital to unproductive speculation and rent-seeking and leaving genuine entrepreneurs and businessmen adrift in a fog of financial disorder. Needless to say, the result is tepid growth of incomes and jobs—-a lamentable condition that the Fed cannot fix with “moar” monetary stimulus because decades of the latter are what has caused the problem.

More importantly, the impossibility of fixing a structural problem with Keynesian cyclical medicine means that the monetary politburo will descend into an ever more incoherent babble as the “incoming data” fail to match its clueless forecasts. In this regard, not only were Wednesday’s minutes an embarrassing exercise in Washington pettifoggery, they were also self-evidently a fraud and lie—–spun well after the meeting in an attempt to undo Bernanke’s original message.  It is bad enough that the nation’s vast, infinitely complex $16 trillion economy is being run by an unelected 12-person monetary politburo. But now the commissars have completely lost both their bearings and their credibility.

Under these circumstances healthy capitalist financial markets would be afraid—very afraid.  But there are no honest markets left—-just a big romper room where the boys and girls and algos endeavor to extract windfalls from central bank word clouds. Still, the magnitude of the deformation that the Fed has wrought in the financial system cannot be under-estimated:  there remain even now tens of thousands of punters, fund managers and home gamers who do not see the Fed’s desperate incoherence, believing instead that “the market is cheap” and that buying the dips is a no loose proposition.

Let’s see. At the last bubble peak in early October 2007, the S&P 500 was only 100 points (or 5%) below today’s lofty peak, and it was deemed to be cheap by the 11th hour bulls at that moment because forward earnings were projected to be $110 per share, thereby trading at less than 16X.  As it happened, 2008 earnings ex-items came in more than a tad lower—- at $55 per share to be precise and actually at only $15 on the basis of honestly reported GAAP earnings.

In truth, at that moment in time financial bubbles—subprime, CDOs, monster LBOs, a raging Russell 2000— were evident everywhere in the financial system. So in late 2007 the market was not cheap even on a paint by the numbers basis.  At the end of the day, the only honest and reliable earnings number in today’s deformed capital markets is 12 month trailing GAAP EPS. The billions that Washington wastes on financial cops each year policing corporate SEC filings at least accomplish that much. At the 2007 peak, therefore, the market was actually trading at 19X earnings on an honestly accounted basis.

So here we are again, and the LTM earnings number on a GAAP basis for the S&P 500 is $87.50 per share. We are back at 19X trailing profits.  Too be sure, forward earnings ex-items are exactly as before—once again at $110 per share. So the market is purportedly “cheap” but here’s the skunk in the woodpile:  honest LTM GAAP earnings have been stuck at $87 per S&P 500 share for seven quarters—since Q3 2011.  In short, true earnings are not growing, China and the BRICs are rolling over, Europe is sinking into economic somnolence, Japan is a massive financial train-wreck waiting to happen, and based on the latest data it would appear that US GDP growth will average hardly 1%  during the three-quarters thru June. That’s stall speed, yet the gambling machines which occupy Wall Street rage on because they believe that Bernanke has their back, that this business cycle will never end and that this latest and greatest financial bubble will never be allowed to collapse. …

Peter Wehner on the “lawless” president.

Both Charles Krauthammer and Ramesh Ponnuru have spoken about the lawlessness of the Obama administration. Examples include (but are not limited to) unilaterally delaying implementation of the Affordable Care Act’s employer mandate, issuing health-care edicts that undermine the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, making unconstitutional “recess appointments” to the National Labor Relations Board and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, refusing to enforce current immigration laws related to illegal immigrants who were brought to America as children, and waving welfare work requirements.

This is all part of a pattern in which Mr. Obama enforces laws he likes and refuses to enforce (or unilaterally alters) laws he disagrees with. I suppose the temptation to act as a potentate is understandable; but it also happens to be illegal. The president, after all, has the constitutional duty to “take care that the Laws be faithfully executed” (see Article II, Section 3 for more). ..

Andy McCarthy has more in this vein.

Obama has never been clear on the distinction between sovereign and servant, between the American people and those, including himself, elected to do the people’s business. We saw that yet again this week with the president’s unilateral rewrite of the Bataan Death March known as the Affordable Care Act — Obamacare. For this president, laws are not binding expressions of the popular will, but trifling recommendations to be ignored when expedient.

The collapse of law — not just Obamacare but law in general — is the Obama administration’s most egregious scandal. With the IRS here, Benghazi there, and Eric Holder’s institutionalized malevolence crowding the middle, it gets little direct attention. Perhaps it is so ubiquitous, so quotidian, that we’ve become inured to it.

Above all else, though, the office of the president was created to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. For this president, to the contrary, law is non-existent — and not merely law in the traditional sense of our aspiration to be “a nation of laws not men.” Obama has contorted the law into a weapon against our constitutional order of divided powers and equal protection for every American. …

… The faithful execution of laws is never partisan; under Obama, the execution of laws is intensely partisan. He purports to make “recess appointments” when Congress is not in recess. He skirts Congress’s constitutional war powers by pretending that attacking another country (Libya) is not making war. If his core supporters are damaged by the suffocating laws he champions — most prominently, Obamacare — he claims the power to “waive” their provisions selectively. Meanwhile, huge bureaucracies are encouraged, expressly or by nod-and-wink, to harass the president’s opponents and push forward his redistributionist, production-strangling, Islamist-empowering agenda. The executive order — formerly an intra-branch efficiency device designed to organize the exercise of the president’s constitutional powers and the enforcement of Congress’s laws — has effectively become legislation, the president substituting his edicts for our laws. …

Media Bistro has a screen shot of the Oakland TV station announcing the names of the pilots of the Asiana plane. The lead pilot was Capt. Sum Ting Wong. Co-pilot was Wi Tu Lo.

On today’s Noon newscast on KTVU, the station claimed it had “just learned the names of the 4 pilots on board” Asiana flight 214 which crashed last Saturday. But the station was given bad information that made it all the way into the newscast. If you read the names it becomes immediately clear this is a joke, which went unnoticed by the newsroom, producers and the anchor.

You’ll recall earlier this week, KTVU touted its coverage as being not only first, but “100% accurate.”

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Roger Simon comments on the verdict.

Forget the over-zealous prosecutors and the repellent state attorney Angela Corey (who should be immediately disbarred or, my wife said sarcastically, elevated to director of Homeland Security) and even the unfortunate Trayvon Martin family (although it is certainly hard to forget them — they have our profound sympathies), the true loser at the Zimmerman trial was Barack Obama.

By injecting himself in a minor Florida criminal case by implying Martin could be his son, the president of the United States — a onetime law lecturer, of all things — disgraced himself and his office, made a mockery of our legal system and exacerbated racial tensions in our country, making them worse than they have been in years. This is the work of a reactionary, someone who consciously/unconsciously wants to push our nation back to the 1950s.

It is also the work of a narcissist who thinks of himself first, of his image, not of black, white or any other kind of people. It’s no accident that race relations in our country have gone backwards during his stewardship.

Congratulations to the jury for not acceding to this tremendous pressure and delivering the only conceivable honest verdict. This case should never have been brought to trial. It was, quite literally, the first American Stalinist “show trial.” There was, virtually, no evidence to convict George Zimmerman. It was a great day for justice that this travesty was finally brought to a halt. …

Mark Steyn posts on the trial.

Just when I thought the George Zimmerman “trial” couldn’t sink any lower, the prosecutorial limbo dancers of the State of Florida magnificently lowered their own bar in the final moments of their cable-news celebrity. In real justice systems, the state decides what crime has been committed and charges somebody with it. In the Zimmerman trial, the state’s “theory of the case” is that it has no theory of the case: might be murder, might be manslaughter, might be aggravated assault, might be a zillion other things, but it’s something. If you’re a juror, feel free to convict George Zimmerman of whatever floats your boat.

Nailing a guy on something, anything, is a time-honored American tradition: If you can’t get Al Capone on the Valentine’s Day massacre, get him on his taxes. Americans seem to have a sneaky admiration for this sort of thing, notwithstanding that, as we now know, the government is happy to get lots of other people on their taxes, too. Ever since the president of the United States (a man so cautious and deferential to legal niceties that he can’t tell you whether the Egyptian army removing the elected head of state counts as a military coup until his advisers have finished looking into the matter) breezily declared that if he had a son he’d look like Trayvon, ever since the U.S. Department of so-called Justice dispatched something called its “Community Relations Services” to Florida to help organize anti-Zimmerman rallies at taxpayer expense, ever since the politically savvy governor appointed a “special prosecutor” and the deplorably unsavvy Sanford Police Chief was eased out, the full panoply of state power has been deployed to nail Zimmerman on anything.

How difficult can that be in a country in which an Hispanic Obama voter can be instantly transformed into the poster boy for white racism? Who ya gonna believe — Al Sharpton or your lying eyes? …

Naturally, Jennifer Rubin wants part of this.

… This is not an instance in which the prosecution dispassionately weighs the evidence and decides whether guilt can be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. Prosecutors stoked the fire, crafted a media show and concocted a second-degree murder charge that is flimsy at best. They have not been on the side of the angels in this one.

That is not to say that their approach won’t “work,” if by that one means that it will cajole a jury into conviction despite the voluminous (forget “reasonable”) doubt raised in the trial. But it is that mound of evidence contributing to reasonable doubt that was in the prosecution’s hands nearly from the get-go and because of which an ethical, restrained prosecutor would never have filed a second-degree murder charge. “Justice” is not cobbling a flawed case to quench the thirst for justice and then letting a jury decide; that is by definition an abuse of prosecutorial discretion and unethical.

The awesome power of prosecutorial discretion is easily abused, especially when the president shows no restraint and the media pile on.

Maybe the jury will be wise to all of this, but sometimes juries are not. I don’t suppose the Justice Department would then help stage rallies for an Hispanic man unjustly charged and convicted in order to satiate the mob.

John Fund says it was Judicial Watch that discovered the DOJ involvement.

Judicial Watch, a conservative legal foundation, has used the Freedom of Information Act to uncover documents that show Eric Holder’s Justice Department used a “community relations” unit to support and stage-manage public protests in Florida against George Zimmerman after his controversial February 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin.

Justice’s Community Relations Service (CRS) even helped organize a meeting between Sanford, Fla., public officials and the local NAACP. The result was the resignation of police chief Bill Lee over his handling of the Martin case. While his resignation was rescinded after a few weeks by local officials, Chief Lee faced further pressure to leave his job and ultimately quit for good two months later. Valerie Houston, one of the pastors leading the protests against Zimmerman and Lee, praised the Community Relations Service as being “there for us.”

The website for the CRS claims it “does not take sides among disputing parties” and only provides “impartial conciliation and mediation services.” But the evidence of its activities in Sanford shows that it placed a large thumb on the scales of justice in the Zimmerman case. What can providing support for a “March for Trayvon Martin” rally headlined by the rabble-rousing Reverend Al Sharpton have to do with “conciliation and mediation”? …

Rich Lowry.

… Justice, in the sense of a deliberate, lawful judgment consistent with the facts, was never the driving passion of the Zimmerman-haters. They wanted a racial morality play. If Trayvon Martin had been shot by another black person, no one would have cared. Al Sharpton wouldn’t have made him a cause. Lawrence O’Donnell wouldn’t have batted an eyelash. No one outside his immediate family and friends would have ever known his name.

Trayvon Martin’s shooting was an ideologically useful tragedy, and so the vultures did their worst.

For comic relief we go to San Francisco where a restaurant’s neighbors have complained about smelling bacon. Wall Street Journal has the story.

The Haight-Ashbury district was all about peace and love until bacon entered the picture.

The trouble began in May, when this city’s health department shut down a popular restaurant called Bacon Bacon after neighbors’ complaints caused a permit delay. The neighbors’ concern: the scent of bacon grease was blowin’ in the wind.

Now bacon lovers have found out, and they’re raising a stink.

Ahead of a permit hearing scheduled for Thursday, nearly 3,000 bacon advocates have signed a petition in support of Bacon Bacon. Phylis Johnson-Silk, who lives around the corner and loves the place, is making signs that say, “Bacon rules!” and “Really? You complained to the cops that you smelled bacon?”

The restaurant’s owner printed up shirts that read, “Smell this!” and says they are selling like hot cakes. …

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Jennifer Rubin calls it amateur hour.

Now and then we get a perfect microcosm of the president’s ineptness. On foreign policy it’s Egypt and on domestic policy it’s the student loan debacle.

On Egypt, Foreign Policy reports: “Washington’s exhaustive attempts to be viewed as a neutral player in Egypt’s coup are unraveling as pro and anti-Muslim Brotherhood forces latch onto any evidence that America is against them.” Well, they both are right, I suppose. A policy in which neither side believes the U.S. is being constructive and in which it is impossible to tell what our policy is pretty much defines failure.

The domestic counterpart is the student loan mess. House Republicans agreed with the president’s compromise plan on the expiration of the student loan discount. But Senate Dems are at each other’s throats, a clear sign the president didn’t get support for his compromise before releasing it. The Hill reports:

‘Liberal firebrand Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) blasted a fellow Democratic senator Tuesday as a dispute over student loan rates escalated divisions within  the party.

The clash, which is highly unusual among party colleagues in the upper chamber, came at a private caucus meeting about a subject that is helping  Republicans land blows against their Democratic opponents.

“Elizabeth came out very strong against Manchin,” said a Democratic senator who requested anonymity to discuss the exchange. “She said, ‘They’re already making money off the backs of students, and this adds another $1 billion.’ “ ‘

The rival messages appeared to exasperate Sen. Charles Schumer (N.Y.), the Senate’s Democratic messaging chief, who engaged in an animated conversation with Sens. Joe Manchin, Tom Carper and Angus King before they met with reporters. House Speaker John Boehner (Ohio) had a nice soft ball over the plate which he casually hit over the fence in a written statement: …

Paul Brandus at The Week calls him “flounderer in chief.” 

Six months into his new term, President Obama should be feeling pretty good. After all, the economy is looking up and Americans are more confident about their prospects. The job market is healing and housing prices are up double-digits over the past year. New cars are rolling out of showrooms at the fastest pace in nearly six years. There’s nothing like that new car smell.

Yet to many folks in Washington and around the country, a different odor is discernible: It’s one of panic, they say, the smell of a president who is floundering. He seems to know it himself.

“I sure do wanna do some governing,” Obama said at a recent fundraiser. “I wanna get some stuff done. I’ve only got three and a half years left, and it goes by (snaps his fingers) like that.”

Most Americans wanna see some governing too. We wanna see some stuff get done. But we haven’t, at least not yet. For a man who claims to have an acute awareness of time, the president has an inexplicable knack for wasting it.

Tick tock: He spent the first four months of his new term fighting for gun control, an emotionally driven response to an issue of undeniable importance. But (and with the utmost respect to the victims of gun violence) it is not an issue on par with the number one concern for the vast majority of Americans: jobs and the economy. The White House has also been in reactive mode to the IRS mess, and the revelation that the government is tracking our phone calls, email, and snail mail. On top of that came a quiet news dump, deliberately timed to occur as the 4th of July weekend was getting underway, that the employer provision in ObamaCare, the president’s crowning domestic achievement thus far, was being delayed until after the 2014 midterms. …

Peter Foster at Telegraph, UK says foreign policy ratings are plummeting.

A fascinating new poll is out today that shows Barack Obama’s foreign policy approval rating has plummeted over the last two months.

On May 1 the Quinnipiac poll found that 47 per cent of Americans approved of Mr Obama’s handling of foreign policy, while 43 per cent disapproved. Two months later the same pollster has Mr Obama running a 12-point negative rating – 52 per cent disapprove, compared with 40 that approve.

That’s a sharp fall, given the fact that it comes after one of the busiest periods in Mr Obama’s presidency for foreign policy. There was the shirt-sleeve summit with China’s new president, the decision to do more in Syria, the announcement of talks with the Taliban and now, of course the coup-that-wasn’t in Egypt. …

All of this leads Megan McArdle to think the GOP will be in control in 2017. 

My assertion that there’s a 70% chance that the GOP controls White House, Senate, and House in 2017 has attracted a lot of pushback.  And it’s certainly possible that I’m wrong!  Here’s my thinking, for what it’s worth:

Since the Civil War, only two Democratic presidents have been succeeded by another Democrat.  Both of them–FDR and JFK–accomplished this by dying in office.

Since World War II, only four presidents have been succeeded by a member of their party.  As I mentioned above, two of them accomplished this by dying in office.  One of them accomplished this by resigning in disgrace ahead of his own impeachment.  Only one of them, Ronald Reagan, left office at the end of his appointed term and was succeeded by a duly elected member of his own party.  Mostly, the White House flips back and forth like a metronome.

At the beginning of Obama’s term, people were talking about the kind of Democratic dominance that FDR enjoyed.  Didn’t happen.  Isn’t going to.  So I think the GOP goes into the race with a big edge on the White House.  Voters just get tired after eight years.

For example, when I pointed out how few presidents have been succeeded by members of their own party, you may have been tempted to argue that Al Gore “really” won.  I’m not going to have that argument right now, but even assuming you’re correct, what does that tell you?  That after the greatest economic boom in decades, the Democratic vice president fought hard to a statistical tie with the Republican governor of Texas.  Sure, he wasn’t the most charismatic candidate either, but neither was George Bush.  Getting a third term in the White House just seems to be really difficult.  And Barack Obama is not going to finish with a ground-shaking economic boom.

Add to that the Democratic bench. …

A quaint thought leads off the latest column by Thomas Sowell.

I am so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.

Apparently other Americans also recognize that the sources of racism are different today from what they were in the past. According to a recent Rasmussen poll, 31 percent of blacks think that most blacks are racists, while 24 percent of blacks think that most whites are racist.

The difference between these percentages is not great, but it is remarkable nevertheless. After all, generations of blacks fought the white racism from which they suffered for so long. If many blacks themselves now think that most other blacks are racist, that is startling.

The moral claims advanced by generations of black leaders — claims that eventually touched the conscience of the nation and turned the tide toward civil rights for all — have now been cheapened by today’s generation of black “leaders,” who act as if it is all just a matter of whose ox is gored. …

Walter Williams’ takeaway from the Zimmerman trial was the sad state of black education.

As if more evidence were needed about the tragedy of black education, Rachel Jeantel, a witness for the prosecution in the George Zimmerman murder trial, put a face on it for the nation to see. Some of that evidence unfolded when Zimmerman’s defense attorney asked 19-year-old Jeantel to read a letter that she allegedly had written to Trayvon Martin’s mother. She responded that she doesn’t read cursive, and that’s in addition to her poor grammar, syntax and communication skills.

Jeantel is a senior at Miami Norland Senior High School. How in the world did she manage to become a 12th-grader without being able to read cursive writing? That’s a skill one would expect from a fourth-grader. Jeantel is by no means an exception at her school. Here are a few achievement scores from her school: Thirty-nine percent of the students score basic for reading, and 38 percent score below basic. In math, 37 percent score basic, and 50 percent score below basic. Below basic is the score when a student is unable to demonstrate even partial mastery of knowledge and skills fundamental for proficient work at his grade level. Basic indicates only partial mastery.

Few Americans, particularly black Americans, have any idea of the true magnitude of the black education tragedy. The education establishment might claim that it’s not their fault. They’re not responsible for the devastation caused by female-headed families, drugs, violence and the culture of dependency. But they are totally responsible for committing gross educational fraud. It’s educators who graduated Jeantel from elementary and middle school and continued to pass her along in high school. It’s educators who will, in June 2014, confer upon her a high-school diploma. …

Paul Mirengoff thinks there is nobody as clueless as John Kerry.

Has the United States ever had a more clueless Secretary of State than John Kerry? Perhaps, but I can’t think of one.

Not long ago, James Rosen traveled with Kerry to Egypt, among other places. Kerry met for two and half hours with then-President Mohammed Morsi. According to Rosen’s report in Playboy (yes, Playboy):

Kerry emerged from [the meeting] so persuaded of Morsi’s sincerity in pledging to administer the IMF reforms and extend an olive branch to his political opponents that Kerry decided on the spot to unlock $250 million in frozen U.S. aid.

Within 72 hours [Kerry's aides] informed us that the Egyptian Supreme Court had just canceled the parliamentary elections set for April and that the intentions of Morsi and the Brotherhood were again proving difficult to discern.
(Emphasis added)

There are areas in which Kerry’s ability to discern is unquestioned — French wine, yachts, and the like. But if one cannot discern the intentions of the Muslim Brotherhood, or worse, discerns them as extending the olive branch to political opponents — one shouldn’t dabble in, much less help shape, foreign policy.

Kerry is an old hand at romanticizing anti-American tyrants and would-be tyrants. Most recently, he perceived Bashar al-Assad as a potential U.S. ally and Middle East peace-broker, prepared to extend the olive branch to Israel.

Kerry isn’t totally devoid of the ability to judge character, though. He figured out that John Edwards was a phony. Then, he made Edwards his choice for Vice President of the United States.

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Great piece on the Voting Rights decision by Abby Thernstrom.

The Supreme Court did itself proud on Tuesday when it struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act. That is the provision of the law containing the formula that determined which jurisdictions should be kept in the penalty box for suspected discrimination—even after nearly half a century of dramatic and heartening racial progress. While passage of the 1965 act marked the death knell of the Jim Crow South, the elimination of one of the act’s obsolete provisions this week reflects the progress since.

With the court’s decision in ShelbyCounty v. Holder, the “covered” jurisdictions (mostly in the South) are free at last to exercise their constitutional prerogative to regulate their own elections. In killing Section 4, the court made unenforceable the preclearance provision in Section 5 of the act that required certain states and jurisdictions to obtain Justice Department permission for any laws or actions related to voting. So “covered” jurisdictions are no longer covered by Section 4, and the requirement that they get federal approval before even moving a polling place across the street is dead.

The civil rights community is up in arms over Shelby. Get ready for pressure on Congress to respond. But what could lawmakers do? Restore federal powers to review all proposed changes in election procedure—with the burden of proving an absence of discrimination on the jurisdiction itself, as was the case in pre-Shelby law? In theory, Congress could just use the original formula and update it with data from the 2012 elections. The problem: Members of Congress would not like the result.

In 2012, no state in the Union had a total voter turnout rate, for whites or minorities, under 50%—a figure that was the heart of the old formula. The turnout in the six states covered entirely by Section 5 was well above the national average. Mississippi, once the worst of the Jim Crow states, had the highest total turnout rate in the nation. …

We have tried to ignore the Zimmerman trial, but Roger Simon has a good post.

If you still, for some reason, need proof that racism in today’s America is largely a liberal mind game, watch ten minutes of the George Zimmerman trial.

This farce of jurisprudence would never have occurred without leading “liberals” like Al Sharpton and his mainstream media buddies beating the drums endlessly for an indictment in a case the local Florida authorities never wanted to try (and for good reason).

Barack Obama helped out too, injecting the presidency (and race) in an unfortunate, but minor regional death by saying “If I had a son, he’d look just like Trayvon.”

I guess all black people look alike to Obama who, unlike Trayvon, attended the most exclusive private school in Hawaii followed by Occidental, Columbia and Harvard in that order. No such luck for Trayvon and, most likely, not much more had he lived. He wasn’t exactly an honor student and evidently dabbled in petty crime. But he did share something with the president, an attraction for cannibis sativa.

Whatever his or the president’s proclivities, this trial should never have happened. As we now know, with the prosecution’s case wrapped, not only is there no evidence to prove Zimmerman guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, there’s virtually no evidence to prove him guilty at all. Farce indeed.

Will we have riots if, as is now widely predicted, Zimmerman is innocent of all charges? Beats me, but what I know is this: if we do, Sharpton should be indicted for incitement. …

More from John Hinderaker.

… The jury has heard Zimmerman tell investigating police officers that Trayvon Martin jumped him, knocked him to the ground, pummeled his face and banged his head repeatedly into the pavement. Fearful of his life, Zimmerman says he pulled his gun from his waistband and fired one shot at Martin, which proved fatal. Zimmerman’s account is supported by Jonathan Good, the only eyewitness to any part of the altercation between the two men, who testified that he saw Martin on top of Zimmerman, punching him in the face. Zimmerman’s defense is also supported by his own condition after the altercation–he had a bruised face and a bloody nose, and the back of his head had several sharp horizontal cuts, which could only have been caused by his head being smashed against the pavement, just as Zimmerman said. Further, the testimony of the chief police investigator into the incident showed that the investigation’s findings were consistent with Zimmerman’s account.

So the evidence in favor of Zimmerman’s claim of self-defense is powerful. …

Inept; thy name is obama. Seth Mandel on the obamacare belly flop.

Since the legislative monstrosity known as ObamaCare was both complex and poorly constructed, its current disastrous rollout should not be too surprising. But it turns out the bill’s critics (most of the country) weren’t the only doubters who foresaw this mess: National Journal points out that the Obama administration also knew exactly what was coming.

The National Journal story includes a chart illustrating how the insurance exchanges work in order to underscore what those who hoped for a seamless debut were up against. But the exchanges are far from the only setback. As Jonathan wrote last week, the administration announced it would postpone by one year the mandate that businesses with more than 50 employees offer them insurance. The mandate is an unbearable financial burden on businesses, so it was delayed until after the midterm elections to give Democrats some breathing space before the economic damage they have done fully sets in.

But there are a couple problems with that. First, the administration’s action is of dubious legality. Second, delaying the employer mandate could drive up the cost of the new law by driving more people seeking insurance into the exchanges. But that’s not how the Congressional Budget Office scored the bill, a point Paul Ryan is making when he asks the CBO to re-score the bill without the first year of the employer mandate–to score the actual law as we have it now, in other words, instead of letting the administration bypass Congress and game the system to fool the CBO. …

Peter Wehner writes on the serial ineptness of our foreign policy. The policy led by the petulant narcissist.

Barack Obama’s serial ineptness in foreign policy is not only continuing; it seems to be accelerating. The most recent example comes from a story in the New York Times in which we read this:

“Increasingly frustrated by his dealings with President Hamid Karzai, President Obama is giving serious consideration to speeding up the withdrawal of United States forces from Afghanistan and to a “zero option” that would leave no American troops there after next year, according to American and European officials.

Mr. Obama is committed to ending America’s military involvement in Afghanistan by the end of 2014, and Obama administration officials have been negotiating with Afghan officials about leaving a small “residual force” behind. But his relationship with Mr. Karzai has been slowly unraveling, and reached a new low after an effort last month by the United States to begin peace talks with the Taliban in Qatar.

Mr. Karzai promptly repudiated the talks and ended negotiations with the United States over the long-term security deal that is needed to keep American forces in Afghanistan after 2014.

A videoconference between Mr. Obama and Mr. Karzai designed to defuse the tensions ended badly, according to both American and Afghan officials with knowledge of it.”

Remind me again, but wasn’t one of the key selling points of Mr. Obama in 2008 that he would improve America’s relations in the world; that he would sit down with other leaders and reach agreements his predecessor did not; and that Afghanistan was the “good war” that America would prevail in under his inspired leadership? …

Washington Post article goes a long way to explain why the food stamp program has exploded.  

A good recruiter needs to be liked, so Dillie Nerios filled gift bags with dog toys for the dog people and cat food for the cat people. She packed crates of cookies, croissants, vegetables and fresh fruit. She curled her hair and painted her nails fluorescent pink. “A happy, it’s-all-good look,” she said, checking her reflection in the rearview mirror. Then she drove along the Florida coast to sign people up for food stamps.

Her destination on a recent morning was a 55-and-over community in central Florida, where single-wide trailers surround a parched golf course. On the drive, Nerios, 56, reviewed techniques she had learned for connecting with some of Florida’s most desperate senior citizens during two years on the job. Touch a shoulder. Hold eye contact. Listen for as long as it takes. “Some seniors haven’t had anyone to talk to in some time,” one of the state-issued training manuals reads. “Make each person feel like the only one who matters.

In fact, it is Nerios’s job to enroll at least 150 seniors for food stamps each month, a quota she usually exceeds. Alleviate hunger, lessen poverty: These are the primary goals of her work. But the job also has a second and more controversial purpose for cash-strapped Florida, where increasing food-stamp enrollment has become a means of economic growth, bringing almost $6 billion each year into the state. The money helps to sustain communities, grocery stores and food producers. It also adds to rising federal entitlement spending and the U.S. debt.

Nerios prefers to think of her job in more simple terms: “Help is available,” she tells hundreds of seniors each week. “You deserve it. So, yes or no?”

In Florida and everywhere else, the answer in 2013 is almost always yes. A record 47 million Americans now rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), also known as food stamps, available for people with annual incomes below about $15,000. The program grew during the economic collapse because 10 million more Americans dropped into poverty. It has continued to expand four years into the recovery because state governments and their partner organizations have become active promoters, creating official “SNAP outreach plans” and hiring hundreds of recruiters like Nerios. …

Andrew Malcolm reports on an al Jazeera story on the night Bin Laden assumed room temperature.

… The report on the al Jazeera website also describes how:

The SEALs achieved complete surprise. Although the team had trained for a fierce firefight, anticipating booby traps and possibly a mined roof, the family said it never expected an attack, possibly lulled by nearly a decade of successful seclusion.

The assault came on a quiet, dark night when Amal left the other wives to go upstairs to bin Laden’s small bedroom. She said he did reach for a weapon during the assault, which began shortly before 1 a.m. And he ordered all family out of his room, but they refused.

She’s the one who rushed a SEAL and was shot in the knee. She was left on a bed while other family were taken and searched by the men. In 37 minutes the foreigners were gone.

The report tells of the family’s confined lives in the compound’s cramped rooms, how the custom buildings had numerous electricity meters to mask their substantial usage and how when one servant’s daughter recognized bin Laden on TV, women were banned from ever watching.

It also reveals how bin Laden feared a nearby tree grove could harbor spies. And an almost humorously incongruous detail that whenever bin Laden exercised outdoors in the courtyard, he wore a large cowboy hat to cover his face. Not exactly the ideal head-covering to blend into a turbaned society.

It tells of their movements around Pakistan before settling into the custom compound in 2005, about the time Pakistan officially closed the books on its bin Laden hunt. …

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Instead of Prez Bystander or Prez Pick-and-Choose, George Will thinks ‘President Never Mind’ is an apt description.

… Although the Constitution has no Article VIII, the administration acts as though there is one that reads: “Notwithstanding all that stuff in other articles about how laws are made, if a president finds a law politically inconvenient, he can simply post on the White House Web site a notice saying: Never mind.”

Never mind that the law stipulates 2014 as the year when employers with 50 full-time workers are mandated to offer them health-care coverage or pay fines. Instead, 2015 will be the year. Unless Democrats see a presidential election coming.

This lesson in the Obama administration’s approach to the rule of law is pertinent to the immigration bill, which at last count had 222 instances of a discretionary “may” and 153 of “waive.” Such language means that were the Senate bill to become law, the executive branch would be able to do pretty much as it pleases, even to the point of saying about almost anything: Never mind.

Thomas Sowell completed a four part series on the mindset of the left. Part one deals with their refusal to acknowledge the existence of evil.

… At least as far back as the 18th century, the left has struggled to avoid facing the plain fact of evil — that some people simply choose to do things that they know to be wrong when they do them. Every kind of excuse, from poverty to an unhappy childhood, is used by the left to explain and excuse evil.

All the people who have come out of poverty or unhappy childhoods, or both, and become decent and productive human beings, are ignored. So are the evils committed by people raised in wealth and privilege, including kings, conquerors and slaveowners.

Why has evil been such a hard concept for many on the left to accept? The basic agenda of the left is to change external conditions. But what if the problem is internal? What if the real problem is the cussedness of human beings?

Rousseau denied this in the 18th century and the left has been denying it ever since. Why? Self preservation.

If the things that the left wants to control — institutions and government policy — are not the most important factors in the world’s problems, then what role is there for the left? …

Part Two of Thomas Sowell’s series covers the left’s policies that keep people in poverty.

… “Poverty” once had some concrete meaning — not enough food to eat or not enough clothing or shelter to protect you from the elements, for example. Today it means whatever the government bureaucrats, who set up the statistical criteria, choose to make it mean. And they have every incentive to define poverty in a way that includes enough people to justify welfare state spending.

Most Americans with incomes below the official poverty level have air-conditioning, television, own a motor vehicle and, far from being hungry, are more likely than other Americans to be overweight. But an arbitrary definition of words and numbers gives them access to the taxpayers’ money.

This kind of “poverty” can easily become a way of life, not only for today’s “poor,” but for their children and grandchildren.

Even when they have the potential to become productive members of society, the loss of welfare state benefits if they try to do so is an implicit “tax” on what they would earn that often exceeds the explicit tax on a millionaire.

If increasing your income by $10,000 would cause you to lose $15,000 in government benefits, would you do it?

In short, the political left’s welfare state makes poverty more comfortable, while penalizing attempts to rise out of poverty. …

Part Three traces the origins of left foolishness to 18th century France. 

… Some of the most sweeping and spectacular rhetoric of the left occurred in 18th century France, where the very concept of the left originated in the fact that people with certain views sat on the left side of the National Assembly.

The French Revolution was their chance to show what they could do when they got the power they sought. In contrast to what they promised — “liberty, equality, fraternity” — what they actually produced were food shortages, mob violence and dictatorial powers that included arbitrary executions, extending even to their own leaders, such as Robespierre, who died under the guillotine.

In the 20th century, the most sweeping vision of the left — Communism — spread over vast regions of the world and encompassed well over a billion human beings. Of these, millions died of starvation in the Soviet Union under Stalin and tens of millions in China under Mao.

Milder versions of socialism, with central planning of national economies, took root in India and in various European democracies.

If the preconceptions of the left were correct, central planning by educated elites with vast amounts of statistical data at their fingertips, expertise readily available, and backed by the power of government, should have been more successful than market economies where millions of individuals pursued their own individual interests willy-nilly. …

Dr. Sowell closes with his own experiences.

At the heart of the left’s vision of the world is the implicit assumption that high-minded third parties like themselves can make better decisions for other people than those people can make for themselves.

That arbitrary and unsubstantiated assumption underlies a wide spectrum of laws and policies over the years, ranging from urban renewal to ObamaCare.

One of the many international crusades by busybodies on the left is the drive to limit the hours of work by people in other countries — especially poorer countries — in businesses operated by multinational corporations. One international monitoring group has taken on the task of making sure that people in China do not work more than the legally prescribed 49 hours per week.

Why international monitoring groups, led by affluent Americans or Europeans, would imagine that they know what is best for people who are far poorer than they are, and with far fewer options, is one of the many mysteries of the busybody elite.

As someone who left home at the age of 17, with no high school diploma, no job experience and no skills, I spent several years learning the hard way what poverty is like. One of the happier times during those years was a brief period when I worked 60 hours a week — 40 hours delivering telegrams during the day and 20 hours working part-time in a machine shop at night. …

The Economist explains why diesel engines are becoming more popular.

NOT to belittle the success Tesla Motors has had with its Model S luxury electric car—outselling its petrol-powered equivalents since being launched last year—the prospects for battery-powered vehicles generally may never shine quite as bright again. Babbage believes their day in the sun is about to be eclipsed by, wait for it, the diesel engine.

Surely not that dirty, noisy, smelly, lumbering lump of a motor that was difficult to start in the winter? Certainly not. A whole new generation of sprightly diesels—developed over the past few years—bear no resemblance to your father’s clattering, oil-burner of an Oldsmobile. It is no exaggeration to say that, with its reputation for unreliability and anaemic performance, the Olds 4.3-litre diesel from the late 1970s single-handedly destroyed the reputation of diesel engines in America for decades to come. Quite possibly, it also contributed to Oldsmobile’s own demise.

Later this year, Americans will get their first chance to experience what a really advanced diesel is like—and why Europeans opt for diesels over hybrids, plug-in electrics and even petrol-powered cars. The leader of the new pack is the Mazda 6, completely redesigned for 2014, with the choice of either a 2.5-litre four-cylinder petrol engine or a 2.2-litre turbo-charged diesel. The diesel has 30% better fuel economy and provides oodles more pulling power. Good as the petrol version is, motorists who choose it over the diesel will miss out on a lot.

Mazda is not the only motor manufacturer with an advanced diesel in the works. Among others, Mitsubishi Motors has been selling cars with a new generation of 1.8-litre and 2.2-litre diesel engines in Europe since 2010. Hedging its bets on hybrids, Toyota has also been testing several radically new diesel designs.

What marks this latest generation of diesel engines from even their “common-rail” predecessors of the late 1990s, let alone their belching ancestors from the 1970s, is the use of a surprisingly low compression ratio of around 14-to-1 rather than the more usual 16-to-1 or higher. The reduction in cylinder pressure may sound marginal, but it gives rise to a virtuous cycle of beneficial effects unavailable before. …

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John Fund explains how the dishonesty of President Pick-and-Choose will probably cause the collapse of immigration reform.

Chuck Todd, the political director of NBC News, startled much of Washington on Sunday morning when he announced on Meet the Press that White House aides he’s spoken to have lost confidence that immigration reform will pass. He reported that “suddenly the White House doesn’t see a path” to passing a bill through the House this year.

There are many reasons why immigration reform is in trouble, ranging from the fact that immigration is not currently a burning political issue to the inherent complexity and internal contradictions of a 1,200-page bill.

But there is another less-discussed reason. The Obama administration’s instinctive dishonesty and contempt for the rule of law are finally catching up with it. Few Republicans in the House — even those who devoutly want immigration reform — trust the Obama administration to enforce with consistency and integrity anything that passes Congress.

Take the 900-page monstrosity of a law that’s been dubbed “Obamacare.” When it passed back in 2010, the law was clear on many points. It decreed that beginning in 2014, any company with more than 50 full-time employees would be required to offer them health-care insurance or pay stiff fines. But it’s been impossible, in the three years since the law’s passage, to work out the Byzantine requirements of that mandate. Max Baucus (D., Mont.) said in a congressional hearing he feared that Obamacare’s implementation would result in a “train wreck,” and many other Democrats have come to share his anxiety. White House aides fretted that enforcing the mandate’s timetable would hurt job creation in the run-up to the 2014 midterm elections and put Democratic control of the Senate in jeopardy.

The White House could have handled the problem as the Constitution envisioned and opened up negotiations with Congress to change the law. But it quickly concluded that the Republican House would demand too much in exchange for any adjustment to the law. …

Charles Krauthammer has fun with globalony.

… For the sake of argument, nonetheless, let’s concede that global warming is precisely what Obama thinks it is. Then answer this: What in God’s name is his massive new regulatory and spending program — which begins with a war on coal and ends with billions in more subsidies for new Solyndras — going to do about it?

The United States has already radically cut carbon dioxide emissions — more than any country on earth since 2006, according to the International Energy Agency. Emissions today are back down to 1992 levels.

And yet, at the same time, global emissions have gone up. That’s because — surprise! — we don’t control the energy use of the other 96 percent of humankind.

At the heart of Obama’s program are EPA regulations that will make it impossible to open any new coal plant and will systematically shut down existing plants. “Politically, the White House is hesitant to say they’re having a war on coal,” explained one of Obama’s climate advisers. “On the other hand, a war on coal is exactly what’s needed.”

Net effect: tens of thousands of jobs killed, entire states impoverished. This at a time of chronically and crushingly high unemployment, slow growth, jittery markets and deep economic uncertainty.

But that’s not the worst of it. This massive self-sacrifice might be worthwhile if it did actually stop global warming and save the planet. What makes the whole idea nuts is that it won’t. This massive self-inflicted economic wound will have no effect on climate change. …

Craig Pirrong reminds us of the folly of ethanol mandates. Mandates, by the way, signed into law by George W. Bush who proved he could be as stupid as the idiot incumbent.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.  A couple of examples from environmentalist attempts to mitigate climate change.

The first relates to ethanol.  In its infinite wisdom, in 2010 Congress mandated the use of renewable fuels with lower CO2 content than corn ethanol to meet the renewable fuel standard it created in 2005.  Sugar ethanol from Brazil fits the bill.  But given the blend wall and other limits on ethanol usage, this created an excess of corn ethanol in the US, and created an incentive to export excess corn ethanol from the US to Brazil, and import sugar ethanol from Brazil.

The problem being, of course that all the fuel burned to ship ethanol from the US to Brazil, and from Brazil to the US, pours CO2 into the atmosphere.  And the net result: more CO2 emissions than would have occurred absent the mandate to meet the renewable fuel standards with low CO2 producing fuels:

Left hypocrisy exposed by Victor Davis Hanson.

One of the strangest things about the modern progression in liberal thought is its increasing comfort with elitism and high style. Over the last 30 years, the enjoyment of refined tastes, both material and psychological, has become a hallmark of liberalism — hand in glove with the art of professional altruism, so necessary to the guilt-free enjoyment of the good life. Take most any contemporary issue, and the theme of elite progressivism predominates.

Higher education? A visitor from Mars would note that the current system of universities and colleges is designed to promote the interests of an elite at the expense of the middle and lower-middle classes. UCLA, Yale, and even CSU Stanislaus run on premises far more reactionary and class-based than does Wal-Mart. The teaching loads and course responsibilities of tenured full professors have declined over the last half-century, while the percentage of units taught by graduate students and part-time faculty, with few benefits and low pay, has soared.

The number of administrators has likewise climbed — even as student indebtedness has skyrocketed, along with the unemployment rate among recent college graduates. A typical scenario embodying these bizarre trends would run something like the following: The UC assistant provost for diversity affairs, or the full professor of Italian literature, focusing on gender and the self, depend on lots of graduate and undergraduate students in the social sciences and humanities piling up debt without any guarantee of jobs, while part-time faculty subsidize the formers’ lifestyles by teaching, without grading assistants, the large introductory undergraduate courses, getting paid a third to half what those with tenure receive.

The conference and the academic book, with little if any readership, promote the career interest and income of the trendy administrator and the full professor, and are subsidized by either the taxpayers or the students or both. All of the above assumes that a nine-month teaching schedule, with tenure, grants, sabbaticals, and release time, are above reproach and justify yearly tuition hikes exceeding the rate of inflation. The beneficiaries of the system win exemption from criticism through loud support of the current progressive agenda, as if they were officers with swagger sticks in the culture wars who must have their own perks if they are to properly lead the less-well-informed troops out of the trenches. …

Today we opened with an example of the extra-legal actions of the administration and Kim Strassel provides more at the close. 

For a true expression of the imperious and extralegal tendencies of the Obama administration, there is little that compares with the Wisdom of Solomon. Lafe Solomon, that is, the acting general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board.

Mr. Solomon’s wisdom was on revealing display this week, in the form of a newly disclosed letter that the Obama appointee sent to Cablevision in May. The letter was tucked into Cablevison’s petition asking the Supreme Court this week to grant an emergency stay of NLRB proceedings against it. The Supremes unfortunately denied that request, though the exercise may prove valuable for shining new light on the labor board’s conceit.

A half-year has passed since the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Noel Canning that President Obama’s appointments to the NLRB were unconstitutional, and thus that the board lacks a legal quorum. In May, the Third Circuit affirmed this ruling. Yet the NLRB—determined to keep churning out a union agenda—has openly defied both appeals courts by continuing to issue rulings and complaints.

Regional directors in April filed two such unfair-labor-practice complaints against Cablevision. The company requested that Mr. Solomon halt the proceedings, given the NLRB’s invalid status. It is Mr. Solomon’s refusal, dated May 28, that provides the fullest expression of the NLRB’s insolence.

The acting general counsel begins his letter by explaining that the legitimacy of the board is really neither here nor there. Why? Because Mr. Solomon was himself “appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate”—and therefore, apparently, is now sole and unchecked arbiter of all national labor policy.

This is astonishing on many levels, the least of which is that it is untrue. Mr. Solomon is the acting general counsel precisely because the Senate has refused to confirm him since he was first nominated in June 2011. Nor will it, ever, given his Boeing escapades. …

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Egyptian history lesson from Mark Steyn.

After midday prayers on Wednesday, just about the time the army were heading over to the presidential palace to evict Mohammed Morsi, the last king of Egypt was laying to rest his aunt, Princess Fawzia, who died in Alexandria on Tuesday at the grand old age of 91. She was born in 1921, a few months before the imperial civil servants of London and Paris invented the modern Middle East and the British protectorate of Egypt was upgraded to a kingdom, and seven years before Hassan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood.

A long life reminds us of how short history is: Princess Fawzia outlived the Egyptian monarchy, and the Nasserist fascism and pan-Arabism that succeeded it, and the doomed “United Arab Republic” of Egypt and Syria, and the fetid third-of-a-century “stability” of the Mubarak kleptocracy. And she came within 24 hours of outliving the Muslim Brotherhood’s brief, disastrous grip on power. …

… Washington has spent six decades getting Egypt wrong, ever since the CIA insouciantly joined the coup against Farouk under the contemptuous name “Operation Fat F***er.” We sank billions into Mubarak’s Swiss bank accounts, and got nothing in return other than Mohammed Atta flying through the office window. Even in a multicultural age, liberal Americans casually assume that “developing countries” want to develop into something like a Western democracy. But Egypt only goes backwards. Princess Fawzia is best remembered in the Middle East as, briefly, the first consort of the late shah of Iran, whom she left in 1946 because she found Tehran hopelessly dull and provincial after bustling, modern, cosmopolitan Cairo. In our time, the notion of Egypt as “modern” is difficult to comprehend: According to the U.N., 91 percent of its women have undergone female genital mutilation — not because the state mandates it, but because the menfolk insist on it. Over half its citizenry subsists on less than two dollars a day. A rural population so inept it has to import its food, Egyptians live on the land, but can’t live off it. …

… This week, the Brotherhood was checked — but not by anything recognizable as the forces of freedom. Is it only a temporary respite? Certainly, in the age of what Caroline Glick calls “America’s self-induced smallness,” Western ideas of real liberty have little purchase in Cairo. Egypt will get worse, and, self-induced or not, America is getting smaller.

The news from and about Egypt led to rather droll posts from Power Line’s Paul Mirengoff. Here’s the first suggesting this is the end of amateur hour.

David Goldman shows, among other things, that the Egyptian coup signals that Saudi Arabia, not the U.S., will have the leading foreign role in Egypt’s affairs going forward. At the risk of sounding unpatriotic, that’s probably a good thing for Egypt under the present circumstances.

I have suggested, and Goldman goes a long way toward demonstrating, that the Egyptian turmoil is more about economics than politics. The Saudis might just be able to keep Egypt financially afloat and better fed.

Moreover, even from a political point of view, Egypt is probably better off taking its cues from the Saudis than from President Obama. As Goldman says: “The notion that [the Muslim Brotherhood's] band of Jew-hating jihadi thugs might become the vehicle for a transition to a functioning Muslim democracy was perhaps the stupidest notion to circulate in Washington in living memory.” …

John Kerry is next to feel Mirengoff’s lash with an assist from John Hinderaker.

… JOHN adds: As several readers have pointed out, the State Department has now walked back its denial that Kerry was on his yacht while the crisis in Egypt took place:

“As regime change was unfolding in Egypt, Secretary of State John Kerry spent time on his boat Wednesday afternoon in Nantucket Sound, the State Department acknowledged to CBS News on Friday, after repeatedly denying that Kerry was aboard any boat.

“While he was briefly on his boat on Wednesday, Secretary Kerry worked around the clock all day including participating in the President’s meeting with his national security council,” said State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki, naming a series of Egyptian and international officials Kerry had spoken with on Wednesday.

Psaki’s acknowledgment marked a stark reversal from previous denials that Kerry was on any boat whatsoever.”

Two observations here: First, the administration’s “lie first and figure out the facts later” approach is typical. Have we ever seen such instinctive dishonesty from any administration? Second, I share Paul’s view that the less John Kerry has to do with events in the Middle East, the better. And the same goes for Barack Obama. Yesterday my tweet on that subject was, I am proud to say, Glenn Reynolds’ “Tweet of the Day”:

“On Egypt, Obama should strive for irrelevance. It’s the best he is going to do. …”

Not fans of Lurch, The Boston Herald has some fun.

… Kerry’s vacation kerfuffle is being seen as the latest stumble in what has already been a rocky five months for the nation’s top diplomat.

“Kerry is having a pretty tumultuous tenure at the State Department,” Tom Whalen of Boston University said. “It seems everything he touches is not turning out well.”

Said Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution: “I’m not sure he’s really fully established himself as the go-to guy on foreign policy in the public’s eye here in the United States. I would think he’d want to define his leadership on some of the big crises of the day. Let him have his Fourth of July weekend, but recognize that this is an issue — Egypt — where he’s probably got to step up his game.” …

Turning to President Bystander’s economic mess, CNS News tells us we have passed a record 54 months of 7.5% unemployment.

Since January 2009, when Barack Obama was inaugurated as president, the United States has seen 54 straight months with the unemployment rate at 7.5 percent or higher, which is the longest stretch of unemployment at or above that rate since 1948, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics started calculating the national unemployment rate.

Today, BLS reported that the seasonally adjusted national unemployment rate for June was 7.6 percent, the same it was in May.

In December 2008, the month after Obama was first elected and the month before he was inaugurated, unemployment was 7.3 percent. In January 2009, it climbed to 7.8 percent. …

Breitbart drills down into the numbers and figures only 47% of American adults have full time work. Way to go President Part-Time!

The release of the June Jobs’ Report Friday was something of a relief for the markets. The Labor Department reported that the economy gained 195,000 jobs in June, which beat economists’ expectations. The Department also reported that the economy gained 70,000 more jobs in April and May than it originally estimated. The report, however, also provides clear evidence that the nation is splitting into two; only 47% of Americans have a full-time job and those who don’t are finding it increasingly out of reach.

Of the 144 million Americans employed last month, only 116 million were working full-time. Friday’s report showed that 58.7% of the civilian adult population of 245 million was working last month. Only 47% of Americans, however, had a full-time job. …

More on this from the NY Post. 

The fireworks had barely fizzled in the Hudson River Friday morning when a new round of celebrations took hold during a wildly gyrating day on Wall Street.

The jobs report had a “robust” 195,000 new positions created last month as the unemployment rate held steady at 7.6 percent. Hallelujah!

Unfortunately, the problem that has stunted any green shoots in jobs recovery persisted in June and shows no signs of abating.

The problem continues to be that a huge swath of the jobs being created are part-time or temporary.

Is a job really a job if it’s only for a few weeks, or if workers have to show up every morning to see if there is temporary work that day? Should one part-time job be counted the same as a full-time position? …

The Atlantic lets us know what liberals think of the job numbers.

Another month, another jobs report that’s good, but not quite good enough. 

Employers beat expectations in June by adding 195,000 new workers to their payrolls. Thanks to the government’s data revisions, we know they added 195,000 in May as well, and 199,000 in April (as shown in the Washington Post graph below). Over the past year, we’ve averaged 191,000 per month. Over the past 6 months, we’ve averaged 202,000. We’re nothing if not consistent. 

Which means we’ve still got a long slog ahead

Unemployment is still hovering at 7.6 percent, unchanged this month thanks to an influx of new workers into the labor force. Brookings projects that we’ll still be above 7 percent by the end of the year. Meanwhile, there are still 2 million fewer workers on U.S. payrolls than at our pre-crash peak. If you assume we’ll keep adding jobs at our 6-month average pace, we’re looking at 10 to 11 months before we get back to where things were before the market fell apart.   

When you account for new workers entering the labor market, the Hamilton Project projects it will still take us more than 7 years to get back to full employment at our current pace — assuming we miraculously avoid hitting another recession during that time. …

Jennifer Rubin thinks the part time employment and the climate push are related.

The addition of 195,000 non-farm payroll jobs (plus upward revisions in past months) is nothing to sneeze at. It is some confirmation that sequester has not sent the economy careening, as the White House warned. But the biggest story here is the part-time unemployment numbers.

The U-6 number (unemployed, part-time employed and underemployed) took a statistically alarming jump from 13.8 to 14.3 percent. Coupled with 322,000 part-time jobs and 1 million workers who abandoned the job market.

Why all this part-time employment? It is hard to avoid the conclusion that it is related to Obamacare, which places burdens on employers for each full-time worker. Had the Obama administration not attempted triage by delaying the employer mandate, the numbers could well have been expected to worsen (and still could).

If we want to arrest the flight from the job market and give a boost to full-time jobs, we should at the very least do no more harm. Freezing Obamacare and foregoing anti-growth climate change legislation would be helpful. Instead of raising energy costs, domestic energy development is the no-brainer move, but one the president appears incapable of adopting. …

The ABC agents’ bust and jailing of the UVA coed is back in the news according to Instapundit.

… These agents should be fired, and probably prosecuted. And if Virginia wants to move into the 21st late 20th century, it could abolish its Alcoholic Beverage Commission.

UPDATE: Reader Karl Bock writes: “Besides getting us pretty riled up here in Charlottesville, this is another example of the continued nationwide trend towards the militarization of bureaucracies at the federal, state and local level. Armed ABC agents running a parking lot sting operation aimed at underaged drinkers is just calling down a potential tragedy. There is simply no reason for those guys to be armed under those circumstances. It’s not like they were raiding stills up in the hollers of Nelson County.” Indeed.

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There’s a new “insiders” book in DC. Since it might figure in this morning’s talk show fest we have a review from the Washington Post.

Mark Leibovich toyed with several titles for his new book on self-interest, self-importance and self-perpetuation in the nation’s capital. “Suck-Up City” was one. “The Club” was another. Finally, he settled on “This Town,” a nod, he explains, to the “faux disgust” with which people here refer to their natural habitat.

It’s not bad, but the longer I roamed around “This Town,” the more I thought Leibovich should have borrowed Newsweek’s memorable post-Sept. 11, 2001, cover line: “Why They Hate Us.” His tour through Washington only feeds the worst suspicions anyone can have about the place — a land driven by insecurity, hypocrisy and cable hits, where friendships are transactional, blind-copying is rampant and acts of public service appear largely accidental.

Only two things keep you turning pages between gulps of Pepto: First, in Leibovich’s hands, this state of affairs is not just depressing, it’s also kind of funny. Second, you want to know whether the author thinks anyone in Washington — anyone at all? — is worthy of redemption.

Leibovich, chief national correspondent for the New York Times Magazine and a former reporter at The Washington Post (where we overlapped briefly but never met), is a master of the political profile, with his subjects revealing themselves in the most unflattering light. That talent becomes something of a crutch in “This Town,” which offers more a collection of profiles and scenes than a rich narrative. Still, his characters reveal essential archetypes of Washington power.

First, there is longtime NBC news reporter Andrea Mitchell — a conflict of interest in human form. …

… Here’s how some Leading Thinkers came out: In “This Town,” we’re told that Chris Matthews and Matt Lauer have joked that David Gregory would rub out a few colleagues to advance his career. That Bill and Hillary Clinton are convinced that Tim Russert disliked them, and that they’re not wrong.That Harry Reid has “observed privately to colleagues” that John Kerry has no friends.That West Wing types suspected Valerie Jarrett had “earpiece envy” after David Axelrod got Secret Service protection, and so arranged the same for herself. And that when a national security official suggested that Obama shouldn’t skip the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner on the weekend of the Osama bin Laden raid because the media might get suspicious, Hillary Clinton looked up and issued her verdict: “[Expletive] the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.” …

… But it’s not trying to be a book for the ages — it’s a book for the moment, and it captures it well.

That moment begins with stories of frantic networking at Russert’s memorial service at the KennedyCenter in June 2008, and ends with Leibovich’s musings on Inauguration Day 2013. Other than the calendar, there is no clear arc to the tale, and by the 2012 campaign, “This Town” has lost some steam. If there is an underlying theme, one that Leibovich returns to between parties, it is Team Obama’s transformation from an above-it-all, apolitical wonkfest, at least in self-perception, into just another administration, where conflicts of interest are rife, lobbyists proliferate and outgoing staffers quickly sell out (although no one in Washington sells out anymore; they monetize their government service).

Leibovich recalls Obama’s attacks on lobbyists during the 2008 campaign, including the promise to keep them out of the White House. “It’s not who we are,” top aides intoned.

But it is who they became. In a near-parody of Washington’s revolving door, administration honchos joined up with some of the biggest corporate villains of recent years. Leibovich highlights the “unholy triplet”: Pentagon spokesman (and George W. Bush holdover) Geoff Morrell became BP’s head of U.S. communications , Treasury counselor Jake Siewert started spinning for Goldman Sachs, and OMB director Peter Orszag cashed in at Citigroup. (Morrell’s deal was negotiated by Barnett. Obviously.) And whenever lobbyists joined the administration, the White House would just “acknowledge the exception, wait out the indignant blog posts and press releases, and move on,” Leibovich writes. “That lobbying ban was so four years ago anyway.”

John Fund deals some Valerie Jarrett dish from the book. This is important, because Valerie is running the country for President Bystander.

Valerie Jarrett, the White House senior adviser who mentored both the president and first lady at the start of their careers in Chicago, usually stays out of the news. In Washington, that is taken as a sign she is far more influential than she or the White House lets on.

So when Jarrett does briefly become the news it’s significant, because it may provide a window into how the Obama White House really works.

This week there were several sightings of Jarrett in the media. She popped up as the chief defender of the White House’s sudden decision to delay enforcement of a key Obamacare mandate requiring employers to offer health insurance or face stiff fines. “As we implement this law, we have and will continue to make changes as needed,” Jarrett wrote in a post on the White House blog.  In other words, continue to keep in touch with my office as we figure out how to manage this train wreck.

Another pair of Jarrett sightings came from Mark Leibovich’s new book This Town, a takedown of insular, status-conscious Washington. The New York Times writer reports that Jarrett was resented by several top Obama aides for getting her own full-time Secret Service detail of six agents. She apparently felt threatened by the fact that fellow Obama adviser David Axelrod had been given protection after a gunman who opened fire at people at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum was found to be carrying personal data on Axelrod. “While a high-profile White House official — especially an African-American woman, such as Jarrett — could legitimately be considered a more likely target than most, several West Wing officials I spoke to were dubious there had been any special threats against her,” Leibovich writes. “They suspected, rather, that Jarrett asked the president to authorize a detail out of ‘earpiece envy.’ ‘The person Valerie felt threatened by was Axe,’ quipped one top aide.”

Jarrett goes to extraordinary lengths to manage her image in the few articles that do mention her. Liebovich writes that “a top Obama aide forwarded me a set of confidential talking points that were circulated through the West Wing when Becker was reporting her story. The memo, written by deputy press secretary Jamie Smith, was titled ‘The Magic of Valerie.’ It included an unrelenting 33 talking points” that praised her intelligence, empathy, life experience, and work ethic.  “My personal favorite ‘Magic of Valerie’ bullet point is the one where we learn that ‘Valerie is someone who other people inside the building know they can trust (need examples.)’”

Truth be told, Valerie Jarrett is indeed trusted by President Obama and Michelle Obama, who have complete confidence in her loyalty and ability to get things done. As for the rest of the White House, the seething tension about her behind-the-scenes power and self-aggrandizement continues to build. Witness the number of leaks that are starting to flow out of the White House challenging the myth of her “magic.”

And more from WaPo’s Reliable Source.

… But the most scathing assessments from Leibovich (a New York Times reporter and former Washington Post colleague of ours) are of people who are famous only within the intimate confines of D.C.’s media-political complex — folks whose names probably won’t ring a bell for even the most devoted “Morning Joe” groupies outside the Beltway. (**See also: “This Town,” review of Mark Leibovich book)

Ken Duberstein: Ronald Reagan’s last White House chief of staff and “a vintage Washington character in his own right. . . riding the D.C. carousel for years, his Rolodex flipping with billable connections,” though it’s often said of him “it isn’t clear what he does,” Leibovich asserts — not an unusual condition among Washington “formers.” Leibovich writes that Duberstein “talks constantly on the phone to his close friend Colin Powell, and even more constantly to everyone else about what ‘Colin was just telling me,’ and loves to read his name in print. Finally: “The standard line on Duberstein is that he spent six and a half months as Reagan’s chief of staff and twenty-four years (and counting) dining out on it.” …

… But the cruelest part of all? The 386 pages of “This Town” features no index. For Beltway players horrified by the idea they might be mocked — or even worse, left out — the only way to find out is to read it.

There actually is some serious news, what with Egypt, obamacare delay, and the like. Rich Lowry writes in Politico about the administration’s decision to delay the employer mandate of the “affordable” care act until after next year’s election. So, now the white house decides what parts of the law should be followed as President Bystander becomes President Pick-and-Choose.

… Explaining the decision, Obama apparatchik Valerie Jarret issued a stalwart communiqué from Central Command that should take an honored place in the annals of blatant, unembarrassed hackery.

Her message: All is well. Nothing to see here. Yes, maybe we’ve delayed implementation of the (hilariously euphemistic) “employer responsibility payments” (aka fines), but don’t worry: it’s “full steam ahead” with the health-care exchanges this October. Never mind that determining eligibility for the exchanges depends on employers reporting their insurance offerings — reporting that now won’t happen.

Jarrett portrayed the decision as about “cutting red tape.” But if you pass a horrendously complicated law placing new burdens on employers, you aren’t cutting red tape, you are adding to it. And a delay doesn’t cut red tape — it only delays it.

“As we implement this law,” Jarrett explained, “we have and will continue to make changes as needed.” But the law is supposed to be the law, not optional suggestions from Congress. In Jarrett’s view, Obamacare is little more than warrant for the Obama administration to decide how it wants to run the American health care system, one executive decision at a time.

It has become a trope among defenders of the law that its flaws are the fault of Republicans because they don’t want to fix them. They must have seen their own peculiar version of “School House Rock”: The first step in making a law is jamming a 2,000-page bill down the opposition’s throat. The second is whining that the opposition won’t fix problems inherent in the bill jammed down their throats. …

More on this mess from Yuval Levin.

Until yesterday, the administration had basically put on a brave face about the difficulties arising in its implementation of Obamacare. With a few minor exceptions (now especially notable among them the one-year delay of key requirements for the new small-business exchanges), they have pretended everything was fine, and have enabled a chorus of defenders on the left to do the same. Last night’s announcement of a one-year delay in the implementation of the employer mandate is the first serious indication that the administration sees that the wheels are coming off the bus, and is very worried about it.

Attempts to downplay the significance of this decision fail, I think, to reckon with how very difficult and embarrassing it must have been for the administration. You don’t announce something like this just before the start of a long holiday weekend while Congress is out of town if you’ve got a good case to make for yourself. The administration presumably intended to announce the decision after business hours tonight (Wednesday), not last night, but the news leaked to two Bloomberg reporters and they had to scramble some. The formal announcement came through a “Treasury Note,” essentially a blog post by the Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy at Treasury, which had the hilariously Orwellian title of “Continuing to Implement the ACA in a Careful, Thoughtful Manner.” The post mostly discussed the administration’s decision to delay employer reporting requirements for a year (and more on that below), and toward the end noted in passing that this also meant the employer mandate would be delayed. That’s a very odd way to break news like this. It seems clearly to be a move the administration did not want to make.

This would have been a very tough decision to come to for several reasons. Not least of them is that, as I say, it is the first major acknowledgement of a serious problem implementing this law, and it is a problem with an element of the law that is by no means the most difficult to implement. If they’re actually telling the truth that they can’t handle getting employer reporting requirements into place, how are they doing getting the exchange system into place? But perhaps more troubling for the law’s defenders, this decision is even more likely an acknowledgement of some of the economic irrationality of the law. I doubt that just implementing reporting requirements is the issue here. More likely, the administration agrees with some of its critics who have argued that this element of the law would hurt the economy, and especially employment. And they probably also saw that the pressure from employers to avoid both the reporting requirements and the mandate was going to create huge problems for their PR effort in the fall. That would make this decision a little easier to understand, but there must be more to it to explain the enormous costs and risks they’re taking by doing this.

For one thing, they run the risk of badly dispiriting their supporters going into the fall. The administration’s brazen disregard for and denial of plainly evident problems with Obamacare has been absolutely central to sustaining the morale and dedication of the law’s defenders. If that mask is dropping, they could be in for serious trouble. …

Craig Pirrong sums this up well at Streetwise Professor

… there is the Constitutional issue.  Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution directs the President to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”  For worse or worst, Obamacare is law-at Obama’s insistence.  It is his Constitutional duty to execute the law.   He should not be able to walk away from this duty, just because it is politically expedient to do so.  That would be true if he hadn’t pushed the measure into law, but it is all the more necessary because he did, to hold him accountable for the consequences of his political choices.

Obama is the Chief Executive.  He needs to perform his Constitutional duty.  His black letter Constitutional duty.  His duty to execute the laws faithfully.  To fail to do so is to undermine the Constitutional order, in particular by respecting the separation of powers between the legislative and executive branches.  The blending of such responsibilities is a recipe for tyranny.

More tomorrow on the continuing excitement of a country run by law school faculty. What could go wrong? They’ve done such a great job with their own institutions.