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Mike Adams, a professor at UNC Wilmington, responds to a critic.

I want to take the time to thank you for writing and telling me that I should be fired from my position as a tenured professor because I am “the biggest embarrassment to higher education in America.” I also want to thank you for responding when I asked you exactly how you arrived at that conclusion. Your response, “because you insist that marriage requires one man and one woman,” was both helpful and concise.

While I respect your right to conclude that I am the biggest embarrassment to higher education in America, I think you’re wrong. In fact, I don’t even think I’m the biggest embarrassment to higher education in the state of North Carolina. But since you’re a liberal and you support “choice” – provided we’re talking about dismembering children and not school vouchers for those who weren’t dismembered – I want to give you some options. In fact, I’m going to describe the antics of ten professors, official campus groups, and invited campus speakers in North Carolina and let you decide which constitutes the biggest embarrassment to higher education.

     1. In the early spring semester of 2013, a women’s studies professor and a psychology professor at WesternCarolinaUniversity co-sponsored a panel on bondage and S&M. The purpose of the panel was to teach college students how to inflict pain on themselves and others for sexual pleasure. When you called me the biggest embarrassment in higher education, you must not have known about their bondage panel. Maybe you were tied up that evening and couldn’t make it. …

Michael Graham on the president’s college initiatives. 

What was the dumbest idea of the summer of 2013: Ignoring previous Syrian chemical attacks? The
 Massachusetts tech tax? Letting Miley Cyrus pick out her own clothes?

How about this one:

Telling college kids that if they spend six years running up a student loan tab getting an unmarketable diploma, they’ll only have to pay back a fraction of what they borrowed. In fact, the less valuable their degree and the more money they borrow — the more they win!

And the more we taxpayers have to pay.

I know what you’re thinking: An idea that bad can only come from Washington, D.C.

So let me quote from the White House fact sheet on President Obama’s plans to make college “more affordable”:

“The president has proposed allowing all student borrowers to cap their federal student loan payments at 10 percent of their monthly [discretionary] income … and forgives any remaining debt after 20 years of payments.”

So if Susy Science majors in a challenging STEM program (Science, Technology, Engineering or Math) and gets a good-paying job, she’d be on the hook for her entire student loan bill. Because she did the right thing.

But if Paulie Pompous parties his way to a degree in liberal arts before starting his job in “currency exchange and comestible retailing” (a.k.a. “Want fries with that?”), he’d end up paying back just a fraction of his loans. …

College administrators and faculty should be very afraid when the left media writes something like Thomas Frank in his blog.

This essay starts with utopia—the utopia known as the American university. It is the finest educational institution in the world, everyone tells us. Indeed, to judge by the praise that is heaped upon it, the American university may be our best institution, period. With its peaceful quadrangles and prosperity-bringing innovation, the university is more spiritually satisfying than the church, more nurturing than the family, more productive than any industry.

The university deals in dreams. Like other utopias—like Walt Disney World, like the ambrosial lands shown in perfume advertisements, like the competitive Valhalla of the Olympics—the university is a place of wish fulfillment and infinite possibility. It is the four-year luxury cruise that will transport us gently across the gulf of class. It is the wrought-iron gateway to the land of lifelong affluence.

It is not the university itself that tells us these things; everyone does. It is the president of the United States. It is our most respected political commentators and economists. It is our business heroes and our sports heroes. It is our favorite teacher and our guidance counselor and maybe even our own Tiger Mom. They’ve been to the university, after all. They know.

When we reach the end of high school, we approach the next life, the university life, in the manner of children writing letters to Santa. Oh, we promise to be so very good. We open our hearts to the beloved institution. We get good grades. We do our best on standardized tests. We earnestly list our first, second, third choices. We tell them what we want to be when we grow up. We confide our wishes. We stare at the stock photos of smiling students, we visit the campus, and we find, always, that it is so very beautiful.

And when that fat acceptance letter comes—oh, it is the greatest moment of personal vindication most of us have experienced. Our hard work has paid off. We have been chosen.

Then several years pass, and one day we wake up to discover there is no Santa Claus. Somehow, we have been had. We are a hundred thousand dollars in debt, and there is no clear way to escape it. We have no prospects to speak of. And if those damned dreams of ours happened to have taken a particularly fantastic turn and urged us to get a PhD, then the learning really begins. …

 

… This same industry, despite its legal status as a public charity, is today driven by motives indistinguishable from the profit-maximizing entities traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

The coming of “academic capitalism” has been anticipated and praised for years; today it is here. Colleges and universities clamor greedily these days for pharmaceutical patents and ownership chunks of high-tech startups; they boast of being “entrepreneurial”; they have rationalized and outsourced countless aspects of their operations in the search for cash; they fight their workers nearly as ferociously as a nineteenth-century railroad baron; and the richest among them have turned their endowments into in-house hedge funds.

Now, consider the seventeen-year-old customer against whom this predatory institution squares off. He comes loping to the bargaining table armed with about the same amount of guile that, a few years earlier, he brought to Santa’s lap in the happy holiday shopping center. You can be sure that he knows all about the imperative of achieving his dreams, and the status that will surely flow from the beloved institution. Either he goes to college like the rest of his friends, or he goes to work.

He knows enough about the world to predict the kind of work he’ll get with only a high school diploma in his pocket, but of the ways of the University he knows precious little. He is the opposite of a savvy consumer. And yet here he comes nevertheless, armed with the ability to pay virtually any price his dream school demands that he pay. All he needs to do is sign a student loan application, binding himself forever and inescapably with a financial instrument that he only dimly understands and that, thanks to the optimism of adolescence, he has not yet learned to fear.

The disaster that the university has proceeded to inflict on the youth of America, I submit, is the direct and inescapable outcome of this grim equation. Yes, in certain reaches of the system the variables are different and the yield isn’t quite as dreadful as in others. But by and large, once all the factors I have described were in place, it was a matter of simple math. Grant to an industry control over access to the good things in life; insist that it transform itself into a throat-cutting, market-minded mercenary; get thought leaders to declare it to be the answer to every problem; mute any reservations the nation might have about it—and, lastly, send it your unsuspecting kids, armed with a blank check drawn on their own futures.

Was it not inevitable? …

 

… An educational publisher wrote to me a few months back; they wanted to reprint an essay of mine that they had seen on the Internet, where it is available for free. The textbook in which they wanted to include it, they said, would be “inexpensively priced,” and authors were therefore being asked to keep their reprint fees to a minimum. The low, low price that students were to pay for this textbook: $75.95. “Approximately.”

I was astounded, but it took just a few minutes of research to realize that $76 was, in fact, altruistic by the standards of this industry. Paying $250 for a textbook is more like it nowadays; according to one economist, textbook prices have increased 812 percent over the past thirty-five years, outstripping not only inflation (by a mile) but every other commodity—home prices, health care—that we usually consider to be spiraling out of control.

The explanation is simple. The textbook publishers use every trick known to the marketing mind to obsolete their products year after year, thus closing off the possibility of second-hand sales. What’s more, textbook publishing is a highly concentrated industry—an oligopoly—which means they can drive prices pretty much as high as they feel like driving them. Meanwhile, the professors who assign the textbooks and who might do something about the problem don’t have to pay for them.

Actually, that explanation isn’t simple enough. The truth is that rip-offs like this abound in academia—that virtually every aspect of the higher-ed dream has been colonized by monopolies, cartels, and other unrestrained predators—that the charmingly naive American student is in fact a cash cow, and everyone has got a scheme for slicing off a porterhouse or two. …I

 

… t is all so wonderfully circular, is it not? We know college degrees make us affluent because affluent people have college degrees; and we also know that we must spend lots of money on college—signing up for a life of debt, essentially—because we believe status signifiers like college ought to be fantastically expensive. Think about it this way for long enough and you start to suspect that maybe those fancy stickers you put in your rear window are what education is all about, the distilled essence of the whole thing. …

 

… Administrators, it seems, have understood that the fortunes of their cohort are directly opposed to those of the faculty. One group’s well-being comes at the expense of the other, and vice versa. And so, according to Ginsberg, the administrators work constantly to expand their own numbers, to replace professors with adjuncts, to subject professors to petty humiliations, to interfere in faculty hiring, to distill the professors’ expertise down to something that can be measured by a standardized test.

It is not until you read Ginsberg’s description of the day-to-day activities of administrators that the light bulb goes on, however. The particular pedagogy that motivates this class of university creatures is . . . management theory. They talk endlessly about “process management” and “excellence.” They set up “culture teams.” They attend retreats where they play team-building games. And whole divisions of them are dedicated to writing “strategic plans” for their universities, which take years to finish and are forgotten immediately upon completion.

Last year’s attempted coup at my alma mater, the University of Virginia, gave us a glimpse of how this conflict can play out. The university’s president, a sociologist, is a traditional academic; the university’s Board of Visitors is dominated by wealthy figures from finance and real estate who wanted (of course) to dump the classics department and who thought the university needed to get with the online thing toot sweet because David Brooks had said it was a good idea in his New York Times column. When the board forced the president to resign last June, they cloaked the putsch in a stinky fog of management bullshit. …

 

… The de-professionalization of the faculty is another long-running tragedy that gets a little sadder every year, as teaching college students steadily becomes an occupation for people with no tenure, no benefits, and no job security. These lumpen-profs, who have spent many years earning advanced degrees but sometimes make less than minimum wage, now account for more than three-quarters of the teaching that is done at our insanely expensive, oh-so-excellent American universities. Their numbers increase constantly as universities continue to produce far more PhDs than they do full-time, tenure-track job openings, and every time cutbacks are necessary—which is to say, all the time—it is those same full-time, tenure-track job openings that get pruned.

What can I add to this dreadful tale? That it continues to get worse, twenty years after it began? Is there anything new to be said about the humiliation that the lumpen-profs suffer at the hands of their so-called colleagues? Can I shock anyone by describing the shabby, desperate lives they lead as they chase their own university dream? Will it do any good to remind readers how the tenured English dons of thirty years ago helped to set the forces of destruction in motion simply because producing more PhDs meant a lighter workload for themselves? …

For the start of the humor section we have Power Line’s post on the arctic expedition arranged to call attention to global warming. Because you read Pickings you already know they had to turn back. There’s too much ice this year. The most in 20 years they say. God has a sense of humor.

Severe weather conditions hindered our early progress and now ice chokes the passage ahead.

Our ice router Victor has been very clear in what lies ahead. He writes, “Just to give you the danger of ice situation at the eastern Arctic, Eef Willems of “Tooluka” (NED) pulled out of the game and returning to Greenland. At many Eastern places of NWP locals have not seen this type ice conditions. Residents of Resolute say 20 years have not seen anything like. It’s, ice, ice and more ice. Larsen, Peel, Bellot, Regent and Barrow Strait are all choked. That is the only route to East. Already West Lancaster received -2C temperature expecting -7C on Tuesday with the snow.” … 

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We celebrate the March on Washington. Roger Simon, a veteran of the civil rights brigades of the 60′s says it is time to end the movement.

End the civil rights movement. Now. Shoot the sucker and put it (and us) out of its misery.

It’s a relic of the 1960s about as relevant as bell bottom trousers.

When we are debating Oprah Winfrey’s right to buy a thirty-five thousand dollar purse or whether Barack Obama’s dog should be flown to Martha’s Vineyard in the canine’s own private state-of-the art military transport, you know it’s finished. Or should be.

It’s also time for the NAACP and the Black Caucus to close up shop. They are dinosaurs from another era, making life miserable for the very people they are intended to help.

Black unemployment is at record levels during the administration of the first black president and that horrible situation is aided and abetted by those organizations. They are determined to preserve the image of black people as victims — an insulting self-fulfilling prophecy. What was once a solution has become the problem.

Affirmative action should also be flushed down the toilet with the civil rights movement. …

… And when we discuss Oprah, tell it like it really is — she’s a celebrity who has been extremely rich and famous for decades and has almost no idea what it’s really like to be a shopgirl in Zurich or anywhere else.

Her story is one of Marie Antoinette, not Rosa Parks.

And that’s the point. Rosa Parks was a very brave woman who made a tremendous contribution to our country — in 1955! That’s almost sixty years ago. Stop this nostalgia for racism. Stop playing the race card. Switch to Old Maid — or rummy. End the civil rights movement. We should all honor Rosa Parks’ great contribution by moving on.

More proof of Harry Truman’s saying the only thing new is history you don’t know. Paul Mirengoff takes a look at how the “I have a dream” speech was reported. Would you believe it was almost ignored in the WaPo the next day?

With the 50th anniversary of the civil rights march on Washington fast approaching, I had intended to check old newspapers at the Library of Congress to see how the mainstream reported the march. I confess to having an ulterior motive: I participated in that march and wanted to test the view, now a commonplace, that the media never gets right a story about which one has no personal knowledge.

Unfortunately, veteran Washington Post reporter Robert Kaiser has beaten me to the punch. Not only that, he shows that the Post missed the boat to a degree that I would not have imagined possible.

Kaiser writes:

‘The main event that day was what we now call the “I Have a Dream” speech of Martin Luther King Jr., one of the most important speeches in U.S. history. But on the day it was given, The Post didn’t think so. We nearly failed to mention it at all. . . .[The] lead story, which began under a banner headline on the front page and summarized the events of the day, did not mention King’s name or his speech. . . .

In that paper of Aug. 29, 1963, The Post published two dozen stories about the march. Every one missed the importance of King’s address. The words “I have a dream” appeared in only one, a wrap-up of the day’s rhetoric on Page A15 — in the fifth paragraph. We also printed brief excerpts from the speeches, but the three paragraphs chosen from King’s speech did not include “I have a dream.” ‘ …

Commentary has reminiscences from Joshua Muravchik who was there. This is long, because he covers the highlights of decades of civil rights struggles.

On August 28, 1963, a quarter million Americans staged the most important demonstration in our nation’s history. They marched from the WashingtonMonument to the Lincoln Memorial in what is now remembered primarily as the setting for Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. But it was much more than that. The speech was epochal precisely because the event culminated the civil-rights “revolution” that put an end to the dark era of racial segregation and open discrimination.

Growing up in an activist household, I was, although just shy of 16, already a seasoned protester, having for example first seen Washington when my parents took me to the 1958 Youth March for Integrated Schools, a prequel to the 1963 march. Thanks to being in the right place at the right time, I now found myself in the role of coordinator of two old yellow school buses bringing marchers from Harlem to Washington. As we prepared for the nighttime drive to the capital, the sense of anticipation in the air along 125th Street was not limited to those who would make the journey. In a late-night drugstore, I assembled the contents of a first-aid kit for each bus, and when I told the clerks it was for the march, they cheered and refused to accept payment.

A checklist for the kits had been issued by the march’s organizers, who seemed to have thought of everything even though there was no template for a mobilization on this scale. In addition to first aid, there was another checklist for the contents of box lunches and dinners that participants were told to bring. Alcohol was banned, as were children younger than 14. Large numbers of portable toilets were rented and so was the best available sound system. Bayard Rustin, the lead organizer, was determined to ensure that everyone could hear the speeches and singers so no one would grow restless. Members of the Guardians, a fraternal order of New York City’s black police officers, were enlisted to provide volunteer crowd control without the help of weapons or uniforms.

The columnist Mary McGrory quipped that it was “the most elaborately nurse-maided demonstration of grievance ever held.” The aim of these preparations was to confound dire predictions that such a gathering would devolve into violence. Weeks later, I heard Rustin chortle at another civil-rights rally: “No one believed we could bring all those Negroes to D.C. without someone getting cut.” For that reason, President John F. Kennedy had tried to dissuade the conveners, fearing that any incidents would jeopardize the civil-rights bill he had sponsored. After Kennedy’s failure to dissuade the march organizers, members of his administration ghostwrote letters to them from liberal senators warning of difficulties. A Gallup poll showed that most Americans had heard of plans for the march and disapproved of it by a 3:1 ratio. …

 

… The dignity of participants, two-thirds black, one-third white, according to a sample counted by the Washington Post, was matched by the rhetoric from the podium, which resonated with patriotism and measured moral indignation. A. Philip Randolph opened the program by proclaiming: “We are not a pressure group…we are not a mob. We are the advance guard of a massive moral revolution.” Touching on the most controversial part of the civil-rights bill, he said simply and tellingly: “Property rights [cannot] include the right to humiliate me because of the color of my skin.” The NAACP’s leader, Roy Wilkins, displayed an eloquence belying his known preference for legal briefs over soapbox oratory, decrying racial discrimination as a “sickness which threaten[s] to erode…the liberty of the individual, which is the hallmark of our country among the nations of the earth.” And King’s peroration invoked “the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning, ‘My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.’”

When John Lewis, the 23-year-old leader of SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or “snick”) prepared a speech of more radical tenor—rejecting Kennedy’s bill for being too modest and threatening a “nonviolent” reprise of Sherman’s March through the South—the other leaders told him that he would not be allowed to speak unless he moderated those words. The specter of a shrill and perhaps violent black militancy that the leaders believed would harm the cause was already in the air. King addressed it directly in his speech, inveighing: “We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence.”

But King did not fear Lewis as much as the spirit that was personified in Malcolm X. The Black Muslim rabble-rouser camped out in the lobby of the Statler Hilton, where the leaders were staying and the journalists were swarming, and offered up sound bites about the “farce on Washington.” “While King was having a dream, the rest of us Negroes are having a nightmare,” he declaimed. “The Negroes spent a lot of money, had a good time, and enjoyed a real circus….Now that it is all over, they are still jobless, homeless, and landless, so what did it accomplish?”

In fact, it accomplished a lot. …

… The march was commemorated this August 24 by another march that did more to remind us of the eventual sad decay of the movement than of its glorious apogee. It was convened and led by Al Sharpton, who uses the title “Reverend” before his name although he never attended divinity school. Sharpton came into prominence in 1988 as the advocate of Tawana Brawley, a teenaged black girl who claimed to have been kidnapped and raped by white men, when in fact she was merely afraid to go home to her stepfather, a convicted killer. The man who served as Sharpton’s assistant during the first four months of the affair later quoted Sharpton as exulting, “We beat this, we will be the biggest niggers in New York.” Eventually, a jury found Sharpton guilty of having defamed one of the accused white men, awarding substantial damages. Since then, Sharpton has made a career as what black columnist Jonathan Capehart calls a “racial ambulance chaser,” highlighted by a campaign against a white store owner in Harlem that culminated in an arson attack in which eight died. Although he denies any responsibility for violence, the formal slogan of Sharpton’s National Action Network is menacing: “No justice, no peace.” Sharpton’s agenda has never been difficult to discern. NAN’s homepage is graced with a photo of King, one of President Barack Obama, one of Trayvon Martin, and three of “Reverend Al.” I have said that the Big Six were men who would never glorify themselves on the backs of their people; Sharpton, in contrast, never passes up an opportunity to do so. Nonetheless, the various reputable civil-rights groups, or rather their empty shells, as well as some labor unions and other organizations, fell in line behind Sharpton’s call.

Thus continues the perverse appropriation of the memory of one of the greatest moments in American history—itself the culmination of one of the greatest episodes—when hundreds of thousands of black and white citizens came together peacefully and in dignity and succeeded in putting an end to the worst evil besides slavery that has ever blighted our land.

For a change of pace, would you believe this has been the mildest summer in a century? Real Science has the story.

This summer, the US has experienced the fewest number of 100 degree readings in a century. The five hottest summers (1936, 1934, 1954, 1980 and 1930) all occurred with CO2 below 350 PPM.

CO2 went over 400 PPM this year, indicating that heatwaves and CO2 have nothing to do with each other. Scientists who claim otherwise are either incompetent, criminal, or both.

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Mark Steyn, referring to the healthcare act, says it is a “very strange law whose only defining characteristic is that no one who favors it wants to be bound by it.”  

On his radio show the other day, Hugh Hewitt caught me by surprise and asked me about running for the U.S. Senate from New Hampshire. My various consultants, pollsters, PACs and exploratory committees haven’t fine tuned every detail of my platform just yet, but I can say this without a doubt:

I will not vote for any “comprehensive” bill, whether on immigration, health care or anything else.

“Comprehensive” today is a euphemism for interminably long, poorly drafted, and entirely unread — not just by the peoples’ representatives but by our robed rulers, too (how many of those Supreme Court justices actually plowed through every page of ObamaCare when its “constitutionality” came before them?).

The 1862 Homestead Act, which is genuinely comprehensive, is two handwritten pages in clear English. “The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” is 500 times as long, is not about patients or care, and neither protects the former nor makes the latter affordable.

So what is it about? On Wednesday, the Nevada AFL-CIO passed a resolution declaring that “the unintended consequences of the ACA will lead to the destruction of the 40-hour work week.” That’s quite an accomplishment for a “health” “care” “reform” law. But the poor old union heavies who so supported ObamaCare are now reduced to bleating that they should be entitled to the same opt-outs secured by big business and congressional staffers. It’s a very strange law whose only defining characteristic is that no one who favors it wants to be bound by it. …

With the example of government types exempting themselves from their healthcare legislation, this USA TODAY column by Glenn Reynolds calling for a halt to special privileges, is timely.

All over America, government officials enjoy privileges that ordinary citizens don’t. Sometimes it involves bearing arms, with special rules favoring police, politicians and even retired government employees. Sometimes it involves freedom from traffic and parking tickets, like the special non-traceable license plates enjoyed by tens of thousands of California state employees or similar immunities for Colorado legislators. Often it involves immunity from legal challenges, like the “qualified” immunity to lawsuits enjoyed by most government officials, or the even-better “absolute immunity” enjoyed by judges and prosecutors. (Both immunities — including, suspiciously, the one for judges — are creations of judicial action, not legislation).

Lately it seems as if these kinds of special privileges are proliferating. And it also seems to me that special privileges for “public servants” that have the effect of making them look more like, well, “public masters,” are kind of un-American. Even more, I’m beginning to wonder if they might actually be unconstitutional. Surely the creation of two classes of citizens, one more equal than the others, isn’t the sort of thing the Framers intended. Why didn’t they put something in the Constitution to prevent it?

Well, actually, they did. …

Jillian Melchior of National Review tells us how she got all her obamaphones.

Confession: You’re paying my phone bill.

In the past month, I have received three shiny new cell phones, courtesy of American taxpayers, that should never have fallen into my hands.

The Federal Communications Commission oversees the so-called Lifeline program, created in 1984 to make sure impoverished Americans had telephone service available to call their moms, bosses, and 911. In 2008, the FCC expanded the program to offer subsidized cell-phone service, and since then, the expenses of running the program have soared. In 2012, the program’s costs had risen to $2.189 billion, up from $822 million before wireless carriers were included. As of June, there were 13.8 million active Lifeline subscriptions.

To be eligible for Lifeline, the applicant is supposed to be receiving some significant government benefit — food stamps, Medicaid, Supplemental Security Income, public housing assistance, etc. But because welfare eligibility has expanded under the Obama administration, more people than ever before are qualified to receive “free” cell-phone service — part of the reason why Lifeline mobiles have become commonly known as Obamaphones. Alternatively, applicants can qualify if their household income is less than 136 percent of the federal poverty line.

But as with any federal program with too much funding, too little oversight, and perverse financial incentives, Lifeline has become infamous for rampant fraud and abuse. …

Slumber Wise Blog tells us people use to have two sleeping periods each night.

… The existence of our sleeping twice per night was first uncovered by Roger Ekirch, professor of History at Virginia Tech.

His research found that we didn’t always sleep in one eight hour chunk. We used to sleep in two shorter periods, over a longer range of night. This range was about 12 hours long, and began with a sleep of three to four hours, wakefulness of two to three hours, then sleep again until morning.

References are scattered throughout literature, court documents, personal papers, and the ephemera of the past. What is surprising is not that people slept in two sessions, but that the concept was so incredibly common. Two-piece sleeping was the standard, accepted way to sleep.

“It’s not just the number of references – it is the way they refer to it, as if it was common knowledge,” Ekirch says.

An English doctor wrote, for example, that the ideal time for study and contemplation was between “first sleep” and “second sleep.” Chaucer tells of a character in the Canterbury Tales that goes to bed following her “firste sleep.” And, explaining the reason why working class conceived more children, a doctor from the 1500s reported that they typically had sex after their first sleep.

Ekirch’s book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past is replete with such examples. …

Weekly Standard informs us of a new hot dog brand in FL. Would you believe Carlos Danger Brand Weiners?

“Anthony Weiner may be lagging in the race for New York City mayor, but he is winning in another area—hot dog marketing. The delicious combination of Anthony Weiner’s name and his sexually suggestive Twitter antics were apparently too good to pass up for one Florida marketing man, who has joined forces with an Illinois hot dog company to create a hot dog brand called .” (“‘Carlos Danger’ Brand of Weiners Enters the Food Market,” ABC News, August 16).

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It’s Higher Education Day at Pickings. First, why does it cost so much? The WSJ Weekend Interview asks Richard Vedder.

… Mr. Vedder, age 72, has taught college economics since 1965 and published papers on the likes of Scandinavian migration, racial disparities in unemployment and tax reform. Over the last decade he’s made himself America’s foremost expert on the economics of higher education, which he distilled in his 2004 book “Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs Too Much.” His analysis isn’t the same as President Obama’s.

This week on his back-to-school tour of New York and Pennsylvania colleges, Mr. Obama presented a new plan to make college more affordable. “If the federal government keeps on putting more and more money in the system,” he noted at the State University of New York at Buffalo on Thursday, and “if the cost is going up by 250%” and “tax revenues aren’t going up 250%,” at “some point, the government will run out of money.”

Note that for the record: Mr. Obama has admitted some theoretical limit to how much the federal government can spend.

His solution consists of tieing financial aid to college performance, using government funds as a “catalyst to innovation,” and making it easier for borrowers to discharge their debts. “In fairness to the president, some of his ideas make some decent, even good sense,” Mr. Vedder says, such as providing students with more information about college costs and graduation rates. But his plan addresses just “the tip of the iceberg. He’s not dealing with the fundamental problems.”

College costs have continued to explode despite 50 years of ostensibly benevolent government interventions, according to Mr. Vedder, and the president’s new plan could exacerbate the trend. By Mr. Vedder’s lights, the cost conundrum started with the Higher Education Act of 1965, a Great Society program that created federal scholarships and low-interest loans aimed at making college more accessible.

In 1964, federal student aid was a mere $231 million. By 1981, the feds were spending $7 billion on loans alone, an amount that doubled during the 1980s and nearly tripled in each of the following two decades, and is about $105 billion today. Taxpayers now stand behind nearly $1 trillion in student loans. …

IBD Editors think the president’s proposals are a poor idea.

President Obama says his new aid proposal will make college more affordable. It’s actually an attempt to leverage a government-caused problem to root Washington even more deeply into higher education.

Like most Obama proposals, this one has a surface appeal. “It is time to stop subsidizing schools that are not producing good results, and reward schools that deliver for American students and our future,” the president told an audience of college students in Buffalo, N.Y.

Well, who could oppose that? But, like most Obama proposals, things get ugly once you scratch that surface. …

Minding the Campus had a symposium of five.

It’s called “the Bennett Hypothesis,” and it explains–or tries to explain–why the cost of college lies so tantalizingly out of reach for so many. In 1987, then Secretary of Education William J. Bennett launched a quarter century of debate by saying, in effect, “Federal aid doesn’t help; colleges and universities just cream off the extra money by raising tuition.” Now Andrew Gillen, research director of CCAP–the Center for College Affordability and Productivity–has tweaked the data and produced a sophisticated “2.0″ version of the hypothesis. It’s filled with heavy math, game theory and terms like “inelastic fairly vertical curves.” You probably won’t read it. We know. But it’s important. So here are some smart people who have read it, and have something to say: Peter Wood, Hans Bader, Richard Vedder, George Leef and Herbert London.

Peter Wood: They Are Insatiable

Long before I knew it was called the “Bennett Hypothesis” I knew that colleges and universities increase tuition to capture increases in federal and state financial aid. I attended numerous meetings of university administrators where the topic of setting next year’s tuition was discussed.

The regnant phrase was “Don’t leave money sitting on the table.” The metaphoric table in question was the one on which the government had laid out a sumptuous banquet of increases of financial aid. Our job was to figure out how to consume as much of it as possible in tuition increases. …

Power Line’s Paul Mirengoff posts on the “education reform.”

… While the first elements of Obama’s plan is merely unnecessary, the second element — tying federal assistance to the federal rating system — strikes me as pernicious. First, I doubt the federal government’s ability to rate colleges with sufficient accuracy to justify attaching monetary consequences to its ratings.

Second, Obama’s plan will increase the federal government’s ability to coerce colleges into embracing even more fully a left-wing agenda — e.g., discriminating against whites in admissions and hiring, unfairly disciplining male students based on flimsy allegations of sexual harassment, and so forth.

Third, even if the federal government were able to come up with a reasonable and unbiased rating system, it would still have no business discriminating financially against the families of students who decide to attend colleges they (and the families) believe are better suited to their particular purposes. …

WSJ Editors comment on what colleges will look like with more federal “help.”

… Particularly jarring for Mr. Obama’s fans in the faculty lounge, he talked about them on Thursday in the same disrespectful manner that he normally reserves for entrepreneurs. “And I’ve got to tell you ahead of time, these reforms won’t be popular with everybody, especially those who are making out just fine under the current system. But my main concern is not with those institutions; my main concern is the students those institutions are there to serve,” said the President.

Conservative readers may be tempted to chuckle here. And we concede that this latest Obama regulatory onslaught couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch than the university elite who did so much to elect him. …

… Mr. Obama is trodding a well-worn political path. Politicians subsidize the purchase of a good or service, prices inevitably rise in response to this pumped-up demand, and then the pols blame the provider of the good or service for responding to the incentives the politicians created. Think housing finance and medical care. Now President Obama is attacking colleges for rationally raising tuitions and padding their payrolls in response to a subsidy machine that began in 1965.

That’s when the feds launched a program to make college “affordable” by offering a taxpayer guarantee on student loans. Federal grants and loans have been expanding ever since and it’s no coincidence that tuition prices have been rising faster than inflation for decades. This week the White House noted that since the academic year ending in 1983 tuition and fees at four-year public colleges have risen by 257%, while typical family incomes have advanced 16%.

The better answer is to stop the increases in grants and subsidized loans that Mr. Obama has so greatly accelerated. Let educators, students and their parents decide which courses and campus amenities provide the most educational value. As fervently as many professors abhor the idea of free people operating in a free market, they may decide it’s better than federal politicians running their universities.

Gretchen Morgenson provided a good example of poorly run government programs in Sunday’s NY Times. Her example is a Dept of Agriculture program of loans to businesses in rural areas. Of course it was needed. Don’t you want rural areas to prosper?

CREATING jobs is an essential goal today, given our high unemployment rate. But when job programs rely on taxpayer backing, their success or failure should be clearly disclosed.

For example, the United States Department of Agriculture has called its $1.6 billion business and industry loan program a rousing success. Not surprisingly, the department often trumpets the number of jobs that are expected to result from these loans — figures that it gets from the borrowers themselves. Whether these jobs are actually created, however, is another story.

The loan guarantee program is overseen by the Rural Development unit of the Agriculture Department and is part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Rural Development provides loan guarantees of as much as 90 percent to banks or other approved lenders that finance the improvement or development of businesses in rural and high-unemployment areas.

How many jobs were added or saved through the loans is also a crucial measure of the program’s success or failure.

A current success story on the agency’s Web site is that of Carolina AAC, a company that received $10.4 million in late 2010 to build a concrete manufacturing plant in Bennettsville, S.C.

“This project will create approximately 197 new jobs in MarlboroCounty,” the Agriculture Department’s Web site says. Such a figure would make Carolina AAC the program’s third-largest borrower in terms of jobs created.

But Carolina AAC said in a January 2011 news release that only 36 jobs would be created at the project. And even that has not come to pass. Currently, 10 people work at the company, according to Charles Paterno, its managing member. Troubling for taxpayers is that the government backs 90 percent of the loans and they are in liquidation. …

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Opening up today’s coverage of the Middle East, Caroline Glick says there is no doubt American foreign policy has been reset.

Aside from the carnage in Benghazi, the most enduring image from Hillary Clinton’s tenure as US secretary of state was the fake remote control she brought with her to Moscow in 2009 with the word “Reset” in misspelled Russian embossed on it.

Clinton’s gimmick was meant to show that under President Barack Obama, American foreign policy would be fundamentally transformed. Since Obama and Clinton blamed much of the world’s troubles on the misdeeds of their country, under their stewardship of US foreign policy, the US would reset everything.

Around the globe, all bets were off.

Five years later we realize that Clinton’s embarrassing gesture was not a gimmick, but a dead serious pledge. Throughout the world, the Obama administration has radically altered America’s policies.

And disaster has followed. Never since America’s establishment has the US appeared so untrustworthy, destructive, irrelevant and impotent. …

 

… Obama’s approach to world affairs was doubtlessly shaped during his long sojourn in America’s elite universities.

Using the same elitist sensibilities that cause him to blame American “arrogance” for the world’s troubles, and embrace radical Islam as a positive force, Obama has applied conflict resolution techniques developed by professors in ivory towers to real world conflicts that cannot be resolved peacefully.

Obama believed he could use the US’s close relationships with Israel and Turkey to bring about a rapprochement between the former allies. But he was wrong. The Turkish-Israeli alliance ended because Erdogan is a virulent Jew-hater who seeks Israel’s destruction, not because of a misunderstanding.

Obama forced Israel to apologize for defending itself against Turkish aggression, believing that Erdogan would then reinstate full diplomatic relations with the Jewish state. Instead, Erdogan continued his assault on Israel, most recently accusing it of organizing the military coup in Egypt and the anti- Erdogan street protests in Turkey.

As for Egypt, as with Syria, Obama’s foreign policy vision for the US has left Washington with no options for improving the situation on the ground or for securing its own strategic interests. To advance his goal of empowering the Muslim Brotherhood, Obama pushed the Egyptian military to overthrow the regime of US ally Hosni Mubarak and so paved the way for elections that brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power.

Today he opposes the military coup that ousted the Muslim Brotherhood government. …

Walter Russell Mead was in the WSJ with additional critique of U. S. Mideast policy.

… With the advantages of hindsight, it appears that the White House made five big miscalculations about the Middle East. It misread the political maturity and capability of the Islamist groups it supported; it misread the political situation in Egypt; it misread the impact of its strategy on relations with America’s two most important regional allies (Israel and Saudi Arabia); it failed to grasp the new dynamics of terrorist movements in the region; and it underestimated the costs of inaction in Syria.

America’s Middle East policy in the past few years depended on the belief that relatively moderate Islamist political movements in the region had the political maturity and administrative capability to run governments wisely and well. That proved to be half-true in the case of Turkey’s AK Party: Until fairly recently Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whatever mistakes he might make, seemed to be governing Turkey in a reasonably effective and reasonably democratic way. But over time, the bloom is off that rose. Mr. Erdogan’s government has arrested journalists, supported dubious prosecutions against political enemies, threatened hostile media outlets and cracked down crudely on protesters. Prominent members of the party leadership look increasingly unhinged, blaming Jews, telekinesis and other mysterious forces for the growing troubles it faces.

Things have reached such a pass that the man President Obama once listed as one of his five best friends among world leaders and praised as “an outstanding partner and an outstanding friend on a wide range of issues” is now being condemned by the U.S. government for “offensive” anti-Semitic charges that Israel was behind the overthrow of Egypt’s President Mohammed Morsi.

Compared with Mr. Morsi, however, Mr. Erdogan is a Bismarck of effective governance and smart policy. Mr. Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood were quite simply not ready for prime time; they failed to understand the limits of their mandate, fumbled incompetently with a crumbling economy and governed so ineptly and erratically that tens of millions of Egyptians cheered on the bloody coup that threw them out.

Tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorists and incompetent bumblers make a poor foundation for American grand strategy. We would have done business with the leaders of Turkey and Egypt under almost any circumstances, but to align ourselves with these movements hasn’t turned out to be wise.

The White House, along with much of the rest of the American foreign policy world, made another key error in the Middle East: It fundamentally misread the nature of the political upheaval in Egypt. Just as Thomas Jefferson mistook the French Revolution for a liberal democratic movement like the American Revolution, so Washington thought that what was happening in Egypt was a “transition to democracy.” That was never in the cards. …

So, what to do now in Egypt? American policy there, reasons Charles Krauthammer, should support the military over Morsi and the brotherhood.

… After all, we’ve been here. Through a half-century of cold war, we repeatedly faced precisely the same dilemma: choosing the lesser evil between totalitarian (in that case, communist) and authoritarian (usually military) rule.

We generally supported the various militaries in suppressing the communists. That was routinely pilloried as a hypocritical and immoral betrayal of our alleged allegiance to liberty. But in the end, it proved the prudent, if troubled, path to liberty.

The authoritarian regimes we supported — in South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Chile, Brazil, even Spain and Portugal (ruled by fascists until the mid-1970s!) — in time yielded democratic outcomes. Gen. Augusto Pinochet, after 16 years of iron rule, yielded to U.S. pressure and allowed a free election — which he lost, ushering in Chile’s current era of democratic flourishing. How many times have communists or Islamists allowed that to happen?

Regarding Egypt, rather than emoting, we should be thinking: what’s best for Egypt, for us and for the possibility of some eventual democratic future.

Under the Brotherhood, such a possibility is zero. Under the generals, slim.

Slim trumps zero.

As for Syria, Craig Pirrong of Streetwise Professor says, given our tardiness, there are no longer any plausible options.

… A robust air campaign against Assad would seriously jeopardize his ability to survive.  But then what?

That’s the real problem.  Perhaps if the US had intervened in US and toppled Assad in 2011, a somewhat stable outcome could have been achieved.  Stable by Mideastern standards, anyways.  Maybe like Iraq, circa 2008-2009.  You wouldn’t want to live there, but it could be worse.

That’s no longer an option: it now will be worse than Iraq post-Surge, and likely worse than Iraq pre-Surge.  In the last two years, the Islamist fanatics, many of them foreigners, have come to dominate the opposition.  Assad’s fall would result in a bloody civil war between the factions of the opposition, and the communities that support Assad (notably the Alawites).  The place would become a horror show, a magnet for jihadists, and a sanctuary for terrorists.

The US Army and Marines have no stomach for getting involved in such a fight, the American people have no stomach for it, and it is hard to justify on the basis of our national interest.  Some Europeans, notably the French and British, are currently all hot to intervene, but given their pathetic military capabilities, that’s a case of “let’s you and him fight.”  Moreover, you know that as soon as things get tough, or at the first claim that the US military has committed an atrocity, the Europeans would be self-righteously criticizing us.

So I have little doubt that US airpower could make relatively short work of Assad’s military forces and government, and tip the balance to the opposition (who were on the verge of victory early this year without air support) but the aftermath would be a bloody mess, and we would be led by a CIC (Commander in Chief) who would have no stomach for the fight.  So I can understand Dempsey’s reluctance completely.

I am seriously conflicted about how to proceed. ..

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The Mere Orthodoxy blog posts on the why the family matters in economics.

Nick Schulz is frustrated. He’s frustrated that economists talk about the role of institutions in the American economy, yet ignore the most fundamental one of them all: the family. With a career built on writing about the roots of economic growth, Schulz has realized that you can’t understand today’s economy—from the need for human capital to rising inequality— without considering the platoons of moms, dads, and children that form the backbone of American society. And the situation is not pretty. The American family is in a state of crisis, which in turn is having a profound impact on the economy.

Yet too many experts remain silent for fear of becoming collateral damage in America’s culture wars. Nick Schulz wrote Home Economics for these silent ones who have ignored the family’s role in the economy. He concludes as former Secretary of Education Bill Bennett did, finding that the “family is the original and best Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.” …

… American families now seem to follow two tracks: those of the upper-middle class, where family institutions remain relatively strong, and those of the lower-middle class, where family instability is distressingly common. Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, in particular, provides a detailed picture of this growing disconnect.

Many people can and do succeed in the midst of family brokenness, of course. Yet the risks of failing are far too high when kids are raised in the context of relational instability. Socioeconomic mobility and multigenerational poverty are empirically linked to family stability like never before.

Family is society writ small, where one builds basic human capital, social capital, and skills. In Schulz’s calculation, family is a basic, vital economic unit—the X factor. Family builds empathy and self-control, which in turn shapes character. Character fosters human capital (“knowledge, education, habits, willpower”) and social capital (assets “created and maintained by relationships of commitment and trust”), which ultimately generates economic growth. You could practically build a formula out of it. …

Of course, any government efforts to control college costs will end in disaster, but last week the president uttered the most amazing sentence. We have included the Wash Times article just so you could read it. He said, “At some point, the government’s going to run out of money.” What’s happened? He has never felt such constraints before.

Saying the rising costs of college are punishing students who have played by the rules, President Obama on Thursday announced that the federal government will take a broader role in pushing schools to lower costs by rating schools based on their educational value, and in trying to tie taxpayer money to school performance.

Mr. Obama, speaking at the State University of New York at Buffalo, said he would cap student loan repayments at 10 percent of future paychecks but also would take steps to discipline students who are attending school on federal grants by doling out the money in chunks to make sure they stay in school. …

Weekly Standard reports the Nevada AFL-CIO wants healthcare changes.

The Nevada AFL-CIO has released a resolution condemning Obamacare and demanding that the president and lawmakers change the law.

“[F]or two years we have sought from the Administration and Congress interpretations to the ACA that merely allows us keep the health plans we currently have: nothing more, nothing less. No special treatment. To date, the Administration has postured on proposals to address the problem, but no proposal to date will actually solve the problem. Our health plans only get worse,” the resolution in part reads. …

 

From UPS to UVA, American Interest says more employers are reacting to increased health care costs because of the ACA.

Even a well-designed law can have unintended effects that worsen the problems it was meant to solve—and a slipshod law like Obamacare threatens to cause serious damage. UPS, for instance, has decided to stop offering insurance to employee spouses who can get insurance from their own employer. The company cites the new costs imposed by Obamacare, including:

-Coverage for dependent children up to age; regardless of whether they are enrolled in school, are married, or (beginning 2014) have coverage available from their own employer;

-Removal of lifetime and annual benefit limits;

-Fees for comparative effectiveness research; and

-Fees to help fund the public exchanges.

UVA officials announced a similar policy yesterday, also referencing the costs Obamacare will add to the university’s health care budget. …

More on UPS changes from Andrew Malcolm.

Thousands of UPS workers have found out what’s actually in that ObamaCare package Democrats shipped out in 2010. Their company decided to drop coverage for spouses to avoid the law’s added costs.

President Obama has been claiming lately that most of his signature law is already in place, and that all the fuss about delays and premium hikes is over parts of the law that don’t go into effect until next year and are relevant only to the small share of uninsured.

“For the 85% to 90% of Americans who already have health insurance,” he says, “they don’t have to worry about anything else.”

Tell that to the 15,000 UPS workers who recently learned that the shipping giant is dropping coverage for husbands and wives who can get insurance from another employer.

A chief reason for the change? The added costs ObamaCare is imposing, including the mandate that plans cover children up to age 26, its ban on lifetime spending limits, and the $65 in ObamaCare fees that will be imposed on every enrollee starting next year.

Rising medical costs, “combined with the costs associated with the Affordable Care Act, have made it increasingly difficult to continue providing the same level of health care benefits to our employees at an affordable cost,” UPS told its employees in a memo.

As Kaiser Health News reports, many of these spouses will end up on worse health plans. …

Noemie Emery sums up health care.

Forget demographics. Forget the re-branding. Forget the poll matchups, most of them involving newcomers who are still largely unknown to the general public.

Nothing will influence 2014 (and 2016) nearly as much as the implosion of Obamacare, which so far has been messy and will become even worse.

Demographic allegiances aren’t always stable, parties cannot re-brand themselves in a vacuum, and the current contenders will be judged, not for who they appear to be today but on who they become in the next three years.

Democrats may seem to have a strong coalition, but Republicans had one, too, in 2005, before events intruded. In Forbes, Avik Roy notes that the White House has missed 41 of 82 deadlines in the bill’s first three years of existence, while labor leaders say the bill is destroying full-time employment.

Last week, Obama announced the umpteenth delay in implementation; exempted congressional staffers from Obamacare costs; and said he will spend an additional $67 million to “educate” the public on the blessings to come with the law that survived the Supreme Court and the 2012 election (in part because it was planned NOT to kick in before then).

It may not survive its clash with reality, however, which was always its enemy and which seems to be closing in fast. …

WSJ OpEd tells the story of why and how a man saved 85% of an operation’s cost.

Every so often I have an extraordinary and surprising experience with a patient—the kind that makes us both say, “Wow, we’ve learned something from this.” One such moment occurred recently.

A gentleman in his early 60s came in with a rather routine hernia in his lower abdomen, one that is easily repaired with a simple outpatient surgical procedure. We scheduled the surgery at a nearby hospital.

My patient is self-employed and owns a low-cost “indemnity” type of health insurance policy. It has no provider-network requirements or preferred-hospital requirements. The patient can go anywhere. The policy pays up to a fixed amount for doctor and hospital bills based upon the diagnosis. This affordable health-insurance policy made a lot of sense to this man, based on his health and financial situation.

When the man arrived at the hospital for surgery, the admitting clerk reviewed the terms of his policy and estimated the amount of his bill that would be paid by insurance. She asked him to pay his estimated portion in advance. (More hospitals are doing that now because too often patients don’t pay their portions of the bills after insurance has paid.)

The insurance policy, the clerk said, would pay up to $2,500 for the surgeon—more than enough—and up to $2,500 for the hospital’s charges for the operating room, nursing, recovery room, etc. The estimated hospital charge was $23,000. She asked him to pay roughly $20,000 upfront to cover the estimated balance. …

Mark Steyn with a Corner Post on Chelsea Manning.

Private Bradley Manning, the strange semi-Welshman the four million US bureaucrats with security clearances let snaffle all their secrets, is now a female called Private Chelsea Manning. Same soldier, different privates*.

Jailing Manning and hounding Snowden is a complete waste of time unless you also do something about the system that allowed these guys access to everything. Manning appears to have been a lonely and troubled individual all his life, and obviously vulnerable to sympathetic pitches from wily opportunists like Assange. Why didn’t his superiors see that? That’s the real scandal. I wish young Chelsea well in his/her makeover; maybe the “intelligence community” could use one of its own.

(*Eventually.)

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Turns out many in the media have been following the lead of the NY Times re Hillary Clinton. Jake Tapper starts us off with the dénouement of Benghazi.

As of today, it’s official, the Obama administration is holding no one responsible for what happened before the deadly attacks on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya. Last fall, it was only a matter of days after those four Americans were killed in Benghazi before evidence started appearing indicating that State Department officials paid insufficient attention to requests from diplomats and security personnel in Libya desperately asking for additional security. Around that time, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put four State Department officials on administrative leave. But, as of today, those four have been invited back to work. Secretary of State John Kerry decided that the four do not deserve any formal disciplinary action, and a State Department official tells me that there was no breach of duty for these officials and that they are not returning to their previous positions. …

Salon with a Camille Paglia interview that will not please Hillary.

… As a registered Democrat, I am praying for a credible presidential candidate to emerge from the younger tier of politicians in their late 40s. A governor with executive experience would be ideal. It’s time to put my baby-boom generation out to pasture! We’ve had our day and managed to muck up a hell of a lot. It remains baffling how anyone would think that Hillary Clinton (born the same year as me) is our party’s best chance. She has more sooty baggage than a 90-car freight train. And what exactly has she ever accomplished — beyond bullishly covering for her philandering husband? She’s certainly busy, busy and ever on the move — with the tunnel-vision workaholism of someone trying to blot out uncomfortable private thoughts.

I for one think it was a very big deal that our ambassador was murdered in Benghazi. In saying “I take responsibility” for it as secretary of state, Hillary should have resigned immediately. The weak response by the Obama administration to that tragedy has given a huge opening to Republicans in the next presidential election. The impression has been amply given that Benghazi was treated as a public relations matter to massage rather than as the major and outrageous attack on the U.S. that it was.

Throughout history, ambassadors have always been symbolic incarnations of the sovereignty of their nations and the dignity of their leaders. It’s even a key motif in “King Lear.” As far as I’m concerned, Hillary disqualified herself for the presidency in that fist-pounding moment at a congressional hearing when she said, “What difference does it make what we knew and when we knew it, Senator?” Democrats have got to shake off the Clinton albatross and find new blood. The escalating instability not just in Egypt but throughout the Mideast is very ominous. There is a clash of cultures brewing in the world that may take a century or more to resolve — and there is no guarantee that the secular West will win. …

Jennifer Rubin with interesting take on Benghazi.

A former Bush national security figure had an interesting take on Hillary Clinton’s challenge, should she run for president in 2016, and her historical legacy, even if she doesn’t.

The observation has been made by numerous critics of the Obama administration that the real center of national security power has always been in the Oval Office, where political operatives played an inappropriately large role on national security matters. The former official says this is no excuse for Hillary: “She was perfectly happy to be an irrelevant secretary of state, racking up the frequent-flier miles, rather than engaging in a serious policy debate in Washington. A secretary of state has to do a lot of showing up, but that travel has to be restrained or one is never in Washington long enough to impact the important decisions.”

The ex-official attributes the Benghazi debacle in large part to Hillary’s globetrotting and lack of executive focus. He figures, “Perhaps if she had spent more time in Washington, she might have had time to ask some questions about the deteriorating security situation in Libya, and in Benghazi in particular. The excuse that she can’t be responsible for reading all the cables that come in to State is no excuse for her not paying enough attention to what’s happening in Libya — and it wouldn’t have taken much attention — to ask whether there was a security problem, and if so, what plans did we have to handle an emergency, particularly after the fiasco in early 2011 when it took forever to get Americans out of the country.” Needless to say, the failure to have a system in place for flagging critical memos is solely her fault.

Hillary’s famous 3 a.m. phone call ad turned out to be prophetic. Obama was not prepared for the myriad of foreign policy challenges. But neither was she.

Here’s Politico on the story.

Tabloid headlines. Personal dramas. Organizational disarray. Score-settling between rival factions documented in news accounts like a soap opera.

Does this have a familiar ring?

No one — or mostly no one — truly believes the swirl of headlines surrounding Bill and Hillary Clinton in the summer of 2013 should lead to a grand conclusion about whether another iteration of a Clinton campaign can be run effectively, free of the internecine warfare and incessant drama that marked her 2008 bid.

But if Clinton and her supporters were hoping to allay those doubts well ahead of a possible 2016 run, the past few months have not been helpful.

Clinton supporters would point out, fairly, that much of what has happened to them this summer — the steady stream of unseemly stories about Anthony Weiner’s continued virtual liaisons, his wife and Clinton confidante Huma Abedin’s very public decision to stand by him, and reports of mismanagement at the Clinton Foundation — has been beyond their control.

But it has all still renewed the question that hangs over Hillary Clinton: Has she learned from the mistakes of the past, and can she finally break some recurring cycles in her public life? Can she manage a functional, and focused, national campaign? …

The NY Post zeros in on Clinton organizations’ travel expenses for 10 years. Would you believe $50 million?

Bill Clinton’s foundation has spent more than $50 million on travel expenses since 2003, an analysis of the non-profit’s tax forms reveal.

The web of foundations run by the former president spent an eye-opening $12.1 million on travel in 2011 alone, according to an internal audit conducted by foundation accountants. That’s enough to by 12,000 air tickets costing $1,000 each, or 33 air tickets each day of the year.

That overall figure includes travel costs for the William J. Clinton Foundation (to which Hillary and Chelsea are now attached) of $4.2 million on travel in 2011, the most recent year where figures are available.

The Clinton Global Health Initiative spent another $730,000 on travel, while the Clinton Health Action Initiative (CHAI) spent $7.2 million on travel.

CHAI also spent $2.9 million on meetings and training, according to the report, conducted by the Little Rock, Ark. Accounting firm BDK CPA’s and Advisors. All three entities have global reach, while CHAI has the most staff.

It’s impossible to discern from tax filings how the total travel costs were reached, although the former president is known to rack up his personal miles on private jets.

Wealthy businessman John Catsimatitis has lent aircraft to Clinton and to the foundation multiple times for travel, including Clinton’s recent trip to Africa along with daughter, Chelsea.

Clinton sometimes uses Catsimatitis’ Boeing 727, opting on other flights to use a smaller Gulfstream jet. …

Power Line cheers on Maureen Dowd.

You know the old saying about how even stopped clocks are right twice a day.  The New York Times op-ed columnist version of this would be that one of the Krugman-Friedman-Collins-Dowd foursome will get something right about once a year.  (I’ll take once a decade from Friedman or Krugman.)

Today is Maureen Dowd’s turn to get something right, reminding us of why she was a popular political news journalist before the Times ruined her by making her an self-indulgent, faux-introspective op-ed columnist.  She trains her snarky eye on a worthy target: the Clintons. …

Jennifer Rubin says the Clintons never change.

You can see how Hillary Clinton lost in 2008. She comes in with an air of entitlement. The chattering class declares her the prohibitive favorite. She runs a campaign with questionable political judgments based on her own inevitably.The cloud of controversies that follow the Clintons like Pig Pen’s dust comes blowing in. The pundits and then the voters are reminded what an ordeal the Clintons can be while Hillary Clinton’s innate caution and lack of accomplishment make her less than stirring as a presidential candidate. Enter someone to her left to remind primary voters that they are forever being cheated of a “real” standard bearer.

With the exception of a rival to her left, you can easily fit 2016 into the same sequence. In 2008 Clinton was 30 or more points ahead in early polling, but she ran on experience in a “change” election. Now, to the dismay of some of her media fans, she’s weighing in very early, trying to rid the field of competitors before the race even starts. But soon we are reminded of the Clintons’ money-grubbing ways (then it was the Lincoln bedroom, now it is the Clinton Foundation) and penchant for mismanagement. The Anthony Weiner incident not only echoed the Clintons’ private dramas but also focused on the peculiar deal Clinton struck with , Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin:

“Ms. Abedin, 37, a confidante of Mrs. Clinton’s, was made a “special government employee” in June 2012. That allowed her to continue her employment at State but also work for Teneo, a consulting firm, founded in part by a former aide to President Bill Clinton, that has a number of corporate clients, including Coca-Cola. In addition, Ms. Abedin worked privately for the Clinton Foundation and for Mrs. Clinton personally.”

Yes, the line between the taxpayers’ money and the Clintons’ own pecuniary interests has been as porous as President Obama’s red lines. …

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Pickings has been flogging the student loan issue for years, it’s nice to see Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone on the case.

On May 31st, president Barack Obama strolled into the bright sunlight of the Rose Garden, covered from head to toe in the slime and ooze of the Benghazi and IRS scandals. In a Karl Rove-ian masterstroke, he simply pretended they weren’t there and changed the subject.

The topic? Student loans. Unless Congress took action soon, he warned, the relatively low 3.4 percent interest rates on key federal student loans would double. Obama knew the Republicans would make a scene over extending the subsidized loan program, and that he could corner them into looking like obstructionist meanies out to snatch the lollipop of higher education from America’s youth. “We cannot price the middle class or folks who are willing to work hard to get into the middle class,” he said sternly, “out of a college education.”

Flash-forward through a few months of brinkmanship and name-calling, and not only is nobody talking about the IRS anymore, but the Republicans and Democrats are snuggled in bed together on the student-loan thing, having hatched a quick-fix plan on July 31st to peg interest rates to Treasury rates, ensuring the rate for undergrads would only rise to 3.86 percent for the coming year.

Though this was just the thinnest of temporary solutions – Congressional Budget Office projections predicted interest rates on undergraduate loans under the new plan would still rise as high as 7.25 percent within five years, while graduate loans could reach an even more ridiculous 8.8 percent – the jobholders on Capitol Hill couldn’t stop congratulating themselves for their “rare” “feat” of bipartisan cooperation. “This proves Washington can work,” clucked House Republican Luke Messer of Indiana, in a typically autoerotic assessment of the work done by Beltway pols like himself who were now freed up for their August vacations. …

 

… the dirty secret of American higher education is that student-loan interest rates are almost irrelevant. It’s not the cost of the loan that’s the problem, it’s the principal – the appallingly high tuition costs that have been soaring at two to three times the rate of inflation, an irrational upward trajectory eerily reminiscent of skyrocketing housing prices in the years before 2008.

How is this happening? It’s complicated. But throw off the mystery and what you’ll uncover is a shameful and oppressive outrage that for years now has been systematically perpetrated against a generation of young adults. For this story, I interviewed people who developed crippling mental and physical conditions, who considered suicide, who had to give up hope of having children, who were forced to leave the country, or who even entered a life of crime because of their student debts.

They all take responsibility for their own mistakes. They know they didn’t arrive at gorgeous campuses for four golden years of boozing, balling and bong hits by way of anybody’s cattle car. But they’re angry, too, and they should be. …

 

… While it’s not commonly discussed on the Hill, the government actually stands to make an enormous profit on the president’s new federal student-loan system, an estimated $184 billion over 10 years, a boondoggle paid for by hyperinflated tuition costs and fueled by a government-sponsored predatory-lending program that makes even the most ruthless private credit-card company seem like a “Save the Panda” charity. Why is this happening? The answer lies in a sociopathic marriage of private-sector greed and government force that will make you shake your head in wonder at the way modern America sucks blood out of its young.

In the early 2000s, a thirtysomething scientist named Alan Collinge seemed to be going places. He had graduated from USC in 1999 with a degree in aerospace engineering and landed a research job at Caltech. Then he made a mistake: He asked for a raise, didn’t get it, lost his job and soon found himself underemployed and with no way to repay the roughly $38,000 in loans he’d taken out to get his degree.

Collinge’s creditor, Sallie Mae, which originally had been a quasi-public institution but, in the late Nineties, had begun transforming into a wholly private lender, didn’t answer his requests for a forbearance or a restructuring. So in 2001, he went into default. Soon enough, his original $38,000 loan had ballooned to more than $100,000 in debt, thanks to fees, penalties and accrued interest. He had a job as a military contractor, but he lost it when his employer ran a credit check on him. His whole life was now about his student debt.

Collinge became so upset that, while sitting on a buddy’s couch in Tacoma, Washington, one night in 2005 and nursing a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, he swore that he’d see Sallie Mae on 60 Minutes if it was the last thing he did. In what has to be a first in the history of drunken bullshitting, it actually happened. “Lo and behold, I ended up being featured on 60 Minutes within about a year,” he says. In 2006, he got to tell his debt story to Lesley Stahl for a piece on Sallie Mae’s draconian lending tactics that, curiously enough, Sallie Mae itself refused to be interviewed for.

From that point forward, Collinge – who founded the website StudentLoanJustice.org – became what he calls “a complaint box for the industry.” He heard thousands of horror stories from people like himself, and over the course of many years began to wonder more and more about one particular recurring theme, what he calls “the really significant thing – the sticker price.” Why was college so expensive? …

 

… Talk to any of the 38 million Americans who have outstanding student-loan debt, and he or she is likely to tell you a story about how a single moment in a financial-aid office at the age of 18 or 19 – an age when most people can barely do a load of laundry without help – ended up ruining his or her life. “I was 19 years old,” says 24-year-old Lyndsay Green, a graduate of the University of Alabama, in a typical story. “I didn’t understand what was going on, but my mother was there. She had signed, and now it was my turn. So I did.” Six years later, she says, “I am nearly $45,000 in debt. . . . If I had known what I was doing, I would never have gone to college.”

“Nobody sits down and explains to you what it all means,” says 24-year-old Andrew Geliebter, who took out loans to get what he calls “a degree in bullshit”; he entered a public-relations program at TempleUniversity. His loan payments are now 50 percent of his gross income, leaving only about $100 a week for groceries for his family of four.

Another debtor, a 38-year-old attorney who suffered a pulmonary embolism and went into default as a result, is now more than $100,000 in debt. Bedridden and fully disabled, he accepts he will likely be in debt until his death. He asked that his name be withheld because he doesn’t want to incur the wrath of the government by disclosing the awful punch line to his story: After he qualified for federal disability payments in 2009, the Department of Education quickly began garnishing $170 a month from his disability check. …

 

… In a way, America itself is violating the Truth in Lending Act. It’s cheering millions of high school graduates toward college every year, feeding them into the debt grinder under the banner of increased opportunity, when full disclosure would require admitting that there isn’t a hell of a lot waiting for them on the other side, where the middle class has nearly vanished and full employment is going the way of the dodo.

We’re doing the worst thing people can do: lying to our young. Nobody, not even this president, who was swept to victory in large part by the raw enthusiasm of college kids, has the stones to tell the truth: that a lot of them will end up being pawns in a predatory con game designed to extract the equivalent of home-mortgage commitment from 17-year-olds dreaming of impossible careers as nautical archaeologists or orchestra conductors. One former law student I contacted for this story had a nervous breakdown while struggling to pay off six-figure debt. It wasn’t until he tapped into one of the few growth industries open to young Americans that his outlook brightened. “I got my life back on track by working for a marijuana delivery service in Manhattan,” he says. “I’ve had to compromise who I am . . . because I started down a path that I couldn’t turn away from. Student loans aren’t hope. They’re despair.”

Good spot for this on NYU salaries from the Daily Caller.

New York University President John Sexton has decided to resign, following weeks of criticism over the lavish perks he received — including a vacation home financed with university loans.

He is set to leave NYU in 2016 — after collecting a $2.5 million bonus.

Sexton makes $1.5 million a year, and is one of the highest paid college presidents in the country. He also took advantage of a university loan program that helps top faculty and administrators afford luxurious vacation homes on New York’s Fire Island and the Hamptons.

His tenure as president was marked by a dramatic shift toward growing the business prestige of the university, as well as its physical boundaries. He has enacted a $2 billion expansion of the campus, angering residents and some faculty members, who voted “no confidence” in his leadership.

NYU’s board of trustees stressed that his decision to leave was his own, and that they remained happy with his leadership. …

The government is hiring “navigators” to assist us in enrolling in the new healthcare plan. In a post that should have appeared yesterday, Andrew Malcolm gives us the skinny on our new helpers.

… Have you heard of “navigators”? No, not Ferdinand Magellan or Vasco de Gama. These new battalions of government employees are being hired to help applicants enroll quicker for this Rube Goldberg-monstrosity called ObamaCare. Isn’t that thoughtful?

These navigators will have absolutely zero background in insurance. But they’ll be full of advice on what’s best for you. And given Obama’s record of truthfulness, who wouldn’t trust a total government stranger implementing Obama’s health plan? …

… But here’s the teeny, tiny problem with these navigators.

In the interests of, you know, moving things along quickly, the Obama administration will not be vetting these navigators. No background checks. No resume or education verifications. Takes too much time, you see. …

… Obama people suggest private insurance reps just don’t want the competition and promise that navigators will undergo training. They better hurry.

Training or not, the new situation opens the door wide for fraud and identity thieves, who will know virtually anything that matters about you, your income, Social Security and military records. While their government employer will know very little about them or their record. And if some identities get stolen, who will be responsible?

Thank goodness we didn’t elect to the White House a businessman with decades of experience running vast personnel operations.

At least 18 states have begun or are considering imposing tougher certification procedures on navigators. But the feds warn these local limits can not impact ObamaCare rules in any way.

Oh, and to boost the number of government employees and dues-paying union members even more, each of these navigators will have an assistant, who will have the same vast data access. And that assistant will not be checked either.

What could possibly go wrong with any of this?

WSJ Review of Golf in America claims ancient origins for the game’s skills. Pickerhead thinks a better case could be made for baseball which uses important skills used in killing at a distance – throwing and swinging a club. Take a look at riots in the Arab street. Because they’re soccer players, they can’t throw rocks and bricks with accuracy.  This makes it harder for primitive peoples to bring down their governments. 

In ‘The Art Instinct,’ a book about evolutionary psychology that has little to do with golf, the late Denis Dutton quotes scholars on the notion of an ideal landscape, one that humans have evolved to see as beautiful. It is a landscape like the ones where mankind arose in Africa, rolling grasslands with signs of water and groups of trees and bushes where our forebears hunted and gathered.

 

Crouched with clubs in their hands, squinting at the distance, these hominids look familiar, to my mind’s eye. Trade the bare feet for FootJoy shoes, and they are golfers looking at the water hazard to the left, the out-of-bounds trees to the right, the rolling grassland called a fairway.

At the roughly 15,000-20,000 golf courses in America, half or more of the golf courses in the world, we can fulfill our savanna heritage. The courses I play have deer and fox running across the fairways instead of dik-diks and hyenas, but the view is the same. In the deep American South an atavistic touch is the alligator sunning next to one’s ill-struck drive. …

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Today we spend most of our time on healthcare. John Steele Gordon picks up on a NY Times idea for health care cost reform.

… Two weeks ago, I wrote about the medical outrage called the chargemaster, the exhaustive list of prices for procedures, drugs, and medical equipment that every hospital maintains and which every hospital refuses to reveal—until they send the bill. Interestingly, even the avidly pro-ObamaCare New York Times editorial page has noticed that price transparency is a big problem in the American medical marketplace.

Tina Rosenberg writes in today’s Sunday Review section:

“Here is a basic fact of health care in the United States: Doctors and hospitals know what they charge, but patients don’t know what they pay. As in any market, when one side has no information, that side loses: price secrecy is a major reason medical bills are so high. In my previous column, I wrote about the effect of this lack of transparency on the bills patients pay out of pocket.”

Here is an obvious reform that wouldn’t cost the federal government one cent and would exert an immediate and powerful downward pressure on medical costs: require that medical service providers make those chargemasters public. Market forces would instantly force the prices down towards the low end.

The natural forces that dominate an economy would do the work, and the Republicans can have the credit for lowering medical costs. What’s not to like?

Next a couple of items from Debra Saunders from SF Chronicle. First, she asks if the president owns obamacare.

If House Republicans had somehow erased chunks of the Affordable Care Act — the employer mandate, the ability to screen who gets subsidies and the annual cap on out-of-pocket costs for a year — the Democrats would have blasted those moves as unconscionable acts of sabotage. But the GOP didn’t sneak in those changes. President Barack Obama did.

The New York Times reported this week that the administration didn’t even announce its decision to delay a cap on copayments in many health care plans. “The grace period has been outlined on the Labor Department’s Web site since February, but was obscured in a maze of legal and bureaucratic language that went largely unnoted,” the Times reported.

Democrats argue that because Republicans don’t like Obamacare, they shouldn’t complain when the White House delays provisions.

This week, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius slammed Republicans who want to overturn Obamacare. She said: “It was passed and signed three years ago. It was upheld by the Supreme Court a year ago. The president was re-elected. This is the law of the land.”

OK, then, who made Obama king, and how does he get to override a law passed by Congress? …

Next Ms. Saunders writes on the president’s maneuver to exempt congress and its staff from healthcare reform.

… As a result of that brilliant maneuver, senators and congressmen will be able to exempt their staffers if they so choose. Capitol Hill, it turns out, is one colossal golden-domed exemption.

In pushing his amendment in 2010, Grassley rightly argued: “It’s only fair and logical that administration leaders and congressional staff, who fought so hard to overhaul America’s health care system, experience it for themselves. If the reforms are as good as promised, then they’ll know it firsthand. If there are problems, public officials will be in a position to really understand the problems, as they should.”

But there’s this ugly reality on ObamacareIsland: The rules do not apply to the people who make them.

Andrew Stiles writes about the coming “train wreck.”

The White House plans to delay yet another provision of Obamacare, the New York Times revealed on Monday, in what was described as “another setback for President Obama’s health-care initiative.” Indeed, it seems that every week the administration offers up a new example of the implementation “train wreck” of which Obamacare architect Max Baucus (D., Mont.), among others, has warned.

Here are nine examples of how Obamacare implementation hasn’t gone according to plan:

1. Caps on Out-of-Pocket Insurance Costs
The Obama administration plans to delay until 2015 a provision that limits out-of-pocket health-care costs, including deductibles and co-payments, for individuals ($6,350) and families ($12,700). In the meantime, many insurers will be able to set higher limits on out-of-pocket costs, or no limit at all.

The obscure ruling, which received attention this week despite being published on the Labor Department’s website back in February, has drawn complaints from advocacy groups representing individuals with chronic illnesses, who argue that patients requiring expensive drug treatments will face exorbitant out-of-pocket costs in the absence of caps. “The promise of out-of-pocket limits was one of the main reasons we supported health-care reform,” Theodore M. Thompson, a vice president of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, told the New York Times.

President Obama repeatedly touted the limits on out-of-pocket expenses in his effort to win support for the law. “No one should go broke because they get sick,” Obama told a joint session of Congress in September 2009. In explaining the decision to delay the requirement, a senior administration official told the Times, “We had to balance the interests of consumers with the concerns of health-plan sponsors and carriers” who “asked for more time to comply.” …

It is so bad, CNBC is running pieces on how to avoid the con-artists that are swarming to obamacare.

As the debate rages over who benefits from the Affordable Care Act, one thing is becoming clear: The controversial program is a dream come true for rip-off artists.

Consumer experts warn that the program has created a huge opportunity for swindling people by stealing their money and their sensitive personal information.

“Any time you roll out a big government program like this, confusion is inevitable,” said Lois Greisman, an associate director in the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the Federal Trade Commission. “This confusion creates a tremendous opportunity for the fraudster.”

Scammers have been at it for more than a year now, but consumer advocates and security experts warn that the problem will worsen as we get closer to Oct. 1. That’s when the millions of uninsured Americans can use a health insurance exchange, set-up by their state or by the federal government, to shop for coverage.

“I believe the incidents are going to skyrocket as that date approaches,” said Eva Velasquez, president and CEO of the nonprofit Identity Theft Resource Center. “And even people who are smart and savvy could get taken, so we are very concerned about the potential for some serious financial harm.” …

For a welcome change of pace, we go to Birmingham, MI, in suburban Detroit for last weekend’s dream cruise. The story is from the NY Times.

It’s Dream Cruise week in metro Detroit, and Woodward Avenue, main street to the American auto industry for more than a century, is dancing to the rumbling beat of some 30,000 muscle cars, street rods and classics.

A crowd estimated at more than one million has been gathering for days to witness Saturday’s bumper-to-bumper parade of automotive excess. The revelers are celebrating what the MotorCity does — and honoring the Woodward tradition of cruising, an automotive ritual of youth that’s generations old and hit a peak in the 1950s and ‘60s, glory days for Detroit’s industry.

The first Woodward Dream Cruise — a fund-raiser for a soccer program — took to the streets in 1995 and proved far more popular than organizers had anticipated. It returned the next year and each year since. Today, it is a mammoth outdoor party that’s a pilgrimage for enthusiasts who make the trek and a marketing showcase for automakers and sponsors.

Among those enjoying the festivities are Dave and Shirley Ziolkowski. The Ziolkowskis are well into retirement; he’s 70 and she’s 66. Their home is a modest ranch house in the quiet suburb of Sterling Heights, and their car is a 1988 Dodge Shadow, just the sort of thrifty transportation one might expect to find in the garage of seniors.

But the Ziolkowski’s Shadow shares little with the 93-horsepower front-drive compact that Chrysler built in 1987-94.

 In the lexicon of hot rodders, it’s a pro-street custom, with flaming-red sheet metal that conceals a professional-grade racecar frame and a brawny Chrysler V-8.

Subtlety is not part of the package:

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OK, we know Lincoln acted extra-constitutionally during the beginning months of the Civil War. How does that compare to the current lawlessness? Answers from a WSJ OpEd by a Georgetown Law prof.

… Scholars have debated whether Lincoln exceeded his power by suspending the writ and whether Congress’s retroactive ratification cured any constitutional infirmity. Whatever one’s answer, this is a case of a president—himself a constitutional lawyer—trying, under impossible circumstances, to be as faithful to the Constitution as possible.

Contrast all of this with President Obama’s announcement that he is unilaterally suspending part of the Affordable Care Act. Like Lincoln, Mr. Obama is a constitutional lawyer. And like Lincoln’s action, Mr. Obama’s was a unilateral executive suspension of the law. But in every other way, the president’s behavior could not have been more different from Lincoln’s.

First, Lincoln’s action was at least arguably constitutional, while Mr. Obama’s is not. The Constitution has a provision for suspending habeas. It has no general provision for executive suspension of laws. English kings used to suspend laws, but the Framers rejected that practice: The president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

Second, Lincoln volunteered an articulate constitutional defense of his action. Mr. Obama seemed annoyed when the New York Times dared to ask him the constitutional question. When the reporter asked whether he had consulted with lawyers about the legality of the mandate’s delay, he declined to answer.

As for Republican congressmen who had the temerity to question his authority, Mr. Obama said only: “I’m not concerned about their opinions—very few of them, by the way, are lawyers, much less constitutional lawyers.” Mr. Obama made no mention of Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin—a Democrat, a lawyer and one of the authors of ObamaCare—who said: “This was the law. How can they change the law?” …

Mark Steyn reacts to what NSA does “accidentally.”

On Thursday, the Washington Post’s revelation of thousands upon thousands of National Security Agency violations of both the law and supposed privacy protections included this fascinating detail:

A “large number” of Americans had their telephone calls accidentally intercepted by the NSA when a top secret order to eavesdrop on multiple phone lines for reasons of national security confused the international code for Egypt (20) with the area code for Washington (202).

Seriously.

I enjoy as much as the next chap all those Hollywood conspiracy thrillers about the all-powerful security state — you know the kind of thing, where the guy’s on the lam and he stops at a diner at a windswept one-stoplight hick burg in the middle of nowhere and decides to take the risk of making one 15-second call from the payphone, and as he dials the last digit there’s a click in a basement in Langley, and even as he’s saying hello the black helicopters are already descending on him.

It’s heartening to know that, if I ever get taken out at a payphone, it will be because some slapdash time-serving pen-pusher mistyped the code for Malaysia (60) as that of New Hampshire (603).

The Egypt/Washington industrial-scale wrong number is almost too perfectly poignant a vignette at the end of a week in which hundreds are dead on the streets of Cairo.

On the global scene, America has imploded: its leaders have no grasp of its national interests, never mind any sense of how to achieve them. The assumption that we are in the early stages of “the post-American world” is now shared by everyone from Gen. Sisi to Vladimir Putin. Sisi, I should add, is Egypt’s new strongman, not Putin’s characterization of Obama. Meanwhile, in contrast to its accelerating irrelevance overseas, at home Washington’s big bloated blundering bureaucratic security state expands daily. It’s easier to crack down on 47 Elm Street than Benghazi.

Perhaps this is unavoidable. A couple of months back, I quoted Tocqueville’s prescient words from almost two centuries ago: Although absolute monarchy theoretically “clothed kings with a power almost without limits,” in practice “the details of social life and of individual existence ordinarily escaped his control.”

In other words, the king couldn’t do it even if he wanted to. What would happen, Tocqueville wondered, if administrative capability were to evolve to bring “the details of social life and of individual existence” within His Majesty’s oversight? That world is now upon us. Today, the king concedes he certainly can do it, but assures us not to worry, he doesn’t really want to. …

 

Reminding us of Candy Crowley’s interference in one of last season’s debates, John Fund celebrates the GOP’s willingness to take control back from the media.

… It’s not controversial to note that presidential debates have long displayed real problems with fairness on the part of moderators and panelists. PBS anchor Jim Lehrer notes in a recent book, Tension City: Inside the Presidential Debates, that the panelists in one of the 1988 presidential debates between George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis pressured CNN moderator Bernard Shaw to withdraw or alter what became his famous question to Dukakis: Would he favor the death penalty if his wife, Kitty, were raped and murdered? Now-MSNBC anchor Andrea Mitchell and ABC’s Ann Compton confirmed to Lehrer that they had put pressure on Shaw, who is still peeved over the incident. “I’ve never confronted any of the three panelists,” Shaw said. “But I was outraged at the time that a journalist would try to talk a fellow journalist out of asking a question. I think you can tell I am still doing a burn over it. I just wouldn’t think of doing that.”

Old-school journalists such as Shaw would no doubt have wondered at the shenanigans of the 2012 campaign. During the final debate between President Obama and Mitt Romney, CNN moderator Candy Crowley stepped out of her role and took Obama’s side in a heated moment in the debate, attempting to correct Romney on a factual question about the Benghazi terrorist attack. She later had to admit that Romney had been more right than wrong in his answer. …

Last week’s NY Times’ report of chaos in the Clinton Foundation gets a déjà vu reaction from Maureen Dowd.

CLINTON nostalgia is being replaced by Clinton neuralgia.

Why is it that America’s roil family always seems better in abstract than in concrete? The closer it gets to running the world once more, the more you are reminded of all the things that bugged you the last time around.

The Clintons’ neediness, their sense of what they are owed in material terms for their public service, their assumption that they’re entitled to everyone’s money.

Are we about to put the “For Rent” sign back on the Lincoln Bedroom?

If Americans are worried about money in politics, there is no larger concern than the Clintons, who are cosseted in a world where rich people endlessly scratch the backs of rich people.

They have a Wile E. Coyote problem; something is always blowing up. Just when the Clintons are supposed to be floating above it all, on a dignified cloud of do-gooding leading into 2016, pop-pop-pop, little explosions go off everywhere, reminding us of the troubling connections and values they drag around.

There’s the continuing grotesque spectacle of Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin. And there’s the sketchy involvement of the Clintons’ most prolific fund-raiser, Terry McAuliffe, and Hillary’s brother Tony Rodham in a venture, GreenTech Automotive; it’s under federal investigation and causing fireworks in Virginia, where McAuliffe is running for governor. …

Last week was the 10th anniversary of the great blackout in the NorthEast. Popular Mechanics explains why we haven’t had a repeat.

… So why haven’t we had a major power outage since then? For one thing, power companies are now forced to prune their trees thanks to the Energy Policy Act of 2005. But the other major factor is a technological advance. According to Matt Wakefield of the Electric Power Research Institute, most power transmission companies have now installed high-tech synchrophasors, which allow them to detect problems in transmission lines and reroute electricity around trouble spots. The synchophasors work by giving real-time feedback on power flows and voltage and transmitting the data back to power companies.

“While we will always have local and regional power outrages because of things like weather,” Wakefield says, “these synchrophasors mean that these rolling blackouts that can affect large regions of the country at once are much less likely.”  …