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Mark Steyn takes us back to Putin’s star turn at the NY Times OpEd.

For generations, eminent New York Times wordsmiths have swooned over foreign strongmen, from Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer-winning paeans to the Stalinist utopia to Thomas L. Friedman’s more recent effusions to the “enlightened” Chinese Politburo. So it was inevitable that the cash-strapped Times would eventually figure it might as well eliminate the middle man and hire the enlightened strongman direct. Hence Vladimir Putin’s impressive debut on the op-ed page this week.

It pains me to have to say that the versatile Vlad makes a much better columnist than I’d be a KGB torturer. His “plea for caution” was an exquisitely masterful parody of liberal bromides far better than most of the Times’ in-house writers can produce these days. He talked up the U.N. and international law, was alarmed by U.S. military intervention, and worried that America was no longer seen as “a model of democracy” but instead as erratic cowboys “cobbling coalitions together under the slogan ‘you’re either with us or against us.’” He warned against chest-thumping about “American exceptionalism,” pointing out that, just like America’s grade-school classrooms, in the international community everyone is exceptional in his own way.

All this the average Times reader would find entirely unexceptional. Indeed, it’s the sort of thing a young Senator Obama would have been writing himself a mere five years ago. Putin even appropriated the 2008 Obama’s core platitude: “We must work together to keep this hope alive.” …

… When the president’s an irrelevant narcissist and his secretary of state’s a vainglorious buffoon, Marco Rubio shouldn’t be telling the world don’t worry, the other party’s a joke, too.

Charles Krauthammer thinks we got a bad deal in Syria last week.

… And what does America get? Obama saves face.

Some deal.

As for the peace process, it has about zero chance of disarming Damascus. We’ve spent nine years disarming an infinitely smaller arsenal in Libya — in conditions of peace — and we’re still finding undeclared stockpiles.

Yet consider what’s happened over the last month. Assad uses poison gas on civilians and is branded, by the United States above all, a war criminal. Putin, covering for the war criminal, is exposed, isolated, courting pariah status.

And now? Assad, far from receiving punishment of any kind, goes from monster to peace partner. Putin bestrides the world stage, playing dealmaker. He’s welcomed by America as a constructive partner. Now a world statesman, he takes to the New York Times to blame American interventionist arrogance — a.k.a. “American exceptionalism” — for inducing small states to acquire WMDs in the first place.

And Obama gets to slink away from a Syrian debacle of his own making. Such are the fruits of a diplomacy of epic incompetence.

Responding to the new Putintate, Peggy Noonan has good ideas about what is exceptional in our country.

… America is not exceptional because it has long attempted to be a force for good in the world, it attempts to be a force for good because it is exceptional. It is a nation formed not by brute, grunting tribes come together over the fire to consolidate their power and expand their land base, but by people who came from many places. They coalesced around not blood lines but ideals, and they defined, delineated and won their political rights in accordance with ground-breaking Western and Enlightenment thought. That was something new in history, and quite exceptional. We fought a war to win our freedom, won it against the early odds, understood we owed much to God, and moved forward as a people attempting to be worthy of what he’d given us.

We had been obliged, and had obligations. If you don’t understand this about America you don’t understand anything.

I don’t know why the idea of American exceptionalism seems to grate so on Mr. Putin. Perhaps he simply misunderstands what is meant by it and takes it to be a reference to American superiority, which it is not. Perhaps it makes him think of who won the Cold War and how. Maybe the whole concept makes him think of what Russia did, almost 100 years ago now, to upend and thwart its own greatness, with a communist revolution that lasted 75 years and whose atheism, a core part of its ideology, attempted to rid his great nation of its faith, and almost succeeded. Maybe it grates on him that in his time some of the stupider Americans have crowed about American exceptionalism a bit too much—and those crowing loudest understood it least.

But I suspect on some level he’s just a little envious of the greatness of America’s beginnings. The Russian Revolution almost killed Russia—they’re still recovering. The American Revolution has been animating us for more than two centuries. …

Wait until you see the example of media protecting president bystander provided by Power Line.

Congress (Dems included) was mugged by minimum-wage reality last week. Kate Bachelder has the story in WSJ’s Political Diary.

Members of Congress sometimes bump into economic reality. Take Tuesday’s vote on a bill to delay federally mandated minimum-wage increases in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands and American Samoa, U.S. territories in the South Pacific. Congress agreed, 415-0, that a minimum-wage requirement can worsen economic mobility, though apparently only on small islands.

The government has historically granted the territories an exemption from minimum-wage requirements under the Fair Labor Standards Act. The last federal increase in 2007, to $7.25 from $5.15, required CNMI and American Samoa for the first time to raise their minimum wage by $0.50 per year until it reached parity with the states. The bill included American Somoa only after Nancy Pelosi came under attack for granting an exemption to a place that had factories for companies headquartered in her district.

Even with the minimum wage currently only at $5.55 in CNMI after three increases, the requirement has caused so much economic tumult that Congress has now passed two pieces of legislation, in 2010 and on Tuesday, to extend the transition period for the islands.

That’s because the minimum-wage hikes have slammed local economies, which were already reporting years of declining GDP when the increases began. Government Accountability Office studies have shown that wage floors tend to do precisely the opposite of what their supporters purport. …

Michelle Malkin celebrates the gun control loss in CO.

Quick, call the CDC. We’ve got a RockyMountain outbreak of Acute Sore Loser Fever. After failing to stave off two historic recall bids on Tuesday, two delusional state legislators and their national party bosses just can’t help but double-down and trash voters as dumb, sick, criminal and profligate.

The ululations of gun-grabbing Democrats here in my adopted home state are reverberating far and wide. Appearing on cable TV Thursday to answer the question “What happened?” Pueblo State Sen. Angela Giron sputtered that she lost her seat due to “voter suppression.” Giron whined to CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin that voters “weren’t able to get to the polls” and that there was “voter confusion.”

“Voter confusion”? My goodness. You’d think there were no public libraries, local television stations, talk radio, newspapers, blogs, Facebook, Twitter or government websites to get information about the elections. (Oh, and pay no attention to the massive 6-to-1 spending advantage that Giron and her fellow recall target John Morse, formerly the president of the state Senate, enjoyed.)

“Voter suppression”? Dios mio! You’d think there were New Black Panther Party thugs standing outside the polls shouting racist epithets and waving police batons!

But no, there was no “voter confusion” or “voter suppression.” In fact, as the Colorado Peak Politics blog pointed out, the “majority of turnout in (Giron’s) district was Democrat, by a large margin. And she still lost. Voter suppression (is) not even believable.”

Giron lost in her Obama-loving Democratic Senate District 3 by a whopping 12 points. …

For what it’s worth, turns out it was Sec. Clinton who first proclaimed the “red line.” At least that is the story from Daily Caller.

.. On August 11, 2012, ten days before Obama’s statement, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu had a joint press conference in Istanbul.  During that press conference the following exchange happened:

QUESTION: Madam Secretary, for you, can you tell us a little bit more in detail about your meeting with the opposition activists? Did you get a better sense of whether they are really prepared to be able to be involved in leading a transition? What kind of questions did you ask them about who is actually doing the fighting on the ground? And what kind of answers did you get?

And then, for both of you, there has been a lot of talk about this common operational picture. What exactly is that common operational picture? Does it involve the potential of this corridor from Aleppo, north to the border here, turning into some kind of safe haven? And does it include anything on how to deal with the chemical weapons that everyone has expressed concern about? Thank you.

SECRETARY CLINTON: [yadda yadda] And both the minister and I saw eye to eye on the many tasks that are ahead of us, and the kinds of contingencies that we have to plan for, including the one you mentioned in the horrible event that chemical weapons were used. And everyone has made it clear to the Syrian regime that is a red line for the world, [italics mine] what would that mean in terms of response and humanitarian and medical emergency assistance, and of course, what needs to be done to secure those stocks from every being used, or from falling into the wrong hands.

It appears that where Obama deviated from script was in omitting “for the world” and substituting “for us.” …

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Out of the spot light, House IRS investigators have been grinding out the work. WSJ Editors comment.

Congress’s investigation into the IRS targeting of conservatives has been continuing out of the Syria headlines, and it’s turning up news. Emails unearthed by the House Ways and Means Committee between former Director of Exempt Organizations Lois Lerner and her staff raise doubts about IRS claims that the targeting wasn’t politically motivated and that low-level employees in Cincinnati masterminded the operation.

In a February 2011 email, Ms. Lerner advised her staff—including then Exempt Organizations Technical Manager Michael Seto and then Rulings and Agreements director Holly Paz—that a Tea Party matter is “very dangerous,” and is something “Counsel and [Lerner adviser] Judy Kindell need to be in on.” Ms. Lerner adds, “Cincy should probably NOT have these cases.”

That’s a different tune than the IRS sang in May when former IRS Commissioner Steven Miller said the agency’s overzealous enforcement was the work of two “rogue” employees in Cincinnati. When the story broke, Ms. Lerner suggested that her office had been unaware of the pattern of targeting until she read about it in the newspaper. “So it was pretty much we started seeing information in the press that raised questions for us, and we went back and took a look,” she said in May. …

Carol Platt Liebau has more.

… Perhaps one of the most sinister statements in the newly-released Lerner emails is the following: After receiving an article about Democrats complaining about anonymous donors financing attack ads against them, Lerner wrote, “”Perhaps the (Federal Election Commission) will save the day.” 

Hm.  So is it a coincidence, as reported here on Townhall, that Lois Lerner colluded with a lawyer from the FEC to try to influence the record before the FEC — at least twice — and illegally sharing confidential information?  The answer has always been obvious; now it is increasingly so.

The more the facts in the IRS targeting scandal emerges, the more obvious it becomes that this was a partisan operation, in which law-abiding Americans were discriminated against based only on their political views. …

In City Journal, Steve Malanga asks “Who will audit the auditors?”

The Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups has revived old fears about the agency’s vast taxing and auditing powers, so easy to abuse. But the IRS isn’t alone in holding those powers. Across the country, states and municipalities have endowed thousands of revenue and audit bureaucracies with similar capabilities. Critics complain that officials use these entities to harass enemies and help allies. The evidence makes clear just how well-founded those concerns are—especially since these agencies typically receive far less scrutiny than the IRS does.

Under the administration of Democratic governor Bill Richardson, New Mexico’s labor department sparked controversy in 2006 for auditing the state’s Republican Party. The audit, launched shortly after the party criticized the governor harshly, was meant to examine whether it was complying with state laws on employment taxes. After initially claiming that a computer had randomly chosen the GOP for scrutiny, the state admitted that an employee of the labor department had selected the party. Under fire from state newspapers, the Richardson administration turned the audit over to a private firm. The controversy faded after the firm found the Republican Party “squeaky clean,” as the Santa Fe New Mexican put it, though the paper noted that the audit was “more harassment than just due vigilance on the labor department’s part.” …

While the IRS was harassing tea party groups, they were assisting obama voters. Investor’s Business Daily with the story.

At the same time the IRS harassed Republican nonprofit groups during the 2012 political campaign, it selectively advised black churches and other Democrat nonprofits on how far they can go in campaigning for President Obama and other Democrats.

This raw exercise in political favoritism has not been reported in the context of the still-smoldering IRS scandal, in which the agency in 2012 audited big GOP donors and blocked Tea Party groups trying to obtain tax-exempt status as part of what House investigators suspect was an effort to re-elect the president.

But that same year, top officials with both the IRS and Justice Department — including the IRS commissioner and attorney general — met in Washington with several dozen prominent black church ministers representing millions of voters to brief them on how to get their flocks out to vote without breaking federal tax laws.

The “summit” on energizing the black vote in houses of worship was hosted by the Democrat-controlled Congressional Black Caucus inside the U.S. Capitol on May 30, 2012.

The Daily Caller has an example of how the IRS may have been recruited by greens to audit a land owner.

The Inspector General of the U.S. Treasury Department is investigating whether an environmental group pressured the Internal Revenue Service into auditing a Virginia farmer and tea partier, according to attorneys, policy analysts and other sources familiar with the case.

But the investigation has not discouraged IRS auditors, who are expanding their audit of Martha Boneta in what has become a high-profile dispute over property rights.

Boneta told The Daily Caller in an interview that she has been asked to submit “reams and reams” of new information in addition to the original audit request.

Boneta said that she and her legal representatives recently met with a special agent of the U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Information (TIGTA) “on two separate days, for almost five hours.”

While Boneta would not comment on the details of the meeting, she did say the “close coordination and collusion” between the Piedmont Environmental Council (PEC) and the FauquierCounty government in Virginia could become central to the ongoing investigation. The meetings with the special agent took place earlier this summer and with witnesses as recently as this past week. …

And to top off the day, World News Daily has a story on how the IRS is beating up veterans.

The Internal Revenue Service, which has been caught harassing conservative organizations with demands for personal ideological details, such as the content of prayers, now is doing the same to veterans’ groups.

Louis J. Celli Jr., director of the National Legislative Division at the American Legion, spoke exclusively with WND about the developing problem.

He said that officials at American Legion headquarters have been getting calls from a number of the group’s outposts complaining of IRS agents who, during the course of their inspections, were demanding personal information.

The information, Celli said, includes birth dates and Social Security numbers of members.

Celli said one outpost in Texas, where officials were unable to comply immediately with the requirements, was fined $12,000, or $1,000 for each of 12 days it failed to produce the documents the IRS demanded.

Celli lamented that such actions mean the American Legion will have less money for many of the veteran-related programs it sponsors. …

The Blaze has some good news about citizens fighting back against traffic cameras.

Citizens across the country have grumbled about speed cameras, but someone in Wicomico County, Maryland appears to be making a physical — and political — point.

A photo posted on the blog SBY News shows a traffic camera that’s been spray-painted over the lens and tagged with the year 1776, the year the U.S. declared independence.

“Good for them!” blog publisher Joe Albero wrote.

Some commenting on the post seem to agree. Here are a few:

Everytime I drive past one, I secretly wish someone would do that. I would gladly donate to their bail if they get caught.

I love it then the top it off 1776 nice touch

Next, surveillance cameras for the surveillance cameras. …