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Thomas Sowell on how things are going for the administration.
This has been the worst time, politically, for President Barack Obama since he took office. Recent polls reveal that public confidence in both his domestic and foreign policies has been falling, amid revelations about their defects and dangers. Even people who once supported and defended him have now turned against him.
There have even been rumblings against Barack Obama in the Congressional Black Caucus and among labor unions that were a major factor in helping him get elected and re-elected.
Two of President Obama’s own former Secretaries of Defense have publicly criticized his gross mishandling of the Syria crisis, which has emboldened America’s enemies and undermined our allies around the world.
As ObamaCare continues to go into effect, step by step, its high costs and dire consequences for jobs have become ever more visible — as have the lies that Obama blithely told about its costs and consequences when it was rushed into law too fast for anyone to see that it would become a “train wreck,” as one of its initial Democratic supporters in the Senate has since called it.
As more and more revelations have come to light about the cynical and dangerous misuse of the Internal Revenue Service to harass and sabotage conservative political groups, the lies that the Obama administration initially told about this, as part of the coverup, have also been exposed.
So have the lies told about what happened in Benghazi when four Americans were killed last year. Their killers remain at large, though they are known and are even giving media interviews in Libya. …
Andrew Malcolm notes this record of failure has brought about announcements of what the administration will not do.
… Obama announced to the waiting nation what he wasn’t going to do. He wasn’t going to attack Syria. And he wasn’t asking Congress anymore to grant him the authority to attack.
Which prompted Jay Leno to comment: “You can tell Fall is coming. The leaves are changing faster than Obama’s positions on Syria.”
On Friday in a rare gesture for this arrogant administration, Obama reached out by telephone to GOP House Speaker John Boehner on looming fiscal votes in Congress, especially raising the national debt ceiling so Obama could spend even more money than was coming in.
But in an unexpected and gratuitous twist, Obama announced that unlike his predecessors, he wasn’t going to negotiate with Capitol Hill about matching spending cuts or raising the limit, which he used to oppose.
Then, in his weekly remarks, Obama announced that he wasn’t going to take the word of Assad or Russia’s Vladimir Putin about collecting Syria’s vast stocks of chemical weapons for disposal. How’s Obama’s verification demand looking so far? …
WSJ Editors point out another thing the administration won’t do.
Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett has extended a lifeline to Philadelphia’s hemorrhaging schools attached to a requirement for modest education and fiscal reforms. No thanks, says the teachers union. Herewith a parable of education decline.
Philadelphia’s schools are a textbook case of chronic, systemic failure. Woeful finances and academics compelled the state in 2001 to install a five-member School Reform Commission. Test scores have improved but are still pitiful. Last year only about 40% of students scored proficient or above in reading on the state standardized test, but 99.5% of teachers are rated satisfactory. …
… Meantime, union leaders will whipsaw the GOP Governor for increasing corporate tax credits for private school scholarships that benefit low-income students in failing schools and then for not caring about Philadelphia’s poor, black kids. The tragedy is that Mr. Corbett’s ideas will help those kids while the union is dooming most of them to lives of underachievement and poverty. Where are Education Secretary Arne Duncan and President Obama when they really could help?
Jay Sekulow, one of the attorneys in the Lois Lerner hunt writes on her future.
… As the evidence of her wrongdoing quickly piled up, Lerner improperly pled the Fifth Amendment before a congressional panel, proclaiming her innocence before refusing to speak – a move that would never work in federal court.
Lerner has been on paid administrative leave, collecting a paycheck from taxpayers even as IRS officials kept signing her name to official correspondence. Now she’s retired, and will still cash her checks from taxpayers.
This is intolerable. If Lerner worked in the private sector, she would have been fired long ago. But our federal bureaucracy protects its own, and few agencies are better at evading responsibility than the IRS.
According to an unnamed Democratic staffer, Lerner retired after the IRS found that Lerner was “neglectful of duty,” but the IRS still maintains there was “no evidence of political bias.”
The IRS needs to re-read the definition of “evidence.”
Lerner has retired, but her legal troubles are not over. The FBI is conducting a criminal investigation, Congress is continuing its own probes, and the ACLJ is pressing forward with its federal lawsuit — brought on behalf of 41 conservative groups in 22 states — to hold Lerner and other senior IRS officials accountable for their unconstitutional abuse of the First Amendment.
The IRS may have decided that Lerner was merely “neglectful,” but the IRS doesn’t have the last word. The FBI, Congress, and – ultimately – the federal courts will have their say.
And their judgment could be harsh indeed.
Instapundit spots craziness in VA Beach schools.
Kid expelled for playing with airsoft gun in own yard.
Two seventh grade Virginia Beach students previously suspended for shooting an airsoft gun have been expelled, WAVY.com has learned.
During a hearing Tuesday morning, Aidan Clark and Khalid Caraballo were expelled in a unanimous vote. Clark was offered the option of attending an alternative school, but his father, Tim, told WAVY News’ Andy Fox he will be homeschooled.
Caraballo will attend an alternative school.
Like thousands of others in Hampton Roads, Khalid Caraballo plays with airsoft guns. Caraballo and his friend Aidan were suspended because they shot two other friends who were with them while playing with the guns as they waited for the school bus.
The two seventh graders say they never went to the bus stop; they fired the airsoft guns while on Caraballo’s private property.
Aidan’s father, Tim Clark, told WAVY.com what happened next lacks commons sense. The children were suspended for possession, handling and use of a firearm.
Khalid’s mother, Solangel Caraballo, thinks it is ridiculous the Virginia Beach City Public School System suspended her 13-year-old son and Aidan because they were firing a spring-driven airsoft gun on the Caraballo’s posted private property. “My son is my private property. He does not become the school’s property until he goes to the bus stop, gets on the bus, and goes to school.”
The bus stop in question is 70 yards from the Caraballo’s front yard.
Homeschooling is the right solution. The school district should worry that others will follow suit. And the parents should (1) file suit: (2) oppose funding for the public school system, which has obviously gone off the rails.
WSJ with the story of yesterday’s America’s Cup victory.
… Six weeks before the Cup began on Sept. 7, Oracle examined a sailing technique called foiling. This involves lifting its boat’s two hulls out of the water, by balancing on L-shaped boards called foils, to reduce drag and increase speed. The boats had already foiled downwind, so the team studied whether it could do so on the course’s upwind leg, where boats must sail about 45 degrees to the wind and make a series of zigzag turns.
The problem was that the yacht needed to be moving especially fast to elevate on its foils. And to get the extra speed, the boat would have to avoid headwinds by sailing on a less-direct zigzag course.
Oracle didn’t like the test results and decided against the tactic. “They had it so wrong out of the blocks,” said Ken Read, a former America’s Cup skipper and current NBC Sports analyst. “It’s shocking how much technology they had at their disposal and came out so wrong upwind.”
But when the regatta started, one team did foil upwind: New Zealand. The Kiwis trounced Oracle in six of the first seven races, building enormous leads on the upwind segment.
During that first week, a flustered Oracle team called a “timeout” to postpone a race and regroup. The team’s 11 sailors spent the off days studying upwind foiling again. They realized the technique had two advantages: the speed boost offset the greater distance the boat had to travel. And they could better maintain speed on zigzag turns, which are called tacks, with the boat’s hull above the water. “You cover more ground, but you’re going into the tack at a faster speed,” Oracle chief Russell Coutts said Sunday.
Oracle adopted the technique and immediately started equaling the Kiwis on the upwind leg. Then, in the last few races, breezed past them. “We just had to configure the boat properly,” Ellison said Wednesday. “The guys on the engineering team finally…broke the code. Russell talked about driving the boat lower and faster, rather than higher and slower.”
In Wednesday’s clincher, Oracle turned a three-second deficit at the start of the segment into a 26-second advantage. It won by 44 seconds. …