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A CNN reporter found the woman who is the voice of Siri on your iPhone.

Sandy Springs, Georgia (CNN) — For the past two years, she’s been a pocket and purse accessory to millions of Americans. She’s starred alongside Samuel L. Jackson and Zooey Deschanel. She’s provided weather forecasts and restaurant tips, been mocked as useless and answered absurd questions about what she’s wearing.

She is Siri, Apple’s voice-activated virtual “assistant” introduced to the masses with the iPhone 4S on October 4, 2011.

Behind this groundbreaking technology there is a real woman. While the ever-secretive Apple has never identified her, all signs indicate that the original voice of Siri in the United States is a voiceover actor who laid down recordings for a client eight years ago. She had no idea she’d someday be speaking to more than 100 million people through a not-yet-invented phone.

Her name is Susan Bennett and she lives in suburban Atlanta.

Apple won’t confirm it. But Bennett says she is Siri. Professionals who know her voice, have worked with her and represent her legally say she is Siri. And an audio-forensics expert with 30 years of experience has studied both voices and says he is “100%” certain the two are the same. …

What’s it like at the commanding heights of the legal profession? NY Times with an answer.

Anyone who wonders why law school applications are plunging and there’s widespread malaise in many big law firms might consider the case of Gregory M. Owens.

The silver-haired, distinguished-looking Mr. Owens would seem the embodiment of a successful Wall Street lawyer. A graduate of DenisonUniversity and VanderbiltLawSchool, Mr. Owens moved to New York City and was named a partner at the then old-line law firm of Dewey, Ballantine, Bushby, Palmer & Wood, and after a merger, at Dewey & LeBoeuf.

Today, Mr. Owens, 55, is a partner at an even more eminent global law firm, White & Case. A partnership there or any of the major firms collectively known as “Big Law” was long regarded as the brass ring of the profession, a virtual guarantee of lifelong prosperity and job security.

But on New Year’s Eve, Mr. Owens filed for personal bankruptcy.

According to his petition, he had $400 in his checking account and $400 in savings. He lives in a rental apartment at 151st Street and Broadway. He owns clothing he estimated was worth $900 and his only jewelry is a Concord watch, which he described as “broken.”

Mr. Owens is an extreme but vivid illustration of the economic factors roiling the legal profession, although his straits are in some ways unique to his personal situation. …

Wired published an item from Mother Jones on the seriousness of this year’s flu.

You’ve probably heard by now that this year’s flu season is a bad one. Below is a guide to the viruses that are going around now, plus a refresher on flu basics.

Is the flu widespread where I live?
Probably:

How many people have died so far this year?
Twenty-eight children have died so far. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not keep track of adult deaths. That’s because states are not required to report flu deaths to the CDC. Older adults often die of flu complications or secondary infections rather than the flu itself, so tracking flu deaths is not an exact science. That said, in California, the death toll is currently at 146, including 95 people under the age of 65. At this time last year, just 9 Californians under 65 had died of the flu, and by the end of the season, a total of 106 people had died.

How does this year’s season compare to last year’s?
As the chart below shows, so far, this season is milder in terms of number of cases. However, CDC spokesperson Jason McDonald notes that more people between the ages of 18 and 64 have been hospitalized for flulike symptoms this year than in previous years. This season’s predominant virus strain is H1N1—which, when it originated in 2009, also sent an unusually high number people in the 18-to-64 age range to the hospital. Epidemiologists don’t know why H1N1 hits younger people hard, but one theory, says McDonald, is that older adults have built up more immunity to it. H1N1 is similar to the virus that caused the Spanish Flu of 1918, and also to strains that circulated in the ’60s and ’70s. Another possible factor: Only about 30 percent of younger adults get flu shots, compared to about 40 percent of older adults. …

The A-10 Warthog is our ugliest airplane, but it protects ground troops. Real Clear Defense makes the case for keeping the plane in our quiver.

As the FY15 defense budget is finalized and the fiscal pressure of sequestration endures, there has been informed speculation that the Air Force will seek to retire its A-10 Warthog fleet. Congress has already prevented such a move in the National Defense Authorization Act, but yet the fight continues. Last week, RCD featured a proposal to transfer the A-10 to the Army. This week, J. Furman Daniel, III offers ten good reasons to save the beloved A-10.  

1. It is proven

The A-10 is a tried and true design that has served our nation well.  In an era of increasingly complex, expensive, and troubled weapons procurement, it is essential to have some systems that are solid and reliable. With only modest changes to the original design, the A-10 has been upgraded to meet the challenges of the future and deliver its trademark firepower, durability, survivability, and persistence to battlefield hotspots for decades to come.

2. It is cheap

The A-10 is and will continue to be cheap. While it is ugly, slow, and old fashioned, it remains the most cost effective way of delivering aerial firepower to the battlefield. While it is possible todrop ordinance and provide suppressive fire with other fighter platforms few would consider the F-22, F-35, F-15, or F-16 as ideal ways of performing this essential mission. In fact, the F-22 has been excluded from such missions and is in danger of becoming a “force in being” for “big wars” rather than an asset that can actually be used in the conflicts we are currently fighting. A rational force structure would retain the A-10 as the unglamorous but necessary “low” component of a “high-low mix” and would thus free our more expensive platforms for missions such as air superiority and strategic bombing that demand higher performance.

3. It is survivable …

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Ron Christie tries to understand the juxtaposition of the dictator and the democrat.

… There is a sense this White House moves from one news cycle to the next to shape public opinion – which brings us to Mr. Obama’s press availability just prior to his first Cabinet meeting of the year this past Tuesday morning. After noting that he was looking forward to working with Republicans and Democrats, President Obama made the following startling declaration:

“But one of the things that I’ll be emphasizing in this meeting is the fact that we’re not just going to be waiting for legislation in order to make sure that we’re providing Americans the kind of help that they need.  I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone—and I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions and administrative actions that move the ball forward in helping to make sure that our businesses are getting the kind of support and help they need to grow and advance to make sure that people are getting the skills that the need to get those jobs that our businesses are creating.” …

… During a fundraising speech in San Francisco last November, President Obama responded to a heckler who interrupted his remarks by shouting “Executive Order” to overcome Republican opposition to his policies on Capitol Hill. First, Obama offered that there is “no short-cut to democracy” and that he could not utilize executive orders to bypass Congress.

More specifically, the president continued by saying: “A lot of people have been saying this lately on every problem, which is just, ‘Sign an executive order and we can pretty much do anything and nullify Congress’…That’s not how it works. We’ve got this Constitution, we’ve got this whole thing about separation of powers. So there is no short-cut to politics, and there’s no shortcut to democracy.”

So which President Obama are we supposed to believe? …

We circle back to the president’s racism remarks with Craig Pirrong.

… Race is such a divisive and polarizing issue that a president should do everything possible to downplay, rather than emphasize, racial divisions.  He should certainly not attempt to exploit race for petty political purposes, or to excuse his political and policy failures.  Racial appeals are more befitting a Jim Crow-era Southern politician than a Lincoln, to whom Obama has compared himself.

Racial appeals are the last refuge of the demagogic scoundrel.  They are the last thing we need now.  A man of honor who put the country’s interests above his own would eschew such appeals.  Indeed, he would chastise his supporters for making such arguments.

But we are talking about Obama, aren’t we?

Andrew McCarthy with a pitchfork president post.

A dour President Obama was in no mood to hear about Wall Street’s troubles. “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks,” he warned a room full of the nation’s banking titans.

They’d been summoned to the White House woodshed over what Dear Leader had decided was excessive compensation for industry execs. The president had been on the job for less than three months, but his community-organizer roots were already showing: the fraudulent narrative — in this instance, “income inequality” — helped along by whatever arm-twisting the occasion required. The narrative camouflages execution of the statist game-plan: (1) government creates problem, (2) government locates scapegoat, and (3) government exploits scapegoat to juxtapose itself as savior — rationalizing more regulation and more power.

The pitchfork imagery leapt to mind this week because Timothy Geithner, Obama’s tax-challenged former Treasury secretary, was back in the news — specifically, the extortion news. Turbo Tim had been in the room back in 2009, absorbing the boss’s lesson in Alinsky-style government-corporate relations. Now we learn, at least according to Standard & Poor’s top honcho, that Geithner made the Obama method his own.

In an affidavit filed in a California federal court, S&P chairman Harold McGraw III alleges that on August 8, 2011 — i.e., when the Obama reelection campaign was gearing up — Geithner tracked him down by phone. The then-secretary was irate because, three days earlier, S&P had downgraded the credit rating of the United States to a notch below triple-A for the first time in history. McGraw had been forewarned by a Geithner associate that the secretary “was very angry at S&P.” When the two men finally spoke, Geithner ripped McGraw for having “done an enormous disservice to yourselves and to your country.” He further warned that S&P’s insolence — er, I mean, S&P’s decision — would “be looked at very carefully” and would prompt “a response from the government.”

That “response” came in the form of a punitive lawsuit, brought by the government against S&P. At least that’s the way S&P sees it, with what appears to be ample reason. …

Now that Jim Moran is leaving office, perhaps he can be honest. This will make him a Dem nightmare. Two weeks after announcing his retirement, Moran has warned the healthcare act might unravel. Fox News has the story.

Congressman Jim Moran (D-Va.) is voicing concern that the entirety Affordable Care Act could unravel because not enough young people are signing up.

More than 40,000 Virginians signed up for health insurance on the federal exchange last month. Only 27 percent of those were young adults — the group needed to fund the new system. Moran says he doesn’t think those numbers are going to get much better.

“I’m afraid that the millennials, if you will, are less likely to sign up. I think they feel more independent, I think they feel a little more invulnerable than prior generations,” Moran says. “But I don’t think we’re going to get enough young people signing up to make this bill work as it was intended to financially.”

Andrew Malcolm posts on the trash talk president.

In his compelling and revealing new memoir, “Duty,” former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates describes that tense evening in the White House situation room when the Obama crowd watched the assassination of Osama bin Laden real-time.

When the world’s most wanted man had been popped, bagged and was enroute to the bottom of the Indian Ocean, the in-crowd rose to disperse. Obama would soon announce the news, igniting spontaneous street celebrations.

Gates worried about leaks of operational details revealing how Special Ops conducts such raids nightly in the world’s deadliest corners. He asked everyone to promise to reveal nothing more of what they saw than the bare facts. We got him. He’s dead. All raiders are safe. Everyone agreed.

“That lasted about five hours,” Gates recalls sadly. …

… Now comes another stunning example of Obama’s Amateur Hour. He had a recent conversation with David Remnick of the New Yorker. Now Remnick, like Bob Woodward, is a master at getting subjects to talk.

But Obama has just begun the 62d month of his presidency as commander-in-chief of the world’s most powerful military. He didn’t just fall off the sweet-potato truck. Yes, the Super Bowl looms near, prompting all kinds of inappropriate sports metaphors and analogies.

However, as he sought to explain White House thinking to his journalist visitor, Obama should know better than to stoop to the inflammatory, trash-talking level of a Richard Sherman.

“The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a J.V. team puts on Lakers uniforms, that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant.”

Forget for a moment, Mr. President, the fact that the hobbled Bryant has been out since late last year with no return date set. So, right now in basketball warrior terms, Kobe Bryant is useless.

Al Qaeda, on the other hand, has never controlled more territory. Thanks to Obama’s impulsive overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi with no replacement at hand, those terrorists now control most of Libya. They’re on the winning side of Obama’s vanished red line in Syria. …

More on the “jayvee” talk from Power Line.

… In his New Yorker interview, Obama argued that just because al Qaeda makes territorial gains in areas where a power vacuum exists doesn’t mean that its fighters have the desire or the capacity to attack our homeland. But where is the evidence that they lack this desire or capacity? According to Heritage, there have been at least 60 plots to attack the homeland since 9/11, and the number has risen in recent years.

Let’s also keep in mind that the pre-9/11 al Qaeda didn’t look like “Kobe Bryant” either. Neither the Clinton administration nor the Bush administration took it seriously enough, and this low regard helped pave the way for 9/11.

Let’s hope that Obama takes al Qaeda more seriously than his trash-talking interview with the New Yorker suggests. To take al Qaeda lightly would be the approach of a jayvee president. …

Late Night from Andrew Malcolm.

Leno: Obama is getting tough on the NSA scandal. Says the secret agency will never be used to suppress critics or dissenters. He said he has the IRS for that job.

Letterman: All these snowstorms make driving nightmarish. So be very careful while texting.

Conan: Justin Bieber was arrested in Florida for DUI. Police reports said Bieber’s blood contained large amounts of alcohol, pot and Flintstone’s Chewables.

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You would think after a series of train wrecks involving tank cars carrying Canadian crude oil, even someone as dense as the president could see the efficacy of building the Keystone XL pipeline. In addition, as Charles Krauthammer points out today we are treating Canada like obama treats all traditional allies of our country – rudely.

Fixated as we Americans are on Canada’s three most attention-getting exports — polar vortexes, Alberta clippers and the antics of Toronto’s addled mayor — we’ve somewhat overlooked a major feature of Canada’s current relations with the United States: extreme annoyance.

Last week, speaking to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Canada’s foreign minister calmly but pointedly complained that the United States owes Canada a response on the Keystone XL pipeline. “We can’t continue in this state of limbo,” he sort of complained, in what for a placid, imperturbable Canadian passes for an explosion of volcanic rage.

Canadians may be preternaturally measured and polite, but they simply can’t believe how they’ve been treated by President Obama — left hanging humiliatingly on an issue whose merits were settled years ago.

Canada, the Saudi Arabia of oil sands, is committed to developing this priceless resource. Its natural export partner is the United States. But crossing the border requires State Department approval, which means the president decides yes or no.

After three years of review, the State Department found no significant environmental risk to Keystone. Nonetheless, the original route was changed to assuage concerns regarding the Ogallala Aquifer. Obama withheld approval through the 2012 election. To this day he has issued no decision.

The Canadians are beside themselves. After five years of manufactured delay, they need a decision one way or the other because if denied a pipeline south, they could build a pipeline west to the Pacific. China would buy their oil in a New York minute. …

More on this from Andrew Malcolm.

Barack Obama has achieved acrimony among numerous sectors of Americans now fighting with each other bitterly. His ongoing efforts to screw up relations with America’s closest allies have enjoyed some success during these 1,830 endless days of his reign.

Obama’s undercut the Poles, Czechs, Israelis, angered the Brits, Brazilians, Egyptians and insulted the Germans, Japanese and Indians. And Obama single-handedly made Vladimir Putin look like the Nobel Peace Prize winner over the American’s fictional red line in Syria.

But Obama’s bid to ruin the U.S.-Canadian relationship is doomed to failure. Like Obama’s 2000 challenge of Rep. Bobby Rush back home.

That’s because the depth of ties and centripetal forces between the two former British colonies in culture, business, finance, security, language, family and trade are so deep and so profound that even a wily Alinsky-disciple cannot surmount them. The two countries enjoy the world’s longest undefended border and by far its largest bilateral economic relationship.

They share terrorist data banks, air defense and traffic commands and computer networks. You can’t get much farther apart on this continent than Miami and the Yukon’s DawsonCity. But when local Florida police check a driver’s license on a routine traffic stop, they know immediately the Mounties want that man for murder near the Arctic Circle.

Currently, Obama is trying the polite Canadians’ patience with his laughable, now five-year stall over approving the northern part of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would bring Alberta tar-sands oil to the world’s best refineries in Texas.

His administration has been “studying” this pipeline now longer than the U.S. was in World War II. …

Back a few days, Pickings noted the Israeli defense minister had committed the faux pas of telling the truth. Caroline Click has more on the administration’s failed Mid-East policies.

… The only parties whose lot is improved by the Obama administration’s Middle East policies are Iran, the PLO and the Muslim Brotherhood. But none of them will praise those policies, because they all hold the US in contempt.

This is why the Palestinian leadership continues to incite against Israel and reject the Jewish state even as the US is acting as their surrogate in talks with Israel.

This is why the Iranians mock the US, even though the White House just cleared the way for Iran to develop nuclear weapons, and develop its economy and has allowed it to take over Iraq and Lebanon, and defend its puppet regime in Syria.

This is why the Muslim Brotherhood condemns the US even as the Obama administration upended the US alliance with Egypt in order to support the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Obama administration has responded to these demonstrations of contempt and bad faith with extreme reticence. Either it issues written, general condemnations, or it claims, as in the case of Palestinian incitement, that it doesn’t believe it is productive to publicly criticize the Palestinians.

Given this behavior, the Obama administration’s response to Yediot Aharonot’s publication of Ya’alon’s private statements can be fairly describe as apoplectic. It was also mean-spirited.

Shortly after Yediot published his private remarks, the administration launched a full-bore public attack on Ya’alon, and by implication, the government. As White House spokesman Jay Carney put it, “The remarks of the Israeli defense minister, if accurate, are offensive and inappropriate, especially in light of everything that the United States is doing to support Israel’s security needs.”

In other words, the Obama administration just accused Israel of ingratitude.

But there is nothing ungrateful about Israel’s treatment of the US.

Americans are getting the same message from allies throughout the Middle East. Under Obama, America’s regional policies are so counterproductive that the US has come to be seen as the foreign policy equivalent of a drunk driver.

As the US’s strongest ally, and also as a country that has depended for decades on US support, Israel is a passenger in the back seat of the car. On the one hand, we are happy for the ride. On the other hand, the administration’s driving is endangering our survival.

It is only because our leaders are grateful to the US for its support that the government is going along with Kerry’s ridiculous peace-processing.

More important, what is gratitude, exactly? Is it shutting up and watching your closest friend drive both of you over a cliff? Of course not. …

Washington Examiner OpEd focuses on the men who are dropping out of economic life. 

As a binge-TV watcher, I’ve relished devouring serial dramas in advertising-free gulps. But “Breaking Bad” — the story about a cancer-stricken chemistry teacher turned clandestine meth-cooking badass — didn’t appeal.

Then Anthony Hopkins declared it an “epic work” with “the best actors I’ve ever seen.”

Midway through season two, I understand why Walter White is heroic. As men increasingly check out of work, marriage, and fatherhood, it’s hard not to root for a man fiercely determined to secure his family’s future before dying — despite his morally abhorrent methods.

That there are dramatically fewer men willing and able to safeguard family prosperity is perhaps America’s greatest — and most unrecognized — problem.

Consider Sunday’s “Shattering the Glass Ceiling” discussion on ABC’s “This Week.” Lamenting unrealized opportunities and unsolved problems when “women aren’t fully utilized,” businesswoman Carly Fiorina and co-panelists were oblivious about two key facts.

First, two times more men than women aged 25-34 languish in their parents’ basement far below the glass ceiling, according to U.S. Census data. Second, women now outperform men in nearly every measure of social, academic and vocational well-being.

Rather than apply Band-Aids to the cancer of chronic unemployment — like unemployment-insurance extensions and minimum-wage hikes — political elites must focus on the real problem:

Millions of males, especially less-educated men, are “unhitched from the engine of growth,” according to a 2011 Brookings Institution report.

Women gained all 74,000 jobs added to payrolls in December, and among the world’s seven biggest economies, America is last in the share of “prime age” males working — just behind Italy.

Why isn’t widespread male workless-ness a priority for policymakers, given the massive economic, fiscal and social costs? …

Mental Floss with background on the threats in Sochi.

As we approach the 2014 Sochi Olympics, law enforcement officials and security experts are concerned about the prospect of so-called “black widow” terrorists, a group of female suicide bombers. But who are they? Where did they come from? How did they get such a terrifying moniker?

First, a bit of geography. Sochi is one of Russia’s southernmost cities. Because of its subtropical climate and vast, beautiful beaches along the Black Sea, the city is a popular destination for Russians on summer vacation. Think of it as their Fort Lauderdale. And wouldn’t the Winter Olympics be fun in Fort Lauderdale?

Sochi is located near the Caucasus Mountains. There’s been war or insurgency in the Caucasus region (which stretches from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea) for nearly three decades now, and the region has seen some of the most shocking terrorist attacks in modern history.

The political, economic, and cultural forces at work in the region are extremely complicated, but here are the broad strokes of the last several years. East of Sochi is Chechnya. After the Soviet Union collapsed, Chechnya declared itself a sovereign nation. This didn’t go over well in Moscow, which had organized a federation of republics and constituent entities. The Russian Federation argued that Chechnya couldn’t just willy-nilly throw together a government and invent a country, and refused to accept any such effort. Meanwhile, the legacy of Soviet control and a general exodus of non-ethnic-Chechens left Chechnya socially and economically crippled. …

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The Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm, is one of Pickerhead’s favorite charities. All day long those folks get to sue governments! Clark Neily III, one of their senior attorneys has a new book that has received a lot of attention. Bookworm Room has the first post.

I went to a lunch today where the speaker was Clark M. Neily, III, author of Terms of Engagement: How Our Courts Should Enforce the Constitution’s Promise of Limited Government. Neily is an attorney at the libertarian Institute for Justice, a public interest organization that focuses on Constitution-centric civil liberties cases. (I know that it sounds redundant to say “Constitution-centric civil liberties cases” but I use that phrase deliberately to distinguish it from the ACLU’s version of “civil liberties,” which is also known as the “We hate Christians” school of thought.)  The subject of his talk was the poisonous effect of the “rational basis” analysis that the Supreme Court has mandated for cases involving government infringement on an individual’s right to work.

Neily is a great speaker. He speaks quickly, so you have to pay attention.  Paying attention isn’t a problem, though, because Neily also speaks clearly, and everything he says is interesting, with enjoyable and appropriate dollops of humor thrown in at warp speed. This is a man with a very high verbal, analytical intelligence. Even as I was listening closely to what he said, a small part of my brain was running an IQ calculator. When he started speaking, I pegged him at about 145 on the IQ scale. By the time he was done, I’d moved him up to 175. After all, his is precisely the type of intelligence the IQ test measures.

Before I begin, it behooves me to tell you that I haven’t yet read Neily’s book. I was planning on looking for it in the library or getting it on Kindle (because, as I’ve probably mentioned more than once, I’m very cheap). By the time he was done speaking, though, I wanted a signed copy and shelled out $26 (!) just so that I could gloat about having it signed by the man himself. This disclaimer is to warn you that I’m not reviewing his book, which I assume is as interesting as the speech. The book’s Table of Contents also tells me that it covers a much broader range of topics than the speech did. Finally, since I haven’t done anything remotely related to Constitutional law in years, you’ll have to pardon (or perhaps be grateful for) the fact that this is not a lawyerly analysis.

The “rational basis” test is the Supreme Court-mandated test for “non-fundamental rights.” One of those non-fundamental rights (and this may come as a surprise to you) is the right to hold a job in the field of your choice or to sell a product of your choice. Non-fundamental rights, by definition, are less important than rights such as speech or freedom of worship. (And no, don’t get me started on Obamacare’s attack on faith.)

If you protest a state or federal law imposing such a great burden on your profession that you cannot run a viable business, or that imposes ridiculous impediments as a predicate to holding a certain type of job, the federal court judge hearing your case will ask the government to justify the law.  Fortunately, for the government, the standard, known as the “rational basis test” is so low that it requires no facts or analysis, just imagination.  Worse, it turns the judge into an active part of the government’s defense team.  Or as Neily explains: …

Here’s George Will.

Disabusing the Republican Party of a cherished dogma, thereby requiring it to forgo a favorite rhetorical trope, will not win Clark M. Neily III the gratitude of conservatives who relish denouncing “judicial activism.” However, he and his colleagues at the libertarian Institute for Justice believe the United States would be more just if judges were less deferential to legislatures.

In his book “Terms of Engagement: How Our Courts Should Enforce the Constitution’s Promise of Limited Government,” Neily writes that the United States is not “a fundamentally majoritarian nation in which the ability to impose one’s will on others through law is a sacred right that courts should take great pains not to impede.” America’s defining value is not majority rule but individual liberty.

Many judges, however, in practicing what conservatives have unwisely celebrated as “judicial restraint,” have subordinated liberty to majority rule. Today, a perverse conservative populism panders to two dubious notions — that majorities should enjoy a largely untrammeled right to make rules for everyone, and that most things legislatures do reflect the will of a majority.

Conservatives’ advocacy of judicial restraint serves liberalism by leaving government’s growth unrestrained. This leaves people such as Sandy Meadows at the mercy of government acting as protector of the strong.

Meadows was a Baton Rouge widow who had little education and no resources but was skillful at creating flower arrangements, which a grocery store hired her to do. Then Louisiana’s Horticulture Commission pounced. …

Paul Ryan had a WSJ OpEd calling for a different focus for the war on poverty.

… This month marks the 50th anniversary of Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. For years, politicians have pointed to the money they’ve spent or the programs they’ve created. But despite trillions of dollars in spending, 47 million Americans still live in poverty today. And the reason is simple: Poverty isn’t just a form of deprivation; it’s a form of isolation. Crime, drugs and broken families are dragging down millions of Americans. On every measure from education levels to marriage rates, poor families are drifting further away from the middle class.

And Washington is deepening the divide. Over the past 50 years, the federal government has created different programs to fix different problems, so there’s little or no coordination among them. And because these programs are means-tested—meaning that families become ineligible for them as they earn more—poor families effectively face very high marginal tax rates, in some cases over 80%. So the government actually discourages them from getting ahead.

Poverty isn’t a rare disease from which the rest of us are immune. It’s the worst strain of a widespread scourge: economic insecurity. That’s why concern for the poor isn’t a policy niche; it goes to the heart of the American experiment. What the poor really need is to be reintegrated into our communities. But Washington is walling them up in a massive quarantine.

On this less-than-golden anniversary, we should renew the fight. The federal government needs to take a comprehensive view of the problem. It needs to dump decades-old programs and give poor families more flexibility. It needs to let communities like Pulaski High develop their own solutions. And it needs to remember that the best anti-poverty program is economic growth.

As my friend Sen. Mike Lee (R., Utah) likes to say, we need to bring the poor in—to expand their access to our country’s free enterprise and civil society. Luckily, policy makers in states and other countries are doing just that. Here’s a look at some of the latest advances in the fight against poverty. …

Thomas Sowell has a more focused look at the failures of the war on poverty.

Without some idea of what a person or a program is trying to do, there is no way to know whether what actually happened represented a success or a failure. When the hard facts show that a policy has failed, nothing is easier for its defenders than to make up a new set of criteria, by which it can be said to have succeeded.

That has in fact been what happened with the “war on poverty.”

Both President John F. Kennedy, who launched the proposal for a “war on poverty” and his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, who guided the legislation through Congress and then signed it into law, were very explicit as to what the “war on poverty” was intended to accomplish.

Its mission was not simply to prove that spending money on the poor led to some economic benefits to the poor. Nobody ever doubted that. How could they?

What the war on poverty was intended to end was mass dependency on government. President Kennedy said, “We must find ways of returning far more of our dependent people to independence.”

The same theme was repeated endlessly by President Johnson. The purpose of the “war on poverty,” he said, was to make “taxpayers out of taxeaters.” Its slogan was “Give a hand up, not a handout.” When Lyndon Johnson signed the landmark legislation into law, he declared: “The days of the dole in our country are numbered.”

Now, 50 years and trillions of dollars later, it is painfully clear that there is more dependency than ever. …

Moody’s has rated YeshivaUniversity’s bonds as “junk.”  TaxProf has the story.

Moody’s Investors Service has said bonds issued for Yeshiva – a highly respected Jewish university in Manhattan – are junk.

But administrators say they are working diligently to make the university sustainable, and some faculty, driven by the notion that the university is unique and has assets and a future beyond the eye-popping short-term math, believe the institution is or can eventually be solid. …

… University officials told Moody’s they expect an “equally poor performance” this year and at least three more years of shortfalls, which come on top of several years of previous shortfalls that average about 16 percent of the institution’s operating budget. Moody’s said the shortfalls were driven by operations at Yeshiva’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine campus.

YeshivaUniversity’s 2012 tax return lists President Joel’s compensation as $1,242,424, and eleven other salaries in excess of $600,000.

Free Beacon tells us about union creeps living large at Disney.

Union bigwigs representing some of the nation’s lowest paid workers are holding their annual board meeting at one of Florida’s ritziest resorts just months after increasing membership dues.

The United Food and Commercial Workers union, which represents 1.4 million workers, is holding its annual board meeting at Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort, where “Victorian elegance meets modern sophistication.”

Two-hundred-fifty union officials are attending the 11-day conference ending Jan. 25, although not all are staying at the Grand Floridian. Resort rooms start at $488 per night before taxes and can exceed $2,000 if officials opt for a two Bedroom Club Level suite. …

… The union spent more than $500,000 to host its 2011 board meeting at the Hyatt Regency Coconut Point Resort & Spa in BonitaSprings, FL—home to a “championship golf course and world-class spa”—according to UFCW’s 2012 Department of Labor filings. The union also spent more $155,000 for a conference at Asheville’s Omni Grove Park Inn, a Four Diamond resort that has earned praise from Conde Nast Traveler, Golf Magazine, and Wine Spectator in recent years. …

… UFCW does not just shell out big bucks for hotel accommodations. International President Hansen received more than $350,000 in salary and other disbursements in 2011, while nine other union honchos pulled down more than $220,000 on the year. …

Andrew Malcolm with late night.

Conan: Michelle Obama says she might consider getting plastic surgery. Said, “If Barack’s popularity keeps dropping, I do not want to be recognized.”

Conan: Legal experts say if Justin Bieber is convicted of a felony, he could be deported back to Canada. They also say if he’s found to have cocaine in his system, he could be elected mayor of Toronto.

Leno: Justin Bieber is in trouble for throwing eggs at a neighbor’s house. Could be big trouble. The DA wants to charge him as an adult.

Letterman: Police raid Justin Bieber’s house after his altercation with a neighbor. Now there’s a five-day waiting period for him to buy eggs.

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Pickerhead didn’t think anything sleazier than Terry McAuliffe could happen to Virginia. The indictments of Bob and Maureen McDonnell suggest it already had.  Byron York writes on the case against McDonnell.

If the prosecutors’ case in United States v. Robert F. McDonnell and Maureen G. McDonnell is correct, the corrupt acts of the 71st governor of Virginia and his wife had their beginning even before Bob McDonnell took the oath of office. Virginia’s new First Couple allegedly hoped to start cashing in before they officially became the First Couple.

News reports give readers the basic outline of the prosecution, but one has to read the indictment itself — it’s just 43 pages — to grasp the full extent of the McDonnells’ alleged corruption. The gist of the case is that the governor and his wife, in debt and constantly worried about money, cultivated a “friendship” with Virginia pharmaceutical entrepreneur Jonnie Williams and almost immediately began asking him for money and gifts, at the same time holding out hope that the governor would help Williams’ company, Star Scientific, win clinical trials for its main product, an anti-inflammatory diet supplement that Williams believed had the potential to treat all sorts of ailments.

McDonnell, who had been the attorney general of Virginia, was elected governor on Nov. 3, 2009. His victory was a huge bright spot for a Republican Party that had taken a beating in the 2008 elections and had no power in the face of President Obama and the Democratic majority in Congress. He was inaugurated on Jan. 16, 2010.

During the campaign, in March 2009, according to the indictment, Attorney General McDonnell’s staff approached Williams — who is referred to throughout the indictment as “JW” — about McDonnell using Williams’ private jet in the campaign. “Prior to this time,” the indictment says, “McDonnell and JW had never met, and they had no personal or professional relationship.”

According to the indictment, the two met briefly during the campaign but were basically strangers when McDonnell was elected governor. Then, in December 2009, when McDonnell was governor-elect, Williams asked to meet with McDonnell at an event at the Four Seasons Hotel in New York. At the meeting, Maureen McDonnell allegedly asked Williams for help buying a dress for the upcoming inauguration. Williams said yes. According to the indictment, Maureen McDonnell later told one of her husband’s senior staffers, identified only as “JE,” that Williams “had agreed to purchase a designer dress by Oscar de la Renta … for the inauguration.”

Remember — Bob McDonnell was not even governor yet, and his wife allegedly was already asking for favors. …

Turning to other corruption in our governments, Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit used his weekly USA column to discuss the seriousness of the IRS scandal and the subsequent loss of faith in the government from both the IRS and NSA scandals.  

At a tax symposium at Pepperdine Law School last week, former IRS chief counsel Donald Korb was asked, “On a scale of 1-10 … how damaging is the current IRS scandal?”

His answer: 9.5. Other tax experts on the panel called it “awful,” and said that it has done “tremendous damage.”

I think that’s right. And I think that the damage extends well beyond the Internal Revenue Service. In fact, I think that the government agency suffering the most damage isn’t the IRS, but the National Security Agency. Because the NSA, even more than the IRS, depends on public trust. And now that the IRS has been revealed to be a political weapon, it’s much harder for people to have faith in the NSA.

As I warned President Obama back in 2009 after he “joked” about having his enemies audited, the IRS depends on trust:

“Should the IRS come to be seen as just a bunch of enforcers for whoever is in political power, the result would be an enormous loss of legitimacy for the tax system. Our income-tax system is based on voluntary compliance and honest reporting by citizens. It couldn’t possibly function if most people decided to cheat. Sure, the system is backed up by the dreaded IRS audit. But the threat is, while not exactly hollow, limited: The IRS can’t audit more than a tiny fraction of taxpayers. If Americans started acting like Italians, who famously see tax evasion as a national pastime, the system would collapse.”

Since then, of course, the new “weaponized IRS” has, in fact, come to be seen as illegitimate by many more Americans. …

Sherman Frederick is tired of the whining.

… Frankly, I’m weary of hearing Obama tell us how hard his job is.

It’s not that I fault the president for his deliberate nature. I appreciate thoughtful decision-making over, say, the appearance of bluster for bluster’s sake.

But, Mr. President, hard is no excuse. Get it done or get out of the way.

What is especially irritating about the Obama shtick, as we enter the sixth year of his tedious presidency, is the conceit that he’s somehow uniquely gifted to solve the world’s problems, if only circumstances would give him half a chance.

Consider the summer of 2010. That was supposed to be the “summer of recovery.” It never happened. And Obama’s staff became disillusioned about the unexpected stuff with which the president was forced to cope.

The BP oil spill just wouldn’t stop. Rolling Stone magazine carried a story about Gen. Stanley McChrystal that eventually required the president to fire him and replace him with Gen. David Petraeus, who led the Iraq surge that Obama did not support. It was a humbling moment for “The One.”

Politico carried a story about how “privately, Obama advisers talk of being prisoners to uncontrollable events and deeply uncertain about how all of this will play out.”

To which one can only reply: “Good lord, these guys do drink their own bathwater.”

The Obama crew really believes that if it were not for these darned unexpected events, President Obama could get on track and use his superpowers to heal the planet and otherwise make himself available for the world to touch the hem of his garment. …

The crybaby shtick is not enough, now President Bystander is playing the race card. Jason Riley with the story.

In September 2009, less than a year after he won the keys to the White House, Barack Obama appeared on the “The Late Show,” where David Letterman asked the president if criticism of his policies was driven by racism, as former President Jimmy Carter and some members of Congress were suggesting.

“I think it’s important to realize that I was actually black before the election,” Mr. Obama quipped. His response was both funny and pointed. Given that a majority-white country had just elected a black man president, it was a little ridiculous to suggest that racial animosity was driving his critics, and Mr. Obama was right not to take the bait. Instead, he told Mr. Letterman that the criticism mostly reflected policy differences and came with the job. “One of the things that you sign up for in politics is that folks yell at you,” he said.

But it seems that Mr. Obama is in a less gracious mood these days. In an interview with the New Yorker magazine that appeared over the weekend, the president said his skin color may help explain his declining job-approval rating. …

Michael Barone says even the young are getting tired of President Excuse-Monger; especially so since war has been declared on their generation.

What do young Americans want? Something different from what they’ve been getting from the president they voted for by such large margins.

Evidence comes in from various polls. Voters under 30, the Millennial generation, produced numbers for Barack Obama 13 percentage points above the national average in 2008 and 9 points above in 2012.

But in recent polls, Obama approval among those under 30 has been higher than the national average by only 1 percentage point (Quinnipiac), 2 points (ABC/Washington Post) and 3 points (YouGov/Economist).

Those differences are statistically significant. And that’s politically significant, since a higher percentage of Millennials than of the general population are Hispanic or black.

The reasons for Millennials’ decreased approval of Obama become clear from a Harvard Institute of Politics poll of 18- to 29-year-olds conducted in November.

That poll shows Obama’s job approval dipping to 41 percent, down from 52 percent in April 2013 and the lowest rating in any HIOP survey. …

National Interest piece on the disrespect of our Constitution.

The pen is mightier than the sword. Couple it with a phone and it becomes mightier than Congress—and perhaps even the Constitution.

That’s one way of interpreting President Obama’s promise to use some combination of the bully pulpit and executive orders to bypass Congress. “I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone,” Obama said at the year’s first Cabinet meeting. “We are not just going to be waiting for legislation in order to make sure that we’re providing Americans the kind of help that they need.”

After all, why wait? We are the ones we have been waiting for.

While the president also stressed he was “looking forward to working with Democrats and Republicans, House members and Senate members,” his remarks were redolent of Clinton aide Paul Begala’s enthusiastic—if constitutionally illiterate—celebration of executive orders: “Stroke of the pen. Law of the land. Kind of cool.”

But in an administration that increasingly seems to wing it when it comes to limits on its own power, it may not be the law or the land or particularly cool. Even the liberal justices of the Supreme Court appeared skeptical of the White House’s expansive claims of recess appointment powers during oral arguments Monday. …

That constitutional disregard has Nat Hentoff,  liberal icon and civil libertarian extraordinaire, calling for impeachment. WND News has the story.

Worse than Richard Nixon. An unprecedented abuse of powers. The most un-American president in the nation’s history.

Nat Hentoff does not think much of President Obama.

And now, the famous journalist says it is time to begin looking into impeachment.

Hentoff sees the biggest problem as Obama’s penchant to rule by executive order when he can’t convince Congress to do things his way.

The issue jumped back into the headlines last week when, just before his first Cabinet meeting of 2014, Obama said, “I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone … and I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions.”

“Apparently he doesn’t give one damn about the separation of powers,” Hentoff told WND. “Never before in our history has a president done these things.”

And just to make sure everyone knew how extremely serious he regarded the situation, the journalist added, “This is the worst state, I think, the country has ever been in.”

Many have regarded Hentoff as the conscience of civil libertarianism and liberalism for decades.

Recognized as one of the foremost authorities on the Bill of Rights and the Supreme Court, Hentoff was a columnist and staff writer with The Village Voice for 51 years, from 1957 until 2008, when his columns began appearing in WND. …

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We don’t have Thomas Sowell often enough. So, we’ll correct for that today. First he compares Christie, obama, and hillary.

The first time I saw New Jersey Governor Chris Christie on television, a few years ago, my first reaction was astonishment: “A talking Republican!”

It would scarcely have been more astonishing if there had been a talking giraffe. For reasons unknown, most Republican leaders seem to pay very little attention to articulation — certainly as compared to leading Democrats, who seem to pay little attention to anything else.

Governor Christie’s nearly two-hour-long press conference last week showed again that he is in a class by himself when it comes to Republicans who can express themselves in the heat of political battle.

When it comes to policies, I might prefer some other Republican as a 2016 presidential candidate. But the bottom line in politics is that you have to get elected, in order to have the power to accomplish anything. It doesn’t matter how good your ideas are, if you can’t be bothered to articulate them in a way that the voting public can understand.

Chris Christie’s press conference showed that, unlike Barack Obama, Christie did not duck the media or sidestep questions. Nor did he resort to euphemisms or cry out, like Hillary Clinton, “What difference, at this point, does it make?”

He met the questions head on and gave unequivocal answers — the kind of answers that could, and should, destroy his political future if they are not true.

More important, Governor Christie quickly fired the people he held responsible for deliberately creating a traffic jam on the GeorgeWashingtonBridge. Contrast that with the many scandals in Washington for which President Obama has not fired anyone. …

Next, Mr. Sowell writes on fact-free liberals.

Someone summarized Barack Obama in three words — “educated,” “smart” and “ignorant.” Unfortunately, those same three words would describe all too many of the people who come out of our most prestigious colleges and universities today.

President Obama seems completely unaware of how many of the policies he is trying to impose have been tried before, in many times and places around the world, and have failed time and again. Economic equality? That was tried in the 19th century, in communities set up by Robert Owen, the man who coined the term “socialism.” Those communities all collapsed.

It was tried even earlier, in 18th century Georgia, when that was a British colony. People in Georgia ended up fleeing to other colonies, as many other people would vote with their feet in the 20th century, by fleeing many other societies around the world that were established in the name of economic equality.

But who reads history these days? Moreover, those parts of history that would undermine the vision of the left — which prevails in our education system from elementary school to postgraduate study — are not likely to get much attention.

The net results are bright people, with impressive degrees, who have been told for years how brilliant they are, but who are often ignorant of facts that might cause them to question what they have been indoctrinated with in schools and colleges. ..

The last item from Thomas Sowell is about the administration’s war against black children.

Anyone who has still not yet understood the utter cynicism of the Obama administration in general, and Attorney General Eric Holder in particular, should look at the Justice Department’s latest interventions in education.

If there is one thing that people all across the ideological spectrum should be able to agree on, it is that better education is desperately needed by black youngsters, especially in the ghettoes. For most, it is their one chance for a better life.

Among the few bright spots in a generally dismal picture of the education of black students are those successful charter schools or voucher schools to which many black parents try to get their children admitted. Some of these schools have not only reached but exceeded national norms, even when located in neighborhoods where the regular public schools lag far behind.

Where admission to these schools is by a lottery, the cheers and tears that follow announcements of who has been admitted — and, by implication, who will be forced to continue in the regular public schools — tell the story better than words can.

When the state of Louisiana decided to greatly expand the number of schools available to students by parental choice, rather than by the rigidities of the usual public school system, Attorney General Holder’s Justice Department objected on grounds that this was at cross-purposes with the federal government’s racial integration goals for the schools.

In short, Louisiana’s attempt to improve the education of children is subordinated by Holder to the federal government’s attempt to mix and match black and white students. …

Michael Barone posts on the possible sale of art from Detroit’s museum. 

As someone who grew up in Detroit and its suburbs, I am sad about the possibility that the Detroit Institute of Arts may have to sell off much of its collection due to the bankruptcy of its owner, the Detroit city government. So I share much of the dismay expressed by Jed Perl in this article in the New Republic. But I’m also sympathetic to some of the arguments Virginia Postrel made in her Bloomberg column last June. She notes that most of the DIA’s masterpieces were purchased with municipal funds and that local donors never provided the museum with a significant endowment. Rather coolly she writes:

“A sale to satisfy Detroit’s creditors would certainly be a tragedy for the institution and its local constituents. But if buyers were limited to other museums, possibly even to museums in the U.S., the works wouldn’t disappear from public view. A sale could be a huge boon for art lovers (and tourists) in cities that had the bad luck to grow primarily in the second half of the 20th century — and that are still growing today. The public trust is no less served by art in Atlanta, Phoenix or Seattle than it is by art in Detroit.”

The history of fine arts is, among other things, a history of the creation and then the dispersal of great collections. For a fascinating example, see art historian Francis Haskell’s posthumously published The King’s Pictures, the story of how King Charles I and his courtiers the Duke of Buckingham, the Duke of Hamilton and the Earl of Arundel amassed great collections in the 1620s and 1630s and then how these collections were sold off under the Parliament that rebelled against Charles. …

It was about 10,000 years ago that humans started asking the question; “Got milk?”  Nature magazine writes on the milk revolution in human history.

In the 1970s, archaeologist Peter Bogucki was excavating a Stone Age site in the fertile plains of central Poland when he came across an assortment of odd artefacts. The people who had lived there around 7,000 years ago were among central Europe’s first farmers, and they had left behind fragments of pottery dotted with tiny holes. It looked as though the coarse red clay had been baked while pierced with pieces of straw.

Looking back through the archaeological literature, Bogucki found other examples of ancient perforated pottery. “They were so unusual — people would almost always include them in publications,” says Bogucki, now at PrincetonUniversity in New Jersey. He had seen something similar at a friend’s house that was used for straining cheese, so he speculated that the pottery might be connected with cheese-making. But he had no way to test his idea.

The mystery potsherds sat in storage until 2011, when Mélanie Roffet-Salque pulled them out and analysed fatty residues preserved in the clay. Roffet-Salque, a geochemist at the University of Bristol, UK, found signatures of abundant milk fats — evidence that the early farmers had used the pottery as sieves to separate fatty milk solids from liquid whey. That makes the Polish relics the oldest known evidence of cheese-making in the world.

Roffet-Salque’s sleuthing is part of a wave of discoveries about the history of milk in Europe. Many of them have come from a €3.3-million (US$4.4-million) project that started in 2009 and has involved archaeologists, chemists and geneticists. The findings from this group illuminate the profound ways that dairy products have shaped human settlement on the continent.

During the most recent ice age, milk was essentially a toxin to adults because — unlike children — they could not produce the lactase enzyme required to break down lactose, the main sugar in milk. But as farming started to replace hunting and gathering in the Middle East around 11,000 years ago, cattle herders learned how to reduce lactose in dairy products to tolerable levels by fermenting milk to make cheese or yogurt. Several thousand years later, a genetic mutation spread through Europe that gave people the ability to produce lactase — and drink milk — throughout their lives. That adaptation opened up a rich new source of nutrition that could have sustained communities when harvests failed.

This two-step milk revolution may have been a prime factor in allowing bands of farmers and herders from the south to sweep through Europe and displace the hunter-gatherer cultures that had lived there for millennia. …

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Daniel Greenfield shows how targeting the 1% is self defeating.

… Targeting the 1 percent kills the goose that lays the golden tax revenues and states and cities that are already close to the edge can’t afford to drive away their tax base. The welfare class is taught to blame the rich, but without the rich its lifestyle implodes, its social dysfunction increases and in the final phase of urban collapse, the middle class abandon their homes block by block and retreat to the suburbs as the city collapses.

There is no better demonstration of that than Detroit.

Detroit has the highest property taxes of the 50 largest cities in the country. Its property taxes are twice as high as the national average and barely half of property owners even bother paying property taxes. Five of the wealthier neighborhoods paid 15 percent of the city’s property taxes. Another 19 percent came from a handful of companies, including casinos and MotorCity’s shaky automobile industry.

The population fled, the tax base shrank and the city raised property taxes which drove away more property owners leaving a shrinking tax base that had to be compensated for with higher taxes. The cycle left a bankrupt ghost town filled with abandoned properties and outlaw property owners.

To make up the difference, Detroit began borrowing more money. Under Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who was convicted of everything from racketeering to extortion, debt hit $9 billion while revenues plunged to nearly $1 billion. Income taxes fell from $378 million in 2000 to $245 million in 2010. At the same time, Detroit lost nearly 200,000 people; the worst implosion of an American city in the last decade.

One out of three people in Detroit is poor. Three of the top five employers in Detroit are the city government and the national government. Whatever middle class it has left consists of government employees and they are a net loss. They can never pay as much into the system as they take out of it.

The only liberal solution to the Detroit disaster is to expand its boundaries into the suburbs and tax the ones who got away. Similar regionalization proposals are being flirted with on a national level but they are nothing more than wealth redistribution schemes that only encourage the tax base to flee farther, destroying the city as a business center by transforming it into a regional financial plague instead.

In all its economic experiments, the left has refused to accept that there is no substitute for income generation and that when you kill the golden goose, you don’t get an unlimited supply of golden eggs. …

Since we are governed by mis-educated people, we will continue to question the efficacy of our education system. From The Atlantic, another article on student debt; not debt for professional schools like law or business, but the debt that is incurred by PhD candidates in the humanities.

College debt. Law school debt. Medical school debt. These are all topics that have been hashed over ad nauseam in the past few years. 

But when was the last time you heard anything about Ph.D. debt? 

Unless you’re an academic, my guess is you haven’t. Doctoral programs still have a reputation for giving their students a (mostly) free ride by providing living stipends and teaching opportunities along with tuition breaks. And most of the time, the rep holds true.

But not always. In some cases, Ph.D.’s leave school with the same kind of mountainous loan bills we’ve come to expect for pre-professional students. This week, Karen Kelsky, a former tenured anthropology professor turned consultant and blogger, kicked off a conversation about this dirty little secret of the ivory tower by asking Ph.D.’s to report the debt they stacked up in grad school on a public Google doc and explain how they accumulated it. Hundreds responded—enough that the sheet temporarily appeared to crash from the traffic. 

Thankfully, we don’t need to rely solely on crowdsourcing to get a sense of how much debt Ph.D.’s take on during their studies. According to the National Science Foundation’s annual (and comprehensive) Survey of Earned Doctorates, about 63 percent of Ph.D.’s completed their degrees in 2012 with no grad school-related debt. However, about 18 percent bookwormed their way to more than $30,000 in loans. …

From A Commonplace Blog, the lament of one of those PhD’s spit out by the higher education system.

Tomorrow I will step into a classroom to begin the last semester of a 24-year teaching career. Don’t get me wrong. I am not retiring. I am not “burned out.” The truth is rather more banal. OhioStateUniversity will not be renewing my three-year contract when it expires in the spring. The problem is tenure: with another three-year contract, I would become eligible for tenure. In an era of tight budgets, there is neither money nor place for a 61-year-old white male professor who has never really fit in nor tried very hard to. (Leave aside my heterodox politics and hard-to-credit publication record.) My feelings are like glue that will not set. The pieces fall apart in my hands.

This essay is not a contribution to the I-Quit-Academe genre. (A more accurate title in my case would be Academe QuitsMe.) Although I have become uncomfortably aware that I am out of step with the purposeful march of the 21st-century university (or maybe I just never adjusted to Ohio State), gladly would I have learned and gladly continued to teach for as long as my students would have had me. The decision, though, was not my students’ to make. And I’m not at all sure that a majority would have voted to keep me around, even if they had been polled. My salary may not be large (a rounding error above the median income for white families in the U.S.), but the university can offer part-time work to three desperate adjuncts for what it pays me. A lifetime of learning has never been cost-effective, and in today’s university—at least on the side of campus where the humanities are badly housed—no other criterion is thinkable. …

And Megan McArdle says, “Read this before you apply to grad school.”

If you’re thinking about going to graduate school, read this before you apply. It’s an open spreadsheet where graduates have posted about their debt levels, why they acquired so much debt, and how they’re planning to pay it off.

Note that a lot of these people had funding. Before they go to grad school, people are warned that you shouldn’t go unless you’re fully funded (tuition paid, some sort of research or teaching stipend). And that’s absolutely correct. If a Ph.D. program admits you without funding, it’s telling you that it doesn’t care whether you come; the program is willing to take your money, but not willing to invest in you. That means you won’t have access to the opportunities and support required to have a viable career in academia.

But what the spreadsheet shows is that in many cases, that’s not nearly enough. Some of the people with six-figure debt clearly shouldn’t have been in academia — one person writes that she took on debt because her stipend wasn’t enough to support two children, which is undoubtedly true, and a good reason that someone with two kids and no second income should probably look elsewhere for a career. …

Der Spiegel is not happy about it, but it looks like the EU is developing some common sense about green extremism.

The EU’s reputation as a model of environmental responsibility may soon be history. The European Commission wants to forgo ambitious climate protection goals and pave the way for fracking — jeopardizing Germany’s touted energy revolution in the process.

The climate between Brussels and Berlin is polluted, something European Commission officials attribute, among other things, to the “reckless” way German Chancellor Angela Merkel blocked stricter exhaust emissions during her re-election campaign to placate domestic automotive manufacturers like Daimler and BMW. This kind of blatant self-interest, officials complained at the time, is poisoning the climate.

But now it seems that the climate is no longer of much importance to the European Commission, the EU’s executive branch, either. Commission sources have long been hinting that the body intends to move away from ambitious climate protection goals. On Tuesday, the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported as much.

At the request of Commission President José Manuel Barroso, EU member states are no longer to receive specific guidelines for the development of renewable energy. The stated aim of increasing the share of green energy across the EU to up to 27 percent will hold. But how seriously countries tackle this project will no longer be regulated within the plan. As of 2020 at the latest — when the current commitment to further increase the share of green energy expires — climate protection in the EU will apparently be pursued on a voluntary basis. …

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Robert Samuelson writes on the minimum wage. His short essay explains why there are no simple answers; just simpletons running governments.

… For starters, the minimum wage is a blunt instrument to aid the poor because it covers many workers from families that are well above the federal poverty line. By the administration’s figures, 53 percent of workers who would benefit from a higher minimum come from families with incomes above $35,000, including 22 percent with incomes exceeding $75,000.

Next, economists still disagree on the job effect. In studies — and their review of other studies — economists David Neumark and J.M. Ian Salas of the University of California at Irvine and William Wascher of the Federal Reserve conclude that higher minimums do weaken low-wage employment. Under plausible assumptions, even a small effect (say, a 1 percent job loss for each 10 percent increase in the minimum) implies nearly a million fewer jobs over three years.

But scholarly research, regardless of conclusions, may be beside the point. Businesses don’t consult studies to decide what to do. They respond based on their own economic outlook. They may not react to a higher minimum wage now as they did in the past. Two realities suggest this.

First, the proposed increase is huge. By 2016, it’s almost 40 percent. Similar gains usually have occurred when high inflation advanced all wages rapidly. The minimum mainly kept pace. That’s not true today. Compared to average wages, the proposed hike in the minimum appears to be the largest since the 1960s.

Second, businesses have been reluctant job creators. They curb hiring at the least pretext. They seem obsessed with cost control. The Great Recession and the 2008-09 financial crisis spawned so much fear that they changed, at least temporarily, behavior. Firms are more cautious. …

A column by David Brooks is more illustration of how complex these problems are. It’s why the government efforts always fail.

… If you have a primitive zero-sum mentality then you assume growing affluence for the rich must somehow be causing the immobility of the poor, but, in reality, the two sets of problems are different, and it does no good to lump them together and call them “inequality.”

Second, it leads to ineffective policy responses. If you think the problem is “income inequality,” then the natural response is to increase incomes at the bottom, by raising the minimum wage.

But raising the minimum wage may not be an effective way to help those least well-off. Joseph J. Sabia of San Diego State University and Richard V. Burkhauser of Cornell looked at the effects of increases in the minimum wage between 2003 and 2007. Consistent with some other studies, they find no evidence that such raises had any effect on the poverty rates.

That’s because raises in the minimum wage are not targeted at the right people. Only 11 percent of the workers affected by such an increase come from poor households. Nearly two-thirds of such workers are the second or third earners living in households at twice the poverty line or above. …

The Economist thinks it looks like the president will lose in the Supreme Court over his recess appointments.

TO APPOINT people to certain important posts, the president needs the “advice and consent” of the Senate. The constitution offers a small loophole, however: the president may “fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate, by granting commissions which shall expire at the end of their next session.” Through this loophole successive commanders-in-chief—and especially Barack Obama—have driven an 18-wheel truck.

On January 13th the Supreme Court heard arguments about the scope of the president’s power to make recess appointments. National Labour Relations Board v Noel Canning asks whether Mr Obama’s three appointments on January 4th 2012 to the NLRB, the five-member federal agency that resolves disputes between companies and workers, were constitutional. Mr Obama says that the Senate was in recess that day, so the appointments were legitimate. But under the Senate’s own rules, it was in session.

Noel Canning, a soft-drink bottler in Washington state, claims it was harmed by Mr Obama’s appointments. It lost a pay dispute with the Teamsters union when a three-member panel including two of Mr Obama’s recess appointees ruled against it. The bottler appealed, claiming that the NLRB was improperly constituted.

The court of appeals for the District of Columbiaagreed. It issued a sweeping ruling that invalidated Mr Obama’s appointments and even called into question thousands of recess appointments that dozens of presidents have issued over the centuries. …

John Fund illustrates the way the media ignore the IRS scandal and “flood the zone” with Chris Christie bridgegate coverage.

Yes, liberal bias does play a role in explaining why — as Newsbusters.org reports — the major networks have had 44 times more coverage of Chris Christie’s “Bridgegate” scandal than they have had on anything related to the IRS political-targeting scandal that began last May.

Jonathan Alter, speaking on MSNBC, has dismissed the comparison by saying that “there are not ongoing revelations [in the IRS story]. If there were ongoing revelations in the IRS matter, that would still be a story.” He made his claim only four days after news broke that the Justice Department had chosen a significant Obama donor to head its investigation of the IRS, creating the obvious perception of a conflict of interest.

But it’s also true that a large part of the difference in coverage is owing simply to the laziness of journalists, for whom anything connected to a future presidential election trumps delving deeply into more complicated topics. …

Jennifer Rubin explains why the media types are so biased.

… Beyond political bias, the great shortcomings the mainstream media have are cultural and social biases. College-educated, politically correct, well-heeled and well-spoken, unreligious and pro-choice, these are people who generally don’t look or talk like Christie, nor do they have people in their social circles who do. The only reference they may have is a character out of a Martin Scorsese movie. It’s an extreme mismatch of habits and style, in the same way that virtually none of media can personally identify with an evangelical who prays every day, goes to church weekly and takes the Bible literally. In short, they lack empathy for such people and, therefore, misjudge how others relate to them.

Just as they took George W. Bush — the reader, wartime innovator and now painter — as a rube and not intellectually curious, they take Christie’s public jousting with media and opponents as “bullying.” Do the media consider Obama a bully because he criticizes the media and says mean things about Republicans? Oh no! Not the sophisticated, urbane fellow.

Hillary Clinton can keep a “hit list,” and Obama can reward friends and excoriate enemies, but they will never be “bullies.” They are tough, determined, not “patsies” and many other admirable things, but it is Christie, the media insist, who operates with “fear” and retribution. Evidence is beside the point. Bipartisan achievement is irrelevant. It is simply self-evident to the media elite. Their expectation of a politician is someone who is TV-ready, hair-perfect, voice-modulated and emotionally muted. The bridge story only confirms their stereotype of an ethnic, Northeastern pol — one who outwits and shows up fellow journalists on a daily basis. …

Dilbert creator, Scott Adams, posts on success stigma. Our colleges are turning out economic ignoramuses.

The other day I asked aloud in this blog if there might be some sort of anti-success trend emerging in society. I think I found it.

Some folks emailed me directly (dilbertcartoonist@gmail.com) to say they believe it is a waste of time to pursue success because it is a zero-sum game. In other words, they believe they can only be successful by making someone else less successful, on the theory that there isn’t enough success in the universe for everyone to get a meaningful slice. They tell me it would be “wrong” on some level to pick the pockets of strangers for self-enrichment.

And there it is.

I doubt that sort of thinking would have existed before the massive media campaign against the “top 1%.” The power of the top 1% story is in the false impression that rich people stole the money from the poor and middle class, and therefore it would only be fair to give most of it back.

Clearly some of the financial titans are doing little more than picking pockets. But those are the exceptions. Most one-percenters are growing the economy and creating jobs. That’s obvious to people who were born in the “rising tide lifts all boats” era. And it’s obvious to anyone with a bit of economics education.

But if you are in your twenties, with no deep understanding of economics, wouldn’t you believe success is evil? That’s the dominant story of their generation. …

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Charles Krauthammer takes off on the boundless cynicism of the president.

By early 2011, writes former defense secretary Robert Gates, he had concluded that President Obama “doesn’t believe in his own [Afghanistan] strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his.”

Not his? America is at war and he’s America’s commander in chief. For the soldier being shot at in the field, it makes no difference under whose administration the fighting began. In fact, three out of four Americans killed in Afghanistan have died under Barack Obama’s command. That’s ownership enough.

Moreover, Gates’s doubts about Obama had begun long before. A year earlier, trying to understand how two senior officials could be openly working against expressed policy, Gates concluded that “the most likely explanation was that the president himself did not really believe the strategy he had approved would work.” This, just four months after Obama ordered his 30,000 troop “surge” into Afghanistan, warning the nation that “our security is at stake . . . the security of our allies, and the common security of the world.”

The odd thing about Gates’s insider revelation of Obama’s lack of faith in his own policy is that we knew it all along. Obama was emitting discordant notes from the very beginning. In the West Point “surge” speech itself, the very sentence after that announcement consisted of the further announcement that the additional troops would be withdrawn in 18 months. …

…“If I had ever come to believe the military part of the strategy would not lead to success as I defined it,” writes Gates. “I could not have continued signing the deployment orders.” The commander in chief, Gates’s book makes clear, had no such scruples.

Craig Pirrong at Streetwise Professor posts on Putin’s latest kiss to Iran.

Marx said that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.  The Obama administration is attempting to one-up Marx and compress the process, with its simultaneously farcical and tragic policies on Iran and Syria.

Obama is clearly so dead set on achieving some legacy building agreement with Iran that he is willing to swallow any insult.  Such as the announcement of a Russian-Iranian agreement whereby Iran will provide oil to Russia, in exchange for Russian goods–but more likely, Russian money as well. …

… Russia says that there are no internationally agreed upon sanctions, so it is perfectly free to deal with Iran.

That’s probably true in legal terms, but note that was true yesterday, and last month, and last year.  But Putin didn’t do this.  Until now.  Because he sees that Obama is so desperate for a deal that he knows that he can get away with pretty much anything, and that Obama won’t do or say a damned thing. (And no, State Department expressions of “concern” don’t count.)  So Putin and the Iranians are basically doing donuts on the White House lawn, with their windows down and their middle fingers up.  And Obama just draws the drapes in the Oval Office. …

… Syrians are paying a dreadful price for Obama’s narcissism every day.  The entire region is paying a price, because the festering sore in Syria is the host to myriad jihadists who range from the bad (the Islamic Front) to the terrible (the Al Qaeda affiliate Al-Nusra Front) to the utterly bestial (ISIS/ISIL).  The US and its allies (notably Israel) haven’t paid the price yet, but Obama has sowed the wind, and we will reap the whirlwind in due course.  An empowered, messianic Iran, with Russia providing money and cover, and convinced that the US is a paper tiger, is likely to take actions that will unleash a devastating sequence of events.  It’s a matter of when, not if.

But Obama will have secured peace in our time: or his time, more precisely. His legacy will be secured, and any malign consequences that occur in 2017 and beyond, well, those will obviously not be his fault.  He gave us peace, after all, and if war comes, it will be because some lesser being screwed up.

Farcical tragedy.  Tragical farce.

Daily Beast London Editor Nico Hines has the courage the U. S. media lacks. Hines posts on Brit opinions about the president.

Sir Hew Strachan, an expert on the history of war, says that the president’s strategic failures in Afghanistan and Syria have crippled America’s position in the world.

President Obama is “chronically incapable” of military strategy and falls far short of his predecessor George W. Bush, according to one of Britain’s most senior military advisors.

Sir Hew Strachan, an advisor to the Chief of the Defense Staff, told The Daily Beast that the United States and Britain were guilty of total strategic failure in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Obama’s attempts to intervene on behalf of the Syrian rebels “has left them in a far worse position than they were before.”

The extraordinary critique by a leading advisor to the United States’ closest military ally comes days after Obama was undermined by the former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who questioned the President’s foreign policy decisions and claimed he was deeply suspicious of the military. …

Ed Morrissey posts on the Senate’s bi-partisan committee report on Benghazi.

… One does not need a name at the top of this report to know where responsibility rests for this massive failure. Hillary Clinton ran State, Leon Panetta ran Defense, and David Petraeus ran the CIA. But the distributed nature of the failure indicts the Obama administration and Barack Obama himself, too. The White House is responsible for interagency coordination, for one thing, especially when it comes to national security and diplomatic enterprises. 

However, Obama’s responsibility extends farther and more specifically, too. The reason that eastern Libya had transformed into a terrorist haven in the first place was because of the Obama-led NATO intervention that deposed Moammar Qaddafi without any effort to fill the security vacuum his abrupt departure created. 

Four months before the attack on the consulate in Benghazi, Daniel Larison warned  that the vacuum left by that 30,000-foot intervention not only meant trouble for the West in eastern Libya, but throughout North Africa as al Qaeda and its affiliates entrenched themselves. Sure enough, al Qaeda infused itself into a Tuareg rebellion and almost topped Mali, an effort which France belatedly stamped out with a boots-on-the-ground intervention – with those boots transported in part by the US Air Force.  At the time, the Financial Times called Mali “among the most embarrassing boomerangs” of American policy, specifically noting “the blowback in the Sahel from the overthrow of Colonel Moammar Gaddafi in Libya.”

The policies and actions of the Obama administration in Libya left behind a failed state, and the incompetent handling of security and readiness afterward left four Americans to die needlessly. The buck stops at the top for this mess.

Joel Kotkin, normally writing on economic geography, has written a provocative piece on failures of technology.

Technological advances have slowed from revolutionary to incremental, with a focus more narcissistic than expansive and with the rewards concentrated in ever-fewer hands.

Maybe it’s my age, but, somehow, the future does not seem to be turning out the way I once imagined. It’s not just the absence of flying cars, but also the lack of significant progress in big things, like toward space colonization, or smaller ones, like the speed for most air travel or the persistence of poverty.

Indeed, despite the incessant media obsession with technology as the driver of society, it seems we are a long way from the kind of dramatic change that, say, my parents’ generation experienced. Born at the end of the horse-and-buggy age, they witnessed amazing changes – from the development of nuclear power and the jet engine to the first moon landing.

In contrast, my children’s experience with technological change is largely incremental – a shifting of digital platforms, from desktops to laptops to tablets and iPhones. The new raft of minidevices are ingenious and much more powerful than even the high-end desktop computers of a decade ago. But this wave of technology is not doing much except, perhaps, to make us ever more distracted, disconnected and obsessed with trivia.

As one former Facebook employee put it succinctly: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.”

One clear sign of our technological fail: the stagnant, or even declining, living standards for most Americans. New technology is not creating much-cheaper and better housing, nor is it reducing poverty or creating a new wave of opportunity for grass-roots businesses. In fact, the current “tech boom” has done little to improve incomes much outside a few stretches of the Bay Area, a handful of college towns, and overhyped city media districts. …