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Israel’s defense minister commits the faux pas of telling the truth about Kerry’s efforts with Palestinians. Breitbart has the story.

… Ya’alon added: “In reality, there have been no negotiations between us and the Palestinians for all these months –but rather between us and the Americans. The only thing that can ‘save us’ is for John Kerry to win a Nobel Prize and leave us in peace.”  …

Jonathan Tobin posts at length on Moshe Yaalon’s outburst. 

Give Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu some credit. In his first term as Israel’s leader in the 1990s, he might well have issued a statement like the one attributed to Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon yesterday in which the former general trashed U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and damned the security plan that he presented to Israel this month as “not worth the paper it’s written on.” Since returning to the prime minister’s office in 2009 Netanyahu has done his best to keep the relationship with Washington from overheating. If there have been a series of scrapes with the Obama administration, that is largely the fault of the president’s desire to pick policy fights with him and the prime minister has done his best not to overreact. No matter how wrong Israel’s leaders may think their American counterparts are, little good comes from public spats. As Netanyahu knows, the only ones who benefit from exposing the daylight between the two countries’ positions are the Palestinians and other foes.

But apparently Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon hasn’t gotten the memo about not telling off the Americans. In an apparently unguarded moment, the former general spouted off about Kerry, the peace process, and the Palestinians yesterday, and the subsequent report in Yediot Ahronot published in English on their Ynetnews.com site brought down a firestorm on the Israeli government. Though Yaalon walked back his comments in a statement to the media, he did not deny the accuracy of the original Yediot story. This indiscretion won’t help Netanyahu in his dealings with either Obama or Kerry. It is especially foolish coming from a cabinet minister whose department has worked closely with the administration on security measures throughout the last five years to Israel’s benefit in spite of the political differences between the governments. But leaving aside the diplomatic harm he has done his country, honest observers must admit that what Yaalon said was true. …

Uniting left and right, A NY Times OpEd says the Iran policy is doomed to failure. If Kerry can find another stupid policy in the region, he can have a Mid East “hat trick.”

A great deal of diplomatic attention over the next few months will be focused on whether the temporary nuclear deal with Iran can be transformed into a full-blown accord. President Obama has staked the success of his foreign policy on this bold gamble. But discussion about the nuclear deal has diverted attention from an even riskier bet that Obama has placed: the idea that Iran can become a cooperative partner in regional security.

Although they won’t say so publicly, Mr. Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry surely dream of a “Nixon to China” masterstroke.  …

 

… The Obama strategy is breathtakingly ambitious. It is also destined to fail.

First, it ignores the obvious fact that, unlike China at the time of President Richard M. Nixon’s diplomacy in the 1970s, Iran does not share a common enemy that would force it to unite with America. Though Iran’s proxies are fighting Sunni extremists in a number of theaters, Iran itself has cooperated with Al Qaeda and other Sunni extremists, such as Hamas and the Taliban, when it has served its interests to do so. Iran’s rulers simply do not regard Al Qaeda as an existential threat on a par with the “Great Satan” (as they see the United States). By contrast, Mao did see the Soviet Union as a sufficient threat to justify an alliance with the “capitalist imperialists” in Washington.

The second major problem is that Iran has always harbored dreams of regional hegemony. There is no sign that the election of the “moderate” cleric Hassan Rouhani as president has changed anything. …

He put the Moran into moron. Roll Call says Virginia Dem Moran will finally leave congress.

Senior appropriator and progressive stalwart James P. Moran will step down at the end of this year, making him the third House Democrat in just three days to announce his retirement. …

… Over the years Moran has served on Capitol Hill, his professional accomplishments were sometimes overshadowed by personal scandals. Brash and occasionally outspoken to a fault, he has shoved members leaving the House floor, suggested that the Jewish community pushed for the U.S. invasion in Iraq in 2003 and possibly squandered a small fortune in the stock market. In 2012, his son resigned as field director for his father’s re-election campaign after he was caught on camera advocating voter fraud.

But Moran has always been a team player in the Democratic power structure, trusted by leadership to take reliable, liberal, party-line votes. …

Moran’s son was featured in Chris Cillizza’s Worst Week in Washington in October 2012 when he was caught in a James O’Keefe sting.

When approached at a Cosi by a total stranger pushing a vote-fraud scheme, be very, very leery.

Pat Moran, son of Northern Virginia Rep. Jim Moran (D), learned that the hard way this past week when conservative activists caught him on video providing advice about how one person might be able to cast ballots on behalf of a number of people in next month’s election.

In the video, Moran, the field director for his father’s campaign, appears initially uneasy about the prospect of vote fraud but goes on to suggest that forged utility bills could be used as identification. He adds that the bills must “look good” to fool poll workers. …

Speaking of DC lowlifes, Charles Hurt has more on “Duty.”

… Support would be to never send soldiers to die for a mission not worth dying for. As secretary of defense and president of the United States, that would be your responsibility to determine. Or “duty,” if you like. If they are dying for something you honestly believe the commander in chief does not believe in, then you have a duty to quit and make known your grave concerns about such treasonous leadership.

Mr. Gates also reveals Washington’s worst-kept secret of the past four decades: Mr. Biden has been wrong about every major foreign policy issue of his time. Such ineptitude would get anybody fired from Macy’s shoe department. But in Washington, it makes Mr. Biden the reigning expert on foreign affairs and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for years.

Mr. Gates also smears Mrs. Clinton by relaying a conversation she had with Mr. Obama in which both of them acknowledged that they opposed sending reinforcement troops to Iraq when the fighting grew particularly nasty because they were afraid support might hurt their political careers.

Still, Mr. Gates declares that Mrs. Clinton would make a fine president. And, in an effort to be “even-handed,” says so would Mr. Biden.

Dear God, save America!

If you’ve been wondering about the fuss over the internet court decision, we have the skinny from a WSJ OpEd.

A federal appeals court in Washington slapped the Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday for overstepping its legal authority by trying to regulate Internet access. The FCC is now a two-time loser in court in its net-neutrality efforts. Has the government learned its lesson, or will the agency take a third stab at regulating the Internet? The answer to that question will affect the Internet’s growth in the 21st century.

The FCC’s quest to regulate the Internet began in 2010, when the commission first promulgated rules for net neutrality. The rules, proponents argue, are needed to police Internet “on-ramps” (Internet service providers) ostensibly to ensure that they stay “open.” To accomplish this, some want the FCC to subject the Internet to ancient communications laws designed for extinct phone and railroad monopolies.

But the trouble is, nothing needs fixing. The Internet has remained open and accessible without FCC micromanagement since it entered public life in the 1990s. And more regulation could produce harmful results, such as reduced infrastructure investment, stunted innovation, slower speeds and higher prices for consumers. The FCC never bothered to study the impact that such intervention might have on the broadband market before leaping to regulate. Nor did it consider the ample consumer-protection laws that already exist. The government’s meddling has been driven more by ideology and a 2008 campaign promise by then-Sen. Barack Obama than by reality. …

MIT scientist dumps on Deval Patrick, MA Gov.

While Gov. Deval Patrick and others painted a dire picture of what global warming might do to us, others are more skeptical.

MIT Professor Richard Lindzen is a leading international expert on climate change.

“The changes that have occurred due to global warning are too small to account for,” he told WBZ-TV. “It has nothing to do with global warming, it has to do with where we live.”

Lindzen endorses sensible preparedness and environmental protection, but sees what he terms “catastrophism” in the climate change horror stories.

“Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. The opportunities for taxation, for policies, for control, for crony capitalism are just immense, you can see their eyes bulge,” he says.

“Even many of the people who are supportive of sounding the global warning alarm, back off from catastophism,” Lindzen said. “It’s the politicians and the green movement that like to portray catastrophe.”

The earth is staying in balance. Business Insider reports on a heat wave in Australia.

Australian authorities warned Tuesday of some of the worst fire danger since a 2009 inferno which killed 173 people, with most of the continent’s southeast sweltering through a major heatwave.

Victoria state, where the so-called Black Saturday firestorm flattened entire villages in 2009 and destroyed more than 2,000 homes, was again bracing for extreme fire weather.

“These next four days promise to be amongst the most significant that we have faced in Victoria since Black Saturday,” said acting state premier Peter Ryan.

Tens of thousands of firefighters were on standby, and 1,290 brigades were in a “state of high preparedness”, he added, with the peak danger day expected on Friday when very strong winds are forecast. …

The Atlantic has some good news; we’re not getting zapped by lightning like in the past.

In the first half of the 20th century, hundreds of Americans died each year from lightning strikes. The data is messy, but in the years from about 1920 to the middle of the 1940s, about 400 people were killed by lightning annually.

Last year, 23 did, the fewest on record. Other recent years have had a similarly small number of lightning fatalities, with 28 in 2012, and 26 in 2011, the previous record.

These numbers are all the more remarkable considering how the population of the United States has exploded over the same time period. Measured on a per person basis, the decline in lightning deaths over the last century is staggering, falling from about 3 or 4 annual deaths per million Americans, to fewer than 0.1 in recent years. …

Andrew Malcolm tops off our week with late night humor.

Fallon: President Obama invited unemployed Americans to the White House for a discussion on income inequality. Because if there’s one way to show sympathy for the unemployed, it’s to have them over to a giant white mansion where you get to live for free.

Leno: That MSNBC anchor has apologized for making fun of a Mitt Romney grandchild. She said from now on before she goes on the air, she’ll remind herself that some people may actually be watching MSNBC.

Letterman: People come up to me all the time with their questions. They say, ‘Dave, why is it so cold out?’ And I reply, ‘It’s the chill, that Arctic blast coming off Michelle Obama.’

Leno: In the movie “Wolf of Wall Street” they say the F-word 506 times, breaking the old record of 505 Obama set when he heard about Robert Gates’ new book. …

Don’t miss the cowboy-in-training staring down a Brahma bull.

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John Fund reports how easy voter fraud can be and how difficult it will be to get Dem office holders to enforce the law.

Liberals who oppose efforts to prevent voter fraud claim that there is no fraud — or at least not any that involves voting in person at the polls.

But New York City’s watchdog Department of Investigations has just provided the latest evidence of how easy it is to commit voter fraud that is almost undetectable. DOI undercover agents showed up at 63 polling places last fall and pretended to be voters who should have been turned away by election officials; the agents assumed the names of individuals who had died or moved out of town, or who were sitting in jail. In 61 instances, or 97 percent of the time, the testers were allowed to vote. Those who did vote cast only a write-in vote for a “John Test” so as to not affect the outcome of any contest. DOI published its findings two weeks ago in a searing 70-page report accusing the city’s Board of Elections of incompetence, waste, nepotism, and lax procedures.

The Board of Elections, which has a $750 million annual budget and a work force of 350 people, reacted in classic bureaucratic fashion, which prompted one city paper to deride it as “a 21st-century survivor of Boss Tweed–style politics.” The Board approved a resolution referring the DOI’s investigators for prosecution. It also asked the state’s attorney general to determine whether DOI had violated the civil rights of voters who had moved or are felons, and it sent a letter of complaint to Mayor Bill de Blasio. Normally, I wouldn’t think de Blasio would give the BOE the time of day, but New York’s new mayor has long been a close ally of former leaders of ACORN, the now-disgraced “community organizing” group that saw its employees convicted of voter-registration fraud all over the country during and after the 2008 election.

Greg Soumas, president of New York’s BOE, offered a justification for calling in the prosecutors: “If something was done in an untoward fashion, it was only done by DOI. We [are] unaware of any color of authority on the part of [DOI] to vote in the identity of any person other than themselves — and our reading of the election law is that such an act constitutes a felony.” The Board is bipartisan, and all but two of its members voted with Soumas. The sole exceptions were Democrat Jose Araujo, who abstained because the DOI report implicated him in hiring his wife and sister-and-law for Board jobs, and Republican Simon Shamoun.

Good-government groups are gobsmacked at Soumas’s refusal to smell the stench of corruption in his patronage-riddled empire. …

Richard Epstein posts on how Dems kill jobs.

The latest government labor report indicates that job growth has slowed once again. It is now at a three-year low, with only an estimated 74,000 new jobs added this past month. To be sure, the nominal unemployment rate dropped to 6.7 percent, but as experts on both the left and the right have noted, the only reason for this “improvement” is the decline of labor force participation, which is at the lowest level since 1978, with little prospect of any short-term improvement.

The Economic Logic of Supply and Demand

One might think that these figures would be taken as evidence that a radical change in course is needed to boost labor market participation. The grounds for that revision rest on a straightforward application of the fundamental economic law of demand: As the cost of labor increases, the demand for labor will decrease. There are, of course, empirical disputes as to just how rapidly wage increases will reduce that demand for labor.

The federal government has apparently (and foolishly) assumed that these effects will be small, and that the unemployed can somehow be better helped by government interventions into the labor markets. However, only a free market in labor is able to balance changes in both supply and demand, so as to reduce the incidence of unemployment. Government efforts to impose various minimum wages will, happily, have little adverse effect if the market wage is greater than the government mandate. But the same form of increase could have devastating effects on labor markets when the required wage is set too high relative to market wages. The number of workers eager to take jobs at these higher levels will be great, but the number of jobs available at that wage level will shrink. Unemployment levels will increase, and working off the books could increase.

The correct policy choice is strong deregulation of labor markets, which will spur higher labor market participation, albeit at somewhat lower wages. But once people get into the labor force, they can hone their skills in ways that will allow them to command higher wages. Government mandates can never lead to sustainable wage increases. Higher levels of labor productivity can. …

Bret Stephens has a good take on the Gates book.

There are evangelizers who prefer the company of the heathen and prudes known to spend their nights in strip clubs—presumably to keep a watchful and warning eye on the ways of the wicked.

And then there is Robert Gates in Washington.

The former defense secretary devoted most of his adult life to climbing the structures of power in Washington, D.C. He was deputy CIA director under Ronald Reagan and CIA director under George H.W. Bush. He then served at the Pentagon for 4½ years under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama —holding the job longer than all but four of his predecessors. He was retired with a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Now he wants you to know he was offended, irritated, enraged, scandalized, “too old for this $%*&,” and just plain itching to quit nearly every day he spent at the top. …

 

… Deep in the book Mr. Gates writes that “A favorite saying of mine is ‘Never miss a good chance to shut up.’” His memoir is one big missed chance.

And Jonathan Tobin says the timing of the book helped the president. 

President Obama earned some civility points yesterday by refusing to fire back at Robert Gates after the former secretary of defense disparaged aspects of his leadership style as well as taking shots at Vice President Biden and Hillary Clinton in his new memoir. While Obama admitted he was “irked” by the timing of the publication of the book, he praised the former secretary as an “outstanding” cabinet member and friend. Though Democrats were blasting Gates for writing a book that was mined for negatives quotes about their two leading presidential contenders in 2016, even a Republican like John McCain said that he should have waited until the administration he served was out of office before writing a memoir. …

… Though some of the book doesn’t do much to make the president and his colleagues look good on some points, by waiting until Obama was safely re-elected before coming clean about Obama’s war leadership, Gates did his former boss a huge favor and the voters a disservice. …

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Kevin Williamson introduces us to an America we can barely imagine. 

Owsley County, Ky. – There are lots of diversions in the Big White Ghetto, the vast moribund matrix of Wonder Bread–hued Appalachian towns and villages stretching from northern Mississippi to southern New York, a slowly dissipating nebula of poverty and misery with its heart in eastern Kentucky, the last redoubt of the Scots-Irish working class that picked up where African slave labor left off, mining and cropping and sawing the raw materials for a modern American economy that would soon run out of profitable uses for the class of people who 500 years ago would have been known, without any derogation, as peasants. Thinking about the future here and its bleak prospects is not much fun at all, so instead of too much black-minded introspection you have the pills and the dope, the morning beers, the endless scratch-off lotto cards, healing meetings up on the hill, the federally funded ritual of trading cases of food-stamp Pepsi for packs of Kentucky’s Best cigarettes and good old hard currency, tall piles of gas-station nachos, the occasional blast of meth, Narcotics Anonymous meetings, petty crime, the draw, the recreational making and surgical unmaking of teenaged mothers, and death: Life expectancies are short — the typical man here dies well over a decade earlier than does a man in Fairfax County, Va. — and they are getting shorter, women’s life expectancy having declined by nearly 1.1 percent from 1987 to 2007

.

If the people here weren’t 98.5 percent white, we’d call it a reservation. …

 

… There is here a strain of fervid and sometimes apocalyptic Christianity, and visions of the Rapture must have a certain appeal for people who already have been left behind. Like its black urban counterparts, the Big White Ghetto suffers from a whole trainload of social problems, but the most significant among them may be adverse selection: Those who have the required work skills, the academic ability, or the simple desperate native enterprising grit to do so get the hell out as fast as they can, and they have been doing that for decades. …

 

… There is not much novelty in Booneville, Ky., the seat of OwsleyCounty, but it does receive a steady trickle of visitors: Its public figures suffer politely through a perverse brand of tourism from journalists and do-gooders every time the U.S. Census data are recalculated and it defends its dubious title as poorest county in these United States. …

 

… it turns out that the local economy runs on black-market soda the way Baghdad ran on contraband crude during the days of sanctions.

 

It works like this: Once a month, the debit-card accounts of those receiving what we still call food stamps are credited with a few hundred dollars — about $500 for a family of four, on average — which are immediately converted into a unit of exchange, in this case cases of soda. On the day when accounts are credited, local establishments accepting EBT cards — and all across the Big White Ghetto, “We Accept Food Stamps” is the new E pluribus unum – are swamped with locals using their public benefits to buy cases and cases — reports put the number at 30 to 40 cases for some buyers — of soda. Those cases of soda then either go on to another retailer, who buys them at 50 cents on the dollar, in effect laundering those $500 in monthly benefits into $250 in cash — a considerably worse rate than your typical organized-crime money launderer offers — or else they go into the local black-market economy, where they can be used as currency in such ventures as the dealing of unauthorized prescription painkillers — by “pillbillies,” as they are known at the sympathetic establishments in Florida that do so much business with Kentucky and West Virginia that the relevant interstate bus service is nicknamed the “OxyContin Express.” A woman who is intimately familiar with the local drug economy suggests that the exchange rate between sexual favors and cases of pop — some dealers will accept either — is about 1:1, meaning that the value of a woman in the local prescription-drug economy is about $12.99 at Walmart prices. …

 

… For the smart and enterprising people left behind, life can be very comfortable, with family close, a low cost of living, beautiful scenery, and a very short climb to the top of the social pecking order. The relative ease of life for the well-off and connected here makes it easy to overlook the real unpleasant facts of economic life, which helps explain why Booneville has a lovely new golf course, of all things, but so little in the way of everyday necessities. The county seat, run down as parts of it are, is an outpost of civilization compared with what surrounds it for 50 miles in every direction. Stopping for gas on KY-30 a few miles past the OwsleyCounty line, I go looking for the restroom and discover instead that the family operating the place is living in makeshift quarters in the back. Margaret Thatcher lived above her family’s shop as a little girl, too, but a grocer’s in Grantham is a very different thing from a gas station in Kentucky, with very different prospects. …

 

… This is not the land of moonshine and hill lore, but that of families of four clutching $40 worth of lotto scratchers and crushing the springs on their beaten-down Camry while getting dinner from a Phillips 66 station.

 

This is about “the draw.”

 

“The draw,” the monthly welfare checks that supplement dependents’ earnings in the black-market Pepsi economy, is poison. It’s a potent enough poison to catch the attention even of such people as those who write for the New York Times. Nicholas Kristof, visiting nearby Jackson, Ky., last year, was shocked by parents who were taking their children out of literacy classes because the possibility of improved academic performance would threaten $700-a-month Social Security disability benefits, which increasingly are paid out for nebulous afflictions such as loosely defined learning disorders. “This is painful for a liberal to admit,” Kristof wrote, “but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency.”

 

There is much here to confound conservatives, too. Jim DeMint likes to say that marriage is our best anti-poverty program, and he also has a point. But a 2004 study found that the majority of impoverished households in Appalachia were headed by married couples, not single mothers. Getting and staying married is not a surefire prophylactic against poverty. Neither are prophylactics. …

 

… In effect, welfare has made Appalachia into a big and sparsely populated housing project — too backward to thrive, but just comfortable enough to keep the underclass in place. There is no cure for poverty, because there is no cause of poverty — poverty is the natural condition of the human animal. It is not as though labor and enterprise are unknown here: Digging coal is hard work, farming is hard work, timbering is hard work — so hard that the best and brightest long ago packed up for Cincinnati or Pittsburgh or Memphis or Houston. There is to this day an Appalachian bar in Detroit and ex-Appalachian enclaves around the country. The lesson of the Big White Ghetto is the same as the lessons we learned about the urban housing projects in the late 20th century: The best public-policy treatment we have for poverty is dilution. But like the old project towers, the Appalachian draw culture produces concentration, a socio­economic Salton Sea that becomes more toxic every year.

 

“The government gives people checks, but nobody teaches them how to live,” says Teresa Barrett, a former high-school principal who now publishes the OwsleyCounty newspaper. “You have people on the draw getting $3,000 a month, and they still can’t live. When I was at the school, we’d see kids come in from a long weekend just starved to death. But you’ll see those parents at the grocery store with their 15 cases of Pepsi, and that’s all they’ve got in the buggy — you know what they’re doing. Everybody knows, nobody does anything. And when you have that many people on the draw, that’s a big majority of voters.” …

 

… There is another Booneville, this one in northern Mississippi, just within the cultural orbit of Memphis and a stone’s throw from the two-room shack in which was born Elvis Presley, the Appalachian Adonis. There’s a lot of Big White Ghetto between them, trailers and rickety homes heated with wood stoves, the post-industrial ruins of old mills and small factories with their hard 1970s lines that always make me think of the name of the German musical group Einstürzende Neubauten — “collapsing modern buildings.” (Some things just sound more appropriate in German.) You swerve to miss deer on the country roads, see the rusted hulk of a 1937 Dodge sedan nestled against a house and wonder if somebody was once planning to restore it – or if somebody just left it there on his way to Detroit. You see the clichés: cars up on cinderblocks, to be sure, but houses up on cinderblocks, too. And you get a sense of the enduring isolation of some of these little communities: About 20 miles from Williamsburg, Ky., I become suspicious that I have not selected the easiest route to get where I’m going, and stop and ask a woman what the easiest way to get to Williamsburg is. “You’re a hell of a long way from Virginia,” she answers. I tell her I’m looking for Williamsburg, Kentucky, and she says she’s never heard of it. It’s about the third town over, the nearest settlement of any interest, and it’s where you get on the interstate to go up to Lexington or down to Knoxville. “I went to Hazard once,” she offers. The local economic-development authorities say that the answer to Appalachia’s problems is sending more people to college. Sending them to Nashville might be a start. …

George Will writes on the importance of families.

… If America is to be equitable, with careers open to all talents and competent citizens capable of making their way in an increasingly demanding world, Americans must heed the warnings implicit in observations from two heroes of modern conservatism. In “The Constitution of Liberty” (1960), Friedrich Hayek noted that families are the primary transmitters of human capital — habits, mores, education. Hence families, much more than other social institutions or programs, are determinative of academic and vocational success. In “The Unheavenly City” (1970), Edward C. Banfield wrote: “All education favors the middle- and upper-class child, because to be middle or upper class is to have qualities that make one particularly educable.”

Elaborating on this theme, Jerry Z. Muller, a Catholic University historian, argued in the March-April 2013 issue of Foreign Affairs that expanding equality of opportunity increases inequality because some people are simply better able than others to exploit opportunities. And “assortative mating” — likes marrying likes — concentrates class advantages, further expanding inequality. As Muller said, “formal schooling itself plays a relatively minor role in creating or perpetuating achievement gaps” that originate “in the different levels of human capital children possess when they enter school.”

The Cato Institute’s Brink Lindsey argued in “Human Capitalism: How Economic Growth Has Made Us Smarter — and More Unequal” that this growth intensifies society’s complexity, which “has opened a great divide between those who have mastered its requirements and those who haven’t.” Modernity — education-based complexity — intensifies the demands on mental abilities. People invest increasingly in human capital — especially education — because status and achievement increasingly depend on possession of the right knowledge.

Lindsey cited research showing that “by the time they reach age 3, children of professional parents have heard some 45 million words addressed to them — as opposed to only 26 million words for working-class kids, and a mere 13 million words in the case of kids on welfare.” So, class distinctions in vocabularies are already large among toddlers. …

Don Boudreaux has a great thought on inequality.

Suppose that Jones chooses a career as a poet. Jones treasures the time he spends walking in the woods and strolling city streets in leisurely reflection; his reflections lead him to write poetry critical of capitalist materialism. Working as a poet, Jones earns $20,000 annually.

Smith chooses a career as an emergency-room physician. She works an average of 60 hours weekly and seldom takes a vacation. Her annual salary is $400,000. Is this “distribution” of income unfair? Is Smith responsible for Jones’ relatively low salary? Does Smith owe Jones money? If so, how much? And what is the formula you use to determine Smith’s debt to Jones?

While Dr. Smith earns more money than does poet Jones, poet Jones earns more leisure than does Dr. Smith. Do you believe leisure has value to those who possess it? If so, are you disturbed by the inequality of leisure that separates leisure-rich Jones from leisure-poor Smith? Do you advocate policies to “redistribute” leisure from Jones to Smith—say, by forcing Jones to wash Smith’s dinner dishes or to chauffeur Smith to and from work? If not, why not?

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Charles Krauthammer writes on bigotry in the academic world.

For decades, the American Studies Association labored in well-deserved obscurity. No longer. It has now made a name for itself by voting to boycott Israeli universities, accusing them of denying academic and human rights to Palestinians.

Given that Israel has a profoundly democratic political system, the freest press in the Middle East, a fiercely independent judiciary and astonishing religious and racial diversity within its universities, including affirmative action for Arab students, the charge is rather strange.

Made more so when you consider the state of human rights in Israel’s neighborhood. As we speak, Syria’s government is dropping “barrel bombs” filled with nails, shrapnel and other instruments of terror on its own cities. Where is the ASA boycott of Syria?

And of Iran, which hangs political, religious and even sexual dissidents and has no academic freedom at all? Or Egypt, where Christians are being openly persecuted? Or Turkey, Saudi Arabia or, for that matter, massively repressive China and Russia?

Which makes obvious that the ASA boycott has nothing to do with human rights. It’s an exercise in radical chic, giving marginalized academics a frisson of pretend anti-colonialism, seasoned with a dose of edgy anti-Semitism.

And don’t tell me this is merely about Zionism. The ruse is transparent. Israel is the world’s only Jewish state. To apply to the state of the Jews a double standard that you apply to none other, to judge one people in a way you judge no other, to single out that one people for condemnation and isolation — is to engage in a gross act of discrimination.

And discrimination against Jews has a name. It’s called anti-Semitism. …

John Podhoretz tells us why the IRS scandal is ignored while the media flog bridgegate.

Most government scandals involve the manipulation of the system in obscure ways by people no one has ever heard of. That is why George Washington Bridgegate is nearly a perfect scandal — because it is comprehensible and (as they say in Hollywood) “relatable” to everyone who has ever been in a car. This is the reason this one is not going to go away so easily, even if one accepts the contention that Gov. Chris Christie had nothing whatsoever to do with it.

Government officials and political operatives working for Christie, for weird and petty reasons, chose to make traffic worse. That’s the takeaway. When they are reminded of the fact that people working on Christie’s behalf thought it was a good political game to mire tens of thousands of their fellow Americans in the nightmarish gridlock that is a daily dreaded prospect for tens of millions, they will be discomfited by that and by the politician in whose name it was done.

And yet, you know what is also something everybody would find “relatable”? Politicians who sic the tax man on others for political gain. Everybody has to deal with the IRS and fears it. Last year, we learned from the Internal Revenue Service itself that it had targeted ideological opponents of the president for special scrutiny and investigation — because they were ideological opponents.

That’s juicy, just as Bridgegate is juicy. It’s something we can all understand, it speaks to our greatest fears, and it’s the sort of thing TV newspeople could gab about for days on end without needing a fresh piece of news to keep it going.

And yet, according to Scott Whitlock of the Media Research Center, “In less than 24 hours, the three networks have devoted 17 times more coverage to a traffic scandal involving Chris Christie than they’ve allowed in the last six months to Barack Obama’s Internal Revenue Service controversy.”

Why? Oh, come on, you know why. Christie belongs to one political party. Obama belongs to the other. You know which ones they belong to. And you know which ones the people at the three networks belong to, too: In surveys going back decades, anywhere from 80% to 90% of Washington’s journalists say they vote Democratic.

Scandals are not just about themselves; they are about the media atmosphere that surrounds them. …

Canada’s National Post reviews the Gates book. 

A newly published account of Barack Obama’s White House confirms the worst that outsiders have imagined: The Obama staff is over-politicized, over-confident and desperate to oversee every aspect of government. In questions of national security, it’s the most controlling administration since Richard Nixon’s in the 1970s.

This portrait emerges from Robert Gates’ book, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, published this week. Till now, we have been given only a few private glimpses of the Obama team, such as the famous “home alone” anecdote in Ron Suskind’s 2011 book, Confidence Men. He reported that in Obama’s first year, the chairman of the National Economic Council warned a colleague: “We’re really home alone. There’s no adult in charge.”

But that was second hand. The Gates book is an eyewitness account, and a rare one: Unlike most cabinet memoirs, it describes a president while he’s still in office. Gates was secretary of defence for two years with George Bush and stayed for two more with Obama. Earlier, he had served in the CIA for two decades and directed it under George H. W. Bush. According to a Washington Post book reviewer, Gates is considered the best of the 22 defence secretaries since the Second World War. …

Michael Goodwin says the Gates book just confirms what we already knew. The president is a fool. 

With media attention focused on Chris Christie and Bridgegate, it was easy to miss a more important Washington story last week. The other shoe dropped on the Obama presidency.

Still battered at home by the ObamaCare debacle and the permanently sluggish economy, the last thing the White House wanted was bad news on foreign policy. But that’s exactly what it got, and then some, thanks to the shockingly scathing book by Robert Gates.

The former defense secretary offers the most devastating critique to come from an Obama insider. He paints the president as estranged from the very Afghan military surge he ordered and suspicious of and hostile toward top leaders of the armed forces.

Gates is especially critical of Vice President Joe Biden, writing that he has been “wrong on nearly every major foreign-policy and national-security issue over the past four decades.”

He blames Biden and others for leading Obama to believe that military leaders were giving the president “the bum’s rush” in seeking more troops in Afghanistan in 2009, according to excerpts. …

Thinking about Valerie Jarrett’s government requires some off-setting humor. Here’s late night from Andrew Malcolm.

Leno: President Obama’s approval is the lowest of any president after five years since Richard Nixon. Jimmy Carter says that’s unfair. If he had a fifth year, he’s sure he’’d have won.

Leno: Over the weekend Obama’s healthcare website was down again. Fortunately, no Americans were affected. Because they never knew it was up.

Leno: President Obama names an ex-Microsoft executive to fix the awful ObamaCare website. How about fixing Windows first? Can you start there please?

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Craig Pirrong posts on Bob Gates’ revelations.

… And it’s not just Afghanistan.  As I posted a few days ago, riffing off a WSJ article, this was Obama’s MO in Syria.  He didn’t want to take decisive action, but he didn’t want to make it look like he was abandoning the opposition.  So he took half-measures to support the rebels, and ostentatiously drew a red line–until Assad called his bluff, and left Obama scrambling for a face saving exit, which Putin oh-so-graciously provided.

This is beyond dispiriting.  The office of president carries with it awesome burdens and responsibilities.  Obama shirked those burdens, attempting to avoid politically unpalatable choices by deciding not to decide, or taking middle paths that were doomed to failure.  And doomed to cost thousands of American lives for no purpose in Afghanistan, not to speak of many more thousands of Afghan lives.  And doomed to cost tens-of-thousands of lives in Syria, not to mention the imponderable costs associated with making the United States appear hopeless and feckless in a region where such appearances encourage the wolves. (Not to mention the effect this has on, say, China.)

Obama has not taken his awesome responsibilities seriously, treating them instead as ancillary to his domestic political concerns.  Tens of thousands are paying the price in Southwest Asia.  Who knows what price is to be paid in the future.

Gates has only had the temerity to call attention at this very late date to what was obvious to those that had been paying attention, but which the political class had collectively decided to avert its eyes from. …

More from Ed Morrissey at Hot Air.

When the first excerpts of former Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ new memoir My Duty emerged before its January 14 release date, they seemed calculated to do maximum damage to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.  Without a doubt, the quotes released had significant sensational value — accusing Obama of sending more troops to a war he didn’t think he could win, and Clinton of admitting that nothing nore than baldfaced politics lie in her opposition to the 2007 surge that salvaged — for a time, anyway — western Iraq. Those quotes did get people talking, but will the damage last, or does this just confirm long-embraced narratives?

In my column for The Fiscal Times, I predict that nothing much will come of these releases, especially the context in which Gates frames them in the book:

The decision in December 2009 to increase force strength by adding 30,000 combat troops to the theater followed from Obama’s campaign pledge to put the “distraction” of Iraq behind the US and focus on the legitimate front of the war on terror. However, in private discussions, Gates writes that Obama was “skeptical if not outright convinced it would fail,” even while ordering the troops into combat.

Needless to say, this feeds into a lot of pre-existing opinions of President Obama. Conservatives, especially those in favor of a robust forward military strategy, never believed that Obama was in it for victory. In fact, many pointed out at the time that the President never once included the word “victory” in his speech announcing the escalation. …

Roger Simon reacts to the latest jobs report.

Tell all your “Objectivist” friends and the libertarian gang at Reason magazine to break out the champagne. Americans may have skipped the movie of Atlas Shrugged, nor have many read any of Ayn Rand’s works, but they have taken the author’s advice anyway and gone John Galt, quitting the work force in record numbers.  According to Zero Hedge, the latest figures show the labor participation rate at 35 year low.

Realistically, it’s even more than 35 because that figure reflects an employment bump when larger numbers of women joined the work force in the seventies and eighties.  (They’re gone now, with or without Gloria Steinem.)

Currently a record 91.8 million Americans are no longer looking for work. That’s almost one and a half times the entire population of France.

Although I admit to libertarian tendencies, I don’t think any of us can celebrate because of this.  It’s an economic disaster that should be blowing even Chris Christie off the front pages. …

P. J. O’Rourke has a suggestion for curing Detroit’s ills – turn it into Hong Kong. 

Detroit is beautiful—though you probably have to be a child of the industrial Midwest, like me, to see it. As you may have heard, the city is in trouble. At the end of the 2013 fiscal year, Detroit had a balance sheet with liabilities of $9.05 billion. The city’s emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, estimates long-term debt at $18 billion.

But I know how to fix Detroit, because it reminds me of another favorite place, Hong Kong—two things so opposite that they evoke each other the way any Kardashian is a reminder that you love home and mother.

Hong Kong’s per capita GDP is among the highest in the world. But it was once a worse mess than Detroit. Devastated by Japanese occupation, the British colony’s population had declined from 1.6 million in 1941 to 600,000 by 1945. Then, after the 1949 communist victory on the mainland, a million refugees arrived. Most of them were penniless. Britain’s Labor government was penniless, too. Maybe Hong Kong could have gone into Chapter 9. But who would have been the bankruptcy judge? Chairman Mao?

Instead Hong Kong had the good fortune to get John (later Sir John) Cowperthwaite, a young official sent out to push the colony’s economy toward recovery. “I did very little,” he once said. “All I did was to try to prevent some of the things that might undo it.”

Such as taxes. Even now, Hong Kong has no sales tax; no VAT; no taxes on capital gains, interest income or earnings outside Hong Kong; no import or export duties; and a top personal income-tax rate of 15%.

Cowperthwaite was financial secretary from 1961 to 1971, Hong Kong’s period of fastest economic growth. Sir John, however, wouldn’t allow collection of economic statistics for fear they’d lead to political meddling. Some statistics nonetheless: During Cowperthwaite’s tenure, Hong Kong’s exports grew by an average of 13.8% a year, industrial wages doubled and the number of households in extreme poverty shrank from half to 16% …

According to a blog called Quartz, there are some who have to curtail or shift shopping at the dollar stores because of weakness in our economy.

… Economists argue that things like food stamps and unemployment act as crucial bits of stimulus when the economy is weak. Cutting them can act as a headwind to growth. That’s certainly the case for low-end retailers such as Family Dollar. The store chain’s shares fell sharply this week after it reported disappointing earnings.

Family Dollar CEO Howard Levine had this to say on the subject:

For the last several quarters, we’ve discussed the economic challenges our customers are facing. Over the last two years, I think we’ve seen a growing bifurcation in households. Higher-income households who have benefited from market gains, better employment opportunities, or improvements in the housing markets have become more comfortable and confident in their financial situation. But our core lower-income customers have faced high unemployment levels, higher payroll taxes, and more recently reductions in government-assistance programs. All of these factors have resulted in incremental financial pressure and reduction in overall spend in the market.

Translation? As poor Americans come under more and more pressure, more and more of Family Dollar’s revenue is tied to low-margin sales of necessities like food. (Sales were strongest during the first fiscal quarter in Family Dollar’s “consumables” category, especially in areas like frozen food.)

The fact that so many Americans are being forced to curtail spending at the cheapest discount retailers should give anybody cheering the US recovery something to think about.

Megan McArdle with a great post on the real issues for small business owners.

Health insurance just isn’t high on the list of small-business owners’ worries.

Warren Meyer, whose company operates campgrounds, is getting the hell out of Dodge, by which I mean Ventura County, California:

“Never have I operated in a more difficult environment. VenturaCounty combines a difficult government environment with a difficult employee base with a difficult customer base.

It took years in VenturaCounty to make even the simplest modifications to the campground we ran. For example, it took 7 separate permits from the County (each requiring a substantial payment) just to remove a wooden deck that the County inspector had condemned. In order to allow us to temporarily park a small concession trailer in the parking lot, we had to (among other steps) take a soil sample of the dirt under the asphalt of the parking lot. It took 3 years to permit a simply 500 gallon fuel tank with CARB and the County equivalent. The entire campground desperately needed a major renovation but the smallest change would have triggered millions of dollars of new facility requirements from the County that we simply could not afford.

In most states we pay a percent or two of wages for unemployment insurance. In California we pay almost 7%. Our summer seasonal employees often take the winter off, working only in the summer, but claim unemployment insurance anyway. They are supposed to be looking for work, but they seldom are and California refuses to police the matter. Several couples spend the whole winter in Mexico, collecting unemployment all the while. So I have to pay a fortune to support these folks’ winter vacations.” …

… We tend to talk of entrepreneurship and business growth as if it were a matter of tweaking a few simple policy buttons: lowering taxes, making health insurance cheaper, hamstringing the EPA. Unsurprisingly, these issues map well onto big national policy battles. And yet, when I talk to small-business owners, I’m more likely to get an earful about their state’s workers’ compensation scheme or the local utility’s pricing schedule than I am about the federal tax rate. Yet almost none of the policy journalists I know could even describe in detail how workers’ compensation insurance works, much less articulate a coherent policy agenda for it.

Then there are the sort of soft institutional issues that Meyer highlights, such as whether the local legal system encourages frivolous lawsuits, or some arcane regulatory issue that’s specific to businesses. These things matter a lot, but they’re hard to measure and even harder to fix.

There are a few lessons in this: If you want to encourage entrepreneurship, talk to business owners, not policy wonks. And you often need to think local, not global.

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Peter Schiff says the party will be over soon.

… Based on nothing but pure optimism, the market believes that the Fed can somehow contract its $4 trillion balance sheet without pushing up rates to the point where asset prices are threatened, or where debt service costs become too big a burden for debtors to bear. Such faith would have been impossible to achieve in the time before the crash, when most assumed that the laws of supply and demand functioned in the market for mortgage and government debt. Now we “know” that the demand is endless. This mistakes temporary geo-political paralysis and financial sleepwalking for a fundamental suspension of reality.

The more likely truth is that this widespread mistake will allow us to drift into the next crisis. Now that the European Union has survived its monetary challenge, (the surging euro was one of the surprise stories of 2013), and the developing Asian economies have no immediate plans to stop their currencies from rising against the dollar, there is little reason to expect that the dollar will rally in the coming years. In fact, there has been little notice taken of the 5% decline in the dollar index since a high in July. Similarly, few have sounded alarm bells about the surge in yields of Treasury debt, with 10-year rates flirting with 3% for the first time in two years.

If interest rates rise much further, to perhaps 4% or 5%, the stock and real estate markets will be placed under pressure, and the Fed and the other “Too Big to Fail” banks will see considerable losses on their portfolios of Treasury and mortgage-backed bonds. Such developments could trigger widespread economic turmoil, forcing the Fed to expand its QE purchases. Such an embarrassing reversal would add to selling pressure on the dollar, and might potentially trigger an exodus of foreign investment and an increase in import prices. I believe that nothing can prevent these trends from continuing to the point where a crisis will be reached. It’s extremely difficult to construct a logical argument that avoids this outcome, but that hasn’t stopped our best and brightest forecasters from doing just that.

So while the hallelujah chorus is ringing in the New Year with a full-throated crescendo, don’t be surprised by sour notes that will bubble to the top with increasing frequency. Ultimately the power of monetary policy to engineer a real economy will be proven to be just as ridiculous as the claims that housing prices must always go up.

Peter Schiff was notable for predicting the 2008 collapse. He did that in 2006 and 2007. Here’s a video of him getting ridiculed by all the bien pensants in the financial media.

Roger Simon posts on Dem losers. 

It shouldn’t be that much of an embarrassment to lose a U.S. presidential election.  After all, you made it to the top of the ticket in one of the two major parties in the most powerful country on Earth (at least for now).

Yet, if you judge by the post-defeat activities of Al Gore and John Kerry, you would think their losses were a personal disaster of untold proportions that had to be made  up for in some monumental manner that would cement their (positive) reputations into posterity.  Call it Extreme Narcissism Deficit Disorder (ENDD).  And the closer the election, the more severe the symptoms.

These days, both men’s compulsive need to make their mark against all odds are highly on display — and very much to all of our detriments.

The more ludicrous example — when the wind chill factor is approaching record lows of minus fifty and a group of  so-called climate scientists have been stuck in Antarctic ice for weeks with much of the MSM trying desperately to hide that they were there to investigate global warming in the first place –  is Mr. Gore’s determination to insist that anthropogenic global warming is settled science, that the world must stop everything it’s doing and devote its scant economic resources to preventing this looming catastrophe (not to mention filling Mr. Gore’s bank account).  Only an imbecile, a corrupt UN diplomat, a New York Times or Guardian reporter, or a scientist on the dole could believe that.

Scratch that.  A number of members of Congress plus our president seem to sort of believe it too. …

… The bigger problem is the other presidential loser who, also at this moment in time, is wielding a much greater influence in the world, thanks to our president — John Kerry.  The nonsensical and actually inscrutable Obama foreign policy from  Clinton through Kerry has taken our country — and the world — from bad to worse.  But an announcement from Mr. Kerry today trumped all.

Today our secretary of State informed us that one of the countries at the table at the Syria peace talks this month might be… Iran. …

Bret Stephens with a history lesson about Frank Kellogg U. S. Secretary of State who abolished war in 1928 when 62 countries signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Similar foolishness abounds today in John Kerry’s wake. 

An American secretary of state was once awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for outlawing war. In describing how 62 countries came to sign (and 85 U.S. senators to ratify) the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, the Scottish historian D.W. Brogan observed: “The United States, which had abolished the evils of drink by the Eighteenth Amendment, invited the world to abolish war by taking the pledge. The world, not quite daring to believe or doubt, obeyed.”

John Kerry hasn’t yet captured Frank B. Kellogg’s crown. But he’s trying.

Mr. Kerry announced last week that he’d like to see Iran participate “from the sidelines” in the talks, scheduled to begin in Geneva later this month, to end the Syrian civil war. He’s working overtime on a “framework” agreement for Israeli-Palestinian peace. And then there’s the nuclear deal to finalize with Iran.

Geneva II, as the Syrian talks are known in diplospeak, is based on a June 2012 international communiqué calling on the Syrian government and the opposition to come together and form a “transitional” government. When the communiqué was issued, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton insisted that its terms barred Bashar Assad from remaining in power, while Sergei Lavrov, her Russian counterpart, insisted the contrary.

Otherwise, solid agreement.

Eighteen months, multiple chemical attacks, a spiraling regional crisis, tens of thousands dead and two million refugees later, we come to Geneva II. …

Walter Russell Mead says the higher ed bubble will burst soon too.

Megan McArdle has an excellent essay up at Bloomberg about the sorry state of the job market for PhDs that’s very much worth your time. The crux of her argument:

“The fundamental issue in the academic job market is not that administrators are cheap and greedy, or that adjuncts lack a union. It’s that there are many more people who want to be research professors than there are jobs for them. And since all those people have invested the better part of a decade in earning their job qualifications, they will hang around on the edges of academia rather than trying to start over. Such a gigantic glut of labor is bound to push down wages and working conditions.”

The business model for PhDs is functionally off. Graduate schools are minting far more PhDs than the market can absorb.

The problem as we see it is that the post-World War 2 university system was built on the assumption of an ever expanding population of students needing more and more higher ed. Therefore there was a need for each generation to produce more professors than the last. (This is not all that dissimilar, by the way, to the way many pension systems and social programs like Medicaid were built on the assumption that a bigger generation would roll around to pay the bills for the current enrollees.)

The situation is just as bad for bachelor degrees. WSJ OpEd with the story.

… A college degree’s declining value is even more pronounced for younger Americans. According to data collected by the College Board, for those in the 25-34 age range the differential between college graduate and high school graduate earnings fell 11% for men, to $18,303 from $20,623. The decline for women was an extraordinary 19.7%, to $14,868 from $18,525.

Meanwhile, the cost of college has increased 16.5% in 2012 dollars since 2006, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ higher education tuition-fee index. Aggressive tuition discounting from universities has mitigated the hike, but not enough to offset the clear inflation-adjusted increase. Even worse, the lousy economy has caused household income levels to fall, limiting a family’s ability to finance a degree.

This phenomenon leads to underemployment. A study I conducted with my colleague Jonathan Robe, the 2013 Center for College Affordability and Productivity report, found explosive growth in the number of college graduates taking relatively unskilled jobs. We now have more college graduates working in retail than soldiers in the U.S. Army, and more janitors with bachelor’s degrees than chemists. In 1970, less than 1% of taxi drivers had college degrees. Four decades later, more than 15% do.

This is only partly the result of the Great Recession and botched public policies that have failed to produce employment growth. It’s also the result of an academic arms race in which universities have spent exorbitant sums on luxury dormitories, climbing walls, athletic subsidies and bureaucratic bloat. More significantly, it’s the result of sending more high-school graduates to college than professional fields can accommodate.

In 1970, when 11% of adult Americans had bachelor’s degrees or more, degree holders were viewed as the nation’s best and brightest. Today, with over 30% with degrees, a significant portion of college graduates are similar to the average American—not demonstrably smarter or more disciplined. Declining academic standards and grade inflation add to employers’ perceptions that college degrees say little about job readiness. …

Good day of Cartoons.

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Here’s Don Imus as he opened his show this morning,

“And now Bob Gates, former secretary of defense, has a book that would give you an erection. He drops a safe on the president. … This guy is the worst president, I can’t even think of a worse president.”  The new Gates book will be in the news so we have a little bit today and then more starting next week. Paul Mirengoff of Power Line says this just confirms what we all thought about cynical Dem politicians.

… (Bob) Woodward describes Gates’ report as one of the more serious charges that a defense secretary could make against a commander in chief sending forces into combat. That’s an understatement. Expending American blood on behalf of a strategy one has devised but doesn’t believe in is despicable, if not criminal.

John Kerry came to prominence as a young soldier demanding to know who would be the last to die for a mistake. But at least in Vietnam, the president was in the process of withdrawing from the war — one which had been ramped up under his predecessor. In 2010, by which time Gates says Obama did not believe in the ramp-up strategy he had formulated, the U.S. was forging ahead with that strategy. Phased withdrawal did not begin until mid-2011.

Gates reveals other similarly despicable behavior by both Obama and Hillary Clinton. He writes:

“Hillary told [Obama] that her opposition to the [2007] surge in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary. . . . The president conceded vaguely that opposition to the Iraq surge had been political.”

Gates was surprised when he heard this conversation. But the only surprising thing is that Obama and Clinton had it with Gates present. Modern Democrats consistently make decisions about war and peace based on political calculation, rather than on what’s best for America. …

More from Steve Hayward.

So the first of what has become a pastime of recent two-term presidencies is out today: a critical memoir from a senior cabinet official.  Former defense secretary Bob Gates has a memoir coming out that looks to be very hard on Obama, but perhaps even harder on Obama’s would-be successors Joe Biden and Hillary.

Of Slow-Joe Biden, Gates writes that “I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades,” and that he nearly resigned in 2009 over Obama’s dithering over Afghanistan.

As usual, Bob Woodward seems to have the inside track on Gates’s forthcoming book, noting that the book “reflects outright contempt for Vice President Joe Biden and many of Obama’s top aides.” …

Last on this subject for now from Seth Mandel.

… Today both the Washington Post and New York Times published revelations from former Secretary of Defense Bob Gates’s forthcoming memoir. The Post’s account, written by Bob Woodward, notes that Clinton apparently admitted to President Obama that her opposition to the “surge” was pure politics, since Obama was opposed to the surge and they were in competition at the time. Picking up from that, Woodward’s Post colleague Chris Cillizza speculates on how the excerpt could harm Clinton’s prospects:

But, remember this is Hillary Clinton we are talking about.  And, the criticism that has always haunted her is that everything she does is infused with politics — that there is no core set of beliefs within her but rather just political calculation massed upon political calculation. Remember that she began slipping in the 2008 Democratic primary when her opponents seized on an overly political answer on giving drivers’ licenses to illegal immigrants during a debate in  late 2o07.

Gates’s version of why Clinton opposed the surge fits perfectly into this existing good-politics-makes-good-policy narrative about the former secretary of state. And that’s what makes it dangerous for her —  and why you can be sure she (or her people) will (and must) dispute Gates’s recollection quickly and definitively.

Whether it hurts Clinton might depend largely on who runs against her in the Democratic primary. But he’s right that the reputation of both Clintons has always been not to say a single word that hasn’t been focus-grouped into the ground. If Clinton was hoping her time as secretary of state would temper that reputation, the Gates memoir is yet another example of how difficult it can be for a politician to shake an entrenched narrative, especially one, like this, that is accurate.

The Post story isn’t kind to Biden either. (It’s brutal toward the Obama White House in general, but Obama has no more presidential elections ahead of him.) …

Larry Sabato launched his column at Politico with the teasing thought the GOP could win both houses next November.

Another midterm election beckons, and over the next 10 months we’ll see headlines about a thousand supposedly critical developments—the “game changers” and the “tipping points.” But we all know there aren’t a thousand powerful drivers of the vote. I’d argue that three factors are paramount: the president, the economy and the election playing field. And, at least preliminarily, those three factors seem to be pointing toward Republican gains in both houses in the 2014 midterms. …

… But Obama’s popularity has sagged badly in his fifth year. While some unforeseen event in 2014 might add some points to his job approval average, the odds are against a full restoration; it’s just as likely Obama’s polling average, currently in the low 40s, will decline further—though Obama may have a relatively high floor because of consistent backing from minority voters and other elements of the Democratic base.

As 2014 begins, the environment for the Democrats in this election year is not good. The botched, chaotic rollout of the Affordable Care Act is the obvious cause, but it is broader than that: the typical sixth-year unease that produces a “send-them-a-message” election. Fortunately for Democrats, the GOP-initiated shutdown of the federal government in October has tempered the public’s desire for a shift to the Republican side, too. “None of the above” might win a few races in November if voters had the choice. …

Walter Russell Mead posts on the 10 biggest winners of 2013. One thing the winners have in common is they are arrayed against president bystander. Meaning they have little competition.

Looking back at 2013, some actors on the international scene, both state and non-state, notched up significant achievements and advances. Others didn’t do as well. In developing our list of the world’s biggest winners and losers in 2013, AI didn’t make moral judgments. This is a realist calculation, looking at who gained power during the year and who lost.

1. President Vladimir Putin and Russia

The champagne corks were popping in the Kremlin after a banner 2013. With Edward Snowden ensconced in Moscow, Putin can celebrate Russia’s biggest embarrassment of the United States since the fall of the Soviet Union. But that’s only the beginning. Russia’s client Assad defied bloodcurdling White House threats of bombing raids and demands that “Assad must go” in Russia’s biggest geopolitical victory over the United States since Brezhnev was in power. As icing on the cake, a desperate, fumbling White House had to accept a Russian proposal to escape from the trap President Obama built for himself. Russian foreign policy makers hadn’t had this much fun since the Bay of Pigs. Finally, to complete the Kremlin’s annus mirabilus, a clueless European Union lost out to Russia in a battle to bring Ukraine into a trade association with the rich western bloc. What makes this string of impressive victories even more impressive is that President Putin is playing with a weak hand. His economy is in trouble, his army is rife with corruption, his population is in decline, and his country faces a growing Chinese superpower to the east and a growing threat from terrorists in the south. Underfunded, underequipped, and underrespected, Vladimir Putin danced rings around Barack Obama, John Kerry and Angela Merkel this year.  Western stupidity is his chief strategic asset, and in 2013 at least, there was a lot of that going around.

2. Iran

Close behind Vladimir Putin as the biggest winner of 2013 comes the Islamic Republic of Iran. …

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Tim Carney says de Blasio’s attack on the “rich” will miss them and fall instead on the middle class. 

As New York City’s crusading liberal Mayor Bill de Blasio takes up his pitch fork, don’t worry too much about the wealthy bankers he plans to tax — they can fend for themselves. The potential victims of de Blasio’s “march toward a fairer, more just, more progressive place” are the small businesses and voluntary associations that make up civil society.

Charter schools, crisis pregnancy centers, small businesses and private charities are all in de Blasio’s crosshairs. These are government’s rivals in the business of getting people what they want and need — and a growing government doesn’t tolerate rivals.

Charter schools have long irked the teachers’ unions and many others on the Left. They are publicly funded schools, but they are run by private bodies. This decentralizes power, weakens the unions and applies competitive pressure to public schools.

But charter schools’ worst offense may be offering a different educational experience. The Left puts a huge emphasis on solidarity, which is a virtue. But sometimes “solidarity” can mutate into uniformity. If some New York City kids are at a stellar charter school while others are at mediocre public schools, then we have, to use de Blasio’s favorite phrase, “two cities.” This is intolerable to many activists and journalists on the Left, some of whom pen out op-eds declaring it a sin to send your kids to private school. …

John Hinderaker picks up a Cato post about the 1987 NY Times arguments against the minimum wage. That’s right, the paper that is now a reliable organ of the Dem party used to have some independent thoughts.

… The Times editorialists failure to mention that until very recently, they themselves (or their predecessors on the editorial board) agreed that the minimum wage hurts employment–the “party line theory” that is now “discredited.” David Boaz of the Cato Institute recounts the Times’s history on the issue:

The New York Times gets the prize for its stark decline in economic understanding. …

[F]or decades the Times’s editors knew better. Sure, Henry Hazlitt wrote some of their editorials back in the 1930s. But that doesn’t explain the paper’s continuing criticisms of the minimum wage into the 1990s. Bruce Bartlett reported some of the history in 2004:

When I first began clipping Times editorials on the minimum wage back in the 1970s, they were unambiguous in their condemnation of it as misdirected, inefficient, and having negative consequences for most of those it was supposed to help. For example, an August 17, 1977, editorial stated, “The basic effect of an increase in the minimum wage … would be to intensify the cruel competition among the poor for scarce jobs.” For this reason, it said, “Minimum wage legislation has no place in a strategy to eliminate poverty.”

In the 1980s, the Times became even more aggressive in its denunciations of the minimum wage. Rather than simply argue against increases, it actively campaigned for abolition of the minimum wage altogether. Indeed, a remarkable editorial on January 14, 1987, was entitled, “The Right Minimum Wage: $0.00.”

Everything in that editorial is still true today. “There’s a virtual consensus among economists that the minimum wage is an idea whose time has passed,” it said. “Raise the legal minimum price of labor above the productivity of the least skilled workers and few will be hired,” it correctly observed. In conclusion, “The idea of using a minimum wage to overcome poverty is old, honorable — and fundamentally flawed. It’s time to put this hoary debate behind us, and find a better way to improve the lives of people who work very hard for very little.”

Even in the 1990s, the Times remained skeptical about the value of raising the minimum wage. An April 5, 1996, editorial conceded that a proposed 90 cent increase in the minimum wage would wipe out 100,000 jobs. It said that Republican critics of the minimum wage as a “crude” antipoverty tool were right.

One would think that the Times owes its readers an explanation of why it has done a 180-degree turn on this issue, but none has ever been offered. …

Even the president used to know the truth of the Times’ position. Now he is a fulltime demagogue. Or perhaps back then Valerie Jarrett didn’t have full control. Byron York has the story.

In coming weeks President Obama and Hill Democrats will launch a new campaign to raise the minimum wage. Working with labor unions and activist groups, Democrats hope to increase the federal minimum wage from its current $7.25 to $10.10. “It’s well past the time to raise a minimum wage that in real terms right now is below where it was when Harry Truman was in office,” the president declared in his Dec. 4 speech on inequality.

Republicans will argue that raising the minimum wage will hurt the economy, as employers, especially small businesses, hire fewer low-wage workers. It’s an argument Obama expects to hear a lot. “Now, we all know the arguments that have been used against a higher minimum wage,” he said December 4. “Some say it actually hurts low-wage workers — businesses will be less likely to hire them. But there’s no solid evidence that a higher minimum wage costs jobs, and research shows it raises incomes for low-wage workers and boosts short-term economic growth.”

Perhaps the key word in that passage is “solid” — the president seems to acknowledge that there is evidence a higher minimum wage costs jobs, but he doesn’t find it “solid.” A few years ago, though, in his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope, Obama seemed much more open to the evidence that raising the minimum wage results in less hiring.

“It may be true — as some economists argue — that any big jumps in the minimum wage discourage employers from hiring more workers,” then-Sen. Obama wrote. Nevertheless, Obama still wanted to do it, so he laid out his best case: “When the minimum wage hasn’t been changed in nine years and has less purchasing power in real dollars than it did in 1955, so that someone working full-time today in a minimum-wage job doesn’t earn enough to rise out of poverty, such arguments carry less force,” Obama added.

Little of Obama’s 2006 case applies today. …

John Hinderaker also posts on the lies constructed by Rachel Maddow.

MSNBC has had a hard time lately. The network fired Martin Bashir and Alec Baldwin for craziness, on-air and off-air respectively. Melissa Harris-Perry was forced to apologize, first on Twitter and then, tearfully, on the air, for making political hay out of Mitt Romney’s adopted grandson. The network put Ed Schulz out to pasture, and most people wrote Chris Matthews off as a hysteric long ago, so that pretty much leaves Rachel Maddow–amazingly enough–as MSNBC’s supposed voice of sanity. Eliana Johnson has reported on Maddow’s status as the “queen” of MSNBC, who wields more control than anyone else over the network’s often-crazed content.

But is Maddow any better than the rest? A recent incident suggests that if anything, she is worse.

Last Thursday, 45 minutes before Maddow’s show began, her producer sent this email to representatives of Koch Industries, with which MSNBC has long been obsessed. …

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Deroy Murdock says the blog posts of the leader of the expedition trapped in sea ice give proof the trip was supposed to highlight the lack of sea ice.

Chinese choppers on Thursday evacuated 52 passengers who had been marooned near the South Pole since Christmas Eve aboard the Russian science vessel MS Akademik Shokalsky. It will take far more than helicopters, however, to salvage the theory of so-called “global warming.” It remains trapped in Antarctic ice.

“We’re stuck in our own experiment,” said Chris Turney, a professor of climate change at Australia’s University of New South Wales. The voyage’s leader was no mere guide, and his fellow travelers were not just tourists. While news accounts portrayed these people as star-crossed adventurers, the frustrated Australasian Antarctic Expedition (AAE) was supposed to “discover and communicate the environmental changes taking place in the south,” Turney explained.

“There is an increasing body of evidence, including by the AAE members, that have identified parts of the East Antarctic which are highly susceptible to melting and collapse from ocean warming,” AAE’s website stated. “We are going south to . . . determine the extent to which human activity and pollution has [sic] directly impacted on this remote region of Antarctica.” …

Newsbusters posts on the media’s lack of interest in the fact the ship was on a “global warming” mission.

A group of climate change scientists were rescued by helicopter Jan. 2, after being stranded in the ice since Christmas morning. But the majority of the broadcast networks’ reports about the ice-locked climate researchers never mentioned climate change.

The Russian ship, Akademic Shokalskiy, was stranded in the ice while on a climate change research expedition, yet nearly 98 percent of network news reports about the stranded researchers failed to mention their mission at all. Forty out of 41 stories (97.5 percent) on the network morning and evening news shows since Dec. 25 failed to mention climate change had anything to do with the expedition.

In fact, rather than point out the mission was to find evidence of climate change, the networks often referred to the stranded people as “passengers,” “trackers” and even “tourists,” without a word about climate change or global warming.

Chris Turney, the expedition’s leader, is a professor of climate change at the University of New South Wales. According to Turney’s personal website, the purpose of the expedition is to “discover and communicate the environmental changes taking place in the south.” …

The NY Times is involved in a project to help Hillary clear away the Benghazi problem. Andrew McCarthy starts off a look at the controversy.

What was the commander-in-chief of the United States armed forces doing through the night of September 11, 2012, while he knew Americans were under jihadist siege in Libya? You won’t learn the answer to that question by reading the mini-book-length, six-“chapter” revisionist history of the Benghazi massacre cooked up by David D. Kirkpatrick and the New York Times.

The Times report is a labor of love in the service of President Obama and, in particular, the Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign ramp-up. Former secretary of state Clinton, of course, was a key architect of Obama’s Libya policy. She was also chiefly responsible for the protection of American personnel in that country, including our murdered ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens, and the three other Americans killed by Muslim terrorists — State Department technician Sean Smith and a pair of former Navy SEALs, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods. Still, the Times is banking on your not noticing that in its laborious 7,500 words, Kirkpatrick’s account utters the word “Clinton” exactly . . . wait for it . . . zero times.

The word “Obama” comes in for a mere six mentions, four of which are impersonal references to the current administration. The other two are telling, though fleeting.

One is a rehearsal of the president’s vow to exact “justice” against anyone found responsible for this “terrible act” of killing four Americans, including the formal representative of our nation. As it happens, the only person on the planet to have felt the lash of Obama’s justice is Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the California-based “producer” who filmed the infamous “anti-Mohammed” movie trailer, Innocence of Muslims. In a despicable violation of constitutional free-speech principles, and a bow to sharia blasphemy rules that forbid criticism of Islam, Obama and Clinton publicly portrayed Nakoula and his “film” as the Benghazi culprits — implicitly accepting the Islamic-supremacist premise that verbal insults, no matter how obscure and trifling, justify mass-murder attacks.

In large part, the Times’ autopsy is a futile attempt to breathe new life into this demeaning farce. …

Stephen Hayes of Fox and the Weekly Standard with an exhaustive look.

Let’s start by giving David Kirkpatrick credit. Kirkpatrick, the Cairo bureau chief of the New York Times and author of this weekend’s much-discussed piece on Benghazi, provides many new on-the-ground, minute-by-minute details of the attacks and the weeks and months leading up to them. Some of the reporting is incredible. Kirkpatrick describes the vase in the living room of the home belonging to the mother of Abu Khattala, a main suspect in those attacks. He reports on how the fighting in the consulate paused when Abu Khattala entered the compound, a revealing fact. Citing security camera video footage, the author describes how one of the attackers paused amidst the bedlam in the consulate to pour some Hershey’s chocolate syrup down his throat. Kirkpatrick obviously spent considerable time on the ground in Benghazi and interviewed several anti-Western Islamists, including some involved in the attacks. There’s little doubt he took considerable risks as he reported his piece.

While much of Kirkpatrick’s reporting is admirable and while these details add to our knowledge of certain aspects of the attack, they do not tell the whole story. And that’s where the piece ultimately fails. 

The piece makes two main claims that challenge much of the previous reporting about Benghazi: 1) The Times asserts that there is “no evidence that al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault;” and, 2) that the attack “was fueled in large part by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam.”

We’ll focus on the first one.

There is, in fact, evidence that terrorists linked to al Qaeda had a role in the Benghazi attacks. Indeed, there’s a fair amount of that kind of evidence. As Representative Adam Schiff, a California Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence put it on Sunday when asked about the Times report: “The intelligence indicates that al Qaeda was involved, …

Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post has a somewhat different take on the Times’ efforts on behalf of Hillary and Barry.

The New York Times just delivered a mortal blow to the Obama administration and its Middle East policy.

Call it fratricide. It was clearly unintentional.

Indeed, is far from clear that the paper realizes what it has done.

Last Saturday the Times published an 8,000-word account by David Kirkpatrick detailing the terrorist strike against the US Consulate and the CIA annex in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012. In it, Kirkpatrick tore to shreds the foundations of President Barack Obama’s counterterrorism strategy and his overall policy in the Middle East.

Obama first enunciated those foundations in his June 4, 2009, speech to the Muslim world at Cairo University. Ever since, they have been the rationale behind US counterterror strategy and US Middle East policy.

Obama’s first assertion is that radical Islam is not inherently hostile to the US. As a consequence, America can appease radical Islamists. Moreover, once radical Muslims are appeased, they will become US allies, (replacing the allies the US abandons to appease the radical Muslims).

Obama’s second strategic guidepost is his claim that the only Islamic group that is a bona fide terrorist organization is the faction of al-Qaida directly subordinate to Osama bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Only this group cannot be appeased and must be destroyed through force.

The administration has dubbed the Zawahiri faction of al-Qaida “core al-Qaida.” And anyone who operates in the name of al-Qaida, or any other group that does not have courtroom-certified operational links to Zawahiri, is not really al-Qaida, and therefore, not really a terrorist group or a US enemy.

These foundations have led the US to negotiate with the Taliban in Afghanistan. They are the rationale for the US’s embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood worldwide. They are the basis for Obama’s allegiance to Turkey’s Islamist government, and his early support for the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Syrian opposition.

They are the basis for the administration’s kneejerk support for the PLO against Israel.

Obama’s insistent bid to appease Iran, and so enable the mullocracy to complete its nuclear weapons program. is similarly a product of his strategic assumptions. So, too, the US’s current diplomatic engagement of Hezbollah in Lebanon owes to the administration’s conviction that any terror group not directly connected to Zawahiri is a potential US ally. …

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Roger Simon posts on the ludicrous de Blasio inauguration. 

Back when I was a kid, I used to think Republicans were the party of the rich — white guys who belonged to country clubs and drove Fleetwoods.  Of course, that was long before I heard of the likes of George Soros, Bill  Gates, Warren Buffet, Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison — white guys who fly Gulf Streams and have mansions in Gstaad.  (Well, Buffett lives a little more circumspectly.)  Or went to work in Hollywood, land of Jeff Katzenberg, David Geffen, Oprah Winfrey, etc. There’s rich and then there’s REALLY RICH, if you know what I mean.  And a fair number, maybe the majority, of the latter are Democrats and profess to be liberals or progressives or something.  (And there’s Fidel Castro, who is evidently a billionaire, and professes to be a communist.)

These days, when everybody’s insurance agent or accountant drives around in a Mercedes because interest rates are so low and why not, when it comes to true conspicuous consumption, when it comes to really being the true modern plutocrats, the Democrats are now the party of the rich — Sheldon Adelson excepted, of course.

So  when I watched the broadcast of the inauguration of New York City’s new mayor Bill de Blasio with all the talk of income equality and two New Yorks blablabla, all I could do is snort — that is after checking out the cut of the expensive topcoats on De Blasio and Bill Clinton. Good schmeck, I believe they used to call it  in the Garment District.

But whatever they called it, the entire event, including Harry Belafonte’s  comments straight out of the Third International, smacked or schmecked of high comedy. Income inequality — my fat fanny!  These guys (and girls) can’t be serious. …

Similar thoughts from Seth Mandel. 

While it’s tempting for politicians to interpret an election victory as a mandate that aligns with their personal priorities over those of the electorate, the disconnect is especially glaring in the case of Bill de Blasio. The new mayor of New York City was sworn in yesterday in a downright bizarre spectacle. During a procession of speeches, the New York City of 2013-14 was notably absent to make room for the New York City of the progressives’ fevered imaginations, completely at odds with how New Yorkers generally view their home.

A majority of black and Hispanic New Yorkers believe race relations in their city are “generally good.” Yet the chaplain who gave yesterday’s invocation claimed the city was a “plantation.” New York has seen a steady drop in the murder rate–to historic lows, in fact–for over a decade at the same time as its incarceration rate has plummeted. Yet de Blasio’s inauguration featured a speech by Harry Belafonte in which the crowd was treated to his false depiction of the city: “While it is encouraging to know that the statistics have indicated a recent drop in our city’s murder rate, New York alarmingly plays a tragic role in the fact that our nation has the largest prison population in the world.”

But demonstrably false progressive propaganda on race and crime are just the opening acts. The main event, of course, is income inequality. …

City Journal has more.

Ahistorical anger and slow-witted oafishness were front and center on the steps of City Hall New Year’s Day, as Mayor Bill de Blasio took his ceremonial oath of office. There was significant irony, too, even if it wasn’t quite so obvious.

Harry Belafonte’s bitterness; a black pastor’s fantastical ramblings on race relations; Public Advocate Letitia James’s embarrassing presentation of Dasani Coates, the 11-year-old homeless child from Brooklyn; the seething dismissal of Mike Bloomberg and his real accomplishments—they’re all part of the Inauguration Day record now, and there’s not much new to be said about them.

Except perhaps for this: if nothing else, New Yorkers got a glimpse of how leaders of the de Blasio coalition really think. By and large, they are new to the big tent; before de Blasio’s ascension, nobody cared what they thought about anything, and so it never occurred to them to hold their tongues. Certainly they didn’t Wednesday, and the new mayor’s implicit acceptance of the ugliness was sad and ominous. The speakers represent a large part of the de Blasio base, and his refusal to admonish them sent an unhappy message of its own: stand by for more. …

John Fund says even the NY Times had trouble stomaching the leftist blech.

Bill de Blasio’s inauguration as New York mayor is already in the history books as perhaps the rudest transfer of power for a major U.S. political office anyone can remember. A parade of speakers trashed outgoing mayor Michael Bloomberg and delivered doses of divisive racial rhetoric.

It was all too much for even the New York Times’ editorial board, which has swooned over all things de Blasio for months. In the Times’ editorial today it praised de Blasio for articulating an “ambitious, admirable agenda” at his inauguration. But it then laced into the speakers he allowed to share the podium with him for a series of “backward-looking speeches both graceless and smug.” It singled out Letitia James, the new public advocate, who “made a prop of a 12-year-old girl named Dasani, who had to hold the Bible and Ms. James’ hand as . . . Ms. James turned her into Exhibit A of an Inauguration Day prosecution: the People v. Mayor Bloomberg.”

The Times also zinged other speakers for “pointless and tacky haranguing,” especially radical activist Harry Belafonte for making the “utterly bogus claim” that New York’s prison population was growing and its justice system was “deeply Dickensian.” …

And a card carrying left media type, Peter Beinart says all this is making the Dems the party of John Edwards. It’s quite something when someone like Beinart is making fun of these folks.

In his inaugural address Wednesday, incoming New York Mayor Bill de Blasio tried to establish an intellectual pedigree for his focus on economic inequality. He invoked Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Franklin Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, Al Smith, Frances Perkins, Fiorello La Guardia, Jacob Riis, David Dinkins, Mario Cuomo, and Harry Belafonte. It reminded me of when Democrats, eager to prove their national-security bona fides, tell audiences they hail from the party of Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy. As if there wasn’t some other Democrat after Kennedy who dabbled at war and peace, some guy from Texas.

De Blasio’s speech was a bit like that. He left out the politician who more than any other kindled the Democrats’ renewed interest in economic inequality because that politician has been airbrushed from Democratic Party history. His name is John Edwards.

 

Edwards, of course, was not the first national politician to decry the gap between rich and poor. …

… Now, of course, in the wake of Occupy Wall Street, Elizabeth Warren, and Pope Francis, economic inequality has become motherhood and apple pie for Democrats. Obama will reportedly make it a centerpiece of his final years in office. Meanwhile, John Edwards, having endured more public disgrace than any recent American politician not named Anthony Weiner, has launched a small plaintiff’s law firm in Raleigh, North Carolina. He recently told The News & Observer that he hopes “to give regular people who have been treated unfairly a chance against really powerful opponents and well-funded opponents.” Some things never change.

Jennifer Rubin has 2014 predictions. 

There will be no final deal with Iran in six months.

Sen. Max Baucus’s early retirement will not secure his Montana Senate seat for Democrats.

Republicans will win a Senate seat in either New Hampshire, Iowa or Michigan.

Republican governors in Florida and Pennsylvania will lose reelection bids.

The president’s State of the Union address will be too long, partisan and boring, prompting calls to go back to submitting the SOTU in writing only. …

The cartoonists have fun with the globalony touring ship stuck in Antarctic ice. The US Coast Guard is sending the Polar Star to break the two ships out.

The Australian Maritime Safety Authority’s Rescue Coordination Centre (RCC Australia) has requested the US Coast Guard’s Polar Star icebreaker to assist the vessels MV Akademik Shokalskiy and Xue Long which are beset by ice in CommonwealthBay.

The US Coast Guard has accepted this request and will make Polar Star available to assist.

The Polar Star has been en route to Antarctica since 3 December, 2013 – weeks prior to the MV Akademik Shokalskiy being beset by ice in CommonwealthBay. The intended mission of the Polar Star is to clear a navigable shipping channel in McMurdo Sound to the National Science Foundation’s Scientific Research Station. Resupply ships use the channel to bring food, fuel and other goods to the station. The Polar Star will go on to undertake its mission once the search and rescue incident is resolved. …