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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sherman Frederick is tired of the whining.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

National Interest piece on the disrespect of our Constitution.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nat Hentoff does not think much of President Obama.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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