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Victor Davis Hanson says this president’s mendacity and constant failures, mean nothing to the bien pensants as long as he says the right things. 

Losing a job is freedom from job lock. A budget deficit larger than in any previous administration is austerity. A mean right-wing video caused the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi. Al-Qaeda was long ago washed up. The Muslim Brotherhood is secular. Jihad is a personal journey. Shooting people while screaming Allahu akbar! is workplace violence. Unaffordable higher premiums and deductibles are the result of an Affordable Care Act. Losing your doctor and your health-insurance plan prove you will never lose your doctor and your health-insurance plan — period! Being a constitutional lawyer means you know how to turn the IRS and the FCC on your enemies. Failure is success; lies are truth.

President Obama’s polls are creeping back up again. They do that every time the latest in the series of scandals — the IRS, AP, NSA, Benghazi, and Obamacare messes — recedes into the media memory hole. The once-outrageous IRS scandal was rebranded as psychodramatic journalists being outraged. The monitoring of AP reporters and of James Rosen is mostly “Stuff happens.” The NSA octopus was Bush’s creation. You can keep your doctor and your health plan — period — begat liberation from “job lock” and the ability to write poetry because you don’t have to work.

There will be more momentary outrages on the horizon, as a president who would fundamentally transform America continues to circumvent the Constitution to do it. The latest are the failed efforts of acting FCC director Mignon Clyburn — daughter of a Democratic stalwart, Representative James Clyburn. She dreamed about monitoring news outlets to ensure that they prove themselves correct in matters of race/class/gender thinking.

Yet after all the 24-hour outrages, and all the op-eds pointing out that a self-described constitutional-law professor has been the worst adversary of the Constitution since Richard Nixon, and after perhaps even a slide in the polls of a point or two, we will soon forget Ms. Clyburn and her idiotic attempts to diversify the news by seeking uniform expression in the media. …

One of the tribe though, in the person of WaPo’s Richard Cohen, seems to have had enough as he writes on Susan Rice and the retreat of American power.

Susan Rice ought to stay off “Meet the Press.” The last time she was on, she misrepresented what led to the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya. On Sunday she was back, this time misrepresenting critics of the Obama administration’s Syria policy. Last time her misrepresentation was unintentional. This time it wasn’t. I prefer it, though, when she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

In a frustrating colloquy with host David Gregory, Rice initially said all the right things about Syria. She called the war there “horrific,” which indeed it is. She said it had “spilled over and infused the neighboring states,” which indeed it has. And she said the United States had “every interest in trying to bring this conflict to a conclusion.” Yes. Yes, indeed.

“But if the alternative here is to intervene with American boots on the ground, as some have argued, I think that the judgment the United States has made and the president of the United States has made is that is not in the United States’ interests,” she continued.

Gregory, usually as alert and twitchy as a squirrel, flat-lined. He did not ask Rice who, precisely, advocated boots on the ground. He did not ask her to name just one prominent critic or to wonder why this is “the alternative” when there are so many others. He just pushed on, leaving this straw man to crinkle and crackle under the hot TV lights and allowing Rice, who is the president’s national security adviser, to get away with rebutting an argument that has not been made. She did, though, exhibit an administration mind-set — all or nothing — that, in practice, amounts to nothing.

Rice’s was a splendid performance, characteristic of an administration that values the sound of policy over its implementation. …

Jennifer Rubin says the administration’s foreign policy needs a reset.

The American people may not follow foreign policy regularly, but they know failure when they see it. They know when the wheels are coming off the bus. Gallup reports: “For the first time, more Americans think President Barack Obama is not respected by other world leaders than believe he is. Americans’ opinions have shifted dramatically in the past year, after being relatively stable from 2010 to 2013.”

It is not hard to see why. Around the world the president has generated contempt, dismay, or disappointment — but rarely respect. He has shied from enforcing his own red line. He has failed to articulate a U.S. policy toward the countries undergoing turmoil in the Middle East. He’s pushing a rotten deal with Iran. He bugged out of Iraq entirely, and now an al-Qaeda flag flies over Fallujah, where  just a few years ago Americans lost their lives by the dozens to turn back jihadists.

Perhaps the president needs to do his own reset. A speech would be in order to try to recalibrate his foreign policy and halt the slide into chaos and irrelevancy. …

For those mystified by the continued opposition to the healthcare act, Noemie Emery reminds us of its illegitimate birth in 2009.

… Whenever it could, the public went out of its way to express its displeasure: voting for Republican governors in Virginia and New Jersey, states won by Obama, a “go slow” sign which was wholly ignored by the president’s party, as it plunged ahead, pushing the bill through the Senate the day before Christmas, after the last two reluctant red-state dissenters had been showered with millions of dollars in favors. This wasn’t what voters wanted to find under the tree, but Democrats still had their 60 votes in the Senate, or would have again in January when Martha Coakley won the special election in Massachusetts to fill the seat of Edward M. Kennedy, who had died in August. Massachusetts would never send a non-Democrat to fill “the Kennedy seat,” as David Gergen had put it. But then Massachusetts did.

The gubernatorial elections in November 2009 had been taken as proxies for health care reform, but the December special election in Massachusetts was the third kick of the mule, and by far the most telling. Symbolically, it was held for the seat of the Father of Health Care, and one of the bill’s most conspicuous backers. The governors of two big states couldn’t do much to stop health care reform, but a single vote in the Senate was critical. Newly elected Senator Scott Brown had run as the “41st vote” against Obamacare. There were many reasons for people in Virginia and New Jersey to vote for (or against) their new governors. There was only one reason for people in Massachusetts to be voting for Brown.

“Elections have consequences” is a prime rule in politics, but Democrats went out of their way to make sure that this one would be the exception, as their first move after the results in Massachusetts became evident was not to rework the bill to bring it in line with the will of the public, but to game the system to close off the need for a second vote in the Senate, the will of the public be damned.

Medicare, Social Security, and the Civil Rights Act all passed by huge and bipartisan margins, with public opinion strongly in favor. Health care reform passed by 7 votes in the House, losing the votes of 34 Democrats (and all the Republicans), with a strong tide of public opinion running against it. Had there been a Senator Coakley, Republicans would have groaned, but accepted the bill as having been passed by the regular order of business. As it was, they loathed it almost as much for the way it was passed as for what was in it, and never accepted its moral authority. A Gallup poll taken on March 30, 2010, found that 53 percent of Americans considered the way the bill passed an “abuse of power” by Democrats as against 40 percent who found it “appropriate,” with 86 percent of Republicans and 58 percent of independents concurring in this negative judgment. Time has done nothing to soften these views.

Ultimately, acts of Congress gain their legitimacy in the way they win or reflect the will of the public, as expressed in the way they are passed. The Civil Rights Act, as Michael Barone reminds us, took place against a background of violence, but the careful and orderly way it was passed helped defuse opposition, and the much-feared resistance to it would never materialize. Full compliance, he notes, was not immediate, “[b]ut after Congress acted in such a deliberate fashion .  .  . white southerners largely acquiesced.” No such deliberation was ever to be seen in the passage of the Affordable Care Act, and acquiescence eludes it, as does the conviction that it is legitimate. It isn’t—and never will be.

Thomas Sowell on fairness.

It seems as if, everywhere you turn these days, there are studies claiming to show that America has lost its upward mobility for people born in the lower socioeconomic levels. But there is a sharp difference between upward “mobility,” defined as an opportunity to rise, and mobility defined as actually having risen.

That distinction is seldom even mentioned in most of the studies. It is as if everybody is chomping at the bit to get ahead, and the ones that don’t rise have been stopped by “barriers” created by “society.”

When statistics show that sons of high school dropouts don’t become doctors or scientists nearly as often as the sons of Ph.D.s, that is taken as a sign that American society is not “fair.”

If equal probabilities of achieving some goal is your definition of fairness, then we should all get together — people of every race, color, creed, national origin, political ideology and sexual preference — and stipulate that life has never been fair, anywhere or any time in all the millennia of recorded history.

Then we can begin at last to talk sense. …

Late night humor from Andrew Malcolm.

Conan: Two ex-Pussy Riot punk rock members were detained by Russian police. If convicted, they could face two weeks in a Sochi hotel room.

Letterman: Charlie Sheen is marrying an adult film star. Not only is he marrying her, but she’ll be working the bachelor party.

Conan: President Obama has apologized for saying an art history degree holder doesn’t earn a lot. Then Obama turned to an art history major and ordered a tall frappucino with soy.

SethMyers: The brassiere turns 100 years old this week. And so does everyone who still calls it a brassiere.

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John Fund highlights a moment in Ukraine when journalists were no longer able to lie for the regime.

… for many Ukrainians, there was another moment when they realized the ground was shifting beneath them. It came last Friday evening, during one of the most popular talk shows on Inter, the most-watched Ukrainian network. Lidia Pankiv, a 24-year-old television journalist, was invited on by host Andriy Danylevych to discuss the need for reconciliation following the agreement signed by Yanukovych and dissidents earlier that day. While reporting on the Maidan protests, Pankiv had helped persuade the Berkut riot police not to use further violence against the activists, and she had disclosed that one of the Berkut officers was now her fiancé. But reconciliation was not what Pankiv wished to discuss. As relayed by journalist Halya Coynash, Pankiv had a different message:

“You probably want to hear a story from me about how with my bare hands I restrained a whole Berkut unit, and how one of the Berkut officers fell in love with me and I fell in love with him. But I’m going to tell you another story. About how with my bare hands I dragged the bodies of those killed the day before yesterday. And about how two of my friends died yesterday. . . . I hate Zakharchenko, Klyuev, Lukash, Medvedchuk, Azarov. I hate Yanukovych and all those who carry out their criminal orders. I came here today only because I found out that this is a live broadcast. I want to say that I also despise Inter because for three months it deceived viewers and spread enmity among citizens of this country. And now you are calling for peace and unity. Yes, you have the right to try to clear your conscience, but I think you should run this program on your knees. I’ve brought these photos here for you, so that you see my dead friends in your dreams and understand that you also took part in that. And now, I’m sorry, I don’t have time. I’m going to Maidan (Independence Square). Glory to Ukraine.”

Danylevych immediately tried to return to the night’s topic of reconciliation. But he was stopped by guest Konstantin Reutsky, a human-rights activist from Luhansk. Reutsky agreed with Pankiv, saying that Inter journalists had “lied and distorted information about Maidan over the last three months.” …

Roger Simon says that after Ukraine we should think about the need for an American Spring. Pickerhead thinks that could happen when journalists here stop lying for the regime.

We are not in the situation of the Ukraine, however that turns out, but the events in that Eastern European country should remind us all of the sad condition of our nation, how much we now need an American Spring in the USA.

Not a Spring like the Arab Spring, of course, which was and is a nightmare beyond anyone’s wishes, but something more like the original Prague Spring that remade the Czech Republic into the vibrant country and society it is today.

The Obama administration has been the culmination of the advancement of state intrusion into our lives that began roughly a hundred years ago and has reached such a point that the originality and the intentions of our country are barely recognizable.  The results of this have been disastrous both economically and socially, most of all in terms of the personal freedom and liberty of our citizens. We have gone backwards in many ways, not the least of which is that race relations have deteriorated during the administration of the first African-American president, largely due to state meddling. We are divided as we have never been since the Civil War, and for really no good reason.

The people aren’t the problem. It’s the state. …

Charles Krauthammer examines the myth of settled science.  

I repeat: I’m not a global warming believer. I’m not a global warming denier. I’ve long believed that it cannot be good for humanity to be spewing tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. I also believe that those scientists who pretend to know exactly what this will cause in 20, 30 or 50 years are white-coated propagandists.

“The debate is settled,” asserted propagandist in chief Barack Obama in his latest State of the Union address. “Climate change is a fact.” Really? There is nothing more anti-scientific than the very idea that science is settled, static, impervious to challenge. Take a non-climate example. It was long assumed that mammograms help reduce breast cancer deaths. This fact was so settled that Obamacare requires every insurance plan to offer mammograms (for free, no less) or be subject to termination.

Now we learn from a massive randomized study — 90,000 women followed for 25 years — that mammograms may have no effect on breast cancer deaths. Indeed, one out of five of those diagnosed by mammogram receives unnecessary radiation, chemo or surgery.

So much for settledness. And climate is less well understood than breast cancer. If climate science is settled, why do its predictions keep changing? And how is it that the great physicist Freeman Dyson, who did some climate research in the late 1970s, thinks today’s climate-change Cassandras are hopelessly mistaken? …

Howard Kurtz posts on the intolerant left that attempts to quiet Krauthammer.

Charles Krauthammer says it right up front in his Washington Post column: “I’m not a global warming believer. I’m not a global warming denier.”

He does, however, challenge the notion that the science on climate change is settled and says those who insist otherwise are engaged in “a crude attempt to silence critics and delegitimize debate.”

How ironic, then, that some environmental activists launched a petition urging the Post not to publish Krauthammer’s column on Friday.

Their response to opinions they disagree with is to suppress the speech. …

John Hinderaker of Power Line posts on yet another attempt by the left to silence critic – we allude to the Mark Steyn suit. You can follow the link and read Mark’s latest brief.

As all the world knows, climate buffoon Michael Mann is suing Mark Steyn, National Review and others for disagreeing with him about global warming–not just disagreeing, but doing so in colorful language. As happens so often on the Left, Mann found himself losing the debate on a public issue of great importance. Rather than admit that he was wrong about the hockey stick–one of the most notorious errors, or frauds, in the history of science–he is trying to shut his opponents up through litigation.

Steyn was unhappy with how the lawsuit was going, so he dismissed the lawyers that were representing him and National Review and is now pro se. Rather than engage in further procedural maneuvering, Mark wants to fight out what he sees as the central issue–free speech–in the court of public opinion. So yesterday another shoe dropped: Mark served an answer and counterclaim against Mann in which he requested damages from the discredited scientist. You can read the pleading here. It is entertaining; it should be, Mark wrote it himself. ..

Salon on the foods supposed to be bad for us and turned out to OK, and even beneficial at times.

In the future, when we’re zipping around the biosphere on our jetpacks and eating our nutritionally complete food pellets, we won’t have to worry about what foods will kill us or which will make us live forever.

Until then, we’re left to figure out which of the food headlines we should take to heart, and which should be taken with a grain of unrefined, mineral-rich sea salt. Low-fat or high-fat? High-protein or vegan? If you don’t trust what your body tells you, remember that food science is ever evolving. Case in point: The seven foods below are ancient. But they’ve gone from being considered healthy (long ago) to unhealthy (within the last generation or two) to healthy again, even essential. …

… Old Wisdom: Coffee equals caffeine equals bad for you.

New Wisdom: Coffee is loaded with antioxidants and other nutrients that improve your health. Plus, a little caffeine makes the world go round.

Why? Actually, most of the world never bought into the whole caffeine/coffee scare that made so many Americans start to swear off coffee, or heaven help us, switch to decaf. But these days, the U.S., chock full of Starbucks, has come around. Several prominent studies conducted over the last few years unearthed a bounty of benefits in the average cup of joe. As everyone knows, caffeine boosts energy. Based on controlled human trials, it has also been proven to fire up the neurons and make you sharper, with improved memory, reaction time, mood, vigilance and general cognitive function. It can also boost your metabolism, lower your risk of Type II diabetes, protect you from Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, and lower the risk of Parkinson’s. Whew.

3) Whole Milk

Old wisdom: High-fat milk lead to obesity. Exposing children to lower-fat options keeps them leaner and healthier and instills the low-fat habit.

New Wisdom: Ha

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Another Pickings day without items on DC creeps. First an ode to Elm trees showed up in Sunday’s NY Times. Although the writer was primarily concerned with the trees along Fifth Ave. the accompanying picture was of Pickerhead’s favorite site in New York, the Literary Walk in the Southeast corner of Central Park. That picture, which was too large a file for Pickings, led to a “seasons” of pics of the Walk starting with winter. Then a couple of impressionist paintings are included.

THEY looked, at first glance, like trees in a paint-by-number picture, snow outlining branches in idiot-proof chiaroscuro — a child’s “Winter Scene.” Yet as I stood in a recent wet snowstorm on 110th Street, looking down Fifth Avenue along Central Park, I saw that the elms flanking the sidewalk had an aspect in winter less observable in other seasons, when their branches are cloaked in leaves.

Joined overhead, the topmost limbs rose airily to form a long vaulted corridor stretching to 59th Street and the park’s southern perimeter. It was as if on this west side of Fifth Avenue there existed a chamber, a “tabernacle of the air,” to use a purplish phrase the 19th-century orator and abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher favored when describing groves of elm.

High-canopied, in shape either fountain or vase, the American elm is by habit and nature conducive to a grandeur and elegance not lost on Frederick Law Olmsted, Central Park’s designer. Olmsted saw in the American elm, a favorite of his, a tree conducive to creating canopied spaces intended to evoke the tranquil intimacy of ecclesiastical chambers.

So it seemed to me in the snowy stillness of that recent storm. …

… the American elms here remain among the glories “of world urbanism,” as the architect Andrés Duany once said; that the elms on Fifth Avenue stand as unacknowledged reminders of a civic culture in which elms played an important role, since settlers first hauled them from forests to plant as the tree of choice on New England town commons; and that these sentinel giants embody, as Charles Dickens noted, “a kind of compromise between town and country; as if each had met the other half-way, and shaken hands upon it.”

Dickens was writing about New Haven, a city whose 19th-century appearance was in large part defined by the arcades of venerable elms that arched above its streets. …

… “If you think about it, you can spot an elm at midnight,” Mr. Hansel, of the American Elm Institute, noted, referring to the American elm’s distinctive high branching habit, its way of descending in an elegant fountain of limbs. But why postpone pleasure till midnight? Stand on Fifth Avenue between 59th and 110th Streets any time of day or night in this cold season. Look up.

Thomas Wolfe writes for The Atlantic on another Thomas’ abuse of stuff shirts from Europe. This starts slowly. Stick with it. You’ll be rewarded. Wolfe was asked to write on the origin of the “American Idea.”

Since you asked … the American idea was born at approximately 5 p.m. on Friday, December 2, 1803, the moment Thomas Jefferson sprang the so-called pell-mell on the new British ambassador, Anthony Merry, at dinner in the White House. Oh, this was no inadvertent faux pas. This was faux pas aforethought. Jefferson obviously loved the prospect of dumbfounding the great Brit and leaving him speechless, furious, seething, so burned up that smoke would start coming out of his ears. And all that the pell-mell did.

Jefferson had already tenderized the ambassador three days earlier. Merry was the first foreign diplomat to take up residence in Washington. Accompanied by Secretary of State James Madison, he shows up at the White House wearing a hat with a swooping plume, a ceremonial sword, gold braid, shoes with gleaming buckles—in short, the whole aristocratic European ambassadorial getup—for his formal introduction to the president of the United States. He is immediately baffled. Jefferson doesn’t come to greet him in the grand reception hall. Instead, Merry and Madison have to go looking for him … Bango! All at once they bump into the American head of state in some tiny tunnel-like entryway to his study. What with three men and a sword in it all at once, the space is so congested that Merry has to back himself and his sword out of it just to have room to shake hands. When he shakes hands, he’s stunned, appalled: The president of the United States is a very Hogarth of utter slovenliness from his head … to his torso, clad in a casual workaday outfit thrown together with a complete indifference to appearances and a negligence so perfectly gross, it has to have been actually studied … down to his feet, which are stuffed, or mostly stuffed, into a pair of down-at-the-heels slippers, literally slippers and literally worn down at the heels in a way that is sheer Gin Lane. “Utter slovenliness,” “negligence actually studied,” “indifference to appearances,” and “down at the heels” were Merry’s own words in the first of what would become a regular jeremiad of complaints and supplications to Lord Hawkesbury, the foreign secretary, all but coming right out and begging him to break off relations with the United States to protest such pointed insults toward His Majesty’s representative. Merry was ready to bail out … and his wife, a notably not-shy woman née Elizabeth Death (yes), even more so. …

… Jefferson’s pell-mell gave America a mind-set that has never varied. In 1862, 36 years after Jefferson’s death, the government began the process of settling our vast, largely uninhabited western territories. Under the terms of the Homestead Act, they gave it away by inviting people, anybody, to head out into the open country and claim any plot they liked—Gloriously pell-mell! First come, first served! Each plot was 160 acres, and it was yours, free! By the time of the first Oklahoma Land Rush, in 1889, it had become a literal pell-mell—a confused, disorderly, headlong rush. People lined up on the border of the territory and rushed out into all that free real estate at the sound of a starter gun. Europeans regarded this as more lunacy on the part of … these Americans … squandering a stupendous national asset in this childish way on a random mob of nobodies. …

 

… The Jefferson frame of mind, product of one of the most profound political insights of modern history, has had its challenges in the two centuries since the night Jefferson first sprang the pell-mell upon the old European aristocratic order. But today the conviction that America’s limitless freedom and opportunities are for everyone is stronger than ever. Think of just one example from the late 20th century: Only in America could immigrants of many colors from a foreign country with a foreign language and an alien culture—in this case, Cubans—take political control pell-mell via the voting booth of a great metropolis—Miami—in barely more than one generation.

America remains, as it has been from the very beginning, the freest, most open country in the world, encouraging one and all to compete pell-mell for any great goal that exists and to try every sort of innovation, no matter how far-fetched it may seem, in order to achieve it. It is largely this open invitation to ambition that accounts for America’s military and economic supremacy and absolute dominance in science, medicine, technology, and every other intellectual pursuit that can be measured objectively. And it is absolute.

Yet from our college faculties and “public intellectuals” come the grimmest of warnings. The government has assumed Big Brother powers on the pretext of protecting us from Terror, and the dark night of fascism is descending upon America. As Orwell might have put it, only an idiot or an intellectual could actually believe that.

Der Spiegel examines reports on DNA retrieved from a child who died in Montana 12,000 years ago.

It must have been a pretty special child, otherwise the two-year old wouldn’t have been buried in such a ceremonious manner. The boy was sprinkled with celebratory red dust and given distinctive stone artifacts for his last journey.The characteristic fluting of the stone weapons serve as archeological evidence that the boy, who died some 12,600 years ago, came from the Clovis culture. It was one of the earliest New World groups, disappearing mysteriously a few centuries after the child’s burial in present day Montana. From the summit of a hill towering over the burial site near the YellowstoneRiver, the boy’s Ice Age contemporaries could monitor their hunting grounds for mammoth and bison.

Now a team of scientists led by the Danish geneticist Eske Willerslev has analyzed the boy’s origins and discovered that he descends from a Siberian tribe with roots tracing back to Europe. Some of the boy’s ancestors are likely even to have lived in present-day Germany.

Their findings go even further: More than 80 percent of all native peoples in the Americas — from the Alaska’s Aleuts to the Maya of Yucatan to the Aymaras along the Andes — are descended from Montana boy’s lineage.

Surprising Similarities

Last week, the scientists published the results of sequencing the child’s DNA in the scientific journal Nature. Late last year, the same team published the decoded genome of another early human: A juvenile buried near LakeBaikal in Siberia some 24,000 years ago. Their genomes showed surprising ancestral similarities.

Ever wonder where GDP numbers come from? Tyler Cowen, George Mason econ prof with a bent towards free markets, reviews two books that try to answer that question.

‘May my children grow up in a world where no one knows who the central banker is” is a wise saying. One also can hope for a world where arguments about measuring GDP (gross domestic product, the sum total of the goods and services produced within a nation) or the inflation rate are rare. In good economic times, we tend to take reported economic numbers for granted, but more recently, conspiracy theories have run wild. It is sometimes claimed that “real GDP” or “true inflation” is much higher or lower than what is officially proclaimed. For instance, both Ron Paul and Sen. Tom Coburn have mistakenly charged that inflation is actually running at or above 8 percent a year, which would mean Social Security benefits are not indexed upward enough and real GDP is plummeting, both implausible conclusions.

Fortunately, the popular economics book sector has come to the rescue with two new and useful entries on what our economic statistics mean and why we should (mostly) trust them. This topic is no longer for wonks only.

If you are going to read only one book on GDP, Diane Coyle’s “GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History” should be it. More important, you should read a book on GDP, as many of the political debates of our time revolve around this concept. Can we afford our current path of entitlement spending? Was the Obama fiscal stimulus worth it? When will China overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy?

The answers all depend on GDP. In 140 pages of snappy text, Coyle lays out what GDP numbers measure, what roles they play in economic policymaking and forecasting, and how GDP numbers can sometimes mislead us, albeit not in the way many current critics suggest. …

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It’s Ted Cruz day. We start with Thomas Sowell’s critical comments from last week.

Freshman Senator Ted Cruz says many things that need to be said and says them well. Moreover, some of these things are what many, if not most, Americans believe wholeheartedly. Yet we need to remember that the same was true of another freshman Senator, just a relatively few years ago, who parlayed his ability to say things that resonated with the voters into two terms in the White House. Who would disagree that if you want your doctor, you should be able to keep your doctor? Who would disagree with the idea of a more transparent administration in Washington, or a President of the United States being a uniter instead of a divider?

There are many things like this that freshman Senator Barack Obama said that the overwhelming majority of Americans — whether liberal or conservative — would agree with. The only problem is that what he has actually done as President has repeatedly turned out to be the direct opposite of what he said as a candidate.

Senator Ted Cruz has not yet reached the point where he can make policy, rather than just make political trouble. But there are already disquieting signs that he is looking out for Ted Cruz — even if that sets back the causes he claims to be serving.

Those causes are not being served when Senator Cruz undermines the election chances of the only political party that has any chance of undoing the disasters that Barack Obama has already inflicted on the nation — and forestalling new disasters that are visible on the horizon.

ObamaCare is not just an issue about money or even an issue about something as important as medical care. ObamaCare represents a quantum leap in the power of the federal government over the private lives of individual Americans. …

Sowell added a Part II.

… However unjustified Senator Cruz’s actions, the very fact that a freshman Senator can so quickly gain so many supporters, with so much enthusiasm, ought to be a loud warning to the Republican establishment that they have long been a huge disappointment to a wide range of Republican voters and supporters.

One of their most maddening qualities has for decades been their can’t-be-bothered attitude when it comes to explaining their positions to the American people in language people can understand. A classic example was Speaker of the House John Boehner’s performance when he emerged from a meeting at the White House a while back. There, with masses of television news cameras pointed at him, and a bank of microphones crowded together, he simply expressed his disgust at the Obama administration, turned and walked on away.

Here was a golden opportunity to cut through the Obama administration rhetoric and set the record straight on the issues at hand. But apparently Speaker Boehner couldn’t be bothered to have a prepared, and previously thought out, statement to present, conveying something more than his disgust.

Unfortunately, Speaker Boehner is just the latest in a long line of Republican “leaders” with the same disregard of the need to explain their position in plain English. …

Kimberley Strassel has more.

…  On Thursday, Mr. Cruz told me his debt procedure was a matter of principle, though he acknowledged an “additional benefit” was the “transparency” he’d forced on Republicans. He told me he had not “spoken to anyone at SCF in months.” However, when I asked if anyone on his staff had been in contact with outside groups about his debt-ceiling procedure, he acknowledged: “My staff periodically speaks with people across the conservative movement.” He added, “But the debt ceiling vote occurred suddenly and it was a surprise to everybody when Republican leadership asked every Republican senator to consent to letting Harry Reid raise the debt ceiling.”

In addition to Mr. McConnell, conservative groups are targeting senators John Cornyn (Texas), Pat Roberts (Kan.), Thad Cochran (Miss.), and Lindsey Graham (S.C.). While the primary challengers aren’t likely to win (Mr. Bevin is trailing by 25 points), the attacks are hurting incumbents’ general-election prospects.

None of this is about substance. If political principle were at stake, one would assume these outside groups—so keen on purity—would have already dropped Mr. Bevin. It came out recently that he had once praised the very bank bailouts that he has been slapping Mr. McConnell for supporting.

Mr. McConnell holds the same positions as Mr. Cruz on spending, ObamaCare, gun control, etc. His sin? He has refused to ask Republicans to run into the Obama fixed bayonets, a la the Cruz shutdown. Groups like SCF and Heritage Action want to replace the leadership with more of their own kamikaze caucus. They also understand there are far more fundraising dollars and media attention in attacking fellow conservatives.

Republicans have fumbled their last two Senate takeover chances, mostly thanks to infighting. But this latest movement—to take down incumbents over tactics—is a new low. If the GOP remains a minority, this will be why.

Jennifer Rubin compares Cruz and Cassius.

… Cruz is not a dumb man, so surely he knows what he is saying is patently false and unhelpful to his party. But he is, more than anything, an ambitious man. It is wrong to label him a McCarthyite, as some on the left do (for one thing, there were actual communists to worry about in the 1950s). He is, nevertheless, reminiscent of another figure, Shakespearean in fact, with “a lean and hungry look.” He plots, he schemes and he cloaks it all in self-righteousness.

What to do about a man like Cruz? For one thing it’s a farce to have him as a vice chair on the National Senate Republican Committee. He would more properly be placed on the Democratic counterpart. But really, the best Republicans can do is ignore him and support mainstream and responsible candidates. They can reject the grab-bag of flaky and unqualified candidates who would emulate Cruz (Matt Bevin in Kentucky being the prime example). And if Cruz should run for president on a platform of — hmm, grandstanding? — the voters can tell him what they think of him. There is nothing like getting 5 percent of the vote in New Hampshire to take the wind out of a pol’s sails.

This is a shame, not only because he does damage to his party, which has a real chance to take the Senate, but also because it is a waste of actual talent that could be used to win policy arguments. Cruz can be a positive and intelligent force on the right, as he has shown on foreign policy. By doing this, however, he reveals himself to be a two-bit operator for whom ambition crushes principle. He makes far too many enemies for too little positive result. That doesn’t get you to be president, no matter how many talk show hosts demagogue on your behalf.

Daily Caller posts that even Ann Coulter has had enough.  

First conservative icon Thomas Sowell turned on Ted Cruz, now it appears that Ann Coulter is souring on the Texas Republican as well.

Sowell published two columns this week slamming Cruz for being self-serving. Coulter praised the first of Sowell’s columns in a tweet Wednesday.

Later, in an appearance on Fox News’ “Hannity” Wednesday night, Coulter doubled down on her praise of Sowell’s anti-Cruz column: ”I never push anyone else’s column but mine. Today everyone has got to read Thomas Sowell’s article.”

During the “Hannity” segment, Coulter attacked tea party groups for being filled with “shysters” and “conmen,” naming specifically the Senate Conservatives Fund as an example. The Senate Conservatives Fund was a key outside group that supported Cruz in his fight to “Defund Obamacare” last fall, which ultimately led to a government shutdown.

“And these people are just trying to get money off good Americans by saying we’re going after ‘establishment Republicans,” Coulter complained about tea party groups like the Senate Conservatives Fund. “How about going after Democrats?”

“Do not trust anyone who says they are trying to defeat ‘establishment Republicans,’” she added.

Without mentioning Cruz by name, Coulter railed against tea partiers who fail to understand that the “only way to repeal Obamacare is to elect Republicans.”

“It is not to be fighting against Republicans,” she said.

Wired tells us about the systems (algorithms) used by UPS to plan the routes of their drivers. 

Let’s say you’re a driver for UPS. You have an hour and a half left before your shift ends and you still have 12 packages to deliver. Your challenge is to find the shortest route that takes rush-hour traffic, the higher priority of premium packages, the construction zone up ahead, and a slew of other variables into account. Should you try to shave a few miles off your regular route (better mile optimization) or deliver a high-priority package early (higher customer satisfaction)?

In the past we would have used our experience as drivers and our knowledge of local conditions to make a call based on our instincts. But what if we have a technical resource that can help make that call for us? Far from our workforce fearing automation, we need to embrace it — especially if we focus on designing the technology as a coach. …

… The answer lies in data. Take UPS’s On-Road Integrated Optimization and Navigation, or ORION, as an example. The brainchild of Jack Levis, UPS’s director of process management (he worked on it for nearly a decade before the first test implementation in 2008), it uses a variety of data streams — map data, customer information, business protocols, and work rules — to calculate the most streamlined and efficient delivery route … better than any mere mortal ever could. The system uses so many algorithms — nearly 80 pages of math formulas — that Levis describes it as “something Einstein would have on his blackboard.”

Many of us are a lot like UPS drivers in our daily lives: The only difference is we spend our days shepherding virtual bits between destinations rather than driving physical boxes around. But we still face many of the same prioritization and optimization challenges.

Yet one of the biggest misconceptions about software-enabled decision making is the idea that it’s far removed from us. Many people think of data as something technical that only accountants, warehouses, data scientists, or the latest slew of tech technology-as-a-coach startups need to worry about. We don’t recognize the strategic connection between information collection and decision making, or see how data can help increase our own performance. …

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Ron Christie says Justice Thomas is right about the country’s obsession with race.

Are we obsessed with race and racism in our society? Before you answer the question, consider how issues of race are brought up in the media and discussed around the proverbial water cooler. Do we discuss the remarkable progress we’ve made as a country since the dark days of segregation and Jim Crow?

Do we consider how blacks lived in the South in the not too distant past—like my grandparents, who ran the risk of being lynched for looking at someone white? That’s given way to interracial marriage no longer being a taboo. The Supreme Court didn’t repeal the statute banning interracial marriage in Virginia until 1967.  

Unfortunately, very little of the dialogue involving race in America today is positive, uplifting, or inspirational. Instead, there is a compulsion by many on the left to brand their political opponents as being racist. Two specific events occurred in the past week that have me firmly convinced that there is an obsession with race in America today that is destructive to our societal cohesiveness. 

First, consider the pivotal vote held by autoworkers in Chattanooga, Tenn., last Friday in which the majority ruled and decided not to join the United Auto Workers union. Perhaps these workers did not want their dues siphoned off for political activity. Perhaps they were motivated by the union influence in Detroit, which ultimately led to the town seeking bankruptcy protection. Whatever the reason behind their decision, the employees ultimately voted 712-626 against joining the UAW.  Case closed? Hardly. …

Bethany Mandel hopes Hillary will not run.

At a Shabbat (Sabbath meal) this past week, conversation veered into the political realm, as it often does when my husband and I are guests. We began to discuss the likelihood of Hillary Clinton running, the papers recently unearthed by my former colleague Alana Goodman, and about how Bill’s wandering eye could impact Hillary’s campaign. Around the table were three young people, ranging in age from about 9-17. Adult participants in the conversation soon realized that it was impossible to conduct a conversation about the Clintons with children present, and soon, the mother (rightfully) asked for a complete change in subject. Before doing so we reflected how sad it is that a president’s legacy cannot truthfully be discussed with innocent ears listening.

For how long can this mother shield her children from the topic? If Hillary runs, perhaps only a few more months. With the Clintons back in the news, pundits will be (and should be) discussing how ready America is to relive the sex scandals of the ’90s. Anyone who believes that Bill has learned his lesson need only look to Anthony Weiner to understand that old dogs can’t, and won’t, learn new tricks. Bill’s wandering eye, both in the past and, in all likelihood, the future, will be a topic of conversation for as long as a Clinton occupies the White House.

 

The conversation led me to reminisce about how my own understanding about marriage and sexuality was shaped during my childhood by the scandal. Bill Clinton taught me about sex, about truth, and about politics. Do I really want to have the same conversations with my children that my mother had to have with me? These were some of the many questions my poor mother (and all of her friends) had to grapple with: …

Megan McArdle on letting your kids fail. 

I’m on the road this week, giving talks on my new book about learning to fail better: that is, first, to give ourselves the permission to take on challenges where we might very well fail; second, to pick ourselves up as quickly as possible and move on when things don’t work out. This is, I argue, vital on a personal level, as well as vital for the economy, because that’s where innovation and growth come from.

The other day, after one of my talks, a 10th-grade girl came up and shyly asked if I had a minute. I always have a minute to talk to shy high school sophomores, having been one myself.

And this is what she asked me:

“I understand what you’re saying about trying new things, and hard things, but I’m in an International Baccalaureate program and only about five percent of us will get 4.0, so how can I try a subject where I might not get an A?”

I was floored. All I could think as I talked to this poor girl is “America, you’re doing it wrong.”

I was 15 in 10th grade. If you can’t try something new in 10th grade, when can you? …

Peter Berkowitz from the Hoover Institution on how we might improve colleges.

Liberal education is in decline. And professors and administrators at our best liberal arts colleges are hastening its demise.

Much has been written about liberal education’s skyrocketing costs, its failure to provide students with the knowledge and intellectual skills they need to succeed in a competitive globalized economy, and its burdening of students with massive debt. But these big problems are only part of the story.

As important as is its contribution to individual economic well-being and to national prosperity, liberal education’s traditional and proper aim is even more comprehensive and vital to the public interest: to prepare students to seize the wide range of opportunities and meet the full spectrum of responsibilities characteristic of free men and women.

When it lives up to its own standards, liberal education equips citizens with the mental habits needed to engage effectively in political debate and cast votes in an informed manner. Moreover, by acquainting students with the rich variety of opinions within Western civilization about moral, political, and religious life and introducing them to competing opinions in other civilizations, liberal education promotes the virtues of toleration and moderation.

Liberal education is not neutral. When true to itself, it encourages gratitude toward free societies for offering the opportunity to study fundamental ideas and seminal events, and for maintaining—by means of customs, laws, and political institutions—a framework that allows individuals and their communities a wide sphere in which to organize their lives as they think best. …

The cold winter creates a major tourist attraction in Northern Wisconsin. WSJ tells us about Apostle Islands National Lakeshore.

When Dan Gross learned that Lake Superior had frozen over enough this winter for people to walk to the ice caves along Wisconsin’s northern shoreline, he recruited a handful of friends to make the sojourn. On a recent Sunday, they rode their snowmobiles through the woods and arrived on the frozen lake at noon.

“The ice was incredible,” said Mr. Gross, a 46-year-old heating and cooling technician from Des Moines, Iowa, of the majestic formations that decorate a string of caves carved into the sandstone cliffs centuries ago. “But I was really amazed by all the people,” he said of the miles of visitors snaking their way from cave to cave on the frozen lakeshore. “It was like an exodus.

The migration is the handiwork of both mother nature and Facebook. Frigid temperatures gripping the Midwest have sealed the Great Lakes beneath vast sheets of ice, turning Lake Superior into flat, frozen tundra the likes of which has been seen just a couple of times in the past two decades. Since earlier this winter, when waves crashed and then froze against the cliffs, tens of thousands of visitors have flocked to see the resulting icicles, and their stories and pictures have exploded in news media and social networking. The attention has transformed the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore into a veritable museum of snow and ice, and a wildly popular tourist destination. …

CBS News shows us a NASA photo of the frozen great lakes.

A deep freeze has settled in over the Great Lakes this winter and a new image released by NASA shows the astonishing extent of the ice cover as seen from space.

NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image of the lakes on the early afternoon of Feb. 19, 2014. At the time, 80.3 percent of the five lakes were covered in ice, according to the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory (GLERL), part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Earlier this month, ice cover over the Great Lakes hit 88 percent for the first time since 1994. Typically at its peak, the average ice cover is just over 50 percent, and it only occasionally passes 80 percent, according to NASA’s Earth Observatory. [Earth from Above: 101 Stunning Images from Orbit] …

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James Delingpole writes on Mark Steyn’s court case.

When I first read, many months ago, that the notorious US climate scientist Michael Mann was suing the notorious right-wing bastard Mark Steyn for defamation, I admit that I felt a little piqued.

Obviously a libel trial is not something any sane person would wish to court; and naturally I’m a massive fan of Steyn’s. Nevertheless, after all the work I’ve dedicated over the years to goading Mann, I found it a bit bloody annoying that Steyn — a relative latecomer to the climate change debate — should have been the one who ended up stealing all my courtroom glory.

What made me doubly jealous was that this was a case Steyn was guaranteed to win. In the unlikely event it came to court — which I didn’t think it would, given Mann’s longstanding aversion to any form of public disclosure regarding his academic research — the case would fall down on the fact that defamation is so hard to prove in the US, especially when it involves publicly funded semi-celebrities who are expected to take this sort of thing on the chin.

Since then, though, much has changed. It now looks — go to Steynonline.com for the full story — as if Steyn is going to be up there on his own, fighting and financing his case without the support of his magazine, National Review; that the outcome is not as certain as it seemed at the beginning; and that this hero deserves all the help we can give him.

Why? Well, the fact that I even have to explain this shows what a cowardly, snivelling, career-safe, intellectually feeble, morally compromised age we inhabit. By rights, Mann v Steyn should be the 21st-century equivalent of the Scopes monkey trial, with believers in free speech, proponents of the scientific method and sympathetic millionaires and billionaires all piling in to Steyn’s defence with op eds, learned papers, and lavish funds to buy the hottest of hotshot lawyers.

Instead, what do I read? Crap like, ‘Steyn’s out of order: he shouldn’t have been so rude about the judge who mishandled the initial hearing.’ (OK, maybe he shouldn’t — but what are you supposed to say about judges who mishandle your case? ‘Nice job, ma’am’?) …

Jennifer Rubin posts on the disaster the president has crafted with his moves in Syria. 

It must be maddening spinning for the White House. The White House says Obamacare is fine, so the media spinners parrot that again and again — until the White House admits all is not well. The White House insist the president never promised you can keep your health care, so the spinners repeat that one — until the White House sort of apologizes. You do wonder if the pundits ever get tired of being hung out to dry.

Nowhere is the lunacy of the spin more evident than on Syria. You had a flock of liberals declaring the president’s about-face on Syria’s weapons of mass destruction was a brilliant move and he’d been right to insist we have no interests there. And then, three years after conservatives demanded stronger action against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the president declares himself “frustrated.” (Oh, and the WMD deal isn’t really disarming Assad, just as conservative hawks predicted.) I suppose it really has been a disaster all along.

The disaster, of course, is the president’s. It was his insistence on doing nothing — over the objections at various times of Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Robert Gates and Leon Panetta  — that has brought us to this sorry state of affairs. As a former  Republican official put it, “This rests entirely on his shoulders.”

Notwithstanding, we should not absolve aides and advisers of all responsibility here. ABC’s Jonathan Karl mused that Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power is “haunted” by the debacle. He reminds us that her whole career was built on making an argument about the responsibility to protect when you have a crisis like this.  And now she’s saying, it’s the biggest crisis in a generation and the United States is effectively doing nothing. Well, she could have quit. That is what people of principle do in order to call attention to a disastrous and immoral policy. But if that’s personally untenable because the lure of power is too great, she should be “haunted” by the atrocities unfolding on her watch. …

Michael Barone issues a challenge over mandatory minimum sentences. If they’re so unjust, why doesn’t the president issue pardons?

… So I tend to agree with Judge Ponsor when he laments that “defendants sentenced before the [2010 Fair Sentencing Act] was passed still languish today, serving out sentences that virtually all members of Congress now recognize as excessive.” This is indeed an anomaly and seems unjust.

But I disagree sharply with his next sentence. “And there is not a darn thing anyone can do about it.” But there is someone who can do something about it, even in Congress does not follow the judge’s suggestion and pass a law scaling back those sentences.

That person is President Obama. The president can pardon any offender and he can also commute part of a sentence, as George W. Bush did when he commuted Scooter Libby’s jail term but declined to extend a full pardon.

Obama’s rewriting of the Obamacare law is constitutionally dubious; there is a serious argument that he has not been performing his constitutional duty to faithfully execute the law. But the Constitution is clear in giving the president the “Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment” (Article II, Section 2).

Unless my constitutional interpretation is way off, the president could commute the sentences of all or some of those serving time under sentences that could no longer be imposed under the 2010 law, which Judge Ponsor hails and which President Obama signed.

There is a “darn thing” someone could do about the anomaly Judge Ponsor cites. He sits in the Oval Office, where the buck supposedly stops. Perhaps someone should ask him about it.

Oliver Stone normally turns to students seeking affirmation from the immature. This failed recently when he visited a conference of libertarians. John Fund with the story.

… Stone began by trying to make what he must have thought was an outreach to the audience by resurrecting and agreeing with the Old Right chestnut that “Roosevelt lied us into World War II.” He followed that up with highly personal criticism of Obama — claiming, in effect, that the president has been brainwashed by his national-security advisers into becoming pro-war. “The man stunned us with a lack of spine, he’s a weak man,” he mourned.

Many of the students agreed with panel’s general criticism of America’s military commitments. One noted that America still has 54,000 troops in Germany and 39,000 troops in Japan a full 70 years after World War II and a full 25 years after Communism’s collapse. But then a spirited group of Latin American students attending the panel decided to directly challenge Stone’s left-wing support for Latin dictators from Fidel Castro to Hugo Chávez.

Two months before Chávez’s death last year, Stone praised him on CNN, declaring with a straight face: “He represents hope and change, the things that Obama stood for in our country in 2008.” This past Thursday, in anticipation of the event, the Latin American students published an “Open Letter to Oliver Stone” that declared: …

So while hospitals in India are cutting into the work of U. S. brain surgeons, other Indians are after the rocket scientists. The NY Times reports on India’s launch and subsequent control of a mission to orbit Mars. Most amazing is the price tag; just about one tenth of our latest Mars probe.

While India’s recent launch of a spacecraft to Mars was a remarkable feat in its own right, it is the $75 million mission’s thrifty approach to time, money and materials that is getting attention.

Just days after the launch of India’s Mangalyaan satellite, NASA sent off its own Mars mission, five years in the making, named Maven. Its cost: $671 million. The budget of India’s Mars mission, by contrast, was just three-quarters of the $100 million that Hollywood spent on last year’s space-based hit, “Gravity.”

“The mission is a triumph of low-cost Indian engineering,” said Roddam Narasimha, an aerospace scientist and a professor at Bangalore’s JawaharlalNehruCenter for Advanced Scientific Research.

“By excelling in getting so much out of so little, we are establishing ourselves as the most cost-effective center globewide for a variety of advanced technologies,” said Mr. Narasimha.

India’s 3,000-pound Mars satellite carries five instruments that will measure methane gas, a marker of life on the planet. …

Late Night from Andy Malcolm.

Conan: Billy Ray Cyrus has come out with a hip-hop version of ‘Achy Breaky Heart.’ Experts say it’s the first time in music history that fans of hip-hop and country have hated the same thing.

Fallon: Congratulations to my buddy Charlie Sheen. He’s marrying for the fourth time. Charlie said, “I just know this is the woman I’m going to be with for the rest of my February.”

Conan: Boston Market offered a free dessert to couples. So she may be disappointed you took her to Boston Market on Valentine’s Day. But when she left halfway through the meal, you got two free desserts!

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There can be little doubt business people as a type are held in low regard by governments. media, and the academy. In his post on Elon Musk, Streetwise Professor has a good example of why. Musk spends his time trying to get approval and monies from governments, rather than from individuals in free exchange. The bien pensants come to believe all people in business are in the same ways corrupt because that’s all the business folk they see, and they do not have the imagination to realize there is a universe of people in business who want nothing other than to be left alone.

I haven’t written much at all about Elon Musk and Tesla since the middle of last year.  I have no reason to change my opinion that the prices of Tesla and Solar City stock were manipulated in April-May, but by the same token don’t believe that their subsequent increases are primarily the result of manipulation.  Those stock prices are partying like a 1999-era dot com company.  I think the party will end soon, but I don’t know when and I could be wrong.

But my main issue with Musk was not about the stock price.  It was about the fact that all of his companies were heavily dependent on government subsidies and support.  This support socialized the potential losses, and allowed Musk (and other major investors, notably Goldman) to capture the upside.  My point was if his products and business models were so great, he could succeed on his own, by attracting private capital.

One company that I mentioned in passing was SpaceX, his  space launch venture.  Inevitably, this company is dependent on government contracts, given that a very large fraction of space launches carry government payloads. This is something different from SolarCity and Tesla, where the government is providing subsidies but not receiving any product or service in return.  But still, it means that Musk depends crucially on cultivating government support.  Government contracting-especially big ticket contracting-is hardly a pristine activity.  A firm does not succeed or fail at it primarily on the basis of the superiority of its product, but instead on the basis of its ability to influence politicians and bureaucrats. And a lack of scruple is often a feature not a bug in that regard. …

… The poorest people in Brownsville will not benefit the slightest from the SpaceX venture.  But he and his lobbyist successfully importuned the state and county to take taxpayer money and give it to SpaceX by invoking their poverty.  It was utterly cynical for a billionaire to extract tens of millions from Texas taxpayers in the name of the poor Mexican Americans of Brownsville.

I know this is the way the game is played.  And that’s the problem: the game is cynical and wrong.  It is mere rent seeking.  Musk is particularly appalling because he is a rent seeker posing as a technological visionary.  His businesses all depend on extracting rents from the government, which he pockets. …

Power LIne posts on John Kerry’s sudden realization Assad is not keeping up with his part of the bargain.

We are ganging up on John Kerry this morning. Here’s the thing–Kerry has a number of problems, but the most basic is that he isn’t very bright. He doesn’t have a high enough IQ for difficult work. As a senator, he hid his incapacity by ignoring virtually all of his job duties. As Secretary of State, his ineptitude–one might say shocking ineptitude, if this were not the Obama administration–is being exposed.

Earlier today in Jakarta, having finished bloviating about global warming, Kerry complained that Syria’s Bashar Assad has been “stonewalling” in the Geneva peace talks:

Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday accused Syrian President Bashar Assad of stonewalling in peace talks and called on Russia to push its ally to negotiate with opposition leaders.

“Right now, Bashar Assad has not engaged in the discussions along the promised and required standard that both Russia spoke up for and the regime spoke up for,” Kerry said during a press conference in Jakarta.

Of course he is stonewalling, you fool! He is winning. …

More on Klueless Kerry from Power Line.

I see Scott has already commented on this story, but here’s my 2 cents worth, too:

Let’s see if I’ve got this straight: Secretary of State John Kerry, owner of five multi-million dollar mansions along with a luxury yacht, has seen fit to lecture Indonesians (average income in 2012: $3,420) about why  climate change is “perhaps the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction.”

“Because of climate change, it’s no secret that today Indonesia is … one of the most vulnerable countries on Earth,” Kerry told an audience of students at a high-tech U.S.-funded cultural center at a Jakarta mall.  ”It’s not an exaggeration to say that the entire way of life that you live and love is at risk.”

Maybe Kerry thinks every Indonesian can marry a rich condiment heiress or something.

Incidentally, according to World Bank figures, Indonesian per capita greenhouse gas emissions are 1.8 metric tons. The United States: 17.6. Like Al Gore, John Kerry’s per capita emissions are surely a multiple of this, which suggests an obvious first step. …

Time to look at the stunning UAW vote in Tennessee. Michael Barone is first of three.

It’s official: The United Auto Workers lost the representation vote at the Volkswagen Chattanooga plant. The cleverly named nooga.com has the story. The vote was close: 89 percent of workers voted, and they rejected the union by a 712-626 vote.

What’s remarkable about this is that the company and the union colluded in trying to get the workers to vote for union representation. The reason is that Volkswagen’s German union, IG Metall, which under German law has seats on the company’s board, wanted to install the UAW as the workers’ bargaining representatives. If you want to see evidence of this collusion, click on the link and look at the expressions on the faces of Volkswagen Chattanooga President Frank Fischer and UAW leader Gary Casteel. These are not happy campers. They still hold out of the prospect of some kind of workers’ council on which the union would represent the workers. But they seem to clearly understand that most of the plant’s employees don’t want UAW representation.

Why not? My guess is that you could sum it up in one word: Detroit. …

John Steele Gordon calls it the “UAW’s Waterloo.”

… as the American economy has undergone profound change in the last sixty years, labor law has not kept pace. The Wagner Act dates to 1935 and the Taft-Hartley Act to 1947. Like the unions themselves they are dinosaurs. So why do the unions continue to have such a large place in American politics while they have an ever-shrinking place in the American economy? The answer, of course, is the “mother’s milk of politics,” money. Unions are the single biggest source of funds for Democratic causes and candidates.

According to Opensecrets.org, of the top ten political donors in the last 25 years, six are unions. And they all overwhelmingly donated to Democratic causes and candidates. The UAW, for instance, has donated $41.7 million over the last 25 years. That’s well over twice what the infamous Koch brothers have donated, mostly to Republican causes. (The Koch brothers actually gave 8 percent of their money to Democratic causes and candidates.)

Of the UAW’s donations, 71 percent went to Democrats and zero percent went to Republicans. The other 29 percent went to organizations not formally affiliated with either party but it’s a safe bet they are left-leaning. Unions can also mobilize large numbers of “volunteers” for phone banks and get-out-the-vote efforts. …

More from Jennifer Rubin.

… The Democratic Party has become reliant on Big Labor to an extent not always appreciated by the voters and pundits. If you look at groups leading in independent expenditures between 1989 and 2014, the Service Employees International Union dwarfs all others ($83 million). In the top 15, 11 are labor unions. There is nothing to match the boots on the ground, phone banks and “volunteers” unions can enlist, almost exclusively for Democrats.

Despite its political power, or maybe in spite of it, Big Labor is dissolving in the workplace. From a high in the 1950s when membership peaked at 35 percent of the national workforce, only 6.7 percent of private-sector workers were unionized.  If not for public-sector employees (about 35 percent), Big Labor — with all those dues-paying members — would be kaput. And even there, as we saw in Wisconsin, once  the closed shop is abolished, employees stream out of public-sector unions.

On Friday Big Labor took a huge hit in Tennessee when, even with the help of management, the UAW couldn’t organize the Volkswagen plant. As the Wall Street Journal editorial board put it, “This wasn’t merely one more failed union organizing attempt. The UAW and its chief Bob King spent years working toward this vote as part of its strategy to organize plants in the American South, and all the stars were aligned in its favor.” That proverbial dog company thought so, too. …

And Jason Riley posts on the speculation president bystander tried, ineffectually of course, to interfere for the UAW.

We may never know for certain, but some are speculating that President Obama‘s attempt to help the United Auto Workers organize a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., may have done more harm than good.

The union-organizing vote failed, 712-626, despite the fact that VW management had given union officials plenty of time and opportunity to make their case. Moreover, the UAW had the White House on its side. Just hours before three days of voting ended on Friday, Mr. Obama told Democratic lawmakers in a closed-door meeting that opponents of the union’s effort “are more interested in German shareholders than U.S. workers,” according to Reuters.

Writing in the Chattanoogan on Tuesday, columnist Roy Exum pondered “what unexpected role a markedly unpopular Barack Obama may have played in the stunning defeat.” The president’s approval rating is 43 percent nationwide, based on the Real Clear Politics average, but it’s only about 30 percent in the Volunteer State.

When Mr. Obama “tossed in his two cents’ worth in a way that was clearly designed to be leaked, it isn’t that big a stretch to believe the polarizing Prez may have inadvertently swayed a few emotional votes among the solidly-conservative work force,” wrote Mr. Exum

This is (not) the first time that the president has waded into a state issue on behalf of unions, only to find himself on the losing side after the dust had settled. Back in 2011 when Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was pushing collective-bargaining reforms that were vehemently opposed by Big Labor, Mr. Obama weighed in on behalf of his union allies. Not only did the reforms pass but Mr. Walker, a Republican, later prevailed in a recall election against a Democratic opponent backed by unions and the president.

At this point, labor might be forgiven for asking the president simply to butt out of such matters going forward.

The Atlantic with a post on how much 401K fees can shrink your retirement funds.

… The answer is a lot more than you think. (No cheating with a calculator before we get to the big reveal). Now, let’s say you contribute $3,000 to your 401(k) every year, which is a little more than the national average, starting when you’re 25. Let’s also say that you’re choosing between two investments: the lowest-cost index fund with a 0.08 percent fee, and a typical managed stock fund with, according to Morningstar, a 1.33 percent fee. And finally, let’s say that, though you don’t know it, they both return 7 percent a year, because, as we saw above, most managed funds don’t beat the market.

This 1.25 percent difference in annual fees adds up to a six-figure difference in lifetime earnings. That’s because you don’t just lose the money you pay in fees. You lose the returns you could have had on the money you pay in fees, too. As you can see in the chart below, this compounding effect doesn’t matter much for the first 20 years or so, but really accelerates after that. If you chose the lowest-cost index fund, you’d have $15,000 more at age 45, $55,000 more at 55, and $159,000 more at 65. That would balloon to $257,000 more if you waited to retire at 70. …

Interesting book on JFK the Conservative reviewed by the Washington Times.

Who would have thought it could have happened?

The scene: A Democrat in the White House is a supply-side tax-cutter (before Ronald Reagan, no less). Moreover, he goes out of his way to condemn communism, and not just the foreign left-wing dictators (That was easy then. Today’s leftists brag about vacations in the Castros’ Cuba.) Beyond that, this president condemned the infiltrators on our own soil. (Today, it would be called a “witch hunt.”)

America, meet the real John F. Kennedy, as viewed by Ira Stoll, revisionist fact-checker. In “JFK, Conservative,” this author and journalist acknowledges the liberal “reforms” the 35th president promised the nation, including education and medical care for the elderly (pre-Medicare, and surely predating today’s wobbling Obamacare). …

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Walter Russell Mead on the disaster in Syria.

This is what a policy looks like when it dies and goes to hell. The FT reports that violence is ramping up in Syria, with Assad agents using devastating “barrel bombs” against rebel areas. More:

According to the opposition Syrian National Council, 20,000 people have been killed in barrel-bomb campaigns since the start of the conflict in 2011. A Turkish official said about 2,000 had been killed since peace talks began in Geneva last month. The Damascus reg­ime has failed to offer an explanation for the bombing, but insists in its official media and during the Geneva talks that it is fighting a war against terrorists [...]

Residents say not a single building in rebel-controlled parts of Aleppo has been spared from damage in the bombing. Pictures from the city show entire districts reduced to ruins. One video shows people digging a toddler from the rubble. The little girl survived.

The President can only count his one remaining blessing: the press is still busy trying to shield itself from understanding the full damage this administration’s painfully inept Syria policy has done. Our Syria response has harmed America’s position, our alliances in the Middle East, and our relationships around the world — to say nothing of the humanitarian disaster we’ve implicated ourselves in.

To bluster heroically about how ‘Assad must go’, then do nothing as he stays; to epically proclaim grandiose red lines and make military threats that fall humiliatingly flat; to grasp with pathetic eagerness an obviously bogus Russian negotiating ploy; to sputter ineffectually as the talks collapse…it is rare that American diplomacy is conducted this poorly for so long a period of time.

To some degree we sympathize with those in the mainstream media who turn their eyes from the sight. It’s not just the decomposing corpse of Obama’s Syria/Russia policy that’s stinking up the joint. The comforting assumptions and diplomatic ideas of a whole generation of ambitious Washington foreign policy wonks are being discredited. They thought to build a new Democratic consensus foreign policy on the tomb of George W. Bush’s failures, but “smart diplomacy” turns out to be deeply flawed. The left is moving toward the kind of meltdown moment that many neocons had as the Bush foreign policy went off the rails. …

More kudos for Jonathan Turley, this time from Peter Wehner. 

During the period of the impeachment of Bill Clinton, there were few intellectually honest liberals to be found. George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley was one of them.

Professor Turley is a liberal who was deeply troubled by President Clinton’s abuse of power and violations of federal law. I recall having had lunch with Professor Turley and William Bennett during that period, and being mightily impressed with Turley’s independence of judgment.

Some 15 years later, I still am.

Professor Turley appeared on FNC’s The Kelly File to discuss his concerns about President Obama’s willingness, even eagerness, to “rewrite or ignore or negate federal law.” Mr. Obama’s repeated and unilateral actions amount to “the usurpation of authority that’s unprecedented in this country.” The liberal “cult of personality” that has grown up around the president worries Professor Turley, who says we are “turning a blind eye to a fundamental change in our system.”

“I think many people will come to loathe that they remained silent during this period,” according to Turley. …

Turns out Bill de Blasio is really a typically hypocritical leftist as he tries to suppress charter schools in New York City. His opponent there is Eva Moscowitz who is the subject of this weekend’s interview in the Wall Street Journal. 

For several months running, the Bill and Eva Show has been the talk of New York City politics. He is the new mayor, Bill de Blasio, an unapologetic old-school liberal Democrat, scourge of the rich and of public charter schools. She is Eva Moskowitz, fellow Democrat and educational-reform champion who runs the city’s largest charter network.

How did Ms. Moskowitz, a hero to thousands of New Yorkers of modest means whose children have been able to get a better education than their local public schools offered, end up becoming public enemy No. 1?

She is the city’s most prominent, and vocal, advocate for charter schools, and therefore a threat to the powerful teachers union that had been counting the days until the de Blasio administration took over last month from the charter-friendly Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Assailed by Mayor de Blasio and union leaders, Ms. Moskowitz is fighting back with typically sharp elbows.

“A progressive Democrat should be embracing charters, not rejecting them,” she says. “It’s just wacky.”

As she reminds every audience, the 6,700 students at her 22 Success Academy Charter Schools are overwhelmingly from poor, minority families and scored in the top 1% in math and top 7% in English on the most recent state test. Four in five charters in the city outperformed comparable schools.

“We think one of the sins of American education is intellectually underestimating children,” she says. “It’s so much more engaging for kids when they’re challenged.” Her other complaint about many traditional schools: “It’s incredibly boring.” While those public schools don’t have her flexibility to design a curriculum and hire and fire teachers, “engagement doesn’t cost any money. It can be done tomorrow if the adults decide that boredom is not acceptable and you embrace a curriculum that’s interesting and rigorous.”

Such astringent assessments of public education-as-usual are fighting words in New York and other cities where schools find themselves struggling to explain chronic underperformance. …

NY Post editors still want to hear from Lois Lerner.

The American people still need to hear from Lois Lerner. That’s a point that can’t be made often enough.

Remember her? She’s the IRS official who gave a statement before Congress declaring herself innocent of any wrongdoing — and then promptly took the Fifth.

Recently, Congress unearthed another IRS e-mail on which she was copied, talking about taking “off-plan” a discussion about how to harass the 501(c)4 groups the IRS had targeted. Meanwhile, leaks from officials involved in the investigation claim the FBI has not found ­anything criminal.

That’s an amazing finding, given the statement by the AmericanCenter for Law and Justice, which represents the IRS targets, that the FBI hadn’t interviewed a single of the center’s 41 ­clients. …

For some reason E. J. Dionne thought he had the intellectual firepower to take on Hayek and his followers. Foolish man. Volokh Conspiracy post deals with him.

Last week, E.J. Dionne Jr. penned a column in the Washington Post that blamed adherence to the tenets of the Austrian school of economics for gridlock in Washington. Well, sort of. He seemed to say that Austrian economics simultaneously was an obscure set of ideas of which no one has heard (except Ron Paul) and is yet powerful enough to provide the rallying cry for the Republican Party in Washington. More important, he says that Austrian economics is troublesome as a practical matter by blocking activist-government Keynesian-style interventions and deficit spending that would spur the economy and bring about greater wealth redistribution, but Austrian economics is wrong as a theoretical and historical matter. (As an aside, listening to the recording of Ron Paul’s speech, it doesn’t sound like he says “We’re all Austrians now.”  He says, “I’m waiting for the day when we can say ‘We’re all Austrians now.’”).

Dionne’s column is problematic in two ways.  First, he completely misrepresents the central argument of Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, which seems to be his central target. Second, he fails to accurately reflect the debate over the historical record of Keynesianism during the Great Depression and in particular the “stagflation” episode of the 1970s, which shattered the Nixon-era consensus on the wisdom of Keynesian economics. …

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James Taranto examines the cases of liberals who say they’re tired of defending obamacare, and asks an important question.”Why is it they think they are responsible for the defense?”

Ron Fournier is as mad as hell and he’s not going to take it anymore.

Correction: That was the late Howard Beale. Fournier, National Journal’s senior political columnist and editorial director, is going to take it for at least a while longer, and he isn’t so much mad as tapped out, or nearly so. In a recent column he explains, as the headline puts it, “Why I’m Sick of Defending ObamaCare.”

Fox News Channel’s Kirsten Powers feels the same way. On “Special Report With Bret Baier,” she paraphrased Fournier and enthusiastically assented: “The headline was ‘Why I’m Getting Tired of Defending ObamaCare,’ and I’m going to say, ‘Amen, brother.’ . . . People who have supported this law, who support universal health care, are constantly put in a position where they have to defend the president, who has really incompetently put this together, rolled it out.”

Which raises a question: What made Fournier and Powers think they had to defend ObamaCare in the first place? In Powers’s case, an answer suggests itself: Cast in the role of “Fox News liberal,” perhaps she feels obliged to stay on that side most of the time (though one suspects her Fox bosses would be tolerant of that particular heterodoxy).

But Fournier? He’s not supposed to be a partisan. “Like so many political columnists inside the Beltway, Fournier regularly exhibits a devotion to even handedness,” notes Mediaite.com’s Noah Rothman. “With a near pious commitment, no criticism of the Democratic Party can be issued without a commensurate nod to the faults and foibles of the Republican Party, and vice versa.” …

Kathleen Parker writes on white house spin.

It is easy these days to imagine that one is living in a fairy tale, albeit a dreary one.

In fairy tales, as in Washington, things are true that can’t possibly be — and what is not true can be defended by tilting the facts a certain way and catching the light just so.

Objective truth, it seems, has gone the way of trolls, goblins and gremlins, by which one should not infer that Truth has taken up residence in the U.S. Congress.

Cognitive dissonance is a rational response to recent news that Obamacare will reduce the workforce, which is hardly helpful to the economy, and insure less than half of the uninsured — from 55 million down to 31 million.

Let’s see if we can iron this thing out a bit. First, a few indisputable facts:

We are recovering from a recession, slowly. We continue to hope for improved employment numbers, even though we’re now told the jobless rate doesn’t matter anymore. Only about 3 million people have signed up for health insurance through the new marketplaces, well below expectations.

But, says the White House, things are looking good. …

Hot Air’s Allahpundit posts on Jonathan Turley’s complaint that the left’s indifference to presidential power grabs is beginning to border on a cult of personality.

“Beginning”?

There’s nothing here that you haven’t heard before if you watched him testify before Congress in December but it’s still worth watching for two reasons. One is his tone, which has grown darker and more apocalyptic since then. More than once here he warns that Obama’s “enablers” are destined to rue the fact that they remained silent “during this period.” Precedents are being set that will be built on by future presidents of both parties; for all the complaining about executive overreach by Democrats circa 2006 and Republicans today, the cold realities of power are what they are. I’m tempted to say that it was O’s latest unlawful delay to ObamaCare’s employer mandate that soured Turley’s mood, but I don’t think that’s it. I think it was the State of the Union, where Obama embraced bypassing Congress as formal policy. Look out for the phrase “borders on authoritarianism.” …

NPR Blog posts on the weight reducing power of whole milk. That’s right, it helps you keep pounds off. How’s that for counter-intuitive? 

I have to admit, I melt at the creaminess of full-fat yogurt.

It’s an indulgence that we’re told to resist. And I try to abide. (Stealing a bite of my daughter’s YoBaby doesn’t count, does it?)

The reason we’re told to limit dairy fat seems pretty straight forward. The extra calories packed into the fat is bad for our waistlines. That’s the assumption.

But what if dairy fat isn’t the dietary demon we’ve been led to believe? New research suggests we may want to look anew.

Consider the findings of two recent studies that conclude the consumption of whole fat dairy is linked to reduced body fat.

In one paper, published by Swedish researchers in the Scandinavian Journal of Primary Health Care, middle-aged men who consumed high-fat milk, butter and cream were significantly less likely to become obese over a period of 12 years compared to men who never or rarely ate high-fat dairy.

Yep, that’s right. The butter and whole-milk eaters did better at keeping the pounds off. …

Late night humor from Andrew Malcolm.

Fallon: Did you see the Sochi Olympics Opening Ceremony? There was a massive fireworks display. And that was just when someone plugged a hairdryer in at the hotel.

Conan: We just had Groundhog Day. The groundhog came out, saw five minutes of the Super Bowl and then went right back into his hole.

Leno: Was that the worst Super Bowl ever? Colorado fans went straight from recreational marijuana to medicinal marijuana.

Leno: The Broncos just could not move the ball. The last time I saw a Bronco move that slow was in LA and OJ was in it.

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In an effort to describe the healthcare rollout, Bart Simpson is quoted by John Podhoretz, “I didn’t think it was physically possible, but this both sucks and blows.”

I could rage on and on about Monday’s gobsmacking announcement that the Obama administration is once again unilaterally delaying a key aspect of its health-care law and what this act of astonishing royalism suggests about the president and his fundamental disrespect for the American system of checks and balances.

But I’m not going to. Instead, with all the dignity that a 52-year-old man and father of three can bring to the task, I will offer these observations instead:

Neener neener neener.

Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah.

Face it, all of you who celebrated and wept and danced when it passed back in March 2010, all of you who viewed it as the historic moment of transformation for the United States: This law is a lemon.

As Bart Simpson once said, “I didn’t think it was physically possible, but this both sucks and blows.” …

Charles Krauthammer on a few of the ways obamacare hurts jobs.

… But Obamacare’s war on jobs goes beyond voluntary idleness. The administration is now conceding, inadvertently but unmistakably, Obamacare’s other effect — involuntary job loss. On Monday, the administration unilaterally postponed and weakened the employer mandate, already suspended through 2015, for yet another year.

But doesn’t this undermine the whole idea of universal health coverage? Of course it does, but Obamacare was so structured that it is crushing small business and killing jobs. It creates a major incentive for small businesses to cut back to under 50 employees to avoid the mandate. Your business becomes a 49er by either firing workers or reducing their hours to below 30 a week. Because that doesn’t count as full time, you escape both the employer mandate to buy health insurance and the fine for not doing so.

With the weakest recovery since World War II, historically high chronic unemployment and a shockingly low workforce participation rate, the administration correctly fears the economic consequences of its own law — and of the political fallout for Democrats as millions more Americans lose their jobs or are involuntarily reduced to part-time status.

Conservatives have been warning about this for five years. This is not rocket science. Both the voluntary and forced job losses were utterly predictable. Pelosi insisted we would have to pass the law to know what’s in it. Now we know.

Jennifer Rubin provides a link to Jon Stewart’s takedown of the president’s latest ambassador picks. Follow the link in her post and wait through a 30 second spot. It’s worth your time.

… How in the world can the Democrats confirm these people? Frankly, we’re going to get a whole lot more of these ridiculous nominees due to the evisceration of the filibuster. The temptation to do so increases, and the administration can’t very well turn to their big shot donors and say, “I’d like to, but the Senate you know . . .” If there were ever the perfect example of why the filibuster is needed this is it. …

… This is yet another instance in which politics trumps virtually everything else in the administration. Sending unqualified ambassadors to important nations is actually minor compared to shifting the Afghanistan withdrawal to get troops home before the 2012 election. It is ironic that the president who came into office as a purported wonkish intellectual, an ideal technocrat, has in so many instances reflected the worst of mindless partisan politics.

It’s hard to remember that voters took the transformational and inspirational rhetoric of 2008 seriously. All of that has gone by the wayside as Obama has dug in both rhetorically and ideologically. But what likely brings both Democrats and Republicans together is their horror at a president who lacks the competence and will to govern well. The ambassadorial picks are only the tip of iceberg, of course. It’s small compared to Obamacare or the disastrous Syria policy, but it is all of a piece.

And it’s not just our friends on the right who are disgusted by the ambassador picks. Here’s WaPo editors.

… All presidents appoint some ambassadors who are not professional diplomats. Most have been harmless; a few have been stellar. Mr. Obama, however, has considerably stretched the boundaries of previous presidential records, both in quantity and in apparent disregard for quality. The president promised in 2009 to increase professional appointments, and the State Department said last Friday that it aims for a 70-30 split between career and political ambassadors. Yet, so far in his second term, 53 percent of Mr. Obama’s appointments have been political, according to the American Foreign Service Association. A third have been fundraisers for his campaigns.

The bundlers are going not just to London, Brussels and Vienna, where their roles may be largely decorative, but also to countries where relations with the United States are troubled. In addition to Mr. Mamet, Mr. Obama is dispatching fundraiser and soap-opera producer Colleen Bradley Bell to Hungary, a NATO country whose government has a disturbing record of undermining democratic institutions. At her confirmation hearing, Ms. Bell was unable to spell out U.S. interests in Budapest other than “to promote business opportunities, increase trade.”

Mr. Obama’s new ambassador to Norway, George Tsunis, raised $1.3 million for the Democratic Party in 2012 but didn’t know at the time of his hearing last month that Norway has a king but not a president.

Ambassadorial appointments for small allies such as Norway or tough partners including Hungary and Argentina matter because their governments rarely receive the attention of high-level officials in Washington and yet require skilled diplomacy. It’s no wonder that Argentina, the third-largest economy in Latin America but a perennial trouble spot, was tended by career diplomats under the four presidents who preceded Mr. Obama. His use of the Buenos Aires embassy and so many others as political plums signals a disregard for U.S. foreign interests.

Tammy Bruce calls him the “Mrs. Fletcher of Politics.”

First, it’s important that you know I think President Obama was born in the United States. I also think he may be the love child of the television character Mrs. Jessica Fletcher of “Murder, She Wrote.”

Think about it: Wherever Mrs. Fletcher went, someone ended up dead. Wherever Mr. Obama goes, a part of America gets punched in the face, falls into a coma or dies. Oh, sure, both characters seem nice enough, but inviting either to dinner (or to run the country) portends something disastrous.

When Mr. Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize for waking up one morning, we should have known it would invite chaos. They give him the prize, he lobs missiles into Libya, loses Afghanistan and Iraq and Libya to al Qaeda, sides with a tyrant against the Egyptian people, and draws a faux “red line” for Syria (did he hear it in a movie?), managing to make Bashar Assad even more powerful than he was before.

Ask the Syrian people (those who haven’t been gassed to death yet), what they think of Mr. Obama’s foreign-policy prowess.

Recently, a Reuters report wondered if the Japan-China relationship was “at its worst.” Well, if Mr. Obama’s track record continues, it will be soon. …

Tech Dirt says yup Direct TV has dropped the Weather Channel and instead is showing people the weather.

The Weather Channel has been well-deserving of mockery over the last few years, whether its for their efforts to sex up storms by naming them (in the process creating a nation of weather neurotics who become hysterical about drizzle), or for an ocean of TV and website content that has absolutely nothing to do with the weather (here’s some funny faces, yuk yuk). As such, their recent battle with DirecTV over retransmission fees doesn’t find the company getting much sympathy. Especially when the channel tries to argue that people will die without their inane assortment of non-weather-related content.

Normally in such retransmission disputes the content company has some leverage over the satellite or cable TV provider because what they’re withholding has somewhat irreplaceable value to the viewer (say, like “Breaking Bad”). In The Weather Channel’s case, their belief that they somehow held an exclusive over weather forecasting, combined with the fact that they have increasingly gotten worse at their one and only job, has given DirecTV the upper hand in the ongoing feud. After pulling the channel from the lineup back in January, DirecTV continues to battle The Weather Channel in a very simple way — by simply offering viewers the weather for a change …

CNS News reports Lake Superior most likely will be frozen over this year.

Lake Superior hasn’t completely frozen over in two decades.

But an expert on Great Lakes ice says there’s a “very high likelihood” that the three-quadrillion-gallon lake will soon be totally covered with ice thanks to this winter’s record-breaking cold.

The ice cover on the largest freshwater lake in the world hit a 20-year record of 91 percent on Feb. 5, 1994.

Jay Austin, associate professor at the Large Lakes Observatory in Duluth, Minn., told CNSNews.com that he expects that record will be broken this winter when the most northern of the Great Lakes becomes totally shrouded in ice. …