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If you’re wondering where Mark Steyn has been lately, Robert Tracinski has an update on the lawsuit filed against Steyn, National Review, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

The global warming hysteria is disastrous enough in its intended goal, which is to ban the use of our cheapest and most abundant fuels and force us to limp along on “alternative energy” sources that are insufficient to support an industrial civilization. But along the way, the global warming campaign is already wrecking our science and politics by seeking to establish a dogma that cannot legally be questioned.

The critical point in this campaign is a defamation lawsuit by global warming promoter Michael Mann against Mark Steyn, National Review, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

When the “Climategate” e-mails were leaked five years ago, a lot of us speculated that it could all end up in the courts, given the evidence that climate scientists were pocketing large sums of government money on the basis of a scientific consensus they were manipulating behind the scenes. But it’s typical of our upside-down political and cultural environment that when this issue does reach the courts, it will be in the form of a lawsuit against the climate skeptics.

Steyn and the others are being sued for criticizing Mann’s scientific arguments. In the case of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, for example, they’re being sued for Rand Simberg’s complaint that Mann “has molested and tortured data.” (See a summary of the case here.) Frankly, I’m not sure how I escaped this lawsuit myself. I shall have to review what I have written and see if my language was not sufficiently inflammatory. Perhaps I don’t have pockets deep enough to be worth looting. Or perhaps I’m not a big enough target to be worth intimidating and bankrupting. Note the glee with which the left slavers at the prospect of taking out a prominent voice on the right, with one leftist gloating that “it’s doubtful that National Review could survive” losing the case.

(Steyn points out that National Review is insured against such lawsuits and will survive. …

Victor Davis Hanson posts on Icarus In Chief. .

In the last two weeks, we learned that Bashar Assad has dismantled only 5 percent of his WMD arsenal, despite President Obama’s soaring rhetoric to the contrary. Russia violated a long-observed agreement with the U.S. about testing missiles. Iran’s take on the negotiations over its bomb program bears no resemblance to our interpretation. Chinese officials now happily leak fantastic stories about using their military to punish Japan. All that is trumped by veiled threats from the SunniGulf monarchies, terrified of Iran, to buy a bomb or two from Pakistan. We hear other rumors that even China thinks the new leadership in North Korea is unhinged and is not worried about friendly warnings from Beijing.

Whether all these incidents are minor or serious, and whether they are random or interconnected and perceived as proof of the loss of U.S. deterrence, depends on which particular bad actor is studying them to try to guess whether the Obama administration will do anything should a provocateur start a war or attempt to redraw a regional map.

In short, our Icarus-in-Chief, without much foreign-policy experience but with youthful zeal and good intentions, soared far too high for his flimsy waxen wings. Now they are melting, and as the American commander-in-chief careens back to earth, lots of those below are wondering what will come next. Still, there is a lot of irony as Obama freefalls to earth.

Everyone assumed the Europeans were conveniently pacifist and had eroded their defenses because they could — given the fact that the United States had guaranteed the safety of Europe throughout the Cold War and for another quarter-century after it ended. Americans accepted that Europeans could afford to ankle-bite the interventionist United States because the latter’s pledge to the alliance was unquestionable, and such were the natural psychological gymnastics of patron and client.

Then came the waxen Obama soaring on hope and change …

David Harsanyi says “obamacare is just another word for laws we ignore together.”

… Normally, when policy is as burdensome and ungainly as the Affordable Care Act has been, an honest person might admit that perhaps something isn’t exactly right with the law itself. Not today. A never-ending fount of partisan defensiveness makes it impossible to rethink — much less repeal — any part of Obamacare.

So, question: when was the last time policy was executed as chaotically and with such little regard for the law?  I don’t want to sound like a troglodyte, but the president, as head of the executive branch of the federal government is constitutionally obligated to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” not implement laws in an expedient manner, or a more prudent manner, or even in a way that he believes is more moral or a helpful for people struggling to find affordable health care. This is why we write bills down and debate them prior to passage. Or, at least, it used to be.

Jonathan Tobin says delays in the healthcare act won’t save Dems in November. 

From its inception, the strategy behind the Obama administration’s implementation of ObamaCare has been simple: to frontload the benefits and postpone the pain and costs of this massive government intrusion into the private sector for as long as possible. This deceitful approach enabled President Obama run for reelection in 2012 on the spurious promise of extending insurance coverage to the poor and those with pre-existing conditions without being held accountable for the problems with the law that would only become apparent in his second term. Over the course of the last year, as the president’s signature accomplishment debuted with a disastrous rollout, the administration has retreated bit by bit from its insistence on implementing the entire unwieldy and gargantuan edifice on the American people immediately after Obama was safely ensconced in his second term. A dysfunctional website and the president’s broken promises about patients being able to keep their coverage and their doctors has led to the law being dismantled piece by piece as various elements were delayed. Today, yet another element of the law was similarly postponed, by executive order. As the New York Times reports:

The Obama administration announced Monday that it would again delay enforcement of a federal requirement for certain employers to provide health insurance to employees, giving medium-size companies extra time to comply. The “employer mandate,” which had already been delayed to Jan. 1, 2015, will now be phased-in beyond that date for some businesses with more than 50 employees.

The motivation for this latest delay is transparently political. By delaying yet one more element of the law until after the midterm elections, the administration hopes to save some faltering Democratic red-state incumbents who, unlike the president, are faced with the difficult task of running for reelection in the wake of the ObamaCare rollout. …

WaPo blogger says lots of Dems running for re-election have no interest in being near the president.

… Several of the Democrats facing reelection in 2014 hail from dark red districts in states such as Alaska, Arkansas and Louisiana — the regions of the country where Obama is the most unpopular. Conventional wisdom would dictate that those candidates would attempt to keep their heads down — distancing themselves from the Affordable Care Act and avoiding joint appearances with Obama during his official visits to their states. Several of the most vulnerable Democratics Senators are already publicly distanced themselves from Obama following last month’s State of the Union.

“Overall, I’m disappointed with the President’s State of the Union address because he was heavy on rhetoric, but light on specifics about how we can move our country forward,” said  Arkansas Sen. Mark Pryor. “I’ll work with the President when I think he’s right, but oppose him when I think he’s wrong… I’ll continue to oppose his agenda when it’s bad for Arkansas and our country.”

Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu used her first campaign ad of the cycle to criticize the implementation of the federal health-care law, while North Carolina Sen. Kay Hagan was a no-show when Obama appeared in her state to speak at N.C.State last month. And here’s Sen. Mark Begich on Obama: “If he wants to come up [to Alaska], I’m not really interested in campaigning [with President Obama].” …

Debra Saunders posts on the Clintons who are AWOL in the war on women.

Do Americans want another Clinton in the White House? As former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton flirts with running in 2016, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., also a potential White House candidate, has put an interesting spin on Bill Clinton’s White House years. Democrats shouldn’t accuse the GOP of waging a “war on women,” he recently told “Meet the Press,” because President Clinton was a “sexual predator” with former intern Monica Lewinsky.

The next skirmish in the war on the war on women came from the Washington Free Beacon, which reported on papers archived at the University of Arkansas Libraries by Diane Blair, a deceased political science professor and close friend of Hillary’s. According to Blair’s notes, in 1998, the then first lady told her friend that her husband’s relations with Lewinsky — a “narcissistic loony toon” — represented “gross inappropriate behavior,” but it was “consensual,” as in “not a power relationship.”

One of the uglier archived documents is a 1992 campaign memo written by attorneys Nancy McFadden, now chief of staff to California Gov. Jerry Brown, and Loretta Lynch, president of the California Public Utilities Commission from 2000 to 2002. Under the heading “Defensive Research: Tying up ends and seeing ahead,” the memo’s first item no doubt referred to Gennifer Flowers, who said she had an affair with Bill Clinton:

“Exposing GF: completely as a fraud, liar and possible criminal to stop this story and related stories, prevent future non-related stories and expose press inaction and manipulation.”

Six years later, President Clinton admitted under oath to having had sex with Flowers, so it turns out Flowers wasn’t the “liar” in this little tale. Didn’t matter. With both Flowers and Lewinsky, Clinton operatives’ first impulse was to smear the women as liars. …

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David Harsanyi puts the olympics in proper context. 

A few months prior to the 2008 Summer Olympics games in Beijing, there was an Olympic torch running ceremony in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa. There, the nation’s Communist Party leader, Zhang Qingli, declared that “China’s red flag with five stars will forever flutter high above this land” before dropping a bit Jesse Myerson-ish rhetoric on folks, explaining that China would “totally smash the splittist schemes of the Dalai Lama clique.”

Qingli saw the Olympics as optimal moment to launch into some political haranguing, because the Olympics is a political event. Always has been. And sporadically, regimes in various stages of authoritarianism, say the Nazis or the Chinese Communists or the Russian Putinists, use this overhyped and overrated sporting exhibition to try and convince others of the superiority of their regimes. This is why the Germans made a spectacle in 1936, why the Soviets spent decades trying to create Ivan Dragos — and also why, the 1980 United States ice hockey victory over Soviet Union team was, for many of us, the greatest sports moment of all time.

Here’s how Charles Lane put it in a superb column detailing the uselessness of the event:

Whatever might be said for that idea in theory, it hasn’t panned out in practice. The ostensibly apolitical Games have been marred by several boycotts — of Montreal in 1976 (by African nations protesting apartheid), of Moscow in 1980 (by the United States and other Western countries protesting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan) and of Los Angeles in 1984 (by communist countries retaliating for 1980).

The Games also have created a target for extremists, from the Palestinian terrorists who killed 11 Israeli athletes at Munich in 1972 to ultra-rightist Eric Rudolph, who placed a deadly bomb at the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta. Consequently, these celebrations of international conviviality proceed under heavy military guard.

On the bright side, Sochi has been utter embarrassment for Vladimir Putin …

Victor Davis Hanson says California has two droughts; the first is lack of water, the second is lack of common sense.

There is little snow in the state’s towering Sierra Nevada mountains, the source of much of the surface water that supplies the state’s populated center and south. The vast Central Valley aquifer is being tapped as never before, as farms and municipalities deepen wells and boost pump size. Too many straws are now competing to suck out the last drops at the bottom of the collective glass. 

The vast 4-million-acre farming belt along the west side of the Central Valley is slowly drying up. Unlike valley agriculture to the east, which still has a viable aquifer, these huge farms depend entirely on surface water deliveries from the distant and usually wet northern part of the state. So if the drought continues, billions of dollars of Westside orchards and vineyards will die, row cropland will lay fallow, and farm-supported small towns will likewise dry up. …

… Yet there are really two droughts — nature’s and its man-made twin. In the early 1980s, when the state had not much more than half its current population, an affluent coastal corridor convinced itself that nirvana was possible, given the coastal world-class universities, the new dot.com riches of Silicon Valley, the year-round temperate weather, and the booming entertainment, tourism, and wine industries. …

… The California disease is characteristic of comfortable postmodern societies that forget the sources of their original wealth. The state may have the most extensive reserves of gas and oil in the nation, the largest number of cars on the road — and the greatest resistance to drilling for fuel beneath its collective feet. After last summer’s forest fires wiped out a billion board feet of timber, we are still arguing over whether loggers will be allowed to salvage such precious lumber, or instead should let it rot to enhance beetle and woodpecker populations.

In 2014, nature yet again reminded California just how fragile — and often pretentious — a place it has become.

Just north of CA is another state making bad choices Joel Kotkin has the story of Oregon which has some factories that have fled CA, but unfortunately also has some ideas that came from some of CA’s flakiest. 

Oregon is a beautiful place, and, for many of the state’s well-heeled residents, including many refugees from equally beautiful but overpriced California, economic growth not only is unimportant but is even a negative. Rather than create opportunity, the real issue, according to Gov. John Kitzhaber, is making sure the state ranks high on “the happiness index.” Forget sweating the hard stuff, and cozy up with a hot soy latte.

There’s a problem with this. Oregon’s unemployment rate remains above the national average and underemployment – the measure of people working part-time or well below their skill level – stands at nearly 17 percent, behind only Nevada and California. Since 2007, the state has lost over 3.4 percent of its jobs, a performance much worse than the national average and even California.

“You have to wonder about the rhetoric of happiness,” suggests economist Bill Watkins, who predicts the state won’t be back to 2007 employment levels till next year. “You need jobs for people to be happy, you would think.”

This dearth of opportunity extends even into Portland, the state’s dominant city. One recent study showed that earnings for educated males in the city are among the worst in the country. Portland, the land of Ph.D.’s driving cabs and working in coffee shops, notes geographer Jim Russell, “attracts talent for the sake of attracting talent” but does little with them once they arrive. No surprise then that the place has become widely described the “slacker capital of the world.”

Indeed, notes economist Bill Watkins, Oregon over the past five years has lagged in job growth behind not only the nation, but, in particular, its demographic twin, Washington state. Seattle has emerged as the most potent competitor to Silicon Valley, while Oregon’s tech sector is largely propped up by Intel’s plant in suburban Hillsboro, itself a byproduct of California’s regulatory over-reach. There has been no widespread stirring of tech, or for that matter, any strong industry in Oregon. …

From Forbes Magazine we learn about another unintended consequence of the affordable care act. And one more bureaucrat learns a lesson we must all pay for.

After the flawed rollout of the Affordable Care Act, most of Washington focused on repairing and delaying the law’s most obvious problems. However, a handful of lawmakers have finally noticed one of the law’s hidden regulations: a strict calorie labeling requirement for chain restaurants, vending machines, and other food distributors. What at first appeared to be more bureaucratic but harmless government do-gooding is now proving a verifiable nightmare for small business owners and federal regulators alike. …

… The calorie label clause, buried deep within the ACA’s 10,000 pages, seems harmless enough at first glance. Each restaurant chain with over 20 locations is required to display the calorie content of each food and drink item it serves on signs and printed menus–with vending machine distributors subjected to the same rules. But the regulation also covers “similar retail food establishments,” a clause vague enough to give FDA regulators sweeping power to determine who does and doesn’t have to comply.

FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg admitted that she “actually thought [calorie labeling] would be one of the more straightforward tasks…but little did I know how complicated it would be.” Hamburg’s concerns are hardly unfounded, but it’s small business owners and franchisees—not FDA bureaucrats—that will feel the most pain under the new law. …

Mark Perry posts on the NY Times when they had some sense.

It’s pretty amazing how the New York Times editorial board has changed its position over the last 27 years on the  government-mandated wage floor that guarantees reduced employment opportunities for America’s teenagers and low-skilled workers:

Here’s what the NY Times editorial wrote in January 1987 (“The Right Minimum Wage: $0.00“):

There’s a virtual consensus among economists that the minimum wage is an idea whose time has passed. Raising the minimum wage by a substantial amount would price working poor people out of the job market. Most important, it would increase unemployment: Raise the legal minimum price of labor above the productivity of the least skilled workers and fewer will be hired.

If a higher minimum means fewer jobs, why does it remain on the agenda of some liberals? A higher minimum would undoubtedly raise the living standard of the majority of low-wage workers who could keep their jobs. That gain, it is argued, would justify the sacrifice of the minority who became unemployable. The argument isn’t convincing. Those at greatest risk from a higher minimum would be young, poor workers, who already face formidable barriers to getting and keeping jobs.

The idea of using a minimum wage to overcome poverty is old, honorable – and fundamentally flawed. It’s time to put this hoary debate behind us, and find a better way to improve the lives of people who work very hard for very little.

What a change, following several decades of “economic amnesia” at the NY Times, which editorialized in today’s paper (“The Case for a Higher Minimum Wage“): …

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Angelo Codevilla says Solzhenitsyn was right when he said we should not live by lies.

Being human, politicians lie. Even in the best regimes. The distinguishing feature of totalitarian regimes however, is that they are built on words that the rulers know to be false, and on somehow constraining the people to speak and act as if the lies were true. Thus the people hold up the regime by partnering in its lies. Thus, when we use language that is “politically correct” – when we speak words acceptable to the regime even if unfaithful to reality – or when we don’t call out politicians who lie to our faces, we take part in degrading America.

The case in point is Television personality Bill O’Reilly who, in his pre-Super Bowl interview with Barack Obama, suffered the President to tell him – and his audience of millions – that the IRS’ targeting of conservative groups had been a minor “bonehead” mistake in the Cincinnati office, because there is “not even a smidgen of corruption” in that agency. O’ Reilly knew but did not say that both he and the President know this to be a lie, that the key official in the affair, Lois Lerner, had made sure that the IRS’s decision on how to treat the Tea Party matter would be made in Washington by writing: that the matter was “very dangerous” and that “Cincy should probably NOT have these cases.”

O’ Reilly did not call out the lie. Nor did he just remain silent. Rather, he said of Obama that: “his heart is in the right place.” …

The most vulnerable in our country are worse off now after five years of this administration. Arthur Brooks proposes a conservative, free market safety-net construct.

Conservative leaders owe it to their followers and the vulnerable to articulate a positive social-justice agenda for the right. It must be tangible, practical, and effective. And it must start with the following question: What do the most vulnerable members of society need? This means asking the poor themselves. …

… What, then, do poor people say they truly need to lead prosperous and satisfying lives? The real answer is both simple and profound. They need transformation, relief, and opportunity—in that order. On these three pillars, conservatives and advocates for free enterprise can build the basics of the social-justice agenda that America deserves. …

 

… The first pillar is personal moral transformation. By now, everyone acknowledges that poverty in America is often intertwined with social pathologies. In the late 1990s, scholars at the Urban Institute estimated that up to 37 percent of individuals enrolled in Aid to Families with Dependent Children abused drugs or alcohol. Similar findings connect poverty with criminality, domestic violence, and other problems.

Whether these problems are a product of poverty or mutually causal, common sense and the testimony of the poor themselves say that moral intervention must precede economic intervention for the latter to be truly effective.

All the evidence on happiness and successful living shows that living with intentionality, meaning, and purpose boosts well-being in unique and unparalleled ways. …

… This, not puritanism or bourgeois condescension, is the reason that conservatives must promote and defend the time-tested stores of personal and social meaning. To presume that low-income Americans are somehow unworthy of the same cultural standards to which we hold ourselves and our own families is simple bigotry. Genuine moral aspiration, not patronizing political correctness, will be the tip of the spear in a true social-justice agenda. …

 

… After transformation comes material relief. To deny that some Americans are genuinely needy requires willful blindness. In addition to the one-sixth of Americans currently receiving food assistance, consider a few more findings. A 2010 analysis from the NationalCenter on Family Homelessness found that child homelessness spiked by a staggering 38 percent during the Great Recession years. And a team of public-health researchers stunned readers of the journal Health Affairs in 2012 when they released new life-expectancy findings. Among disproportionately low-income white females with fewer than 12 years of education, the scholars found that average life expectancy had fallen sharply since 1990.

Conservatives eager to reverse these facts naturally reach for their checkbooks. As I found in my 2006 book Who Really Cares, the average conservative household contributes significantly more to charity than does the average liberal household despite earning less income. According to the 1996 General Social Survey, those who strongly agreed that “the government has a responsibility to reduce income inequality” gave away $140 on average to charity. Among those who strongly disagreed, the average gift was $1,637.

Of the 10 most charitable states in 2012, as ranked by the Chronicle of Philanthropy, nine went for Romney over Obama. Three times as many red states as blue states placed in the top 20 states in giving. And all but one of the 10 least charitable states swung President Obama’s way. …

 

… To recognize that a safety net for the needy is meritorious is one thing; to say exactly how to build it is another. Which programs should conservatives support? The beginning of an answer lies in the conservative social-policy success story of our time: the welfare reform movement of the 1990s.

American social policy expanded enormously after World War II, largely directing new support to fatherless families in poverty. Conservatives watched as generations of Americans were alienated from the workforce, whole classes defined themselves as claimants on the government, and millions were consigned to squalid public housing and became dependent on income support disconnected from incentives to work.

Two centuries earlier, Thomas Jefferson cautioned that “dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.” More recently, Franklin Roosevelt had warned in his 1935 State of the Union address that “continued dependence” on government support “induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.”

But Jefferson’s and Roosevelt’s words fell on deaf ears, and central planners charged ahead enthusiastically. …

 

… Enlightened labor policy complimented by an appropriate safety net is a key component of material relief. But it also meshes with the sine qua non of American conservatism, the third plank in the social-justice agenda: opportunity.

Nothing inspires conservatives more than a Horatio Alger story, the tale of a man or woman who started with nothing and climbed to the top. Therefore, I submit, nothing should trouble the political right more than the fact that the ladder of socioeconomic opportunity seems to be losing its lowest rungs.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston has shown that in 1980, 21 percent of Americans in the bottom income quintile rose to the middle quintile or higher by 1990. But those who started off in the bottom quintile in 1995 had only a 15 percent chance of becoming middle class in 2005. That is a one-third decline in mobility in under a generation. Other analyses tell a similar tale. One 2007 Pew study measured relative mobility in Canada and Scandinavia at more than twice America’s level.

How can a conservative social-justice agenda reverse these trends and expand opportunity for all? An opportunity society has two basic building blocks: Universal education to create a base of human capital and an economic system that rewards hard work, merit, innovation, and personal responsibility. So opportunity conservatism must passionately advance education reform and relentlessly defend the morality of free enterprise. …

 

… Simply look at worldwide prosperity over the past four decades. When I was a child in 1970, third-world poverty was a picture in National Geographic of a needy child. Charity might help, but we all knew that there was effectively nothing to be done. Our efforts were just thimblefuls in a vast ocean of tragic need.

The world has changed profoundly since then. According to ColumbiaUniversity economist Xavier Sala-i-Martin, the percentage of people in the world living on a dollar a day or less—a traditional measure of starvation-level poverty that he adjusts for inflation—has fallen by 80 percent since 1970. This is the greatest antipoverty achievement in world history. Yet it is not the result of philanthropy, para-statist organizations, or government foreign aid. This miracle occurred when billions of souls pulled themselves out of poverty thanks to globalization, free trade, property rights, the rule of law, and entrepreneurship.

In short, it was the worldwide spread of American-style free enterprise that saved billions from poverty by giving them their first opportunity to rise in history. Truly, this is America’s gift to the world. Conservatives can and must champion this truth without apology or compromise. For the sake of all people, our end goal must be to make free enterprise as universally accepted and nonpartisan as civil rights are today. …

 

… Our nation has a great deal of need that goes unmet, and it is only exacerbated by years of misguided statist policies and a materialistic culture. The social-justice agenda outlined above can reorient us toward our best selves and toward our obligation to help the vulnerable.

It is an agenda that seeks transformation, relief, and opportunity. It means defending a culture of faith, family, community, and work; increasing our charity and protecting the safety net for the truly needy; and fighting for education reform and free enterprise as profound moral imperatives. …

… Fighting for people doesn’t mean a catalog of massive government programs. It means thinking carefully about who is in need and how their need can best be met. In some cases, such as caring for the truly poor and defending our allies around the world, the right solution may well involve the government. In others—such as a crumbling culture, needy children caught in ineffective schools, entrepreneurs struggling to start businesses, or people permanently dependent on the state—the proper conservative answer is for the government to stop creating harm and get out of the way. In both cases, conservatives can and should be equally bold warriors for vulnerable people.

The conservative creed should be fighting for people, especially vulnerable people, whether or not they vote as we do. Such an experiment cannot guarantee success. But its spark will relight the fires of hope in a wearied country that 64 percent of Americans feel is “off on the wrong track.” In ethical, emotional, and potentially even electoral terms, no opportunity could be more promising than this opening to champion those who need our help.

This is our fight, and it is a happy one. After all, as Proverbs 14:21 reminds us, “He that despiseth his neighbor, sinneth: but he that hath mercy on the poor, happy is he.”

Roger Simon who has visited Russia a few times, posts on events in Sochi.

… Communist, socialist, capitalist or something not yet invented, Russia will always be Russia — at least in most of our lifetimes anyway.  It’s a fascinating place with an amazing culture of many of history’s greatest writers and musicians,  but no one would ever want to live there or go there for a fun recreational vacation.  It’s just nerve-wracking. (Don’t ask about the time I stayed in the Hotel Ukraina and the whole place had just been covered with heavily leaded paint and you couldn’t open the windows.)

So when I heard that Sochi had been chosen for the Winter Olympics, I laughed and said to myself — this I’ve got to see.  And apparently we are.  Good luck to Team USA.  I hope they packed some extra cases of Pellegrino or Evian, like five hundred bottles per athlete.  It sounds as if they’re going to need it for showers.

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This coming June is the ninth anniversary of the infamous Kelo decision where the Supreme Court said it was perfectly OK for a government body to take land from one person and give it to another who promised to develop the property for a purpose deemed preferable. The land in question still lies vacant because the City of New London cannot find a developer. National Review has a look.

Nine years after the Supreme Court’s Kelo decision gutted the right of American property owners to resist eminent-domain seizures, the neighborhood at the center of the case remains a wasteland.

FortTrumbull in New London, Conn., was bulldozed to fulfill the vision of politicians and developers eager to create a New Urbanist mixed-use “hub” for upscale living in the depressed town near the mouth of Long Island Sound.

But after nearly a decade, the land is nothing but vacant urban prairie. After homeowners were forced off their property for the sake of “economic development,” the city’s original development deal fell apart, and the urban-renewal corporation that ordered the destruction has not found a developer to use the land.

In January, The Weekly Standard’s Charlotte Allen reported on the horizontal blight that was Fort Trumbull, a neighborhood made famous by Kelo v. City of New London (2005), wherein the Supreme Court ruled that government may forcibly transfer property from one private owner to another if the government believes the latter will generate greater economic activity. …

Seth Mandel calls ‘Kelo’ the “shame of a nation.”

When Sarah Palin was criticized for her inability to answer a series of questions in interviews after her selection as John McCain’s running mate, various commentators each had the one that bothered them the most. The one that caught and held my attention was when Palin was asked which Supreme Court decision–other than Roe v. Wade–she disagreed with. I wasn’t bothered so much by a supposed lack of judicial expertise but rather reminded that conservatives have been too negligent in their outrage at one ruling in particular: the 2005 Kelo decision.

That was when the Supreme Court shredded property rights by upholding a Connecticut town’s eminent domain seizure of private property to transfer to a developer under the guise of improving blighted neighborhoods and thus fulfilling the “public use” requirement under the Fifth Amendment. It’s bunk, of course. I would like to be able to expect conservatives not simply to mention Kelo when asked what non-Roe decision they oppose, but to hiss the words through gritted teeth, preferably with smoke rising from their ears. Kelo was indefensible, an assault not simply on the Constitution but on the pillars of a free society, and a nation that forgets or excuses the high court for its role in this travesty should be ashamed of itself. …

 

… Respect for private property rights is an essential foundation for a free society–and our Founders knew it and said so. The court’s decision in Kelo looks worse with every passing year, and we shouldn’t forget it for a moment.

Charles Krauthammer with amazing counterintuitive facts about health care.

Swedish researchers report that antioxidants make cancers worse in mice. It’s already known that the antioxidant beta-carotene exacerbates lung cancers in humans. Not exactly what you’d expect given the extravagant — and incessant — claims you hear made about the miraculous effects of antioxidants.

In fact, they are either useless or harmful, conclude the editors of the prestigious Annals of Internal Medicine: “Beta-carotene, vitamin E and possibly high doses of vitamin A supplements are harmful.” Moreover, “other antioxidants, folic acid and B vitamins, and multivitamin and mineral supplements are ineffective for preventing mortality or morbidity due to major chronic diseases.” So useless are the supplements, write the editors, that we should stop wasting time even studying them: “Further large prevention trials are no longer justified.”

Such revisionism is a constant in medicine. When I was a child, tonsillectomies were routine. We now know that, except for certain indications, this is grossly unnecessary surgery. Not quite as harmful as that once-venerable staple, bloodletting (which probably killed George Washington), but equally mindless.

After “first, do no harm,” medicine’s second great motto should be “above all, humility.” Even the tried-and-true may not be true. Take the average adult temperature. Everyone knows it’s 98.6 . Except that when some enterprising researchers actually did the measurements — rather than rely on the original 19th-century German study — they found that it’s actually 98.2.

But if that’s how dicey biological “facts” can be, imagine how much more problematic are the handed-down verities about the workings of our staggeringly complex health-care system. Take three recent cases:

Emergency room usage. …

… This is not to indict, but simply to advocate for caution grounded in humility. It’s not surprising that myths about the workings of the fabulously complex U.S. health-care system continue to tantalize — and confound — policymakers. After all, Americans so believe in their vitamins/supplements that they swallow $28 billion worth every year.

George Will says we don’t have a president bystander. We have president ‘magic words.’

Barack Obama, the first president shaped by the celebratory culture in which every child who plays soccer gets a trophy and the first whose campaign speeches were his qualification for the office, perhaps should not be blamed for thinking that saying things is tantamount to accomplishing things, and that good intentions are good deeds. So, his presidency is useful after all, because it illustrates the perils of government run by believers in magic words and numbers.

The last progressive president promised Model Cities, with every child enjoying a Head Start en route to enjoying an Upward Bound into a Great Society. Today’s progressive president also uses words — and numbers — magically emancipated from reality.

Thirty months have passed since Obama said: “The time has come for President Assad to step aside.” Today, James Clapper, director of national intelligence, says Bashar al-Assad’s grip on power has “strengthened.” In last month’s State of the Union address, Obama defined success down by changing the subject: “American diplomacy, backed by the threat of force, is why Syria’s chemical weapons are being eliminated.” If saying so makes it so, all is well.

Assad, however, seems tardy regarding this elimination, perhaps because the threat of force was never actually made. The Democratic-controlled Senate nullified the threat by its emphatic reluctance to authorize force. Reuters recently reported that Assad had surrendered “4.1 percent of the roughly 1,300 tonnes of toxic agents” he supposedly has. The “.1” is an especially magical number, given the modifier “roughly” attached to 1,300 tons.

The English Civil War was not finally ended by negotiations between Oliver Cromwell and Charles I; Cromwell seized power and Charles lost his head. America’s Civil War ended when Robert E. Lee capitulated to U.S. (“Unconditional Surrender”) Grant. Russia’s civil war ended when Leon Trotsky’s Red Army defeated the White forces. Spain’s civil war ended with Francisco Franco in Madrid and remnants of the loyalist forces straggling across the Pyrenees into France. China’s civil war ended when Chiang Kai-shek skedaddled to Formosa (now Taiwan), leaving the mainland to Mao. But Syria’s civil war — after the massacres, torture, chemical weapons — supposedly will be resolved by a negotiated regime change: with words. …

Chicago Magazine profiles Valerie Jarrett.

What exactly does Valerie Jarrett—the Chicagoan often described as a big sister or mother figure to the Obamas—do in the White House? The instant histories of the Obama White House tend to portray her as the Obamas’ pit bull, a woman loyal only to the president, first lady and her own image. In a recent book on the 2012 campaign, Jonathan Alter writes that Rahm Emanuel, on agreeing to become Obama’s chief of staff, recognized that Jarrett would wield such outsized power that he tried unsuccessfully to finesse her into Obama’s senate seat. (Alter also speculates that Valerie Jarrett was one reason why Rahm hightailed it out of DC in late 2010 into the relative ease of the Fifth Floor.) 

Others in media and Washington circles portray Jarrett, who held top positions in Chicago government and business, as a brilliant strategist and thinker who practically runs both wings of the White House and who did as much or more than anyone to put the Obamas there. In 1991, Jarrett, then Mayor Rich Daley’s deputy chief of staff, offered Michelle Robinson a job in City Hall. Before Michelle accepted, she insisted that Jarrett meet with Michelle’s fiancé Barack Obama. Jarrett promptly took both under her wing and, over the years, introduced Barack to the inner Daley circle, to wealthy business people, and to the people who mattered in her enclave, Hyde Park—all of which helped Obama as he moved up from community organizer to Springfield to Washington.

So which is it? Here are six pieces of conventional wisdom about Valerie Jarrett, 57, followed by, in my opinion, the reality. …

… 4.  Jarrett is a mother figure to other White House staffers, especially women.

She’s certainly that to Barack and Michelle: “I can count on someone like Valerie to take my hand and say, You need to think about these three things,” Michelle told the New York Times’ Jodie Kantor. “Like a mom, a big sister, I trust her implicitly.”

And she’s certainly that in her own mind: “And I try very hard to make sure that I am available to people here, particularly, I think, women often come to me. I am older than most of the people here, so I try to be a resource.”

Jonathan Alter’s reporting revealed someone quite different: “Staffers feared her, but didn’t like or trust her. At meetings she said little or nothing, instead lingering afterwards to express her views directly to the President, creating anxiety for her underlings and insulting them by saying, `I don’t talk just to hear myself talking.’”

Derogatory nicknames abound for Jarrett: “Keeper of the Essence,” “Night Stalker” (because of her access after hours to the Obamas in their private quarters), “personal custodian of the president’s lofty motives and gifts.” The latter comes from This Town author Mark Leibovich, who quotes from an apparently leaked memo titled “Magic of Valerie,” its 33 talking points circulated to White House staffers ahead of a New York Times Jarrett profile.

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Andrew Malcolm looks over the last five years of speeches.

Did you ever find an old high school yearbook and shake your head at what’s changed since then? Not just the obvious clothing and hairstyles. But so many of the plans and promise of so many people.

Well, that’s what we’ve done. We went back 1,818 days to one of the first speeches Barack Obama gave as the 44th president. Back to Feb. 12, 2009, less than a month from his first morning in office when he grandly announced the imminent closing of the Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility.

There he was in East Peoria, Ill., at the massive Caterpillar factory, selling his then-$879 billion stimulus spending plan wending its way through the two Democrat-controlled houses of Congress. But you know what struck us as we read down memory lane?

It’s us that’s changed. wiser now about this president’s wily words. Obama hasn’t changed a bit. Well, not much. He’s changed in two minor ways.

As his poll numbers and trust have shrunk, his speeches have grown longer, much longer. As if throwing additional speeches and words at a public falling out of love with him will persuade more people. Like he threw so much of our money at so many not-really shovel-ready projects that were going to thrust us out of the recession.

The Peoria pitch was barely 2,000 words long, just 15 minutes. Today’s typical “remarks” are usually at least twice as long, even more. …

Malcolm says this time let’s get a real president by looking to the deep bench of the ranks of the GOP governors.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that the 2016 presidential race and its main competitors will be determined in Washington.

It can look that way with Washington media talking to Washington inmates about Washington issues on Washington shows. Rand Paul. Hillary Clinton. Marco Rubio. Ted Cruz. Paul Ryan. Peter King. (Just kidding.)

Because these past 1,842 days with a rookie senator pretending to be the nation’s chief executive have shown how really well that works.

Have you heard a single person not employed on Capitol Hill seriously suggest we need another speech-making legislator ascending to the Oval Office?

Or have you glanced at the approval ratings of that smug crowd recently? The single digits consist mainly of family and friends.

It’s time to return to hiring an executive to be America’s chief executive.

Five of the last six presidents were governors or a sitting vice president for a former governor. That doesn’t guarantee success at home or abroad; ask Jimmy Carter. But it sure provides a better shot at a president who takes responsibility and doesn’t claim ignorance as an excuse.

Which is why politics junkies should keep their eyes elsewhere these days. Places like Texas and Florida and even California. There, quietly without much notice beyond local news outlets, several of the GOP’s impressively deep bench of state chief executives are chatting up the big money folks.

Think Scott Walker. Chris Christie. Jeb Bush. Bobby Jindal. Rick Perry. Mike Huckabee, maybe John Kasich. …

Jennifer Rubin posts on presidential pipeline paralysis.

… In the case of the XL Pipeline, the president seems oddly paralyzed. For a guy who unilaterally changed his signature health-care law multiple times and rewrote immigration law without Congress, he has on the pipeline gone to the State Department not once but twice looking for cover. So why the angst?

As the former energy secretary put it, this is not a scientific question; it is a political one. You’d think it would be a slam dunk. He should want to show that he, unlike those Republicans, you know, “believes in science.” He is forever pivoting to jobs, worrying aloud about the inequality gap and fretting about low wages. All of these factors lean in favor of approving the pipeline. Yet in this White House the left must be soothed. The temperature of Hollywood and Silicon Valley elites must be monitored around the clock. This is the White House (and increasingly the party) of university professors, glossy fashion magazine editors, racial and ethnic advocacy leaders and, of course, public employees (who don’t get anything much out of the pipeline). The money and the energy in the party is with the anti-pipeline forces. Hence, the president is conflicted.

I suspect the president will eventually have to capitulate to reason — and/or to the tears of red-state Democrats. However, the difficulty he is having and the agonizing process he is going through should suggest  a fundamental conflict between his elite loyalty and his working-man appeal on inequality. This is how the Democratic Party faltered in the 1970s — the elites of the Democratic Party wound up offending what then became known as the “Reagan Democrats.” …

Roger Simon posts on the New York Observer take down of the NY Times opinion pages.

… I certainly agree about the mind-bending banality of the Times opinion page and the windiness (at best) of Friedman. But I think the reporters are off the mark on the cause.  They can blame it on Rosenthal if they wish — I have no opinion, not working there — but the real problem is far greater than any one editor.

To adopt what is becoming a modern cliché — it’s the ideology, stupid.

The Times reporters complained of the page’s uniformly negative tone, but not even S.J. Perelman or P.G. Wodehouse could write with verve in the service of modern liberalism.  You can’t bring a dead horse to life.  No writer is that good — at least on a regular basis.

How, for example, do you write an eloquent defense of Obamacare or justify the administration’s actions in Benghazi without resorting to the kind of obfuscation that makes for convoluted, or at best tedious, writing? How do you advocate for yet more government programs in a country already so mired in debt it’s hard to see how it will ever get out?  It’s Keynesian economics itself that’s the problem, not Paul Krugman.

Although I admire many of the writers at the Wall Street Journal, let’s admit they have a lot more to work with, a plethora of easy targets for a man or woman with even a modicum of wit. We live in an era when readers  are distrusting big government more than ever.  Where does that leave the NYT, that great tribune of of ever-expanding government? With a bunch of grumps on their hands. …

Here’s the article from The Observer.

IT’S WELL KNOWN AMONG THE SMALL WORLD of people who pay attention to such things that the liberal-leaning reporters at The Wall Street Journal resent the conservative-leaning editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. What’s less well known—and about to break into the open, threatening the very fabric of the institution—is how deeply the liberal-leaning reporters at The New York Times resent the liberal-leaning editorial page of The New York Times.

The New York Observer has learned over the course of interviews with more than two-dozen current and former Times staffers that the situation has “reached the boiling point” in the words of one current Times reporter. Only two people interviewed for this story agreed to be identified, given the fears of retaliation by someone they criticize as petty and vindictive.

The blame here, in the eyes of most Times reporters to whom The Observer spoke, belongs to Andrew Rosenthal, who as editorial page editor leads both the paper’s opinion pages and opinion postings online, as well as overseeing the editorial board and the letters, columnists and op-ed departments. Mr. Rosenthal is accused of both tyranny and pettiness, by the majority of the Times staffers interviewed for this story. And the growing dissatisfaction with Mr. Rosenthal stems from a commitment to excellence that has lifted the rest of the Times, which is viewed by every staffer The Observer spoke to as rapidly and dramatically improving.

“He runs the show and is lazy as all get-out,” says a current Times writer, and one can almost hear the Times-ness in his controlled anger (who but a Timesman uses the phrase “as all get-out” these days?). Laziness and bossiness are unattractive qualities in any superior, but they seem particularly galling at a time when the Times continues to pare valued staffers via unending buyouts.

The Times declined to provide exact staffing numbers, but that too is a source of resentment. Said one staffer, “Andy’s got 14 or 15 people plus a whole bevy of assistants working on these three unsigned editorials every day. They’re completely reflexively liberal, utterly predictable, usually poorly written and totally ineffectual. I mean, just try and remember the last time that anybody was talking about one of those editorials. You know, I can think of one time recently, which is with the [Edward] Snowden stuff, but mostly nobody pays attention, and millions of dollars is being spent on that stuff.”

Asked by The Observer for hard evidence supporting a loss of influence of the vaunted editorial page, the same Times staffer fired back, “You know, the editorials are never on the most emailed list; they’re never on the most read list. People just are not paying attention, and they don’t care. It’s a waste of money.” …

James Pethokoukis has a preliminary look at the January Jobs Report.

I will write up the January jobs report — lousy (establishment survey), pretty good (household survey) —  later, but I wanted to toss something out there. The recent CBO report on the labor market effects of Obamacare has raised the general issue of whether the US is moving away from work.

Here is a stat, reflected in the above chart, to think about: Before the Great Recession, there were 122 million full-time jobs in America. Now 4 1/2 years after its end, there are still just 118 million full-time jobs in America despite a labor force that is 1.6 million larger and a nonjailed, nonmilitary adult working-age population that is 14 million larger.

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Streetwise Professor notes John Kerry’s admission of failure with Syrian policy. Now Kerry wonders if and when the administration grows some gonads, will congress go along?

… Kerry supposedly asked the senators whether there would be support in Congress for a more robust policy.

There’s an easy answer to that: NO!  Even those senators and representatives who in principle would support such a policy will never do so given Obama’s behavior in August and September.  Remember how Kerry built the case for US intervention, going so far as to compare Assad to the Nazis,  but then Obama seized at the first opportunity to bug out.  After that performance, no member of Congress is going to put his or her neck on the line for Obama, especially given that (a) they have to know Obama is not committed to robust action, and will be looking for a way out, and (b) the Gates memoir makes it plain how Obama will engage in half-hearted military efforts for cynical political reasons.  Oh, and (c): the administration has acted so incompetently (and not just in Syria) that any sentient being would conclude that it cannot be relied on to do any better in the future.  Once burned, twice shy.

No.  No sane member of Congress will take risks for a feckless, cynical, and incompetent administration.  Ukrainian patriots shouldn’t do so either.

Jennifer Rubin lists Kerry’s mistakes.

Secretary of State John Kerry keeps telling us to trust him on Iran negotiations. But why should we? He’s gotten virtually every important issue wrong since taking office, and made some shockingly bad misjudgments.

Consider:

He thought a “peace conference” could bear fruit on Syria. Wrong.

He thought the Palestinians were interested in a peace agreement. Wrong.

He thought we should have a special relationship with China. Wrong.

He thought Mohamed Morsi was a democratic leader with whom he could get along. Wrong.

And even before he became secretary, you will recall, he thought Bashar al-Assad could be wooed. He was convinced the Iranians could be engaged, and he tried to throw sand in the wheels on Iran sanctions. He likewise ran interference for the White House, trying to slow down the passage of sanctions against Russia (the Magnitsky Act). He was convinced we didn’t need troops in Iraq.

In short, only Vice President Joe Biden and the president have made so many wrong-headed judgments in the last five years. …

That’s what some of our regulars think. How about a liberal from WaPo, Richard Cohen?

… in the Far East, what concerns South Korean, Japanese and other policymakers is not just the potential instability of the region but also the Obama administration’s erratic Syrian policy. A “red line” was pronounced, then ignored. Force was threatened by the president, and then the decision was lateraled to Congress where, to further the metaphor, the ball was downed and, just for good measure, deflated. None of this comforted the nations that see China as a looming menace and rely on the United States for backup. “[T]he administration’s prevarications over Syria continue to linger for the elites who drive national strategy in these countries,” wrote Michael J. Green , senior director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council under President George W. Bush.

The Syria debacle, coupled with the consensus that the United States is turning inward, is bound to produce instability. The South Koreans, in particular, have to worry if the Dear Leader in the North considers President Obama to be a paper tiger. The Japanese have to worry whether the Chinese have reached the same conclusion. The United States’ European allies worry that the United States has pivoted to Asia. In Asia, the worry is that the proclaimed pivot is just a rhetorical device.

In 1996, Madeleine Albright popularized a phrase used by President Clinton. She repeatedly called the United States the “indispensable nation.” The phrase lends itself to mockery, but it is dead-on. Nowhere is the United States more indispensable than in the Far East, where a rising China, acting like pre-World War I Germany, is demanding respect and flexing its muscles. It’s all too familiar: rising nationalism, excessive pride, irrationality ready in the wings and America going into its habitual hibernation. Only the mustaches are gone.

Another WaPo liberal, Dana Milbank, writes on the stunning developments out of the Congressional Budget Office which predicted the healthcare law would reduce the workforce by 2.3 million full time workers! This report plus the continued rollout problems make it increasingly likely the Supreme Court will drop some safes on the administration before they are finished with this term in June. Obama is vulnerable in three areas; executive over-reach, the healthcare act, and recess appointments. Pickerhead predicts the last two will be brought to an end this year. And who among mainstream Dems is going to arise and fight for continuation of obamacare? John Roberts is going to look very wise when the sorry chapter of this administration goes into the history books. Unfortunately, we are still left with the electorate that voted for the fool twice.

… Live by the sword, die by the sword, the Bible tells us. In Washington, it’s slightly different: Live by the CBO, die by the CBO.

The congressional number-crunchers, perhaps the capital’s closest thing to a neutral referee, came out with a new report Tuesday, and it wasn’t pretty for Obamacare. The CBO predicted the law would have a “substantially larger” impact on the labor market than it had previously expected: The law would reduce the workforce in 2021 by the equivalent of 2.3 million full-time workers, well more than the 800,000 originally anticipated. This will inevitably be a drag on economic growth, as more people decide government handouts are more attractive than working more and paying higher taxes.

This is grim news for the White House and for Democrats on the ballot in November. This independent arbiter, long embraced by the White House, has validated a core complaint of the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) critics: that it will discourage work and become an ungainly entitlement. Disputing Republicans’ charges is much easier than refuting the federal government’s official scorekeepers.

White House officials rushed to dispute the referee’s call — arguing, somewhat contradictorily, that the finding was both flawed and really good news if interpreted properly.

Press secretary Jay Carney quickly issued a statement saying that the CBO report was, by its own admission, “incomplete” and “does not take into account” some favorable effects of the law.

Carney postponed his daily press briefing, then arrived with Jason Furman, head of the Council of Economic Advisers, who argued that the Affordable Care Act couldn’t possibly be a job killer because 8.1 million jobs had been created since it became law. This is true — but irrelevant to the CBO finding. …

The White House reaction to the CBO report was silly and prompted a post from Jennifer Rubin. Instead of president bystander, perhaps we can call him president news cycle.

… All this leads me to believe that the White House, as it has done with each rotten bit of news and instance of Obamacare’s unworkability, is saying whatever it needs just to get through a few news cycles. Because it will not admit any design flaws in the fundamental structure of the bill, it must resort to silly and self-contradictory talking points — or simply misrepresent facts, as the president did when he first claimed you could keep your insurance plan and later denied he said you could keep your insurance plan. The notion that all these bad things — insurance cancellations, reductions in work — simply “happen” in proximity to Obamacare is unbelievable, and does damage to the defense of legitimate safety net problems and efforts to reform those problems.

Obamacare is destroying the public’s faith in the president, in big government and in the premise of liberalism itself — that government programs have a dynamic effect on society and individual behavior. It’s more than the GOP has done in decades.

And, in the same vein, Byron York reports that the liberal Brookings Institution has found obamacare will reduce the incomes of most Americans. 

There’s no doubt the Affordable Care Act will redistribute wealth in America. People at the top of the income ladder will pay more; people at the bottom will benefit. But how, exactly, will that work?

A new study finds that Obamacare’s redistribution will be stunningly lopsided. Scholars at the liberal Brookings Institution have discovered that Obamacare will increase the income of Americans in the lowest 20 percent of the income scale, and especially in the lowest ten percent. But all other income groups — even people who make very modest incomes in the $25,000 to $30,000 range, as well as all income brackets above that — will experience a decline in income because of Obamacare.

In other words, Obamacare is going to cost some of the very people it was designed to help.

Brookings scholars Henry Aaron and Gary Burtless sought to determine the law‘s impact on income in 2016, when almost all of Obamacare will be in effect. To do so, they adopted a broad definition of income — not just a person’s wages, but also pension income, employer health coverage, government cash transfers, food stamps, other benefits, and now, subsidies from Obamacare.

They found quite an impact. “The ACA may do more to change the income distribution than any other recently enacted law,” Aaron and Burtless wrote. Obamacare provides billions in subsidies to those who qualify, expands Medicaid benefits, cuts Medicare, fines those who don’t purchase government-approved coverage and levies new taxes — all of which will change how much income millions of Americans bring in each year. …

As if the continued troubles of the white house creeps are not enough to give a boost to our thoughts coming into the weekend, Power Line posts on the New York Observer story on discontent at the NY Times.

Even the New York Times Hates the New York Times!

Its editorial board, anyway. For sheer entertainment value, it is hard to beat this Observer story about the ongoing civil war at the Times:

“It’s well known among the small world of people who pay attention to such things that the liberal-leaning reporters at The Wall Street Journal resent the conservative-leaning editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. What’s less well known—and about to break into the open, threatening the very fabric of the institution—is how deeply the liberal-leaning reporters at The New York Times resent the liberal-leaning editorial page of The New York Times.

The New York Observer has learned over the course of interviews with more than two-dozen current and former Times staffers that the situation has “reached the boiling point” in the words of one current Times reporter.”

Why do the reporters hate the editorial page? Let’s count the ways: 1) The editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, is arrogant, petty and vindictive. 2) The news room has suffered deep cuts, while the editorial page is lavishly staffed, and yet turns out a lousy product. 3) The poor quality of the paper’s editorials is embarrassing: “they’re completely reflexively liberal, utterly predictable, usually poorly written and totally ineffectual.” Well, they aren’t totally without value. We have fun laughing at them.

It also galls the Times news room that the paper’s columnists are “tired and irrelevant.” Thomas Friedman comes in for special abuse. These are quotes from reporters at the Times:

Andrew Malcolm with late night.

Conan: The Miami Heat canceled Justin Bieber’s courtside tickets. A Heat spokesman said, “Bieber’s not acting like an NBA fan. He’s acting like an NBA player.”

Leno: Obama’s State of the Union was last week. He decided against discussing drugs because he’s not sure which side he’s on.

Leno: Ratings for Obama’s State of the Union were the lowest in 14 years, Only 33 million people. Which is still pretty good since it was a rerun.

Conan: Justin Bieber was charged with assaulting a Toronto limo driver. The driver is suffering from minor injuries and being the laughing-stock of the limo industry.

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A treat today. Nothing about the creeps in government. (Well, the cartoons are here. But otherwise public narcissist free zone)

Fresh off Seattle’s big blowout Super Bowl, John Tamny congratulates Pete Carroll the NFL’s greatest failure. The ups and downs of Carroll’s career are quite a story.

Pete Carroll’s Seattle Seahawks thoroughly mauled the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XLVIII, 43-8. The win squarely places Carroll in an elite circle of all-time great football coaches.

Most would give anything to have a Super Bowl win on their resume. In Carroll’s case, he’s not only joined the fraternity of Super Bowl winners, but he can also claim two national titles on the collegiate level at the University of Southern California (USC). A few more quality seasons in the NFL likely punches Carroll’s ticket to the NFL’s Hall of Fame.

Notable about the ever ebullient Carroll is that he wasn’t always considered a winner. At one time he was very much seen as unsuited to the head coach’s role; so much so that he was unemployed. Carroll’s path to football’s elite was a checkered one, and it speaks to the wondrous, life enhancing value of failure as the driver of future success. Put plainly, when we shield individuals and businesses (think the bailed out banks and carmakers) from their errors, we perpetuate what makes them mediocre while robbing them of the knowledge that would make them successful.

Most readers are familiar with his story, but Carroll’s first stop as a NFL coach COH -2.9% was with the New York Jets in 1994. Though his only team there started out strong, and was in the hunt for a playoff spot right up to the 12th week of the ’94 season, a fake spike by Dan Marino of the Miami Dolphins led to a heartbreaking loss that the Jets seemingly never recovered from. The Jets finished the season with a 6-10 record after which owner Leon Hess, impatient for a winning season late in life, unceremoniously fired Carroll. …

… Happily for Carroll now, he’s once again a Super Bowl winning coach who has ascended to an elite echelon of coaches. Talented as he always was, it was failure at the NFL level that forced him to prove himself on the collegiate level, and it also provided this intensely competitive man who had been dismissed as pro-coaching material with the fuel to prove everyone wrong.  Notable there is that Carroll helped pick players for his Super Bowl winning team that were underestimated much as he was. Russell Wilson was a 3rd round draft choice after being judged too short, shutdown cornerback Richard Sherman lasted until the 5th round, game MVP Malcolm Smith was a 7th round pick, and wideout Doug Baldwin wasn’t drafted at all.  There’s no greater gift in life than that of being underestimated, and the naysayers ultimately did Carroll and his players a big favor in expressing their disdain.

Congratulations to Pete Carroll, the NFL’s greatest failure. His past errors made tonight possible, and they’re a reminder to us all that mistakes made are only bad if we don’t learn from them. …

Two Sunday’s ago, the NY Times’ Business section had an interesting and surprisingly funny profile of an irreverent Greenwich, CT real estate broker, Christopher Fountain.

As he drives his white pickup truck past the manors that crowd the hills and meadows along Round Hill Road in Greenwich, Conn. — a town that has long signified what it means to be rich in America — Christopher Fountain snorts.

One of the gaudy estates is owned by a hedge fund kingpin now residing in prison; others belong to a real estate investor just coming out of prison and an investment adviser who steered his clients and their billions to Bernard L. Madoff. Then, to cap it off, a guy in an 8,000-square-foot mansion is charged with crushing his wife’s skull in with a baseball bat.

This is “Rogues Hill Road,” or so Mr. Fountain has called this 3.5-mile stretch of asphalt. “All these aspirational schnooks came out here thinking that they had really made it,” said Mr. Fountain, a real estate broker, blogger and lifelong Greenwich resident. “But then the tide went out and what you are left with is a bunch of crooks.”

Believe it or not, Mr. Fountain actually makes a living brokering mega-mansion real estate deals to these so-called schnooks, among others.

And his blog, For What It’s Worth, has attracted a cult following among those he lampoons — the financial titans who can afford to plunk down $5 million or more on a house but who nonetheless seem to appreciate his scabrous take on Greenwich residents’ run-ins with the law, debt-fueled implosions or plain old bad taste.

Indeed, Mr. Fountain would seem to spend as much time selling schadenfreude as houses.

The essence of his complaint — that decades of easy money and ceaseless greed have created a glut of unsalable houses that will remain a blight on his hometown for many years — highlights one of the more curious anomalies of today’s explosion in asset prices. …

How about a shark you never heard of? It grows to 20 feet and eats moose!  Wired has the story of the Greenland shark. And if you follow the link there is some video of one of these animals in the St. Lawrence River estuary. Me too!? The ‘estuary’ is actually the Gulf of St. Lawrence which is the world’s largest river estuary and is the outlet for the Great Lakes.

Say hello to the Greenland shark (Somniosus microcephalus), also known as the gurry shark, grey shark, sleeper shark, or by the Inuit name Eqalussuaq. It’s the second largest carnivorous shark after the great white, but luckily for us it lives in deep Arctic waters where it rarely encounters people.

The Greenland shark has a sluggish look, with a thickset, cylindrical body and a small head with a short snout and tiny eyes. They’re one of the more unusual sharks out there, in appearance and behavior.

Read on to learn what sets this slow-moving giant apart from other sharks.

1) They’re rarely observed and somewhat mysterious. The first underwater photos of a live Greenland shark were taken in the Arctic in 1995, and the first video images of a Greenland shark swimming freely in its natural environment were not obtained until 2003.

2) They like it cold. Greenland sharks are native to the North Atlantic waters around Greenland, Canada, and Iceland. They are the only true sub-Arctic shark and the only shark that can tolerate Arctic temperatures year round. They prefer very cold water (-1°C to 10°C). In the summer, they tend to stay in the ocean’s depths where the water is coldest. In the winter, they make a vertical migration to the surface layer, which at that time is colder than the water on the sea floor. …

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Finally, Peggy Noonan gets it.

The State of the Union was a spectacle of delusion and self-congratulation in which a Congress nobody likes rose to cheer a president nobody really likes. It marked the continued degeneration of a great and useful tradition. Viewership was down, to the lowest level since 2000. This year’s innovation was the Parade of Hacks. It used to be the networks only showed the president walking down the aisle after his presence was dramatically announced. Now every cabinet-level officeholder marches in, shaking hands and high-fiving with breathless congressmen. And why not? No matter how bland and banal they may look, they do have the power to destroy your life—to declare the house you just built as in violation of EPA wetland regulations, to pull your kid’s school placement, to define your medical coverage out of existence. So by all means attention must be paid and faces seen.

I watched at home and thought: They hate it. They being the people, whom we’re now supposed to refer to as the folks. But you look at the polls at how people view Washington—one, in October, had almost 9 in 10 disapproving—and you watch a Kabuki-like event like this and you know the distance, the psychic, emotional and experiential distance, between Washington and America, between the people and their federal government, is not only real but, actually, carries dangers. History will make more of the distance than we do. Someday in the future we will see it most vividly when a truly bad thing happens and the people suddenly need to trust what Washington says, and will not, to everyone’s loss.

In the country, the president’s popularity is underwater. In the District of Columbia itself, as Gallup notes, it’s at 81%. The Washington area is now the wealthiest in the nation. No matter how bad the hinterlands do, it’s good for government and those who live off it. The country is well aware. It is no accident that in the national imagination Washington is the shallow and corrupt capital in “The Hunger Games,” the celebrity-clogged White House Correspondents Dinner, “Scandal” and the green room at MSNBC. It is the chattering capital of a nation it less represents than dominates. …

A FL LawProf says the president cannot ignore laws. 

As every grade-schooler knows, Congress has sole authority to make laws. The president has a corresponding duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” When one branch of government exceeds its authority, separation of powers is violated, and representative government breaks down.

Presidents have power to fill gaps or ambiguities in laws passed by Congress. They do not, however, have power to ignore laws as written. For example, when President Obama unilaterally raised the minimum wage for federal contractors’ employees, he directly contravened the Fair Labor Standards Act, which says that “every employer shall pay to each of his employees” a minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.

President Obama has shown a penchant for ignoring the plain language of our laws. He unilaterally rewrote the employer mandate and several other provisions of the Affordable Care Act, failing to faithfully execute a law which declares, unambiguously, that these provisions “shall” apply beginning Jan. 1, 2014. Similarly, in suspending deportation for a class of young people who entered this country illegally, the president defied the Immigration and Nationality Act, which states that any alien who is “inadmissible at the time of entry” into the country “shall” be removed. …

And a Daily Beast article says he can’t ignore the truth about the good wages women are actually getting.

President Obama repeated the spurious gender wage gap statistic in his State of the Union address. “Today,” he said, “women make up about half our workforce. But they still make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. That is wrong, and in 2014, it’s an embarrassment.”

What is wrong and embarrassing is the President of the United States reciting a massively discredited factoid. The 23-cent gender pay gap is simply the difference between the average earnings of all men and women working full-time. It does not account for differences in occupations, positions, education, job tenure, or hours worked per week. When all these relevant factors are taken into consideration, the wage gap narrows to about five cents. And no one knows if the five cents is a result of discrimination or some other subtle, hard-to-measure difference between male and female workers. In its fact-checking column on the State of the Union, the Washington Post included the president’s mention of the wage gap in its list of dubious claims. “There is clearly a wage gap, but differences in the life choices of men and women… make it difficult to make simple comparisons.”

Consider, for example, how men and women differ in their college majors. Here is a list (PDF) of the ten most remunerative majors compiled by the GeorgetownUniversityCenter on Education and the Workforce. Men overwhelmingly outnumber women in all but one of them:

1.   Petroleum Engineering: 87% male
2.   Pharmacy Pharmaceutical Sciences and Administration: 48% male
3.   Mathematics and Computer Science: 67% male
4.   Aerospace Engineering: 88% male
5.   Chemical Engineering: 72% male …

Virginia Postrel defends art majors. 

President Obama had a perfectly fine message for young people when he spoke at a General Electric plant in Wisconsin yesterday: Learning a skilled trade can be just as lucrative and worthy of respect as getting a college diploma. Unfortunately, that’s not what he said.

Instead, he took a cheap shot at the favorite punching bag of people who deride higher education in general and the liberal arts in particular. He attacked art history. “I promise you, folks can make a lot more potentially with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree,” he said.

It was the cheapest of cheap shots because, as I noted in a column two years ago, almost no one majors in art history. Art history majors account for less than 0.2 percent of working adults with college degrees. …

Jillian Kay Melchoir posts on the felons who are obamacare navigators. In CA, of course.

At least 43 convicted criminals are working as Obamacare navigators in California, including three individuals with records of significant financial crimes.

Although some of the offenses are decades old, and although convicted criminals account for only 1 percent of the 3,729 certified enrollment counselors in the state, Californians still have good cause to be concerned about their privacy.

Even a single crooked navigator could do significant harm to the public. That’s because when navigators sign consumers up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, they have access to lots of private information, including Social Security numbers, home addresses, and financial data — basically, everything on the wish list of identity thieves and fraudsters. Navigators also are likely to work with a population that is more vulnerable than average.

Limited statistics released by Covered California — the state’s new health-insurance exchange — showed that one navigator has repeat forgery offenses — one in 1982, then another in 1994, with a burglary in between. Another had two forgery convictions in 1988, in addition to a domestic-violence charge a decade later. Another committed welfare fraud in 1999 and had shoplifted on at least two prior occasions. Since 2000, individuals now working as navigators have committed crimes including child abuse, battery, petty theft, and evading a police officer. At least seven navigators have multiple convictions. The information released covered only certified enrollment counselors, one of the three types of navigators working in California.

These statistics raise a delicate and controversial issue. On the one hand, it’s in the public interest to give former criminals the chance to reform themselves and make a living in the legitimate economy. On the other hand, innocent consumers deserve adequate protection of their private information, especially when they’re being compelled to buy something. …

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Mike Huckabee was more stupid than usual last week. Charles Krauthammer tries to undo some of the damage.

What is it about women that causes leading Republicans to grow clumsy, if not stupid? When even savvy, fluent, attractively populist Mike Huckabee stumbles, you know you’ve got trouble. Having already thrown away eminently winnable Senate seats in Missouri and Indiana because of moronic talk about rape, the GOP might have learned. You’d think.

Huckabee wasn’t quite as egregious, just puzzling and a bit weird. Trying to make a point about Obamacare mandating free contraceptives, he inexplicably began speculating that the reason behind the freebie was the Democrats’ belief that women need the federal government to protect them from their own libidos.

Bizarre. I can think of no Democrat who has ever said that, nor any liberal who even thinks that. Such a theory, when offered by a conservative, is quite unfortunately self-revealing.

In any case, why go wandering into the psychology of female sexuality in the first place? It’s ridiculous. This is politics. Stick to policy. And there’s a good policy question to be asked about the contraceptive mandate (even apart from its challenge to religious freedom). It’s about priorities. By what moral logic does the state provide one woman with co-pay-free contraceptives while denying the same subvention to another woman when she urgently needs antibiotics for her sick child? …

US News OpEd, reviewing the coverage of Sarah Palin, GOP, and Wendy Davis, Dem, suggests the real war on women is the mainstream media treatment of Republican women.

… when National Journal writes that there is a lack of women moving up in GOP leadership – they blame the party. At what point though, do we question the media’s double standard against women? What woman in her right mind would want to run the media gauntlet that they’d face running for office as a Republican?

I grew up in a family of four girls. There were no limits placed on us as kids; we were never told what we could or couldn’t be. In fact, I vividly remember my grandfather telling me that I should become the first woman president.

As a single mom to two girls, I find it interesting that I never tell my daughters that they should run for president. Not to say that they’ll adopt my political persuasion – but if they did – would I want them to run for office? I don’t think so. And it’s not because I fear the GOP.

Who wants to watch their daughter be subjected to the press? Not this Republican woman.

Stephen Moore tours Grand Rapids and parts of Michigan that are not Detroit. Surprise! Things are going well.

… This area has long been known for its productive agriculture, landmark companies like Amway, Steelcase and Herman Miller, and world-class medical facilities such as the Van Andel Research Institute along the “Medical Miracle Mile” off I-96 in Grand Rapids.

Still, the region is not fully independent of the boom-and-bust cycles of the domestic auto industry. Many of the local business owners I met grimace when recalling the 30%-50% crash in factory orders during the crisis years of 2008-10.

Fred Keller, president of Cascade Engineering, which employs more than 1,000 workers assembling truck and auto parts, recalls how the more senior factory workers volunteered to take lower pay and a cut in hours during the depths of the recession to avoid the misery of layoffs of younger workers with families to support. Others logged extra hours without pay to help pull their employers through the darkest hours of the crisis.

This workers-united attitude would rarely be seen in a United Auto Workers plant. But unions are scarce in this part of the state, and that may be a key to its success. Collecting unemployment benefits and welfare is still frowned upon—and the notion in Washington that handouts for doing nothing are an economic “stimulus” draws hearty laughs.

Gentex, with its 4,000 employees, is a corporate anchor in the region. The company’s skilled workers operate tens of millions of dollars in state-of-the art machinery. The brain center of the facility is a lab with physicists, chemists and designers who are constantly developing new technologies, such as high-tech dimming windows for airplanes, a new Gentex product line. The company owns more than 600 patents.

But Gentex, like most of the state’s biggest employers, has had its share of struggles. Fred Bauer, the company’s founder and CEO, remembers that when he opened for business in 1974 the office was across the street from a graveyard. “Believe me, there were many times we thought we would end up buried in that cemetery,” he says. …

Jonathan Tobin posts on Scarlett Johansson’s pro-Israeli decision between Oxfam and SodaStream.

The (Palestinian) BDS campaign against SodaStream took an unexpected turn yesterday when actress Scarlett Johansson announced her resignation as a representative of Oxfam. The British-based coalition of philanthropic groups had condemned Johansson’s role as a commercial spokesperson for SodaStream, an Israeli soda machine manufacturer, because of its location in the Jerusalem suburb of Maale Adumim in the West Bank. Initially, Johansson sought to remain with both organizations, but it was soon clear that she had to choose and released the following statement through a spokesman:

“Scarlett Johansson has respectfully decided to end her ambassador role with Oxfam after eight years,” the statement said. “She and Oxfam have a fundamental difference of opinion in regards to the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. She is very proud of her accomplishments and fundraising efforts during her tenure with Oxfam.

In response, Oxfam thanked Johansson for her service but made it clear that her decision with SodaStream meant she was no longer welcome:

While Oxfam respects the independence of our ambassadors, Ms. Johansson’s role promoting the company SodaStream is incompatible with her role as an Oxfam Global Ambassador. Oxfam believes that businesses, such as SodaStream, that operate in settlements further the ongoing poverty and denial of rights of the Palestinian communities that we work to support.

Oxfam is opposed to all trade from Israeli settlements, which are illegal under international law. Ms. Johansson has worked with Oxfam since 2005 and in 2007 became a Global Ambassador, helping to highlight the impact of natural disasters and raise funds to save lives and fight poverty.

This is a remarkable turn of events. For Johansson, a prominent Hollywood liberal who has campaigned for Democrats and progressive causes, Oxfam was a perfect fit because of her interest in poverty-related causes. But as one of the most visible international charities, it was also a good match for a career in that it added a touch of gravitas to an actress who might otherwise be trivialized as the only woman to be named the sexiest woman in the world by Esquire twice. One might have thought that in terms of an immediate monetary reward, Johansson would choose SodaStream over Oxfam because one pays her and the other doesn’t. But in terms of positive publicity and maintaining her status as a member in good standing of the Hollywood liberal establishment, Oxfam might have been the more sensible choice. …

Kudos to Johansson from the editors of The Daily News.

Actress Scarlett Johansson should need no introduction. She’s glamorous and much in demand as a personality who can lend star power to commercial projects and charitable causes.

One of the latter has been Oxfam, a not-for-profit organization that “works to find practical, innovative ways for people to lift themselves out of poverty and thrive.” So says its annual report.

Now, though, Oxfam has forced Johansson to quit as one of its global ambassadors after she refused to adhere to the rabid, anti-Israel malice of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. In stepping down, she sets a powerful moral example. …

And from Jennifer Rubin.

… Johansson declared, “SodaStream is a company that is not only committed to the environment but to building a bridge to peace between Israel and Palestine, supporting neighbors working alongside each other, receiving equal pay, equal benefits and equal rights.”

SodaStream’s CEO David Birnbaum responded to the flap: “I’m getting encouragement from her that we should stay the course, and keep on doing the right thing and helping people. She is not only a superhero in her movies, she is a superhero in real life.”

For standing up for the actual interests of Palestinians and Jews, resisting the BDS bullies and for risking the ire of the anti-Israel left, Johansson deserves praise and support. SodaStream deserves praise as well, and a bump in sales.

Heather Mac Donald thinks Bill de Blasio will re-break NY City’s windows.

Bill de Blasio won the mayoralty of New York by running a demagogic campaign against the New York Police Department. He has now compounded the injury by dropping the city’s appeal of an equally deceitful court opinion that found that the department’s stop, question, and frisk practices deliberately violated the rights of blacks and Hispanics. De Blasio may thus have paved the way for a return to the days of sky-high crime rates.

Judge Shira Scheindlin’s ruling against the NYPD last August was built on willful ignorance of crime’s racial reality. Scheindlin invented a new concept, “indirect racial profiling,” in order to convict the department of unconstitutional policing, despite lacking the evidence to do so. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals challenged Scheindlin’s appearance of impartiality last October when it found that she had steered stop, question, and frisk cases to her courtroom. The Second Circuit panel removed her from the case and stayed her opinion while the city pursued its appeal. Now, however, thanks to de Blasio, Scheindlin’s tendentious ruling will stay on the books (unless the NYPD’s police unions succeed in their own appeal), setting back the cause of public safety not just in New York, but across the country.

The least of the opinion’s problems is the unnecessary bureaucracy it inflicts on the NYPD, including a federal monitor, burdensome reporting requirements, and left-wing advisory panels, all overseen by the plaintiffs’ attorneys. The most serious problem is Scheindlin’s statistical test of racial profiling, which compares police stops to population data, rather than crime data. Scheindlin found the NYPD guilty of biased policing because blacks make up a little over half the subjects of the department’s pedestrian stops, though they are just under a quarter of the city’s population. She ignored the fact that blacks commit nearly 80 percent of all shootings in New York and two-thirds of all violent crime.

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Last week we ended with a small item on Pete Seeger thinking we were done with the subject. But then John Fund, knowing Pickerhead’s Russian history bent, sent along his National Review article on The Totalitarian Troubadour. Particularly telling in Fund’s piece is how Seeger and his ilk did 180 degree turns on the instant of the German June 22, 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union.

… The late John P. Roche, who served as president of the liberal Americans for Democratic Action in the 1960s and was a speechwriter for Hubert Humphrey, once told me that the success American Communists had in the 1930s by wrapping their ideology in the trappings of American traditions had to be remembered. “If authoritarianism of the right or left ever comes to America it will come surrounded by patriotism and show business,” he told me. “It will be made fashionable by talented people like Pete Seeger.”

Roche vividly recalled how American Stalinists suddenly flipped on the issue of Nazi Germany after the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 brought the two former adversaries together. “Stalinists acclaimed this treaty as the high point of 20th century diplomacy,” Roche wrote in 1979. He vividly recalled “the laudatory speech” that the future congresswoman Bella Abzug gave in support of the pact at HunterCollege in 1940.

The next year, Pete Seeger, a member of the Young Communist League, lent his support for the effort to stop America from going to war to fight the Nazis. The Communist-party line at the time was that the war between Britain and Germany was “phony” and a mere pretext for big American corporations to get Hitler to attack Soviet Russia. The album Seeger and his fellow Almanac Singers, an early folk-music group, released was called “Songs for John Doe.” Its songs opposed the military draft and other policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Franklin D, listen to me,
You ain’t a-gonna send me ’cross the sea.
You may say it’s for defense
That kinda talk ain’t got no sense.

Just one month after the album was released, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. The album was quickly withdrawn from circulation, and Seeger and his buddies immediately did a 180-degree turn and came up with new songs:

Now, Mr. President
You’re commander-in-chief of our armed forces
The ships and the planes and the tanks and the horses
I guess you know best just where I can fight . . . 
So what I want is you to give me a gun
So we can hurry up and get the job done!

Seeger may have formally left the Communist party in 1949, but for decades afterward he would still identify himself as “communist with a small c.”

We can honor Seeger the singer and mourn his passing. But at the same time we should respect the power that popular culture has over people and warn against its misuse. The late Andrew Breitbart lived largely to remind us that culture is upstream of politics — our culture is a stream of influence flowing into our politics.

Pete Seeger aimed to change both our culture and our politics. Howard Husock wrote at NRO this week that he “was America’s most successful Communist.” …

David Goldman, in the person of Spengler, was not kind to Seeger at all. At the end of the pull quote, there is a reference to “folksingers” in the Soviet Union. We will have more on that. 

I first heard Pete Seeger perform when I was five or six, when I was a red-diaper baby and he was blacklisted and drunk. What I recall most about the encounter was that the tip of his needle-nose glowed bright red. He was performing for a children’s group of some sort at a time when his Communist background kept him out of public venues. His records — not just the Weavers albums, but the early Asch 78′s of the Almanac Singers — were daily fare in my home, along with Woody Guthrie’s children’s songs. My parents knew Guthrie casually; my father once organized a concert for him at BrooklynCollege, and my mother was Arlo Guthrie’s nursery-school teacher.

I was not just a Pete Seeger fan, but a to-the-hammer-born, born-and-bred cradle fan of Pete Seeger. With those credentials, permit me to take note of his passing with the observation that he was a fraud, a phony, a poseur, an imposter. The notion of folk music he espoused was a put-on from beginning to end. …

… His capacity to apologize for the brutalities of Communist regimes — including their repression of their own “folksingers” — remained undiminished with age, as David Graham reported in the Atlantic. …

The Wiki on those folksingers in Ukraine calls them Kobzars or Kobzarski

… Blind itinerant musicians, known as kobzars and lirnyks, organized themselves into guilds along the same lines as professional craftsmen. These professional itinerant musicians would gather at regular meeting spots on particular dates to celebrate religious feasts, administer examinations for the induction of novices and masters, and collect money for placement of votive candles under icons of patron saints and to also discuss the business of the guild.

During the Soviet period the Kobzar guilds ceased to exist. …

A blog from Art Ukraine quotes the composer Dimitri Shostakovich on how those wandering musicians “ceased to exist.”  Keep in mind this deed was by the government of Joseph Stalin that was defended time and again by Pete Seeger. The circumstances are similar to the 1940 murder of Polish officers, policemen and intellectuals in KatynForest. A few hundred folksingers gets lost in the millions murdered by the Communists. Here’s Shostakovich;

“I am not a historian. I could tell many tragic tales and cite many examples, but I won’t do that. I will tell about one incident, only one. It’s a horrible story and every time I think of it I grow frightened and I don’t want to remember it. Since time immemorial, folk singers have wondered along the roads of Ukraine. They’re called “lirniki” and “banduristy” there. They were almost blind men—-why that is so is another question that I won’t go into, but briefly, it’s traditional. The point is, they were always blind and defenseless people, but no one ever touched or hurt them. Hurting a blind man—what could be lower?

“And then in the mid thirties the First All-Ukrainian Congress of Lirniki and Banduristy was announced, and all the folk singers had to gather and discuss what to do in the future. ‘Life is better, life is merrier,’ Stalin has said. The blind men believed it. They came to the congress from all over Ukraine, from tiny, forgotten villages. There were several hundred of them at the congress, they say. It was a living museum, the country’s living history. All its songs, all its music and poetry. And they were almost all shot, almost all of those pathetic blind men killed.

“Why was it done? Why the sadism — killing the blind? Just like that, so that they wouldn’t get underfoot. Mighty deeds were being done there, complete collectivization was under way, they had destroyed kulaks as a class, and here were these blind men, walking around singing songs of dubious content. The songs weren’t passed by the censors. And what kind of censorship can you have with blind men? You can’t hand a blind man a corrected and approved text and you can’t write him an order either. You have to tell everything to a blind man. That takes too long. And you can’t file away a piece of paper, and there’s no time anyway. Collectivization. Mechanization. It was easier to shoot them. And so they did.”

 

Pickerhead pleads guilty to knowing too much minutia about Russian and the Soviet Union. However we should all pay attention to the irony that the system of government that promised to do so much for common citizens, in fact did; by killing more of them than any other state in the 20th Century.

R. J. Rummel author of Death by Government provides these estimates of the most brutal governments of the last century;

61,911,000 Murdered: Soviet Union
35,236,000 Murdered: Communist Chinese
20,946,000 Murdered: German National Socialists
10,214,000 Murdered: Nationalist Chinese

Pete Seeger has a lot to atone for.

Back to the state of the union show. Andrew Malcolm has a post and with it a chart comparing the length of speeches for presidents since Reagan. What president has been kindest to us? Ronald Reagan of course.

… Obama has clearly run out of ideas. He’s recycling ones from his unremarkable address last year and even some distinct phrasings from his predecessor’s State of the Unions. He’s also taken to “small ball,” last week meeting to cut voters’ waiting times and last night offering a way for workers to save for retirement.

Ironic because Obama used to criticize Bill Clinton for seizing on small ideas to give the impression of meaningful activity. But great news for Obama’s opponents.

This is the historic fellow who arrived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue promising a radical transformation of American society. And now, thanks in large part to his own gaffes, scandals and political ineptitude, he’s reduced to dickering over voting lines and college loan interest rates.

And threatening to issue executive orders because the Congress he’s above wooing like a real political leader is, in a bipartisan way, acting like an equal branch of government.

Which it is. …

 

… State of the Union addresses do not rescue doomed presidencies. But Obama had an opportunity to sketch a new, more positive path for the 1,087 days left on his White House lease.

Instead, Jay Leno referred accurately in his late-night monologue to the Obama administration as “lame Duck Dynasty.”

Sean Davis at The Federalist has 11 facts about the minimum wage you didn’t hear during the state of the union. Number 11 shows the corruption involved.

11) A Change In The Minimum Wage Often Triggers Union Wage Hikes And Benefit Renegotiations

The famous investment banker J.P. Morgan said something along the lines of, “Every man has two reasons for everything he does:  a good reason and the real reason.” Giving minimum wage workers a little extra cash is the White House’s “good” reason for supporting a hike in the minimum wage. But what’s the real reason? Richard Berman, a union analyst, studied numerous union contracts and published his findings on their terms in the Wall Street Journal in 2013:

The labor contracts that we examined used a variety of methods to trigger the [wage] increases. The two most popular formulas were setting baseline union wages as a percentage above the state or federal minimum wage or mandating a flat wage premium above the minimum wage.

Other union contracts stipulate that, following a minimum-wage increase, the union and the employer reopen wage talks.

[...]

Minimum-wage hikes are beneficial to unions in other ways. The increases restrict the ability of businesses to hire low-skill workers who might gladly work for lower wages in order to gain experience. Union members thus face less competition from workers who might threaten union jobs.

And there you have it. The “real” reason behind the minimum wage push is to pay back the labor unions who helped re-elect the president in the form of higher wages, increased negotiating leverage, and less competition for jobs. The president’s decision to unilaterally hike the minimum wage for federal contract workers to $10.10 an hour doesn’t really make sense until you view it through that lens (is there a critical mass of federal contractors who make only the minimum wage?).

Unfortunately, when it comes to politics, the good reason is rarely, if ever, the real reason.

NY Times interviews Salman Khan of the Khan Academy.

In 2008, Salman Khan, then a young hedge-fund analyst with a master’s in computer science from M.I.T., started the Khan Academy, offering free online courses mainly in the STEM subjects — science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Today the free electronic schoolhouse reaches more than 10 million users around the world, with more than 5,000 courses, and the approach has been widely admired and copied. I spoke with Mr. Khan, 37, for more than two hours, in person and by telephone. What follows is a condensed and edited version of our conversations.

Q. How did the Kahn Academy begin?

A. In 2004, my 12-year-old cousin Nadia visited with my wife and me in Boston. She’s from New Orleans, where I grew up.

It turned out Nadia was having trouble in math. She was getting tracked into a slower math class. I don’t think she or her parents realized the repercussions if she’d stayed on the slower track. I said, “I want to work with you, if you are willing.” When Nadia went home, we began tutoring by telephone. …

… The Internet videos started two years later when a friend asked, “How are you scaling your lessons?” I said, “I’m not.” He said, “Why don’t you make some videos of the tutorials and post them on YouTube?” I said, “That’s a horrible idea. YouTube is for cats playing piano.” …