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Charles Krauthammer has ideas on how we might stop Putin.

… we can do nothing decisive in the short or even medium term. But we can severely squeeze Russia in the long term.

How? For serious sanctions to become possible, Europe must first be weaned off Russian gas. Obama should order the Energy Department to expedite authorization for roughly 25 liquified natural gas export facilities. Demand all decisions within six weeks. And express major U.S. support for a southern-route pipeline to export Caspian Sea gas to Europe without traversing Russia or Ukraine.

Second, call for urgent bipartisan consultation with congressional leaders for an emergency increase in defense spending, restoring at least $100 billion annually to the defense budget to keep U.S. armed forces at current strength or greater. Obama won’t do it, but he should. Nothing demonstrates American global retreat more than a budget that reduces the U.S. Army to 1940 levels.

Obama is not the first president to conduct a weak foreign policy. Jimmy Carter was similarly inclined — until Russia invaded Afghanistan, at which point the scales fell from Carter’s eyes. He responded boldly: imposing the grain embargo on the Soviets, boycotting the Moscow Olympics, increasing defense spending and ostentatiously sending a machine-gun-toting Zbigniew Brzezinski to the Khyber Pass, symbolizing the massive military aid we began sending the mujahideen, whose insurgency so bled the Russians over the next decade that they not only lost Afghanistan but were fatally weakened as a global imperial power.

Invasion woke Carter from his illusions. Will it wake Obama?

Paul Mirengoff spots the dumbest John Kerry statement, ever. There is a lot of competition for this, but Pickerhead agrees. It is a beautiful thing to see how the president has gathered blithering idiots to his cabinet; Kerry, Hagel, and the president – a matched set of incompetents. The American voting public has a lot to answer for.

John Kerry has said some criminally stupid things in his time. Recall, for example, this statement by Kerry from 2010 about Bashar al-Assad:

Let me just say that I am . . . absolutely convinced that carefully calibrated diplomacy, that if that is what we engage in, that Syria will play a very important role in achieving a comprehensive peace in the region and in putting an end to the five decades of conflict that have plagued everybody in this region.

Kerry is never merely convinced of things, he’s “absolutely convinced.” And almost invariably, he’s absolutely wrong.

Kerry is now absolutely convinced that “it’s a mistake” for Israeli leaders “again and again” to raise the PLO’s refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state “as the critical decider of their attitude toward the possibility of a [Palestinian] state and peace.” Apparently, Kerry believes that Israel should consider as its peace partner an entity that doesn’t accept its right to exist as it is fundamentally constituted. …

Andrew Ferguson caught a bunch of economists admitting their mistakes.

… The new report is not solely an admission of error. It is also a catalogue of errors by type. The biggest mistakes, the economists point out, occurred when they forecast growth rates in countries with a relatively high level of government regulation. This surprises the economists, though it won’t surprise anyone who takes a dim view of government regulation generally. The forecasters, good statists all, assumed that the regulations “would help to cushion financial shocks” in the highly regulated countries and would therefore aid recovery. 

The economists now say they failed to consider the damaging effects of regulation. In the real world, regulations “delay[ed] necessary reallocations across [economic] sectors in the recovery phase”—which, translated from the Economese, means that government was retarding the ability of businesses to do what they do best: find a way to create value and make money even in calamitous circumstances. The concession is implied, but it’s clear the economists regret letting an ideological assumption in favor of government intervention overwhelm their forecasts as the recession swept the globe, raining on the regulated and unregulated alike. 

Failures of foresight are common among experts—commoner among them, probably, than among the rest of us, who are unburdened by the expertise that tends to bind rather than liberate habits of mind. The OECD economists are happy to point out that their failures in figuring out the economy from one country to the next are no greater than those of the profession as a whole, especially in the years before and after the recession. Yet no amount of publicity about such spectacular failures deters their clients, whether in government or business, from asking economists for more. …

Perhaps one of this administration’s most contemptible actions came last week with proposals for changes to over-time pay work rules. It was not the result of any diligent effort of study. It is simply something flicked out there to compensate for, and change the subject from, their manifest failures in domestic and foreign policy. Ed Morrissey comments.

The Roman Empire notoriously distracted its citizenry by providing bread and circuses to mollify and distract them from the real problems of their lives and the failures of their government. WashingtonDC kept up that hoary tradition this week, starting with an all-night Senate session on global warming, conducted by Senate Democrats protesting the lack of action by the US government on the issue.

That protest had two big problems for Democrats’ credibility.  First, they control the upper chamber, so they can introduce legislation any time they wish – and they offered no legislation during the all-nighter. Second, climate change falls far down the list of priorities for Americans; according to Gallup, it’s second to last on a non-exclusive list of concerns overall, and near the bottom even among Democrats. The top priorities on Gallup’s list are the economy and unemployment, for voters of both parties.

With the failure of the circus on Capitol Hill, the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue focused on the bread. The White House told The New York Times and other media outlets that President Obama would take executive action to redefine salaried employment in order to expand overtime payment from employers. As usual, this top-down and unforeseen change in regulation will create more problems than it solves, and likely result in lowered compensation rather than the explosion of riches for the working class the Obama administration will claim. …

…All this does is give Obama and Democrats a wonky talking point for the midterm elections, and a way to distract the voters universally impacted by the negative consequences of Obamacare by discussing changes at the margins that will worsen the stagnation in the current economy. It’s just another ring in the circus, with imaginary bread promised to magically appear at some later date.

Camille Paglia never fails to surprise. Her comments on the failures of sex education is spot on. She wants more sex.  

Fertility is the missing chapter in sex education. Sobering facts about women’s declining fertility after their 20s are being withheld from ambitious young women, who are propelled along a career track devised for men.

The refusal by public schools’ sex-education programs to acknowledge gender differences is betraying both boys and girls. The genders should be separated for sex counseling. It is absurd to avoid the harsh reality that boys have less to lose from casual serial sex than do girls, who risk pregnancy and whose future fertility can be compromised by disease. Boys need lessons in basic ethics and moral reasoning about sex (for example, not taking advantage of intoxicated dates), while girls must learn to distinguish sexual compliance from popularity.

Above all, girls need life-planning advice. Too often, sex education defines pregnancy as a pathology, for which the cure is abortion. Adolescent girls must think deeply about their ultimate aims and desires. If they want both children and a career, they should decide whether to have children early or late. There are pros, cons and trade-offs for each choice.

Unfortunately, sex education in the U.S. is a crazy quilt of haphazard programs. A national conversation is urgently needed for curricular standardization and public transparency. The present system is too vulnerable to political pressures from both the left and the right–and students are trapped in the middle. …

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Robert Kaplan of Stratfor wrote a piece that could be a companion to the Pickings introduction about Russia from last week. Only, his is more elegantly written.

The Obama administration claims it is motivated by the G-8, interdependence, human rights and international law. Russian President Vladimir Putin is a more traditional historical actor. He is motivated by geopolitics. That is why he temporarily has the upper hand in the crisis over Ukraine and Crimea.

Geopolitics, according to the mid-20th century U.S. diplomat and academic Robert Strausz-Hupe, is “the struggle for space and power,” played out in a geographical setting. Geopolitics is eternal, ever since Persia was the world’s first superpower in antiquity. …

… It isn’t that geography and geopolitics supersede everything else, including Western values and human agency. Not at all! Rather, it is that geography in particular is the starting point for understanding everything else. Only by respecting geography in the first place can Western values and human ingenuity overcome it. …

… To wit, the late military historian John Keegan explains that Great Britain and the United States could champion freedom only because the sea protected them “from the landbound enemies of liberty.” Alexander Hamilton observed that had Britain not been an island, its military establishment would have been just as overbearing as those of continental Europe, and Britain “would in all probability” have become “a victim to the absolute power of a single man.” …

… Geography is no less relevant to the 21st century than it has been throughout history. Communications technology has not erased geography; rather, it has only made it more claustrophobic, so that each region of the earth interacts with every other one as never before. Intensifying this claustrophobia is the growth of cities — another geographical phenomenon. The earth is smaller than ever, thanks to technology. But like a tiny wristwatch with all of its mechanisms, you have to disaggregate its geographical parts and features in order to understand how it works.

Thus, any international relations strategy must emanate initially from the physical terrain upon which we all live. And because geopolitics emanates from geography, it will never go away or become irrelevant. Strausz-Hupe had it right. If liberal powers do not engage in geopolitics, they will only leave the playing field to their enemies who do. For even evolved liberal states, such as those in America and Europe, are not exempt from the battle for survival. Such things as the G-8, human rights and international law can and must triumph over geography. But that is only possible if geopolitics becomes part of the strategy of the West.

Along a similar vein, Jennifer Rubin asks non-interventionist libertarians how the inter-dependent world is working out?

One of the key assumptions of non-interventionist libertarians (who rankle at the term “isolationist”) is that through trade and economic integration we can woo our enemies and make a profit all at the same time. The only problem is that it is almost never true.

Seth Mandel points out that letting Russia into the World Trade Organization didn’t make it less aggressive: “It’s because the economic integration of Russia has done precisely the opposite of what it was expected to do in one crucial regard: the recent events in Ukraine and the West’s unsteady response indicate Russia’s increased leverage instead.” That is because the West’s business interests become invested (literally) in a new market (thereby weakening support for any kind of sanctions) and because the aggressor gets economic benefits at no costs. …

Ann Coulter recaps Dem disasters in foreign policy from Kennedy to the present.

… When Obama took office, al Qaida had been routed in Iraq — from Fallujah, SadrCity and Basra. Muqtada al-Sadr — the Dr. Phil of Islamofascist radicalism — had waddled off in retreat to Iran. The Iraqis had a democracy, a miracle on the order of flush toilets in Afghanistan.

By Bush’s last year in office, monthly casualties in Iraq were coming in slightly below a weekend with Justin Bieber. In 2008, there were more than three times as many homicides in Chicago as U.S. troop deaths in the Iraq War. (Chicago: 509; Iraq: 155).

On May 30, The Washington Post reported: “CIA Director Michael V. Hayden now portrays (al-Qaida) as essentially defeated in Iraq and Saudi Arabia and on the defensive throughout much of the rest of the world …” Even hysterics at The New York Times admitted that al-Qaida and other terrorist groups had nearly disappeared from Southeast Asia by 2008.

A few short years into Obama’s presidency — and al-Qaida is back! For purely political reasons, as soon as he became president, Obama removed every last troop from Iraq, despite there being Americans troops deployed in dozens of countries around the world.

In 2004, nearly 100 soldiers, mostly Marines, died in the battle to take Fallujah from al-Qaida. Today, al-Qaida’s black flag flies above Fallujah.

Bush won the war, and Obama gave it back.

Obama couldn’t be bothered with preserving America’s victory in Iraq. He was busy helping to topple a strong American ally in Egypt and a slavish American minion in Libya — in order to install the Muslim Brotherhood in those countries instead. …

Since we spent a lot of time looking at failures, we need an expanded humor section. Tim Stanley caught Chelsea Handler explained to Piers Morgan why he failed. Follow the link if you’d like to see the video.  

There’s been a lot of debate about why Piers Morgan lost his CNN talk show. A couple of days ago the comedian Chelsea Handler gave him a definitive explanation. Piers was “interviewing” her, they cut to an ad break, and when they returned they had this priceless exchange.

PIERS: You tweet very amusingly.
CHELSEA: I wish you did.
PIERS: Ha.
CHELSEA: I mean in the middle of the commercial break — I want your viewers to know, although they must know, because they’re probably following you on Twitter. I mean you can’t even pay attention for 60 seconds. You’re a terrible interviewer.
PIERS: Well you just weren’t keeping my attention.
CHELSEA: That’s not my problem.
PIERS: That is your problem.
CHELSEA: This is your show. You have to pay attention to the guests that you invited on your show.
PIERS: If they’re interesting enough.
CHELSEA: Yeah, listen. It doesn’t matter how interesting I am. You signed up for this job.
PIERS: Of course it does.
CHELSEA: Well, maybe that’s why your job is coming to an end.
PIERS: Wow.
CHELSEA: Wow.

It’s better watched that read, because that way you can hear Piers’ painful laughter.

More humor from Power Line with the best obit, ever.

There was quite a lot of notice given to this obituary last November of Leonard Smith, who asked that in lieu of flowers, “the family asks that you cancel your subscription to The New York Times.”  A rather sensible suggestion.

But I think I’ve found one that is even better from earlier this week, for Walter George Bruhl, a retired chemical company executive.  Highlights:

Walter George Bruhl Jr. of Newark and Dewey Beach is a dead person; he is no more; he is bereft of life; he is deceased; he has rung down the curtain and gone to join the choir invisible; he has expired and gone to meet his maker. . .

There will be no viewing since his wife refuses to honor his request to have him standing in the corner of the room with a glass of Jack Daniels in his hand so he would appear natural to visitors.

Cremation will take place at the family’s convenience, and his ashes will be kept in an urn until they get tired of having it around. What’s a Grecian Urn? Oh, about 200 drachmas a week.

RIP, Mr. Bruhl.  You sound like the kind of person I would like to have met.

We finish with late night humor from Andrew Malcolm.

SethMeyers: President Obama appeared on an online comedy show the other day. The president was there to talk about his own online comedy show, ObamaCare.

SethMeyers: Sunday’s Crimean vote to join Russia has no option for “No.” Only two boxes on the ballot — one for “yes,” and one for “murder my family.”

Conan: Obama is threatening Putin now. The U.S. president says if Russia doesn’t pull out of Crimea, he won’t lend Putin any of the money that we’ve borrowed from China.

Fallon: The College Board is revamping SATs to focus on what college students really need. The SAT is now just one question: “How much money do your parents have?”

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If you’re wondering why there are serial screw-ups in Washington, we have an answer.  So, before we get into details of the GOP win in Florida on Tuesday, here is Jim Geraghty on why liberals can’t govern.

Back in late February, a new contract document revealed that the Department of Health and Human Services would be paying $60 million for the computer cloud that supports back-end data sharing for HealthCare.gov and state Obamacare marketplaces, more than five times the amount in the original contract. This week HHS revealed that the contract has been further revised — to roughly $120 million, now more than ten times the original $11 million value of the contract when Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services first awarded it in 2011.

In most professions, when you end up spending ten times what you budgeted, the consequences are swift and severe. Heads roll. Responsibilities are reassigned. Budgetary authority gets yanked. This, of course, is not how things work in the federal government. …

… Over at The Washingtonian, Michael Gaynor offers further details on the culture of the Environmental Protection Agency, where John Beale was the highest-paid official while failing to show up for work months at a time, covering his tracks with strange and implausible tales of secret work for the Central Intelligence Agency.

The lack of accountability throughout the organization is jaw-dropping:

The EPA “research project” that took Beale to Los Angeles five times was really a smoke screen for visiting his parents in Bakersfield, two hours away. Yet his travel vouchers were barely reviewed. Officials didn’t question his expenses — they were approved laterally, by a peer instead of a manager. “Because of where he sat in the organizational structure, there were no questions,” [Office of the Inspector General special agent Mark] Kaminsky says.

Beale’s off-the-charts $206,000 salary, inflated because of the 25-percent retention bonus that never expired, was more than allowed under law. An Inspector General’s report published last year faulted a lack of internal controls at the EPA — there was no automatic stop on the bonuses after the designated allotments were distributed.

In the same report, the IG revealed that these pay issues had been brought to the attention of Beale’s office as early as July 2010. Yet managers believed that the discrepancy was a human-resources matter and tossed it back, causing it to languish for years. . . .Beale and Kaminsky counted up how often he’d used the CIA guise to skip work since 2000. The grand total: approximately 2 1/2 years.          

Investigators later put dollar amounts on his crimes: $437,901 in fraudulent retention bonuses, $58,127 for the “D.O. Oversight” absences, $8,000 for the parking spot, and so on. Altogether, he cost taxpayers $886,186.

Beale’s most recent manager at the EPA was Gina McCarthy, then the assistant administrator in the Office of Air and Radiation. She told the inspector general that she had “concerns” about Beale’s claim to be secretly working for the CIA, but there is no evidence she ever acted on those concerns, according to the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.

The consequence for McCarthy was a promotion; President Obama nominated her to head the EPA in March and she was confirmed in July. …

Josh Kraushaar says a 2014 GOP wave is looking more likely after the Florida election yesterday.

Tuesday night’s special election in Florida should be a serious scare for Democrats who worry that Obamacare will be a major burden for their party in 2014. Despite recruiting favored candidate Alex Sink, outspending Republicans, and utilizing turnout tools to help motivate reliable voters, Democrats still lost to Republican lobbyist David Jolly—and it wasn’t particularly close.

The Republican tool: lots of advertisements hitting Sink over Obamacare, even though she wasn’t even in Congress to vote for it. Sink’s response was from the Democratic playbook: Call for fixes, but hit her opponent for supporting repeal. Sink won 46 percent of the vote, 2 points behind Jolly and 4 points below President Obama’s 2012 total in the district.

Special elections don’t necessarily predict the November elections, but this race in a bellwether Florida district that both parties aggressively contested comes as close as possible to a November test run for both parties. Democrats worked to clear the field for Sink, an unsuccessful 2010 gubernatorial nominee, while Republicans missed out on their leading recruits, settling for Jolly, a lobbyist who once worked for Rep. Bill Young, the late congressman whose 13th District vacancy Jolly will fill. Sink outspent Jolly, but the Republican was able to close the financial gap with the help of outside groups. All told, Democrats held a $5.4 million to $4.5 million spending advantage. …

Byron York reports on the Florida race also.

The widely respected Florida political analyst Adam Smith sees big problems for Democrats in the loss of Alex Sink to Republican David Jolly in the special election to fill the House seat from Florida’s 13th Congressional District. “Democrats had a better-funded, well-known nominee who ran a strong campaign against a little-known, second- or third-tier Republican who ran an often wobbly race in a district Barack Obama won twice,” Smith wrote Tuesday night. “Outside Republican groups — much more so than the under-funded Jolly campaign– hung the Affordable Care Act and President Obama on Sink. It worked.”

Smith noted that both Democrat Sink and Republican Jolly insisted the race to replace the late GOP Rep. Bill Young was mainly about local issues. And indeed, watching the first debate between Sink and Jolly, on February 3, one came away with the sense that issues like flood insurance played a role in the race that some outsiders didn’t appreciate.

But one thing was clear from that debate, and it was that Sink didn’t have much to say about Obamacare.

As usual, informed analysis from Michael Barone.

… I score it as an uninspiring victory for national Republicans and a disappointment for national Democrats. Jolly got the same percentage of the vote, 49 percent, as Mitt Romney won in the district; Sink’s 47 percent was below Obama’s 50 percent in 2012. Turnout was 55 percent of November 2012 turnout, not an unusual decline for a special election; Jolly’s total was 53 percent of Romney’s and Sink’s 50 percent of Obama’s. Jolly naturally campaigned against Obamacare, and a Democratic loss in an Obama district confirms the unpopularity of that legislation. Sink tried campaigning on Social Security and Medicare, Democratic staples which once had a great resonance with St. Petersburg’s elderly population. But the district’s 65-plus population percentage, 22 percent, is significantly lower than that of several others in Florida, though above the national average. In any case, it doesn’t look like Social Security is trumping Obamacare with the elderly.

If this race is an indicator of the November results, it suggests that Democrats will not get the 49-percent to 48-percent edge they got nationwide in the popular vote for the House, and it suggests that they will win somewhat fewer than the 201 House seats they won then. If that’s true, it will be the first time we have had three House elections in a row with similar results, since the string from 1996 to 2004 in which Republicans narrowly won the popular vote and won majorities of seats, but in each case fewer than the 234 they won in 2012.

John Hinderaker says don’t forget about the trouble Alex Sink had with the immigration issue.

A postscript on David Jolly’s big special election over Alex Sink in Florida’s 13th Congressional District: Obamacare was the biggest issue in the race, and deservedly has gotten most of the post-election commentary. But, as Daniel Horowitz notes at RedState, let’s not forget that immigration was also an issue, and may have played an important role.

Sink was pro-amnesty and “comprehensive reform,” while Jolly flatly opposed amnesty and emphasized stronger borders. And Sink made an appalling gaffe–in the sense of saying what liberals really think about expanded low-skill immigration–that made the issue, in this race, an inflammatory one. Explaining her support for immigration reform, Sink said, “We have a lot of employers over on the beaches that rely upon workers and especially in this high-growth environment, where are you going to get people to work to clean our hotel rooms or do our landscaping?” It doesn’t come across any better when you hear her say it”

Sink’s comments reminded voters that the Democratic Party doesn’t care that 100 million working-age Americans don’t have jobs, but is deeply concerned about where they are going to get cheap landscaping services.

Chris Stirewalt of Fox has more.

.. Whatever they say in public, Democrats know that the defeat of their candidate, Alex Sink, in Tuesday’s special election in Pinellas County, Fla. is a very bad omen. If they cannot win in districts like these – won twice by President Obama – and with well-funded, well known candidates like Sink, there’s little reason to believe much of the palaver about Democratic strategies for blunting Republican advances this fall. Outspent, hampered by a Libertarian candidate and with some nagging party divisions lingering on Election Day, David Jolly carried the special election to replace the late Rep. Bill Young, R-Fla. The race provided a revealing snapshot of voter attitudes about ObamaCare and the motivation of the Republican base. There’s a long time to go until November and Democrats have just begun to spend their massive war chest, but the shape of things looks bad for the blue team’s chances to hold the Senate. …

Opportunities provided by increased production of oil and gas are so obvious, a non-political publication like Scientific American can see the value.

Ukraine is on its own, not least when it comes to energy—and that crimps the country’s ability to respond to Russia’s land grab in the Crimean peninsula. Ukraine relies on Russia for roughly two thirds of its natural gas supplies, suggesting that the current geopolitical impasse will likely continue to fall in Russia’s favor. Even with a few months of natural gas in storage, “they’re in a tough spot if those supplies are cut off,” notes Jason Bordoff, one-time Obama administration policy advisor and now director of Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy, who was a speaker on a panel of experts at Columbia University’s School of International and Political Affairs (SIPA) on March 10.
 
Russia has the leverage to use its energy supplies as a political cudgel in Ukraine or the rest of Europe—the European Union imports one third of its gas from the eastern giant—and has not hesitated to use it in the past, most recently in 2009. Western Europe’s gas purchases from Russia (then the Soviet Union) started in the early 1970s, mostly as symbolic trade—part of the policies of Cold War détente and Ostpolitik (the latter, West Germany’s unilateral attempt to normalize relations with the U.S.S.R.). The resulting energy trade with Germany expanded to other Western European countries in the ensuing decades, and grew to become what some critics of détente had always feared: dependence on Russia by Western Europe for essential energy supplies.
 
This vulnerability may not persist indefinitely, however. In fact, this could conceivably be the last time Moscow will be able to use gas as a weapon. The world’s fracking-enabled natural gas boom may, over time, upset this status quo, if not as soon as U.S. politicians would like because fracked gas cannot serve as a bargaining chip in the current crisis. …

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John Fund says counter Putin with natural gas exports.

Post-Crimea, everyone suddenly recognizes that Russia is a potential geopolitical menace to the West.

But for years the Obama administration has completely failed to use the U.S.’s boom in energy production to increase its security and that of its European allies. Frustrated members of Congress from both parties now want to force the White House to stop delaying a full two dozen permits for the export of America’s abundant natural gas.

Ukraine depends on Russia for more than two-thirds of its natural gas, and Russia is already raising prices steeply. Thirty-four percent of Europe’s gas came from Russia last year. Indeed, it was in part Ukraine’s reliance on Russian energy that pushed now-deposed Ukraine president Viktor Yanukovych to abandon a scheduled trade deal with the European Union in favor of discount natural-gas prices from Russia, among other inducements from Putin. That turnaround led to the street protests that toppled Yanukovych last month.

So far the administration, under pressure from its environmental allies, is exhibiting no sense of urgency on an issue that should be a no-brainer. “Its slow-walking of liquefied natural-gas plant permits is of a piece with its failure to approve the Keystone pipeline and get new trade deals done,” says James Lucier, an energy analyst with Capital Alpha Partners in Washington. “It’s all a sign of just how disengaged from the rest of the world the Obama folks have become.” …

Christopher Helman in Forbes says even the NY Times understands the opportunity our oil and gas boom has become. Will president ‘pipeline dither’ figure it out?

The hand-wringing over what to do to help Ukraine has had a very positive impact on the U.S. oil and gas industry. Politicians like Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) are seizing on the crisis to call for a lifting of the ban on U.S. oil exports — the better to counterbalance Russia’s petro-influence. While the Wall Street Journal this morning wrote that western politicians are working on a variety of options to help “loosen Russia’s energy stranglehold on Ukraine” including “larger exports of U.S.-made natural gas.”

Nevermind that the U.S. currently exports no natural gas in the form of LNG because new liquefaction plants won’t be completed until late 2015. The bigger point was made by economist Ed Yardeni in his morning note today: “By invading Crimea, Russian President Vladimir Putin may have succeeded in resolving the debate in the U.S. about whether or not we should export natural gas and crude oil.”

Yardeni noted this New York Times editorial over the weekend as proof positive that the Obama administration (and the rest of the left-leaning side of the political class) now embraces U.S. energy exports as a potentially powerful political tool. When even the New York Times editorial board defies the anti-fracking lobby to conclude that “natural gas exports could serve American foreign-policy interests in Europe” it indicates that LNG exports are something we can all agree on. …

We think we have stultifying bureaucrats? Walter Russell Mead says regulations are killing fracking in the UK.

The mood is downright gloomy at the Shale UK conference this week, where various stakeholders in the country’s fledgling industry are bemoaning a lack of progress in tapping the countries estimated 1.3 quadrillion cubic feet of natural gas trapped in shale. Despite having some of the thicker—and therefore easier to drill—shale in Europe, faulted stratigraphy, stunted support infrastructure, and a byzantine regulatory environment are preventing Britain from imitating America’s shale success. The FT reports:

Exploration is expensive and it is easy to spend more on drilling a well than the value of gas that comes out of the ground. Drilling costs are significantly higher in the UK than the US. The nascent supply chain and long licensing process are largely to blame.

“It’s a lot slower than in the US,” says Francis Egan, Cuadrilla chief executive. “We have to apply for eight or nine permits for each exploration well.” …

Ron Fournier, certified member of the left media, posts on Diane Feinstein’s accusations of CIA congress spying.

They spied on you. They lied to the Senate. They seized telephone records from the Associated Press and considered criminalizing investigative journalism at Fox News. What else can the U.S. intelligence community do to destroy its credibility, curb civil liberties, and ultimately undermine U.S. security?

Spy on Congress.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat bravely challenging a Democratic White House, accused the CIA of searching computer files used by her staffers on the Senate Intelligence Committee to review the CIA’s now-defunct interrogation programs, …

Peggy Noonan posts on Feinstein in her blog.

Here again is the problem of surveillance professionals operating within a highly technologized surveillance state: If they can do it they will do it. If they are able to take an action they will sooner or later take it, whether or not it’s a good thing, even whether or not it is legal. Defenders of the surveillance state as it is currently organized and constituted blithely argue that laws, rules, traditions and long-held assumptions will control or put a damper on the actions of those with the power to invade the privacy of groups or individuals. They are very trusting people! But they are wrong. You cannot know human nature (or the nature and imperatives of human organizations) and assume people will refrain from using the power at hand to gain advantage. And so we have to approach surveillance state issues not from a framework of “it’s OK, we can trust our government” but “it’s not going to be OK, government agencies give us new reasons each day to doubt their probity, judgment and determination to adhere to the law.”  …

In an article more appropriate for yesterday’s discourse on Russia, David Harsanyi says Russians get the government they want.

… the more Putin undermines liberal institutions the more popular he becomes. The people who vote for the presidents of Russia and the United States view are unrelated, emerging from distinct historical, moral and ideological perspectives. So expecting people — even people given a vote — to act in what we consider a logical manner, is a waste of time.  While we, for example, may be confused about the harsh fate of Pussy Riot!,  only 5 percent of Russians believed that the punk/activist band didn’t deserve serious penalties for its actions. Actually, 29 percent believed that the band should have been sent into forced labor, while 37 percent believe they should be imprisoned.

So the Russian government controls the country’s three main television channels, and at the end of 2013, Putin replaced the national news agency with a new and more compliant version. This undermines the free press, of course, but the ugly fact is there doesn’t seem to be much anger about it. In recent years, the Kremlin has imposed limits on protests, criminalized libel, and censored political material on the internet. It has banned the work of nongovernmental organizations (typically aimed at fostering more transparency in government), frozen the assets of human rights groups that receive funding from U.S. citizens, and jailed the political opposition. Occasionally a dissident dies of poisoning.

But the reversal of once promising liberal reforms in Russia is not the result of an undermining of democracy. It happened with the full consent of the electorate. In Russia’s first presidential election, in 2000, Vladimir Putin, who had previously been made prime minister, won 53 percent of the vote. In 2004, he won 71 percent of the vote. In 2008, his lackey Dmitry Medvedev also won in a landslide. In 2012, Putin returned to the presidency in a landslide election with a parliament dominated by members of his party, giving him virtually one party rule.

Sadder still, Putin may be a better choice. …

Paul Mirengoff posts on the GOP win in FL.

Republican Dave Jolly has defeated Democrat Alex Sink in the special congressional election in FLA-13. The margin was 48.5 to 46.5.

This was a closely watched election in which the Democrats invested lots of money and effort (Jolly was significantly outspent) and recruited a prominent candidate — their former nominee for Governor. Although the seat has been held for years by a popular Republican, Obama carried the district in 2012, albeit very narrowly, as did Sink herself in her 2010 run for governor. I discussed the numerous advantages Sink possessed in this post.

The race will be viewed by Republican operatives as a harbinger of things to come in this cycle. That view doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch. Sink will not be the last Democrat who sinks under the weight of Obamacare.

UPDATE: Dave Wasserman, the editor of the non-partisan Cook Political Report and certainly not a Republican operative, says “If Dems couldn’t win an Obama congressional district with a solid candidate against a flawed R, expect a rough November.”

Jennifer Rubin has more.

David Jolly eked out a win with less than 50 percent of the vote over now two-time election loser Alex Sink in a special election for Florida’s 13th Congressional District. We should not make more of it than there is, but here are some specifics regarding this election:

• Obamacare played a huge part in the race; Democrats who think it won’t be the primary issue in November may be deluding themselves. (And, unlike the Democratic incumbents who will be on the ballot, Sink didn’t vote for Obamacare.)

• American Crossroads spent $500,00on Jolly’s behalf. American Action Network also spent $500,000. Another mainstream group YG Network spent six figures as well. Tea party groups did little, if anything. Perhaps they aren’t much help in the trenches.

• That said, the money came out about even when all third-party activity was counted. Neither side left the candidate to fend for himself or herself. …

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One of our favorites, Craig Pirrong of Streetwise Professor, posted a piece highly critical of Putin. We have that here, and have rerun Paul Mirengoff”s Power Line post from a few days ago about the alternate reality that W encountered when dealing with Putin. We follow those two posts with a Forbes article by Paul Roderick Gregory explaining the milieu from whence Putin sprang. Then Michael Barone writes about communication difficulties on our side.

To help understand Russian attitudes it is worth repeating a story in a book about the history of their conquest of Siberia. In 1905 the first leg of the Trans-Siberian Railway was completed to Irkutsk, the town at the bottom of Lake Baikal 3,200 miles from Moscow. Because the Czar’s government was seriously in debt, (25% of the budget was going for interest payments. Was obama the czar?) there was not enough in the budget to do a proper job. As a result, the grades were too steep, the curves were too sharp, and good hardwoods were not used for ties. Speeds were so slow, the trip to Irkutsk took two weeks. At the time, someone pointed out to a Russian man that trains in Western Europe were able to travel three times as fast. To which the Russian responded, “Well, if you need to get someplace sooner, you can just take an earlier train.”

That confounding obliviousness is, to Pickerhead’s experience, typical for the country. We get fooled by a very thin veneer of Russians who have a Western point of view. And more confusion comes from their excellence in Western idioms of music and literature. This leads us to believe they are just like us. They are not. Scratch below the surface and you will find a xenophobic peasant; notable only for a capacity for suffering we cannot even imagine. Smart though. Because everyone of them can speak Russian like a native.

This xenophobia, the fear of the foreign, is something Russians come by honestly and we would too if geography had dealt us their poor hand. It is a huge flat country with no natural barriers to entry, or invasion, for a thousand miles. Don’t think of the Urals, they are like the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. The Volga provides an example. It rises in the Valdai Hills near Moscow and wanders for almost 4,000 miles before arriving at the Caspian Sea. A drop of less than 1,000 feet, or three inches every mile. As a consequence, the country was constantly tested from every direction and Russians came to value a strong government that would protect them.

Our political ancestors were on an island and learned to fear tyranny from inside the country. That’s why we got the Magna Carta, and a government constrained by a constitution and the rule of law. Those things did not happen because we were wrapped in virtue at birth. Our peoples solved a different set of problems.

There is another Western, particularly American, conceit that annoys Russians. It happens at the beginning of every June as we celebrate the anniversary of the D-Day invasion when we landed in Europe and subsequently, supposedly, won the war. Dmitri Vologonov, a Red Army General who served on the staffs of both Gorbachev and Yeltsin, was an historian with unique access to archives of both the Red Army and the Communist Party. His best estimate of the number of Soviets killed in WWII is 27,000,000. The United States lost 300,000. Hitler had lost the war long before June 1944. We were there for the mopping up. Not to say our contribution in national treasure was not immense. But it was Russia that paid the butcher’s bill.

Here’s Craig Pirrong with his post after what he saw as a distressing Putin performance in his presser last week.

… The impression of insanity is only reinforced by other actions during the past several days, including a live fire exercise in the Baltic (witnessed by Putin) and today’s launch of an ICBM test.  Put it altogether, and Putin gives the impression of approaching Kim Jung Un or Kim Jung Il levels of aggressive craziness.  (And for those who say these exercises and tests were planned in advance, they could have easily been canceled if Putin wanted to lower the tension level.  The fact he let them proceed tells you all you need to know about his intent and mindset.)

So what are the broader implications of his disturbing display of mental imbalance?  No doubt the Europeans are even more intimidated now, and will be all the more reluctant to challenge a leader with a nuclear arsenal that they view as mad.

And that raises another possibility: that Putin was playing the psycho for effect.  The Slavic version of Nixon’s Madman Theory, and which Machiavelli wrote about centuries earlier: he wrote that leaders can find it “a very wise thing to simulate madness.”

I will say, watching the video, that Putin did a very, very credible impression of a madman, but that’s necessary to make the gambit work, isn’t it?

I don’t know whether he’s truly mad, or merely feigning it, but the effect will likely be the same.  The disturbing display of mental imbalance will work to his favor, and lead the Europeans in particular to back away slowly, letting him keep his current conquests, and prepare for his next move.  He may back off now, but he will be back for more.  And quite possibly not just in Ukraine.  But in the Baltic states and Poland.

And for reference, Paul Mirengoff’s post on W’s “discussions” with Putin.

As John noted below, President Obama spent an hour and a half on the telephone with Vladimir Putin discussing the Russian invasion of Ukraine. What was the conversation like?

We can probably get a good sense of it by considering the account of President Bush’s conversations with Putin set forth by Peter Baker in his excellent book about the Bush presidency, Days of Fire.

It’s well known that Bush and Putin got on well at first. But when the relationship soured, Bush became exasperated by his talks with the Russian bully.

Putin seemed to delight in debating Bush. But according to Baker, Bush hated debating Putin. “He’s not well informed,” Bush complained. “It’s like arguing with an eighth grader with his facts wrong.” Bush described another encounter as “like junior high debating.”

One of Putin’s tactics was to present absurd analogies between his abuses of power and events in the U.S., a tactic also favored by Nikita Khrushchev in Soviet times:

“You talk about Khodorkovsky [the head of Yukos whose assets and freedom were taken from him after he became a critic of Putin], and I talk about Enron,” Putin told Bush. “You appoint the Electoral College and I appoint governors. What’s the difference?”

At another point, Putin defended his control over media in Russia. “Don’t lecture me about the free press,” he said, “not after you fired that reporter.”

“Vladimir, are you talking about Dan Rather?” Bush asked. Yes, replied Putin.

More along this vein from Paul Roderick Gregory writing in Forbes.

… After level-headed Angela Merkel of Germany talked by phone with Vladimir Putin on the Ukraine crisis, she came away reporting that he had lost touch with reality and was living in another world. Putin’s saber-rattling press conference was another shocking introduction to Putin’s parallel universe, in which black is white, down is up, and the sun rises at night.

In Putin’s world, all demonstrators in Moscow streets are paid agents of Hillary Clinton, and now John Kerry, a student deserves two and a half years in jail for injuring a heavily-armored riot policeman with a lemon,  the tiny Georgian army attacked Russian forces without prvocation as rabid Georgians killed and maimed the embattled citizens of Abkhazia, the Maidan demonstrators are Nazis and skinheads who burn innocent bystanders alive, Yanukovich’s Berkut riot police bravely held their ground as anti-Semitic snipers dropped them one by one, Yanukovich is the legitimate president although Ukraine has no president,  the new Crimean governor (who last commanded a whopping 4% of the vote) has the unanimous support of the people, desperate Russian-speaking Ukrainians turned to Russia for humanitarian support, and the Russian uniforms worn by Crimean “local self defense forces” were purchased in second-hand stores.

Chancellor Merkel should not be surprised by Putin’s lack of touch with reality, or that he is living “in another world.” After all, she grew up behind a wall, erected by Putin’s KGB heroes for the express purpose of keeping out “enemy provocateurs,” not to keep the people from fleeing. The likes of John Kerry and Barack Obama, however, face Putin’s KGB alternative universe for the first time. Let’s hope they come to understand Putin’s uncivilized provokatsia, desinformatisia, maskirovka, and the tried-and-true “big lie” as quickly as possible. …

Michael Barone thinks presidential-sized personality defects lead our country into trouble.

Solipsism. It’s a fancy word which means that you assume others see the world as you do and will behave as you would.

It’s a quality often found in narcissists, people who greatly admire themselves — like a presidential candidate confident that he is a better speechwriter than his speechwriters, knows more about policy than his policy directors and is a better political director than his political director.

If that sounds familiar, it’s a paraphrase of what President Obama told top political aide Patrick Gaspard in 2008, according to the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza.

More recently, Obama’s solipsism has been painfully apparent as the United States suffers one reversal after another in world affairs. But it has been apparent ever since he started running for president in 2007.

Candidate Obama campaigned not just as a critic of the policies of the opposing party’s president, as many candidates do. He portrayed himself repeatedly as someone who, because he “looks different” from other presidents, would make America beloved and cherished in the world.

Plenty of solipsism here. Obama’s status as the possible and then actual first black president was surely an electoral asset. Most Americans believed and believe that, given the nation’s history, the election of a black president would be a good thing, at least in the abstract.

But that history has less resonance beyond America’s borders. Obama must have been surprised to find, on his trip to his father’s native Africa, that he was less popular there than George W. Bush, thanks to Bush’s program to combat AIDS. …

Speaking of defects, John Podhoretz says the healthcare disaster is now undeniable.

The Washington Post has the bombshell story of the month: “A pair of surveys released on Thursday suggest that just one in 10 uninsured people who qualify for private health plans through the new marketplace have signed up for one—and that about half of uninsured adults has looked for information on the online exchanges or plans to look.” Well, and there goes the famed rationale for the health-care law—which was to bring the people, numbering anywhere between 31 million to 47 million depending on how and whom you count, without insurance into the system.

Why aren’t they signing up? First off, there will always be people who choose to live on the margins in some way or other. They don’t want to be in the system, they’re paranoid about the system, they keep their money in their mattress and lots of cans in the basement. But mostly, people aren’t signing up now and haven’t had health care before because of the cost: “Of people who are uninsured and do not intend to get a health plan through the marketplaces, the biggest factor is that they believe they could not afford one.”

Since October 1 of last year, the coverage of the Obamacare disaster has centered on the technical catastrophe of the healthcare.gov and the transitional problems afflicting insurers, employers, and the insured alike—and more recently the administration’s desperate efforts to delay the penalties and controls imposed by the law to limit the political fallout. It is safe to say, though, that this is the worst possible news for Obama and his people. They have thrown the entire health-care system into unprecedented chaos for a population that is, it seems, staying as far away from it as possible. Little has been fixed; much has been made far worse; nothing makes sense; and good luck to the Democrats who have to defend their votes for this colossal cock-up in November.

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Charles Krauthammer on Putin’s good luck.

Vladimir Putin is a lucky man. And he’s got three more years of luck to come.

He takes Crimea, and President Obama says it’s not in Russia’s interest, not even strategically clever. Indeed, it’s a sign of weakness. …

… How to figure out Obama’s foreign policy? In his first U.N. speech, he says: “No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation.” On what planet? Followed by the assertion that “alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long-gone Cold War” — like NATO? — “make no sense in an interconnected world.”

Putin’s more cynical advisers might have thought such adolescent universalism to be a ruse. But Obama coupled these amazing words with even more amazing actions. …

… Would Putin have lunged for Ukraine if he didn’t have such a clueless adversary? No one can say for sure. But it certainly made Putin’s decision easier.

Russia will get kicked out of the G-8 — if Obama can get Angela Merkel to go along. Big deal. Putin does care about financial sanctions, but the Europeans are already divided and squabbling among themselves.

Next weekend’s Crimean referendum will ask if it should be returned to Mother Russia. Can Putin refuse? He can already see the history textbooks: Catherine the Great took Crimea, Vlad (the Great?) won it back. Not bad for a 19th-century man.

NY Post editors are scathing. Jimmy obama they call him.  

Vladimir Putin has taken the measure of Barack Obama. He’s found Jimmy Carter.

Like Jimmy Carter, who boasted he was free of any “inordinate fear of communism,” Obama began his term as president vowing to “reset” relations with Russia.

Like Jimmy Carter, who conveyed weakness when Iran took our embassy staff hostage, Obama confirmed his own weakness when he drew a red line in Syria and then backed down from enforcing it.

Like Jimmy Carter, who was rewarded by Leonid Brezhnev with a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Putin has returned Obama’s favor with a Russian invasion of Ukraine.

And just like Carter, who responded with what his staff called “a strong public statement,” Obama responded with his own statement saying he is “deeply concerned” by Russia’s military movement in Ukraine. …

“Shut up!” They said. Jonathan Tobin answers the administration’s defenders who say we’re not supposed to be critical of serial foreign policy disasters. 

Russia’s aggression against Ukraine has led many Americans to re-evaluate President Obama’s mockery of those Republicans like Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin’s warnings about the geo-strategic threat that Vladimir Putin’s regime posed to the West. It turns out that the administration’s assumptions about not only Russia but also about the basic principles of U.S. foreign policy were mistaken. Not only did the magic of Barack Obama’s personality fail to tame Putin, Iran, Syria or North Korea. As our Abe Greenwald noted yesterday, the administration’s belief that America had transcended history and that the use of force was ineffective has again been thoroughly exploded.

But rather than prompt a far-reaching debate about the lessons to be drawn from this episode, many pundits, not all of whom are knee-jerk Obama defenders are calling for Americans to pipe down about whether the policies of the past five years are partly responsible for the mess in Eastern Europe as well as the fiasco in Syria, not to mention the ongoing administration attempt to forge a new détente with Iran. Instead, we are being told to be quiet and to let America speak with one voice, lest Putin or any other foe be encouraged by criticism of Obama. Not for the first time, Arthur Vandenberg’s famous 1947 quote in which he chided Republican critics of President Harry Truman’s foreign policy that “we must stop partisan politics at the water’s edge” is being disinterred in order to give the 44th president some respite from the beating he has been taking from conservatives about his policies. Though, as Robert Lieber wrote last month in the Washington Post, Democrats have ignored that principle in the last decade, Joe Scarborough, MSNBC’s token conservative is sounding that bipartisan theme both on “Morning Joe” and in a Politico op-ed. Scarborough argues that, “There is nothing more frightening to our enemies than a strong, unified American voice.” That’s true. But in the absence of leadership from the president and the administration, such a stance is impossible. Though loyalty to country must always trump partisanship, the effort to suppress a debate about foreign policy at a time when it is desperately needed is antithetical to the cause of creating that “strong, unified American voice.”

Abe Greenwald says hold on a minute to the progressives who say right wing folks are rooting for Putin. Greenwald reminds it was the last GOP presidential candidate who correctly identified the dangers coming from Russia. 

Americans occasionally indulge a certain progressive notion about world affairs: that humanity has become so enlightened and sophisticated as to have outgrown its brutal and tragic nature. The idea that we can transcend our blood-soaked past was behind the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, which sought to outlaw war altogether. Eighty-five years and millions of war dead later, it’s also behind Secretary of State John Kerry’s recent comment that Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was a  “19th century act in the 21st century.” Invasions, you see, belong to that buried thing called history. We’re now in something else.

Unfortunately that something else doesn’t look much better. A Russian strongman is gluing together the pieces of a smashed empire, underwriting biblical slaughter in the Middle East, and standing with a nuclear-aspirant, exterminationist regime. Doubtless, Putin took Kerry’s characterization as a supreme compliment, an indication that he’s a great man of history and a belated product of Russia’s Golden Age.

Pointing out Putin’s aspirations is becoming risky. There’s been much talk lately of conservatives who idolize the Russian leader. But aside from a handful of marginalized eccentrics, the very opposite is the case. It was the last Republican presidential candidate who called Putin’s Russia our “number-one political foe,” and it was the entire Democratic establishment that supported Obama’s five-year-long attempt to be more accommodating to Moscow. Reconciling these facts has been unpleasant for progressives who’ve only just discovered, via gay-rights activism, that Putin is an unapologetic human-rights abuser. One hopes that similar clarity on Iran is soon to follow. …

Tired of hearing about foreign policy defeats? Jonathan Tobin posts on one in the Senate. 

Two days after a shocking defeat, liberals are still grousing about the Senate spiking the nomination of former NAACP Legal Fund Director Debo Adegbile to be head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. What really burns them up is not just that Republicans successfully filibustered one of President Obama’s choices for a government post but that six Democrats joined with them. But rather than take responsibility for putting forward a controversial figure who was sure to provoke bitter opposition from both sides of the aisle, liberals are reverting to form by blaming their defeat on conservative demagoguery and racism.

This is more than disingenuous. Adegbile lost for one reason and one reason only and its name is Mumia Abu-Jamal, the radical who gunned down Philadelphia Policeman Daniel Faulkner in a cold-blooded murder in 1981. Under the leadership of Adegbile, the NAACP Legal Fund worked on Abu-Jamal’s appeal. The White House and Adegbile’s defenders in the press say blaming the lawyer for his client’s crime is both unfair and an assault on our judicial system. But contrary to this spin, Adegbile and the NAACP were not a latter day version of patriot John Adams defending the British soldiers who perpetrated the Boston Massacre. Far from merely writing briefs on Constitutional issues involving Abu-Jamal’s conviction, Adegbile’s lawyers were part of the propaganda campaign aimed at besmirching the victim and the Philadelphia Police Department and portraying a killer who was literally caught red-handed with the murder weapon as a heroic martyr. Under these circumstances, it’s little wonder that some Democrats wanted no part of the nomination, especially those like Pennsylvania’s Bob Casey, Jr. and Delaware’s Chris Coons voted against cloture for the nomination, whose constituents know the facts of the case and despicable work of Abu-Jamal’s cheerleaders. …

The Cartoonists have a good day.

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Another great day when we don’t expend many electrons with items about the Washington DC creeps that our fellow citizens have decided would be really really good at running the government.

MSN – Money has a piece saying the Dow could hit 26,000 by 2016. Seems silly, but some readers will be interested. The argument is the federal government will keep the bubble going.

Market observer Harry Dent claims that the Dow Jones industrials will rally to 17,000 within the next few weeks — before it disastrously plummets to around 6,000 by 2016. Dent makes his case in a new book, “The Demographic Cliff.”

Sounds like fun times for investors — but it sounds like book shilling to many of the rest of us.

Let’s address several important points that explain why Dent is so terribly wrong. The U.S. government, the Fed, Wall Street and the big Banks are “all-in” on the stock market right now. They can’t and won’t allow a serious collapse in the markets.

Ask yourself this question: All those billions of dollars the Fed printed since 2009 . . . where did that money go? It didn’t go to consumers. It funneled to interest-free loans to Wall Street firms, banks and corporations — so that in the end that money wound up in the stock market.

How else can you explain a market that has risen in value despite billions of dollars in net outflows by retail investors from 2009 to 2013? …

Popular Mechanics suggests how cruise ships can become safer.

For the past three decades cruising has been the fastest-growing segment of the travel industry. Eleven new ships were christened last year, and almost 21 million people went on a cruise. Statistically, cruising is relatively safe, but recent failures in seamanship, emergency response, and engineering should sound an alarm. Introduce bad weather or remote surroundings into the equation and an incident like the Costa Concordia shipwreck, which made international headlines two years ago, could result in hundreds of deaths.

Compared with other areas where technology and human behavior impact passenger safety—notably, aviation—the cruise industry is poorly regulated. It has no clear equivalent of the Federal Aviation Administration, which has a broad mandate to ensure air safety. The U.S. Coast Guard conducts prescheduled, biannual inspections of ships that embark passengers at U.S. ports, but most cruise ships are registered, or flagged, overseas, and critics charge that regulations are poorly enforced. Cruise lines have started instituting reforms, but more needs to be done.

The January 2012 grounding of the Carnival-owned megaship Costa Concordia left 32 dead, 157 injured, and a hulking, disintegrating eyesore beached like a whale off the coast of Tuscany, Italy. It started with ego: Capt. Francesco Schettino swung the ship and its 4229 passengers and crew close to shore on an unsanctioned “salute” to the island of Giglio. The vessel hit submerged rocks, which ripped a nearly 200-foot gash in the hull.

The crew never contacted rescue authorities, who found out about the accident from relatives of panicked passengers. And the abandon-ship order didn’t come until 10:54 pm, more than an hour after the collision. The captain himself had already escaped the foundering vessel. “You’ve abandoned ship!? Get the [expletive] on board!” Italian coast guard captain Gregorio De Falco bellowed when he finally reached Schettino by phone.

The crew didn’t perform much better: The industry standard for the evacuation of a vessel is 30 minutes, but hours into the incident there were still dozens of passengers on board. …
… International law calls for passengers to receive a safety briefing within 24 hours of a ship leaving port, but that can be too late. About 700 of the Costa Concordia’s 3206 passengers had boarded just a couple of hours before the accident; their safety briefing was scheduled for the next day. When things went bad, passengers had no idea where to go or what to do. But the timing of drills isn’t the only issue that needs to be addressed. Mike Inman, the vice president of safety for HollandAmerica, another large cruise line owned by Carnival, says that passenger attendance at muster drills hasn’t always been enforced. “HollandAmerica was one of the first lines to make it mandatory, and we have disembarked people who did not attend,” he says. (Even before the Concordia wreck, HollandAmerica held drills before its ships left port.)

Since February 2012 all CLIA cruise lines have pledged to conduct passenger muster drills before leaving port. Technology can help too. In October 2013 Danish safety-equipment company Viking announced the creation of a self-propelled, inflatable raft that holds 200 people and has a chute-like system to ease boarding for children, the elderly, and the injured. The LifeCraft could be on ships within two years; such advances could save lives. “How you get the person in the life raft is the most important part,” Nadolny says. “Lifeboat injuries are probably the biggest killer of crew out there. It’s a fairly complicated arrangement for lifting and lowering the boat, and if it’s not done just right, well, the boat drops and everybody in the boat gets killed.” That’s what happened last year in Spain’s Canary Islands during a drill on a cruise ship called the Thomson Majesty. Cables snapped, killing five crew members and injuring three more. …

The blessings of fracking are extolled in an article from the Hoover Institution. Secure property rights are one of the reasons fracking took off in our country.

Americans should celebrate fracking. By unleashing production of unconventional hydrocarbons, fracking has catapulted the U.S. from being a has-been producer of oil to the world’s largest total supplier in 2013 when we include natural gas liquids, biofuels, and crude oil. The U.S. produced around an average of 12.1 million barrels a day of these liquids, 300,000 barrels a day more than Saudi Arabia and 1.6 million more than Russia, the previous leaders.

This increase in U.S. output has not been matched since 1940 when the country was blessed with flush new primary production from oil fields in Texas, New Mexico, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. Shale-gas production from the Bakken Formation in North Dakota, the Eagle Ford Formation in Texas, and the Marcellus Formation that crosses parts of West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York now accounts for 44% of total U.S. natural gas output, and eventually could account for nearly 70%. …

… New fracking and horizontal drilling technologies are dominantly developed and implemented in the U.S. Why is that? The answer is secure private property rights to subsurface minerals. These are the major reason why the American oil and natural gas industry has been so dynamic and innovative. Except for western Canada, throughout the world, subsurface mineral rights are held by governments, and indeed, the U.S. government also holds the rights to hydrocarbon deposits on federal lands. The incentives for and transaction costs of investing in and using new fracking, pumping, and drilling technologies are dramatically different between private and public ownership.

When private parties own the mineral rights (often surface land owners), they capture any expected benefits from new discoveries and associated production. In North Dakota, land owners above the Bakken Formation are part of a new generation of oil millionaires in a relatively remote and semi-arid region that previously had seen population declines and economic stagnation. These owners also bear many of the costs, including any environmental ones, such as potential ground water contamination or depletion, because these costs generally are localized in the vicinity of fracking wells. Where they are not, rights holders or the companies they contract with may be held accountable for damages inflicted on others.

Bonding requirements to cover environmental damages also can be used both for mitigation and for indentifying the opportunity costs to rights holders and drilling companies of any harm they inflict on others. Bonding requirements and potential litigation instill incentives for careful production practices. …

WSJ’s Walt Mossberg replacement, Geoffrey Fowler, writes on the ubiquitous computer mouse.

I said goodbye to my mouse last month. It was time to advance, I thought, to a higher plane of input, a trackpad that works like a tablet’s screen. Instead of point and click, I’d swipe and flick.

A few weeks in, I was missing my mouse. Moving a folder across a 27-inch iMac screen with the trackpad was like lugging a grand piano across the Sahara—I had to keep taking breaks along the way, as I ran out of pad.

This can’t be progress. Determined, I rustled up a dozen of the latest input devices, regular mice and trackpads, but also vertical mice, pen- and knob-shaped mice, a touch-screen stylus, even a controller that lets you wave your hands around without touching anything, a la “Minority Report.”

What I discovered: Thirty years after the Macintosh took the mouse mainstream, I couldn’t find anything more precise or comfortable for operating a computer. More important, I found the mouse has managed to reinvent itself over the years—it’s like the Madonna of PC peripherals.

One reinvention stood out during my testing, a mouse whose unconventional look belied its natural grip: the Sculpt Ergonomic Mouse by Microsoft.  Other standouts I tested were Apple‘s  Magic Mouse, the Penclic Mouse and Logitech‘s  Ultrathin Touch Mouse. …

This cold and snow-filled winter we’ve had lots of fun with globalony alarmists. However, there are parts of the northern hemisphere with mild winters. Parts as close as Alaska were warmth and lack of snow have created havoc for the iconic Iditarod Race. The Wire has the story. Check out the picture of a dog sled team mushing through a forest on bare ground.

Along the Farewell Burn, returning racer Scott Janssen, known as the Mushin’ Mortician because of his day job, had to drop out of the race after numerous catastrophes. Janssen slammed into rocks and crashed his sled. He hit his head and was knocked unconscious for at least an hour.

He then continued on until one of his dogs got loose. As Janssen walked across a frozen creek to retrieve the dog, he slipped and fell, breaking his ankle. He laid there for another 45 minuted until another competitor, Newton Marshall, caught up to him and offered assistance (Marshall is from Jamaica, by the way).

As of Thursday morning, 12 of the 69 Iditarod competitors have scratched.  Jeff King currently holds a 39-minute lead, although none of the top five competitors have taken their mandatory eight-hour or 24-hour rests. Buser, however, is in sixth and has already gotten his 24-hour layover out of the way. …

This is what Pickings could look like if we didn’t have a predatory government.

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Apparently the president doesn’t think it has done enough damage in foreign affairs, so on the eve of Netanyahu’s visit to our country he insults Israel yet again.  John Podhoretz posts on the president’s interview with Bloomberg’s Jeffery Goldberg.

In an extraordinary—and I don’t use the word in a complimentary way—interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of Bloomberg, President Obama follows his secretary of state in warning Israel and its leader that a failure to “make peace” now with the Palestinians will have terrible consequences. Israel is “more isolated internationally,” and will become more so; there will be more Palestinians and Israeli Arabs as time goes on, not fewer, so Israel had better move now; and not to move now is to create the conditions for a “permanent Israeli occupation of the West Bank….there comes a point when you cannot manage this anymore.”

The wild logical contradictions in his remarks expose the degree to which the American approach in the Kerry peace talks is to haunt Israel with the dire nightmare it will face should the talks fail; Palestinian rejectionism plays almost no role in the Obaman calculus here.

The Palestinians, in Obama’s view, do not actually need to make changes; astonishingly, he says, they’re ready for peace. “The Palestinians,” the president says, overlooking every piece of polling data we have about the opinions of the Palestinians, “would still prefer peace. They would still prefer a country of their own that allows them to find a job, send their kids to school, travel overseas, go back and forth to work without feeling as if they are restricted or constrained as a people. And they recognize that Israel is not going anywhere.”

Ah. So that 2011 poll that says 60 percent of the Palestinians reject a two-state solution is bunk—a poll whose findings have not been  contradicted since. If Palestinians refuse to accept a two-state solution, they do not “recognize that Israel is not going anywhere.” Rather, they are still engaging in a pseudo-national fantasy about Israel’s disappearance or destruction. And they are so eager for peace and coexistence with Israel that they remain the only significant Muslim population that still has a favorable view of suicide bombings, according to a Pew survey. …

Evelyn Gordon corrects the fact-challenged president. 

Since John Podhoretz, Elliott Abrams and Jonathan Tobin have all written excellent takedowns of the fallacies, outright lies and destructive consequences of President Barack Obama’s interview with Jeffrey Goldberg on Sunday, you might think there’s nothing left to say. But there are some additional points that merit consideration, and I’d like to focus on one: settlement construction. Because on this issue, Obama’s “facts” are flat-out wrong – and this particular untruth have some very important implications.

According to Obama, “we have seen more aggressive settlement construction over the last couple years than we’ve seen in a very long time.” But in reality, as a simple glance at the annual data published by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics reveals, there has been less settlement construction during Benjamin Netanyahu’s five years as Israeli premier (2009-13) than under any of his recent predecessors.

During those five years, housing starts in the settlements averaged 1,443 a year (all data is from the charts here, here and here plus this news report). That’s less than the 1,702 a year they averaged under Ehud Olmert in 2006-08, who is nevertheless internationally acclaimed as a peacemaker (having made the Palestinians an offer so generous that then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice couldn’t believe she was hearing it). It’s also less than the 1,652 per year they averaged under Ariel Sharon in 2001-05, who is similarly lauded internationally as a peacemaker (for having left Gaza); the fact that even Sharon out-built Netanyahu is particularly remarkable, because his term coincided with the second intifada, when demand for housing in the settlements plummeted.  …

Jonathan Tobin says Netanyahu’s decision not to engage the president shows Bibi’s strength and Barry’s weakness. 

The last time President Obama ambushed Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, the Israeli gave as good as he got. This time he turned the other cheek. The reason for this turnabout by the normally combative prime minister tells us everything we need to know about the relative strength of the positions of these two leaders.

While the assumption on the part of most pundits was that Obama has Netanyahu in a corner, the latter’s reaction to the assault the president launched at him in an interview with Bloomberg’s Jeffrey Goldberg this past weekend shows us this isn’t true. Though Netanyahu had to be infuriated by the president’s single-minded determination to blame Israel for the lack of peace as well as his obtuse praise for Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, he felt no need to publicly respond to it. Far from feeling threatened by Obama’s tirade, Netanyahu’s decision to ignore the president’s attack shows that he understands the dynamics of both the peace process and U.S. foreign policy actually give him the upper hand over the weak and increasingly out-of-touch lame duck in the White House. …

… Though Obama’s attacks did real damage to Israel’s position, the prime minister is right to refuse to take the bait. Netanyahu cannot have failed to see that, far from offering him the opportunity to effectively pressure the Israelis, the president is floundering in his second term especially on foreign policy. The most effective answer to Obama’s taunts is patience since events will soon overtake the president’s positions on both the Palestinian and Iranian fronts, as well as in other debacles around the globe that have popped up because of Obama’s weak leadership. Though the disparity in the relative power of their positions inevitably means Netanyahu must worry about Obama’s barbs, the bottom line here is that it is the president and not the prime minister who is in big trouble.

Jennifer Rubin posts on the controversy.

Just as Republicans are on the same side as the majority of Americans in the Obamacare, they find themselves lock-step with voters on Israel, Iran and foreign policy more generally. This is a complete reversal from 2006 when Democrats capitalized on the Iraq war to take the House and rack up big Senate wins.

Rep. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) spoke for virtually all Republicans when he bashed the president for his remarks on Israel. Cotton told Right Turn today: “Yet again, President Obama displays incredible naiveté and cynicism about the world at the same time.  Israel isn’t the obstacle to peace; Palestinian rejectionism is.  When the Palestinians accept Israel as a Jewish state, there will be peace.”  He added, “President Obama’s ominous predictions to the contrary should trouble every pro-Israel American, as well as our Israeli allies.” And that is especially true in a state with so many military (active and reverse) and so many religious voters who support the Jewish state. “Arkansans’ support for Israel remains unshakable, and I will continue to work with my colleagues in both parties to preserve and strengthen the U.S.-Israel alliance,” he said.

But as we have heard from speakers and attendees at the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee, criticism is not limited to Republicans. Longtime Democrat and former AIPAC spokesman Josh Block (who now heads the Israel Project) commented to me, “The president’s interview quite peculiar and disappointing. Not only does it betray a deeply flawed approach to how one should treat allies, but it is riddled with basic factual errors. It also makes one wonder if the president is getting accurate information from his staff, or if he has deep personal beliefs that supersede reality and cloud his perspective.”  …

“She loves blood, this Russian land.” - Russian poet Anna Akhmatova sends us back to the problems in Ukraine. A Russian historian once said the first and second world wars could easily be called the first and second Ukrainian wars. Tragedy lives in that country. Yale historian Timothy Snyder, author of Bloodlands wrote ”Hitler vs. Stalin: Who Was Worse?” for the New York Review of Books. We have it here. It is long, but as we’re wont to do at the end of the week, we will run a little over. Also from Akhmatova – “It was a time when only the dead smiled, happy in their peace.”

… we might ask: who was worse, Hitler or Stalin?

In the second half of the twentieth century, Americans were taught to see both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as the greatest of evils. Hitler was worse, because his regime propagated the unprecedented horror of the Holocaust, the attempt to eradicate an entire people on racial grounds. Yet Stalin was also worse, because his regime killed far, far more people—tens of millions, it was often claimed—in the endless wastes of the Gulag. For decades, and even today, this confidence about the difference between the two regimes—quality versus quantity—has set the ground rules for the politics of memory. Even historians of the Holocaust generally take for granted that Stalin killed more people than Hitler, thus placing themselves under greater pressure to stress the special character of the Holocaust, since this is what made the Nazi regime worse than the Stalinist one.

Discussion of numbers can blunt our sense of the horrific personal character of each killing and the irreducible tragedy of each death. As anyone who has lost a loved one knows, the difference between zero and one is an infinity. Though we have a harder time grasping this, the same is true for the difference between, say, 780,862 and 780,863—which happens to be the best estimate of the number of people murdered at Treblinka. Large numbers matter because they are an accumulation of small numbers: that is, precious individual lives. Today, after two decades of access to Eastern European archives, and thanks to the work of German, Russian, Israeli, and other scholars, we can resolve the question of numbers. The total number of noncombatants killed by the Germans—about 11 million—is roughly what we had thought. The total number of civilians killed by the Soviets, however, is considerably less than we had believed. We know now that the Germans killed more people than the Soviets did. That said, the issue of quality is more complex than was once thought. Mass murder in the Soviet Union sometimes involved motivations, especially national and ethnic ones, that can be disconcertingly close to Nazi motivations. …

… Given that the Nazis and the Stalinists tended to kill in the same places, in the lands between Berlin and Moscow, and given that they were, at different times, rivals, allies, and enemies, we must take seriously the possibility that some of the death and destruction wrought in the lands between was their mutual responsibility. What can we make of the fact, for example, that the lands that suffered most during the war were those occupied not once or twice but three times: by the Soviets in 1939, the Germans in 1941, and the Soviets again in 1944?

The Holocaust began when the Germans provoked pogroms in June and July 1941, in which some 24,000 Jews were killed, on territories in Poland annexed by the Soviets less than two years before. The Nazis planned to eliminate the Jews in any case, but the prior killings by the NKVD certainly made it easier for local gentiles to justify their own participation in such campaigns. As I have written in Bloodlands, where all of the major Nazi and Soviet atrocities are discussed, we see, even during the German-Soviet war, episodes of belligerent complicity in which one side killed more because provoked or in some sense aided by the other. Germans took so many Soviet prisoners of war in part because Stalin ordered his generals not to retreat. The Germans shot so many civilians in part because Soviet partisans deliberately provoked reprisals. The Germans shot more than a hundred thousand civilians in Warsaw in 1944 after the Soviets urged the locals to rise up and then declined to help them. In Stalin’s Gulag some 516,543 people died between 1941 and 1943, sentenced by the Soviets to labor, but deprived of food by the German invasion.

Were these people victims of Stalin or of Hitler? Or both?

Late night humor from Andy Malcolm.

SethMeyers: Although Ukraine has been all over the news for weeks, a survey finds 64% of U.S. students still can’t find Ukraine on a map. Said Vladimir Putin, “Soon, nobody will.”

Fallon: A new survey has found that almost half of dog owners admit to spending more money on their dogs than on their significant others. I tried to ask my wife if that’s true, but she and our dog were out to dinner.

Conan: Newsweek magazine is returning, and this time it will be more expensive. This should work, since everyone’s main complaint with Newsweek magazine before was, “Too affordable.”

Conan: In France, a woman won the right to marry her dead fiancé. Just when he thought he’d gotten out of it

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Before we return to the Ukrainian disaster, we’ll pause for an item by Joel Kotkin, our favorite geographer, who says no matter what the media types say, the Sunbelt is

booming and the coasts are toast.

Ever since the Great Recession ripped through the economies of the Sunbelt, America’s coastal pundit class has been giddily predicting its demise. Strangled by high-energy prices, cooked by global warming, rejected by a new generation of urban-centric millennials, this vast southern was doomed to become, in the words of the Atlantic, where the “American dream” has gone to die. If the doomsayers are right, Americans must be the ultimate masochists. After a brief hiatus, people seem to, once again, be streaming towards the expanse of warm-weather states extending from the southeastern seaboard to Phoenix.

Since 2010, according to an American Community Survey by demographer Wendell Cox, over one million people have moved to the Sunbelt mostly from the Northeast and Midwest.

Any guesses for the states that have gained the most domestic migrants since 2010? The Sunbelt dominates the top three: Texas, Florida and Arizona. And who’s losing the most people? Generally the states dearest to the current ruling class: New York, Illinois, California and New Jersey.  Some assert this reflects the loss of poorer, working class folks to areas while the “smart” types continue to move to the big cities of Northeast and California. Yet, according to American Community Survey Data for 2007 to 2011, the biggest gainers of college graduates, according to Cox, have been Texas, Arizona and Florida; the biggest losers are in the Northeast  (New York), the Midwest (Illinois and Michigan)

For the most part, notes demographer Cox, this is not a movement to Tombstone or Mayberry, although many small towns in the south are doing well, it’s is a movement to Sunbelt cities. Indeed, of the ten fastest growing big metros areas in America in 2012, nine were in the Sunbelt. These included not only the big four Texas cities—Austin, Houston, Dallas-Ft. Worth, San Antonio—but also Orlando, Raleigh, Phoenix, and Charlotte.

Perhaps the biggest sign of a Sunbelt turnaround is the resurgence of Phoenix, a region devastated by the housing bust and widely regarded by contemporary urbanists as the “least sustainable” of American cities. The recovery of Phoenix, appropriately named the Valley of the Sun, is strong evidence that even the most impacted Sunbelt regions are on the way back. …

Roger Simon says Putin and the president have something in common, but more differences. 

With Vladimir Putin giving Barack Obama the back of his gloved hand in the Crimea, it’s easy to forget what the two leaders have in common. Neither of them likes democracy very much.

In Putin’s case that couldn’t be more obvious, but Obama has given more than his share of signals to that effect in recent days, informing a complaisant Congress during the State of the Union that he was going to override them and take the law into his own hands by executive fiat if they didn’t go along with his policies. His number one consigliere, Valerie Jarrett, repeated essentially the same thing during a recent interview on The O’Reilly Factor.

Unfortunately, that’s about it in the similarity department (except they both seem to like sports). In two other major categories, the dissimilarities are striking. Putin is one tough dude and a patriot for his country. Obama is neither of these. In evidence I offer one five-letter word: Syria. I could offer a lot more, but I don’t want to bore you.

The point is, as Putin threatens Ukraine and who knows what else, China moves on the Japanese islands, the Iranian mullahs jaw on while moving ever closer to nuclear capability, the already nuclear North Koreans improve their ballistics while starving their people, Venezuela approaches civil war, al-Qaeda and its myriad cousins metastasize across North Africa, the Levant, and beyond, the West has at its helm someone who is not only a documented liar (“if you like your plan,” etc., etc.) but who is also essentially a blowhard. Even worse, and ultimately even more dangerous to our health and/or survival, our president is a monumentally poor judge of character. He is clueless. …

We know our friends don’t think much of the prez, but now liberals see the failure. From Slate we learn Romney got it right and you know who got it wrong.

… Here’s Obama.

Governor Romney, I’m glad that you recognize that Al Qaida is a threat, because a few months ago when you were asked what’s the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia, not Al Qaida; you said Russia, in the 1980s, they’re now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.

But Governor, when it comes to our foreign policy, you seem to want to import the foreign policies of the 1980s, just like the social policies of the 1950s and the economic policies of the 1920s.

And here’s Romney:

Russia I indicated is a geopolitical foe… and I said in the same — in the same paragraph I said, and Iran is the greatest national security threat we face. Russia does continue to battle us in the U.N. time and time again. I have clear eyes on this. I’m not going to wear rose-colored glasses when it comes to Russia, or Mr. Putin. And I’m certainly not going to say to him, I’ll give you more flexibility after the election. After the election, he’ll get more backbone. 

Romney was right. Why was Obama wrong? Because, I think, he was willfully blurring the distinction between “geopolitical” and other sorts of threats. He was playing to the cheap seats. Voters do not fear Russia, or particularly care about its movements in its sad, cold sphere of influence. They do care a lot about terrorism. And Obama would use any chance he had, in 2012, to remind voters that he was president when Osama Bin Laden was killed.

So you see the politics—they reveal Obama as the player of a cheap trick. …

Here’s a blogger from the leftist New Republic.

In the course of the last presidential campaign, Mitt Romney made a comment about America’s number one “geopolitical foe,” which Romney claimed was Russia. He was mocked by the president and many liberal commentators. Here are Romney’s remarks, in their full context, which came during a conversation with Wolf Blitzer: 

ROMNEY:  Russia…is, without question, our number one geopolitical foe.  They fight every cause for the world’s worst actors.

BLITZER:  But you think Russia is a bigger foe right now than, let’s say, Iran or China or North Korea? Is that—is that what you’re suggesting, Governor?

ROMNEY:  Well, I’m saying in terms of a geopolitical opponent, the nation that lines up with the world’s worst actors.  Of course, the greatest threat that the world faces is a nuclear Iran.  A nuclear North Korea is already troubling enough.

But when these—these terrible actors pursue their course in the world and we go to the United Nations looking for ways to stop them, when—when Assad, for instance, is murdering his own people, we go—we go to the United Nations, and who is it that always stands up for the world’s worst actors? It is always Russia, typically with China alongside.

And—and so in terms of a geopolitical foe, a nation that’s on the Security Council, that has the heft of the Security Council and is, of course, a—a massive nuclear power, Russia is the—the geopolitical foe.

This all seems…exactly right. 

Another New Republic contributor is tired of the administration clichés.

Everyone’s giving President Obama advice about how to handle Vladimir Putin’s adventure into the Crimea. But I want to issue a broader critique, because there’s something that he and his people will need to do to be more effective in this case and in future foreign policy crises: They’ll need to change their rhetoric.

In talking about Putin, as when trying to express disapproval towards other world leaders in the past, administration officials have resorted to language that comes across as either patronizing or out of touch. Let’s examine a couple of the administration’s favorite rhetorical tropes.

1. They are not acting in their own interest. They are only harming themselves.

Secretary of State John Kerry was all over the airwaves this weekend with versions of this line. “He is not going to gain by this,” Kerry told David Gregory on “Meet the Press.” “Russia is going to lose. The Russian people are going to lose.”

Over the years, Obama and his aides have offered similar versions of this line in talking about other foreign leaders who had done or were about to do something of which the administration disapproved: in Syria, for example, or Egypt or Qaddafi’s Libya. And guess what? It’s a useless line of attack. Putin makes his own calculations of what is in his interest. If he believed that sending troops onto Ukrainian soil was a bad idea, he wouldn’t have done it. Bashar al-Assad also makes his own calculations. He’s worried that if he loses to the rebels, he and many of the people around him will be killed. It’s enough of a full-time responsibility for Obama and Kerry to define what’s in America’s own interests without making grand proclamations of what’s in the best interest of other countries or their leaders. …

Back to our friends, Peter Wehner traces the president’s journey from arrogance to incompetence.

… When he ran for the presidency, it was Barack Obama who never put limits on his criticisms of others. He spoke as if the problems of the world would disappear with two events: the removal from office of his predecessor and his arrival as president of the United States. Even in a profession not known for attracting modest individuals, Mr. Obama’s arrogance set him apart.

In 2008 his campaign aides referred to him as the “black Jesus.” He told congressional Democrats during the 2008 campaign, “I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions.” During that campaign, while still a one-term senator, Obama decided he wanted to give a speech in Germany– and he wanted to deliver it at the Brandenburg Gate. 

“I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters,” Mr. Obama told Patrick Gaspard, his political director, at the start of the 2008 campaign, according to The New Yorker. “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m going to think I’m a better political director than my political director.” A convention speech wasn’t enough for Mr. Obama; Greek columns needed to be added. During an interview with “60 Minutes,” Obama said, “I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president — with the possible exceptions of Johnson, FDR, and Lincoln.” (The use of the word “possible” is priceless.) Mr. Obama has compared himself to LeBron James; his aides compared him to Michael Jordan. He clearly conceived of himself as a world-historical figure. Nothing, it seemed, was beyond his power. (If you think I’m exaggerating, I’d urge you to watch this 30-second clip from an Obama speech in 2008.) …

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We interrupt our selections outlining the president’s foreign policy disasters to select an item from Time Magazine on the crisis in student loans. A program the administration decided to nationalize in some of the 2,700 pages of the healthcare act. Why not? There is hardly a thing in this country that government cannot make worse.

Chris Rong did everything right. A 23-year-old dentistry student in New York, Chris excelled at one of the country’s top high schools, breezed through college, and is now studying dentistry at one of the best dental schools in the nation.

But it may be a long time before he sees any rewards. He’s moved back home with his parents in Bayside, Queens—an hour-and-a-half commute each way to class at the New York University’s College of Dentistry—and by the time he graduates in 2016, he’ll face $400,000 in student loans. “If the money weren’t a problem I would live on my own,” says Rong. “My debt is hanging over my mind. I’m taking that all on myself.”

Rong isn’t alone. Across the country, students are taking on increasingly large amounts of debt to pay for heftier education tuitions. Figures released last week by the Federal Reserve of New York show that aggregate student loans nationwide have continued to rise. At the end of 2003, American students and graduates owed just $253 billion in aggregate debt; by the end of 2013, American students’ debt had ballooned to a total of $1.08 trillion, an increase of over 300%. In the past year alone, aggregate student debt grew 10%. By comparison, overall debt grew just 43% in the last decade and 1.6% over the past year.

According to a December study by the Institute for College Access & Success, seven out of 10 students in the class of 2012 graduated with student loans, and the average amount of debt among students who owed was $29,400. There’s no clear end in sight. ”The total amount of student debt is growing basically at a constant rate,” Wilbert van der Klaauw, an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York  tells TIME. “The inflow is much higher than the outflow, which is likely to continue in the future as reliance on student loans for college is expected to remain high.”

Debt is painful for many students, and an increasing number of graduates are unable to pay back their loans on time. Delinquencies on student loans have risen dramatically over the past decade: 11.5 percent of graduates were at least 90 days late on paying back their loans at the end of 2013, compared with 6.2 percent delinquencies on student loans in 2003. Moreover, the Fed’s figures on delinquencies hide more stark data: nearly half of all students with debt aren’t currently in repayment thanks to deferments and forbearances and the fact that students are not expected to pay while they’re in school, according to van der Klaauw. What that means is that for the graduates who are actually expected to pay their loans now, the delinquency rate is roughly double the 11.5% figure. …

… Student debt doesn’t just weigh heavily on graduates. Evidence is growing that student loans may be dragging down the overall economy, not just individuals. Think about it this way: if students have significant debts, it means they’re less likely to spend money on other goods and services, and it also means they’re less likely to take out a mortgage on a house. Consumer purchasing is the primary driver of the U.S. economy, and mortgages and auto loans play a huge role as well. There aren’t any comprehensive, hard numbers yet on how much of a drag student debt may be on the economy, but “the associations definitely suggest that growing student debt is a drag on consumption,” says van der Klaauw. “This is still something we’re discussing. There are a range of views on this. My personal view is that the increasing reliance on student loans for financing college education is going to be a drag on consumption for some time.” …

Andrew Malcolm brings us back to Ukraine.

… Of course, it would be ridiculous to suggest Obama’s passivity toward Putin is connected to the American’s overheard promise of post-election “flexibility” to Putin’s predecessor back in 2012. So, we won’t.

Here’s how Col. Putin responded to Obama’s words of warning: He sent more Russian troops into Crimea.

Then, to show how really serious he is, Obama dispatched Secy. of State John Kerry to Kiev to offer cheap symbolic support for the reformers attempting to organize a new, but bankrupt Ukraine government.

Here’s how Kerry quaintly characterized the Russian invasion: “That is not the act of somebody who is strong. That is the act of somebody who is acting out of weakness.”

Kerry is fresh from a series of diplomatic triumphs including alienating Egypt’s new military-backed government, negotiating a Syrian chemical weapons accord that country is now ignoring and agreeing to give Iran six more months to maybe possibly agree to stop its nuclear weapons program, which everyone knows is not going to happen.

Kerry has also failed to reach agreement with Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai on a residual U.S. troop presence after December.

Recently, Kerry announced that global warming is “perhaps the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction.” Just so we — and Russia — know where this administration’s true priorities lie.

The seeds of Obama’s ongoing diplomatic embarrassments — and dangers to this nation — were sown in the Democrat’s early months in his so-called Russian policy reset. …

LIkewise Craig Pirrong at Streetwise Professor who wants to know why the bien pensants are surprised by Putin’s aggressive instincts and actions.

In 2007, in my 60th post on SWP, I wrote a post about Putin and the Euros, titled “A Man in a Hurry.”  If you look at Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, and the utterly pusillanimous European response to this aggression, that post from more than 7 years ago is quite clearly prophetic, to the last jot and tittle.

The closing paragraph:

“I think that most Europeans, and those few Americans who seem to pay much attention to these issues, are nonplussed by Putin’s audacity in large part because they are projecting their attitudes onto him. They cannot envision why someone would engage in such seemingly short sighted actions. As a recent Newsweek story puts it, they wonder why Putin is risking severe “blowback.” However, their attitudes have evolved and developed in a completely different institutional, economic, and political environment than Russia’s. The Euro-American environment is much more conducive to taking the longer view that the unsettled (and unsettling) environment that characterizes Russia today. So, the Europeans–and Americans–should be ready for more “surprises” from Putin–which shouldn’t be surprises at all.”

My main question is why a blogger, and amateur student of Russian politics, could figure this out, but the State Department, the intelligence agencies, the national security community, the vast bulk of think tanks, and the editorial pages of every major US paper couldn’t.  And why they haven’t been able to do so despite all that has happened since.  Georgia.  The castling move whereby Putin resumed the presidency.  The unrelenting crackdown on civil society.  It’s one thing to ignore reality when it’s lying around.  It’s another to ignore it when it is hitting you in the goddam face. …

Even the Washington Post’s editors are gagging on the policies of the one they enabled saying his “foreign policy is based on fantasy.”

FOR FIVE YEARS, President Obama has led a foreign policy based more on how he thinks the world should operate than on reality. It was a world in which “the tide of war is receding” and the United States could, without much risk, radically reduce the size of its armed forces. Other leaders, in this vision, would behave rationally and in the interest of their people and the world. Invasions, brute force, great-power games and shifting alliances — these were things of the past. Secretary of State John F. Kerry displayed this mindset on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday when he said, of Russia’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine, “It’s a 19th century act in the 21st century.”

That’s a nice thought, and we all know what he means. …