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Friends of Pickings, Stephan and Abby Thernstrom, write on the 60th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education.

In conventional liberal circles, there is never any good news about race. Thus, as the 60th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in the Brown v. Board of Education school-desegregation case nears, mainstream media outlets lately have been depicting American schools as resegregated.

Thus we read that in New York City “children trundle from segregated neighborhoods to segregated schools, living a hermetic reality,” the New York Times  reports. The Los Angeles Times describes more Latino children increasingly attending segregated schools, while the segregation of black students is virtually unchanged from the early 1970s. That conclusion is drawn from the work of a research team led by UCLA professor Gary Orfield, the left’s go-to man on race and schooling. For decades Prof. Orfield has been successfully peddling a story of dashed hopes for school desegregation.

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court declared in its unanimous Brown decision that state-imposed, single-race public schools violated the 14th Amendment. Separating children on the basis of race, the justices said, denied black pupils “equal educational opportunities” and hence deprived them of the “equal protection” of the laws, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote. The watershed decision marked the beginning of the end of the Jim Crow South, applying to more than 10 million children who were enrolled in color-coded schools in 21 states and the District of Columbia. They made up roughly 40% of the nation’s public-school students, and more than two-thirds of all African-American pupils.

Some commentators (thinking wishfully) hailed Brown as a historic vindication of Justice John Marshall Harlan’s magnificent dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson , the 1896 decision that upheld the constitutionality of state laws requiring racial segregation of public facilities. Justice Harlan, a lonely voice on the court, declared the Constitution to be “colorblind.” But the Brown court said nothing of the sort. It spoke only of segregation’s psychological harm to black children and did not bar all racial classifications, as the NAACP had hoped it would. Thus racial preferences in higher education, contracting and employment—often called affirmative action—have been periodically sanctioned by the court. …

Seth Mandel asks an important question. “What if college is making people stupid?” 

International Monetary Fund director Christine Lagarde has become the latest commencement speaker to be chased off by American academia’s guardians of the eternally closed minds. After protests over Lagarde’s planned graduation speech at SmithCollege from professors and students, Lagarde bowed out, echoing Condoleezza Rice’s tactful statement about not wanting to derail the celebratory atmosphere of the day.

The Washington Post sums it up perfectly: “The commencement speaker purity bug has hit Smith College.” Calling it a “bug” is the right classification, for it is certainly both a defect and an apparently contagious infection that demonstrates the extent to which American universities are failing their students while pocketing the tuition money (about $45,000 in Smith’s case). …

… The question, then, is not whether American universities are producing ever more totalitarian-minded brats. Of course they are reinforcing such closed-mindedness; they are leftist institutions steeped in leftist values. This is a problem, and should be addressed. But the out-of-control speech police on college campuses, combined with the unwillingness to even listen to those who might disagree with them, raises the distinct possibility that colleges are producing brainless authoritarians.

What if college, in other words, is making the next generation stupid? Not uniformly, of course. There will always be exceptions, and there may even be a rebellion against what is increasingly making college the most expensive babysitting service in the modern world. But college administrators are now faced with the conundrum of students who pay them gobs of money to keep them uninformed and shielded from critical thinking. It’s a challenge administrators have to deal with–and the sooner, the better

Ruth Wisse, professor of Yiddish, has more.

… Assaults on intellectual and political freedom have been making headlines. Pressure from faculty egged on by Muslim groups induced BrandeisUniversity last month not to grant Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the proponent of women’s rights under Islam, an intended honorary degree at its convocation. This was a replay of 1994, when Brandeis faculty demanded that trustees rescind their decision to award an honorary degree to Jeane Kirkpatrick, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In each case, a faculty cabal joined by (let us charitably say) ignorant students promoted the value of repression over the values of America’s liberal democracy.

Opponents of free speech have lately chalked up many such victories: New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly prevented from speaking at Brown University in November; a lecture by Charles Murray canceled by Azusa Pacific University in April; Condoleezza Rice, former secretary of state and national-security adviser under the George W. Bush administration, harassed earlier this month into declining the invitation by Rutgers University to address this year’s convocation.

Most painful to me was the Harvard scene several years ago when the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies, celebrating its 50th anniversary, accepted a donation in honor of its former head tutor Martin Peretz, whose contributions to the university include the chair in Yiddish I have been privileged to hold. His enemies on campus generated a “party against Marty” that forced him to walk a gauntlet of jeering students for having allegedly offended Islam, while putting others on notice that they had best not be perceived guilty of association with him.

Universities have not only failed to stand up to those who limit debate, they have played a part in encouraging them. The modish commitment to so-called diversity replaces the ideal of guaranteed equal treatment of individuals with guaranteed group preferences in hiring and curricular offerings.

Females and members of visible minorities are given handicaps (as in golf). Courses are devised to inculcate in students the core lesson that (in the words of one recent graduate, writing online at the Huffington Post) “harmful structural inequalities persist on the basis of class, race, sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity in the U.S.” On too many campuses, as in a funhouse mirror, ideological commitment to diversity has brought about its opposite: ideological hegemony, which is much more harmful to the life of the mind than the alleged structural inequalities that social engineering set out to correct. …

Continuing the theme, Thomas Sowell writes on kampus kangaroo kourts.

There seems to be a full-court press on to get colleges to “do something” about rape on campus.

But there seems to be remarkably little attention paid to two crucial facts: (1) rape is a crime and (2) colleges are not qualified to be law-enforcement institutions.

Why are rapists not reported to the police and prosecuted in a court of law?

Apparently this is because of some college women who say that they were raped and are dissatisfied with a legal system that does not automatically take their word for it against the word of someone who has been accused and denies the charge.

There seem to be a dangerously large number of people who think that the law exists to give them whatever they want — even when that means denying other people the same rights that they claim for themselves.

Nowhere is this self-centered attitude more common than on college campuses. And nowhere are such attitudes more encouraged than by the Obama administration’s Justice Department, which is threatening colleges that don’t handle rape issues the politically correct way — that is, by presuming the accused to be guilty and not letting Constitutional safeguards get in the way.

Anything that fits the “war on women” theme is seen as smart politics in an election year. The last thing Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department is interested in is justice.

The track record of academics in other kinds of cases is not the least bit encouraging as regards the likelihood of impartial justice. Even on many of our most prestigious college campuses, who gets punished for saying the wrong thing and who gets away with mob actions depends on which groups are in vogue and which are not. …

The mis-education of the past thirty years has produced what Eliot Cohen calls the “selfie-taking, hashtagging teenage administration.”

… Often, members of the Obama administration speak and, worse, think and act, like a bunch of teenagers. When officials roll their eyes at Vladimir Putin‘s seizure of Crimea with the line that this is “19th-century behavior,” the tone is not that different from a disdainful remark about a hairstyle being “so 1980s.” When administration members find themselves judged not on utopian aspirations or the purity of their motives—from offering “hope and change” to stopping global warming—but on their actual accomplishments, they turn sulky. As teenagers will, they throw a few taunts (the president last month said the GOP was offering economic policies that amount to a “stinkburger” or a “meanwich”) and stomp off, refusing to exchange a civil word with those of opposing views.

In a searing memoir published in January, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates describes with disdain the trash talk about the Bush administration that characterized meetings in the Obama White House. Like self-obsessed teenagers, the staffers and their superiors seemed to forget that there were other people in the room who might take offense, or merely see the world differently. Teenagers expect to be judged by intentions and promise instead of by accomplishment, and their style can be encouraged by irresponsible adults (see: the Nobel Prize committee) who give awards for perkiness and promise rather than achievement.

If the United States today looks weak, hesitant and in retreat, it is in part because its leaders and their staff do not carry themselves like adults. They may be charming, bright and attractive; they may have the best of intentions; but they do not look serious. They act as though Twitter and clenched teeth or a pout could stop invasions or rescue kidnapped children in Nigeria. They do not sound as if, when saying that some outrage is “unacceptable” or that a dictator “must go,” that they represent a government capable of doing something substantial—and, if necessary, violent—if its expectations are not met. And when reality, as it so often does, gets in the way—when, for example, the Syrian regime begins dousing its opponents with chlorine gas, as it has in recent weeks, despite solemn deals and red lines—the administration ignores it, hoping, as teenagers often do, that if they do not acknowledge a screw-up no one else will notice. …

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Humorist P. J. O’Rourke, normally in Weekly Standard, penned a Russian history lesson of sorts for the Daily Beast.

Now that we’ve failed to use Russia’s corrupt and degenerating economy, subservience to the international banking system, and vulnerability to falling energy prices to pop Vladimir Putin like a zit, we’re going to have sit on our NATO, E.U., and OSCE duffs and take the long view of Russian imperialism.

Fortunately the long view, while a desolate prospect, is also comforting in its way, if you aren’t a Russian.

In the sixth century A.D. Russia was the middle of nowhere in the great Eurasian flat spot bounded by fuck-all on the north and east, barbarian hordes and the remains of the Byzantine Empire on the south, and the Dark Ages on the west.

Wandering around in here, up and down the watershed of the DnieperRiver from Novgorod (which hadn’t been built yet) to Kiev (ditto) were disorganized tribes of Slavic pastoral herdsmen herding whatever was available, pastorally. They were harried by Goths, Huns, Khazars, and other people who had the name and nature of outlaw motorcycle gangs long before the motorcycle was invented.

The original Russian state, “Old Russia,” was established at Novgorod in A.D. 862 by marauding Vikings. They’d set off to discover Iceland, Greenland, and America, took a wrong turn, and wound up with their dragon boat stuck on a mud bar in the Dnieper. (Historians have their own theories, involving trade and colonization, but this sounds more likely.)

The first ruler of Old Russia was the Viking Prince Ryurik. Imagine being so disorganized that you need marauding Vikings to found your nation—them with their battle axes, crazed pillaging, riotous Meade Hall feasts, and horns on their helmets. (Actually, Vikings didn’t wear horns on their helmets—but they would have if they’d thought of it, just like they would have worn meade helmets if they’d thought of it.) Some government it must have been.

Viking Prince Ryurik: “Yah, let’s build Novgorod!”

Viking Chieftain Sven: “Yah, so we can burn it down and loot!” …

 

… In 1613 the Romanov dynasty was installed, providing Russia with a range of talents from “Great” (Peter I, Catherine II) to “Late” (Ivan VI, Peter III, and Paul I killed in palace intrigues; Alexander II blown to bits by a terrorist bomb, and Nicholas II murdered with his family by the Bolsheviks).

The Romanovs adhered to what Harvard historian Richard Pipes calls a “patrimonial” doctrine, meaning they owned Russia the way we own our house (except to hell with the mortgage). They owned everything. And everybody. The Romanov tsars imposed rigid serfdom just as that woeful institution was fading almost everywhere else.

Russia never had a Renaissance, a Protestant Reformation, an Enlightenment, or much of an Industrial Revolution until the Soviet Union. Soviet industrialization produced such benefits to humanity as concrete worker housing built without level or plumb bob, the AK-47, MiG fighter jets, and proliferating nukes. (Although the only people the Soviets ever killed with a nuclear device was themselves at Chernobyl, located, perhaps not coincidentally, in what’s now Ukraine, for the time being at least.)

Russia was out in the sticks of civilization, in a trailer park without knowledge of how to build a trailer. But Russia kept getting bigger, mostly by killing, oppressing, and annoying Russians. …

 

… In 1861 Tsar Alexander II freed 50 million serfs. If “freed” is the word that’s wanted. The serfs had no place to go except the land they were already farming, and if they wanted any of that, they had to buy it with the nothing they made as serfs. Later, as mentioned twice already, Alexander got blown to bits.

Russia lost the Jews. Being robbed, beaten, and killed in pogroms was not a sufficient incentive to stay. More than a million Jews emigrated, taking what common sense the country had with them. …

 

… Russia lost World War I, not an easy thing to do when you’re on the winning side. After the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Russia was too much of a mess to keep fighting Germany. The Soviet government signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk surrendering Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Russian Poland, and Ukraine—containing in total a quarter of the population of Imperial Russia—to the Central Powers just eight months before the Central Powers had to surrender to everybody.

Russia lost both sides of the 1917-22 Russian Civil War. The White Russians were losers. The Reds were total losers. We know how their revolution turned out.

Russia might as well have lost World War II. Between 18 million and 24 million Russians died. That’s three times as many military and civilian casualties as Germany suffered. There must have been a better way to kill a bunch of Nazis running low on food and ammunition and stuck in frozen mud. …

The cult of Russia’s Great Patriotic War is explained by Craig Pirrong.

Russia’s “Victory Day” celebration is exceptional in virtually every way. Sixty-nine years after its end, no other nation commemorates WWII like Russia. Indeed, whereas the events in Russia involve the entire nation, if there were official ceremonies in the US and the UK and Continental Europe recognizing VE Day, they were unnoticeable.

Of course Russia’s gargantuan losses in the conflict had an emotional impact far beyond that experienced in any other allied nation. But that does not explain the form, content, or tone of the Russian commemoration. It is not focused first and foremost on remembering the dead. Instead, it is focused first and foremost on venerating the Russian state. On using the Russian (and non-Russian Soviet) deaths to stake a moral and political claim for the state.

To modify the anti-war aphorism, remembrance of war is the health of the Russian state. The Great Patriotic War is used to legitimize the Russian state,  to immunize it from criticism, and to attack those who oppose the state. Note as two examples the attack on opposition channel TV Rain for even questioning whether the sacrifice of the Siege of Leningrad was worthwhile, and the just signed law criminalizing “distorting” the USSR’s role in WWII.

And it has been so from 3 July, 1941. On that day, 11 days after the launch of Barbarossa, a shaken Stalin emerged from hiding and declared a Great Patriotic War. Stalin in particular needed to protect himself against charges of criminal incompetence that cost millions of lives. The narrative of a wise and brave Soviet state uniting with the people to vanquish the Nazi hordes proved amazingly powerful. It united the people emotionally with the state. It was-and is-a reliable way to silence criticism of the state.

It is also grotesquely cynical, exploiting the deaths and suffering of millions to serve the interests of the state and the autocrats that rule over it. In Stalin’s case in particular, it is particularly cynical and grotesque, because he was directly responsible for millions of those deaths and maimings through his operational incompetence and callous indifference to death and suffering. This makes it all the more revealing-and tragic-to see many pictures of Stalin carried reverently at Friday’s Victory Day celebrations. …

 

… The sobering fact is that although he was a true believer in the Cult of the Great Patriotic War then (and before), Putin is using it even more today to strengthen his authority and to silence dissent internally, and to justify aggressive expansion externally. (Note that the St. George colors flaunted by the separatists in Ukraine are the same as those used to commemorate WWII.) There is a direct connection between the prominence of the Cult and Putin’s authoritarian actions at home and imperialism abroad. It is his way of yoking the Russian people to the ambitions of the state–and Putin.

The fact that this year’s Victory Day celebration was as elaborate and passionately intense and overtly politicized (by Putin’s Crimea appearance) as any since the fall of the USSR means that it is a harbinger of greater oppression at home and greater aggression abroad.  Never forget that when Russians make a point of remembering the war, that bad things follow.

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Spectator, UK reviews a ‘troublesome’ book. Trouble for those who have maintained all behavior is learned.

‘This book is an attempt to understand the world as it is, not as it ought to be.’ So writes Nicholas Wade, the British-born science editor of The New York Times, in his new book A Troublesome Inheritance.

For some time the post-War view of human nature as being largely culturally-formed has been under attack just as surely as the biblical explanation of mankind’s creation began to face pressure in the early 19th century. What Steven Pinker called the blank slate view of our species, whereby humans are products of social conditions and therefore possible to mould and to perfect through reform, has been undermined by scientific discoveries in various areas.

But the most sensitive, and potentially troubling to the modern psyche, is the difference between human population groups that have evolved over the past 50,000 years. As Wade writes: ‘The fact that human evolution has been recent, copious, and regional is not widely recognized, even though it has now been reported by many articles in the literature of genetics. The reason is in part that the knowledge is so new and in part because it raises awkward challenges to deeply held conventional wisdom.’

The political objections are a reaction to the horrific things done in the name of race in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, culminating in the Final Solution, after which the UN’s Ashley Montagu made the influential declaration that race was to all intents and purposes a fiction. Before that, anthropologist Franz Boas had popularised the idea that we are entirely products of culture.

This has remained the conventional view, indeed the only one that academics could safely hold; yet a number of inconsistencies have begun to crack away at this noble idea. …

Victor Davis Hanson posts on Russian motives.

… The Obama administration has tried to psychoanalyze Putin as lashing out because of weakness. Or he is supposedly an unruly kid cutting up at the back of the classroom. Or he is acting out a tough-guy “shtick,” as President Obama put it.

Maybe. But it would be wiser to review the historical causes of war, especially why conflicts break out. Aggressors often attack their weaker neighbors to restore a sense of pride. They calibrate self-interest not so much in getting more stuff as winning greater honor, feeling safer and instilling more fear.

Just as important, history’s aggressors embraced their fears and sense of honor because they thought they could get away with doing so scot-free — given the perceived loss of deterrence.

Putin, like Hitler in 1939, may be weak in geostrategic terms. But as long as he does not provoke an American and European collective response, he can assume that Russia is far stronger than any one of his next targets.

Like Hitler, Putin does not know exactly which future aggressive act will prompt a U.S. and European reaction. But until then, he is willing to continue gambling that he can restore some more of the lost empire of the czars and commissars — and with it more Russian honor, influence and pride — without consequences.

If history is any guide, these emotions are driving Putin to grab things that are not his. Putin acts now because in the era of failed reset diplomacy and recent empty American deadlines, red lines and step-over lines, he feels the old U.S. deterrent is absent or dormant. And he will keep up his aggression until he senses that the increasing risks no longer warrant the diminishing returns of absorbing his neighbors. …

The guys from Freakonomics have a WSJ essay on “How to Trick the Guilty and Gullible into Revealing Themselves.”

… David Lee Roth may have been a bit cleverer—according, at least, to Mr. Roth himself. Here is how he tells the story in a Vimeo video. By the early 1980s, Van Halen had become one of the biggest rock bands in history. Their touring contract carried a 53-page rider that laid out technical and security specs as well as food and beverage requirements. The “Munchies” section demanded potato chips, nuts, pretzels and “M&M’s (WARNING: ABSOLUTELY NO BROWN ONES).”

When the M&M clause found its way into the press, it seemed like a typical case of rock-star excess, of the band “being abusive of others simply because we could,” Mr. Roth said. But, he explained, “the reality is quite different.”

Van Halen’s live show boasted a colossal stage, booming audio and spectacular lighting. All this required a great deal of structural support, electrical power and the like. Thus the 53-page rider, which gave point-by-point instructions to ensure that no one got killed by a collapsing stage or a short-circuiting light tower. But how could Van Halen be sure that the local promoter in each city had read the whole thing and done everything properly?

Cue the brown M&M’s. As Roth tells it, he would immediately go backstage to check out the bowl of M&M’s. If he saw brown ones, he knew the promoter hadn’t read the rider carefully—and that “we had to do a serious line check” to make sure that the more important details hadn’t been botched either. …

… But how can a Nigerian scammer tell who is gullible and who isn’t? He can’t. Gullibility is, in this case, an unobservable trait. But the scammer could invite the gullible people to reveal themselves.

How? By sending out such a ridiculous letter—including prominent mentions of Nigeria—that only a gullible person would take it seriously. Anyone with an ounce of sense or experience would immediately trash the email. “The scammer wants to find the guy who hasn’t heard of it,” Dr. Herley says. “Anybody who doesn’t fall off their chair laughing is exactly who he wants to talk to.” Here’s how Dr. Herley put it in a research paper: “The goal of the e-mail is not so much to attract viable users as to repel the nonviable ones, who greatly outnumber them.”

So if your first instinct was to think that Nigerian scammers are stupid, perhaps you have been convinced, as Cormac Herley was, that this is exactly the kind of stupid we should all aspire to be. The ridiculous-sounding Nigerian emails seem to be quite good at getting the scammers’ massive garden to weed itself.

Real Clear Science has some surprising facts about caffeine.

Caffeine is many things: a stimulant, an alkaloid, and to many, a lifesaver. By counteracting a substance called adenosine in the body, which has the purpose of inhibiting activity in the central nervous system, caffeine boosts wakefulness, focus, and coordination.

It’s also the world’s most popular psychoactive drug. Globally, humans consume 120 million kilograms of the stuff each year, which is pretty impressive when you consider that the average cup of coffee contains just .1 grams! …

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Michelle’s tweet for the Nigerian girls gets the Mark Steyn treatment.

It is hard not to have total contempt for a political culture that thinks the picture above (Michelle is holding a sign that says; Bring Back Our Girls.) is a useful contribution to rescuing 276 schoolgirls kidnapped by jihadist savages in Nigeria. Yet some pajama boy at the White House evidently felt getting the First Lady to pose with this week’s Hashtag of Western Impotence would reflect well upon the Administration. The horrible thing is they may be right: Michelle showed she cared – on social media! – and that’s all that matters, isn’t it?

Just as the last floppo hashtag, #WeStandWithUkraine, didn’t actually involve standing with Ukraine, so #BringBackOurGirls doesn’t require bringing back our girls. There are only a half-dozen special forces around the planet capable of doing that without getting most or all of the hostages killed: the British, the French, the Americans, Israelis, Germans, Aussies, maybe a couple of others. So, unless something of that nature is being lined up, those schoolgirls are headed into slavery, and the wretched pleading passivity of Mrs Obama’s hashtag is just a form of moral preening.

But then what isn’t? The blogger Daniel Payne wrote this week that “modern liberalism, at its core, is an ideology of talking, not doing“. He was musing on a press release for some or other “Day of Action” that is, as usual, a day of inaction:

Diverse grassroots groups are organizing and participating in events such as walks, rallies and concerts and calling on government to reduce climate pollution, transition off fossil fuels and commit to a clean energy future.

It’s that easy! You go to a concert and someone “calls on government” to do something, and the world gets fixed.

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Time to have a look at the recent climate foolishness. David Harsanyi is first.

… Have you noticed that we’re always at the cusp of a cataclysm, yet the deadline to act always moves to a politically convenient not-too-distant future? I guess when the time to act runs out – it will at some point, right? — we can begin thinking about defunding all these panels and reinvesting in something more productive: like figuring out how we can adapt to the future.

For now, though, the congressionally mandated report claims we’re no longer merely dealing with impending disaster. The United States, it asserts, has already incurred billions of dollars in damages from severe weather-related disruptions due to climate change. The political hope is that some of this ugly weather will generate more urgency to do something. President Obama will use the report to bolster his case for unilaterally enacting carbon dioxide regulations, neglecting, one imagines, to mention that while there is consensus regarding anthropogenic climate change, there isn’t much agreement on whether severe weather has actually gotten worse over the past years, or, if it has, that climate change is the cause.

Nevertheless.

“We’re committed to moving forward with those rules,” John Podesta said in a bit of an anti-democratic rant the other day. “We’re committed to maintaining the authority and the president’s authority to ensure that the Clean Air Act is fully implemented.” Don’t worry, though. Podesta says this is “actionable science” so separation of powers and consent of the governed and other trifling concerns are no longer applicable. …

Salena Zito writes on a Georgia congressional candidate who might know what the country is thinking.

… One thing Dutton already has won is the sentiment of a country dumbfounded that President Barack Obama last week defined climate change as the most pressing issue facing the country. Obama did so as part of a huge public relations campaign — yes, campaign — that included asking people to pressure Washington to act on the issue.

Not jobs. Not the economy. Not rebuilding our aging infrastructure. Not gang violence, or education.

Climate change.

And he and his party ridiculed anyone who disagrees.

A couple of things about all of this smack the sensibilities of regular folks.

First, most people know Earth’s climate always has changed; everyone knows about this little thing called the Ice Age. What most people don’t care for is the issue being used politically to slice and dice the country, the same way the minimum wage, gender, race, immigration and religion have been used by this administration.

This is why folks do not look toward Washington, D.C., to solve problems anymore. This is why young people — the Millennials — are so turned off by the brands of both political parties, a one-time advantage that Democrats have completely squandered.

And this is why we have wave-election cycles. …

Editors of the Boston Herald have thoughts.

The Obama administration is trying to scare us with totally unverifiable projections of a disastrous global warming. We trust that most people are not going to fall for this outrageous scare-mongering.

The ballyhooed third National Climate Assessment, released last Wednesday by several agencies, alleges first, the world has warmed over the last century and second, it’s going to get much worse.

This is supposed to convince us of the wisdom of President Obama’s plans to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, the chief gas said to be warming the planet. …

Frank Beckmann of the Detroit News writes on the president’s climate obsession.

The Obama administration’s war on affordable energy ramped up a major notch this week with release of the government’s latest guess about future weather events, something it calls the “National Climate Assessment.”

The administration, anxious to continue taxpayer-provided subsidies to politically-favored green energy firms that return the favor with campaign contributions to Democrats, claims it used the expertise of hundreds of “experts” to come up with the findings.

A cursory glance of the participants shows no participation by climate realists but leading report authors from environmental political action groups like Second Nature, The Nature Conservancy, Planet Forward, and the misnamed Union of Concerned Scientists, a group that is not made up of scientists at all and which also advocates for unilateral U.S. nuclear disarmament.

The government’s report is full of alarms claiming America is already experiencing the effects of “climate disruption” — the newest name created by this crowd of hucksters — in the form of records for higher temperatures, more severe storms, rising seas, droughts, floods and melting polar ice.

In each case, their claims are disputed by observable facts and the historical record, a willful flaw for this bunch of amnesia victims. …

The Wall Street Journal reviews a book on a real weather event. It caused a year without summer. T. Jefferson was afraid his poor crops would cause him to lose Monticello. 

… Tambora’s was an almighty explosion. Four thousand feet were instantly lopped off the volcano’s summit and thrust high into the stratosphere by the blast: Few eruptions in recorded history have been so massive. Sir Stamford Raffles, the founder of Singapore, was on scene as governor of Java and, well aware that what he experienced was powerful juju indeed, commissioned the collection of eyewitness reports. Mr. Wood makes a very good case in his persuasively entertaining book that what Raffles noted during that East Indian spring was indeed a volcano like no other in modern human history.

Not that his book is by any means the first to remind us of the broad outlines of the story. That 1816 came to be known as “the year without summer.” That the terrible post-eruption weather in Switzerland prompted Mary Shelley to write “Frankenstein” and Byron to compose gloomier-than-usual poetry. That during the two following years of lowering gloom, mid-latitude snows, failed crops and general distemper, there were all kinds of economic disasters in America, in India, in Ireland, in China. Mr. Wood is not the only one to claim that these can be put down to the trillions of tons of sun-shrouding Tamboran dust hurled into the air on that moonless April Tuesday two centuries ago.

If not the first, Mr. Wood’s book is by far the best on the subject, and the most comprehensive. What Mr. Wood has achieved in “Tambora” is to uncover, collect and collate a great deal of new scientific evidence to bolster his case. He is, incidentally, the English professor of most students’ dreams—a man with a powerful environmental bent who is totally up-to-date and who reads far beyond his remit. From his studies and attention to the work of chemists and zoologists and epidemiologists and historians (combined with adventurous travels to the region, including a risky trek up to the Tambora crater edge), he has built with this slim book a far more plausible case for cause and effect than has ever been made before.

Purple rainfall in Kunming, ruining western China’s 1818 broad-bean crop? Tambora’s fault. A typhus epidemic in County Cork, adding to the miseries of an Ireland swamped in rain and blighted potatoes? Chalk it up to the mighty eruption far off in the East. Thomas Jefferson fretting over the future of his beloved Monticello? His crops were failing precisely because of the sulfurous aerosols from Sumbawa Island and the icy weather they brought. Just about everything presented in these pages fits together like a gigantic intercontinental jigsaw puzzle, with the grand image emerging just as the final piece is slipped onto the board: Tambora. …

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Daniel Henninger tries to find out why the left has become crazy. 

In the U.S., the politics of the left versus the right rolls on with the predictability of traffic jams at the GeorgeWashingtonBridge. It’s a lot of honking. Until now. All of a sudden, the left has hit ramming speed across a broad swath of American life—in the universities, in politics and in government. People fingered as out of line with the far left’s increasingly bizarre claims are being hit and hit hard.

Commencement-speaker bans are obligatory. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice withdrew as Rutgers’s speaker after two months of protests over Iraq, the left’s long-sought replacement for the Vietnam War. Brandeis terminated its invitation to Somali writer Hirsi Ali, whose criticisms of radical Islam violated the school’s “core values.”

AzusaPacificUniversity “postponed” an April speech by political scientist Charles Murray to avoid “hurting our faculty and students of color.” Come again? It will “hurt” them? Oh yes. In a recent NewRepublic essay, Jennie Jarvie described the rise of “trigger warnings” that professors are expected to post with their courses to avoid “traumatizing” students.

OberlinCollege earlier this year proposed that its teachers “be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression.” The co-chair of Oberlin’s Sexual Offense Policy Task Force said last month that this part of the guide is now under revision.

I think it’s fair to say something has snapped. …

James Oliphant of the National Journal posts on how the left media do the administration’s bidding.

When Jay Carney was grilled at length by Jonathan Karl of ABC News over an email outlining administration talking points in the wake of the 2012 Benghazi attack, it was not, by the reckoning of many observers, the White House press secretary’s finest hour. Carney was alternately defensive and dismissive, arguably fueling a bonfire he was trying to tamp down.

But Carney needn’t have worried. He had plenty of backup.

He had The New Republic’s Brian Beutler dismissing Benghazi as “nonsense.” He had Slate’s David Weigel, along with The Washington Post’s Plum Line blog, debunking any claim that the new email was a “smoking gun.” Media Matters for America labeled Benghazi a “hoax.” Salon wrote that the GOP had a “demented Benghazi disease.” Daily Kos featured the headline: “Here’s Why the GOP Is Fired Up About Benghazi—and Here’s Why They’re Wrong.” The Huffington Post offered “Three Reasons Why Reviving Benghazi Is Stupid—for the GOP.” …

More on the media’s cover for failure from Mark Steyn.

A week before the 2012 election, I wrote:

“Someone at the highest level of the United States government made the decision to abandon American consular staff to their fate and cede U.S. sovereign territory to an al-Qaeda assault team — and four out of five Sunday news shows don’t think it’s worth talking about.

In the smoking ruins of that consulate in Benghazi, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods fought for hours and killed 60 of the enemy before they were overwhelmed, waiting for the cavalry that never came. They’re still waiting – for Candy Crowley, David Gregory, Bob Schieffer, and George Stephanopoulos to do their job.”

Democrats and their media enablers openly giggle at the word “Benghazi” now. So funny, isn’t it? Those provincial simpletons at Fox News are still droning on about dead Americans in Benghazi as if anybody but their drooling rubes care about it, ha-ha… If the Democrats are right about that, it doesn’t speak well for the American people. Those four Americans died serving the United States – not Obama, not Clinton, but their fellow Americans. …

Heather Mac Donald reports on the Fed’s pursuit of 55 colleges and universities. It warms Pickerhead’s heart to see the academy harassed by the government. Serves them right. They haven’t lifted a finger to help any other institutions similarly treated. In fact, they have been enablers of government overreach and intrusion.

For decades, universities have nurtured the most lunatic forms of feminism, denying the biological differences between males and females, promoting the idea that Western civilization is endemically sexist, and encouraging in their students ever-more-delusional forms of victimhood. It is therefore deeply gratifying to see these same universities now impaled by the very ideology that they have so assiduously promoted.

The Obama administration has released the names of 55 colleges and universities that it is investigating over their sexual-assault policies, part of an accelerating campaign against universities for allegedly turning a blind eye to the purported epidemic of campus rape. The list is top-heavy with the elite of the elite — Harvard, Princeton, UC Berkeley, Swarthmore, Amherst, and Dartmouth, among others. A more deserving group of victims would be hard to find.

Parroting over 20 years worth of feminist propagandizing, the White House claims nearly 20 percent of female college undergraduates are sexually assaulted during their college years. To put that number in perspective: Detroit residents have been fleeing the city for years due to its infamous violent crime. And what constitutes an American urban crime wave? In 2012, Detroit’s combined rate for all four violent felonies that make up the FBI’s violent-crime index — murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault — was 2 percent. The rape rate was 0.05 percent. And yet, despite an alleged campus sexual-assault rate that is 400 times greater than Detroit’s, female applicants are beating down the doors of selective colleges in record numbers.

Stanford, one of the 55 colleges under investigation by the Department of Education for allegedly ignoring sexual violence, this year received over 42,000 applications, at least half from females, for a freshman class of about 1,700; every other elite college was similarly swamped with female applicants. According to the White House Council on Women and Girls, “survivors” of the alleged campus sexual-assault epidemic “often” experience a lifetime of physical and mental infirmity that includes depression and post-traumatic stress syndrome. How could highly educated baby-boomer mothers, who have spent their maternal years fending off phantom risks to their children from pesticides and vaccines, suddenly send their daughters off to a crime scene of such magnitude, unmatched even in the most brutal African tribal wars? What happened to the Sisterhood? Shouldn’t it be warning its members and forming alternative structures for educating females? …

Jonathan Marks in Contentions posts on anti-Semitism at Vassar. There is great sickness in higher education. 

Vassar has recently distinguished itself in at least two ways. First, it is one of a tiny group of colleges whose faculty supported the American Studies Association’s boycott of Israel in substantial numbers. Thirty-nine faculty members signed a letter that sang the praises of the boycott-Israel movement. Second, as I have written here before, Vassar was the venue for an open forum at which two professors were vilified for leading a trip to Israel and at which Jewish students who spoke up were heckled. William Jacobson has provided extensive coverage of the situation at Vassar and was there to speak earlier this week.

In a blog entry describing reactions to Jacobson’s speech, Jewish studies professor Rebecca Lesses draws attention to a series of posts by Vassar’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, the most shocking of which includes this language: “Of course, mainstream media hasbarats have been around for decades, as have ‘hasbaratchiks,’ fifth-columns in foreign governments who subvert national policies to serve Israel.” The author of the linked article, Greg Felton, also wrote a book entitled The Host and the Parasite: How Israel’s Fifth Column Consumed America. Lesses observes that the Occidental Quarterly, on which the SJP draws, is an anti-Semitic magazine. While I hesitate to take the word of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which she cites, for it, a look through the Occidental Quarterly, which includes an article about libertarianism as a creed advanced by Jewish intellectuals to advance Jewish “group evolutionary interests,” tends to support the charge. …

Once and awhile the president gets called on his mendacity. WaPo’s Glenn Kessler gives four Pinocchio’s to the liar in chief. Four is their highest award. Nobody lies it better.

In addressing a dinner of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in Los Angeles, President Obama made a rather striking claim—that Senate Republicans have filibustered “500 pieces of legislation that would help the middle class.”

Regular readers knows that The Fact Checker has objected to the way that Senate Democrats tally these figures, but the president’s claim makes little sense no matter how you do the numbers.

The Facts

First, some definitions: A filibuster generally refers to extended debate that delays a vote on a pending matter, while cloture is a device to end debate. Filibusters are used by opponents of a nominee or legislation, while cloture is filed by supporters.

Since 2007, there have been 527 cloture motions that have been filed, according to Senate statistics. This is apparently where Obama got his figure. But this tells only part of the story as many of those cloture motions were simply dropped, never actually voted on, or “vitiated” in the senatorial nomenclature. …

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The decision by Toyota U.S. to leave California and move its headquarters to Texas is the subject of Joel Kotkin’s column this week.

The most important news to hit Southern California last week did not involve the heinous Donald Sterling, but Toyota’s decision to pull its U.S. headquarters out of the Los Angeles region in favor of greater Dallas. This is part of an ongoing process of disinvestment in the L.A. region, particularly among industrially related companies, that could presage a further weakening of the state’s middle class economy.

The Toyota decision also reflects the continued erosion of California’s historic economic diversity, which provided both stability and a wide variety of jobs to the state’s workers. …

… The Toyota relocation from Torrance will eliminate 3,000 or more generally high-wage jobs, something that usually accompanies the presence of headquarters operations. It will cost the region, most particularly, the SouthBay, an important corporate citizen, as, over time, the carmaker will likely shift its philanthropic emphasis toward Texas and its various manufacturing sectors. …

Common Core education standards have created a lot of heat. Jennifer Rubin tries to cool it down.

If you didn’t think there could be a debate more irrational and misleading than the one over immigration reform (and the knee-jerk insistence on the misleading term “amnesty” by opponents) think again. Take a look at the arguments these days about Common Core.

Opponents falsely call the Common Core a federal mandate (states developed it) and/or a curriculum (that is left entirely to the states and local school districts). It is, rather, one attempt, or one part of an attempt, to respond to the reality that U.S. kids wind up in remedial classes in college and do a lot worse than a lot of  international competitors, especially when it comes to the reasoning skills and proficiencies needed to compete in a global economy. (If nothing else, read Amanda Ripley’s “The Smartest Kids in the World,” but be prepared to be very upset about the state of U.S. education.) There are lots of reasons for this, but many of the excuses (e.g. stratified American society, not enough money, teachers’ unions) miss the mark. And while admirable, school choice is not a cure-all and sidesteps the question of what skills American kids must master. …

Jonathan Tobin wonders why Rand Paul is helping out a vulnerable Democrat in North Carolina. 

Over the weekend, as the New York Times reported, Senator Rand Paul hosted Rupert Murdoch at the Kentucky Derby. While we don’t know whether this interesting attempt by the 2016 presidential hopeful to ingratiate himself with the influential media mogul paid off, apparently neither of the two made any money at the track while betting on the ponies. The horse Paul was backing in the big race “died” in the last hundred yards, while Murdoch left Louisville saying that he had “contributed enough to Kentucky.” But Paul’s not done betting on horses that are probably not fated to win.

Yesterday he was in North Carolina campaigning for Greg Brannon, one of the candidates in the Republican senatorial primary. Paul has been fairly cautious in the past few years about trying to exercise influence in this manner but by showing up on the eve of today’s primary, rather than just mailing in an endorsement, he was gambling his reputation on the fortunes of a fellow libertarian who has been trailing frontrunner Tom Tillis by double digits throughout the race.

While there is little doubt about who will finish first tonight in North Carolina, Brannon is hoping to keep Tillis’s vote under the 40 percent mark. That would force a runoff to be held on July 15. As it happens, embattled Democratic incumbent Kay Hagan is hoping for the same outcome. …

More on Rand’s foolishness from Allysia Finley. Mike Huckabee is being stupid in NC too.

North Carolina House Speaker Thom Tillis, along with GOP Gov. Pat McCrory, has led nothing short of a Copernican revolution in government reform this past year. Strange then that Rand Paul should be allying with liberal groups and rallying tea party groups against Mr. Tillis in Tuesday’s GOP Senate primary.

Few Republican primaries are as significant and hotly contested as North Carolina’s. A new Public Policy Polling survey shows Mr. Tillis leading obstetrician Greg Brannon by 12 points and Baptist pastor Mark Harris by 25. But here’s the rub: Mr. Tillis is sitting right on the 40% cusp necessary to avoid a runoff, and as the poll notes the momentum is “on the anti-establishment candidates’ side.” A week ago Mr. Tillis was leading the doctor by 26 points and preacher by 35.

However, Mr. Paul and his second fiddle, Utah Senator Mike Lee, have been urging local tea party groups to back Mr. Brannon. And Mike Huckabee —who, recall, was Todd Akin’s biggest supporter—has anointed Mr. Harris as the choice for Christian conservatives. Liberal groups have also poured $4 million into ads against Mr. Tillis, whom they perceive as the most viable candidate to take on Kay Hagan in the fall. …

The good news is that Thom Tillis was able to fight off the interference from Rand Paul and Mike Huck. Eliana Johnson on The Tillis win.

… State-house speaker Thom Tillis emerged victorious Tuesday evening, capturing over 45 percent of the vote and easily clearing the 40 percent threshold that would have sent him into a July run-off with the second-place finisher. Obstetrician Greg Brannon and Mark Harris, a Baptist pastor, who ran to Tillis’s right, divided the tea-party vote and finished with 27 and 17 percent respectively.

Tillis will face Kay Hagan, one of the Senate’s most vulnerable incumbents — her approval rating dropped to an all-time low of 33 percent in March — in November’s midterm election. Among Republicans, the seat is considered among their most promising pick-up opportunities, and one that the party must win if it is to retake the Senate majority.

Tillis and his establishment backers, who include John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and Mitt Romney, succeeded on Tuesday in avoiding a real showdown with the Tea Party in a July run-off, where he would have faced second-place finisher Brannon one-on-one.

Outside groups like Karl Rove’s American Crossroads and the business-friendly Chamber of Commerce poured over $2 million into the race on Tillis’s behalf to avoid that scenario. …

Now, important investing advice from Dilbert’s Blog.

… I started testing an investment strategy a few years ago that is producing positive results. Yes, I am aware that my small sample is meaningless. And the numbers I present aren’t annualized or compared to their same-industry cousins that did even better. But I want you to hear the strategy just so you can keep an eye on it going forward.

The investment idea is that the news always exaggerates risks. This is an extension of the Adams Law of Slow Moving Disasters that says humans generally figure out how to avoid big disasters when they see them coming.

So, for example, when BP stock was in the toilet, and the news media kept telling us the Gulf would be ruined for decades, I loaded up on BP stock because I predicted the opposite: a better-than-expected clean-up. That prediction turned out right. So far, that investment has paid about a 5% dividend in recent years and the stock itself is up 19%. (You should interpret that as just “up” because I haven’t compared the performance to the market in general that is also up.)

When the news was reporting that Iranian leaders were on a suicide mission to develop a nuclear bomb to destroy Israel and their own country, I assumed it would all work out peacefully and I invested heavily in a beaten-down EFT of Israeli stocks. It’s the biggest single investment I’ve ever made. That’s up 26% …

From Nautilus Blog we learn more elephants are needed in the New England forests.

Elephant dung perfumes the air, a fresh, sweet smell, with undertones of sour vegetation. These balls of waste, scattered across the Kenyan landscape, carry the aroma of the bush, an open sea of acacia trees, aloe vera, Sansevieria, and drapes of elephant pudding, a succulent vine that tastes like salty snap beans but smells like bread dough.

Without elephants, Kenya would look and smell different than it does today. It would not support the Samburu warriors herding cattle or the fleet packs of ungulates bounding past them. Without large herbivores, the wilderness would look much more like sparsely inhabited parts of the Americas, Europe, and Siberia—forests dominated by large trees, with mainly small animals darting about in the shadows. This may seem like a healthy ecosystem, but some researchers say it is far from natural—or ideal. Giant herbivores have shaped Earth’s ecosystems for millennia. Today, only Africa retains a hint of epochs past, when large animals, or “megafauna,” dictated the shape of the landscape on every habitable continent. A world without large herbivores—much of the world today—means a loss of grassland, scrub forest, biodiversity. Hello trees, good-bye wilderness.

Matthew Mihlbachler, a paleontologist, sits at a table on the 8th floor of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. We’re surrounded by fossilized Jumbos, giants in varying shades of white and ivory, animal remains from the order Proboscidea that evolved about 55 million years ago and includes elephants, mammoths, and mastodons. 

“Proboscidea moved through the landscape knocking down trees and pushing them over,” Mihlbachler says. “They are deforesters basically.” The scientist teaches anatomy at the New York Institute of Technology, College of Osteopathic Medicine. His research focus, however, is paleoecology and large herbivores. …

And to top off the week, Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.

Fallon: A new study says that many dog owners are giving anti-anxiety medicines to their pets to reduce stress. Then dogs said, “Or you could just sell the vacuum.”

Conan: Michelle Obama’s brother has been fired as Oregon States basketball coach. Like most Americans who lost their job, he blames Obama.

Conan: A new report says being optimistic or pessimistic may be largely genetic. So, in the words of my father, we’re all screwed.

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We’re going to circle back to the Tommy Vietor interview with Bret Baier. The idea that appalling people like Vietor sat in the Situation Room the night of Benghazi stills draws comments. Jennifer Rubin;

Tommy Vietor, the former spokesman for President Obama’s National Security Council — the entity on which the president depends to synthesize national security information and policy — went on Fox News to answer questions about Benghazi. Mind you, the entire episode — the failure to keep tabs on the influx of jihadis, the failure to protect Americans in Libya, the massive confusion and misinformation that persisted up through the president’s Sept. 25, 2012, speech at the United Nations — was as much the responsibility of the NSC as any other entity. When asked about the e-mail Ben Rhodes sent out, Vietor snarked, “Dude, that was like two years ago.” And that’s when it became crystal clear how things like Benghazi happened in this administration.

Here are seven lessons we should keep in mind, ably illustrated by Vietor (who subsequently insulted Fox News rather than apologize, on MSNBC, declaring, “I guess you’re only supposed to use the Queen’s English on Fox.”):

1. An error like Benghazi happens because multiple people have a hyper-partisan mindset that submerges everything to politics.

2. The staff reflects the boss. If the staff is rude, immature and callous, the boss almost invariably is. …

Roger Simon has on open letter to William Goldman who wrote the screenplay for All The President’s Men. Simon pitches a new project for a sequel – All the President’s Dudes. Simon suggests the role for Vietor go to Justin Bieber.

Hey, William Goldman.  You’re getting a little long in the tooth — we all are — but America needs your Oscar-winning brilliance for a new screenplay, a must-do sequel to your original called All the President’s Dudes.

You won’t be able to use Hoffman and Redford this time.  They’re also, er, a little long in the tooth to play, say, Tommy Vietor.  But there are a number of younger players out there.  (I see Justin Bieber as Tommy.)

Look, I know you’re a liberal and want to protect the fort.  But don’t you think things have gone a bit far with this Benghazi business?

I know. I know. It’s not over yet. We need a Deep Throat or at least a John Dean to put an icing on the proverbial cake.  Maybe we’ll have one.  But even if we don’t, think of the dramatic possibilities.

Let’s start with that ten p.m. phone call between Obama and Hillary …

John Hinderaker wants to know where the prez and secstate were.

As I wrote here, one of the striking features of the White House’s latest email production is the complete absence of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton from the communications on the evening of September 11, 2012. Their names appear only later, when staffers write heartfelt statements about the deaths of four Americans to be released over their names.

So where were they on the fateful night of September 11? Tommy Vietor–formerly Obama’s van driver, now, apparently, a foreign policy spokesman–says that Obama wasn’t in the situation room. Where was he? Resting up for his big fundraising trip to Las Vegas the next day? And how about Hillary? As Paul wrote earlier this evening, retired Air Force Brigadier General Robert Lovell testified today that the military should have tried to rescue the besieged Americans in Benghazi. Why didn’t they? They were waiting, he testified, for a request from the State Department that never came. …

Andrew Malcolm only wants to know where the president was that night.

… When Bin Laden perished, we were treated to a detailed “tick-tock,” what every White House knows it must provide Washington media after major events. A minute-by-minute recounting of what the president was doing at the time.

There’s no way for even conscientious reporters to check all the hand-fed, self-serving details. So, they are passed on to the public as gospel of how our nation’s leader addressed the issue, always with seriousness, deliberation and, in the end, calm decisiveness.

But, curiously, not Benghazi. …

… This president does love speech-making, often on minute public issues. Why the suspicious silence on his Benghazi doings?

So, let’s turn the question around:

What could President Barack Hussein Obama have possibly been doing that deadly night, what could his physical and mental condition have been that’s so terrible and shocking that the know-everything chief executive would rather Americans think he was asleep at the national security switch?

That’s something to awaken any American at 3 a.m. — or earlier.

Bill Kristol;

… Former White House national security spokesman Tommy Vietor agreed to come on Fox News’s Special Report with Bret Baier Thursday night to answer questions about Benghazi. Either unprepared or unwilling to answer perfectly reasonable and predictable questions, Vietor got exasperated and said, “Dude, that was like two years ago.”

Four people died in Benghazi. Even defenders of the Obama administration acknowledge errors of omission in the run-up to that day and on that day, and errors of commission in the days that followed. Yet Vietor thought it appropriate to laugh off Bret’s question. And the next night, on MSNBC, Vietor didn’t apologize: “Bret was asking me to remember what––if I changed a word on September 14th, 2012, and my frustration came through. I guess you’re only supposed to use the Queen’s English on Fox.” Ho ho. But then Vietor added, in a pathetic attempt to re-establish some modicum of gravitas, “But obviously what happened that day was an absolute tragedy.”

Obviously.

And one obviously speaks about tragedies by saying, “Dude, that was like two years ago.”

Vietor was just a press flack, and is no longer part of the administration. His comment is, in a way, no big deal. But it does reveal a level of flippancy and vulgarity rare even for Washington, and even for this day and age.

So, a new phrase: “Veni, Vidi, Vietor”—I came, I saw, and I made a fool of myself.

Peter Wehner says we’re watching a presidency die.

… The mid-term elections are still six months away, but the political landscape for Democrats is perilous. And the odds are as good or better that things will get worse, not better, for Democrats between now and November.

The American public, at least at this point, seem intent on deliver a stinging rebuke to President Obama, his party, and liberalism itself. The left, knowing this, is going to become even more desperate, more ad hominem, and more deranged in their attacks.

It won’t alter the outcome. We are watching the Obama presidency die. The cause of death? Massive incompetence. Flawed ideology. And the Obama agenda coming into contact with reality.

We are not the only people in the world watching the collapse of this presidency. Richard Fernandez posts on how the world treats this administration with disrespect.

President Obama is still received throughout the Western alliance as the “leader of the free world”, a position American presidents have held de facto since the end of the Second World War.  Despite the increasingly strident domestic criticism of the president and falling poll numbers, other leaders find it impolitic — not to mention diplomatically improper — to openly express doubts about Obama’s character or competence.

So they’ve taken a page out of his playbook and decided to do a little backstabbing themselves.  The exact moment when the Benghazi crisis began to clip Obama’s wings will probably be  identified as August 29, 2013. That is the date the British parliament refused to join Barack Obama’s impending strike on Syria after it had crossed his “Red Line”.

Congress couldn’t stop him. The American press couldn’t delay him but the British parliament, by pulling out of the deal, tossed a wrench into the gears.

And now the Germans are doing the same thing.  Though the Washington press try to portray Obama’s inaction against Putin as the result of his generous nature, Obama is hampered by a more basic problem: Germany won’t go along.

NBC news says that while “Obama wants the United States and Europe to stand together and force Russia to rethink its moves in Ukraine.”  But Angela Merkel isn’t taking orders. …

An American, watching this train wreck in Washington, is likely to call out, “Mayday.” A blog named Today I Found Out posts on how we came to use mayday to denote extreme distress.

Today I found out why those aboard planes and ships use the word “Mayday” to indicate they are in extreme distress.

In 1923, a senior radio officer, Frederick Stanley Mockford, in CroydonAirport in London, England was asked to think of one word that would be easy to understand for all pilots and ground staff in the event of an emergency. The problem had arisen as voice radio communication slowly became more common, so an equivalent to the Morse code SOS distress signal was needed. Obviously a word like “help” wasn’t a good choice for English speakers because it could be used in normal conversations where no one was in distress.

At the time Mockford was considering the request, much of the traffic he was dealing with was between Croydon and Le Bourget Airport in Paris, France. With both the French and English languages in mind, he came up with the somewhat unique word “Mayday”, the anglicized spelling of the French pronunciation of the word “m’aider” which means “help me”. …

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Steve Hayward at Power Line with a great post on politicians who see the light. He tells the story of David Bonior, former Dem congressman who started a business and suddenly had an understanding of the effects of regulations. Immediately I thought of George McGovern’s similar experiences as the 1972 Dem candidate for president also went into business. I was going to go looking for the letter he sent to the Journal, but Hayward found that too. First we’ll have Hayward.

I know, being on the Left means you’re a slow learner by definition, but still, the story reported the other day that former leftist Congressman David Bonior (D-Michigan) has become an entrepreneur and discovered, lo and behold!— regulations are slow and costly!  From the Washington Post earlier this week:

Bonior said if he had the power, he would lighten up on pesky regulations.

“It took us a ridiculous amount of time to get our permits. I understand regulations and . . . the necessity for it. But we lost six months of business because of that. It’s very frustrating.” (Emphasis added.) …

Here’s the Bonior article from WaPo.

David Bonior is a hungry entrepreneur bent on making money.

David Bonior ?

The former Michigan Democratic congressman, liberal pit bull, academic, antiwar firebrand and labor-union BFF has undergone an epiphany, making him simpatico with businesses and the profit motive.

He has invested at least $1 million, by my estimate, building two family-owned Washington restaurants, the second of which, Agua 301, is near Nationals Park and only a line drive from the Anacostia River. His first eatery, Zest Bistro, opened on Capitol Hill four years ago.

“It’s the American Dream,” he said of his new career.

Over tasty Caesar salad and tacos at Agua 301, the mild-mannered, thoughtful Bonior — chastened by local regulators and fickle weather — sounds more born-again capitalist than fire-breathing lefty.

“Small-business people work very hard,” said the 68-year-old, who has spent most of his life in government. “If you are a small-business guy, you are out there and not as protected as a government employee. They struggle every day. A snow day, a government worker is off. A restaurant person takes a hit from that snow day. This winter was very, very tough on the [restaurant] industry.” …

A contributor to the Detroit News reacts. 

About the only way to get a die-hard liberal politician to understand how the economy of business really works is to require them to run an actual business. Case in point: Former Congressman David Bonior. As reported in the Washington Post, Bonior has taken the plunge and become a business owner. Among the more ironic of his observations is this gem: “Bonior said if he had the power, he would lighten up on pesky regulations.”

For almost three decades, Congressman Bonior did have the power. He used it to increase the regulatory burden on business – especially small business. How delightful that he finally figured out what we, small business-people, were trying to tell him during those years was true. Not that it does us a whole lot of good now. …

Here’s George McGovern.

… My own business perspective has been limited to that small hotel and restaurant in Stratford, Conn., with an especially difficult lease and a severe recession. But my business associates and I also lived with federal, state and local rules that were all passed with the objective of helping employees, protecting the environment, raising tax dollars for schools, protecting our customers from fire hazards, etc. While I never doubted the worthiness of any of these goals, the concept that most often eludes legislators is: `Can we make consumers pay the higher prices for the increased operating costs that accompany public regulation and government reporting requirements with reams of red tape.’ It is a simple concern that is nonetheless often ignored by legislators.

For example, the papers today are filled with stories about businesses dropping health coverage for employees. We provided a substantial package for our staff at the Stratford Inn. However, were we operating today, those costs would exceed $150,000 a year for health care on top of salaries and other benefits. There would have been no reasonably way for us to absorb or pass on these costs.

Some of the escalation in the cost of health care is attributed to patients suing doctors. While one cannot assess the merit of all these claims, I’ve also witnessed firsthand the explosion in blame-shifting and scapegoating for every negative experience in life.

Today, despite bankruptcy, we are still dealing with litigation from individuals who fell in or near our restaurant. Despite these injuries, not every misstep is the fault of someone else. Not every such incident should be viewed as a lawsuit instead of an unfortunate accident. And while the business owner may prevail in the end, the endless exposure to frivolous claims and high legal fees is frightening. …

Thomas Sowell with a three part series on the costs of liberalism. Here he writes on the effects of regs that limit growth.

… One couple who had lived in their 1,200 square foot home in Palo Alto for 20 years decided to sell it, and posted an asking price just under $1.3 million.

Competition for that house forced the selling price up to $1.7 million.

Another Palo Alto house, this one with 1,292 square feet of space, is on the market for $2,285,000. It was built in 1895.

Even a vacant lot in Palo Alto costs more than a spacious middle-class home costs in most of the rest of the country.

How does this tie in with liberalism?

In this part of California, liberalism reigns supreme and “open space” is virtually a religion. What that lovely phrase means is that there are vast amounts of empty land where the law forbids anybody from building anything.

Anyone who has taken Economics 1 knows that preventing the supply from rising to meet the demand means that prices are going to rise. Housing is no exception.

Yet when my wife wrote in a local Palo Alto newspaper, many years ago, that preventing the building of housing would cause existing housing to become far too expensive for most people to afford it, she was deluged with more outraged letters than I get from readers of a nationally syndicated column.

What she said was treated as blasphemy against the religion of “open space” — and open space is just one of the wonderful things about the world envisioned by liberals that is ruinously expensive in the mundane world where the rest of us live.

Much as many liberals like to put guilt trips on other people, they seldom seek out, much less acknowledge and take responsibility for, the bad consequences of their own actions. …

Next, Sowell writes on liberals and disarmament.

Liberals can be disarming. In fact, they are for disarming anybody who can be disarmed, whether domestically or internationally.

Unfortunately, the people who are the easiest to disarm are the ones who are the most peaceful — and disarming them makes them vulnerable to those who are the least peaceful.

We are currently getting a painful demonstration of that in Ukraine. When Ukraine became an independent nation, it gave up all the nuclear missiles that were on its territory from the days when it had been part of the Soviet Union.

At that time, Ukraine had the third largest arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world. Do you think Putin would have attacked Ukraine if it still had those nuclear weapons? Or do you think it is just a coincidence that nations with nuclear weapons don’t get invaded?

Among those who urged Ukraine to reduce even its conventional, non-nuclear weapons as well, was a new United States Senator named Barack Obama. He was all for disarmament then, and apparently even now as President of the United States. He has refused Ukraine’s request for weapons with which to defend itself.

As with so many things that liberals do, the disarmament crusade is judged by its good intentions, not by its actual consequences. …

Mr. Sowell closes with the liberal inequality dreck.

… If nothing else, it is a much-needed distraction from the disasters of ObamaCare and the various IRS, Benghazi and other Obama administration scandals.

Like so many other favorite liberal issues, income inequality is seldom discussed in terms of the actual consequences of liberal policies. When you turn from eloquent rhetoric to hard facts, the hardest of those facts is that income inequality has actually increased during five years of Barack Obama’s leftist policies.

This is not as surprising as some might think. When you make it unnecessary for many people to work, fewer people work. Unprecedented numbers of Americans are on the food stamp program. Unprecedented numbers are also living off government “disability” payments.

There is a sweeping array of other government subsidies, whether in money or in kind, which together allow many people to receive greater benefits than they could earn by working at low-skilled jobs. Is it surprising that the labor force participation rate is lower than it has been in decades?

In short, when people don’t have to earn incomes, they are less likely to earn incomes — or, at least, to earn incomes in legal and visible ways that could threaten their government benefits.

Most of the households in the bottom 20 percent of income earners have nobody working. There are more heads of household working full-time and year-round in the top 5 percent than in the bottom 20 percent.

What this means statistically is that liberals can throw around numbers on how many people are living in “poverty” — defined in terms of income received, not in terms of goods and services provided by the government. …

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A foreign policy overview from Major Garrett. He calls it our “Punch and Judy” policy.

MANILA — For President Obama, caution in the defense of liberty is no vice, and militarism in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

Obama didn’t come to Asia to paraphrase Barry Goldwater’s acceptance speech at the 1964 Republican National Convention. But he did after growing frustrated with recent editorial criticism portraying his foreign policy as weak and naive. …

… Obama, in other words, knows precisely what he doesn’t want to do. No errors. No big, embarrassing strikeouts. Singles and doubles. In baseball, that’s called a Punch and Judy, station-to-station offense. Move the runners along gradually; keep momentum going.

But if your global rivals know you best by your self-imposed limits, how capably can you project power? Is it canny to concede more than necessary? This is the central question for Obama’s foreign policy. He argued forcefully here that the greater danger is picking reckless fights or pretending a war-exhausted American public will support war in Syria, Ukraine, or anywhere in Asia.

The problem for Obama is the perception here and elsewhere that the most forceful thing he’s done on this trip or since Benghazi has been to explain what he can’t do—not what he can.

John Kerry is just one of the fools picked for the foreign policy team. Gerald Seib reports on an interview that shows how the SecState gets Russia policy exactly wrong. Kerry thinks present policy is uniquely Putin, when in fact it is exactly what Russians want and exactly what Russia has always done whether Czars, Communists, or the new Putintate.

Secretary of State John Kerry has been thinking about, talking through and wrestling with the Ukraine crisis for weeks, but he still grasps for words to describe the motivations of the man at its center: Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“You almost feel that he’s creating his own reality, and his own sort of world, divorced from a lot of what’s real on the ground for all those people, including people in his own country,” Mr. Kerry said in an interview late Monday. …

… while sanctions may be pinching Kremlin cronies, the conversation with Mr. Kerry leaves no doubt that he sees Russia’s actions as the product not of any collective Russian view of the world, but of the determination of an individual: Vladimir Putin.

The Ukraine crisis, Mr. Kerry said, is “obviously very personally driven in ways that I think are uniquely inappropriate to 21st century leadership.” He added: “It’s an amazing display of a kind of personal reaction to something that just doesn’t fit into the lessons learned for the last 60 years or 70 years. It’s so divorced that it leaves you feeling badly for the consequences. I think the Russian people are going to pay a price for this. It’s unfortunate for the Russian people, who clearly don’t fit into the costs that are being attached to this, because it appears to be so personal to President Putin.”

Mr. Kerry said he finds the Russian leader’s appeals to nationalism in particular “dangerous in this time and place.” …

Here’s something written by Pickerhead in March 11th’s Pickings. It explains how Kerry gets fooled when he thinks the Russians he hears represent the rest of 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 of Russia’s flat geography. It rises in the Valdai Hills near Moscow and wanders for almost 2,400 miles before arriving at the Caspian Sea. A drop of less than 750 feet, or three and a half 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. …

To put a coda on this section, we learn from Breitbart News Russians are the happiest they have been in 25 years. And why not? Regardless of what Kerry thinks, they have exactly the government they want.

Even though their country is preparing for military conflict and its economy is in recession, Russians, a survey released Thursday said, are the happiest they have been in 25 years.

In its annual “Happiness Index,” the VTsIOM public opinion research center said 78 percent of Russians declared themselves content with their lives, a one percent increase over last year’s statistics. Those in the 18 to 25 age group were the happiest, with 92 percent of respondents saying they were happy.

One in three respondents noted happiness, for them, was linked to family life, their children and grandchildren, and an interesting work life. The number of those simply thankful to be alive has doubled, the survey said.

Those unhappy complained of bad health and a low standard of living.

The survey was conducted among 1,600 respondents across 45 Russian regions.

Of course, it is not only Kerry. The president has found kindred fools for more of his foreign policy apparatus. American Thinker has a long post about the Tommy Vietor interview with Bret Baier last week. It is a long post, but here’s some bio material on others.  

Now, on to the real news: the grave affairs of state in the Obama administration are in the hands of incompetent, inexperienced people who are not up to the responsibilities they wield. If you are wondering how someone so callow came to such a position, read this and weep. He started as a van driver. Jonathan Karl, Richard Coolidge, and Jordyn Phelps wrote over a year ago:

“Tommy Vietor started working for Barack Obama when he was still Senator Obama–well before he became a presidential candidate–and until Friday, the 32-year-old Vietor hadn’t stopped. His first job for Obama was as the driver of a press van, and he rose up the ranks through the 2008 campaign, and then the White House press office, to become the National Security Council spokesman.”

Now leaving the White House to open a political communications firm with the president’s departing speechwriter Jon Favreau, Vietor says it’s been the privilege of a lifetime to work for the president. …

… In 2010, Ed Lasky examined the appalling lack of qualifications of Ben Rhodes, now at the center of the storm:

Who is Ben Rhodes and what qualifies him to be the Deputy National SecurityAdviser?

He was Barack Obama’s speechwriter (albeit, on foreign policy topics) during the campaign. He also played a role in the Cairo speech that presented a highly fictionalized history of both Islam (praised it for accomplishments that were not Islam’s) and Israel (a legacy of the Holocaust guilt).

Maybe he has a certain talent for fiction. After all, it was only  a few years ago that “he was an aspiring fiction writer working on a novel called “The Oasis of Love” about a megachurch in Houston, a dog track and a failed romance.

Rhodes has enjoyed a rapid rise — because why?

Granted he is quite the wordsmith. That must qualify him for one of the top jobs involving our national security. It must have been a symbiotic relationship — a talented speechwriter with a talented speech reader. …

… Then there is Valerie Jarrett, who appears to be running the country while Obama plays golf, shoots hoops, parties, and has “downtime,” as Michelle Obama recently called it, with his family, watching TV.

Even among foreign policy appointees with actual credentials, such as UN Ambassador Samantha Power who has a PhD, it is all theory and no actual experience and an inability to follow through on all the fine words she has written.

As Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit so often sarcastically remarks, “The country is in the best of hands.”

 Craig Pirrong with a welcome post on Warren Buffett.

… The recent spate of accidents has led Warren Buffett to call for stronger regulation, most notably, a requirement for safer rail cars.  Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway of course owns the nation’s second largest rail carrier, BNSF.

That Warren, always looking out for the public interest, and willing to sacrifice the interests of one of his major holdings to benefit us hoi polloi.

Not.

First, it’s long been known that some firms in an industry can benefit from the imposition of more stringent safety regulations. Yes, these regulations raise everybody’s costs, but some firms’ costs rise more than others. The less-impacted firms have an incentive to press for the regulations in order to raise their rivals’ costs. This raises market price. The effect on price more than offsets the effect on cost for the less cost-impacted firms.

Which means: always look askance at people like Buffett who are calling for regulation of their industry.

And this goes double for Buffett. For in addition to BNSF, Berkshire Hathaway owns the Union Tank Car Company, one of the largest manufacturers of oil tanker railcars. Meaning that some of the costs from requiring the purchase of more robust railcars goes from Buffett’s BNSF pocket into his UTLX pocket. He is, effectively, hedged against the rise in BNSF’s costs that would result from regulations requiring the use of safer cars. What’s more, his UTLX also pockets some of the costs incurred by his rivals. That’s a double win for Buffett. His rivals’ costs go up, raising prices for rail freight which benefits BNSF, and Buffett also books as profit (at UTLX) some of the higher costs his rivals incur.

Great work if you can get it.

So yeah, Buffett’s call for more stringent regulation of oil carrying railcars is totally altruistic. Totally.

It never ceases to amaze me how Buffett’s kindly grandfather shtick fools the world. He is utterly cynical in his actions and public statements. He demonizes derivatives, but engages in some huge exotic options trades. He claims he supports the estate tax out of interest of fairness and equity, not mentioning that his insurance businesses profit immensely from the estate tax (and that he can of course largely circumvent the tax). He has manipulated the silver market. And he poses as a defender of public safety, not mentioning his very strong economic interests in such regulation. …

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The administration’s Benghazi BS gets some treatment from a few of our favorites. Roger Simon kicks it off.

A couple of weeks ago, the prime minister of South Korea resigned over a tragic ferry accident in his country for which he had no personal responsibility whatsoever 

In the USA, the exact opposite has been happening. Going on two years now, our administration has done nothing but attempt to lie, obfuscate and shift the blame concerning the events in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012, during which four Americans were murdered.

But as information dribbles out — most recently the long-hidden email from Ben Rhodes — the extent of this prevarication is reaching a tipping point with even a few representatives of the mainstream media (notably Jonathan Karl of ABC) stepping forward to challenge the administration. …

David Harsanyi says, “You know what, Dude; even if Benghazi was about a video, it’s still a scandal.

Judging from the reaction of liberals on my Twitter feed, the appropriate reaction to any #Benghazi talk is snickering and derision. And the defense offered by administration, which amounts to mocking conservatives for offering any questions  –  former National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor dropping “dude” on Fox News’ Bret Baier was tailored to parallel this dismissive attitude – reminds me that even if all this was about a video, even if the GOP’s “conspiracy theory” regarding talking-point timelines is all wrong, the Obama administration’s reaction is still a scandal.

By downplaying the Benghazi attack during the 2012 race, by grandstanding and attacking critics, the president saved himself any serious debate about, not only the attack, but our misguided Libyan intervention, our Egyptian policy, and the administration’s claims that al-Qaeda terrorism had been largely subdued. And by continuing to make the ludicrous assertion that a sophisticated tactical terrorist attack was merely a spontaneous protest by hypersensitive Muslims in reaction to a halfwit’s silly video, Obama defenders remind us that nothing is more important than politics.

From the beginning the administration misrepresented what occurred. And not only in Libya. When Judicial Watch recently made available documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act public, one of them, an email dated September 14, 2012, showed national security official Ben Rhodes editing Libya talking points for Susan Rice. Jay Carney (who initially claimed that these were “stylistic changes“) says the talking points reflected all protests across the Muslim world. The goal: “underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy.” But that’s a lie, no matter when the edit was made. It would have been a lie the night of Sept. 11 and it was a lie if Rice was referring to the entire Muslim world or simply Benghazi. And it’s a scandal because the administration knew it was untrue and went out and tacitly blamed the United States for the barbaric actions of others. …

Andrew McCarthy gets to the foundation of the president’s serial lies about Benghazi. 

Here is the main point: The rioting at the American embassy in Cairo was not about the anti-Muslim video. As argued here repeatedly (see here and here), the Obama administration’s “Blame the Video” story was a fraudulent explanation for the September 11, 2012, rioting in Cairo every bit as much as it was a fraudulent explanation for the massacre in Benghazi several hours later. 

We’ll come back to that because, once you grasp this well-hidden fact, the Obama administration’s derelictions of duty in connection with Benghazi become much easier to see. But let’s begin with Jay Carney’s performance in Wednesday’s exchange with the White House press corps, a new low in insulting the intelligence of the American people

Mr. Carney was grilled about just-released e-mails that corroborate what many of us have been arguing all along: “Blame the Video” was an Obama-administration–crafted lie, through and through. It was intended, in the stretch run of the 2012 campaign, to obscure the facts that (a) the president’s foreign policy of empowering Islamic supremacists contributed directly and materially to the Benghazi massacre; (b) the president’s reckless stationing of American government personnel in Benghazi and his shocking failure to provide sufficient protection for them were driven by a political-campaign imperative to portray the Obama Libya policy as a success — and, again, they invited the jihadist violence that killed our ambassador and three other Americans; and (c) far from being “decimated,” as the president repeatedly claimed during the campaign (and continued to claim even after the September 11 violence in Egypt and Libya), al-Qaeda and its allied jihadists remained a driving force of anti-American violence in Muslim countries — indeed, they had been strengthened by the president’s pro-Islamist policies. …

Let’s spend some time on the coming election. Josh Kraushaar looks at the polls and Nate Silver’s forecasts and suggests the Dems will do more poorly than Silver thinks.

I’m a numbers guy. As a baseball fan, I pore over box scores, regularly second-guess managers who use old-school tactics, and was probably one of Nate Silver’s first readers and an early subscriber to the sabermetric reference book Baseball Prospectus, where he made a name for himself projecting player outcomes. In reporting on and analyzing politics, I rely greatly on fundraising reports and polling data to inform the trajectory of key races.

But count me underwhelmed by the new wave of Senate prediction models assessing the probability of Republicans winning the upper chamber by one-tenth of a percentage point. It’s not that the models aren’t effective at what they’re designed to do. It’s that the methodology behind them is flawed. Unlike baseball, where the sample size runs in the thousands of at-bats or innings pitched, these models overemphasize a handful of early polls at the expense of on-the-ground intelligence on candidate quality. As Silver might put it, there’s a lot of noise to the signal.

The models also undervalue the big-picture indicators suggesting that 2014 is shaping up to be a wave election for Republicans, the type of environment where even seemingly safe incumbents can become endangered. Nearly every national poll, including Tuesday’s ABC News/Washington Post survey, contains ominous news for Senate Democrats. President Obama’s job approval is at an all-time low of 41 percent, and public opinion on his health care law hasn’t budged and remains a driving force in turning out disaffected voters to the polls to register their anger. Public opinion on the economy isn’t any better than it was before the 2010 midterms when the unemployment rate hit double-digits. Democrats hold only a 1-point lead on the generic ballot in the ABC/WaPo survey—worse positioning than before the GOP’s 2010 landslide. …

A. B. Stoddard says the Dems are on thin ice.

… The consensus, among pollsters and prognosticators, is that turnout favors Republicans. Midterm elections attract an older, whiter and more male electorate than presidential elections do, and the participation of the coalition on which Democrats depend tends to drop off dramatically. In 2010, the Democrats had a 5-point lead in the general ballot just before the party lost control of the House majority. Now they are tied in one survey and ahead by just 1 point in another.

The popularity of ObamaCare has seen a slight uptick in the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll but remains unpopular enough among Republican and independent voters that Democrats, for the most part, have refused to run on it, even as all of their GOP opponents run against it. The issue continues to galvanize Republicans while Democrats hold their collective breath, in fear of a spike in premiums set by insurance companies in the late summer could create a wave that costs them 10 seats or more in the Senate. …

Charlie Cook writes on why the Dems should not be celebrating the minor scraps of good news.

There seemed to be a pop-the-champagne mood among Democrats after the Obama administration’s announcement that 8 million Americans had signed up for health care coverage under the Affordable Care Act. Democrats, desperate for good news, became euphoric at the suggestion that perhaps they had turned the corner on Obamacare, moving from it being a likely political liability to an asset, and that maybe the 2014 midterm elections might not be so bad. The fact that 8 million is less than 3 percent of the 313.9 million people in the United States seemed lost in the shuffle.

My impression at the time was that this sounded a bit too much like whistling past the graveyard. Now an array of new polling from a variety of sources suggests that Democrats have no reason to be encouraged at this point. Things still look pretty awful for the party. Especially meaningful to consider is that—no matter how bad the national poll numbers appear for Democrats—eight of their nine most vulnerable Senate seats this year are in states that Mitt Romney carried in 2012. Further, nine of the most competitive 11 Senate seats in both parties are in Romney states; the numbers in these states will likely be considerably worse than the national numbers. …

Michael Barone likes the idea of more tolls on the interstate system.

It is not often that I can congratulate the Obama administration for adopting a policy I’ve advocated myself. But today I can. Last month in a Washington Examiner column I called for increased use of tolling to finance highways. As I pointed out, the gasoline tax is a diminishing resource — and will diminish more as the administration’s stringent auto mileage standards come into force — and there is great resistance to raising the federal gas tax. Tolls provide a ready alternative, with transponder technology greatly reducing the cost and hassle of exacting tolls from drivers — and with fees pegged closely to actual usage of particular highways.

So I am happy to see that the transportation bill (titled the Grow America Act) that Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx is recommending to Congress includes a provision to “eliminate the prohibition on tolling existing free Interstate highways, subject to the approval of the Secretary, for purposes of reconstruction, thus providing States greater flexibility to use tolling as a revenue source for needed reconstruction activities on all components of their highway systems. This section would allow any State or public agency to impose variable tolls on existing highways, bridges, or tunnels for purposes of congestion management, subject to the approval of the Secretary.” This presumably wouldn’t allow tolling for purposes other than “reconstruction” and “congestion management,” but I suspect that could include very many projects. I hope Congress takes Secretary Foxx’s proposal seriously