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Andrew Malcolm posts on the Clintons’ hard choices.

… Ever the gallant husband, Bill Clinton was defending Hillary’s oopsey-do claims on her book tour that the couple was “dead broke” in 2001, struggling just like ordinary Americans to get mortgages on their two mansions and finance Chelsea’s private school. It wasn’t easy, Hillary said in that flawed interview with ABC News.

Like hell it wasn’t.

They walked out of the White House into multi-million dollar book contracts and fees for a single speech that exceeded several years’ earnings for most Americans. Terry McAuliffe, their political money man who’s now Virginia governor, put up more than a million as bridge loan for one house down-payment.

Hillary and Bill both boast of having millions in debts when entering private life. Which is true. But where did those debts come from? Well, uh, mountainous attorney fees for numerous actual and alleged wrongdoings while occupying the Oval Office and other rooms.

One of the more humorous evergreen characteristics of Democrats in politics is their genetic need to claim humble beginnings and to apologize for being rich beyond the wildest dreams of the little people they claim to so devotedly defend. …

Hillary Clinton’s defense of a child rapist in 1975 gets the Continetti treatment. And you can listen to newly unearthed tapes with Hillary laughing about her defense strategy.

The facts are these. In 1975, before she married Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham defended a child rapist in Arkansas court. She was not a public defender. No one ordered her to take the case. An ambitious young lawyer, she was asked by a friend if she would represent the accused, and she agreed. And her defense was successful. Attacking the credibility of the 12-year-old victim on the one hand, and questioning the chain of evidence on another, Clinton got a plea-bargain for her client. He served ten months in prison, and died in 1992. The victim, now 52, has had her life irrevocably altered—for the worse.

Sometime in the mid-1980s, for an Esquire profile of rising political stars, Hillary Clinton and her husband agreed to a series of interviews with the Arkansas journalist Roy Reed. Reed and Hillary Clinton discussed at some length her defense of the child rapist, and in the course of that discussion she bragged and laughed about the case, implied she had known her client was guilty, and said her “faith in polygraphs” was forever destroyed when she saw that her client had taken one and passed. Reed’s article was never published. His tapes of the interviews were later donated to the University of Arkansas. Where they remained, gathering dust. …

Jennifer Rubin says Hillary was part and parcel of the administration’s Iraq policy.

As I have written, the Obama/Hillary Clinton cover story that Iraq wouldn’t let troops stay behind (or even more outlandishly that the George W. Bush administration put Bush’s successor in a position where the United States “had” to get out) is at odds with reality.

A reader points out the Obama/Clinton cover story was recently blown up by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). Graham, along with Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), had gone to Iraq on behalf of the administration trying to secure a stay-behind force. Take three minutes to listen to Graham’s blow-by-blow account. Three things are clear:

The principal Iraq leaders all agreed to a stay-behind force and warned the administration not to bring the issue up with its parliament.

When Graham asked Gen. [Martin] Dempsey in the discussion how many forces we would have, he had no clear answer.

The number of troops was reduced not by Iraq, but by the White House.

Obama then insisted he had to go to parliament and without its approval (which wasn’t forthcoming) it was impossible to leave troops –  any number — behind. In all of this, Graham points out that the administration “got the answer they wanted.” Remember this was a campaign promise — to get all the troops out. Obama was to run for reelection as the guy who ended wars and had decimated al-Qaeda. (Recently Obama decided — with his policy in shambles — that parliament didn’t need to vote on an immunity deal for our 300 advisers.) …

Peggy Noonan writes on Hillary and her book.

… Mrs. Clinton seems to have a peculiar and unattractive relationship with money. She wants it and she doesn’t want you to know. She also appears to think she’s entitled to it, as a public servant who operated at high levels. But public servants now are less like servants than bosses.

When an interviewer compared her to Mitt Romney in terms of wealth, she got a stony look. That is a “false equivalency,” she said. You could see she feels she should not be compared to a wealthy Republican because she’s liberal and therefore stands for the little guy. So she can be rich and should not be criticized, while rich people who have the wrong policies—that would be Republicans—are “the rich” and can be scorned and shamed. This is seen by some as hypocrisy but is more like smugness. …

… As for the book, it is actually the first I have encountered that was written so a politician could say, “I wrote about this at length in my book.” It exists to offer a template for various narratives and allow her to suggest she’s already well covered the issue at hand, which the interviewer would know if he were better informed.

It is written in the style of the current Ladies’ Home Journal in that it patronizes even as it panders. It is an extended attempt to speak “their language,” the language of a huge imagined audience of women. There are silver linings of defeat. She brims with ideas, advocates, gets to yes, chooses her own team. There are clear-eyed assessments and daunting challenges. The State Department neighborhood is known as “Foggy Bottom.” She proudly quotes a speech she gave in 2008. “You will always find me on the front lines of democracy—fighting for the future.”

Ladies and gentleman, that is the authentic sound of 2016. Shoot me now.

Why do Democratic politicians talk like this about themselves, putting themselves and their drama at the ego-filled center, instead of policy ideas, larger meanings, the actual state of the country? In this she is just like Barack Obama.

Free Beacon reports UNLV students incensed over Hillary Clinton’s speaker’s fee.

The University of Nevada-Las Vegas is set to host Hillary Clinton on October 13 as their speaker for their UNLV Annual Foundation Dinner. Clinton will be paid $225,000 to address attendees at the fundraiser. Her sky-high speaking fee has raised eyebrows and caused a stir on the UNLV campus.

UNLV student government leaders expressed their outrage at the university’s decision to pay the former Secretary of State such a hefty fee. “We really appreciate anybody who would come to raise money for the university, but anybody who is being paid $225,000 to come speak- we think that’s a little bit outrageous. And we would like Secretary Clinton, respectfully, to gracefully return the money back to the university or to the foundation,” Daniel Waqar, Public Relations Director for the UNLV Student Government, told Jon Ralston on Ralston Reports.

UNLV Student Body President Elias Benjelloun agreed and weighed in on Clinton’s controversial speaking fee. “We’re excited that Hillary Clinton would come to the university to fundraise on behalf of our university. We’re excited anyone wants to come to UNLV and fundraise on our behalf. When we heard $225,000, we weren’t so thrilled…We’d hope that Hillary Clinton…returns part or whole of the amount she receives for speaking,” he said.

Carl Cannon posts on the 15 most annoying political phrases.

… 2. “AT THE END OF THE DAY” When Bill and Hillary Clinton arrived on the national scene, they brought pizazz to politics. They also popularized this unfortunate phrase. “At the end of the day” is simultaneously addictive and grating. Its first usage can be traced to 1826, although it really caught on in the 1990s. In Britain, it so offended BBC host Vanessa Feltz that she issued a fatwa against the phrase, which she rescinded when no guest was able to speak aloud without using it. In this country, it quickly spread beyond the Clinton circle. Everyone says it now: Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives, baseball players, football coaches, prosecutors, bartenders, movie stars. In 2004, an organization called The Plain English Campaign surveyed its members in 70 countries and pronounced it “the most irritating phrase in the English language.”

1. “FOLKS” U.S. presidents love this word, which they find, well, folksy. It’s been invoked by our chief executives some 4,400 times since Herbert Hoover occupied the Oval Office. Bill Clinton loved “folks” so much he used it publicly eight times during his last month in office. But it’s proliferating. George W. Bush used it 21 times in his first month as president. Then he started misusing it. His most discordant example was his reference to “al-Qaeda, the very same folks that attacked us on September the 11th.” There must be something in the White House water supply because Obama matched Bush’s January-February 2001 record by saying “folks” 21 times in only two debates with Mitt Romney. The first time he used it in the Oct. 22, 2012, debate was the most jarring. Discussing military intervention in Syria, Obama said he wanted to make sure “we’re not putting arms in the hands of folks who eventually could turn them against us or allies in the region.” At least he didn’t say, “Look, frankly, at the end of the day—as Ronald Reagan knew—Syria is a no-brainer.”

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Glenn Reynolds posted on the two Watergate-era heroes who died last week;

…Howard Baker, who famously asked “what did the President know and when did he know it?” and Johnnie Walters, the IRS Commissioner who refused to go along with Nixon’s efforts to target his enemies. Both were Republicans who stood up for the rule of law.

Where are the Democrats willing to stand up for it under this Administration?

More on Johnnie Walters from Jim Taranto.

In the scandal involving the Internal Revenue Service, the IRS commissioner refused to play along with a corrupt administration, the New York Times reports. A White House aide handed him a list of 200 political “enemies” the president wanted investigated. In response, the commissioner asked: “Do you realize what you’re doing?” Then, he answered his own rhetorical question: “If I did what you asked, it’d make Watergate look like a Sunday school picnic.”

The White House aide’s reply was “emphatic,” according to the Times: “”The man I work for doesn’t like somebody to say ‘no.’ ”

The commissioner went to his boss, the Treasury secretary, “showed him the list and recommended that the I.R.S. do nothing.” The secretary “told him to lock the list in his safe.” Later, he retrieved the list and turned it over to congressional investigators.

It’s enough to restore your trust in the government–except that it happened more than 40 years ago. The corrupt order was delivered by John Dean in September 1972. The commissioner, Johnnie Walters, eventually “testified to various committees investigating alleged Nixon misdeeds,” the Times reports. “He left office in April 1973.” He died Tuesday; the Times article we’ve been quoting is his obituary. …

… Four decades ago, during a Republican administration that was brought down by corruption, the IRS turned out to be a bulwark of government integrity. Today the possibility remains that the IRS itself is the source of the corruption. As we’ve repeatedly argued, that would be even worse than an IRS that follows corrupt orders from the president. A corrupt administration can be replaced, as Nixon’s was. It’s harder to see what can be done if a vital and permanent institution of the administrative state has been corrupted.

Even the liberals on the Supreme Court cannot countenance presidential power plays. John Fund posts on the 12th and 13th unanimous ruling in the last two and a half years.  

Did you know the Obama administration’s position has been defeated in at least 13 – thirteen — cases before the Supreme Court since January 2012 that were unanimous decisions? It continued its abysmal record before the Supreme Court today with the announcement of two unanimous opinions against arguments the administration had supported. First, the Court rejected the administration’s power grab on recess appointments by making clear it could not decide when the Senate was in recess. Then it unanimously tossed out a law establishing abortion-clinic “buffer zones” against pro-life protests that the Obama administration argued on behalf of before the Court (though the case was led by Massachusetts attorney general Martha Coakley).

The tenure of both President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder has been marked by a dangerous push to legitimize a vast expansion of the power of the federal government that endangers the liberty and freedom of Americans. They have taken such extreme position on key issues that the Court has uncharacteristically slapped them down time and time again. Historically, the Justice Department has won about 70 percent of its cases before the high court. But in each of the last three terms, the Court has ruled against the administration a majority of the time. …

Kimberley Strassel writes on the president’s enablers.

… In the history of this country, there was one thing on which Republicans and Democrats, House and Senate, could regularly agree: Nobody messes with Congress’s powers. Political parties were happy to rally votes for a president’s agenda, to slam his opponents, to excuse his failings. But should that president step on Congress’s size 12 toes, all partisan bets were off. …

 

… Name a prominent Democrat—name any Democrat—who has said boo about the president’s 23 unilateral rewrites of ObamaCare. Or of immigration law. Name any who today are defending constituents in their districts against the abuses of the Obama IRS. A few congressional Democrats got their backs up with the White House over possible Syria action, but they are dwarfed by the majority who’ve gone silent over Mr. Obama’s national-security policies—which they once berated George W. Bush for pursuing as an “imperial” president.

The main culprits here are Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and Ms. Pelosi, who’ve put themselves and their caucuses at the disposal of the White House. Winning political battles—sticking it to the GOP—is their priority, not constitutional balance. Mr. Reid has made himself White House gatekeeper, sitting on thorny votes, earning Congress public scorn for dysfunction. His members are meanwhile happy for Mr. Obama to pervert the law, since it saves them taking tough votes.

It hasn’t helped that much of the institutional memory of the Democratic Party has retired or died this past decade. Nearly half of today’s Democratic Senate was elected with or since Mr. Obama and has never known institutional leadership. …

Philip Klein explains how the recess appointments ruling bolsters Boehner’s suit for presidential usurpation.

A unanimous ruling by the Supreme Court on Thursday invalidating three of President Obama’s recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board bolsters House Speaker John Boehner’s effort to sue Obama over his abuse of executive power.

Liberals have consistently dismissed as political posturing any charges by Republicans that Obama has violated the U.S. Constitution by frequently bypassing Congress. But the decision in the NLRB v. Noel Canning case shows that there’s more to the GOP’s claims than liberals care to acknowledge.

The case goes back to January 2012 when Obama, frustrated by his inability to get his pro-union nominees to the NLRB confirmed, made three appointments to the board tasked with adjudicating labor disputes – even though the U.S. Senate said it was still in session.

In a 9-0 decision authored by liberal Justice Stephen Breyer, the court held that, “the Senate is in session when it says it is” and thus, Obama “lacked the power to make the recess appointments here at issue.” …

WSJ reports we’ve been voting for butter.

Changing views of nutrition are turning butter into one of the great comeback stories in U.S. food history.

Americans this year are expected to eat an average of 5.6 pounds of butter, according to U.S. government data—nearly 22.5 sticks for every man, woman and child. That translates to 892,000 total tons of butter consumed nationwide, an amount not seen since World War II.

Americans in 2013 for the third straight year bought more butter than margarine, spending $2 billion on products from Land O’Lakes Inc., OrganicValley and others, compared with $1.8 billion on spreads and margarines, according to IRI, a market-research firm.

The revival flows in part from new legions of home gourmets inspired by celebrity chefs and cooking shows with butter-rich recipes. Butter makers have encouraged the trend, using food channels and websites to promote what they say is their products’ natural simplicity. …

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Kevin Williamson writes on the children’s free libraries in the Kansas City suburbs and the reaction from government creeps on the zoning board.

Funny how words change over time: “To be attached to the subdivision,” Edmund Burke wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France, “to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind.” The phrase “little platoon” remains current among conservatives, who are mindful that the small, local, voluntary associations of civil society — and not Leviathan — are the real building blocks of our common life. But “subdivision” now means something entirely different, calling to mind the petty dictatorships of local zoning boards and the like. Nine-year-old Spencer Collins of Leawood, Kan., was trying to make his contribution to his little platoon when he ran up against the ham-fisted tyranny of the subdivision.

There is a charming phenomenon known as the “little free library,” in which private citizens, very often children, build modest little birdhouse-like structures, fill them with books, and offer them to their neighbors on a take-a-book/leave-a-book honor system. The practice is popular in the Kansas City suburbs where the Collinses reside, but they have been built from coast to coast. The business of America being business, there are even entrepreneurs who build ready-made little free libraries for those insufficiently handy or not inclined to build their own. Children engaging their communities in a generous, civic-minded activity dedicated to books: You could hardly improve on that.

Unless you are the local zoning board. And then you might have some ideas. …

 

… From the suburbs to the capital, we are governed by fools.

Kevin Williamson reminds us how delicate our democratic government is.

… freedom, self-rule, and prosperity are extraordinarily delicate things. The natural state of the human animal is not security and plenty, but terror and privation. When the Romans overthrew Tarquin, they swore they’d never have another king. Soon enough, they had an emperor, a word deriving from the Latin imperator, which, some of my conservative friends would do well to remember, means “commander-in-chief.”

We Americans venerate our Constitution as the English venerate their Magna Carta (which is our Magna Carta, too), but it isn’t our laws or our documents that keep us free. The United States and the United Kingdom have very different forms of government, and there are many contradictory and incompatible laws, institutions, health-care arrangements, etc., across the countries of the Anglosphere. What keeps us free is our civilization and our culture, and our tenacity in defending the best aspects of them.

As John Fund points out, 13 times since 2012 the Supreme Court has felt itself obliged to unanimously stop Barack Obama from doing violence to the Constitution and the law in the service of aggrandizing his own power. The president’s most recent defeat, in the matter of his attempting to make recess appointments when the Senate is not in recess, was a naked power grab, ugly and vicious enough that even Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, whom President Obama named to the Court, both felt obliged by duty to blow the whistle on his transgression. But even the mighty Supreme Court can be overcome: …

Kevin Williamson posts on the unfortunate series of events that have overcome the IRS. Says it must be “the unluckiest agency in the history of the federal government.”

You may recall that when the IRS political-persecution scandal first started to become public, the agency’s story was that the trouble was the result of the misguided, overly enthusiastic actions of a few obscure yokels in Cincinnati. That turned out to be a lie, as we all know. But the IRS made a similar case successfully in the matter of its criminal disclosure of the confidential tax records of the National Organization for Marriage, whose donor lists were leaked to left-wing activists in order to use them against the Romney campaign. The IRS admitted that an employee leaked the information, but said it was an accident, that it involved only a single employee making a single error, etc., and the court agreed that NOM could not show that the leak was the result of malice or gross negligence.

Truly, the IRS must be the unluckiest agency in the history of the federal government. Oops! It’s leaking confidential taxpayer information to political activists. D’oh! It’s improperly and illegally targeting conservative organizations for harassment and investigation and misleading Congress, investigators, and the public about the scope and scale of that wrongdoing. Dang! It cannot produce the emails that investigators have demanded as part of the inquiry into its actions. Rats! Its employees are openly campaigning for Barack Obama’s reelection while on the IRS’s clock, using IRS resources, and holding taxpayers hostage. And, who could have seen it coming? The IRS violated the Federal Records Act by refusing to archive relevant documents. With a string of bad luck like that, sure, accidentally releasing NOM’s confidential taxpayer information to left-wing activists seems right at home. …

… The alternative and much more likely — undeniable, to my mind — explanation is that the Internal Revenue Service is engaged in an active and ongoing criminal conspiracy to misappropriate federal resources for political purposes, to use its investigatory powers, including the threat of criminal prosecution, for purposes of political repression, and to actively mislead Congress and the public about the issue;  that the Justice Department is turning a blind eye to these very serious crimes for political purposes and is therefore complicit in the cover-up; that these crimes were encouraged if not outright suborned by Senate Democrats; and that the White House is at the very least passively complicit, refusing to lift so much as a presidential pinkie as the IRS runs amok.

And, apparently, there’s nobody in Washington with the power and the inclination to do anything about it.

Kevin Williamson thinks we need a boring president.

As I was lunching with a few conservative political types earlier this week, the subject turned, as it does, to the 2016 field. When the name of a highly regarded former governor came up, the judgment was unequivocal: “He’s just so . . . boring.” That was not intended as an endorsement.

It should be.

Barack Obama has been anything but boring. “May you live in exciting times” may be a fake Chinese curse, but the wisdom communicated therein is real. …

… The most boring president of the modern era probably was Dwight Eisenhower, whose administration was marked by relative peace, prosperity, and confidence in the effectiveness and integrity of our institutions. The most boring president ever surely was Calvin Coolidge, who pinched pennies and kept at his plow, more or less leaving the country free to go about its own business, which turned out to be an excellent economic program. Our most exciting recent presidents? John Kennedy, who was privately corrupt and publicly inept; Richard Nixon, who was privately corrupt and publicly corrupt; Bill Clinton, who combined the worst features of Kennedy and Nixon, adding a distasteful dose of sanctimony to the mix.

What greeted Barack Obama during his ascent was excitement that bled into reverence — it is easy to forget, with the demigod in his now diminished state, that his admirers were literally singing hymns to him. Exciting, in the same way that a head-on collision in a speeding Cadillac is exciting — it’s a shame J. G. Ballard, the poet laureate of car crashes, was not around to write about this wreck. …

One of the most disturbing trends in contemporary life is the animus towards free markets coming from parts of the Catholic Church and other organized religions. Guess who has comments? That’s right; Kevin Williamson once again.

Something strange happened in Washington last week: A panel of Catholic intellectuals and clergy, led by His Eminence Oscar Andrés Maradiaga, was convened to denounce a political philosophy under the headline “Erroneous Autonomy: The Catholic Case against Libertarianism.” The conference was mainly about free-market economics rather than libertarianism per se, and it was an excellent reminder that the hierarchy of the Church has no special grace to pronounce upon matters of specific economic organization. The best that can be said of the clergy’s corporate approach to economic thinking is that it is intellectually incoherent, which is lucky inasmuch as the depths of its illiteracy become more dramatic and destructive as it approaches coherence.

The Catholic clergy is hardly alone in this. There is something about the intellectually cloistered lives of religious professionals that prevents them from engaging in anything but the most superficial way with the 21st-century economy. Consider Tricycle, the American Buddhist review, which periodically publishes hilariously insipid economic observations — e.g., the bracingly uninformed writing of Professor Stuart Smithers of the University of Puget Sound religion department, whose review of Conscious Capitalism by Whole Foods CEO John Mackey and Raj Sisodia contains within it a perfect distillation of fashionable economic antithought. Like Cardinal Rodríguez Maradiaga, he writes about the “structural” problems of capitalism, but gives no evidence at all that he even understands what that structure is. Unfortunately, relatively few do. …

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Walter Russell Mead surveys the Middle East and says, “Welcome to obama’s brave new world.”

ISIS is bigger, badder, richer, and better organized than any jihadi threat the United States has faced thus far. Its rise represents a foreign policy disaster of the first order.

A group more radical than al-Qaeda, better organized, better financed, commanding the loyalty of thousands of dedicated fanatics including many with Western and even U.S. passports? And this group now controls some of the most strategic territory at the heart of the Middle East?

Welcome to President Obama’s brave new world. After six years in office pursuing strategies he believed would tame the terror threat and doing his best to reassure the American people that the terror situation was under control, with the “remnants” of al-Qaeda skittering into the shadows like roaches when the exterminator arrives, Obama now confronts the most powerful and hostile jihadi movement of modern times, a movement that dances on the graveyard of his hopes. …

 

… One wishes we had a Republican President right now if only because when a Republican is in the White House, the media and the chattering classes believe they have a solemn moral duty to categorize and analyze the failures of American strategy and policy. Today that is far from the case; few in the mainstream press seem interested in tracing the full and ugly course of the six years of continual failure that dog the footsteps of the hapless Obama team in a region the White House claimed to understand. …

 

… Rarely has an administration so trumpeted its superior wisdom and strategic smarts; rarely has any American administration experienced so much ignominious failure, or had its ignorance and miscalculation so brutally exposed. No one, ever, will call this administration’s Middle East policies to date either competent or wise—though the usual press acolytes will continue to do what they can to spread a forgiving haze over the strategic collapse of everything this White House has attempted, …

 

… So here, alas, is where we now stand six years into the Age of Obama: The President isn’t making America safer at home, he doesn’t have the jihadis on the run, he has no idea how to bring prosperity, democracy, or religious moderation to the Middle East, he can’t pivot away from the region, and he doesn’t know what to do next. He’s the only President this country has got, and one can’t help but wish him well, but if things are going to get any better, he needs to stop digging. He probably needs to bring in some new blood, and he must certainly ask himself some tough questions about why so many of his most cherished ideas keep leading him and his country into such ugly places. …

Fouad Ajami, often in these pages, gets a send off from Bret Stephens.

… Consider a typical example, from an op-ed he wrote for these pages in February 2013 on the second anniversary of the fall of Hosni Mubarak‘s regime:

“Throughout [Mubarak's] reign, a toxic brew poisoned the life of Egypt—a mix of anti-modernism, anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism. That trinity ran rampant in the universities and the professional syndicates and the official media. As pillage had become the obsession of the ruling family and its retainers, the underclass was left to the rule of darkness and to a culture of conspiracy.”

Or here he is on Barack Obama‘s fading political appeal, from a piece from last November:

“The current troubles of the Obama presidency can be read back into its beginnings. Rule by personal charisma has met its proper fate. The spell has been broken, and the magician stands exposed. We need no pollsters to tell us of the loss of faith in Mr. Obama’s policies—and, more significantly, in the man himself. Charisma is like that. Crowds come together and they project their needs onto an imagined redeemer. The redeemer leaves the crowd to its imagination: For as long as the charismatic moment lasts—a year, an era—the redeemer is above and beyond judgment.” …

Claire Groden posts on separatist voting in Scotland. 

Scots are expected to turn out en masse for a September referendum that could cleave the British Isle into two countries. If a majority of Scots vote “yes,” then the state would splinter from the United Kingdom, limiting the latter’s access to Scotland’s fossil fuel reserves, Navy bases and kilts.

Chief Secretary to the Treasury in the U.K., Danny Alexander, frames the referendum in the economic effects for both sides. In an interview with Wall Street Journal editors this week, he said that 15 percent to 20 percent of Scots are still undecided and that those votes will depend on their pocketbooks rather than nationalistic sentiments. …

Turns out now the lowly crock-pot has gone high tech. Now it can take orders from your smart phone. WSJ has the story.  

A Crock-Pot is one of the simplest and most trustworthy pieces of home-ec tech there is. Its hallowed history dates back nearly half a century. That ultra-basic interface—High, Low and Warm temperatures, plus a timer—is so foolproof there seems no reason to make it “smarter.”

So, when news came in January of a Smart Crock-Pot with Wi-Fi and the ability to be controlled by smartphone, I was thrown for a loop. As an enthusiastic home cook and professional gadget nerd, I welcome new kitchen technologies. But the very idea of a networked slow-cooker stokes a debate that won’t soon end: Just because you can connect anything to the Internet, should you?

Still, the slow-cooker is the one high-temperature kitchen appliance that we gladly leave on when we’re out of the house. That’s basically its point: If I want to make pulled pork but am nervous about leaving my oven unattended, out comes the Crock-Pot. …

Ann Coulter says the favorite American pastime is; Hating Soccer.

I’ve held off on writing about soccer for a decade — or about the length of the average soccer game — so as not to offend anyone. But enough is enough. Any growing interest in soccer can only be a sign of the nation’s moral decay.

(1) Individual achievement is not a big factor in soccer. In a real sport, players fumble passes, throw bricks, and drop fly balls — all in front of a crowd. When baseball players strike out, they’re standing alone at the plate. But there’s also individual glory in home runs, touchdowns, and slam-dunks

In soccer, the blame is dispersed and almost no one scores anyway. There are no heroes, no losers, no accountability, and no child’s fragile self-esteem is bruised. There’s a reason perpetually alarmed women are called “soccer moms,” not “football moms.”

Do they even have MVPs in soccer? Everyone just runs up and down the field and, every once in a while, a ball accidentally goes in. That’s when we’re supposed to go wild. I’m already asleep. …

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Roger Simon posts on why Hillary Clinton is bombing.

Which leads me to the deeper reason the country is sleeping through Hillary’s book and it’s not just because it’s hugely over long and therefore a totally un-green waste of paper and trees (although that’s true).  Most people know she’s basically dishonest, a prevaricator.  Even liberals, though they won’t readily admit it, know this.  Who can forget her blaming her husband’s compulsive philandering on the “great, right-wing conspiracy”?  If they only had such power. Or the dim-witted claims of being under fire when she hadn’t been (at least Geraldo makes a show of ducking)  and, more recently, the banshee-cry of “What difference does it make?” concerning the deaths of our people in Benghazi?  The Benghazi lies are actually exponential. (I’m not even going to go back to Whitewater, the miracle quick killing on the stock market, the mysterious Rose Law Firm bill and all the rest.)

But is the cause of this lying ideological — the ends even roughly justifying the means? In truth, I think not.  Years ago, as a college girl, she may have had an attraction for Saul Alinsky, but in the intervening time that has been overwhelmed and, for the most part, forgotten in a welter of blind, unremitting ambition of the financial and power sort. Hillary’s not a socialist, not a Marxist, not a capitalist, not a libertarian, not anything.  There’s nothing authentic about her, no there there. It’s hard to know what Hillary believes anymore.  She’s so disingenuous she probably fools herself.   No wonder she  got so upset when being questioned about her “evolving” position on gay marriage.  She undoubtedly was having trouble remembering what she had said when and why.  It’s all situational.  No one can — not even she — remember what she did as secretary of State except fly around on planes. …

Now for the feel good story of the year, Edward Klein’s new book outlines the jealous feud between the two leading Dem families.

Outwardly, they put on a show of unity — but privately, the Obamas and Clintons, the two power couples of the Democrat Party, loathe each other.

“I hate that man Obama more than any man I’ve ever met, more than any man who ever lived,” Bill Clinton said to friends on one occasion, adding he would never forgive Obama for suggesting he was a racist during the 2008 campaign.

The feeling is mutual. Obama made ­excuses not to talk to Bill, while the first lady privately sniped about Hillary.

On most evenings, Michelle Obama and her trusted adviser, Valerie Jarrett, met in a quiet corner of the White House residence. They’d usually open a bottle of Chardonnay, catch up on news about Sasha and Malia, and gossip about people who gave them heartburn.

Their favorite bête noire was Hillary Clinton, whom they nicknamed “Hildebeest,” after the menacing and shaggy-maned gnu that roams the Serengeti. …

… Lately, Bill Clinton has become convinced that Obama won’t endorse Hillary in 2016. During a gathering at Whitehaven, guests overheard Bill talking to his daughter Chelsea about whether the president would back Joe Biden.

“Recently, I’ve been hearing a different scenario from state committeemen,” Clinton said. “They say he’s looking for a candidate who’s just like him. Someone relatively unknown. Someone with a fresh face.

“He’s convinced himself he’s been a brilliant president, and wants to clone himself — to find his Mini-Me.

“He’s hunting for someone to succeed him, and he believes the American people don’t want to vote for someone who’s been around for a long time. He thinks that your mother and I are what he calls ‘so 20th century.’ He’s looking for ­another Barack Obama.”

Hillary Clinton has talked herself into another corner. Rich Lowry has the first part of the story.

We haven’t learned much new about Hillary Clinton on her book tour except that she mistakes herself for a version of Norma Rae.

First, during an interview in her well-appointed Washington, D.C., home with ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer, she said she and Bill left the White House “dead broke,” although they always made better potential subjects for Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous than for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

Next, in an interview with the Guardian, she seemed to suggest that she and Bill aren’t among the “truly well off,” and said that no one could possibly resent their wealth since they earned it “through dint of hard work.”

And so they did — the hard work of building political careers for themselves, and then, when the time came, profiting massively off them. As Hillary put it in her walk-back of the “dead broke” remark, she and Bill had different “phases” in their lives. One phase involved climbing into the White House and incurring stupendous legal bills in fending off various scandals. The other has involved getting showered with money. …

John Hayward has more on the Guardian interview. 

Hillary Clinton keeps doubling down on her claims to be “dead broke” after leaving the White House – one of the biggest unforced errors ever committed at the early stages of a run for the White House.  She becomes more of a laughingstock every time she tries to “clarify” those comments, but her ego – and her crude sense of how she needs to control the narrative and keep herself from getting painted into the dreaded “out-of-touch rich elitist” corner – won’t allow her to let it drop.

The latest lawn full of rakes awaited her in a generally friendly interview from the UK Guardian, …

… This is the passage from the interview that brightened CNN’s morning with giggles:

And money? What about money? Bill and Hillary have reportedly made more than $100m since they left the White House in 2001. Yet that didn’t stop Hillary complaining to Diane Sawyer on ABC News that the couple had emerged from highest office “dead broke”, a comment that ranks for its tone deafness alongside John McCain’s admission in the 2008 presidential election that he couldn’t remember how many houses he owned.

America’s glaring income inequality is certain to be a central bone of contention in the 2016 presidential election. But with her huge personal wealth, how could Clinton possibly hope to be credible on this issue when people see her as part of the problem, not its solution?

“But they don’t see me as part of the problem,” she protests, “because we pay ordinary income tax, unlike a lot of people who are truly well off, not to name names; and we’ve done it through dint of hard work,” she says, letting off another burst of laughter. If past form is any guide, she must be finding my question painful.

You’ve got to love that spiteful, envious little dig she throws in about not naming names.  Classic Hillary, and a big part of the reason why I continue to doubt she’s even going to be the Democrat nominee in 2016, no matter what conventional wisdom says.  She’s just plain off-putting. …

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Slate’s John Dickerson says the GOP is right to feel outrage at the IRS.

… One of the big complaints I hear from voters, particularly conservative voters, is that the government exempts itself from the burdens it puts on everyday people. So members of Congress are treated differently under the Affordable Care Act than regular citizens, President Obama can decide which laws he wants to follow and which ones he doesn’t, and the IRS doesn’t have to be as circumspect as the rest of us. Sometimes there are good explanations, like the congressional “exemption” from the ACA, but since the IRS is stingy with its benefit-of-the-doubt powers, it has a high bar with the public.

Democrats mocked the elaborate displays of outrage at the hearing—always a safe thing to do—but you don’t have to share Ryan’s view that the IRS is engaged in a cover-up of a scheme to target conservatives to recognize a more universal element to Ryan’s anger. The IRS expects all of us to maintain rigid compliance, spelunk-on-demand for every receipt, and is highly skeptical of what might be garden-variety mistakes until we prove otherwise. So if the congressional system of inquiry feels a little itchy, tight, and irrational, perhaps this will be a learning opportunity or a good topic for the next pricey conference.

Daniel Henninger says the IRS scandal is not Watergate; it’s worse than Watergate.

On Jan. 27, 2010, Mr. Obama used his State of the Union speech to explicitly criticize the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, seated in front of him, for their campaign-finance ruling in Citizens United v. FEC.

The forces Mr. Obama put in motion with this attack were described in a seminal piece for this newspaper by former FEC Chairman Bradley Smith—”Connecting the Dots in the IRS Scandal.” Through 2012, a succession of Democratic senators urged the IRS to investigate 501(c)(4) nonprofit political groups. Mr. Obama himself in a March 2010 radio address spoke of “shadowy groups with harmless sounding names” that threaten “our democracy.”

Here’s a partial list of the American place names where the “tea party” groups audited by the IRS were organized: Franklin, Tenn.; Livonia, Mich.; Lucas, Texas; Middletown, Del.; Fishersville, Va.; Jackson, N.J.; Redding, Calif.; Chandler, Ariz.; Laurens, S.C.; Woodstown, N.J.; Wetumpka, Ala.; Kahului, Hawaii; Sidney, Ohio; Newalla, Okla.

He’s right, these people do live most of their lives in the shadow of daily American life, out of the public eye. Still, they considered themselves to be very much inside “our democracy.” Then the IRS asked them for the names of their donors, what they talked about, political affiliations.

The IRS tea-party audit story isn’t Watergate; it’s worse than Watergate.

Just for reminders, we go back five years to something Glenn Reynolds wrote about the president joking about having the IRS audit his enemies. More corrupt than Nixon.

Barack Obama owes his presidency in no small part to the power of rhetoric. It’s too bad he doesn’t appreciate the damage that loose talk can do to America’s tax system, even as exploding federal deficits make revenues more important than ever.

At his ArizonaStateUniversity commencement speech last Wednesday, Mr. Obama noted that ASU had refused to grant him an honorary degree, citing his lack of experience, and the controversy this had caused. He then demonstrated ASU’s point by remarking, “I really thought this was much ado about nothing, but I do think we all learned an important lesson. I learned never again to pick another team over the Sun Devils in my NCAA brackets. . . . President [Michael] Crowe and the Board of Regents will soon learn all about being audited by the IRS.”

Just a joke about the power of the presidency. Made by Jay Leno it might have been funny. But as told by Mr. Obama, the actual president of the United States, it’s hard to see the humor. Surely he’s aware that other presidents, most notably Richard Nixon, have abused the power of the Internal Revenue Service to harass their political opponents. But that abuse generated a powerful backlash and with good reason. Should the IRS come to be seen as just a bunch of enforcers for whoever is in political power, the result would be an enormous loss of legitimacy for the tax system. …

Kimberley Strassel shows the connections between Lois Lerner and Dems.

… But the alleged disappearance of Ms. Lerner’s hard drive—and the fact that the missing conversations are those the former IRS director had with people outside the IRS—has suddenly resurrected, with force, the explosive possibility that she was chatting with Democrats who mattered.

There’s plenty of reason to believe she was. Just last week Congress discovered (via a subpoena to the Justice Department) emails showing that Ms. Lerner had conversations with Justice prosecutors about investigating conservative nonprofits. Who else in the Obama administration was Ms. Lerner talking to?

Or consider the extraordinary interaction between congressional Democrats and the IRS. Some of it was in a recent complaint filed to the Senate Ethics Committee by the Center for Competitive Politics against nine Democratic senators. It details their many letters and statements (that we know of) demanding the IRS shut down specific organizations that posed a threat to their Democratic House and Senate majority in the 2010 election.

Sen. Carl Levin, the head of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, exchanged at least 12 letters (that we know about) with the IRS in 2012 alone. IRS officials, including Ms. Lerner, met with Sen. Levin’s staff in 2013. And former IRS Acting Commissioner Stephen Miller testified that the IRS acted in part because Sen. Levin was “complaining bitterly” to the agency. In what forums? Were email conversations also taking place, behind the scenes, between the Levin office and Ms. Lerner and other IRS officials? …

The Redskins get a defense from Jonathan Turley.

… Even water has become a vehicle for federal agency overreach. Recently, the Obama administration took punitive agency action against Washington state and Colorado for legalizing marijuana possession and sales. While the administration said it would not enforce criminal drug laws against marijuana growers — gaining points among the increasing number of citizens who support legalization and the right of states to pass such laws — it used a little-known agency, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, to cut off water to those farms. The Bureau of Reclamation was created as a neutral supplier of water and a manager of water projects out West, not an agency that would open or close a valve to punish noncompliant states.

When agencies engage in content-based speech regulation, it’s more than the usual issue of “mission creep.” As I’ve written before in these pages, agencies now represent something like a fourth branch in our government — an array of departments and offices that exercise responsibilities once dedicated exclusively to the judicial and legislative branches. Insulated from participatory politics and accountability, these agencies can shape political and social decision-making. To paraphrase Clausewitz, water, taxes and even trademarks appear to have become the continuation of politics by other means.

What is needed is a new law returning these agencies to their core regulatory responsibilities and requiring speech neutrality in enforcement. We do not need faceless federal officials to become arbiters of our social controversies. There are valid objections to the Redskins name, but it is a public controversy that demands a public resolution, not a bureaucratic one.

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Victor Davis Hanson posts on how “War was interested in Obama.”

Leon Trotsky probably did not quite write the legendary aphorism that “you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” But whoever did, you get the point that no nation can always pick and choose when it wishes to be left alone.

Barack Obama, however, never quite realized that truth, and so just declared that “the world is less violent than it has ever been.” He must have meant less violent in the sense that the bad guys are winning and as they do, the violence wanes — sort of like Europe around March 1941, when all was relatively quiet under the new continental Reich.

One of Obama’s talking points in the 2012 campaign included a boast that he had “ended” the war in Iraq by bringing home every U.S. soldier that had been left to ensure the relative quiet and stability after the successful Petraeus surge. In the world of Obama, a war can be declared ended because he said so, given that no Americans were any longer directly involved. (Remind the ghosts of the recently beheaded in now al Qaeda-held Mosul that the war ended there in 2011.)

Iraq is in flames, as is “lead from behind” Libya, as is “red line” Syria, and as are those places where an al Qaeda “on the run” has migrated. Had Obama been commander in chief in 1940, he would have assured us that the wars in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and France were “over” — as they were in a sense for those who lost them, but as they were not for those next in line. …

Charles Krauthammer reminds us of the Iraq this administration inherited from W.

… “A sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq.” That’s not Bush congratulating himself. That’s Obama in December 2011 describing the Iraq we were leaving behind. He called it “an extraordinary achievement.”

Which Obama proceeded to throw away. David Petraeus had won the war. Obama’s one task was to conclude a status-of-forces agreement (SOFA) to solidify the gains. By Obama’s own admission — in the case he’s now making for a status-of-forces agreement with Afghanistan — such agreements are necessary “because after all the sacrifices we’ve made, we want to preserve the gains” achieved by war.

Which is what made his failure to do so in Iraq so disastrous. His excuse was his inability to get immunity for U.S. soldiers. Nonsense. Bush had worked out a compromise in his 2008 SOFA, as we have done with allies everywhere. The real problem was Obama’s determination to “end the war.” He had three years to negotiate a deal and didn’t even begin talks until a few months before the deadline period.

He offered to leave about 3,000 to 5,000 troops, a ridiculous number. U.S. commanders said they needed nearly 20,000. (We have 28,500 in South Korea and 38,000 in Japan to this day.) Such a minuscule contingent would spend all its time just protecting itself. Iraqis know a nonserious offer when they see one. …

However,  Andrew McCarthy says it is wrong to blame the Iraq collapse on barry alone.

… It is pretty safe to say I am no fan of Barack Obama’s. But it is just as safe to say that for Beltway Republicans to blame Obama alone for the implosion of Iraq — which is now being overrun by the same Sunni jihadists those Republicans have championed in Syria and Libya — is shameful.

Look, I will stipulate that the president’s signature recklessness is abundantly evident in Iraq. He heedlessly withdrew U.S. forces, making no effort to preserve the security gains they achieved in routing al-Qaeda, even as it became obvious that the withdrawal had evaporated those gains and invited the terror network to return with a vengeance.

Still, it was not Obama who agreed to the withdrawal schedule. It was President Bush. And it was not Obama who turned Iraq into an Islamic-supremacist state seething with anti-American and anti-Semitic hatred. Long before Obama came to power, Iraq was an Islamist country, rife with Sunni and Shiite militants who agreed on little else besides their devotion to sharia and their abhorrence of the West.

In late 2008, several weeks before Obama entered the Oval Office, I wrote here about the status of forces agreement (SOFA) the Bush administration was then entering into with the ingrate Shiite government of Nouri al-Maliki. Even then, Iraq was pulling ever closer to the terrorist regime in Iran while American troops continued fighting to protect Maliki’s fledgling government from al-Qaeda jihadists — jihadists that the insidious mullahs were also supplying with money, training, and IEDs.

In the SOFA, the Bush administration agreed to strict withdrawal deadlines that invited al-Qaeda to catch its breath, wait out the United States, then resume the jihad as Americans were leaving — the better to make it look to the world like they were chasing us out. …

Pickings readers understand when the state wishes to achieve a goal, its efforts will usually result in the exact opposite, because “the government always f**ks up.” The Telegraph’s Charles Moore says the “peace president is starting to leave a legacy of war.”

… The new American foreign stance was to be chilly towards friends and nicer towards enemies. Out went the bust of Churchill from the Oval Office, and the Obama administration sent no high representative to Lady Thatcher’s funeral. Israel and Saudi Arabia, America’s most important allies in the Middle East, felt disrespected. There was a sharp contrast between Obama’s dropping of his country’s old friend Hosni Mubarak in Egypt in the face of the Arab Spring, and Putin’s staunch and successful defence of his ally, Bashar al-Assad, in Syria. In Iran, the country where pro-Western feeling is strongest among the population, President Obama did nothing to fertilise the shoots of the “green revolution”, and effectively let the Islamist regime develop its nuclear programme unmolested.

And, of course, he did not like anything military. He withdrew from Iraq, leaving it without US troops and without proper intelligence, and began to do the same from Afghanistan. By a paradox that often afflicts leaders who shun military affairs, he ordered quite a number of deaths. He had Osama bin Laden killed and became the master of the drone strike. When he finally came round to the idea of doing something about Assad’s chemical weapons, he sought (and failed to get) what one critic in the Congress called “legislative authority for a drive-by shooting”.

Mr Obama is not a pacifist. He sees the utility of force in individual tricky situations. It would not be at all surprising if he uses a bit of it soon, in drone or aerial form, in Iraq. What he does not see is its strategic value. He does not grasp, apparently, that the Pax Americana, under whose protection we have lived since 1945, has existed because it has always been backed by the credible threat of force. Weakness is provocative to bad actors, and some of the world’s worst have now been provoked. This seems to have come as an almost complete surprise to the Obama White House. The Peace President is starting to leave a legacy of war. …

These days it is pretty rare when the New Yorker gets it right, so the article by Dexter Filkins referred to here last week gets another look, this time from Peter Wehner. The Filkins piece is 11,000 words, so too long for Pickings. But, the you can follow the above link if you wish. Wehner ends like this;

.. To sum up, then: post-surge, Iraq was making significant progress on virtually every front. The Obama administration said as much. The president was not engaged or eager to sign a new SOFA. A full withdrawal was the right decision. His own top advisers admitted as much. The president had long argued he wanted all American troops out of Iraq during his presidency, and he got his wish. He met his goal.

The problem is that in getting what he wanted, Mr. Obama may well have opened the gates of hell in the Middle East.

Here’s Roger Cohen of the heretofore administration-friendly NY Times.

… Force in the absence of a sustained political and diplomatic strategy leads nowhere. This has been Obama’s failure in Afghanistan, where the United States never invested much capital in a diplomatic solution involving negotiation with the Taliban; and in Iraq, where the president allowed American forces to withdraw without leveraging the massive U.S. investment there into ensuring that the sectarian Shiite government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki reached out to the Sunnis and Kurds.

Maliki is a Nixonian figure who sees enemies everywhere, especially among Sunnis. Like Nixon, he was elected democratically. But Obama should never have allowed Maliki to indulge his worst, petulant instincts. Now it is too late. Asking him to be inclusive won’t convince a single Sunni from Mosul to Riyadh. The exercise is as pointless as asking Assad to be a democrat. It smacks of an earnest naïveté. Progress in Iraq and Syria hinges on moving beyond Maliki and Assad. …

Harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend; that’s what our country has become. Now the US government has turned on Maliki and wants him to leave Iraq. Andrew Malcolm writes on that and reminds what we did in Vietnam to the Diem Bros.

… If he knows what’s good for him and a little history about America’s deadly diplomacy when frustrated, Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, might want to change his behavior toward Sunnis rather quickly.

And not just because the barbaric ISIL rebels are bearing down on Baghdad from the north, leaving beheadings and mass graves along the trail.

From Maliki’s autocratic viewpoint, he’s been quite rational. Obama proved untrustworthy with his sly maneuvers to exit Iraq quickly, making the lack of a residual U.S. troop presence appear Maliki’s fault. So, the Iraqi leader instinctively surrounded himself with loyal fellow Shiites.

Last winter when Maliki sought U.S. help against advancing radical Islamists, Obama ignored him, focusing instead on his Afghan exit. So, Maliki is sidling up to Iran next door.

Obama is batting .666 ousting governments he dislikes. The Nobel Peace Prize winner was successful when he announced Libya’s Gaddafi had to go. With allied help, Obama forced him to run where an angry mob could spot him and save court costs. Obama also said Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak had to go, when he was no longer useful. …

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Pickerhead is in the middle of moving a boat up the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway so we’ll be different this week. First, John McPhee one of the country’s best writers profiles a trucker, and the long haul tanker industry, for the New Yorker. Notable McPhee books include a study of New Jersey’s Pine Barrens,     Coming Into The Country – about Alaska, and a look at the Merchant Marine – Looking For a Ship.

Tomorrow it’s back to the Washington creeps.

… From the Carolina piedmont to Hot Lake, Oregon—across the Appalachians, across the Rockies—he had not put his foot on the brake pedal on any descending grade. In harmony with shrewd gear selection, this feat was made possible by Jake Brakes—a product of Jacobs Vehicle Systems, of Bloomfield, Connecticut. Ainsworth called the device “a retarder, generically—you’re turning a diesel engine into an air compressor.” On a grade we descended in Tennessee, he said, “If you choose your gear right, and your jake’s on maxi, you can go down a hill with no brakes. It saves money. It also lengthens my life.” Crossing the summit of the LaramieRange and addressing the western side, he geared down from twelfth to eighth and said, “I won’t use one ounce of brake pressure. The jake is on maxi.” As big trucks flew past us—dry boxes, reefers—he said, “These guys using brakes with improper gear selection don’t own the tractor or the trailer. Using brakes costs money, but why would they care?” Ainsworth owns the tractor and the trailer. As he glided onto the Laramie Plains, he went back up to eighteenth gear: “the going-home gear, the smoke hole; when you got into this gear in the old days, your stacks would blow smoke.” On a grade at HotLake, however, he tried fifteenth gear, and his foot had to graze the pedal. He seemed annoyed with himself, like a professional golfer who had chosen the wrong club. …

 

… The Yakima River was deeply incised and ran in white water past vineyards and fruit trees, among windbreaks of Lombardy poplars. Hops were growing on tall poles and dangling like leis. There was so much beauty in the wide valley it could have been in Italy. Now, through high haze, we first saw the Cascades. On our route so far, no mountain range had been nearly as impressive. We had slithered over the Rockies for the most part through broad spaces. Now we were looking at a big distant barrier, white over charcoal green, its highest visible point the stratovolcano Mt.Adams. We met three new Kenworths coming east—three connected tractors without trailers. One was hauling the other two, both of which had their front wheels up on the back of the tractor ahead of them. They looked like three dogs humping. It was here that we were first passed by the scant bikini in an open Porsche, here that Ainsworth touched his horn for the second time on the journey. I was marginally jealous that he could look down into that bikini while I, on the passenger side, was served rumble bars in the pavement. …

 

 

… Ainsworth thinks his chemical tanker is at least as attractive as anything that could pass it in a car. He is flattered by the admiring glances it draws. He is vain about his truck. That day in particular had started in a preening mode— at a nylon-covered building called Bay Wash of Idaho, next to a beet field west of Boise, where we drew up soon after six and went off to have breakfast before the big doors opened at eight. Ainsworth will not go just anywhere to have his truck’s exterior washed. All over the United States and Canada, for example, are washes called Blue Beacon, and they are known among truck drivers as Streakin’ Beacon. Ainsworth passes them by. He insists on places that have either reverse-osmosis or deionized rinse water. He knows of three—one in Salt Lake City, one in the Los AngelesBasin, and BayWash of Caldwell, Idaho. To the two guys who washed the truck he promised “a significant tip” for a picture-perfect outcome, and he crawled in granny gear through the presoak acids, the presoak alkalis, the high-concentration soap, and warm water under such high pressure that it came through the seams of the windows. “They’re hand-brushing the whole critter,” he said admiringly a little later. And soon he was getting “the r.o. rinse” he had come for. Ordinary water dries quickly and spottily. This water had been heated and softened, sent through a carbon bed and a sand filter, and then introduced to a membranous machine whose function was distantly analogous to the gaseous diffusion process by which isotopes of uranium are separated. In this case, dissolved minerals and heavy metals failed to get through the semipermeable membranes of the reverse-osmosis generator. Water molecules made it through the membranes and on to rinse the truck, drying spotless. The Army and the Marine Corps use reverse-osmosis generators to go into swamps and make drinkable water. (Deionization is a different process but does the same thing.) Ainsworth paid sixty dollars and tipped fifteen. We were there two hours. “If you go into a Streakin’ Beacon, you’re going to be out in twenty minutes,” he said. “You see the amount of time we fuck around just manicuring the ship? If I were in a big hurry, I wouldn’t be doing it. Lord help us.” We were scarcely on the interstate rolling when he said, “This is as close as a man will ever know what it feels like to be a really gorgeous woman. People giving us looks, going thumbs up, et cetera.”

This is what raised the thumbs et cetera: a tractor of such dark sapphire that only bright sunlight could bring forth its color, a stainless-steel double-conical trailer perfectly mirroring the world around it. You could part your hair in the side of this truck. The trailer seemed to be an uncomplicated tube until you noticed the fused horizontal cones, each inserted in the other to the hilt in subtle and bilateral symmetry. …

 

… I rode with him as “part-owner” of the truck. I didn’t own even one hub nut, but was primed to tell officials in weigh stations that that’s what I was. I never had to. My identity in truck stops was at first another matter. Hatless, in short-sleeved shirts, black pants, and plain leather shoes, I had imagined I would be as nondescript as I always am. But I was met everywhere with puzzled glances. Who is that guy? What’s he selling? What’s he doing here? It was bad enough out by the fuel pumps, but indoors, in the cafés and restaurants, I felt particularly self-conscious sitting under block-lettered signs that said “Truck Drivers Only.”

So, a little desperate and surprisingly inspired, I bought a cap. Not just any cap. I picked one with a bright-gold visor, a gold button at the top, a crown of navy blue, an American flag on the left temple, and—on the forehead emblem—a spread-winged eagle over a rising sun and a red-and-green tractor-trailer and the white letters “America— Spirit of Freedom.” On the back, over my cerebellum, was a starred banner in blue, white, red, green, and gold that said “Carnesville, GA Petro.” I put on that hat and disappeared. The glances died like flies. I could sit anywhere, from Carnesville to Tacoma. In Candler, North Carolina, while Ainsworth was outside fuelling the truck, I sat inside in my freedom hat saying “Biscuits and gravy” to a waitress. She went “Oooooo wheeeee” and I thought my cover wasn’t working, but a trucker passing her had slipped his hand between the cheeks of her buttocks, and she did not stop writing. …

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Using the example of baseball’s knockdown pitches, Charles Krauthammer writes on the American way of revenge. 

Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord. And although retribution shall surely come in the fullness of time, a ballplayer can only wait so long.

Accordingly, when Boston slugger David Ortiz came to bat against Tampa Bay’s David Price at the end of May — for the first time this season — Price fired the very first pitch, a 94-mile-an-hour fastball, square into Ortiz’s back.

Ortiz was not amused. Hesitation, angry smile, umpire’s warning. Managers screaming, tempers flaring. Everyone knew this was no accident.

On Oct. 5, 2013, Ortiz had hit two home runs off Price. Unusual, but not unknown. Except that after swatting the second, Ortiz stood at home plate seeming to admire his handiwork, watching the ball’s majestic arc into the far right field stands — and only then began his slow, very slow, trot around the bases.

This did not sit well with Price. Cy Young winners don’t take kindly to being shown up in public. He yelled angrily at Ortiz to stop showboating and start running.

But yelling does not quite soothe the savage breast. So, through the fall and long winter, through spring training and one-third of the new season, Price nursed the hurt. Then, as in a gentleman’s pistol duel, at first dawn he redeemed his honor. …

Eliana Johnson profiles Scott Walker as he explores his 2016 chances in Chris Christie’s backyard. 

Scott Walker is already thinking about how to defeat Hillary Clinton. “You gotta move it from a personality race, because if it’s a personality race, you got a third Clinton term,” the Wisconsin governor told a lunchtime crowd of about 30 last Tuesday assembled at the Lakewood, N.J., home of Rich Roberts, one of his biggest financial backers. “The only way we win that election is to transform her personality to Washington versus the rest of us. Senator Clinton is all about Washington, everything about her is all about Washington.”

Walker is up for reelection in November — his third time on the ballot in four years, he likes to point out — but it is almost certainly his presidential ambitions that brought him to the Orthodox Jewish enclave of Lakewood, where he toured the town’s yeshiva and lunched with Roberts and his friends. Roberts has always donated to Republicans, but after selling his pharmaceutical company for $800 million in 2012, he began pouring a lot more money into the coffers of GOPers, including Walker, Senator Lindsey Graham (S.C.), Senator Rand Paul (Ky.), and former Florida congressman Allen West. 

With Walker at his side, Roberts recounted receiving threatening e-mails after donating $50,000 to ward off Walker’s recall from the governorship. “With three days to go until the election, now I’m receiving all these threats, so what am I going to do? I wired him another $50,000,” Roberts said to laughter and applause. …

In a feel good story Der Spiegel reports on India’s experiments with a new pearl millet grain designed to end malnutrition in many parts of the developing world.

I may not make his family wealthy, but Devran Mankar is still grateful for the pearl millet variety called Dhanshakti (meaning “prosperity and strength”) he has recently begun growing in his small field in the state of Maharashtra, in western India. “Since eating this pearl millet, the children are rarely ill,” raves Mankar, a slim man with a gray beard, worn clothing and gold-rimmed glasses.

Mankar and his family are participating in a large-scale nutrition experiment. He is one of about 30,000 small farmers growing the variety, which has unusually high levels of iron and zinc — Indian researchers bred the plant to contain large amounts of these elements in a process they call “biofortification.” The grain is very nutritional,” says the Indian farmer, as his granddaughter Kavya jumps up and down in his lap. It’s also delicious, he adds. “Even the cattle like the pearl millet.”

Mankar’s field on the outskirts of the village of Vadgaon Kashimbe is barely 100 meters (328 feet) wide and 40 meters long. The grain will be ripe in a month, and unless there is a hailstorm — may Ganesha, the elephant god, prevent that from happening — he will harvest about 350 kilograms of pearl millet, says the farmer. It’s enough for half a year.

The goal of the project, initiated by the food aid organization Harvest Plus, is to prevent farmers like Mankar and their families from going hungry in the future. In fact, the Dhanshakti pearl millet is part of a new “Green Revolution” with which biologists and nutrition experts hope to liberate the world from hunger and malnutrition. …

The Daily Mail, UK with a story on the concrete block like package of catalogs Restoration Hardware delivered to our homes.

Recipients of Restoration Hardware magazine were left flabbergasted when they received the latest issue, which tipped the scales at a whopping 17lbs.

While some complained about the ecological wastefulness of the gargantuan volume, others saw the humor in the situation and took to Twitter to share their inventive uses of it – as a stool, an ottoman and even a weight for doing arm exercises. …

… In one Instagram shot, a young boy stands on the catalog, which consists of 13 ‘sourcebooks’ with more than 3,300 pages altogether.

He uses it like a step stool to reach the kitchen sink. ‘I knew I would find a use for these!!!!’ reads the caption. …

Late night from Andrew Malcolm.

Conan: Hillary Clinton said she and her husband Bill were dead broke when they left the White House. Hillary said things were so bad the two of them had to share a bedroom.

Conan: President George H.W. Bush celebrated his 90th birthday skydiving. So if you include Obama, there were two presidents in free-fall today.

Meyers: Obama surprises tourists by walking to Starbucks near the White House. Even more surprising, he traded five Taliban members for one grande soy latte.

Meyers: Oklahoma Republican Scott Esk wrote on Facebook last week that he’s “OK” with stoning gay people to death. Now, he’s in deep trouble with Republicans for being anti-gun.

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Craig Pirrong has a look at Iraq.

… Obama’s response? A peevish statement that basically told the Iraqis they are on their own, delivered in front of Marine One before embarking on a-what else?-golfing and fund-raising weekend. …

… Whatever you think of the situation Obama inherited in 2009, you cannot dispute that he has made it immeasurably worse. America’s two most dangerous enemies in the Middle East-radical Sunni jihadists and the radical Shia Iranian government-have been empowered. Indeed, in his desperation Obama is pursuing direct talks with Iran to coordinate a response to the ISIL threat.

Right now the best we can reasonably hope for is a stalemate, with a de facto division of Iraq, with two segments under control of American enemies.

And this isn’t the sole disaster in the making. There’s Ukraine, too, where American and European pusillanimity are encouraging Putin to pursue his asymmetric warfare strategy.

When I contemplate the further damage that Obama can do in the next two-and-a-half years, I am tempted to go on a permanent hiatus. It is just so discouraging to watch a great nation stumble so badly, all due to the extreme misjudgments of its chief executive. It is perhaps even more discouraging to recognize that despite the evidence of failure that lies wherever one looks, the author of this disaster is utterly convinced that his judgment has been unerring. There are few combinations more dangerous than extreme incompetence, insufferable arrogance, and an unwillingness to acknowledge empirical reality. But Barrack Obama combines those things, by the gross.

Allysia Finley posts on presidential priorities.

Over the weekend, Sunni insurgents reportedly mass murdered Iraqi Shiite soldiers and captured another key outpost in the country’s North. Kremlin-abetted fighters shot down a Ukrainian military plane as Russian tanks entered Eastern Ukraine. The Taliban killed 68 Afghans in an unsuccessful effort to obstruct the fledgling democracy’s presidential election. And Somalia Islamists gunned down 50 soccer fans at a Kenyan hotel.

Where was President Obama while the world was set aflame? He was in sunny California, campaigning and working on his golf handicap. On Saturday morning, he attended a private fundraiser in tony Laguna Beach for the Democratic National Committee, after which he gave a campaign speech which doubled as a commencement address at the University of California, Irvine. …

Paul Mirengoff uses a New Yorker article written by a NY Times reporter to show how the president owns Iraq.

The Islamist blitzkrieg in Iraq is the direct result of President Obama’s failure to maintain an American military presence there. As David French has shown, when Obama took office the Islamist extremists were a subdued and nearly defeated force. With a continued American presence, they would have remained subdued.

Some Obama apologists argue that we could not maintain our military presence because the Iraqi government wanted us out, and thus would not negotiate a status of forces agreement with us. In reality, though, Iraqi prime minister Maliki and his government wanted a continued U.S. military presence, and it was Obama who never seriously negotiated for this to happen. His goal was a complete military withdrawal so he could boost that he ended the war in Iraq.

You don’t have to my word for this. Dexter Filkins, who covered the Iraq war for the New York Times, has written an article in the New Yorker that lays out the sorry history.

I urge you to read the whole thing, but here are relevant highlights: …

Bret Stephens on the pace of the disasters. 

Was it only 10 months ago that President Obama capitulated on Syria? And eight months ago that we learned he had no idea the U.S. eavesdropped on Angela Merkel ? And seven months ago that his administration struck its disastrous interim nuclear deal with Tehran? And four months ago that Chuck Hagel announced that the United States Army would be cut to numbers not seen since the 1930s? And three months ago that Russia seized Crimea? And two months ago that John Kerry‘s Israeli-Palestinian peace effort sputtered into the void? And last month that Mr. Obama announced a timetable for total withdrawal from Afghanistan—a strategy whose predictable effects can now be seen in Iraq?

Even the Bergdahl deal of yesterweek is starting to feel like ancient history. Like geese, Americans are being forced to swallow foreign-policy fiascoes at a rate faster than we can possibly chew, much less digest.

Roger Simon weighs in.

… This is a moment when we need a Churchill and what we have is the man who sent Churchill’s bust home — a nowhere man whose only demonstrable skill is fund-raising. (In that way, however,  he was even outdone by Abu Bakr himself who evidently snatched several hundred million for his cause from Mosul banks in one day.)

Today, on Twitter, a veteran named J. R. Salzman tweeted: “I did not get an arm blown off in Baghdad so you could sit on your ass and watch Iraq fall, @BarackObama. I did my job. DO YOUR JOB.” It got retweeted over 2600 times and climbing.  It’s easy to see why. …

Matthew Continetti says we’re seeing the start of the post-presidency. 

One evening in March, during a visit to Italy, President Obama asked the U.S. ambassador to round up a bunch of—and I quote—“interesting Italians” for a dinner at the ambassadorial residence. The history of the property, the Villa Taverna, goes as far back as the tenth century. Its art collection includes Roman sarcophagi and centuries-old imperial busts. The menu that evening included a variety of pastas, and wines from Tuscany and the regions around Venice. Dinner lasted four hours.

In this sumptuous and Baroque setting, amid these beautiful artifacts of long-gone civilizations, enjoying the finest foods and most delicate wines, President Obama was at home. The interesting Italians surrounding him included a particle physicist, two heirs to the Fiat auto fortune, and the postmodern architect Renzo Piano. The dinner conversation, according to Politico’s Carrie Budoff Brown and Jennifer Epstein, touched on architecture, on art, on science, and on urban planning. Protocol demands that the president be the first guest to leave such an event. But Obama would not shut up. It was “a quite long dinner,” Piano told Politico.

Piano said that he and Obama compared and contrasted the work of architectural design with the work of drafting a political speech—and in these particular cases, it should be noted, the quality of the results is the same. This was but one digression in a long and meandering colloquy, however. “It took a certain time to end,” Piano said. “It wasn’t like, ‘I have to go.’ We kept going, talking, talking, talking. … You don’t stand up. You stay at the table.”

The next morning, during a briefing, the president—whose office holds a burden of responsibility matched only by its power—regretted that his job involved duties other than pretentious conversation with extremely wealthy famous people. “One aide paraphrased Obama’s response: ‘Just last night I was talking about life and art, big interesting things, and now we’re back to the minuscule things of politics.”  …

… “The bull sessions satisfy the president’s intellectual curiosity as he indulges in nuanced conversations about life, ideas, and art,” Politico reports. But how nuanced, really, can these conversations be? Has anyone at these parties ever suggested to Barack Obama that his take on life and ideas and art is incomplete, biased, shallow, or—gulp—wrong? Or that, you know, maybe he should devote some attention to his actual job?

Referring to the administration, one Democrat said to Politico: “I wouldn’t be surprised if they looked at the next three years and think, ‘Oh my God, how are we going to survive the next 36 months of this bullshit?” Good question—one the president seems intent on answering by not caring, by retreating into his comfy and unthreatening cocoon of affluent bourgeois liberals from around the world. The rest of us have to live with the consequences. …