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John Fund posts on Scott Walker’s most impressive qualification for employment in Washington. If you’re sick of failing government run by “A” students, think about how well this country could be run by someone who doesn’t even have a college degree.
Wisconsin governor Scott Walker has said one of his biggest regrets was in not finishing his degree at MarquetteUniversity. As a young man, he left school in his senior year in 1990 for a job with the American Red Cross. Later that year, he got bitten by the political bug and ran unsuccessfully for the Wisconsin legislature.
“I kept thinking I’d go back, got married, had one kid, had another kid, next thing you know . . . you’re worrying more about paying for your kids’ college education than you are for your own,” Walker has said. …
Mark Steyn posts on the insidious way our freedoms have been lost.
It’s not just Obamacare. In many other areas of life, Americans now enjoy considerably less freedom of maneuver than Europeans do. If it doesn’t seem like that, it’s because we’ve come up with a more cunning form of statism. In France a third of a century back, Mitterrand nationalized the banks. That’s what socialists do. And people would kick up a fuss if Washington tried anything like that. So instead we’ve wound up with a kind of third-party statism, in which the zombie husks of private industry are conscripted as the front men for de facto nationalization. Except for the check design and debit-card color, it doesn’t make any difference whether you go to the First National Bank of Deadsville, the Deadsville Savings Bank, or the Deadsville Community Bank: The answers are all the same, because they’re all just operating the federal guidelines. It’s like going to the North Deadsville DMV and thinking you’ll get a different answer from the South Deadsville DMV. …
Paul Mirengoff has more on Douglas Laycock, UVA law prof, who has run afoul of the gay speech police.
… Take the case of Douglas Laycock, a law professor at the University of Virginia and a leading expert on religious liberty. Laycock supports gay marriage. At the same time, and quite consistently if one is an old-fashioned liberal, he is sympathetic to the right of those with religious objections to gay marriage to be exempt (within reason) from state laws conferring certain gay rights.
Laycock expressed this position in a letter (signed by other religious liberty scholars, as well) to Arizona Governor Jan Brewer. The letter refuted claims that Arizona S.B. 1062 — which clarified ambiguous terms in the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act — would subject gays to a regime of discrimination.
As a result, Laycock is now under fire from the gay speech police. An outfit called GetEQUAL (led by its co-director Heather Cronk) has launched a national e-mail campaign attacking Laycock for his role in shoring up the legal arguments of those who support what it calls “religious bigotry.” …
What’s it like when a Federal SWAT team visits your factory? Forbes has the story of Gibson Guitar.
“Henry. A SWAT team from Homeland Security just raided our factory!”
“What? This must be a joke.”
“No this is really serious. We got guys with guns, they put all our people out in the parking lot and won’t let us go into the plant.”
“Whoa.”
“What is happening?” asks Gibson Guitar CEO Henry Juszkiewicz when he arrives at his Nashville factory to question the officers. “We can’t tell you.” “What are you talking about, you can’t tell me, you can’t just come in and …” “We have a warrant!” Well, lemme see the warrant.” “We can’t show that to you because it’s sealed.”
While 30 men in SWAT attire dispatched from Homeland Security and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service cart away about half a million dollars of wood and guitars, seven armed agents interrogate an employee without benefit of a lawyer. The next day Juszkiewicz receives a letter warning that he cannot touch any guitar left in the plant, under threat of being charged with a separate federal offense for each “violation,” punishable by a jail term.
Up until that point Gibson had not received so much as a postcard telling the company it might be doing something wrong. Thus began a five-year saga, extensively covered by the press, with reputation-destroying leaks and shady allegations that Gibson was illegally importing wood from endangered tree species. In the end, formal charges were never filed, but the disruption to Gibson’s business and the mounting legal fees and threat of imprisonment induced Juszkiewicz to settle for $250,000—with an additional $50,000 “donation” piled on to pay off an environmental activist group.
What really happened at the Nashville plant? …
Now, a couple of looks at Hillary Clinton’s attempt to put Benghazi behind her. Jennifer Rubin is first.
Politico reveals the contents of the Benghazi chapter of Hillary Clinton’s book “Hard Choices.” The chapter itself reveals nothing new, which I strongly suspect will be true of the entire book. Clinton is a master at using many words to say very little.
To summarize the summary: 1.) Hillary Clinton grieves for the loss of the fine Americans killed in Benghazi, Libya; 2.) there was the fog of war that created confusion about the cause of the incident; and 3.) Republicans are meanies out to get her. What the chapter lacks in detail and context it makes up for in simplicity. Clinton will be a hard nut to crack in interviews. But for the interviewers who will get their turn, a few points should be kept in mind.
As a preliminary matter, they should be on the lookout for the favorite Clinton ploys. She doesn’t answer questions directly, she filibusters with fluffy material, she speaks about her own emotions and she accuses critics. Interviewers should call her on it. Please answer the question, Mrs. Clinton. Yes, but that doesn’t answer my question, Mrs. Clinton.
Now as to the substance, …
There is probably no one in the media who knows more about Benghazi than Steve Hayes of the Weekly Standard. He lets loose on Clinton’s claims.
… We are left with this: the ARB (State Department’s Accountability Review Board) leadership was hand-picked by Hillary Clinton; the ARB leaders were tasked with holding accountable State Department officials involved in decision making on Benghazi but chose not to interview the secretary of state; the ARB report excluded important testimony from those who raised questions about the Secretary of State; the ARB leadership warned Secretary Clinton’s top adviser about a potentially problematic witness; and the ARB leadership provided an advanced copy of the report to Secretary Clinton’s chief of staff while denying other witnesses an opportunity even to read the report before it was released. So, yes, there are reasons to question the impartiality of the inquiry.
In her Benghazi chapter, Clinton defends the intelligence Susan Rice used in her much-discussed Sunday show appearances after the attacks. “Susan stated what the intelligence community believed, rightly or wrongly, at the time.”
That’s not true. Rice placed the video at the center of the administration’s case on Benghazi—something the intelligence community never did. Deputy CIA director Michael Morell, who has been a loyal defender of the administration on most Benghazi-related issues, went out of his way in recent congressional testimony to make clear that the video story did not come from the CIA. In prepared testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, Morell stated, without qualification: “There was no mention of the video defaming the Prophet Muhammad as a motivation for the attacks in Benghazi. In fact, there was no mention of the video at all.” Under questioning, Morell said this of Rice’s Sunday show appearances: “When she talked about the video, my reaction was, that’s not something the analysts have attributed this attack to.” .