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Last week Pasternak, this week Shostakovitch. Real Clear History writes on how Dmitri survived Stalin and the rest of the Russian true believers in powerful government. 

Consider a Russian born in 1900 with a natural 70-year lifespan. What are his chances of survival? He would have to endure the First World War, the Revolution, Civil War and famine, Stalinist terror in the 1930s, the invasion of Hitler, the remainder of Stalin’s life, the Khrushchev years, and the first part of the Brezhnev stagnation.

The remarkable Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), personal target of Joseph Stalin and Party censors, managed to survive all these periods while maintaining his artistic integrity. …

… The artistic constraints imposed on the composer forced him to think deeply about how to express himself truthfully within an external guise of Party orthodoxy. A public figure’s survival in the Stalin era required an astute political eye, adaptability, and a measure of plain luck. Shostakovich was fortunate to have all three of these. What made him particularly successful, in a cultural and historical sense, was that he deployed these gifts within an unforgiving environment while remaining faithful to his creative impulses. …

… The Seventh Symphony in C Major (1942, “Leningrad”) is ostensibly a musical testament to the suffering of the Russian people during the war, but features a significant double meaning. The circumstances of the invasion permitted Shostakovich to skillfully express his true feelings toward the Party and its leader while simultaneously inspiring Soviet citizens, and indeed other Allied citizens, to defy Hitler’s armies.

The Seventh Symphony received worldwide praise as a work of resistance against Nazi totalitarianism; it is this, but it is dually an indictment of Stalin’s brutality. Shostakovich wrote, damningly, that the symphony was about the Leningrad that “Stalin destroyed and Hitler merely finished off.” Thus, Shostakovich was able to condemn two different, albeit comparably terrible, tragedies in one artistic statement, and in so doing received exaltation as a hero. …

Turning our attention to another musical genre, The Village Voice has the story about Dave Robinson, the record producer who made Bob Marley a household name.

At the time of his death, in May 1981, Bob Marley was 36 years old, reggae’s biggest star, and the father of at least eleven children. He was not, however, a big seller.

For Dave Robinson, this presented an opportunity.

Two years after Marley’s passing, Chris Blackwell, the founder of Marley’s label, Island Records, brought Robinson in to run his U.K. operation. Robinson’s first assignment was to put out a compilation of Bob Marley’s hits. He took one look at the artist’s sales figures and was shocked.

Marley’s best-selling album, 1977′s Exodus, had only moved about 650,000 units in the U.S. and fewer than 200,000 in the U.K. They were not shabby numbers, but they weren’t in line with his profile. …

… “My vision of Bob from a marketing point of view,” Robinson says, “was to sell him to the white world.”

The result of that coolly pragmatic vision was Legend: The Best of Bob Marley and the Wailers, an album that became one of the top-selling records of all time, far exceeding even the ambitious goals Robinson had set for it. Unlike the Backstreet Boys’ Millennium, ‘N Sync’s No Strings Attached and many other best-selling albums in recent decades, Legend isn’t a time capsule of a passing musical fad. Selling roughly 250,000 units annually in the U.S. alone, it has become a rite of passage in pop-music puberty. It’s no wonder that on July 1 Universal released yet another deluxe reissue of the album, this time celebrating its 30th anniversary.

Few artists have hits collections that become their definitive works. But if you have one Bob Marley album, it’s probably Legend, which is one reason members of his former backing band, the Wailers, are performing it in its entirety on the road this summer. Legend also defines its genre unlike any other album, introducing record buyers to reggae in one safe and secure package. In fact, it has been the top-selling reggae album in the U.S. for eight of the past ten years. …

A few years ago, Nicholas Kristoff went to an island of the coast of Kenya seeking to answer questions grown out of the legend of an ancient (1421) Chinese shipwreck on the coast of Africa.

From the sea, the tiny East African island of Pate, just off the Kenyan coast, looks much as it must have in the 15th century: an impenetrable shore of endless mangrove trees. As my little boat bounced along the waves in the gray dawn, I could see no antennae or buildings or even gaps where trees had been cut down, no sign of human habitation, nothing but a dense and mysterious jungle.

The boatman drew as close as he could to a narrow black-sand beach, and I splashed ashore. My local Swahili interpreter led the way through the forest, along a winding trail scattered with mangoes, coconuts and occasional seashells deposited by high tides. The tropical sun was firmly overhead when we finally came upon a village of stone houses with thatched roofs, its dirt paths sheltered by palm trees. The village’s inhabitants, much lighter-skinned than people on the Kenyan mainland, emerged barefoot to stare at me with the same curiosity with which I was studying them. These were people I had come halfway around the world to see, in the hope of solving an ancient historical puzzle.

“Tell me,” I asked the first group I encountered, “where did the people here come from? Long ago, did foreign sailors ever settle here?”

The answer was a series of shrugs. “I’ve never heard about that,” one said. “You’ll have to ask the elders.”

I tried several old men and women without success. Finally the villagers led me to the patriarch of the village, Bwana Mkuu Al-Bauri, the keeper of oral traditions. He was a frail old man with gray stubble on his cheeks, head and chest. He wore a yellow sarong around his waist; his ribs pressed through the taut skin on his bare torso. Al-Bauri hobbled out of his bed, resting on a cane and the arm of a grandson. He claimed to be 121 years old; a pineapple-size tumor jutted from the left side of his chest.

“I know this from my grandfather, who himself was the keeper of history here,” the patriarch told me in an unexpectedly clear voice. “Many, many years ago, there was a ship from China that wrecked on the rocks off the coast near here. The sailors swam ashore near the village of Shanga — my ancestors were there and saw it themselves. The Chinese were visitors, so we helped those Chinese men and gave them food and shelter, and then they married our women. Although they do not live in this village, I believe their descendants still can be found somewhere else on this island.”

I almost felt like hugging Bwana Al-Bauri. For months I had been poking around obscure documents and research reports, trying to track down a legend of an ancient Chinese shipwreck that had led to a settlement on the African coast. My interest arose from a fascination with what to me is a central enigma of the millennium: why did the West triumph over the East?

For most of the last several thousand years, it would have seemed far likelier that Chinese or Indians, not Europeans, would dominate the world by the year 2000, and that America and Australia would be settled by Chinese rather than by the inhabitants of a backward island called Britain. The reversal of fortunes of East and West strikes me as the biggest news story of the millennium, and one of its most unexpected as well.

As a resident of Asia for most of the past 13 years, I’ve been searching for an explanation. It has always seemed to me that the turning point came in the early 1400′s, when Admiral Zheng He sailed from China to conquer the world. Zheng He (pronounced jung huh) was an improbable commander of a great Chinese fleet, in that he was a Muslim from a rebel family and had been seized by the Chinese Army when he was still a boy. Like many other prisoners of the time, he was castrated — his sexual organs completely hacked off, a process that killed many of those who suffered it. But he was a brilliant and tenacious boy who grew up to be physically imposing. A natural leader, he had the good fortune to be assigned, as a houseboy, to the household of a great prince, Zhu Di. …

The voyages of Zheng He have led to a theory propounded in Gavin Menzies’ book 1421:The Year China Discovered America. The blog How Stuff Works have examined Menzies’ claims and finds them wanting.

… From its introduction in 2003, Gavin Menzies’ 1421 theory has come under assault. The writing that seeks to disprove Menzies is at least as long as his book. One question perhaps looms largest when approaching the 1421 theory: If the Chinese had a presence in the Americas prior to Christopher Columbus, then why isn’t their mark left indelibly on the face of American civilization?

The Norse, who sailed as far west as Newfoundland in their travels across the Atlantic, left remnants of their visits to North America. Their folklore includes accounts of the Vikings’ encounters with Native Americans. The crumbling remains of the stone outposts they built during their stay can still be seen. This was 1,000 years ago, and 500 years before Columbus’ voyage. Yet the Vikings brief settlement in North America is still evident. If the Chinese had such a thorough impact on societies in the Americas just 70 years before Columbus’ arrival, then why isn’t evidence of their presence everywhere?

What’s more, there’s a distinct lack of cross-cultural pollination between the new world and China. When the Europeans arrived in the Americas, they brought with them things that have never before been seen in the continents, like steel and horses. But more importantly, they took back exotic treasures from the new world. Maize and tomatoes, along with vast amounts of plundered gold, found its way to Europe upon the ships of returning explorers. Where’s the Incan gold or the corn of the Aztecs in China? …

The Economist posts on the days when New York City becomes ManhattanHenge.

WHEN traffic lights changed to red on the evening of July 11th, hundreds of New Yorkers raced out to the middle of Manhattan’s roads, cameras in hand, safety be damned. They faced west, where the setting sun was lighting up the sky. The skyscrapers and high-rises framed the firey orb which lit up the surrounding glass, brick and stone buildings spectacularly. For the next 15 minutes or so, the pattern repeated. Traffic lights changed, the sun worshippers took to the street to capture the stunning sight, until the sun disappeared. The cosmic phenomenon is known as Manhattanhenge, or the Manhattan Solstice. …

… The phenomenon is not designed by gods or man. The perfect alignment is a cosmically happy accident. Manhattan’s street grid was designed for 1m people in 1811, when the population was only 100,000. It runs east to west from the East River to the Hudson River and roughly north to south—28.9 degrees east of north, to be exact. Because the street grid is not strictly laid out to true north, Manhattanhenge takes place around May 28th and again around July 11th, each date roughly three weeks before and after the summer solstice. The relatively low topography in New Jersey across the Hudson River to the west, coupled with Manhattan being an island, means the horizon is mostly unobstructed. The best places to view the sun and the blazing skyscrapers are at 14th, 23rd, 34th, 42nd and 57th Streets. …

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David Harsanyi says, “actually getting rich is Hillary’s greatest achievement.”

… Which brings me to Hillary Clinton, whose clumsy efforts to convince America that she’s a commoner aren’t only transparently silly, but intentionally discount her most impressive gift: the ability to convince rational people to pony up $200,000 (the Wall Street Journal says she was paid $300,000 for a speech at UCLA) to hear her talk about a career in politics. One thing’s for sure: those students would benefit far more from a talk about the inner working of Clinton Inc.’s multimillion-dollar business than they will sitting through an hour of platitudes about public service.

If I had to pick a reason to vote for Hillary, it would be her wealth. She should own it. It’s her greatest success. Through her speaking engagements and terrible ghost-written books, she is worth somewhere between $25 and $50 million. Bill’s net worth is around $80 million (or more). Even combined, that’s nothing like the Koch money, or even John Kerry or Mitt Romney money, as the Washington Post helpfully pointed out recently. …

… Certainly, Hillary is more gifted at making money than she was at being First Lady, a stint that featured a disastrous stab at health-care policy and her husband being tricked into having an affair by a shadowy conspiracy. She is undoubtedly a better businesswoman than she was a Senator, where the single consequential vote she took turned out, in her own words, to be “a mistake.” And she is a far better businesswoman than she was a secretary of State, a job that doesn’t seem to feature any achievements worth remembering by anyone. …

Telegraph, UK says sales of her book have tanked.

Hillary Clinton’s memoirs have been replaced at the top of the New York Times best sellers list by an expose of the Clintons’ rocky relationship with Barack Obama.

Edward Klein’s book “Blood Feud” now tops the combined print and non-fiction table in what is being seen as a blow to the former secretary of state’s prestige ahead of a likely run for the presidency in 2016.

One expert suggested that the less than expected sales suggested that there was some “Clinton fatigue” among the American public.

According to the latest authoritative Nielsen BookScan ratings which covers 85 per cent of the US market, Hard Choices now stands at number nine in the list of hardcover sales. …

According to Jennifer Rubin the disaster of the book roll-out has some Dems convinced they have a Hillary problem.

You expect Hillary Clinton to be panned by conservatives. But increasingly she is getting some brutal reviews from, of all places, MSNBC commentators. Mark Halperin broke the news to the network’s liberal audience: “The biggest development in the 2016 race in the last month is Republicans do not fear anything like they did before. She’s never going to be a great candidate. She’s never going to have the fingertip feel of politics of her husband, Barack Obama or George Bush. I think the story to some extent is the people around her failing to prepare her for the most obvious questions imaginable.”

Or maybe they did try to prepare her and she wasn’t receptive. (Worse, could be this be the improved version?)

With no specific GOP opponent journalists covering the lead-up to the 2016 presidential race don’t have much to do but dissect her latest gaffes and try to maintain some suspense  in a race with a candidate they’ve been covering for decades. (Will she run? Why can’t she talk about money?) Some rather frank criticism of her from liberal media and mainstream reporters may provoke some Democratic soul-searching. …

An example of Mrs. Clinton’s problem with the media is Maureen Dowd’s column this past Sunday.

CHELSEA CLINTON never acted out during the eight years she came of age as America’s first daughter.

No ditching of her Secret Service detail. No fake IDs for underage tippling. No drug scandal. No court appearance in tank top and toe ring. Not even any dirty dancing.

Despite a tough role as the go-between in the highly public and embarrassing marital contretemps of her parents, Chelsea stayed classy.

So it’s strange to see her acting out in a sense now, joining her parents in cashing in to help feed the rapacious, gaping maw of Clinton Inc.

With her 1 percenter mother under fire for disingenuously calling herself “dead broke” when she left the White House, why would Chelsea want to open herself up to criticism that she is gobbling whopping paychecks not commensurate with her skills, experience or role in life?

As the 34-year-old tries to wean some of the cronies from the Clinton Foundation — which is, like the Clintons themselves, well-intended, wasteful and disorganized — Chelsea is making speeches that go into foundation coffers. She is commanding, as The Times’s Amy Chozick reported, up to $75,000 per appearance.

Chozick wrote: “Ms. Clinton’s speeches focus on causes like eradicating waterborne diseases. (‘I’m obsessed with diarrhea’ is a favorite line.)” …

Joel Kotkin says there will be no recovery without the middle class. 

What if they gave a recovery, and the middle class were never invited? Well, that’s an experiment we are running now, and, even with the recent strengthening of the jobs market, it’s not looking very good.

Over the last five years, Wall Street and the investor class have been on a bull run, but the economy has been, at best, torpid for the vast majority of the population. Despite blather about our “democratic capitalism,” stock ownership is increasingly concentrated with the wealthy as the middle class retrenches. The big returns that hedge funds, real estate trusts or venture capitalist receive are simply outside the reach of the vast majority.

A recent study by the Russell Sage Foundation suggests these patterns of inequality, which have been developing over the last several decades, have become more pronounced in the post-Recession years. In 2013 the wealth of those at the 90th and 95th percentiles was actually higher than 10 years ago. Everyone else is lower.

The labor market may be strengthening, with the unemployment rate falling to 6.1% last month, but too many of the new jobs are low wage or part time. They aren’t providing the kick the economy got in the last, more broad-based expansion from robust consumer spending.

Wage growth has been weak, rising 2.5% annually since 2009, according to Bloomberg, compared with a 4.3% annual rise from 2001 to 2007. …

Similar thoughts from Mort Zuckerman.

There has been a distinctive odor of hype lately about the national jobs report for June. Most people will have the impression that the 288,000 jobs created last month were full-time. Not so.

The Obama administration and much of the media trumpeting the figure overlooked that the government numbers didn’t distinguish between new part-time and full-time jobs. Full-time jobs last month plunged by 523,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. What has increased are part-time jobs. They soared by about 800,000 to more than 28 million. Just think of all those Americans working part time, no doubt glad to have the work but also contending with lower pay, diminished benefits and little job security.

On July 2 President Obama boasted that the jobs report “showed the sixth straight month of job growth” in the private economy. “Make no mistake,” he said. “We are headed in the right direction.” What he failed to mention is that only 47.7% of adults in the U.S. are working full time. Yes, the percentage of unemployed has fallen, but that’s worth barely a Bronx cheer. It reflects the bleak fact that 2.4 million Americans have become discouraged and dropped out of the workforce. You might as well say that the unemployment rate would be zero if everyone quit looking for work.

Last month involuntary part-timers swelled to 7.5 million, compared with 4.4 million in 2007. Way too many adults now depend on the low-wage, part-time jobs that teenagers would normally fill. Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen had it right in March when she said: “The existence of such a large pool of partly unemployed workers is a sign that labor conditions are worse than indicated by the unemployment rate.” …

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Looking over this administration’s foolishness, Victor Davis Hanson says the chickens have come home to roost.

Often, crazy things seem normal for a time because logical catastrophes do not immediately follow.

A deeply suspicious Richard Nixon systematically and without pushback for years undermined and politicized almost every institution of the federal government, from the CIA and the FBI to the IRS and the attorney general’s office. Nixon seemed to get away with it — until his second term. Once the public woke up, however, the eventual accounting proved devastating: resignation of a sitting president, prison sentences for his top aides, collapse of the Republican party, government stasis, a ruined economy, the destruction of the Vietnam peace accords that had led to a viable South Vietnam, the end of Henry Kissinger’s diplomatic breakthroughs, and a generation of abject cynicism about government. Did Nixon ever grasp that such destruction was the natural wage of his own paranoia?

In the post-Watergate climate of reform, for nearly three years a naïve Jimmy Carter gave utopian speeches about how American forbearance would end the Cold War and create a new world order based on human rights — until America’s abdication started to erode the preexisting global order. Scary things followed, such as the fall of the shah of Iran, the rise of Iranian theocracy, the taking of American hostages in Tehran, revolutions and insurrection throughout Central America, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, radical Islamists taking over Mecca, more gas lines, continued stagflation, and China invading Vietnam. Did the puritanical Carter ever understand what might be the consequences of his own self-righteousness in an imperfect world?

Barack Obama likewise has done some crazy things that seemed for years to have no ramifications. Unfortunately, typical of the ways of Nemesis (a bitter goddess who waits until the opportune moment to demand payment for past hubris), suddenly the bills for Obama’s six years of folly are coming due for the American people.

When a president occasionally fails to tell the truth, you get a scandal like the monitoring of the Associated Press reporters. When a president serially fails to tell the truth, you get that plus the scandals involving the IRS, the NSA, the VA, Benghazi, and too many others to mention.

The same is true abroad. …

Kimberley Strassel with an example of this foolishness.

In the smallest stories we sometimes find the biggest themes. The small story of the past month has been dysfunction at a backwater federal agency known as the Chemical Safety Board. Yet in this tale of obstruction, bullying and lawlessness we find what is now the clear pattern of the Obama administration.

If you’ve never heard of the CSB, join the rest of humanity. Created by Congress in 1990, the CSB is charged with probing industrial chemical accidents. Like the National Transportation Safety Administration, it’s a rare entity with no regulatory authority; CSB’s only job is to investigate and make recommendations. Its board and staff have mainly been wonky safety experts, and the agency largely devoid of political controversy.

That changed with this administration. The scandal popped in late 2013 when the Environmental Protection Agency’s inspector general, Arthur Elkins (charged with CSB oversight), sent a “seven-day letter” to Congress. Said letters are rare, since they are used (reads the statute) to convey to legislators “particularly serious or flagrant problems” at an agency. …

Andrew Claven thinks the country will be able to overcome what this president has left behind.

… In fact, I would predict that almost everything Obama has done in his time in office will vanish without a trace within a decade or two. Obamacare, the clown car foreign policy, the corruption…  I think it has caused some problems and will cause some more, but then I think we’ll shrug it all off and move on. Even some of the cleverer subterranean stuff, like favoring cities over suburbs, will only have a long-lasting effect if, in fact, the suburban era is over. If people still want their houses and lawns and cars, they’ll get them back, no matter what oppressive regulations this guy puts in place.

Many people on the right think Obama is an Evil Leftist Genius. Not me. I think he is a hapless putz. I think his ideas are all wrong, his application of his ideas is incompetent, and the chaos that he causes with his wrongness and incompetence will not lead in the direction he thinks it will.

I think when the history of the 21st century is written, Obama will not merit more than a single line. Even the fact that he was the first black president may come to seem irrelevant in a couple of decades. In which case, he will not merit any line at all.

The guy is just a sad little schmuck who played cynical politics well and got promoted way above his competence. His policies won’t change the face of the nation. They’ll just make a mess that those who come after him will have to clean up.

Writing in the National Review, A. J. Delgado argues the costs of immigration amnesty will fall most heavily on African Americans.

One of the sleeper issues surrounding the debate on amnesty for illegal immigrants – an inconvenient one that no proponent of a widespread amnesty wishes to acknowledge – is the devastating effect so-called immigration reform will have on African Americans.

The black unemployment rate is almost 11 percent, far higher than that of any other group profiled by labor statistics. African Americans are disproportionately employed in lower-skilled jobs – the very same jobs immigrants take. As Steven Camarota asked in a recent column, why double immigration when so many people already aren’t working?

Who will be harmed most by amnesty? African-Americans.

The issue resurfaced this week when a YouTube video emerged of two young African-Americans confronting pro-illegal-immigration demonstrators in Murrieta, California. Murrieta is one of the towns in which undocumented minors are being relocated — and supporters are squaring off with protestors.

The young man argues: …

Road & Track publishes the unbelievable costs of maintaining super cars. A new clutch for a Porsche Carrera GT is $25,000. A brake job – $30,000. 

On paper, a used super-exotic makes sense. You get the mind-blowing performance and heartbreaking looks, but at a lower price than a new hypercar, and with no yearlong stay on a dealer’s waiting list. But—surprise!—the buy-in is only half the damage. Parts are far from cheap and often hard to come by. Many jobs require purpose-built tools. And for countless reasons, supercars are rarely designed for ease of maintenance—the same task that takes an afternoon on your mother’s Toyota could consume five days on a McLaren. We polled owners and mechanics to find out what makes working on these cars aggravating, expensive, and just plain weird. …

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David Harsanyi writes on the NY Times bias against Israel.

The New York Times issued a correction today to fix a demonstrably false editorial that claimed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spent “days of near silence” before condemning the murder of Arab teenager Mohammed Abu Khdeir. Netanyahu had, in fact, called the killing an “abominable murder,” and on the day of the killing issued a statement instructing his minister for internal security to investigate the crime. Three Israeli suspects were arrested and have since confessed to the murder.

Even with a correction, the editorial in question was a mess from the top down. The NewRepublic has a good rundown of other egregious errors and misleading points that won’t be getting much-needed corrections. It’s likely that the editorial page was simply relying on the news side to feed its preconceived biases (though one story had already reported on Netanyahu’s comments), which is a mistake considering the NYT’s reporting exhibits absolutely no journalistic standards when it comes to the topic.

This is nothing new. Let’s momentarily set aside the decades-long institutional bias at the paper and simply focus on factual errors of the past few years: …

Seth Mandel has more on the Times’ editorial that prompted Harsanyi’s post.

Earlier this week I wrote about the thoroughly dishonest and ignorant editorial in the New York Times on the recent abduction and killing of four teens in Israel. The Times strove for moral equivalence since the victims included Jews and an Arab. To review: the Times editorial wrongly accused Benjamin Netanyahu of a delay in condemning the killing of an Arab teen and the editors took a Netanyahu quote that denounced the desire for vengeance and claimed it meant Netanyahu was doing the opposite and inciting vigilante terrorism. After wide condemnation, the Times corrected the editorial. Sort of. …

4th of July post from Mark Steyn.

… Speaking of lèse-majesté, even when our sovereign liege lord is not present, it is improper to disrespect him. For example, Friday’s Fourth of July parade in Norfolk, Nebraska included a float with a wooden outhouse labeled “Obama Presidential Library”. According to the gentlemen of the press, the float has “drawn criticism“. I should certainly hope so. I assumed that the criticism it had drawn would be from freeborn citizens hoping for something a little less generic and anodyne in the way of Presidential mockery.

But no, the court eunuchs of the media are huffin’ an’ a-puffin’ about how this time the Obama-haters have gone too far:

Norfolk City Councilman Dick Pfeil told the Omaha World-Herald that he was unhappy with the float, and he wanted to make clear the city had not approved it.

Because nothing better exemplifies the spirit of Independence Day than having your float approved by the government.

Charles Krauthammer says an immigration fix is a no-brainer.

… Obama blames the crisis on Republicans for failing to pass comprehensive immigration reform.

More nonsense. It’s a total non sequitur. Comprehensive reform would not have prevented the current influx. Indeed, any reform that amnesties 11 million illegal immigrants simply reinforces the message that if you come here illegally, eventually you will be allowed to stay.

It happens that I support immigration reform. I support amnesty. I have since 2006. But only after we secure the border.

Which begins with completing the fencing along the Mexican frontier. Using 2009 Government Accountability Office estimates, that would have cost up to $6.6 billion. Obama will now spend more than half that sum to accommodate a mass migration that would have been prevented by just such a barrier.

But a fence is for the long term. For the immediate crisis, the answer is equally, blindingly clear: Eliminate the Central American exception and enforce the law.

It must happen. The nightmare will continue until it does. The only question is: How long until Obama is forced to do the obvious?

The big sports news of the summer was LeBron James returning to Cleveland. John Kass of Chicago claims it’s a Midwestern thing.

If you’re from the Midwest, you probably hated LeBron James.

Who didn’t?

Not true hatred, of course. I’m talking about sports hatred.

It’s not something you act on. But it’s bitter, and it just sits there on your heart as you watch that other team celebrate or that other player with the rings kissing the trophy, that one athlete who seems to cut your heart out year after year.

We’ve seen such athletes before. And LeBron is one of them.

But no matter how hard I try, I can’t hate him anymore. And you probably don’t hate him anymore either, not the way we once did. That’s gone.

LeBron is going home to Cleveland after four years in Miami, four years of SouthBeach glamour, four NBA Finals and two championship rings.

He’s devious enough to have planned it. He left Cleveland for Miami, and during those four years, Cleveland hit rock bottom, and Cavaliers fans hated him the most. Over those years, the team picked up plenty of young talent.

So LeBron now returns to reap the love and the rings to come, and try as I might, I can’t hate him anymore. Perhaps it’s because I can recognize a pattern in all this. …

… But if you’re from the Midwest and you’ve gone away, then returned, determined to stick it out, then you’ll understand. And you’ll understand LeBron.

“Before anyone ever cared where I would play basketball, I was a kid from northeast Ohio. It’s where I walked,” James was quoted as saying by SI.com. “It’s where I ran. It’s where I cried. It’s where I bled. It holds a special place in my heart. People there have seen me grow up. I sometimes feel like I’m their son. Their passion can be overwhelming. But it drives me. I want to give them hope when I can. I want to inspire them when I can.”

Reading that, I know what he was doing in SouthBeach for those four years he was away from Ohio. …

And then there is a speech by the president. Terry Jeffrey said he talked about himself. No news there.

… The White House presented Obama’s speech, which the president delivered at Austin’s Paramount Theatre, as “Remarks by the President on the Economy.” The remarks, the White House reports, ran 40 minutes, and the full transcript (including annotations for “laughter” and “applause”) is more than 5,500 words.

By contrast, President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was only 272 words–and did not include any form of the first person singular.

In President Obama’s speech, he used a first person singular, on average, every 12 seconds. At that rate, had Obama spoken for just 15 more minutes, he would have used the first person singular more than 272 times in one speech—exceeding all the words in the Gettysburg Address.

In one 68-word passage–in which he vowed to act unilaterally if Congress did not enact legislation he liked–Obama used the first person singular five more times than the zero times Lincoln used it in his 272 words at Gettysburg.

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What with the dismal record of schools operated by governments, a for-profit educational enterprise has always looked to be a promising business. That was before this administration and the animus it has brought towards private market solutions. WSJ Editors tell the story of the collapse of Corinthian Colleges.  

The Obama Administration has targeted for-profit colleges as if they are enemy combatants. And now it has succeeded in putting out of business Santa Ana-based Corinthian Colleges for a dilatory response to document requests. Does the White House plan to liquidate the IRS too?

A month ago the Department of Education imposed a 21-day hold on Corinthian’s access to federal student aid because it “failed to address concerns about its practices, including falsifying job placement data used in marketing claims to prospective students.” The funding freeze triggered a liquidity crisis, which has culminated in Corinthian’s decision to wind down or sell its 97 U.S. campuses.

Like the for-profit college industry, Corinthian draws roughly 80% of its revenues from federal student aid. Yet this is a function of its demographics. For-profit schools educate a larger share of low-income, minorities, veterans and single mothers than do nonprofit and public colleges. Eighty percent of their students lack parental financial support. …

… Most of the investigations involve trumped-up charges of misleading job placement rates, which federal law requires for-profits—but not public and nonprofit colleges—to document and disclose. But here’s the rub: There’s no standard definition of “job placement.” …

… Students enrolled in colleges that are to be shut down will be allowed to finish their degrees, transfer or withdraw with a full refund. However, these students may not be able to find the same programs at nearby community colleges or for-profit schools. Students are the collateral damage but the real target of this war on Corinthian are investors in an industry that Democrats don’t like: They can destroy you even before they have any evidence.

The above makes this a good place for a post from the Mises Economics Blog on intellectuals’ hostility towards free markets.

… The intellectuals are a paradoxical product of the market economy, because “unlike any other type of society, capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.” Like Hayek, Schumpeter described intellectuals broadly as “people who wield the power of the spoken and the written word.” More narrowly, “one of the touches that distinguish them from other people who do the same is the absence of direct responsibility for practical affairs.” That is, intellectuals do not participate in the market (at least not in the areas they write about), and do not generally rely on satisfying consumers to earn a living. Add to this their naturally critical attitude—which Schumpeter argues is the product of the essential rationality of the market economy—and it is easy to see why intellectuals would be hostile to the market.

In other words, intellectuals are often out of place in entrepreneurial societies. The growth of the intellectual class is not a response to consumer demand, but to the expansion of higher education. Passing through the higher education system does not necessarily confer valuable skills, but it often does convince graduates that work in the market is beneath them: …

And here comes Kevin Williamson trying to explain why profit has become a dirty word.

People intensely dislike profits. The belief that turning a profit is tantamount to operating some sort of con is disturbingly common. …

 

… The crude version of exchange — which is, unhappily, the common version — is inclined to suspect that there is an objectively correct price for a good, and that profit comes from duping somebody into paying more than the correct price for it. That error is fundamental to Marxism and other anti-capitalist philosophies, and it is implicit in such social phenomena as the anti-advertising movement, “Buy Nothing Day,” and similar political tendencies. …

 

… The Left often tries to explain its objection to free prices and wages in terms of asymmetrical economic power, and that analysis is not without some practical meaning: If you have been unemployed for six months, have $20,000 in debt, and are down to your last $4, then you are in a pretty poor negotiating position vis-à-vis most potential employers. But what is true at the anecdotal level is not true at the aggregate level: …

 

… In the entire history of economic thought, nobody has ever been able to demonstrate that there is an objectively “right” price for anything separate and apart from the subjective valuation that happens in the marketplace. Progressives like speeches about diversity, but they loathe the actual diversity of views and desires, especially the idea that prices should be sorted out according to the billions of subjective valuations in the marketplace through a process that nobody is in charge of. (In Dante’s Hell, the engraving reads: “Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here.” In Ezra Klein’s Hell, the engraving reads: “Nobody In Charge.”) Implicit in this belief is that most people — consumers and workers alike — are too stupid or too weak for us to allow them to act on their own subjective valuations, that we are compelled by . . . justice, efficiency, expert opinion, whatever . . . to substitute our own judgment for theirs. And then all you need is two government studies and a rent-a-philosopher writing in the New York Times to proclaim that there is some real-world basis for your own preferences as compared to those of the rabble on whose behalf you have just deputized yourself to organize the world. The language of “social justice” is largely a sort of moral minstrel show designed to distract from the real argument, which is: “You’re too stupid to be entrusted with your own life.” …

Glenn Reynolds writes about the “New Class.” 

Life is hard. It’s harder still when an entire class of people with their hands out stands between you and success.

Unfortunately, that’s increasingly the problem, all around the world. A recent New York Times piece tells the story of a Greek woman’s efforts to survive that country’s financial collapse. After losing her job, she tried to start a pastry business, only to find the regulatory environment impossible. Among other things, they wanted her to pay the business’s first two years of taxes up front, before it had taken in a cent. When the business failed, her lesson was this: “I, like thousands of others trying to start businesses, learned that I would be at the mercy of public employees who interpreted the laws so they could profit themselves.”

This phenomenon isn’t limited to Greece, or even to capitalistic societies. Dissident Soviet-era thinker Milovan Djilas coined the term “the New Class” to describe the people who actually ran the Soviet Union: Not workers or capitalists or proletarians, but managers, bureaucrats, technocrats, and assorted hangers-on. This group, Djilas wrote, had assumed the power that mattered in the “workers’ paradise,” and transformed itself into a new kind of aristocracy, even while pretending, ever less convincingly, to do so in the name of the workers. Capitalists own capital, workers own their labor, but what the New Class owned was political control over other people’s capital and labor. Those Greek bureaucrats’ power didn’t come from making things. It came from being able to make people — like our pastry chef — jump through hoops before they could make things. …

The College Fix with a post that help explains why colleges have so many ignorant graduates.

Young America’s Foundation has surveyed the required reading programs for incoming college freshmen nationwide and found that, over the past three years, none of the colleges have assigned a conservative-leaning book.

None of them.

Young America’s Foundation surveyed the top 50 schools as noted by Forbes, and “found that many of the ‘required’ books only offered left-wing perspectives on topics such as race, feminism, socialism, inequality, and wealth redistribution.”

Here’s a sample:

Americanah by Chimamanda Nogzi Adichie (required at DukeUniversity and PomonaCollege in 2014) This is a fictional story of a young Nigerian woman and man who immigrate to the United States. Throughout the book, the author delves heavily into concepts of race. Yet, at the same time, she criticizes everyone but the protagonists for their prejudices.

The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert (required at LafayetteCollege in 2014) This book argues that humanity is causing a sixth mass extinction due to global warming and advocates environmental sustainability.

And because we need some humor, here’s Andy Malcolm with the late night kind.

Conan: Michelle Obama says she wants Americans to elect a woman president “as soon as possible.” So even she’s had enough of President Obama.

Meyers: A new report says “Brooklyn” is now one of the country’s most popular baby names. Still the least popular baby name, “Staten Island.”

Conan: I’m halfway through Hillary Clinton’s book. I don’t want to ruin the ending, but I bet she kills this guy “Bill.”

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The first two items today are from Pickings last December 24th. They are reminders of how bad last year was for the president. And Glenn Reynolds is a proven prescient professor with his call that 2014 would be worse.

John Podhoretz reviews the president’s terrible year.

When Barack Obama sings “Auld Lang Syne” on New Year’s Eve, he will have reason to think back, with a deep sense of nostalgia and not a small amount of regret, on the last time he sang the song.

If he gets a lump in his throat as he recollects that glorious night one year ago, who would blame him? After all, he was riding about as high as a man can ride on New Year’s Eve 2012.

There he was, almost literally the master of the universe — the canny victor of the 2012 election, having run what was instantly regarded as the most brilliant technical campaign in American history. He used that victory to prevail in a “fiscal cliff” showdown with Republicans the last week of December that led to the significant tax increases on the well-to-do he had sought since the beginning of his first term. He had a 53% approval rating; only 40% disapproved.

In a few weeks, he would be inaugurated for a second term and, liberated from the demands of running again and emboldened by his win, he would that day offer the country an unabashedly and unapologetically left-wing vision of the American future toward which he was guiding it.

“Preserving our individual freedoms,” he said in a startling turn of phrase, “ultimately requires collective action.” …

Glenn Reynolds thinks 2014 will be even worse. Condign punishment is what we say.

A lot of people are saying that 2013 was President Obama’s worst year. Roll Call headlined, “Subdued Obama Hopes For Better 2014.” The Hill reported, “Obama names health care rollout his biggest mistake of dismal year.” Most people seem to think it was. But I think it was average, in the manner of the old Soviet joke:

Ivan: So how was your day?

Boris: Average.

Ivan: What do you mean, average?

Boris: Worse than yesterday, better than tomorrow. So, average.

Unless something turns around, Obama’s 2013 is likely to be similarly “average”: Worse than 2012, but better than 2014.

It’s true that Obamacare has been a debacle, wrapped in a catastrophe, shrouded in a disaster. But it’s also become clear that it was founded upon a lie: …

Matt Lewis of the Telegraph, UK has the honors explaining how bad this president is.

The trailers were great, but the movie was horrible.

Six years in, that’s the general consensus on the Obama presidency. Having ridden a wave of “hope and change” to the White House, President Barack Obama has failed to deliver on his huge box office, err, ballot box expectations.

Just how bad is it? Since it is summer “blockbuster” season, I’ll explain thusly: There’s a difference between being bad and being most awesomely bad. You and I probably never even hear of the worst movies made. They are forgotten, not mocked. But the truly disastrous flops – the Water Worlds and Ishtars of the world – are the movies that come with huge budgets and huge expectations.

Obama fits the latter category – extremely talented and hyped, but ultimately, unsatisfying. True, I’ve been making this case for a long time – but now, there’s evidence.

A Quinnipiac poll released in America this week has Obama ranked as the “worst president” since World War II. For various reasons, this may or may not be entirely fair, but considering his competition included Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush, this is problematic. And, what is more, a majority surveyed also said “the nation would be better off” had Mitt Romney won presidency. …

But it gets unbelievably worse. Victor Davis Hanson posts on the presidential trip to Texas yesterday.

Surely reports that President Obama is going down to Texas at the height of the Katrina-like border debacle to raise money at the home of the popular but often polarizing filmmaker and Quentin Tarantino–collaborator Robert Rodriguez are the stuff of right-wing mythology?

No one could be so politically dense as to head south in the direction of this catastrophe only to pull up short to huckster campaign funds — while under a lingering cloud that such special-interest money solicitation in the past typically has taken precedence over national security (cf. the need to retire early on the night of Benghazi in order to prep for an important fundraiser the next day in Las Vegas, where the selfish go to blow their kids’ tuition money).

That the Obama money-raiser is purportedly being hosted by filmmaker Robert Rodriguez also cannot be true. The latter is famous for ultra-violent exploitation films of just the sort that gun-control liberals have insisted glorify (true) assault-weapon violence for profit and influence the deranged to translate such violent fiction into murderous fact. …

Spectator, UK reviews a book on the survival of Boris Pasternak and the international politics that swirled around the publication of Dr. Zhivago.

… It is natural to wonder how Pasternak survived the Stalin era. This may have been in part because he somehow, perhaps guided by some unconscious instinct for self-preservation, established what one could call a ‘personal’ relationship with Stalin. This began after the suicide of Stalin’s wife in 1932. Thirty-three other writers published a collective letter in the Literary Gazette; Pasternak managed to append a separate message of his own.

Like nearly all Soviet writers, Pasternak joined in some of the public denunciations of the politicians sentenced to death during the show trials of the mid-1930s. He refused, however, to sign a letter calling for the execution of Marshal Tukhachevsky and other senior generals. Ignoring Pasternak’s clear refusal, the authorities included his signature in the published text of the letter.  Pasternak then wrote to Stalin, saying he could not act as a judge of life and death.  He also wrote letters to Stalin about Maya-kovsky, and about the Georgian poets he was translating. The unexpected tone of these letters, their odd fusion of reverence and intimacy, could well have made an impression on a tyrant concerned about his place in history. Whether Stalin truly said ‘We won’t touch this cloud-dweller!’ is uncertain, but there is no doubt that he kept at least one of Pasternak’s letters in his personal archive. …

Mental Floss has 20 things you don’t know about chocolate.

2. Chocolate Is Actually a Vegetable—Kind Of.

Milk and dark chocolate come from the cacao bean, which grows on the cacao tree (theobroma cacao), an evergreen from the family Malvaceae (other members of the family include okra and cotton). This makes the most important part of the sweet treat a vegetable. …

19. There Are Two Kinds of Cacao.

Most modern chocolate comes from forastero beans, which are considered easy to grow—though the crillo bean is believed to make much tastier chocolate.

20. Chocolate Has a Special Melting Point.

Chocolate is the only edible substance to melt around 93° F, just below the human body temperature. That’s why chocolate melts so easily on your tongue.

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John Fund writes on the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act.

… There are sound reasons that so many Americans resist a regime of racial entitlements. Schools now put a race-conscious fist on the admissions scale rather than a thumb and clearly admit students based on race. They aren’t doing these students a favor. Affirmative-action students are 50 to 75 percent more likely to drop out of a science program than are regular admits. At law schools, they are two or three times more likely to fail the bar exam. But students who attend a school where their entering credentials are similar to those of their fellow students are more likely to finish and fulfill their work and life ambitions. We almost certainly now have fewer black doctors, lawyers, and business chiefs than we would have had under race-neutral admissions policies.

In Wounds That Will not Heal: Affirmative Action and Our Continuing Racial Divide, Princeton professor Russell Nieli wrote: “It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that racial-preference policies have lulled substantial segments of the black middle class into complacency and half-hearted performance in our increasingly education-focused world.” That isn’t the outcome that supporters of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 hoped for or promised. It’s time to return to the original vision of civil rights that principled liberals such as Hubert Humphrey and William O. Douglas supported.

Roger Simon posts on the crossroads faced by the country. 

America is at a crossroads — we always seem to be, but this time we really are.

We are living under the administration of a president that is now the least popular since World War II.  A full one-third  of those polled by Quinnipiac rate Barack Obama the worst president since 1945.  (Reagan is rated the best.)

What accounts for this?  There are dozens of reasons that have been detailed on these pages and many others.  The man has lied to us multiple times — and to himself as well, no doubt — and many people now apparently sense this.  But I think the deepest reason, the motivating cause, stems from a time Barack Obama actually didn’t lie, but told an important truth.

Back on July 27, 2004, a then obscure Illinois senator made himself famous by standing in front of the Democratic National Convention and speaking these words: “There is not a liberal America and a conservative America. There is a United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America, a Latino America, an Asian America — there’s the United States of America.”

Did he believe those words?  Maybe. Once upon a time.  But evidently not very deeply. The fact is he betrayed them completely and almost everything he has done wrong has stemmed from that betrayal.  He has acted in the most partisan and deceitful manner, surrounding himself with a tiny group of yes-women and yes-men,  making a mockery of his self-proclaimed transparency, shamelessly exploiting interest groups in a way that could only divide our society while diminishing America’s place in the world,  and allowing evil forces to grow across the globe. …

Kevin Williamson says the problem with science is . . .

The problem is that scientific prestige accompanies scientists well outside their fields of expertise. That’s true when they wander into other scientific fields — as I noted in my essay, Carl Sagan authored scientific illiteracies based on long-discredited ideas in the course of arguing for abortion — but the problem is most acute when it comes to the matter of politics. A relatively recent and intensely annoying example of this comes from my alma mater, the University of Texas, which is proud to employ the physicist Steven Weinberg, who was awarded the Nobel prize in 1979. Professor Weinberg is not short of opinions — evangelizing for causes ranging from atheism to Zionism — and is unsurprisingly interested in the question of government funding for scientific research, a subject he explores in his compact essay “The Crisis in Big Science,” recently republished in The Best American Science and Nature Writing of 2013. (Yes, I am a little behind on my reading; I also have 54,000 unread e-mails.) Professor Weinberg’s essay is remarkably simple-minded, though it is admirably modest: Offering a potted history of the Standard Model, he mentions the unification of the weak and electromagnetic forces but not the fact that he is one of the men who did that.

I do not get the impression that Professor Weinberg is the grasping sort, but it is worth noting that the man arguing that we need to spend more money not only on science but on most everything government does — he endorses a general increase in tax rates and an equally general expansion of the state — is a 1 percenter among public dependents. More than that: He was, as of 2012, the ninth most highly paid professor ($536,000) in these United States, annually taking home the equivalent of Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett’s salary plus Morningstar CEO Joe Mansueto’s salary. His wife is paid an additional quarter-million a year as a tenured professor at the University of Texas law school (the reputation of which is in dramatic decline of late). Some years ago, an administrator at the University of Texas described Professor Weinberg’s professional responsibilities to me in approximately these words: “He has a Nobel prize; he does what he wants.” The Weinberg household is a very significant net recipient of tax dollars. That being written, he seems to be a very productive man, and UT has spent a great deal more money on much less admirable investments: Mack Brown, who led the Longhorns to mediocrity on the gridiron, was paid approximately ten times what Professor Weinberg is.

The Financial Times writes on the antibiotic problem.

There is a mischievous Punch cartoon that depicts a woman and five men sitting round a conference table. The caption reads: “That’s an excellent suggestion, Miss Triggs. Perhaps one of the men here would like to make it.”

Dame Sally Davies must feel like a modern-day Miss Triggs. More than a year ago the chief medical officer for England warned that antibiotic resistance should be ranked alongside terrorism as a national threat. Failing to keep up the medicinal arms race against superbugs, she said, would fling us back to the dark days of the 19th century when a cut finger could lead to a festering death.

Her apocalyptic vision was not much reported – unlike David Cameron’s strikingly similar pronouncement this week that we are entering a post-antibiotics era which will see us “cast back into the dark ages of medicine where treatable infections and injuries will kill once again”. The prime minister has ordered a review by economist Jim O’Neill, co-funded by the Wellcome Trust, the UK’s biggest medical research foundation, into why industry has failed to deliver any new antibiotics for decades.

The battalions of bacteria have meanwhile marched on, relentlessly replicating and evolving and spewing out new generations of randomly mutated daughters. Some of these will have genetic mutations that allow them to survive medicinal onslaught, and replicate in ever greater numbers. …

Ann Coulter has a second part to her soccer slam. Part Deux she calls it.

PARIS — Soccer fans have decided to prove me wrong about soccer being a fruity sport by spending the last week throwing hissy fits. This, in defense of a “sport” where the losing players cry on camera.

The massive and hysterical response to my jovial sports piece proves how right I was. Nothing explains the uniform, Borg-like caterwauling, but that soccer is a game for beret-wearers. Most of the articles attacking me are verbless strings of obscenities, their subject matter identified only in the title

Consequently, I’ve decided to emulate The New York Times, which runs the exact same column, year after year, “Soccer Catches On, Take 27,” by re-running mine on how excruciatingly boring soccer is.

This past week has allowed me to add several new items to my list of grievances.

Further proof that soccer is a game for girls: Since my column came out, a guy from the Paraguay team (Uruguay? Who cares?) was caught biting an opponent in a match. Not punching. Not a cross-body block. BITING! How long can it be until we see hair-pulling in soccer? …

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WSJ OpEd shows how North Carolina’s curtailment of unemployment benefits got people back to work. Whad’YaKnow? Stop subsidizing something and it begins to dry up.

A year ago, North Carolina became the first state in the nation to exit the federal government’s extended-benefits program for the unemployed. Facing the prospect of job-killing hikes in payroll taxes to pay back Washington, Gov. Pat McCrory and the state legislature instead reduced the amount and duration of unemployment-insurance benefits, which had been higher in North Carolina than in most states. As a result the state lost its eligibility to participate in the extended-benefits program on July 1, 2013.

National media and liberal activists pounced. Citing the decision and several other “outrages” by the state’s first Republican-led government since Reconstruction—such as adopting a pro-growth flat tax, clearing out the state’s regulatory thicket, and rejecting ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion—left-wing critics subjected the Tar Heel State to months of invective and ridicule. …

… New York Times columnist Paul Krugman called it a “war on the unemployed.” …

… Left-leaning economists may still cling to their demand-side popguns and Keynesian religion. But here in the Tar Heel State, the governor and state legislature have decided to promote growth and opportunity by reducing and reforming taxes, streamlining regulation and improving public education and infrastructure. Given the state’s impressive economic growth rate in 2013—4.2% in total GDP and 4.9% in private GDP, both far exceeding the national average—they are not likely to change their minds soon.

In a related note, The Corner features Krauthammer’s Take on who won the unemployment debate. Not that being right makes any difference.

While liberals hail new job numbers as a vindication of President Obama’s economic policies, it is conservatives who should feel vindicated, said Charles Krauthammer on Thursday’s Special Report. Citing a recent National Review Online post on The Corner by economist Robert Stein, Krauthammer noted that the sharp drop in unemployment has coincided with the end of emergency unemployment benefits. Obama and the Democrats, who insisted that the benefits be extended, wrongly predicted that their expiration would come as a calamity to the poor. Instead, their end has demonstrably had “precisely the opposite effect.”

“These six months coincide with a decrease in the medium length of unemployment from 17 weeks to 13 weeks — the largest six-month decline in the length of unemployment ever measured,” he said. “Which means the real problem of long-term unemployment was a function of this anomaly of emergency-extended unemployment, which should never have happened, and whose end has contributed to this excellent result. The debate on that extension is over, and the conservatives were right.”

In one short paragraph Kevin Williamson outlines what is wrong with the present political practitioners of public narcissism; the office holders who get well by “doing good.” And yet, they insist they’re in “public service.” Williamson goes on to say that a culture cannot thrive if its innovators are subservient to its bureaucrats.

Chelsea Clinton, from her $10.5 million perch on GramercyPark, declares that she finds it impossible to care about money. Bill and Hillary Clinton, shuttling between their multimillion-dollar homes — Chappaqua, Washington, the $200,000-a-month rental in the Hamptons — denounce the wicked rich and protest that they are not “truly well off.” A professor of poverty and left-wing activist at the University of North Carolina School of Law is paid $200,000 per annum to teach a single class; anti-inequality crusader Elizabeth Warren was paid $350,000 per annum to teach a single class and thinks deeply about the plight of the little guy in her $1.7 million Cambridge mansion. The city of Bell, Calif., was nearly bankrupted by the very generous salaries its political class secured for themselves: nearly $800,000 per annum for the chief executive of the modest Los Angeles suburb, on his way to collecting a $1 million annual pension. (Several Bell leaders were later charged with misappropriating millions of dollars’ worth of public money for their own benefit.) Philadelphia was paying the feckless chief executive of its violent and defective government schools some $350,000 a year before the mayor got around to firing her, but not before the city wrote her a check for nearly $1 million to make her go away — and then she filed for unemployment benefits. A Philadelphia police lieutenant on an $87,000 annual salary takes home nearly $200,000 after nearly a hundred grand in “overtime” kicks in. The head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, a federal enterprise, was paid nearly $6 million in 2013; the agency’s chief financial officer and chief lawyer were paid $2.1 and $1.9 million, respectively, that same year. The school superintendent in Lubbock, Texas, is paid nearly a quarter-million dollars a year.

Politics pays. …

… No society can long thrive by making its creators and innovators subservient to its pimps and thieves. But agencies with the power to tax or the power to pay themselves out of taxes have the power to command, and, human nature being what it is, it is not surprising that their executives use that power to extort for themselves extraordinary levels of compensation (occasionally through criminal means, as in the Bell case), even as they bore us all to death talking about the sacrifices they have endured on behalf of their careers in “public service.” …

How’s Hillary doing, you ask? Jennifer Rubin has 10 lessons from Hill’s hellish book tour. 

Hillary Clinton certainly wasn’t expecting a tough go of it when she hit the road on her book tour. After all, her book was devoid of controversy — not to mention new or interesting material — so there wouldn’t be much fodder for the interviewers, right? And besides, her popularity as secretary of state was high and she has come to personify for liberal women (many of those interviewing her) a valiant fighter. Her competence? Beyond question! Her devotion to the little people? Beyond measure!

But things didn’t pan out as Clinton expected, to put it mildly. She has nothing much to say, certainly nothing new, so focus falls on her foreign policy stumbles and her curious obsession with stuffing her bank account. She is in a defensive crouch before she formally announces her presidential run.

Some suspect that Clinton doesn’t want to run but has had to keep up pretenses to sell books and cash in on speaking gigs. These are not so lucrative if you are merely the former secretary of state and not a possible future president. But Clinton certainly didn’t want to bomb on this tour, nor throw away whatever good will she accrued in office. No, this seems to be a situation where her ambitions outstrip her abilities.

For those who are considering a run, the lessons are clear:

1. If you don’t have something new to say, the conversation will be about things you don’t want to talk about. … 

Ed Morrissey posts on another Hillary Clinton error.

When I first saw this clip earlier today, I was inclined to dismiss it. After all, plenty of people make the mistake Hillary Clinton does in this interview with BBC Radio today. The interviewer asks the former Secretary of State to gauge the strength of the “special relationship” between the US and the UK, and offers a rather insipid answer that applies to nearly all of our allies in the West. But it’s the apparent ignorance of the UK’s political parties from a woman who served for four years as America’s chief diplomat that got the buzz (via TWS and NRO):

BBC: So how special is the special relationship?

CLINTON: It is so special to me, personally, and I think it is very special between our countries. There’s just a — not just a common language — but a common set of values that we can fall back on. It doesn’t matter in our country whether it’s a Republican or Democrat, or frankly in your country whether it’s a Conservative or a Tory. There is a level of trust and understanding. It doesn’t mean we always agree because of course we don’t.

In case you don’t get the joke, the Tories are the Conservatives in the UK. Their other major political parties are Labour and Liberal Democrats, which means this is another way in which the comparison is a bit inapt. …

John Lott takes a dim view of the new Freakonomics book.

The Freakonomics franchise certainly has legs. According to legions of admirers, in their best-selling series that includes Freakonomics, SuperFreakonomics, and now Think Like a Freak, University of Chicago economics professor Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner have taught us to use economic reasoning to shed light on real-life situations. In the process, they have also shown that economics can be fun.

But the fun quotient is ultimately diminished by the fact that their stock in trade is naive economics. Typically, Levitt and Dubner fail to understand that when a problem arises in a market, it generally provides an incentive for those involved to remedy the problem. …

… Levitt and Dubner also brag in Think Like a Freak about the authors’ “truly original” thesis, presented in Freakonomics, that liberalizing abortion lowered crime rates. Abortion, they argued, lowered the number of unwanted children who would be prone to commit crimes. But again, the authors naively ignored the new set of incentives that legalized abortion offered.

What actually happened when abortion was legalized will sound ironic, but no more so than the unintended consequences of many other changes in laws and regulations. Multiple studies have shown that the availability of legalized abortion increased the incidence of unprotected sex, which led to more unwanted pregnancies, which in turn boosted the number of unplanned births, even offsetting the reduction in unplanned births due to abortion. The net result: an increase in the number of single-parent families who couldn’t devote a lot of time to raising their children, an effect Levitt and Dubner ignored and one that more than offset what they focused on.

It would be nice to believe that Think Like a Freak and its prequels have promoted interest in sound economics. But alas, when you think like a freak, you think superficially, like most freaks probably do in real life.

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While Europe was in the dark ages, the Arab world kept civilization alive. The Economist explores Islam’s present dark age.

A THOUSAND years ago, the great cities of Baghdad, Damascus and Cairo took turns to race ahead of the Western world. Islam and innovation were twins. The various Arab caliphates were dynamic superpowers—beacons of learning, tolerance and trade. Yet today the Arabs are in a wretched state. Even as Asia, Latin America and Africa advance, the Middle East is held back by despotism and convulsed by war.

Hopes soared three years ago, when a wave of unrest across the region led to the overthrow of four dictators—in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen—and to a clamour for change elsewhere, notably in Syria. But the Arab spring’s fruit has rotted into renewed autocracy and war. Both engender misery and fanaticism that today threaten the wider world.

Why Arab countries have so miserably failed to create democracy, happiness or (aside from the windfall of oil) wealth for their 350m people is one of the great questions of our time. What makes Arab society susceptible to vile regimes and fanatics bent on destroying them (and their perceived allies in the West)? No one suggests that the Arabs as a people lack talent or suffer from some pathological antipathy to democracy. But for the Arabs to wake from their nightmare, and for the world to feel safe, a great deal needs to change. …

Victor Davis Hanson corrects Dems on the history of war in Iraq.

So who lost Iraq?

The blame game mostly fingers incompetent Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki. Or is Barack Obama culpable for pulling out all American troops monitoring the success of the 2007–08 surge?

Some still blame George W. Bush for going into Iraq in 2003 in the first place to remove Saddam Hussein.

One can blame almost anyone, but one must not invent facts to support an argument.

Do we remember that Bill Clinton signed into law the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 that supported regime change in Iraq? He gave an eloquent speech on the dangers of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.

In 2002, both houses of Congress voted overwhelmingly to pass a resolution authorizing the removal of Saddam Hussein by force. Senators such as Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Harry Reid offered moving arguments on the Senate floor why we should depose Saddam in a post-9/11 climate. …

Jennifer Rubin says the border crisis is just another failure of this president.

… Had Obama not moved unilaterally to protect a group of DREAMers from deportation, it is unclear where he and the immigration debate would stand currently. What we do know is that 1.) it fed the narrative that he is an overreaching executive who can’t work with Congress and 2.) heightened fears that immigration “reform” is going to make borders less, not more, secure. …

… In the larger scheme of things, this becomes one more presidential failure along with Obamacare, his foreign policy debacles and a raft of scandals. With losses at the Supreme Court on recess appointments and the Obamacare contraception mandate, the president seems to be shrinking before our eyes. And now with the border emergency, we have one more vivid example of the federal government’s inability to perform its core functions. We shouldn’t be surprised – all this is par for the course in the second Obama term.

John Steele Gordon starts our look at the jobs report. 

The employment picture brightened somewhat in June, with 288,000 new jobs (up from a revised 224,000 in May) and a decline in the unemployment rate to 6.1 percent from 6.3. That’s the lowest unemployment rate since August 2008, on the eve of the financial crisis. We have now had job growth above 200,000 for the last five months, the first time that has happened since the very prosperous years of the late 1990s. The number of long-term unemployed (over 27 weeks) declined by 293,000. Unemployment among African-Americans fell from 11.5 percent to 10.7.

But the picture was not all bright. The number of involuntary part-time workers increased by 275,000. Teenage unemployment increased to 21 percent. Among black teenagers it was a horrendous 33.4 percent, up from 31.1 percent in May. One in three black teenagers in the labor force are unemployed. …

The Washington Post with an extensive article on the growth of part time employment. Maybe instead of president bystander or president petulant, we can call him president part-time. That fits in many ways.

In the new landscape of the American labor market, jobs are easier to come by but hours remain in short supply.

New government data released Thursday showed the economy added 288,000 jobs in June — the fifth straight month gains have topped the critical benchmark of 200,000. The unemployment rate fell to 6.1 percent, down more than a percentage point over the past year.

But there’s a gnawing fear among some economists that the improving data provides false comfort. The number of people in part-time jobs jumped by more than 1 million in June to 27 million, according to the government’s data, making it one of the corners of the labor market that has been slowest to heal. That has led to worries that the workforce may be becoming permanently polarized, with part-timers stuck on one side and full-time workers on the other.

“What we’re seeing is a growing trend of low-quality part-time jobs,” said Carrie Gleason, director of the Fair Work Week Initiative, which is pushing for labor reforms. “It’s creating this massive unproductive workforce that is unable to productively engage in their lives or in the economy.” …

More from Ed Morrissey.

Binyamin Applebaum delivers the bottom line:

Binyamin Appelbaum         @BCAppelbaum Follow

Bottom line: This labor market is much much weaker than the last time the unemployment rate stood at 6.1 percent.

Indeed. And while the overall job growth is pretty decent, it’s still not high enough to make a dent in the ranks of the chronically unemployed from the last six years.

Update: Plus, there’s this:

Only one month in the past 4+ years has the number of jobs added exceeded the number of people leaving the workforce. Yikes.

Debra Saunders asks a pointed question about the Hobby Lobby flap.

How did women get birth control before President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act? Before Obamacare, a woman could go to a doctor and get birth control. She often had to pay or make a copayment for contraception. But in the 2014 political lexicon, that means she had no access. …

You knew this would happen. Video from inside fireworks. There is no sound of the explosions, so they added cheesy music. Shut the sound. It’s better that way.

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Roger Simon reviews Blood Feud by Edward Klein.

… And unlike the Times, Blood Feud is a compulsive read.  I dare you to put it down. The book reminds you of nothing so much as an episode of Shonda Rhimes’ television series Scandal — and a particularly excessive episode at that. Even at its most seemingly illogical, Klein’s work has the ring of truth.  He’s on to something, even if he hasn’t hit the bull’s eye.

The main characters here — Hillary, Michelle, Barack, Bill and, to an extraordinary extent,  real “power behind the throne” Valerie Jarrett — read like a group of Borgias set free on today’s Washington, loathing each other and plotting revenge while living a lifestyle even the one percent could barely dream of.

The idea that these people could even utter the words “income inequality” is farcical.  At some point they may have had political ideas of some sort — who knows — but that was in a galaxy far, far away and has been lost forever in the latest round of golf, $200,000 speeches to Arab potentates or spur-of-the-moment trips  to Maui to woo Oprah at her mansion.

A lot of the book too reads like a companion piece to Hillary’s latest — well, not exactly, since no one appears to be interested in that door stopper –because most of the leaks appear to be from people anxious to differentiate Hillary from Obama. POTUS, as we know, is not exactly popular these days and anyone seeking the presidency would be well advised to separate herself from him as far as possible. This accounts for much of the amusing dish in the book, Hillary even dropping the F-bomb in front of some of her amazed old classmates from Wellesley when referring to Obama’s undeniable executive incompetence. …

… Barack Obama’s brand of narcissism seemed quite attractive to many early on with all its soaring talk of hope and change. Voters had no idea this man had only scant interest in the nitty-gritty task of governing. And the person they were really electing, as Blood Feud makes abundantly clear, was someone almost none of them had then heard of and most still haven’t — President Jarrett.

In another hint the media have had enough of Hillary’s money grabs, WaPo with a story on the almost $2 million she has sucked out of universities in the last nine months.

At least eight universities, including four public institutions, have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for Hillary Rodham Clinton to speak on their campuses over the past year, sparking a backlash from some student groups and teachers at a time of austerity in higher education.

In one previously undisclosed transaction, the University of Connecticut — which just raised tuition by 6.5 percent — paid $251,250 for Clinton to speak on campus in April. Other examples include $300,000 to address UCLA in March and $225,000 for a speech scheduled to occur in October at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.

The potential 2016 Democratic presidential candidate also has been paid for speeches at the University at Buffalo, ColgateUniversity and HamiltonCollege in New York, as well as SimmonsCollege in Massachusetts and the University of Miami in Florida.

Officials at those five schools refused to say what they paid Clinton. But if she earned her standard fee of $200,000 or more, that would mean she took in at least $1.8 million in speaking income from universities over the past nine months.

Since stepping down as secretary of state in early 2013, Clinton has given dozens of paid speeches to industry conventions and Wall Street banks. But Clinton’s acceptance of high fees for university visits has drawn particularly sharp criticism, with some students and academic officials saying the expenditures are a poor use of funds at a time of steep tuition hikes and budget cuts across higher education. …

More on administration foreign policy errors from Mary Anastasia O’Grady. This time we learn how our ambassador has insulted Canada.  

President Obama once promised to remake America’s image around the globe. He has kept that promise—only not in the way many voters who backed him had hoped.

Mr. Obama’s latest step in the image makeover is to tell Canada—the U.S.’s largest trading partner, largest supplier of energy and most loyal ally in war and peace—that its long-nurtured special relationship with the U.S. is not so special after all. To carry out the mission, Mr. Obama has sent a new U.S. ambassador to Ottawa.

Bruce Heyman, a former Goldman Sachs banker based in Chicago and a top Obama campaign bundler in both 2008 and 2012, may have deserved an ambassadorship for his services. But that’s what all those tiny islands in the Caribbean are for. Appointing Mr. Heyman—who is diplomatically challenged, to put it diplomatically—his top representative to Canada says a lot about what the president thinks about his northern neighbor.

Mr. Heyman made his debut in Ottawa earlier this month with a dinner speech at the National Gallery followed by a Q&A with former Canadian ambassador to Washington Frank McKenna. Mr. McKenna used the event to raise what Canada sees as troubling “irritants” in the bilateral relationship. Mr. Heyman used it to explain to Canadians how insignificant they are in the eyes of Washington. …

In 2008 the editors of the Billings, Montana paper endorsed the man who has become president petulant. They did this to show they can be just as insufferable as the bien pensants out East. At least the Billings people have come to see the error of their way and have recanted.

… The latest NBC/Wall Street Journal polls show that Americans are giving Obama lower marks than in 2006 when Iraq was going poorly for Bush and a tepid response to Hurricane Katrina sunk Bush’s ratings.

It’s not that popularity polling should be the final or even best measure of a president. There is that old saw that points out there’s a difference between doing what is right and what is popular.

For us, though, it’s the number of bungled or blown policies in the Obama administration which lead us to believe Obama has earned every bit of an abysmal approval rating.

Let’s recap some of the mistakes:

- Maybe the worst and most widespread invasion of privacy occurred when the Obama administration continued a controversial National Security Agency program of spying on millions of citizens culling their phone records to intercepting online information. The administration has done nearly nothing to safeguard civil liberties or put in safeguards to protect our Constitutionally guaranteed freedoms.

- The Obama administration has continued to ratchet down on emissions from coal-fired power plants while giving consumers little new innovation to replace the power supply. Meanwhile, Obama continues to thwart other energy projects that might be helpful to the economy, like the Keystone XL pipeline. The war on carbon might not be so bad if indeed it was being counterbalanced by true innovation.

- Iraq was an inherited quagmire from the Bush administration. But six years later, Obama has to own the current situation which, as this is being written, looks perilously close to civil war and a complete breakdown of government in Iraq. …

Hugh Hewitt slams the Presbyterian Church’s Middle East foolishness.

Prominently featured at the website of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is an “An Open Letter of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) to our American Jewish Interfaith Partners” which is signed by the denomination’s three senior officials and which begins:

We are reaching out to you after our General Assembly’s action, by a 310-303 vote, to recommend to the Presbyterian Foundation and the Board of Pensions to divest from three North American corporations following extensive corporate engagement. The assembly concluded that further engagement would not bring an end to their pursuits that further the Israeli occupation in Palestine.

Read the whole thing at pcusa.org. It is gibberish, nonsense of the worst sort: deeply disingenuous double talk intended to skim over the biased proceedings which produced it. Now the PCUSA, as its members call it, has taken an official position against Israel and so I, as an elder in the PCUSA — no longer a “ruling” elder in my congregation, having wrapped up my second such stint last year — have to take a position for or against the PCUSA based on it.

Many PCUSA congregations across the country are already engaged in the process of “discerning” whether to remain within the splintering denomination, and this new assault on Israel and the virulent language employed — “occupation” — will no doubt make that process much easier for hundreds of thousands of us. If their congregations don’t leave, they will. They will not be part of the American intifada against Israel. …

An article from Andrew Malcolm sounds like bringing coals to Newcastle. Seems someone is pooping in the hallways of federal offices.

… On Wednesday, McCarthy informed the House Oversight Committee that, doggone it, a whole bunch of emails sought by Congress have just up and disappeared.

Quite a coincidence given the strange timing of a half-dozen crashed and trashed hard-drives over at the Internal Revenue Service containing subpoenaed evidence.

Fortunately, at least one EPA email survived and Government Executive’s Eric Katz found it. In the message to Denver employees, EPA Deputy Regional Administrator Howard Cantor described several damaging incidents of inappropriate bathroom behavior, including toilet sabotage and disturbing deposits of human fecal material in adjacent hallways.

He said such material presented health hazards to fellow employees. Managers consulted with a workplace violence expert who warned that such anti-social behavior was not only unhealthy and unsafe but likely to escalate to something.

“Management is taking this situation very seriously,” Cantor wrote, “and will take whatever actions are necessary to identify and prosecute these individuals.” He asked EPA workers with any information on suspected hallway poopers to alert their supervisor.

An Environmental Impact Statement on the incidents is expected within a couple of years.