Click on WORD or PDF for full content
John Fund has more on the Dems impeachment dreams.
The simplest explanation for the bizarre spectacle of President Obama’s allies practically begging for Republicans to impeach him is that it’s a sign of political weakness, not of strength.
“Dems Fear A Debacle on Turnout,” read the front-page headline of the Capitol Hill newspaper the Hill this week. Turnout in this year’s congressional primaries hit record lows in a majority of states, with Democratic turnout lagging most. “A Pew poll out last week showed 45 percent who said they planned to vote Republican reported being more enthusiastic about voting this year than in years prior, while only 37 percent of those who supported a Democratic candidate said the same,” the Hill reported.
While the parties are roughly even in polls where voters are asked to choose between a generic Democratic or Republican candidate, that is cold comfort for those Democrats who remember they enjoyed a six-point lead in the Gallup poll on that question in early August 2010. Three months later they lost six Senate seats, control of the House, and a slew of governorships.
One way for Democrats to boost turnout is to rile up their base voters with horror stories that Republicans are planning to impeach President Obama. …
Ed Morrissey says the GAO review of the building of the healthcare website is more proof of the incompetence of the obama command economy.
Prepare yourselves for a shock –- federal government bureaucracies produce incompetence. These days, the evidence of this is almost impossible to ignore, whether it’s the Department of Veterans Affairs and its wait-list fraud, or the IRS and its epidemic of hard drive failures that was curiously confined to those targeting conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status. One would be hard put to find evidence of government-produced excellence at any level, and most of us would be satisfied to discover a modicum of competence.
In this case, though, the government itself has confirmed its own bureaucratic incompetence. The Government Accountability Office has concluded its investigation into the debacle of HHS’ federal exchange for health insurance, Healthcare.gov, and the overall rollout of Obamacare last October. No one will faint from shock to learn that the GAO’s independent review confirms that management failures and a lack of accountability led to the disastrous rollout of the central marketplace to service the command economy created by the Affordable Care Act.
With more on government incompetence, Virginia Postrel writes on the lack of full time jobs in President Part-Time’s economy. She explores the effects on the labor forced to work part-time.
The worst thing about being on jury duty isn’t actually serving on a jury. It’s having to check in every day — possibly several times a day, depending on your local system — to see whether you’ll be needed. You can’t plan either your work or your personal life. Your schedule is unpredictable and completely out of your control.
For many part-time workers in the post-crash economy, life has become like endless jury duty. Scheduling software now lets employers constantly optimize who’s working, better balancing labor costs and likely demand. The process demands enormous flexibility from part-time workers, sometimes requiring them to be on call all the time without knowing when they’ll work or how much they’ll earn. That puts the kibosh on the age-old strategy of working two or more part-time jobs to make ends meet. As my colleague Megan McArdle writes, “No matter how hard you are willing to work, stringing together anything approaching a minimum income becomes impossible.”
The problem, she concludes, is the weak job market: “As long as the demand for low-skilled labor significantly lags the supply, workers will continue to struggle.” It’s an obvious conclusion. But it’s missing something important. …
Howard Kurtz updates us on the Lois Lerner emails just discovered and the lack of interest in much of the media.
The new batch of Lois Lerner emails may or may not be a smoking gun. But they’re something of a Rorschach test for the media.
For the former IRS official to be branding conservative commentators as “crazies” and “a–holes” is a telling moment in this scandal—but some in the media could care less.
To be sure, this investigation has dragged on a long time without proving a link between the White House and the Cincinnati office’s targeting of advocacy groups, especially on the right, for special scrutiny of their tax-exempt status. Critics say that conservative outlets such as Fox have tried to keep the story alive.
But the administration has done a decent job of bringing the story back to the headlines. The IRS acknowledged that it could not find two years’ worth of lost emails written or received by Lerner, who pleaded the Fifth when summoned by Congress. And the commissioner, William Koskinen, sounded downright arrogant when he showed up on the Hill.
Now the Republicans have found three emails in which Lerner disparaged conservatives.
What did the New York Times give the story? One measly paragraph, written by the AP, in a roundup column. …
As a reminder that our country does not always send such disgusting people to electoral success, Max Boot reviews a new book about the Reagan era.
Rick Perlstein has established himself as one of our foremost chroniclers of the rise of the modern conservative movement. It’s an unexpected niche for a card-carrying liberal. But if he’s occasionally tart in his comments about conservatives, he is not entirely unsympathetic either. In fact, he reserves some of his most cutting barbs (and there are many in his well-crafted if slightly over-caffeinated works) for clueless establishment liberals who all too readily dismissed the significance of conservative champions such as Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. …
… “In the years between 1973 and 1976, America suffered more wounds to its ideal of itself than at just about any other time in its history,” he claims. And he provides ample evidence to back up that assertion.
First and foremost, of course, was the defeat in Vietnam. Then, too, there was the first-ever resignation of a president and the Arab oil embargo, which led to nationwide shortages and rationing. Along with, as Mr. Perlstein writes, “A recession that saw hundreds of thousands of blue-collar workers idled during Christmastime [of 1974]; crime at a volume and ghastliness greater, according to one observer, ‘than at any time since the fifteenth century.’ Senate and House hearings on the Central Intelligence Agency that accused American presidents since Dwight Eisenhower of commanding squads of lawless assassins.”
These were just a few of the headline events. An assiduous researcher, Mr. Perlstein has unearthed numerous “smaller traumas,” too, such as “the near doubling of meat prices in the spring of 1973, when the president’s consumer advisor went on TV and informed viewers that ‘liver, kidney, brains and heart can be made into gourmet meals with seasoning, imagination, and more cooking time.’ ”
Mr. Perlstein suggests that this accumulation of crises had the potential to remake the U.S. into a very different kind of country. He quotes, for example, the editor of Intellectual Digest magazine writing in 1973: “For the first time, Americans have had at least a partial loss in the fundamental belief in ourselves. We’ve always believed we were the new men, the new people, the new society. The ‘last best hope on earth,’ in Lincoln’s terms. For the first time, we’ve really begun to doubt it.”
Liberals hoped to harness such self-doubt to redefine what it truly meant to “believe in America.” They wanted to displace wave-the-flag patriotism with a supposedly higher form of loyalty rooted in the freedom “to criticize, to interrogate, to analyze, to dissent,” and to replace boundless belief in America’s potential with a conviction that, as Jerry Brown (then, as now, governor of California) put it during his 1976 presidential campaign: “We have fiscal limits, we have ecological limits, we even have human limits.”
Mr. Perlstein argues that this revolution in American thought was effectively thwarted by the ascent of that perpetual optimist Ronald Reagan, who insisted on seeing even the most traumatic events in his own life (such as his father’s alcoholism or his own divorce) as being part of a providential design for the greater good. Reagan made no concessions to the self-critical weltanschauung of the 1970s.