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Charles Krauthammer writes on John Kerry; Clueless in Gaza.

John Kerry is upset by heavy criticism from Israelis — left, right and center — of his recent cease-fire diplomacy. But that’s only half the story. More significant is the consternation of America’s Arab partners, starting with the president of the Palestinian Authority. Mahmoud Abbas was stunned that Kerry would fly off to Paris to negotiate with Hamas allies Qatar and Turkey in talks that excluded the PA and Egypt.

The talks also undermined Egypt’s cease-fire proposal, which Israel had accepted and Hamas rejected (and would have prevented the vast majority of the casualties on both sides). “Kerry tried through his latest plan to destroy the Egyptian bid,” charged a senior Palestinian official quoted in the Arab daily Asharq Al-Awsat — a peace plan that the PA itself had supported.

It gets worse. Kerry did not just trample an Egyptian initiative. It was backed by the entire Arab League and specifically praised by Saudi Arabia. With the exception of Qatar — more a bank than a country — the Arabs are unanimous in wanting to see Hamas weakened, if not overthrown. The cease-fire-in-place they backed would have denied Hamas any reward for starting this war, while what Kerry brought back from Paris granted practically all of its demands.

Which is what provoked the severe criticism Kerry received at home. When as respected and scrupulously independent a national security expert as David Ignatius calls Kerry’s intervention a blunder, you know this is not partisan carping from the usual suspects. This is general amazement at Kerry’s cluelessness. …

… Whatever his intent, Kerry legitimized Hamas’s war criminality. Which makes his advocacy of Hamas’s terms not just a strategic blunder — enhancing a U.S.-designated terrorist group just when a wall-to-wall Arab front wants to see it gone — but a moral disgrace.

Andrew Malcolm analyzes President Part-timer bragging about last month’s job report.

… Take this June, for instance. Obama boasts the economy under his administration helped to create “about 300,000 new jobs.” (Actually, 288,000.)

OK. Let’s look inside those numbers. During that month the United States, in fact, lost 523,000 full-time jobs. They were replaced by 811,000 new jobs.

That might look good, until you realize that only 12,000 of those new jobs — 1.4% — were full-time. The other 799,000 “new jobs” — nearly 99% — that Obama’s claiming credit for were only part-time.

Apparently, in his remarks President Obama can’t find time to go into such detail. We’re pleased to help him out.

Nate Silver has an extensive analysis of the chances for the GOP to snag the Senate. This is worth reading carefully and bookmarking because on election night if you see Gardner in Colorado and Ernst in Iowa winning, then it will be a very good night for Republicans.

If Americans elected an entirely new set of senators every two years — as they elect members of the House of Representatives — this November’s Senate contest would look like a stalemate. President Obama remains unpopular; his approval ratings have ticked down a point or two over the past few months. But the Republican Party remains a poor alternative in the eyes of many voters, which means it may not be able to exploit Obama’s unpopularity as much as it otherwise might.

Generic Congressional ballot polls — probably the best indicator of the public’s overall mood toward the parties — suggest a relatively neutral partisan environment. Most of those polls show Democrats with a slight lead, but many of them are conducted among registered voters, meaning they can overstate Democrats’ standing as compared with polls of the people most likely to vote. Republicans usually have a turnout advantage, especially in midterm years, and their voters appear to be more enthusiastic about this November’s elections. Still, the gap is not as wide as it was in 2010.

The problem for Democrats is that this year’s Senate races aren’t being fought in neutral territory. Instead, the Class II senators on the ballot this year come from states that gave Obama an average of just 46 percent of the vote in 2012.

Democrats hold the majority of Class II seats now, but that’s because they were last contested in 2008, one of the best Democratic years of the past half-century. That year, Democrats won the popular vote for the U.S. House by almost 11 percentage points. Imagine if 2008 had been a neutral partisan environment instead. We can approximate this by applying a uniform swing of 11 percentage points toward Republicans in each Senate race. In that case, Democrats would have lost the races in Alaska, Colorado, Louisiana, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Carolina and Oregon — and Republicans would already hold a 52-48 majority in the Senate.

It therefore shouldn’t be surprising that we continue to see Republicans as slightly more likely than not to win a net of six seats this November and control of the Senate. A lot of it is simply reversion to the mean. This may not be a “wave” election as 2010 was, but Republicans don’t need a wave to take over the Senate. …

Jennifer Rubin has a great idea. Why not “pull the plug on those phony Sunday talk shows?”

On the Sunday talk shows, American politicians come in three categories. The first are there to impart spin that neither the host nor the audience buys. The second are there to be the subject of ridicule by the mainstream media and thereby prove helpful to Democrats. The third are there for the media to test and prod potential candidates for something. (Obtaining information from pols or determining their position on an issue is a minor concern. With 24/7 news, social media and uber-partisanship, it is rare that a pol ever says something new, informative or surprising.) All three categories were on full display Sunday.

We’ve noted before that when it comes to laughable spin on an Obama administration scandal or political ploy, the White House often resorts to sending out Dan Pfeiffer, who seems incapable of being shamed and will gladly say anything. It has gotten to the point that when he appears, you know something laughably false is going to be said. We were not disappointed on ABC’s “This Week”: …

The Koch Bros. gave $25 million to the United Negro College Fund. Armstrong Williams defends the fund against the leftists who have criticized the fund for accepting the gift. 

During the first week of June, the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) received a generous $25 million donation from conservative/libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch.

At a time when historically black colleges and universities are struggling to obtain funding for hopeful African Americans students, you would think that the UNCF and other prominent African American leaders would rejoice over the fifth largest donation in UNCF history.

Instead, the reaction to the $25 million donation has been anything but thankful. Some individuals on twitter wrote “UNCF literally sells ‘their soul to the devil’ accepting checks from the Koch Brothers without knowing their evil history” or “Koch donation to UNCF tells children everywhere that money is first and integrity is unnecessary.”

Executive director of Color for Change, Rashad Robinson, said, “Charity is not justice. Giving someone a check at the end of spending years putting in laws to suppress them is not justice. It’s cover. It’s maybe allowing the Kochs to sleep well at night.” …

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Richard Epstein, once of U. of Chicago Law, and now of the Hoover Institution, and Mario Loyola penned a look at the federal takeover of state governments.

The tug of war between the president and Congress is steadily escalating. The most recent sign of incipient institutional breakdown is House Speaker John Boehner’s suit against President Obama for rewriting laws and stepping on Congress’s turf.

But lurking in the wings is a second separation-of-powers issue, just as important, that Americans have mostly overlooked—the separation between federal and state government. In many areas, that vital divide is fast disappearing, owing to a relentless expansion of federal power. And both political parties share the blame.

Programs like Medicaid, Common Core, the Clean Air Act, and the federal highway system enjoy popular support because they appear to allow the federal government to accomplish things all Americans want, at least in the short run. But those programs often turn states into mere field offices of the federal government, often against their will, in turn creating a  host of structural problems.

Federal officials exert enormous influence over state budgets and state regulators, often behind the scenes. The new federalism replaces the “laboratories of democracy” with heavy-handed, once-size-fits-all solutions. Uniformity wins but diversity loses, along with innovation, local choice, and the Constitution’s necessary limits on government power. 

Take Medicaid. …

The impeachment wish continues to get critical media attention. This time from Ross Douthat of the NY Times.

… in political terms, there is a sordid sort of genius to the Obama strategy. The threat of a unilateral amnesty contributes to internal G.O.P. chaos on immigration strategy, chaos which can then be invoked (as the president did in a Friday news conference) to justify unilateral action. The impeachment predictions, meanwhile, help box Republicans in: If they howl — justifiably! — at executive overreach, the White House gets to say “look at the crazies — we told you they were out for blood.”

It’s only genius, however, if the nonconservative media — honorable liberals and evenhanded moderates alike — continue to accept the claim that immigration reform by fiat would just be politics as usual, and to analyze the idea strictly in terms of its political effects (on Latino turnout, Democratic fund-raising, G.O.P. internal strife).

This is the tone of the media coverage right now: The president may get the occasional rebuke for impeachment-baiting, but what the White House wants to do on immigration is assumed to be reasonable, legitimate, within normal political bounds.

It is not: It would be lawless, reckless, a leap into the antidemocratic dark.

And an American political class that lets this Rubicon be crossed without demurral will deserve to live with the consequences for the republic, in what remains of this presidency and in presidencies yet to come.

John Fund thinks censure is an appropriate remedy.

… It is important for our overall political health that we focus our criticism on President Obama’s unconstitutional acts and omissions rather than on the president himself. Lawmakers can word a censure resolution carefully to do this. Impeachment, on the other hand, would inevitably be viewed by many as a personal attack on President Obama.

But while impeachment isn’t appropriate, Congress must not simply acquiesce to President Obama’s numerous violations of the first Article of the Constitution, which is: “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States.” In the 1830s, Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky offered a Senate resolution denouncing as unconstitutional President Andrew Jackson’s actions against the Bank of the United States. He warned his fellow Senators: “The premonitory symptoms of despotism are upon us; and if Congress does not apply an instantaneous and effective remedy, the fatal collapse will soon come on.”

A resolution of censure would serve as a warning, a sort of constitutional yellow card, that Congress and the American people will not tolerate abuses of power indefinitely and that presidents who so overreach risk having a permanent blot on their record. President Obama should not be removed from office, but we will need more than mere criticism or even a lawsuit to remind him that his first duty is to uphold the laws, and that he is falling short.

WSJ OpEd on sailing making a comeback with commercial shipping.

As the shipping industry struggles with high fuel costs and tepid demand, some innovators say that high-tech sails may hold the secret to cheaper and cleaner fuel.

Chief among them is a group of maritime veterans whose company, Windship Technology, is working to revive the wind-powered merchant ship with sails made from metal alloys and carbon fibers.

A few companies have tried harnessing wind energy for shipping, though the technology is still largely in its initial development phase. Concepts have ranged from giant parachutes to towering cylindrical rotors. Rolls Royce and U.K.-based B9 Shipping are jointly developing a sail-natural gas hybrid system for small cargo ships.

London-based Windship is unique in moving into a higher weight class of long-haul cargo vessels—larger than 40,000 tons, and up to a quarter-mile long. …