Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

 PDF

The Gruber story has become a firestorm. Pickerhead doesn’t consider it news that fans of government are liars and cheats. They know they are governing against the will of the people and they lie to hide their intent. Our favorites have comments and we’ll go through them today. Charles Krauthammer is first. 

It’s not exactly the Ems Dispatch (the diplomatic cable Bismarck doctored to provoke the 1870 Franco-Prussian War). But what the just-resurfaced Gruber Confession lacks in world-historical consequence, it makes up for in world-class cynicism. This October 2013 video shows MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber, a principal architect of Obamacare, admitting that, in order to get it passed, the law was made deliberately obscure and deceptive. It constitutes the ultimate vindication of the charge that Obamacare was sold on a pack of lies.

“Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” said Gruber. “Basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.” This was no open-mic gaffe. It was a clear, indeed enthusiastic, admission to an academic conference of the mendacity underlying Obamacare. …

Craig Pirrong is next.

… The latest episode in the Gruber Gone Wild video collection is his performance at a conference at U Penn, where he said that key elements of the ACA had been written in a misleading way to conceal deliberately their true intent and effect. Gruber said that the law was written in a “tortured” way to ensure that CBO would not score it as taxes, and to hide the fact that the healthy would be subsidizing the sick. If these things had been transparent, the bill never would have passed. But fortunately, sayeth Gruber, American voters are too stupid to see through this.

How Leninist of him. The ends justify the means. Who-whom (the Smart People giving it to the Great Unwashed, but only for their own good).

Gruber again sends his regrets for his incautious language. No apology needed. His ex post honesty is welcome, if his (and the drafters’) contemporaneous dishonesty is not.

And there’s apparently a third video, in which Gruber again insults American voters.

Quite the franchise he’s got here.

Gruber’s revelations makes it clear that Obamacare was a fraud, passed (by the thinnest of margins) using utterly dishonest means. …

Roger Simon compares and contrasts the lies of obamacare and the recently announced climate “deal” with the Chinese.

… So, as I said, Mitch McConnell should relax.  Not that he shouldn’t oppose the deal, but in the end this will be the least of his problems. Obama is only making a fool of himself, at least in the eyes of the Chinese and probably most people who see the reality of the situation.

But not as a big a fool as Jonathan Gruber, the MIT professor and putative architect of Obamacare, who has been caught on three videos explaining why it was necessary to overcomplicate and lie about the Affordable Care Act in order to pass it. (At least he read it.  I doubt Obama did and I know Pelosi didn’t.)  Besides the professor’s sleazy Gramscian elitism that doesn’t do much for the reputation of MIT, Gruber has something unconscious and disconnected about him that suggests a personality disorder.   He doesn’t seem to quite get why people might be upset that his deliberate obscurantism completely undermines democracy and the founding documents of our country.  After all, he means well. (The ends justify the means meets Asperger Syndrome)

In fact, it’s actually quite fascist, reminiscent of Mussolini in a way.  But that makes Gruber the perfect adviser for Barack Obama, whose approach to governing is becoming ever closer to Il Duce’s statism. … 

The videos of Jonathan Gruber have been hiding in plain sight for more than a year. American Thinker posts on the man who found them.

The story about Rich Weinstein, an unknown investment advisor who poured through hours and hours of YouTube videos, radio interviews, and other media featuring Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber is both incredible and inspiring.

It is Weinstein who is responsible for ferreting out Gruber’s toxic comments about the “stupidity of the American people” and, more importantly, Gruber’s insistence that Obamacare subsidies were limited to state exchanges and should not be made available at the federal level. …

Another post from American Thinker on private citizens doing the job that investigative reporters won’t do. But then, Glenn Reynolds has said media types are just Democrat operatives with bylines.

As explained here yesterday, Rich Weinstein, an investment banker and private citizen, with just average computer skills and higher than average persistence, uncovered the video of MIT professor Jonathan Gruber admitting that voter stupidity and deliberate lack of government transparency were necessary for the passage of the (Un-)Affordable Care Act, aka ObamaCare, in which he was involved.  

This revelation raises the question: why didn’t any investigative reporter with access to the right people, a basic understanding of the problems involved with the ACA, paid for persistence and – most importantly – a chance for a career-making scoop undertake the investigative part of the job and make the discovery?  And where were the fabled watchdogs – governmental and non-governmental – when they were so desperately needed? …

National Review catches Dems trying to send Gruber down the memory hole.

Jonathan Gruber? “I don’t know who he is,” Nancy Pelosi told reporters on Thursday.

To jog the former speaker’s memory: Jonathan Gruber is, of course, the MIT economist widely hailed for his work as the “architect” of Obamacare. His sudden demotion comes after video surfaced over the weekend of a 2013 interview with Gruber at the University of Pennsylvania, where he told listeners that a “lack of transparency” was crucial to passing Obamacare through Congress in 2010, given the “stupidity of the American voter.” Three more videos have followed, all showing Gruber making substantially similar remarks.

Nancy Pelosi’s ignorance of Gruber is odd for two reasons. First, she was speaker of the House at the time that the Affordable Care Act was passed. Second, she cited Gruber — by name — at a press conference in 2009: “I don’t know if you have seen Jonathan Gruber of MIT’s analysis. . . . ” Around the same time, his work was quoted and linked on her website.

In Pelosi’s defense, she may only have been following the lead of Maine senator Angus King, who told the hosts of Fox & Friends earlier this week, “I don’t know who this guy is.” …

More on the memory loss from Jonathan Tobin.

… Just to put this in perspective, here’s what Pelosi said today about Gruber while refusing to answer a question about his admissions:

I don’t know who he is and he didn’t help write our bill.

Here’s what she said in November 2009:

We’re not finished getting all of our reports back from CBO, but we’ll have a side by side to compare. But our bill brings down rates. I don’t know if you have seen Jonathan Gruber of MIT’s analysis of what the comparison is to the status quo versus what will happen in our bill for those who seek insurance within the exchange. And our bill takes down those costs, even some now, and much less preventing the upward spiral.

Judging by Pelosi’s convenient memory loss today, the conviction among those who foisted ObamaCare on the nation that they can always count on “the stupidity of the American voter” wasn’t just something invented by Gruber. …

From Pajamas Media, a fifth Gruber video has surfaced.

… In the 2011 video shot by TrueNorthReports.com and sent to Watchdog.org on Thursday, Gruber appears before the Vermont House Health Care Committee to present recommendations for a universal, publicly financed health care program. The recommendations were part of the 2011 “Hsiao Report” submitted to the Legislature by economist William C. Hsiao and co-written by Gruber.

As Gruber sits listening, the committee chair reads a comment from a Vermonter who expresses concern that the economist’s plan might lead to “ballooning costs, increased taxes and bureaucratic outrages,” among other things.

After hearing the Vermonter’s worries, Gruber responds, “Was this written by my adolescent children by any chance?”

The remark was met with uproarious laughter…. 

… Contrary to Gruber’s snarky insult, the comment was not written by an adolescent.

“It was actually written by a former senior policy adviser in the White House who knew something about health care systems,” said John McClaughry, a two-term Vermont state senator and adviser to President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. …

Daily Caller finds Gruber in a PBS Frontline interview saying one of the deceptions was crafted in a meeting with the president.

… The Gateway Pundit highlighted a clip from Gruber’s 2012 interview with the PBS program Frontline in which the professor admitted that he worked together with the president in the Oval Office to conceal the political impact of their plan to get more tax revenue out of employer-sponsored health insurance plans by imposing a new “Cadillac tax” on companies. The Gateway Pundit also confirmed that Gruber checked into the West Wing for a meeting with the president on July 20, 2009, according to White House visitor logs.

“And Obama was like, ‘Well, you know’ — I mean, he is really a realistic guy. He is like, ‘Look, I can’t just do this.’ He said: ‘It is just not going to happen politically. The bill will not pass. How do we manage to get there through phases and other things?’ And we talked about it. And he was just very interested in that topic,” Gruber continued.

“Once again, that ultimately became the genesis of what is called the Cadillac tax in the health-care bill, which I think is one of the most important and bravest parts of the health care law and doesn’t get nearly enough credit,” Gruber added. …

Ed Morrissey says it’s true Gruber was paid $400,000 by the feds for his work crafting the Democrat subterfuge. That’s just the feds. States paid him $1.6 million. 

Or, if you prefer a more acerbic conclusion, taxpayers paid Jonathan Gruber in the mid-six-figures to lie to them, and then brag about it to all of his friends and fans later. Glenn Kessler fact-checked an assertion made by Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) about Gruber’s paid involvement with ObamaCare while Nancy Pelosi et al kept claiming amnesia about the man called the “architect” of the law. Normally, Kessler jumps in to correct factually lacking claims, but this one gets the rare check mark.

The story begins in February 2009, when HHS signed Gruber to a contract to provide a micro-simulation model for four months at $95,000. They later added an eight-month contract for $297,000, bring the total known value of “almost $400,000,” exactly what Barrasso stated. For his year or so on the job — which would have been just a little more than the ObamaCare legislative effort lasted (June 2009 – March 2010) — Gruber received roughly what the President of the United States makes in a year. That’s not too bad for an MIT professor. …

Last, but not least, we get liberal Ron Fournier’s Gruber take.

… Gruber’s remarks struck a nerve with me.

Appearing on an academic panel a year ago, this key Obamacare adviser argued that the law never would have passed if the administration had been honest about the fact that the so-called penalty for noncompliance with the mandate was actually a tax.

“And, basically, call it ‘the stupidity of the American voter,’ or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass,” Gruber said.

He called you stupid. He admitted that the White House lied to you. Its officials lied to all of us—Republicans, Democrats, and independents; rich and poor; white and brown; men and women.

Liberals should be the angriest. Not only were they personally deceived, but the administration’s dishonest approach to health care reform has helped make Obamacare unpopular while undermining the public’s faith in an activist government. A double blow to progressives.

On top of that, Gruber has helped make the legal case for anti-Obamacare lawyers. In July, a year-old video surfaced in which Gruber said Washington legally withholds money from states that don’t create their own health care exchanges. That could be construed by the Supreme Court to buttress the case against health insurance subsidies.

Last year, The Post helped document how Obama and his advisers knowingly misled the public during his 2012 reelection campaign by repeatedly saying that, under Obamacare, people could keep their doctors and keep their health plans. To knowingly mislead is to lie. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Roger Simon says Hispanics are the next target of the liberal racism machine. 

Roughly ninety-five percent of racism in America today now either emanates from liberals or is generated by them.  The Democratic Party relies on racism because, without the perception of serious ongoing racism in our culture, the identity politics on which the party depends would disintegrate.   As presently constituted, they wouldn’t win another national or statewide  election.  This makes the Democratic Party by necessity a virtual racism-manufacturing machine.

The Al Sharptons and Jesse Jacksons are not anomalies.  They are the motor that drives the car.  Barack Obama could in no way be a post-racial president as promised, even if he wanted to be (doubtful).   He wouldn’t have had a party anymore.

Do I exaggerate? Actually it’s worse.  Because economic policies such as tax preferences for disadvantaged neighborhoods a la Jack Kemp that could have benefited black people are anathema to Obama and liberals, African Americans have little chance of improving their condition.  No original ideas are instituted.  It’s always the same old, same old from the days of Lyndon Johnson.  Result: seventy percent of black children born out of wedlock and all the other horrifying statistics that are only a key stroke or two away for anyone with a computer — numbers on food stamps , unemployed, black-on-black crime, etc. …

Megan McArdle posts on the Supreme’s second look at the healthcare act.

Just as those of us who covered the Affordable Care Act were investigating new topics to cover, the Supreme Court yanks us back in.  Today they agreed to hear a set of cases involving the availability of insurance subsidies on federally operated insurance exchanges.  (I will henceforth refer to this collective body as the Halbig case for ease of reading.) 

Sounds kind of boring, right?  Actually, this could severely damage, even potentially kill, Obama’s signature program.  I won’t recap all the issues that an adverse ruling would create for our health-care overlords, but if you are interested in the details, read my write-up from this summer.  For the rest of you, suffice to say that this case could ultimately determine whether the program survives, and if so, in what form. …

Ed Morrissey reports on WaPo’s slams of the president.

This hasn’t exactly been a banner week for Democrats, but especially so for Barack Obama. The Washington Post corrected him twice this week on claims made by the President’s denial of reality in his post-election press conference, the first time in a formal fact-check from Glenn Kessler. Obama tried arguing that the election results didn’t really reflect on ObamaCare despite the success of Republicans in defeating Democrats who supported it — or even those who refused to answer the question — because ObamaCare has reduced the costs of health care in every year since its passage. That assumes facts not in evidence in terms of causal relationship, Kessler notes, and isn’t true on the facts anyway:

 ”In fact, despite the president’s claim of a decrease of every year, the White House’s own chart shows that the 2013 estimate represents a slight uptick from 2012, when adjusted for inflation and population. As the White House report puts it, “the three years since 2010 will have recorded the three slowest health-care spending growth rates since record keeping began in 1960.” That is impressive, but it is not the same as health costs going down “every single year” since the law was passed in 2010. …” …

Politico piece calls for the firing of Valarie Jarrett. Pickerhead thinks this would be a mistake. She is probably more responsible for administration mistakes than anyone else. We need her next to the president, whispering in his ear telling him how wonderful he is.

Almost since the start of Barack Obama’s presidency, people who have actual, real duties in the West Wing of the White House—the working, executive part of the government, that is—have been urging him to do something about Valerie Jarrett. Push her into the East Wing, where she can hang out with Michelle Obama and the White House social secretary, or give her an ambassadorship—or something—but for Pete’s sake get her out of the way of the hard work of governing that needs to be done.

Now it’s really time to do it.

Let’s stipulate right away that it would be unfair to blame Jarrett, the longtime Obama family friend and confidante, for the walloping that the president and his party suffered at the polls on Tuesday. And Jarrett will no doubt be needed in the weeks ahead to comfort her old pals, Barack and Michelle. What happened on Tuesday almost couldn’t be worse for Obama personally—not just the Senate’s going Republican but all those governorships lost, including Illinois Governor Pat Quinn’s defeat in Obama’s adopted home state, even after the president and first lady came to Illinois to campaign for him. The morning after the elections, Democrats and their top staffers were hopping mad, blaming Obama and, by extension, his staff for the defeat.

But let’s also face facts—and expect the president to do so as well. We’re at that point in an already long-toothed presidency when things inside really need to change. In the days before anyone knew how brutally the Democrats would get beaten, politicians and staffers and pundits were urging a shakeup of the White House staff. …

The New Republic has more on Jarrett.

Even at this late date in the Obama presidency, there is no surer way to elicit paranoid whispers or armchair psychoanalysis from Democrats than to mention the name Valerie Jarrett. Party operatives, administration officials—they are shocked by her sheer longevity and marvel at her influence. When I asked a longtime source who left the Obama White House years ago for his impressions of Jarrett, he confessed that he was too fearful to speak with me, even off the record.

This is not as irrational as it sounds. Obama has said he consults Jarrett on every major decision, something current and former aides corroborate. “Her role since she has been at the White House is one of the broadest and most expansive roles that I think has ever existed in the West Wing,” says Anita Dunn, Obama’s former communications director. Broader, even, than the role of running the West Wing. This summer, the call to send Attorney General Eric Holder on a risky visit to Ferguson, Missouri, was made by exactly three people: Holder himself, the president, and Jarrett, who were vacationing together on Martha’s Vineyard. When I asked Holder if Denis McDonough, the chief of staff, was part of the conversation, he thought for a moment and said, “He was not there.” (Holder hastened to add that “someone had spoken to him.”)

Jarrett holds a key vote on Cabinet picks (she opposed Larry Summers at Treasury and was among the first Obama aides to come around on Hillary Clinton at State) and has an outsize say on ambassadorships and judgeships. She helps determine who gets invited to the First Lady’s Box for the State of the Union, who attends state dinners and bill-signing ceremonies, and who sits where at any of the above. She has placed friends and former employees in important positions across the administration—“you can be my person over there,” is a common refrain.

And Jarrett has been known to enjoy the perks of high office herself. When administration aides plan “bilats,” the term of art for meetings of two countries’ top officials, they realize that whatever size meeting they negotiate—nine by nine, eight by eight, etc.—our side will typically include one less foreign policy hand, because Jarrett has a standing seat at any table that includes the president.

Not surprisingly, all this influence has won Jarrett legions of detractors. They complain that she has too much control over who sees the president. That she skews his decision-making with her after-hours visits. That she is an incorrigible yes-woman. That she has, in effect, become the chief architect of his very prominent and occasionally suffocating bubble.

There is an element of truth to this critique. While aboard Air Force One at the end of the 2012 campaign, Jarrett turned to Obama and told him, “Mr. President, I don’t understand how you’re not getting eighty-five percent of the vote.” The other Obama aides in the cabin looked around in disbelief before concluding that she’d been earnest. …

 

Late Night from Andrew Malcolm.

Fallon: Joe Biden will soon visit Turkey, Ukraine and Morocco. So, Biden’s advisers are learning how to say “I’m sorry” in all three languages.

Meyers: On Sunday, a couple got married on a Southwest Airlines flight. They didn’t want to get married, but the seats were so close together, they had to.

Fallon: A new study finds that babies hear three times as many words from their moms as from their dads. My wife said “That’s so fascinating!” I said “Cool.”

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Jennifer Rubin picks Scott Walker as the Distinguished Pol of The Week.

… But this week special praise goes to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker who won his third race in four years, once again standing up to Big Labor and withstanding an influx of out of state money. As Betsy Woodruff wrote, “While Walker was repeating the same simple pitch throughout the state, national labor organizations were running ads targeting the governor and [Mary]Burke was hobnobbing with the president and first lady in the state’s two most liberal cities, Madison and Milwaukee. If Burke bet on this being an anti-incumbent election cycle, Walker bet on its being anti-Washington. And he bet right.”

Walker has perfected the pitch to middle- and working-class voters, fashioning himself as their advocate against elites, Washington bureaucrats and liberal special interests. His rhetoric is simple but direct and effective, serving to accentuate his Midwest roots and blue-collar ethos.

Every prominent politician these days is evaluated as a prospective presidential candidate. Walker may lack foreign policy know-how or charisma, but his skill and competency in his present role are evident. He is an excellent governor who was able to show results from his reforms. And he is a model campaigner for Republicans trying to break through in purple and blue states. And for that we can say, well done, Gov. Walker.

Walker was also the subject of the WSJ Weekend Interview. Hearing how he addressed the headquarters crowd election night, you would think he just participated in a Passover Seder. And remember, he is the only potential 2016 candidate without a college degree. We’ve had enough of government by A students. We need drop-outs and C students.

‘Wow. First off, I want to thank God for his abundant grace and mercy. Win or lose, it is more than sufficient for each and every one of us,” Scott Walker said, taking the podium on Tuesday night at the Wisconsin state fair grounds after being re-re-elected for governor. It was a curious register, given that Mr. Walker’s religious faith, even though his father was a pastor, has never seemed central to his economic and political identity. But then maybe the intervention of a higher power is as good an explanation as any for the commanding victory that unions and liberals went all-out to prevent. …

… The race Mr. Walker won this week was close-run and became a referendum on his first term. His opponent, Mary Burke, a former executive of Trek Bicycle Corp., ran as a not-Walker. The governor calls her “almost the bionic candidate,” in the sense that her intelligence, business experience, gender and noncommittal up-the-middle platform were focus-group-tested as the perfect foil for his agenda and his track record of the past few years.

In June 2012, Mr. Walker became the only governor in American history to survive a recall election—initiated to reverse his enormously controversial 2011 budget-repair bill, Act 10, which limited the collective-bargaining powers of public-employee unions, as well as automatic dues collection and health and pension benefits. Big Labor and national Democrats returned this year to avenge their loss, though the irony was that Ms. Burke declined to relitigate Act 10 or even take a coherent position. The election turned on competing accounts of economic progress under Mr. Walker, such as job creation and rising household incomes.

Surveys indicated that Mr. Walker and Ms. Burke were statistically tied through the summer and most of the fall, though Mr. Walker observes that “those polls consistently showed that the opinion of the state in terms of right-track/wrong-track was still very positive. A solid majority felt the state was headed in the right direction.” He was confident that he would receive those votes in the end. …

Before the election, Victor Davis Hanson posted on the campaign the Dems could not run.

… Foreign policy?

Consider the failed Russia “reset,” the bugout from Iraq, the “leading from behind” in Libya, the Benghazi scandal, the Iranian soon-to-be bomb, the smearing of Israel, the special relationship with a thuggish Erdogan, the dissolving Middle East, the eroding NATO, and an ever more bullying China. No Democrat will run on something like, “I fully support the Obama foreign policy initiatives and the brilliant work of Secretaries Clinton and Kerry.” Foreign policy, then, cannot be a campaign issue, in the positive sense of defending the status quo. No Democrat even made the attempt.

How about bigger and competent government?

No Democratic congressman would wish to campaign on, “Obama made government work for you — just look at the new and dynamic IRS, VA, ICE, GSA, NSA, and Secret Service.” “Not a smidgen of corruption” is not a viable campaign theme. No candidate even tried that.

Why don’t Sens. Landrieu, Pryor, and Udall play up their support for the Obama economy?

We did not see a candidate commercial like the following: “I was instrumental in keeping interest rates at zero percent for six years. I made sure that we borrowed another $7 trillion and oversaw the $1 trillion stimulus. We kept GDP above 1% and unemployment below 7%.” Apparently avoiding a depression is not felt to be an economic renaissance, and thus not a winning message.

How about Democratic ads trumpeting new big-ticket government initiatives? …

Remember “Julia?”  Kevin Williamson says she lost last week.

A funny thing happened in the “war on women” — Mia Love and Joni Ernst won, Wendy Davis and Sandra Fluke lost. The representative who will be the youngest woman ever to have served in Congress, Elise Stefanik, is a Republican who won a formerly Democratic seat — not in Oklahoma or Texas but in New York. Senator-elect Ernst is a 21-year veteran of the Army Reserve and National Guard who served overseas during the Iraq war; Representative-elect Love, a daughter of Haitian immigrants who came to the United States fleeing the Tonton Macoutes, is a former city councilman and mayor of Saratoga Springs, Utah.

The difference could not be more dramatic: The Democrats’ vision of an American woman’s life was best expressed in the Obama campaign’s insipid “Julia” cartoons, in which a faceless, featureless woman at every crossroads in her life turns to the federal government, as personified by Barack Obama, for succor and support. From negotiating a salary to managing her pregnancy, Julia cannot do anything for herself — at every turn, she is reminded that she enjoys political patronage “under President Obama,” in the campaign’s psychosexually fraught and insistently reiterated phrase. So much for the Democrats. And the Republican women of 2014? They helped fight wars and made new lives for themselves on foreign shores. They were women who ran for office on policy platforms, not on their uteruses. …

Peter Wehner comments on the GOP wave.

… There are plenty of reasons for Republicans to be buoyed. They have very impressive people, including people in their ’30s and ’40s, at every level. Of the two parties, the GOP seems to be the one of greater energy and ideas. The Democratic Party, and liberalism more broadly, seems stale, aging, and exhausted. And of course the GOP has now strung together massive, back-to-back midterm wins. But it’s still worth keeping in mind that Republicans had spectacular showings in 1994 and 2010–and they were defeated by rather large margins in the presidential races two years after those wins. The danger is that a victory like the one Republicans experienced on Tuesday creates a false dawn, a sense of false confidence. Winning midterms elections is important; but midterm elections are different than presidential elections. The GOP still has repair work to do and things to build on. But progress is being made–and the results of this week’s election are the best evidence of that fact.

WSJ’s Allysia Finley says “teacher’s unions flunked their mid-terms.”

… Reformers like Republican Govs. Rick Snyder in Michigan, Scott Walker in Wisconsin, Nathan Deal in Georgia and Sam Brownback in Kansas did cut through a torrent of negative union ads and prevailed.

Teachers unions this election provided an object lesson in how to lie with statistics by lambasting school reformers across the country for “cutting” education spending. According to one ad, Mr. Brownback signed the “largest single cut to education in Kansas history.” Florida Gov. Rick Scott stood accused of taking a $1.3 billion sledgehammer to schools, and Mr. Snyder of slashing $1 billion from education.

Yet in Kansas, total per pupil spending has increased to $12,960 from $12,283 since Mr. Brownback was elected in 2010, despite a $412 per pupil decline in federal aid. Mr. Snyder has increased education spending by $660 per student over his four-year tenure, while Mr. Scott has increased annual state funding for schools by 20%—nearly $2 billion—over the past four years.

The teachers unions also whacked Mr. Scott for expanding private-school scholarships for low-income kids, eliminating tenure, and linking pay to performance for new teachers. “Florida’s private-school voucher programs are a risky experiment that gambles taxpayers’ money and children’s lives,” Florida Education Association vice president Joanne McCall warned in a local newspaper op-ed. “Voucher schools are largely unregulated.”

So far as we know, there have been no reports in Florida of death-by-voucher. …

More on the union losses from the Washington Post. There was an interesting contest in CA where two Dems squared off for state schools superintendent. The reformer was narrowly beaten by the old pol in a race that served as a metaphor for the problems facing Democrats throughout the country.  

… And in the white-hot battle in California for state schools superintendent, the union’s choice, Tom Torlakson (D), was narrowly reelected, beating back Marshall Tuck (D) by 52 percent to 48 percent.

While both are Democrats, they differ over the best way to improve public education, reflecting a schism within the national Democratic Party. Torlakson pushed for more investment in public schools, does not believe student test scores should be used to assess teachers, and said charter schools need more oversight. Tuck supports expansion of public charter schools, argued for more accountability for teachers and said California’s teacher tenure laws are an obstacle to improving schools.

The down-ballot contest generated $30 million in spending, three times as much as the race for governor, with money pouring in from around the country. Torlakson received heavy support from teachers unions while Tuck had the backing of billionaire philanthropists such as Bloomberg, the heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton, and Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Tailgating at The University of Mississippi is covered in the NY Times. And the Times didn’t look down its Northeast nose at the event.

OXFORD, Miss. — Perhaps there isn’t a word for the ritualized pregame revelry on the University of Mississippi campus. “Tailgating” certainly does not do it justice. It might be a gathering of football fans before a game, but it hardly resembles those celebrated scenes in Green Bay and Kansas City, which are modest by comparison.

For one, there are the $71,000 portable toilets. And then there’s this fall’s $750,000 university budget for the quintessentially Southern marvel known as the Grove. The price tags, and the orchestration, just keep getting grander.

“We want to put on the dog here,” one fan said, using regional vernacular for “over the top.”

Rebels fans began putting on the dog in high fashion again Friday night, when an estimated 2,500 tents were erected for Saturday’s game between Mississippi, ranked seventh in The Associated Press Top 25, and Auburn, ranked fourth. To help set the stage, here is a tour of one of the country’s most elaborate pregame gatherings. …

 

… In many tents, food is served on silver trays, drinks splash through fountains and chandeliers hang from the metal supports. Fur coats abound. Jackets, ties and cowboy boots are common.

Prominent chefs are hired to cater meals, and chicken is a favored entree. “You don’t want to be a chicken in northern Mississippi on game day,” said Tim Walsh, the executive director of alumni affairs.

The tents themselves can be fashion statements. Some fans hire interior decorators. One tent on the Walk of Champions (the Grove’s Main Street) is painted with zebra stripes. One of its owners is Jane Foster, a converted MississippiState fan. She brings in a rock band once a year. …

Dilbert’s Blog reviews the iPhone 6.

After a month-long wait – and salivating the entire time – I finally got my iPhone 6 Plus. I don’t know how Apple manipulates my emotions so effectively but I am thoroughly impressed at the mental anguish they put me through while I waited.

My heart was racing as I removed the phone from its strikingly well-designed packaging. Apple makes the process of opening a box feel as if you are winning a prize. Every color, shape, texture and probably smell has been studied and tweaked to perfection. Simply touching the product or its associated packaging is a tactile joy.

The experience of getting the iPhone 6 Plus was like getting a puppy. …

… But I needed a case. I tried to imagine my anguish if I accidentally dropped this new member of my family and cracked it. I needed protection.

So I went to the Verizon store and bought the only cover they had left that doesn’t look like a six-year old girl’s bedroom wall. The color of my new case could best be described as Colonoscopy Brown. It is deeply disturbing. But because I love my iPhone 6 Plus, and want to keep it safe, I put it on. …

Jewish World Review article downplays the efficacy of Tamiflu. But it does recommend chicken noodle soup. What, you wanted gefilte fish?

Neuraminidase inhibitors including Tamiflu and Relenza are recommended by government health agencies for treating and preventing symptoms of the influenza virus in both children and adults. A review conducted by the Cochrane Collaboration has now revealed these treatment options may cause more harmful side effects compared to their ability to reduce and prevent flu-like symptoms. …

… There are certain household treatments people suffering from flu-like symptoms can apply in order to achieve a natural remedy. For example, our best defense against any bodily ailment is staying hydrated. Drinking and avoiding alcohol, coffee, and soda can go a long way in maintaining a healthy immune system. With its anti-inflammatory properties, chicken noodle soup can also serve as a natural, at-home remedy for boosting the movement of immune system cells. Lastly, avoid dry places where cold viruses thrive and seek humidity. Adding moisture to your home via a humidifier can prevent a stuffy nose and scratchy throat by dampening our airways’ mucous membrane.

From Fight Aging we learn dementia may be the result of many small strokes.

… The researchers conducted an intensive study to observe the development of this white matter disease over a short period of time, rather than on an annual basis – the interval at which previous studies have performed repeat brain imaging. The study involved 5 patients with white matter disease undergoing detailed MRI scanning of their brains every week for 16 consecutive weeks. The weekly MRI scans revealed new tiny spots arising in the brain’s white matter that were, based on their MRI appearance, characteristic of small new strokes (cerebral infarcts). The lesions had no symptoms but, with time, came to resemble the existing white matter disease in the subjects’ brains. In the study’s random sampling, the majority of subjects had this phenomenon: Tiny strokes occurring without symptoms, and developing into the kind of white matter disease that causes dementia. …

US Naval Institute says China’s new stealth fighter has the attention of our pilots.

China’s new Shenyang J-31 stealth fighter — making its debut next week at the Zhuhai international airshow — could eventually become more than a match for American stealth fighters in battle, several U.S. military and industry officials told USNI News.

The J-31 is China’s latest crack at developing a modern so-called fifth-generation stealth fighter — equivalent in ability to Lockheed Martin’s F-22 Raptor or F-35 Lighting II Joint Strike Fighter.

“They’re still in the glossy brochure phase of development, so they still look ten feet tall and bulletproof,” one senior U.S. fighter pilot familiar with the F-35 program told USNI News.

“I think they’ll eventually be on par with our fifth gen jets — as they should be, because industrial espionage is alive and well.” …

WSJ writes on the growing amount of unused retail space that is being converted to other uses.

The Internet is moving to a shopping center near you.

In Fort Wayne, Ind., a vacated Target store is about to be home to rows of computer servers, network routers and Ethernet cables courtesy of a local data-center operator. In Jackson, Miss., a former McRae’s department store will get the same treatment next year. And one quadrant of the Marley Station Mall south of Baltimore is already occupied by a data-center company that last year offered to buy out the rest of the building.

As America’s retailers struggle to keep up with online shopping, the Internet is starting to settle into some of the very spaces where brick-and-mortar customers used to shop. The shift brings welcome tenants to some abandoned stretches of the suburban landscape, though it doesn’t replace all the jobs and sales-tax revenue that local communities lost when stores left the building.

Venyu Solutions LLC, a data-center operator that is renovating the former department store in Jackson, sees more opportunity for conversion because of sheer amount of distressed retail properties. “Who else wants them?” said Brian Vandegrift, the company’s executive vice president of sales. “You’re not competing with people in substantial businesses who want those spaces.”

Many malls and neighborhood shopping centers are still grappling with vacancies five years after the recession. …

Ever wonder while waiting to board a plane whether there’s a faster way? Wired has a piece on how boarding could be improved.

No, there’s not much chance it will be adopted. Just wanted you to know people are trying.

I was at the airport last week, and all I wanted to do was sit down, strap in, and lift off. Of course I couldn’t, because there were a bunch of people standing in my way. As the line crept along, I scanned ahead for malingerers, but everyone seemed sufficiently ready to board. I couldn’t help but wonder, is there a more efficient way for airlines to put get our butts into our seats, and into the air?

Millions of other people probably have pondered this question. At least one wrote a computer program to find the answer. Jason Steffen is an astrophysicist at NorthwesternUniversity, and several years ago he modeled different airline boarding methods to see what made them so slow. He also figured out how airlines could get us on board much faster. …

ARS Technica says LED bulbs have pulled ahead of compact fluorescents in efficiency.

A few years back, when I got my first LED-based lightbulb, it seemed natural to stick it into a wattmeter to get a sense of its efficiency. At under 15 Watts of power drawn, it clearly beat any incandescent bulbs I’d ever put into the same lamp. But I was disappointed to find that it wasn’t any better than a compact fluorescent bulb.

Based on the graph shown above, my experience was hardly unique; in fact, it was decidedly average. Although the technology behind LEDs had the potential to be far more efficient than any other lighting source, the complete LED bulb package wasn’t doing that much better at the time than the far more mature fluorescent bulbs, which output roughly 60 lumens for every Watt put in.

After some small boosts in 2013, however, a new generation of more efficient LEDs hit the market this year, raising the typical efficiency to nearly 100 lumens per Watt. The increased efficiency is coming at a time when prices for the bulbs continue to drop; given their expected lifetimes, they’re now far and away the most economical choice for most uses.

The graph also nicely displays why incandescents have been booted off the market for a failure to achieve sufficient efficiency, as they have flatlined at around 15 lumens per Watt.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

We start today with a WaPo blog post on how Harry Reid’s senior aide ripped the administration. 

You almost never see this in politics. David Krone, the chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D), launches a major attack on the White House in this blockbuster story by my colleagues Philip Rucker and Robert Costa:

“At a March 4 Oval Office meeting, Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and other Senate leaders pleaded with Obama to transfer millions in party funds and to also help raise money for an outside group. “We were never going to get on the same page,” said David Krone, Reid’s chief of staff. “We were beating our heads against the wall.”

The tension represented something more fundamental than money — it was indicative of a wider resentment among Democrats in the Capitol of how the president was approaching the election and how, they felt, he was dragging them down. …”

Here’s the Post article by Phillip Rucker and Robert Costa. (Costa, btw, was a reporter for The National Review until the start of this year.)

One night in early September, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called a longtime colleague, Sen. Pat Roberts, from his living room in Louisville, furious about the 78-year-old Republican’s fumbling and lethargic reelection campaign.

Roberts had raised a paltry $62,000 in August. He was airing no ads. His campaign staff, mostly college students, had gone back to school. Most worrisome, McConnell had in his hands a private polling memo predicting Roberts would lose in Kansas — an alarming possibility that could cost the GOP a Senate majority.

McConnell was blunt. A shake-up was needed. Roberts unleashed a flurry of expletives at McConnell. Ultimately, though, the ex-Marine gave in. The next day, he led campaign manager Leroy Towns, 70, a retired college professor and confidant, into a Topeka conference room and fired him. There were tears. “It hurt,” Towns said.

Eleven hundred miles away in Richmond, Va., Chris LaCivita, a hard-charging Republican fixer, was on his back deck picking apart steamed crabs and drinking beer with friends when he got the order to fly to Kansas. The Republican rescue was underway. …

 

… From the outset of the campaign, Republicans had a simple plan: Don’t make mistakes, and make it all about Obama, Obama, Obama. Every new White House crisis would bring a new Republican ad. And every Democratic incumbent would be attacked relentlessly for voting with the president 97 or 98 or 99 percent of the time.

But none of that would work if Republicans did not get the right candidates, a basic tenet that had eluded them in recent elections. This time, party officials pushed bad candidates out, recruited and coached contenders with broad appeal and resuscitated two flailing incumbents, Roberts and Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi. …

 

… In New Hampshire, Scott Brown, the former senator from neighboring Massachusetts, waffled about taking on Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D). Brown said he would pull the trigger only if the party met an eight-point list of demands that included not allowing another government shutdown or a loose-cannon conservative like Akin to become the nominee in another state. Party operatives assured him they would do their best, and Brown was in.

But just such a candidate was on the rise down in Mississippi.

Chris McDaniel, a tea party conservative and former talk-radio host, was making a run for the Senate. Republican leaders, wary about McDaniel, had lined up Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann to run against him, on the assumption that Sen. Thad Cochran would retire.

Cochran upended those plans when he made a surprise announcement in December, a day shy of his 76th birthday, that he would seek a seventh term. The primary was set: the firebrand McDaniel vs. the veteran Cochran.

Republicans across the country worried that Democrats would turn McDaniel, with his history of inflammatory statements, into the face of their party and link every other candidate to him. Just last month, Collins pulled an anti-McDaniel mailer out from his desk and opened it to play sound of McDaniel referring to Hispanic women as “mamacitas” — demonstrating that McDaniel as the nominee would have been what Collins called “an existential threat to the entire party.”

Researchers at the NRSC pored over McDaniel’s radio tapes, searching for damaging audio. Within a month, they had uncovered a slew of incendiary racial remarks. But fearful that McDaniel could still win the nomination, they leaked only a small slice of the material — about “one-50th,” Dayspring estimated.

For much of the primary, Cochran was sleepy and might have been defeated outright were it not for a late push from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which aired a pro-Cochran testimonial from football legend Brett Favre on his farm in Hattiesburg, Miss.

McDaniel, a state senator, won the primary — though not by enough to avoid a runoff. The Republican establishment, as well as some black Democrats, rallied to Cochran’s side, and the incumbent narrowly prevailed.

McDaniel, bitter to this day, has refused to concede. “You had the entire Republican Party in Washington doing everything they could to keep the true conservative out,” he said. …

Joel Kotkin says changing demographics hurt Democrats this year.

… It can be argued that changing demographics will make this year’s blowout a temporary setback. Among Latinos, a key constituency for the Democrats’ future, economic hardships and disappointment at the Democrats’ failure to achieve immigration reform have blunted but hardly reversed voting trends. This year, according to exit polls, Latinos remained strongly Democratic, but down from the nearly three-quarters who supported President Obama in 2012 to something slightly less than two-thirds.

One encouraging sign for Republicans: Texas Governor-elect Abbott won 44% of the Hispanic vote.

Perhaps the more serious may be shifts among millennials, a generation that, for the most part, stands most in danger of proleterianization. Once solidly pro-Democratic, this generation has become increasingly alienated as the economy has failed to produce notable gains. In states across the country, the Republican share of millennial votes grew considerably. According to exit polls, their deficit with voters under 30 has shrunk to 13%. The Republicans actually won among white voters under 30, 53% to 44%, even as they lost 30- to 44-year-olds, 58 to 40. If these trends hold, the generation gap that many Democrats saw as their long-term political meal ticket may prove somewhat less compelling. …

A Power Line post highlights Dem malpractice.

1. Reid cleverly gets Baucus (MT) to resign early to be appointed ambassador. The Dem governor than appoints a senator who can run as an “incumbent.” They appoint a guy who has plagiarism problems and has to drop out. They can only find some whacko woman to run instead. Easy R pick up.

5. Mark Uterus (CO) runs a campaign focusing on the war on womyn, disgusting almost everyone. R pick up.

10. Mary Landrieu claims her independence from Obama, but because Reid won’t let anything of substance come to the Senate floor her voting record is 97% with Obama. She will lose the run-off in December.

Michael Barone on the shrinkage of the obama majority.

Some observations on the election:

(1) This was a wave, folks. It will be a benchmark for judging waves, for either party, for years.

(2) In seriously contested races Republican candidates were generally younger, more vigorous, more sunny and optimistic than Democrats. The contrast was sharpest in Colorado and Iowa, which voted twice for President Obama. Cory Gardner and Joni Ernst seemed to be looking forward to the future. Their opponents grimly championed the stale causes of feminists and trial lawyers of the past.

Democrats see themselves as the party of the future. But their policies are antique. The federal minimum wage dates to 1938, equal pay for women to 1963, access to contraceptives to 1965. Raising these issues now is campaign gimmickry, not serious policymaking.

Democratic leading lights have been around a long time. The party’s two congressional leaders are in their 70s. The governors of the two largest Democratic states are sons of former governors who won their first statewide elections in 1950 and 1978. …

Peggy Noonan turned out her best column in years.

The drubbin’, thumpin’, poundin’ was a two-part wave, a significant Republican rise in the U.S. Senate and a Democratic collapse in the governorships.

It was one of those nights neither party ever forgets.

Republicans won not only because of a favorable map. In solid Democratic states, they won big or came close. Nor were the results due only to low midterm turnout. Nate Cohn, in the New York Times , noted that turnout in Colorado was up over 2010, yet Republican Cory Gardner beat incumbent Sen. Mark Udall with room to spare. The sheer number of blowouts was mind-boggling. …

 

… But that is only one of the amazing things that happened this week. The second is how the president responded.

A sweep this size tends to resolve some things. The landscape shifts, political figures accommodate themselves to it.

Common sense says a chastened president would acknowledge the obvious—some things aren’t working, he has made some mistakes—and, in Mr. Obama’s case, hit the reset button with Congress. Reach out, be humble. Humility has power. It shows people that you have some give—you get the message, you are capable of self-correcting.

That is not what he’s doing. The president is instead doubling down on hostility, antagonism and distance.

What a mistake. What a huge, historic mistake, not only for him but also for his party. …

 

… The president here is doing what he has been doing for a while, helping Republicans look good. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Roger Simon sets the tone for how we might think about  last week’s results.

… Too bad there’s no time to celebrate.  We almost lost our country.  There’s no time to lose getting it back.

Depending on whether Barack Obama decides to behave like an adult or not in the face of massive defeat, all Hell can break loose in the next few months.  He can subvert Congress and initiate an absurd amnesty program that nobody wants except for perhaps some random aging members of La Raza.  Just as bad, or maybe worse — it involves weapons of mass destruction — he can subvert Congress again and sign a deal with the Iranian mullahs that, on latest reports, relies on our good friends the Russians to police the Iranian nuclear program. How insane is that? Ask any Ukrainian.

And that’s only getting started.  The litany of possible mischief small and large is endless from Obamacare to accusations  of racism (how else could Obama lose?) to that monumental absurdity the “War on Women.”  (That one doesn’t seem to be working out too well lately with the Senate filling up with Republican women.) …

… Okay, now I’m going to celebrate.  But just for a few hours.  In the end, it’s just like tennis.  The minute you think you’re ahead, you start to lose. Stay hungry.

Craig Pirrong at Streetwise Professor has a note of caution.

… Practically, however, I think the results will be fairly barren, and may in fact set the stage for a Constitutional crisis, or crises. Obama is still president, and can block any substantive legislation emerging from the solidly Republican Congress. More ominously, given Obama’s personality, ideological rigidity, and hatred of Republicans (and I do think he viscerally hates them), confrontations are inevitable. Obama will not take his whipping and emerge more conciliatory and willing to compromise. To the contrary, to someone of his narcissistic temperament, yesterday’s repudiation is an existential affront that he must confront. He will channel his inner Alinsky, and attempt to use every executive power to achieve results that he cannot implement through legislation. He will double down on the divisive rhetoric and policies that he has employed in the past couple of years. A Constitutional confrontation over immigration, or some other issue (climate?), could well result when Obama attempts to exert executive power unilaterally.

Perhaps most importantly, his obsession with completing a deal with Iran, which has warped virtually every aspect of American foreign policy (Syria most notably) lays the groundwork for confrontation as he will likely attempt to implement it without Congressional approval. The substantive ramifications of such a deal are also very frightening, because they could lead to an even greater crisis in the Middle East and an intensification of the Shia-Sunni/Arab-Persian conflict that is already the source of chaos and misery. It is beyond bizarre that a man who claims to strive for nuclear disarmament is pursuing, Ahab-like, a deal that would likely lead to the nuclearization of the most unstable and conflict-ridden part of the world. …

Jennifer Rubin posts on Wednesday’s presser.

President Obama is a singularly ungracious and non-self-reflective person. In his press conference today he refused yet again to acknowledge reality.

He tried to downplay the Democrats’ loss of the Senate by talking to the two-thirds of people who did not vote. He tried to insinuate that it was a bipartisan rejection. He reminded us several times that he is still president. (“I’m the guy elected by everybody.”) He boasted about an economy most voters think is rotten. He has, however, learned nothing. After a historic repudiation, he is staying the course and still threatens unilateral action by year’s end on immigration reform. One would have thought his policies were not on the ballot or that his party saw historic losses in consecutive midterm elections. He defiantly announced that he will veto some bills and that Congress won’t like his executive actions. He insisted it had to be his way: “If there are ideas that the Republicans have that I have confidence will make things better for ordinary Americans, the fact that the Republicans [are] suggesting it, as opposed to a Democrat — that’ll be irrelevant to me. I want to just see what works.” In other words he sees no reason to compromise; Republicans must agree with him. …

David Harsanyi on the press conference too.

In his post-midterm press conference today, President Barack Obama reaffirmed his commitment to taking executive action on immigration, “before the end of the year.” Obama argued that most Americans desire reform and consequently he has an imperative to act. Because, as everyone knows, polls, rather than elections, are by far the best measurement of what the electorate desires.

If Obama moves forward a number of things are bound to happen: First, and most definitely, there will be no way Republican leadership can engage the administration in any meaningful bipartisan legislation for the next two years. With a freshly enraged base, the GOP will be powerless to work with the White House unless it’s willing to risk civil war. Second, kicking off a new round of needless acrimony highlights the fiction that Obama has any intention of recalibrating his strategy and finding common ground moving forward.

An example of perfect puerile presidential petulance comes from the tete a tete with Michael Jordan. Yahoo Sports has the story of Jordan saying The One was a “sh*tty” golfer. We didn’t include any of that in Pickings because it was of little consequence, but then the childish chief narcissist had to respond and it became a story.

“[T]here is no doubt that Michael is a better golfer than I am,” Obama said. “Of course if I was playing twice a day for the last 15 years, then that might not be the case.”

Obama rounded out his response with a final burn on Jordan, whose NBA franchise returned to its original name this season, saying, “He might want to spend more time thinking about the Bobcats — or the Hornets.”

Given the nationwide Republican wave in Tuesday’s elections, perhaps Obama has bigger problems than what His Airness thinks of his golf game.

Scott Johnson of Power Line also posted on the Michael Jordan kerfuffle and then compares that to reactions to the election.

President Obama is a man who does not respond well to criticism. He can’t even fake it. When Michael Jordan recently observed that Obama is a “shitty golfer,” to take just one small example, Obama responded in a Milwaukee radio interview that he gave to lend his magic touch to Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke the day before the midterm elections: “[T]here is no doubt that Michael is a better golfer than I am.” Obama couldn’t leave it at that: “Of course, if I was playing twice a day for the last 15 years, then that might not be the case. You know, he might want to spend more time thinking about the Bobcats — or the [NBA's Charlotte] Hornets.” (Jordan is part of the Hornets ownership group and the team if off to a poor start.)

This unfunny gibe wasn’t enough for Obama. He deepened his critique of Jordan: “I love the man, though. He brought [the Chicago Bulls] a lot of championships. He does like talking trash sometimes, even when he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” Obama’s sympathetic radio interviewer found this hilarious. The New York Daily News has posted the entire interview at the link. I’m embedding it below. You can check it out yourself.

I may be wrong about that example, but I’m not wrong about this one. Obama is seething with anger in response to the repudiation he and his policies received in the midterm elections. It comes through loud and clear in the press conference he held to address the results of the midterm elections (White House video below, White House transcript here, Washington Post transcript here). I can also say with certainty Obama rejected the good advice that Peggy Noonan offered him before the votes were counted. Noonan advised him to be gracious in defeat and gave him a good example. (The example was George W. Bush’s, and it was brilliant.) Sorry, but Obama doesn’t do gracious. …

Now even Chris Matthews is fed up. We get this from National Review.

MSNBC host Chris Matthews expressed dismay over President Obama’s post-election press conference on Wednesday, calling him entirely deaf to the millions of Americans who voted against his plan to grant executive amnesty for as many as 6 million illegal immigrants. 

“The people, if you look at the polling, their problem is illegal immigration,” he said. “He says, ‘I’m going to fix the problem.’ He doesn’t mean he’s gonna stop illegal immigration. He’s not going to do anything to stop illegal hiring, which is the magnet for illegal immigration, really. He’s going to basically say, ‘I’m going to deal with them by giving them green cards.’”

“What bothered me about him tonight — he keeps talking about common ground,” Matthews said. “Damnit, there’s very little common ground between left and right! But what there is, is compromise.”

“There’s something in this guy that just plays to his constituency, and acts like there’s no other world out there,” the MSNBC host lamented. “And that’s going to be a collision at the end of this year like you’ve never seen. I do believe it’s will be waving a red flag in front of the bull. I think Mitch McConnell’s headed for a fight with the president.”

Jonathan Tobin has more on the presser.

… Rather than taking a page from Bill Clinton’s book and understanding that he had to adjust his policies and ideas to political reality, Obama seems to think he has no lessons to learn from the voters who broadly rejected the policies that he told us last month were on the ballot yesterday.

Asked several times by members of the press if he was prepared for genuine compromise, all he gave them was the usual boilerplate he’s been employing throughout his presidency about being willing to listen to Republicans if they come up with reasonable ideas. The only problem with that: he believes the only one with reasonable ideas is Barack Obama. …

And Tobin also had lists of the biggest winners and biggest losers in the Wave of 2014. 

The 2014 midterms turned out to be the wave election that Republicans dreamed of and Democrats dreaded. But amid the debris of what turned out to be a stunning repudiation of the administration, there are some people who must be judged to be the big winners and losers on both sides. Here’s my list:

The Winners:

The first and most obvious winner is Mitch McConnell who will be the majority leader in January. Earlier in the year, he looked to be under siege in his race for reelection but ran among the smartest campaigns in the country as he first swamped a Tea Party challenger and then destroyed Alison Lundergan Grimes, the candidate the Clintons helped handpick to oppose him, in the general election. McConnell finally gets his chance to run the Senate and the man in position to put the heat on President Obama even if he won’t have an easy time with some members of his caucus.

Tom Cotton came into 2014 as the most hyped GOP Senate candidate but was thought to have run a lackluster campaign that turned an easy win into a nail biter. In the end, he won his Arkansas seat in a landslide. That puts him back into the conversation as the most highly regarded young (37) Republican and a future leader of his party.

In the course of the last year Joni Ernst …

Boston Herald columnist posts on the results from Hillary’s perspective.

Hillary Clinton put her political clout and even her political future on the line in this election — from Massachusetts to New Hampshire and in races clear across the country — and as the dust settles this morning we’ll see how it paid off.

The news that Republicans took control of the Senate despite Clinton’s best efforts doesn’t bode well for her desire to become the next president of the United States. …

… But don’t worry about Hillary. To explain away any weak points in the national Democratic mosaic, Hillary Clinton has what every political Clinton needs — a fall guy.

That would be President Obama. Expect to see Obama shoulder a lot of the blame for a lot of Democratic woes, thanks to his abysmal job approval ratings and back-to-back scandals, from Obama­care’s stumbling launch, to the renewal of combat operations in Iraq and now Syria, to Ebola … the list goes on.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Next week we can rehash the vote.

Today we spend some time looking at QE (Quantitative Easing). Pickerhead has always thought this was nonsense on steroids. But, some of our regulars have a more favorable view. First up is James Pethokoukis.

Many conservatives loved pointing to Europe when its debt crisis seemed to be spiraling out of control. A cautionary tale, they said, of what can happen when government spending goes wild.  But they had the story wrong, or at least incomplete. Europe’s sovereign debt crisis was as much about slow growth as high debt. Anyway, these folks don’t talk much about Europe any more. And maybe that’s because it is now a cautionary tale of what happens when you combine fiscal austerity and tight money. That’s the exact deflationary formula some have been recommending for America the past few years. And as Europe’s experience shows, that would have been an utter disaster. Economist Michael Darda of MKM Partners: …

Power Line’s Scott Johnson posts a reader’s letter with similar thoughts.

… During the Depression, the Fed did nothing like QE and the Treasury wanted to force liquidation of excess assets and inventories and debts. The result is economic cataclysm, especially in a leveraged economy with a fractional reserve banking system. Banks cannot liquidate and satisfy their depositors need for cash. Deposits are borrowings for the bank. They in turn lend out the money they have on deposit to generate a return, and this pays savers a return. But when an economy goes into recession, this system malfunctions because the credit that originally justified the loan can no longer support it. This is the natural course of the business cycle. But the banking system on the way down is equivalent to the problem of a fire in a crowded theater. Everybody cannot get out at once. Not even close. It’s a fire in a vault really. Those lines of depositors waiting to take their money out cannot be satisfied.

It is easy to castigate the Fed and the Treasury for “bailing out” lenders and management teams, but the truth is more complicated. They were backstopping a system which holds the savings for the vast majority of Americans. As for the continuance of QE, I would revert to the Depression data and again observe that the Fed allowed the money supply to collapse by 1/3. This was devastating to the economy. Allowing monetary contraction through forced liquidation (which is the policy antidote to QE) would be beyond cataclysmic – it would make the Depression or today’s Greece a walk in the park. Unemployment would be 30%, people’s savings would be wiped out all at once – and the beneficiaries would be a tiny fraction of wealthy who would be able to buy assets for pennies from desperate sellers.

The primary criticism viz QE is that we are destroying the dollar and sowing the seeds of inflation. Maybe. But we are currently not inflating. At all. Commodity prices are falling or have fallen dramatically – gold, oil, you name it. The dollar has strengthened viz its alternative currencies, including gold and silver. There may be particular areas of price rises, but that means it’s not a uniform monetary phenomenon. Measured inflation is tame. One of the “inputs” which drives inflation is something called monetary velocity, or the speed with which people spend their money on items. As it did in the depression, it has collapsed. During the depression, it was this particular input which was responsible for the collapse in the money supply. You can think of QE as effectively offsetting the decline in velocity. …

Here’s the Power Line post that  the above letter.

We are approaching the end of year six of the regime of Quantitative Easing (QE) engineered by the Federal Reserve under Fed chairmen Ben Bernanke and now Janet Yellen. In place of responsible economic policy to revive economic growth and employment, we have had QE and the explosive growth of job-killing regulations (including Obamacare). In a recent look back at QE, New York Post columnist John Crudele credits QE with some good effects, but adds this inarguable observation, consistent with the avowed goals of QE:

“There’s one more thing that QE accomplished: it has made the stock market soar. Interest rates have remained so low for so long that investors have had no other choice but to move their money into the stock market, thus creating a bubble.

Even those adverse to risk were forced to chase the better yields in stocks, no matter how dangerous that was.

But for every winner in QE there are 99 losers. While the richest 1% of the US population has been loving the rise in stock prices and other QE amenities, Fed policy has been taxing on the masses of savers. …”

For a first, we have an item from Hollywood Reporter. It is an interview with Sharly Attkisson. It is long but interesting. Thankfully it’s the end of the week so there’s time to read it.

Sharyl Attkisson is an investigative journalist who became the story when she quit CBS News after two decades amid allegations that the network refused to run some of her stories that were critical of President Barack Obama. Ahead of the Tuesday release of her book Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama’s Washington, she spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about her struggles with CBS executives and her assertion that her computers were hacked, possibly by Obama operatives.

Who did you tell at CBS that your computers were hacked?

The first person I spoke to was Washington bureau chief Chris Isham.

Did he believe you?

He appeared to.

Did CBS care? Did they do anything about it?

God, you know, there’s a lot of people there. He seemed to care. He hired a separate computer forensics firm to look at the computers. They, too, agreed that there had been highly sophisticated remote intrusion of my computers. They decided to dig deeper and embark upon a process that spanned a number of months, during which time the situation with the Associated Press and the government spying on Fox News reporter James Rosen was disclosed, as well as Edward Snowden’s NSA information. …

Now for the important stuff. Slate’s Explainer tells us why ghosts say. “Boo!”

… Variations of the word boo—including bo and boh—have been found in books as published as far back as 500 years ago. While the Oxford English Dictionary notes the similarity between bo and the Latin boāre and the Greek βοãv, both meaning “to cry aloud, roar, shout,” it’s unlikely that bo and boo—as nonsensical exclamations—derived  from these words. An etymological dictionary of Scottish from 1808 notes that the sound  might denote “a sound in imitation of the cry of a calf,” or be related to menacing creatures like the bu-kow and the bu-man (a possible ancestor of the modern bogeyman).

The combination of the voiced, plosive b- and the roaring -oo sounds makes boo a particularly startling word. Some linguists argue that the “ooh” or “oh” sounds can be pronounced at a higher volume than other vowel sounds, such as the “ee” in “wheel.” Since boo is a monosyllable, it can also be said very quickly, which may add to its scariness.

If you want to frighten someone in Spain, you can say uuh (pronounced like ooh in English), and in France you can say hou. A Czech ghost might say baf. In most European languages, including non-Romance languages like Polish, the sound boo is also understood as an attempt to scare someone, but it comes in different spellings.* For example, the Spanish version is written as ¡bú! …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Back to the subject of the Wisconsin prosecutor’s harassment of Gov. Scott Walker, Stuart Taylor reports some Democrats are becoming uneasy with the witch hunt.

Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. has accused District Attorney John Chisholm, a fellow Democrat, of “abuse of prosecutorial power” in the relentless criminal investigation of Republican Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and 29 conservative groups.

Clarke’s forceful public criticism is of Chisholm and the so-called “John Doe” investigation that Chisholm has pursued since 2010 against Walker, his staff and virtually every conservative advocacy group in the state.

Clarke, who has been sheriff since 2002 and is running for re-election on Tuesday as the Democratic nominee, has been elected and re-elected with heavy support both from fellow African-Americans and from conservatives.

Clarke said that he agreed with a petition seeking appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate Chisholm. The petition was filed on Sept. 26 by a major Chisholm target, conservative fundraiser Eric O’Keefe.

While Clarke and Chisholm are both Democrats, the iconoclastic sheriff has often clashed with the more liberal Democrats who dominate Milwaukee politics, including Chisholm.

“This will go down as one of the ugliest chapters in Wisconsin political history” Clarke told this reporter. “This is a witch-hunt by a hyper-partisan prosecutor’s office … to go after political adversaries they disagree with.”  …

Jonathan Tobin posts on this year’s race baiting by Dems.

With the midterm campaign coming down to its last days, its been clear for weeks that the only way Democrats believe they can save some of their endangered red-state Senate incumbents is to play the race card. Both Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu and North Carolina’s Kay Hagan have sought to identify Republicans with racism and even, in Hagan’s case, with the killing of Trayvon Martin or the Ferguson, Missouri shooting, in order to mobilize African-American voters. While these tactics are based on outrageous slanders, the decision to play the race card is logical if not scrupulous. … 

… Waving the bloody shirt of Ferguson seems like a good idea to those who believe, not wrongly, that many African-Americans view such incidents as evidence of the enduring legacy of the nation’s history of racism. But the line between sending subtle hints about such issues and outright race baiting has clearly been crossed when, as Hagan did, Republicans are falsely accused of playing a role in killing young African-Americans. Nor did Landrieu do herself any favors by publicly complaining about the treatment of blacks and women in the contemporary south. …

… Thus, even if these tactics work to turn out blacks—and it is by no means clear that it will come anywhere close to the 2012 levels that Democrats desperately need—the party may be doing itself real damage with the public in ways that will harm their presidential candidate in 2016. As with other misleading memes they have beat to death, such as the spurious war on women that Republicans are supposed to be waging, Democrats are finding that they are fast exhausting the electorate’s patience and are running out of ideas. As much as playing the race card seems like a foolproof if unsavory tactic, it may not be as smart a move as they think it is.

How much has the president hurt the Democrats? Michael Barone has answers. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch. 

Before the election results are in, and keeping in mind that there may be some unpleasant surprises for one party or the other — or both — it’s possible to assess how the Democratic Party has fared under the leadership of President Obama. To summarize the verdict: not so well.

By one metric it has done very badly indeed. When Obama took the oath of office in January 2009, there were 257 Democrats in the House of Representatives. Going into this election there are 201 (including two vacant Democratic seats).

Psephologists universally agree Democrats will suffer a net loss of House seats, for reasons explained in an earlier column in this space. That will leave them with a number probably somewhere in the 190s.

That means a loss of something like 60 seats — far more than the parties of George W. Bush after six years (19 seats), and slightly more than Bill Clinton at this stage (47 seats). 

House race results are particularly meaningful because in the past two decades, much more than in the 1970s and 1980s, Americans are voting straight tickets. Party performance in House elections is a pretty good indicator of support of a party and (when it has one) its president. …

Thomas Sowell on voter fraud.

One of the biggest voter frauds may be the idea promoted by Attorney General Eric Holder and others that there is no voter fraud, that laws requiring voters to have a photo identification are just attempts to suppress black voting.

Reporter John Fund has written three books on voter fraud and a recent survey by OldDominionUniversity indicates that there are more than a million registered voters who are not citizens, and who therefore are not legally entitled to vote.

The most devastating account of voter fraud may be in the book “Injustice” by J. Christian Adams. He was a Justice Department attorney, who detailed with inside knowledge the voter frauds known to the Justice Department, and ignored by Attorney General Holder and Company.

One of these frauds involved sending out absentee ballots to people who had never asked for them. Then a political operator would show up — uninvited — the day the ballots arrived and “help” the voter to fill them out. Sometimes the intruders simply took the ballots, filled them out and forged the signatures of the voters.

These were illegal votes for Democrats, which may well be why Eric Holder sees no evil, hears no evil and speaks no evil. …

Ed Meese and Ken Blackwell with a column in USA Today on how to prevent election fraud. 

Once upon a time, Americans got together on Election Day, went to the polls, and chose our leaders. Voting on the same day helped bind us together as self-governing citizens in a free republic. It even felt like a national holiday — Independence Day without the fireworks.

Except for those traveling or who are infirm and who can use absentee ballots, Election Day puts everyone in the same boat. As a civic exercise in equality, it is unparalleled. It has the added advantage of making vote fraud more difficult, since there is a very short window in which to commit it.

But over the past few decades, election laws have been relaxed in the name of convenience, with “reforms” such as early voting, same-day registration, Sunday and evening voting hours, no-excuse absentee voting and allowing out-of-precinct ballots. All of these increase the possibility of vote fraud.

At the same time, despite a clear mandate in the National Voter Registration Act (also known as the Motor Voter Law) to keep accurate registrations, the system has grown lax; election authorities have left millions on the voter rolls who should not be there.

A 2012 study by the PewCenter on the States found 1.8 million deceased people were registered to vote, and 24 million invalid or inaccurate registrations. An American Civil Rights Union (ACRU) review of voter rolls around the nation in 2013 found more than 200 counties with more voters registered than age-eligible, legal residents. The ACRU has won historic consent decrees in federal court requiring two Mississippi counties to clean up their voter rolls and is now litigating in Texas. …

Ilya Somin on the fact that liberal cities are the ones with less affordable housing.

… Why do liberal cities enact policies that often making housing unaffordable for the poor and much of the middle class? The cynical explanation is that “limousine liberal” voters only pretend to care about affordable housing for the poor and the middle class, but in reality adopt zoning restrictions to keep home prices up and prevent the riffraff from living near them. Such motives may be present in some cases. But, on most issues, there is little correlation between political views and measures of narrow self-interest. It is therefore likely that most voters in liberal cities do genuinely care about affordable housing and the interests of the poor.

The virus that plagues our body politic is not selfish voting, but ignorant voting. Like their conservative counterparts, most liberal voters don’t think carefully about the possible negative side effects of their preferred policies. Just as most of them do not realize that rent control diminishes the stock of housing, they also may not realize that zoning restrictions diminish it, and thereby increase housing costs.

Conservative voters have their own characteristic patterns of economic ignorance. Both sides tend to ignore or even blatantly misinterpret evidence that cuts against their preferred views – especially if the evidence or the reasoning behind it is counterintuitive. To a considerable extent, the high cost of housing in liberal cities is yet another negative effect of widespread political ignorance. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

You want the truth about what the election is about? Krauthammer has answers.

… First, like all U.S. elections, it’s about the economy. The effect of the weakest recovery in two generations is reflected in President Obama’s 13-point underwater ratings for his handling of the economy.

Moreover, here is a president who proclaims the reduction of inequality to be the great cause of his administration. Yet it has radically worsened in his six years. The 1 percent are doing splendidly in the Fed-fueled stock market, even as median income has fallen.

Second is the question of competence. The list of disasters is long, highlighted by the Obamacare rollout, the Veterans Affairs scandal and the pratfalls of the once-lionized Secret Service. Beyond mere incompetence is government intrusiveness and corruption, as in the overreach of national security surveillance and IRS targeting of politically disfavored advocacy groups.

Ebola has crystallized the collapse of trust in state authorities. The overstated assurances, the ever-changing protocols, the startling contradictions — the Army quarantines soldiers returning from West Africa while the White House denounces governors who did precisely the same with returning health-care workers — have undermined government in general, this government in particular.

Obama’s clumsy attempt to restore confidence by appointing an Ebola czar has turned farcical. …

John Fund writes on the voting of non-citizens.

Could non-citizen voting be a problem in next week’s elections, and perhaps even swing some very close elections?

A new study by two OldDominionUniversity professors, based on survey data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, indicated that 6.4 percent of all non-citizens voted illegally in the 2008 presidential election, and 2.2 percent in the 2010 midterms. Given that 80 percent of non-citizens lean Democratic, they cite Al Franken ’s 312-vote win in the 2008 Minnesota U.S. Senate race as one likely tipped by non-citizen voting. As a senator, Franken cast the 60th vote needed to make Obamacare law.

North Carolina features one of the closest Senate races in the country this year, between Democratic incumbent Kay Hagan and Republican Thom Tillis. So what guerrilla filmmaker James O’Keefe, the man who has uncovered voter irregularities in states ranging from Colorado to New Hampshire, has learned in North Carolina is disturbing. This month, North Carolina officials found at least 145 illegal aliens, still in the country thanks to the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, registered to vote. Hundreds of other non-citizens may be on the rolls.

A voter-registration card is routinely issued without any identification check, and undocumented workers can use it for many purposes, including obtaining a driver’s license and qualifying for a job. And if a non-citizen has a voter-registration card, there are plenty of campaign operatives who will encourage him or her to vote illegally. …

According to John Fund, the campaign manager caught in the James O’Keefe NC sting has resigned.

Guerrilla filmmaker James O’Keefe has prompted investigations into political operatives he caught on camera advising non-citizens they could vote. The North Carolina Board of Elections is looking into whether they broke state law.

Meanwhile, Greg Amick, the campaign manager for the Democratic candidate for sheriff in Charlotte, N.C., has left his position. Amick told an O’Keefe investigator that her non-citizen status was no problem: “As long as you’re registered to vote, you’ll be fine.” …

Stephen Hayes says this election is about everything.

… Not only is this election not about nothing, it is being fought over exactly the kinds of things that ought to determine our elections.

It’s about the size and scope of government. It’s about the rule of law. It’s about the security of the citizenry. It’s about competence. It’s about integrity. It’s about honor.

It’s about a government that makes promises to those who have defended the country and then fails those veterans, again and again and again. It’s about a president who offers soothing reassurances on his sweeping health care reforms and shrugs his shoulders when consumers learn those assurances were fraudulent. It’s about government websites that cost billions but don’t function and about “smart power” that isn’t very smart. It’s about an administration that cares more about ending wars than winning them, and that claims to have decimated an enemy one day only to find that that enemy is still prosecuting its war against us the next. It’s about shifting red lines and failed resets. It’s about a president who ignores restrictions on his power when they don’t suit him and who unilaterally rewrites laws that inconvenience him. It’s about a powerful federal agency that targets citizens because of their political beliefs and a White House that claims ignorance of what its agents are up to because government is too “vast.” In sum, this is an election about a president who promised to restore faith in government and by every measure has done the opposite. …

Kevin Williamson gives a hearty goodbye to Wendy Davis and her Texas fail.

Acknowledging the admittedly remote risk that I am giving a hostage to fate by writing these words, I note that the implosion of Wendy Davis’s ugly and vacuous gubernatorial campaign in Texas has been a satisfying spectacle. On Tuesday, it is all but inevitable that Greg Abbot’s campaign and Texas voters are going to beat Wendy Davis like a circus monkey, and it will be her second significant defeat in the campaign: She ran triumphantly unopposed in the New York Times primary, with Robert Draper all but kissing the hem of her garment, but she took a beating in the Rio Grande primary, with her penniless nobody opponent outperforming her in critical border counties that had gone heavily for Barack Obama in the presidential elections.

Bipartisan lesson: If you are going to run a horsepucky media creation as a single-issue candidate, pick a single issue that doesn’t stack voters up against you four to one.

Wendy Davis is a fanatic as Winston Churchill defined the word: “One who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.” Her candidacy was the product of abortion fanaticism and almost nothing else. …

… Strangely enough, marijuana reform is a notable locus of fanaticism. You’d think that of all the single-issue enthusiasms across these fruited plains, the marijuana-legalization crusade would be one of the more laid-back. It isn’t. If you think that the gay-marriage obsessives or the Chicken Littles of climate change are fanatics and bores, spend a few hours with the potheads. Marijuana — or  cannabis, or hemp, or whatever particular nomenclature the individual factionalist with whom you are speaking insists upon — will, if the ganja gang is to be believed, cure cancer, replace fossil fuels, prevent global warming, transform the economy, balance the budget, lower taxes, win the war on terror (“Duuude, I could go for some falafel . . . ”), lower health-care costs, eliminate kitchen drudgery, turn a sandwich into a banquet, and find that slipper that’s been at large under the chaise lounge for several weeks. I agree with the potheads on the basic policy, but even so, it is all but impossible to have a conversation with them about the subject, especially one that considers the possible downsides associated with having a legal free market in marijuana, such as an increased difficulty in getting correct change at 7-Eleven, longer lines at Taco Bell, increased incidence of Phish concerts, etc. …

George Will writes on some of the little noticed items on Tuesday.

… Because Senate control is at issue, insufficient attention has been paid to 2014’s most important election, which is in the worst-governed state. Illinois incumbent governor is Pat Quinn, a compliant time-server who floated up from lieutenant governor when Rod Blagojevich became the fourth of the previous nine governors to be imprisoned. The state has high unemployment, low growth and more than $100 billion in unfunded pension liabilities. If voters ratify the state’s trajectory by reelecting Quinn, he will accelerate the downward spiral by continuing policies that have produced it, beginning by making “temporary” tax increases permanent. Republicans will win if their candidate, businessowner Bruce Rauner, wins and delivers, among other things, a campaign to term-limit the state legislators who, collaborating with government employee unions, buy job permanence using money looted from taxpayers.

Republicans also will win if Quinn wins, thereby making Illinois a scary example to the nation of the terrible toll taken by the “blue model” of governance. Although U.S. law allows a one-party city like Detroit to go bankrupt, there is no provision for state bankruptcies. Hence a Quinn victory would provide, perhaps within his next term, hair-raising excitement for the states’ masochistic electorate as lenders recoil from America’s Argentina. …

… We govern through parties, and this autumn President Obama’s has repudiated him. Tuesday will supply evidence of not only how little pulse Obama’s presidency still has but also how much damage he has done to his party. Before he led it to its 2010 debacle, it controlled 62 state legislative chambers to the Republicans’ 36. Entering Tuesday, Republicans led Democrats, 59 to 39. (Subtract two chambers because Nebraska’s legislature is unicameral and nonpartisan.) Can Democrats stop the hemorrhaging? …

Peter Wehner posts on the damage done to the Dems. 

How much damage is Barack Obama doing to the Democratic Party? According to the respected political analyst Stuart Rothenberg, the answer is quite a lot. According to Rothenberg, “President Barack Obama is about to do what no president has done in the past 50 years: Have two horrible, terrible, awful midterm elections in a row.”

Mr. Rothenberg compares Obama to the worst midterm numbers of two-term presidents going back to Harry Truman. He concludes that it’s likely that over the course of two midterm elections, Democrats will lose somewhere in the range of 68-75 House seats range and 11-15 Senate seats. …

Jennifer Rubin spots some sore losers.

If you have been watching or reading the caterwauling in the mainstream media about the midterms, you will have discovered it goes something like this: There is no GOP wave. Well, there is a GOP wave, but Republicans are not running on anything. Well, the Republicans ARE running on something, but they will kill each other. Maybe they won’t kill each other, but the majority will be so big that it will fall apart. Even if it does not fall apart, the Democrats will get the Senate back in 2016.

It is more than sore loser-itis in anticipation of a loss they fear will be impossible to spin. It is evidence of a party and a liberal movement out of gas, barren of ideas and desperate to scare its own base with race-baiting and gender victimization. Even the New York Times sounded shocked: “The images and words they are using are striking for how overtly they play on fears of intimidation and repression.” Welcome to what is left of “hope and change.”

It seems fitting that embattled Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) finishes the race accusing her fellow citizens of racism. (“I’ll be very, very honest with you. The South has not always been the friendliest place for African Americans. It’s been a difficult time for the president to present himself in a very positive light as a leader.”) Who wouldn’t want to vote for a pol who thinks them so despicable, huh? …

Michael Goodwin notices the president and his staff always blame someone else. 

In the New York Times the other day, anonymous aides to President Obama trashed Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel. Kerry was mocked mercilessly, with officials joking “that he is like the astronaut played by Sandra Bullock in the movie ‘Gravity,’ somersaulting through space, untethered to the White House.”

A week before that, The Times reported that, despite Obama’s public efforts to calm fears over Ebola, he was privately seething at health aides’ bungling. In a bid to separate him from the incompetence of his administration, the leakers claimed Obama was “visibly angry” and “demanded a more hands-on approach” from his team.

Then there was the story about Pentagon boss Hagel firing off a memo to national security chief Susan Rice that faulted America’s Syrian policy. Then there was a story about — oh, never mind, you get the picture.

The extraordinary pile-up of crises has turned the usual White House blame game into something more lethal: a shootout in a lifeboat. The presidency is sinking, but we are expected to believe that only the president is blameless. …

Power Line tells us one of Louisiana’s most famous crooks, Edwin Edwards, is running for office again.

I think it is Glenn Reynolds who may have first come up with the slogan that the Democratic Party is nowadays a criminal conspiracy masquerading as a political party, which is fitting for their candidate for Louisiana’s 6th House district: Edwin Edwards!

He’s only a convicted felon, and after serving nine years in federal prison he’s back in he game, a spry age 87 adorned by his 35-year-old (third) wife, whom he met while in prison when she became his pen pal. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

It was the best of times it was the worst of times, . . . .  Today we celebrate the best of our species and then we pull back the curtain on some of the worst. First, what makes us human? Nautilus says it is our willingness to cooperate. Given the item that runs second today, you might want to immerse yourself in this piece.

Tales about the origins of our species always start off like this: A small band of hunter-gatherers roams the savannah, loving, warring, and struggling for survival under the African sun. They do not start like this: A fat guy falls off a New York City subway platform onto the tracks.

But what happens next is a quintessential story of who we are as human beings.

On Feb. 17, 2013, around 2:30 a.m., Garrett O’Hanlon, a U.S. Air Force Academy cadet third class, was out celebrating his 22nd birthday in New York City. He and his sister were in the subway waiting for a train when a sudden silence came over the platform, followed by a shriek. People pointed down to the tracks.

O’Hanlon turned and saw a man sprawled facedown on the tracks. “The next thing that happened, I was on the tracks, running toward him,” he says. “I honestly didn’t have a thought process.”

O’Hanlon grabbed the unconscious man by the shoulders, lifting his upper body off the tracks, but struggled to move him. He was deadweight. According to the station clock, the train would arrive in less than two minutes. From the platform, O’Hanlon’s sister was screaming at him to save himself.

Suddenly other arms were there: Personal trainer Dennis Codrington Jr. and his friend Matt Foley had also jumped down to help. “We grabbed him, one by the legs, one by the shoulders, one by the chest,” O’Hanlon says. They got the man to the edge of the platform, where a dozen or more people muscled him up and over. More hands seized the rescuers’ arms and shoulders, helping them up to safety as well.

In the aftermath of the rescue, O’Hanlon says he has been surprised that so many people have asked him why he did it. “I get stunned by the question,” he says. In his view, anybody else would’ve done the same thing. “I feel like it’s a normal reaction,” he says. “To me that’s just what people do.”

More precisely, it is something only people do, according to developmental psychologist Michael Tomasello, codirector of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. …

 

… There are no fossils of ancient hominid brains or other physical evidence that might tell us when and how our ancestors first put their minds together to collaborate. Without such clues, the question of why we alone became a collaborative species is difficult to answer, says Hare, who is now a professor at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at DukeUniversity. “Figuring out what makes us unique is hard as hell,” he says. “But it’s much easier than the next question, which is the real issue, the Higgs boson of evolutionary anthropology: How did we get that way?”

In the absence of physical evidence, Tomasello proposes one possible scenario. During the Pleistocene, about 1.5 million years ago, the climate became very bumpy, with frequent temperature swings that forced our ancestors to work together to access new sources of food. Perhaps we became scavengers, joining forces to ward off bigger, tougher meat-eating competitors. Under these circumstances, any genetic variation that made it easier to collaborate—maybe by more accurately reading someone else’s intentions, seeing the whites of their eyes, or simply being more relaxed about sharing food—presumably would have helped those individuals survive, and would have spread through the population.

Hints as to how this might have happened emerge from a surprising place: a fox-breeding farm in Siberia. In the 1950s the Russian biologist Dmitri Belyaev was interested in how dogs might first have been domesticated. He paired the most docile, friendly foxes he could find, then chose the gentlest from each litter and bred them. In a mere 10 generations, the young foxes acted like puppy dogs. The first time they met a human, they wagged their tails and tried to leap into people’s arms to lick their faces. …

 

… Ultimately, Tomasello’s research on human nature arrives at a paradox: our minds are the product of competitive intelligence and cooperative wisdom, our behavior a blend of brotherly love and hostility toward out-groups. Confronted by this paradox, the ugly side—the fact that humans compete, fight, and kill each other in wars—dismays most people, Tomasello says. And he agrees that our tendency to distrust outsiders—lending itself to prejudice, violence, and hate—should not be discounted or underestimated. But he says he is optimistic. In the end, what stands out more is our exceptional capacity for generosity and mutual trust, those moments in which we act like no species that has ever come before us.

Now, a look at our seamier side from Wired. 

The campuses of the tech industry are famous for their lavish cafeterias, cushy shuttles, and on-site laundry services. But on a muggy February afternoon, some of these companies’ most important work is being done 7,000 miles away, on the second floor of a former elementary school at the end of a row of auto mechanics’ stalls in Bacoor, a gritty Filipino town 13 miles southwest of Manila. When I climb the building’s narrow stairwell, I need to press against the wall to slide by workers heading down for a smoke break. Up one flight, a drowsy security guard staffs what passes for a front desk: a wooden table in a dark hallway overflowing with file folders.

Past the guard, in a large room packed with workers manning PCs on long tables, I meet Michael Baybayan, an enthusiastic 21-year-old with a jaunty pouf of reddish-brown hair. If the space does not resemble a typical startup’s office, the image on Baybayan’s screen does not resemble typical startup work: It appears to show a super-close-up photo of a two-pronged dildo wedged in a vagina. I say appears because I can barely begin to make sense of the image, a baseball-card-sized abstraction of flesh and translucent pink plastic, before he disappears it with a casual flick of his mouse.

Baybayan is part of a massive labor force that handles “content moderation”—the removal of offensive material—for US social-networking sites. As social media connects more people more intimately than ever before, companies have been confronted with the Grandma Problem: Now that grandparents routinely use services like Facebook to connect with their kids and grandkids, they are potentially exposed to the Internet’s panoply of jerks, racists, creeps, criminals, and bullies. They won’t continue to log on if they find their family photos sandwiched between a gruesome Russian highway accident and a hardcore porn video. Social media’s growth into a multibillion-dollar industry, and its lasting mainstream appeal, has depended in large part on companies’ ability to police the borders of their user-generated content—to ensure that Grandma never has to see images like the one Baybayan just nuked. …

… This work is increasingly done in the Philippines. A former US colony, the Philippines has maintained close cultural ties to the United States, which content moderation companies say helps Filipinos determine what Americans find offensive. And moderators in the Philippines can be hired for a fraction of American wages. Ryan Cardeno, a former contractor for Microsoft in the Philippines, told me that he made $500 per month by the end of his three-and-a-half-year tenure with outsourcing firm Sykes. Last year, Cardeno was offered $312 per month by another firm to moderate content for Facebook, paltry even by industry standards.

 

Here in the former elementary school, Baybayan and his coworkers are screening content for Whisper, an LA-based mobile startup—recently valued at $200 million by its VCs—that lets users post photos and share secrets anonymously. They work for a US-based outsourcing firm called TaskUs. …

… Given that content moderators might very well comprise as much as half the total workforce for social media sites, it’s worth pondering just what the long-term psychological toll of this work can be. Jane Stevenson was head of the occupational health and welfare department for Britain’s National Crime Squad—the UK equivalent of the FBI—in the early 2000s, when the first wave of international anti-child-pornography operations was launched. She saw investigators become overwhelmed by the images; even after she left her post, agencies and private organizations continued to ask for her help dealing with the fallout, so she started an occupational health consultancy, Workplace Wellbeing, focused on high-pressure industries. She has since advised social media companies in the UK and found that the challenges facing their content moderators echo those of child-pornography and anti-terrorism investigators in law enforcement.

“From the moment you see the first image, you will change for good,” Stevenson says. But where law enforcement has developed specialized programs and hires experienced mental health professionals, Stevenson says that many technology companies have yet to grasp the seriousness of the problem. …

For needed comic relief, here’s Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.

Conan: President Obama said he hugged and kissed some of the nurses who treated Ebola patients. Man, that guy will do anything to get out of that job right now.

Fallon: The CDC is trying to calm people saying you can’t get Ebola sitting next to someone. But you could give it to someone sitting next to you. So, don’t worry. But, you know, worry.

Conan: NFL teams got a league newsletter informing them of the dangers of Ebola. Meanwhile, Ebola has received a letter about the dangers of the NFL.