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American Thinker posts on Sarah Palin’s year of achievement. Beyond her success backing candidates in the 2014 election, there are her impressive foreign policy chops.

… Governor Palin endorsed 22 candidates for various offices during the midterm finals, including senators, governors, lieutenant governors, congressmen, and attorneys general.  Of those so endorsed, an incredible 20 were elected – contrasted with, for example, Hillary Clinton’s record of 8 wins out 24 endorsed candidates. …

… After Russian president Putin invaded the Ukraine and annexed the Crimea, video surfaced of Governor Palin’s 2008 speech where she predicted exactly that occurrence should then presidential candidate Barack Obama be elected.  Palin sounded a deserved note of triumphalism in March:

“Yes, I could see this one from Alaska,” Palin posted on Facebook, saying she said “told-ya-so” in the case of her “accurate prediction being derided as ‘an extremely far-fetched scenario’ by the ‘high-brow’ Foreign Policy magazine.”

“Here’s what this ‘stupid’ ‘insipid woman’ predicted back in 2008,” Palin said.  “After the Russian Army invaded the nation of Georgia, Senator Obama’s reaction was one of indecision and moral equivalence, the kind of response that would only encourage Russia’s Putin to invade Ukraine next.” …

John Fund and Hans Van Spakovsky write on the president and attorney general who inflame race relations.

Attorney General Eric Holder insisted to MSNBC earlier this month that “we are in a better place than we were before” in race relations since Barack Obama was elected president.

The president doubled down in an interview with NPR last week. Asked if race relations were worse since he took office, he said, “No, I actually think that it’s probably in its day-to-day interactions less racially divided.”

But that’s not what the American people see. A PewResearchCenter poll found that only 40% of Americans approve of the way Obama is handling race relations. Black approval is down to 57%, while approval among whites is down to 33%.

More young people under age 30, the age group who were most enthusiastic about electing the nation’s first African-American president, now disapprove of his performance on racial issues than approve. And Eric Holder has one of the lowest approval ratings of any public official.

Law-enforcement officials are appalled at the way the Obama administration exploited tragedies in Ferguson, Mo., and New York City to appeal to its political base. David Clarke, a Democrat who is the African-American sheriff of Milwaukee, doesn’t mince his words.

“The thing that disappoints me the most is some very powerful people in this country — the president of the United States, Attorney General Eric Holder and Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York — have created a pathway that contributes to an unjustifiable hatred of law enforcement officers across the country,” he told WMAL radio in Washington, DC. “They trashed an entire profession with a broad brush because it was politically expedient for them to do so.” …

Jonathan Tobin posts on the increased use of executive memoranda. 

When conservatives protested President Obama’s attempt to go around the Constitution and rule by executive orders rather than with the consent of Congress, his defenders had a ready answer. While they insisted that Obama’s fiat granting amnesty to five million illegal immigrants did not exceed his authority, they also countered by saying that the president had actually issued far fewer such executive orders than that of President Bush. But, as USA Today noted last week, focusing only on executive orders while ignoring the far more numerous executive memoranda issued by this administration that have the same effect as law, the press and the public have vastly underestimated the extent of how far he has stretched the boundaries of executive power. If anything, this president’s effort to create a one-man government may have gone farther than we thought.

As of last week, Obama had issued 198 executive memoranda alongside 195 executive orders. That’s 33 percent more than Bush issued in his full eight years in office and 45 percent more than Bill Clinton. That blows a huge hole in the defense of Obama’s use of executive orders. Seen in this light, rather, as he and his media cheering section have contended, Obama has far exceeded the resort to unilateral measures of not only his immediate predecessor, but every one before that as well. …

Jennifer Rubin says politicians who take sides against police will pay a price.

… Pols who dabble in anti-police invective and join the mantra that “the system is rigged against you” find themselves exacerbating frayed nerves, increasing polarization and losing control of their own message. It might be politically appealing to throw red-meat rhetoric to one’s base and play to the fawning liberal punditocracy, but it comes at a price. As William Galston put it, when de Blasio brought up his son, “If he had been a private citizen, his candor would have been beyond reproach. But the question is not only whether what Mr. de Blasio said is true, but also whether it was appropriate for him to say it. As mayor of the country’s largest and most complex city, he has a responsibility to weigh the impact of his words on all New Yorkers, not just those who agree with him.”

That admonition — to think first and figure out how to calm, not increase, tensions — would seem like fundamental common sense, but the desire to play to the crowd or advance an agenda that may or may not fit the facts is too tempting for many pols. And it is not just Democrats who have behaved badly. …

And even the NY Times can’t save Bill De Blasio says Jonathan Tobin. 

It’s been an awful week for New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. The man who was elected in 2013 on a platform of cop bashing has faced the fury of the police and the public after the murder of two members of the force exposed the ugly face of the post-Ferguson/Eric Garner protests. Like most politicians backed into a corner, de Blasio has lashed out at the media while proving unable to either make peace with the cops or to control his leftist allies who continue to conduct anti-police demonstrations. But de Blasio is not completely without friends. He still has the New York Times, which weighed in today with an embarrassing piece of flummery intended to reassure New Yorkers that everything was OK because the mayor was “calm.” If that’s the best they can do, de Blasio may be in even more trouble than his critics thought.

The conceit of the piece is that de Blasio’s personal approach to the crisis that has threatened to tear the city apart while the rank and file of the NYPD are openly displaying their contempt and anger at the mayor is so deft that he is overcoming all obstacles. But even a casual reader can tell that the only people saying such things are close de Blasio allies whose comments are then slavishly taken down and published by the Times. …

Now for the important stuff. According to Calaveras Enterprise, beer can improve your thinking ability. 

There is newfound reason to indulge in a pint or two of your favorite beer, and it’s not just to catch up and share a few laughs with friends. New research has shown that a chemical compound in beer may be able to improve cognitive function. The beverage once thought to obliterate brain cells when consumed in abundance may actually have the opposite effect and boost brain power.

No one should run out and start imbibing just yet, however. The study that ran in Behavioral Brain Research in October 2014 was preliminary and only conducted on lab mice. During the study, scientists discovered that xanthohumol, a type of flavonoid found in beer, seemed to improve brain function in the young mice given xanthohumol doses. The cognitive flexibility of the mice was tested with a specially designed maze, and younger mice showed signs of intellectual improvement. Older mice showed no improvements. Researchers believe xanthohumol and other flavonoids, such as those found in red wine, blueberries and dark chocolate, may play a role in helping a person form memories. …

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Scott Johnson with a meditation on the ungrounded Peggy Noonan.

Peggy Noonan joined the crowd that turned on George W. Bush in what I thought was (in Noonan’s case) a grossly unfair manner in 2008. I wrote critically about one of Noonan’s weekly Wall Street Journal columns in which she identified with the public disapproval of Bush that April in “Season of the witch.”

Having turned on George W. Bush, Noonan moved on to support the election of Barack Obama later that year. Noonan all but endorsed Obama in her 2008 column “Obama and the runaway train.” The anti-Bush and pro-Obama columns fit neatly together. She wrote of Obama just before the election:

“He has within him the possibility to change the direction and tone of American foreign policy, which need changing; his rise will serve as a practical rebuke to the past five years, which need rebuking; his victory would provide a fresh start in a nation in which a fresh start would come as a national relief. He climbed steep stairs, born off the continent with no father to guide, a dreamy, abandoning mother, mixed race, no connections. He rose with guts and gifts. He is steady, calm, and, in terms of the execution of his political ascent, still the primary and almost only area in which his executive abilities can be discerned, he shows good judgment in terms of whom to hire and consult, what steps to take and moves to make. We witnessed from him this year something unique in American politics: He took down a political machine without raising his voice.”

In a sense, Obama delivered, but in another sense Noonan got everything wrong. Obama has changed the direction and tone of American foreign policy, alright, yet the change hasn’t yielded the results Noonan anticipated.

Noonan has now turned on Obama. …

Same treatment for another who should have known better. Scott Johnson on David Brooks.

… But what are we to make of Brooks? In his day job, he is one of the regular columnists accorded prime journalistic real estate on the op-ed page of the New York Times. Brooks came to the Times from a conservative milieu. Life at the Times has domesticated him. Gabriel Sherman recounts in his 2009 NewRepublic piece on Brooks:

In the spring of 2005, New York Times columnist David Brooks arrived at then-Senator Barack Obama’s office for a chat. Brooks, a conservative writer who joined the Times in 2003 from The Weekly Standard, had never met Obama before. But, as they chewed over the finer points of Edmund Burke, it didn’t take long for the two men to click. “I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging,” Brooks recently told me, “but usually when I talk to senators, while they may know a policy area better than me, they generally don’t know political philosophy better than me. I got the sense he knew both better than me.”

That first encounter is still vivid in Brooks’s mind. “I remember distinctly an image of–we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant,” Brooks says, “and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.” In the fall of 2006, two days after Obama’s The Audacity of Hope hit bookstores, Brooks published a glowing Times column. The headline was “Run, Barack, Run.”

Brooks’s 2006 column is accessible online here; P.J Gladnick excerpts the highlights of Sherman’s 2009 New Republic article here. Sherman documents Brooks’s continuing infatuation with Obama as of 2009. Sherman quotes Brooks conceding his shift on the political spectrum and Obama’s assessment of himself as “a Burkean,” which Brooks took at face value. And they say journalists are cynics.

Now those of us who aren’t as smart as Brooks had no problem pegging Obama’s place on the political spectrum, and it wasn’t a terribly difficult task. We didn’t find him to be “a Burkean.” We thought he was a left-wing ideologue who would do great damage to the United States at home and around the world, and I believe he has done so. Steve says that Brooks has gone silent on Obama, but, if so, he needs to open up. The man is a political columnist, after all, not a spiritual adviser. …

Matthew Continetti profiles film maker John Milius.

… there may be no better moment than now to reflect on the life and work of John Milius, the Romantic genius whose influence spans the films he wrote, the films he directed, and the films such as American Graffiti (1973) and The Big Lebowski  (1998) whose characters he inspired. The documentary Milius (2013) is available for free on Amazon Prime. It is the best place to start for someone eager to learn more about Hollywood’s most notorious conservative, a natural storyteller attracted to, as his daughter puts it, “the extreme man who knows no fear.” 

Born in 1944 to a Jewish family in St. Louis, Milius’ childhood heroes were Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, John Wayne, and Chuck Yeager. His family moved to Los Angeles when he was seven years old. Milius was a troublemaker, a raconteur, a tall and hefty teenager who surfed and shot and dreamed of a military career. But he couldn’t enlist: asthma. “It was totally demoralizing,” he once said.

Milius’ inability to fight in Vietnam led to a profound crisis of identity. What to do? One day he wandered into a retrospective of the films of Akira Kurosawa. He found his calling somewhere in the images of armored samurai enforcing ancient codes of honor. He enrolled in the film school at the University of Southern California. It was, he said, “the West Point of Hollywood.”

Milius was among the early graduates of film programs at USC (George Lucas), UCLA (Francis Ford Coppola), and NYU (Martin Scorsese) who established the contemporary movie experience. They were joined early on by Steven Spielberg, who had been rejected from USC twice but won a job at Universal television nonetheless. The group socialized, promoted, and collaborated with each other.

Milius was known for his writing ability, his girth, his bravado, his hijinks, his politics. He was skeptical of government and defended the Second Amendment and supported the war in Vietnam. He mocked the counterculture that was on its way to becoming the dominant culture. The hero of the student revolutionaries was Ché Guevara. Milius’ was Theodore Roosevelt.

These were not the dominant opinions in Hollywood. Hippies often wore buttons emblazoned with peace signs and the slogan, “Nirvana Now.” Milius changed the peace sign into the silhouette of a B-52 and replaced the slogan with “Apocalypse Now.” …

Kevin Williamson with another example of an out-of-control government. This time NSA employees who spy on significant others. One commenter on Instapundit says; “The government is in open rebellion against its people.” 

A private investigator once explained to me why he always turned down husband-and-wife cases: If your marriage has gone so sour that the best course of action you can think of is hiring a guy to spy on your spouse, then you don’t need an investigator — you need a minister, a therapist, or a good divorce lawyer. That has always seemed eminently sensible to me.

So how screwed up does your relationship have to be that getting the NSA involved sounds like a good idea?

Thanks to a Christmas Eve document dump, we learn that agents of the National Security Agency, the spookiest spooks in all our vast spookocracy, are a bunch of stalkers, using the effectively boundless surveillance powers of their organization to spy on husbands and wives, overseas girlfriends, and sundry romantic partners. And that’s our government at work: While the guys who are supposed to be keeping an eye on Gordon Gekko are keeping their eyes on marathon porn sessions instead, the guys who are supposed to be putting a hurt on Durka Durka Mohammed Jihad are trying to figure out whether their girlfriends are browsing Tinder. One curious analyst targeted the numbers in her husband’s telephone directory. Another spied on his wife, who was stationed overseas.

As usual, basically nothing happened to the wrongdoers — working for the government means facing no real consequences for real crimes. …

Here’s one bit of snooping we’ll all like. WaPo reports DNA testing solves a messy problem. 

Joe Gillmer had a problem. A big, stinky, sole-troubling problem plaguing Midtown Alexandria Station condos, where he serves as board vice president.

How to put this gently? Dog, er, waste in the vestibule, in the elevator (yes, really), and — this particularly incensed Gillmer — in the garage beside handicapped parking, making life difficult for residents with physical challenges.

“What were we going to do?” Gillmer says. “Put up 13 cameras for $100,000 with the slim chance of catching the guy?”

Instead, the condo association hired a service called PooPrints to match evidence from the crime scene to registered DNA taken from all condo dogs. 

Yes, yes, Gillmer has heard all the jokes: “CSI: Manure,” you name it. “I got a lot of criticism,” he recalls. “They called me the ‘Czar of Poop.’ ” …