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Ben Stein wants to know why obama can’t tell the truth.

I have been observing President Obama for a few days and a number of questions have occurred to me:

1. In the President’s State of the Union address, he bragged about how U.S. oil production has surged thanks to shale drilling. Question for Mr. Obama: Does he not recall that he and his followers have been fighting and harassing the oil companies that are finding and producing all of that oil? Does he believe he deserves any credit at all for acts and successes done by people against whom he has waged war since he was a child? …

… Now, I think it’s just great that he has offbeat African Americans interviewing him at the White House. They are citizens, too. But on the day Yemen falls, this is how he’s spending his time? He wants respect as President. Hard to believe he gets it frolicking with this green lipstick creature. Hard to believe he has time for the green lipstick comedienne and not time for reaching a better arrangement with Mr Netanyahu (who is by no means perfect himself). Israel is facing an existential threat from Iran. Sanctions are on the table. This is a huge subject and Netanyahu is coming to town. Can they really not find an hour taken away from Green Lipstick for Mr. Obama to discuss how to prevent a second Holocaust? Or maybe Mr Obama really does think he is a character in a frat house comedy. I guess he sees himself as everything.

But how sad that this delusional little man is our President. And how Mr. Putin must sneer when he considers who he is up against. God help us.

And Noemie Emery says he’s reality challenged.

… If he dislikes facts, he ignores them and substitutes others, which he finds more attractive.

As he did in the State of the Union last week.

“In Iraq and Syria, American leadership … is stopping ISIL’s advance,” the president told us. “Instead of getting dragged into another ground war in the Middle East, we are leading a broad coalition, including Arab nations, to degrade and ultimately destroy this terrorist group.”

This isn’t true. Two thousand American troops have gone back to the war that Obama claimed he had ended; the Islamic State has extended its hold over Syria; Yemen and Libya, which Obama claimed as showcases for his brand of diplomacy, are going to pieces; Iran is dominant in much of the region (and closer than ever to nuclear status); and Russia is threatening the Soviet Union’s former possessions, in Eastern Europe and in Ukraine.

“There’s a real world out there he didn’t really talk about,” said Christopher Matthews. “His projection of success … is not close to reality,” said Andrea Mitchell. When the choir rebels, you know you’re in trouble.

“It sounds like the president was outlining a world that he wishes we were all living in, but which is very different than the world you described,” Richard Engel informed NBC’s Brian Williams. “So there was a general tone, maybe even suspended disbelief, I think, when he started talking about foreign policy. There’s not a lot of success stories to be talking about in foreign policy right now.” …

Conrad Black posts on the state of the union.

The president’s State of the Union message was in many respects, and as has been much remarked upon, an appalling document. It was verbose, stylistically grating, and largely fraudulent, as it took credit for benign developments that have not occurred and unctuously denounced political practices of which he has been the chief practitioner. …

… Mr. Obama claimed huge credit for job-creation figures that were very inferior to those of the Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Kennedy-Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton years, and claimed that this success was based on the reversal of outsourcing. It wasn’t. He took credit for reducing dependence on foreign oil, though his docility before the eco-radicals caused him to fight against much of what has produced the increased domestic production of which he now boasts.

He claimed credit for reduction in oil, gasoline, and other fuel costs, though the reduction is due to the increased production he obstructed and Saudi production increases motivated largely by Obama’s failure to take effective action against the Iranian nuclear military program, Iran’s support of Hamas and Hezbollah, and Iranian and Russian meddling in Syria. He was taking credit for the success of developments he opposed and the actions of countries motivated by his failure to act.

In domestic affairs, the president gave a menu of blissfully unattainable legislative ideas clearly designed to enable him in his memoirs to claim that he was sandbagged by Republican reactionaries from transforming Jeremiah Wright’s racist and exploitive America into a serene, law-abiding, uniformly prosperous commonwealth. He proposed seven days of sick leave for everyone. …

Stephen Hayes reports on a hard hitting speech from the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Lt. General Michael Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, blasted the Obama administration’s approach to the War on Terror in a hard-hitting speech to a meeting of intelligence professionals. “The dangers to the U.S. do not arise from the arrogance of American power, but from unpreparedness or an excessive unwillingness to fight when fighting is necessary,” Flynn said, in an unsparing critique first reported by the Daily Beast.

The Obama administration doesn’t understand the threat, Flynn said, noting that the administration refuses to use “Islamic militants” to describe the enemy. 

“You cannot defeat an enemy you do not admit exists,” he said.

The administration, he continued, wants “us to think that our challenge is dealing with an undefined set of violent extremists or merely lone-wolf actors with no ideology or network. But that’s just not the straight truth.”

Flynn left government last summer, a year before scheduled. He did not provide a reason for his early departure, but sources close to Flynn told THE WEEKLY STANDARD that he was forced out after years of making arguments the Obama administration did not want to hear.

Flynn, and many of the analysts who worked for him, consistently reported on the global nature of the jihadist threat and the interconnectedness of the groups driving it. They mapped overlapping networks of al Qaeda and its offshoots and rejected arguments, pushed primarily by the White House and the CIA, that killing leaders of “core al Qaeda” inevitably meant a diminishing threat. …

John Hinderaker posts on the self-obsessed prez.

Many commentators have noted how frequently Barack Obama’s speeches focus on himself. It is true: for Obama, no matter the topic, it turns out to be mostly about him.

Earlier today, Obama delivered a farewell speech in New Delhi, wrapping up his trip to India. The speech was only 33 minutes long, and yet…Barack managed to work in references to himself no fewer than 118 times. The folks at Grabien write:

“Today in New Delhi, the president of the United States delivered an address to the people of India. Topics ranged from Obama’s pride in being the first U.S. president to visit India twice, to the historic nature of his attendance at India’s Republic Day Parade, to his grandfather’s occupation as a chef, to his graying hair, to his daughters … to his struggles against political critics back home. If this is starting to sound like the president spoke quite a bit about himself, that’s because he did. Somehow in the span of just 33 minutes, Obama referenced himself 118 times. (For those keeping score at home, that’s 3.5 Obama references per minute.)”

During the Cold War, you could count on the American Left marching in lock-step with Russian interests. It’s passing strange to see them carrying water for the Russian interest in killing fracking. The Free Beacon has a long article on the Russian funds that find their way to groups like the Sierra Club.

A shadowy Bermudan company that has funneled tens of millions of dollars to anti-fracking environmentalist groups in the United States is run by executives with deep ties to Russian oil interests and offshore money laundering schemes involving members of President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.

One of those executives, Nicholas Hoskins, is a director at a hedge fund management firm that has invested heavily in Russian oil and gas. He is also senior counsel at the Bermudan law firm Wakefield Quin and the vice president of a London-based investment firm whose president until recently chaired the board of the state-owned Russian oil company Rosneft.

In addition to those roles, Hoskins is a director at a company called Klein Ltd. No one knows where that firm’s money comes from. Its only publicly documented activities have been transfers of $23 million to U.S. environmentalist groups that push policies that would hamstring surging American oil and gas production, which has hurt Russia’s energy-reliant economy.

With oil prices plunging as a result of a fracking-induced oil glut in the United States, experts say the links between Russian oil interests, secretive foreign political donors, and high-profile American environmentalists suggest Russia may be backing anti-fracking efforts in the United States.

The interest of Russian oil companies and American environmentalist financiers intersect at a Bermuda-based law firm called Wakefield Quin. The firm acts as a corporate registered agent, providing office space for clients, and, for some, “managing the day to day affairs,” according to its website.

As many as 20 companies and investment funds with ties to the Russian government are Wakefield Quin clients. Many list the firm’s address on official documentation. …

Jennifer Rubin advises Scott Walker to resist responding to attacks. Attacks that will come from the right; from goofball GOP candidates like Huckster, Cruz, Paul, Trump, Santorum, etc.

The Post reports: “Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, whose speech to activists in Iowa last weekend drew strong reviews, has taken the first formal step toward a presidential candidacy in 2016, establishing a committee that will help spread his message and underwrite his activities as he seeks to build his political and fundraising networks in the months ahead.” Indeed, there is no candidate who helped his cause more or who has more momentum than Walker, which is why he is going to face a pack of lesser candidates nipping at his heels. It is the obvious play, especially for freshman senators with no record, to take on the conservative with an impressive record and support from a wide array of Republicans.

Walker would be smart to resist the urge to “punch down” to engage with lesser candidates or to be pulled into the marshes of the right-wing fever swamp with Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum and others. You can spot their attacks a mile away. …

It’s tough to end the week with lots of items about President Trainwreck. To make up for that, here’s Andy Malcolm with late night humor.

Meyers: Joe Biden says he can “do a good job as President.” And if that doesn’t work out, he wants to be an astronaut or a fireman.

Conan: After his State of the Union speech Obama  talked with three YouTube celebrities. Right, the president met with a cat, a bear and a water-skiing squirrel.

Meyers: Here’s a new drinking game for Obama’s State of the Union address. Instead of watching the speech, drink. 

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Kevin Williamson with an interesting take on the annual Davos gathering.

Convening to ring the alarm about global warming, our putative betters and would-be rulers gathered in Davos, Switzerland, filling the local general-aviation hangars with some 1,700 private jets. Taking an international commercial flight is one of the most carbon-intensive things the typical person does in his life, but if you’re comparing carbon footprints between your average traveler squeezed into coach on American and Davos Man quaffing Pol Roger in his cashmere-carpeted intercontinental air limousine, you’re talking Smurfette vs. Sasquatch. The Bombardier’s Global 6000 may be a technical marvel, but it still runs on antique plankton juice. The emissions from heating all those sprawling hotel suites in the Alps in winter surely makes baby polar bears weep bitter and copious baby-polar-bear tears.

The stories add up: Jeff Greene brings multiple nannies on his private jet to Davos, and the rest of the guys gathered to talk past each other about the plight of the working man scarf down couture hot-dogs that cost forty bucks. Bill Clinton makes the case for wealth-redistribution while sporting a $60,000 platinum Rolex. …

… These ridiculous hypocrites deserve every syllable of abuse that comes their way. I instinctively write off all denunciations of the wicked 1 percent coming from anybody unwilling to live at or below the median U.S. household income, which amounts to less than Clinton’s Rolex is worth. But there is something worse at work here than hypocrisy: stupidity. And stupidity is, like private-jet travel, shockingly expensive.

Our governments and our business and political elites are not mainly made up of stupid people. One of the shocking things about getting to know people in government, whether in elected office or in the bureaucracies, is that they are mostly bright, well-intentioned, and honest. Together they represent a sterling example of one of the most important and least understood of modern social paradoxes: None of us is as dumb as all of us. …

Davos hypocrisy gets a post from Jonathan Tobin. 

Glenn Reynolds, of Instapundit fame, is fond of saying that he’ll believe there’s a climate change crisis when the people who say there’s a climate change crisis start acting like there’s a climate change crisis.

They haven’t started yet. The annual World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, for instance, is on right now and its attendees arrived in an estimated 1,700 private jets. Among the attendees are Al Gore and Pharrell Williams. …

Daniel Hannan posts on Davos too. 

This will be the last time anti-globalisers protest at the World Economic Forum in Davos. From 2016, the ministers, chief executives, columnists and assorted quangocrats who gather at the Swiss resort won’t see so much as a stray dreadlock: eco-protesters say the meeting is no longer worth picketing.

You can see why they might feel conflicted. Davos is a place where powerful people pick up consultancies and directorships and international posts. Left-wingers rightly resent this. What they see, in Marxist terms, is a gang of rentiers coming together to devise new means to live off the sweat of the workers. Against a background of dazzling, empty slopes – there are no skiers, because every chalet has been hired by an NGO or a multi-national – the few hatch schemes against the many.

Yet, when it comes to free markets, Davos Man is often on the same side as the Lefties. He derives most of his income, directly or indirectly, from state patronage. If he is in the private sector – and he is more likely to be a lobbyist, politician or bureaucrat than a businessman – he’ll be an instinctive monopolist, keen to persuade ministers and officials to raise barriers against his potential rivals. …

Speaking of people who are full of themselves, ESPN has a story on the flameout of Johnny Manziel.

The name on the card that night in May seemed to draw as much anxiety as it did excitement; Johnny Manziel, Quarterback, Texas A&M.

The former Heisman Trophy winner had been passed over 21 times, prompting a text from Manziel to then-Browns quarterbacks coach Dowell Loggains that he wanted to “wreck this league” in Cleveland. The words were actually more R-rated, but the implication was clear.

Twitter erupted at the selection. A Cleveland radio host cheered and screamed openly on air. Manziel gave his “money” sign as he walked onstage to greet Roger Goodell.

By season’s end, cheering had turned to frustration and anger as Manziel struggled mightily in almost six quarters as a starter, then was fined for being AWOL the final Saturday of the season. Offensive coordinator Kyle Shanahan resigned with two years left on his contract. Loggains was fired. The Browns openly discussed Manziel’s viability as the franchise’s quarterback at a wide-ranging postseason staff meeting about the roster. And at least a couple of Manziel’s teammates were joking his text should have read “wreck this team.”

Now the Browns point to 2015 with a talented but misguided quarterback who must repair the wreckage done in his own locker room. …

… Opinions on Manziel are so varied — one league insider says “think Steve Young,” while ESPN analyst Merril Hoge says think “sixth-round talent” — that making judgments on his long-term value is still difficult.

Manziel still has support in the building, particularly on the business side because of the attention he commands in stadiums and merchandise lanes. Though the team said football decisions were made without influence or pressure, some coaches and many players had the clear perception the business and marketing end of the team favored the guy whose jerseys would sell.

Manziel led the NFL in jersey sales in July, before taking a training camp snap. His off-field star power is uncommon for most rookies: His super-friends include Drake and LeBron and Bieber.

“What Johnny has to understand is [if] he has another year like he just had, he’s not going to be famous anymore,” one NFL team exec said. “LeBron James is going to lose his number.”

Because Drudge has a sense of humor they linked to a one year old NY Times piece suggesting the possibility of the end of snow. We have a little bit of a long piece. Follow the link if you want more. If we read to much of the Times, you will loose IQ points.

OVER the next two weeks, hundreds of millions of people will watch Americans like Ted Ligety and Mikaela Shiffrin ski for gold on the downhill alpine course. Television crews will pan across epic vistas of the rugged Caucasus Mountains, draped with brilliant white ski slopes. What viewers might not see is the 16 million cubic feet of snow that was stored under insulated blankets last year to make sure those slopes remained white, or the hundreds of snow-making guns that have been running around the clock to keep them that way.

Officials canceled two Olympic test events last February in Sochi after several days of temperatures above 60 degrees Fahrenheit and a lack of snowfall had left ski trails bare and brown in spots. That situation led the climatologist Daniel Scott, a professor of global change and tourism at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, to analyze potential venues for future Winter Games. His thought was that with a rise in the average global temperature of more than 7 degrees Fahrenheit possible by 2100, there might not be that many snowy regions left in which to hold the Games. He concluded that of the 19 cities that have hosted the Winter Olympics, as few as 10 might be cold enough midcentury to host them again. By 2100, that number shrinks to 6. …

The pope is at it again. He wants people to put down their iPhones and start talking. Is there any cliche the man can resist? Telegraph, UK has the story.  

Pope Francis is urging families to put aside their iPhones and Twitter feeds and learn to talk to one another again.

In his annual message for the church’s World Day of Communications, released Friday, the Pope said media can both help or hinder family communication – helping far-flung members stay in touch but also enabling others to avoid one another.

“The great challenge facing us today is to learn once again how

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Thomas Sowell looks over the GOP’s 2016 prospects. He thinks a governor should get the nod and gives a lift to our favorite. You know, the one without a college degree.

… We can certainly hope that the country has learned that lesson — and that Republican rookie Senators get eliminated early in the 2016 primaries, so that we can concentrate on people who have had some serious experience running things — and taking responsibility for the consequences — rather than people whose only accomplishments have been in rhetoric and posturing.

The more optimistic among us may hope that the Republicans will nominate somebody who stands for something, rather than the bland leading the bland — the kind of candidates the Republican establishment seems to prefer, even if the voters don’t.

If the Republicans do finally decide to nominate somebody who stands for something, and who has a track record of succeeding in achieving what he set out to do, then no one fits that bill better than Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, who has put an end to government employee unions’ racket of draining the taxpayers dry with inflated salaries and extravagant pensions.

That Governor Walker succeeded in reining in the unions, in a state long known for its left-leaning and pro-union politics, shows that he knows how to get the job done. It also shows that he has the guts to fight for what he believes, and the smarts to articulate his case and win the public over to his side, rather than pandering to whatever the polls show current opinion to be. …

John Fund profiles our hero – Scott Walker.

National polls show Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney, and Chris Christie as the best-known Republicans preparing to run for president. Their high name ID puts them in front of other challengers for now. But the road to the GOP nomination runs through Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada — all states that vote early and can give an upstart candidate valuable momentum. Iowa will kick off campaigning for its caucuses this coming weekend, when Citizens United and Iowa congressman Steve King host the day-long Iowa Freedom Summit in Des Moines.

While Bush and Romney won’t be there, at least eight potential GOP candidates will show up, along with 150 journalists. Lots of attention will be paid to Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, who many observers say has a chance to break out of the pack in Iowa. He comes from a neighboring state and understands Midwestern sensibilities. His dramatic confrontation with public-sector unions in 2011 and his ability since then to survive both a recall and a reelection battle against those unions have earned him the equivalent of a Medal of Honor with many conservative activists. He has built up a national network of donors who can finance an intense grassroots operation in a state where organizing supporters is key.

But as he prepares to take his record to the nation, Walker is getting blowback from back home. Republicans won clear control of both houses of the state legislature last November, and many are eager to press an aggressive conservative agenda this year. Topping their priority list is a right-to-work bill under which private-sector workers can’t be forced to join a union or pay union dues. A total of 24 states — including Iowa — are right-to-work. The latest additions to the list were heavily unionized Michigan and Indiana.

Yet Governor Walker has made it clear that he views the push for right-to-work as a distraction from his buttoned-down agenda of business, tax, and education reforms. …

According to a report in The Hill, Scott Walker had a good debut in Iowa this past weekend.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) delivered a fiery speech in Iowa on Saturday, wowing the conservative crowd with a passionate argument for small government and his own lengthy resume.

The Wisconsin governor, in rolled-up shirtsleeves, paced the stage as he blasted big government and touted a long list of conservative reforms he’s pushed through in blue Wisconsin.

The governor also showed a rhetorical flourish that’s largely been absent from his previous campaigns, drawing the crowd to its feet multiple times.

“There’s a reason we take a day off to celebrate the 4th of July and not the 15th of April,” he said, almost yelling as his voice grew hoarse. “Because in America we value our independence from the government, not our dependence on it.” …

More on Walker from Jennifer Rubin.

… He also displayed his telltale pugnaciousness with a sense of humor previously not seen by many. He cheered his winning Packers while teasing New Jersey Gov. and Dallas fan Chris Christie. (“I had plenty of fun hugging owners in the stands at Lambeau.”) He knocked Common Core, perhaps a shot at Jeb Bush. (“My sons graduated from outstanding public schools in Wauwatosa and my nieces are in public schools as well, so I have a vested interest, like parents all across the state, in high standards. But those standards should be set by people from within Wisconsin—and preferably at the local level.”) He was upbeat and determined.

And most interesting, at the end of the speech he signaled how he looks at the world: “Last week, innocent people were targeted in France by terrorists. These cowards are not symbols of confidence. They are overwhelmed by fear. They are afraid of freedom. They are afraid of those who have the freedom of the press. They are afraid of freedom of speech. They are afraid of freedom of religion. Tonight, we must stand together—Democrat and Republican—and denounce those who wish to threaten freedom anywhere in this world. We need to proclaim that an attack against freedom-loving people anywhere is an attack against us all. And we will not allow it.” It wasn’t a lot, but it was enough to confirm that he, unlike President Obama and isolationists on the right and left, understands the stakes in the war against global jihad and recognizes this is a fight for our way of life.

The irony here is that while most attention has focused on a potential Bush-Romney duel and a potential Christie run, Walker has been making steady progress in staffing up and preparing for a run (for one thing, making certain he would not face off against friend and Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan). What we learned yesterday is that Walker has a record, some personal style and a mature view of the world. He is someone who can be seen fighting against liberal interests in the age of Obama, but not someone burdened either by foreign policy miscues or past defeats. …

And Rubin turns her ire towards the Huckster. 

… In his recent interview with Hugh Hewitt, Huckabee tried to argue:

“I may be lonely, I may be the only one, but I’m going to stand absolutely faithful to the issue of marriage not because it’s a politically expedient thing to do, because it isn’t. I’m going to do it because I believe it is the right position, it’s the Biblical position, it’s the historical position. I believe like Barack Obama said he believed back in 2008, that it’s an issue that has been settled by the Bible, and God is in the mix. Now one of three things – either Barack Obama was lying in 2008, he’s been lying now since he’s changed his view, or the Bible got rewritten, and he was the only one who got the new version. So I’m just going to have to say that I haven’t been given the role of editor. And I’m not angry about it. One thing I am angry about, though, Hugh, is this notion of judicial supremacy, where if the courts make a decision, I hear governors and even some aspirants to the presidency say well, that’s settled, and it’s the law of the land. No, it isn’t the law of the land. Constitutionally, the courts cannot make a law. They can interpret one. And then the legislature has to create enabling legislation, and the executive has to sign it, and has to enforce it.”

This is frankly nonsense. …

… Huckabee exemplifies the triumph of crank right-wing rationalizations over common sense and mainstream thinking. You think the average American would support a candidate who doesn’t abide by the courts’ rulings? He can disapprove of gay marriage. He can call for broad conscience exemptions. He can refuse to officiate or attend gay nuptials. But he cannot in good faith tell court clerks not to follow the law. Huckabee’s comments are a recipe for constitutional chaos and political oblivion. Enough already. Just stop it.

Yesterday in Pickings we spent lots of electrons with an overview of the president’s disastrous policies. You are left wondering why the administration continues with what is obvious failure. Part of the cause for that is the comfort they get from the fools in the left media. One of the most execrable of them is Paul Krugman who spins nonsense and lies from his column at the NY Times. Robert  Samuelson decided to spend a few columns on Krugman calumny directed towards Ronald Reagan.

It’s important to get history right — and economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has gotten it maddeningly wrong.

Krugman recently wrote a column arguing that the decline of double-digit inflation in the 1980s was the decade’s big economic event, not the cuts in tax rates usually touted by conservatives. Actually, I agree with Krugman on this. But then he asserted that Ronald Reagan had almost nothing to do with it. That’s historically incorrect. Reagan was crucial.

In nearly four decades of column-writing, I can’t recall ever devoting an entire column to rebutting someone else’s. If there were instances, they’re long forgotten. But Krugman’s error is so glaring that it justifies an exception. …

… What Volcker and Reagan accomplished was an economic and political triumph. Economically, ending double-digit inflation set the stage for a quarter-century of near-automatic expansion (indeed, so automatic that it bred the complacency that led to the 2008-2009 financial crisis — but that’s another story). Politically, Reagan and Volcker showed that leaders can take actions that, though initially painful and unpopular, served the country’s long-term interests.

But their achievement was a joint venture: If either hadn’t been there, the outcome would have been much different.

There was no explicit bargain between them. They had what I’ve called a “compact of conviction.” Volcker later said of Reagan: “Unlike some of his predecessors, he had a strong visceral aversion to inflation.” So did Volcker. Both believed the country could not flourish with high inflation. Both acted on that faith.

Volcker needed presidential support, because the Fed’s formal “independence” is highly qualified by political realities. The Fed, Volcker has said, “has got to operate . . . within the range of understanding of the public and the political system.” Reagan widened that range.

To exclude him from this narrative is not history. It’s fiction.

You can always count on snarky replies from the crude Krugman. They led Samuelson to a second column.

Last week, I wrote a column taking issue with Paul Krugman’s contention that President Ronald Reagan had little to do with the decisive crushing of double-digit inflation of the early 1980s. In Krugman’s telling, all the credit belongs to Paul Volcker, then chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. In my telling, both Volcker and Reagan counted. Volcker imposed tight money; Reagan’s support enabled him to maintain the painful and unpopular policy (the monthly unemployment rate peaked at 10.8 percent) long enough to purge inflationary psychology.

The column predictably provoked a backlash; economist and New York Times columnist Krugman responded on his blog. So I return to the subject. My aim here, as with the original column, is to ground history in facts. In that spirit, let me address some common criticisms of the column. …

‘The 1980s were a triumph of Keynesian economics, because “events played out exactly the way Keynesian-leaning textbooks said they would.” ‘ 

The claim and the quote are Krugman’s. They distort history. As preached and practiced since the 1960s, Keynesian economics promised to stabilize the economy at levels of low inflation and high employment. By the early 1980s, this vision was in tatters, and many economists were fatalistic about controlling high inflation. Maybe it could be contained. It couldn’t be eliminated, because the social costs (high unemployment, lost output) would be too great. Inflation persists, wrote Yale economist James Tobin, because “major economic groups [claim] pieces of the pie that together exceed the whole pie.”

This was a clever rationale for tolerating high inflation, and the Volcker-Reagan monetary onslaught demolished it. High inflation was not an intrinsic condition of wealthy democracies. It was the product of bad economic policies. This was the 1980s’ true lesson, not the contrived triumph of Keynesianism.

As my original column said, I don’t dispute Krugman on the importance of the 1980s’ disinflation. Indeed, the premise of my book (“The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath”) is that inflation’s rise and fall are underrated events in post-World War II history. But it matters how high inflation was overcome. Krugman seems so determined to discredit Reagan that he makes a mockery of the history.

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Three paragraphs from Jonathan Tobin’s latest post remind us how ideologically blinded and obtuse the president is.

… Mr. Obama was also brainy enough to declare his foreign policy a terrific success on the very day that a Shiite militia group took over the presidential palace in the Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, “sparking fresh concerns about a country that has become a cornerstone of U.S. counterterrorism strategy.” Which reminded me of how President Savant held up Yemen as a model of success only last September, telling us, “This strategy of taking out terrorists who threaten us, while supporting partners on the front lines, is one that we have successfully pursued in Yemen and Somalia for years.” Which in turn reminded me of Libya.

It was in the fall of 2011 when President Obama, speaking to the United Nations and announcing yet another of his grand achievements, declared, “Forty two years of tyranny was ended in six months. From Tripoli to Misurata to Benghazi — today, Libya is free.” Mr. Obama went on to say, “This is how the international community is supposed to work — nations standing together for the sake of peace and security, and individuals claiming their rights.” And what a success it was. Just last summer, in fact, the United States, because of rising violence resulting from clashes between Libyan militias, shut down its embassy in Libya and evacuated its diplomats to neighboring Tunisia under U.S. military escort. Earlier this month King’s College George Joffe wrote, “Libya seems finally to be about to descend into full blown civil war.” Call it another Model of Success during the Obama era.

Our percipient president also declared in his State of the Union speech, “Our diplomacy is at work with respect to Iran, where, for the first time in a decade, we’ve halted the progress of its nuclear program and reduced its stockpile of nuclear material.” That assertion is so reality-based that (a) the Washington Post fact-checker declared “there is little basis” for the president’s claims and (b) the highest ranking Democratic member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Robert Menendez, said the more he hears from Mr. Obama and his administration about Iran, “the more it sounds like talking points that come straight out of Tehran.” Oh, and the president made his announcement on the very day that we learned that Russia and Iran are more aligned than ever, having signed an agreement on military cooperation between the two nations. …

And Stephen Hayes writes on Iran nonsense.

When House speaker John Boehner invited Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress in the coming weeks, the reaction from the White House was swift. In background interviews with reporters, top Obama administration officials made clear that they considered the invitation itself an affront and the acceptance of it a breach of protocol.

Please.

This is the same White House that last week had British prime minister David Cameron making calls to Capitol Hill to lobby lawmakers against more sanctions on Iran. It’s the same administration that had to apologize to Senator Marco Rubio and others for violating its pledge to “consult Congress” before making any unilateral changes to U.S. policy on Cuba. This is the same president who has boasted repeatedly of his ability and willingness to ignore the legislative branch and use his “pen and phone” to do what he wants. And this is the same administration that used the cover of anonymity to call Netanyahu “chickenshit” in a recent interview. …

All of the above has led Craig Pirrong of Streetwise Professor to say “we are in the midst of another low and dishonest decade.”

… Indeed, ISIS has been expanding rather dramatically throughout Syria, giving the lie to this SOTU statement: “In Iraq and Syria, American leadership — including our military power — is stopping ISIL’s advance.” That’s true to a limited degree in Kobani and Mosul, but flatly wrong elsewhere in Iraq and especially Syria. Don’t even get me started on another Obama delusion: the “success” in Yemen, which has descended into absolute chaos with competing “Death to America” factions, both Shia and Sunni, vying for control.

It’s rather depressing to see the President of the United States do a Baghdad Bob imitation while addressing a joint session of Congress.

In sum, at present it appears that Putin is on the advance in Ukraine and ISIS is at best stalemated in Iraq and Syria. And the West’s leaders, reflecting the indifference of their citizenry, are content to let it happen, or at least do too little to prevent it from happening. In other words, we are in the midst of another low and dishonest decade. …

And has the Editors of Investor’s Business Daily starting to wonder if we have become a “banana republic.”

Yemen’s government fell and Saudi Arabia’s king died. But President Obama busied himself with YouTube stars and some of the lowest characters on the Internet. Is this our descent to a banana republic?

Another week has gone by in which the Free World could have used some leadership and President Obama was found wanting.

First, there were the events in Yemen, an ally that Obama had touted as one of our biggest successes in the war on terror but where the president was driven from office by tribal rebels. The commander in chief said virtually nothing. …

The Editors of IBD also rise to defend the A-10 Warthog.

… As Iraqi News reported last week after an A-10 sortie against IS forces near Mosul: “The aircraft sparked panic in the ranks of ISIS and bombing its elements in spaces close to the ground.” Such strikes also prove the value of such a low-maintenance aircraft built to take the punishment expected in close air support.

“Elements of the terrorist organization targeted the aircraft with 4 Strella missiles, but that did not cause it any damage, prompting the remaining elements of the organization to leave the bodies of the dead and carry the wounded to escape,” according to the Iraqi report.

This is not surprising, since the A-10 can almost hover over a battlefield as it picks out targets for its 20-foot-long, 2.5 ton, seven-barrel Gatling gun that can fire 1,100 of those 30 mm shells. The titanium shell that wraps around the bottom of its cockpit makes it difficult to shoot down.

The U.S. sent the aircraft to the region in late November with the 163rd Expeditionary Fighter Squadron, a unit with the Indiana Air National Guard. The unit also provided close air support for air operations against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

On Jan. 15, Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James pointed out that the A-10 had conducted 11% of all sorties against IS since August, despite the fact it was not deployed to the battlefield until November.

But it may be shot down soon by the budget-cutters. …

The last piece today on this president’s disasters comes from Roger Simon.

… During Obama’s presidency the influence of Ayatollah Khamenei’s Iranian Shiite regime has spread across the world like the proverbial wildfire, reaching from North Africa into Iraq, Lebanon (via Hezbollah), Syria (via Assad whose red line on chemical weapons famously faded into invisibility), Gaza (via improved relations with Hamas) and now into Yemen (via the Houthis) and undoubtedly a number of other places, including Venezuela, North Korea and Cuba.  And our president, consciously or unconsciously or both, has had as much to do as anyone with the creation of this nascent, soon-to-be nuclear armed and missile-ready  fundamentalist “Greater Persia.”  No wonder the Sunni Saudis are alarmed — they have been for a long time — and no wonder Obama suddenly decided to replace Biden in paying a condolence visit to Riyadh for the death of King Abdullah.  He has some powerful fence-mending to do that pretend bowing and scraping may not so easily solve.

Much of this Iran-coddling began back when the Green Movement was in the streets of Tehran seeking the overthrow of the ayatollahs and chanting “Obama, Obama… Are you with us or are you with them?” Our president did not respond.  He was already in private communication with the bizarre Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  Obama wanted to be the one who got credit for reining in the excesses of the Islamic Republic, not those unruly student demonstrators who were the ones suffering from the regime in the first place, being murdered, tortured and raped in Evin Prison, often in reverse order.

Indeed, this unconscionable and out-of-control narcissism has been the key to Obama’s foreign policy throughout and accounts for the catastrophic global results we see in front of us now.  The “leading from behind” mantra has always been a fraud, masking what it really means: “I, Barack, know best and manipulate affairs from behind.”  It’s all about me.  (Is it ever!) …

As if by magic, the Washington Post’s business section has an article that could stand as the perfect metaphor for the president. Turns out major auto manufacturers are adding fake engine noise to give their vehicles an undeserved V8 growl. But we all know President Bystander is a three cylinder two-stroke Saab. 

Stomp on the gas in a new Ford Mustang or F-150 and you’ll hear a meaty, throaty rumble — the same style of roar that Americans have associated with auto power and performance for decades.

It’s a sham. The engine growl in some of America’s best-selling cars and trucks is actually a finely tuned bit of lip-syncing, boosted through special pipes or digitally faked altogether. And it’s driving car enthusiasts insane.

Fake engine noise has become one of the auto industry’s dirty little secrets, with automakers from BMW to Volkswagen turning to a sound-boosting bag of tricks. Without them, today’s more fuel-efficient engines would sound far quieter and, automakers worry, seemingly less powerful, potentially pushing buyers away. …

… That type of ire has made the auto industry shy about discussing its sound technology. Several attempts to speak with Ford’s sound engineers about the new F-150, a six-cylinder model of America’s best-selling truck that plays a muscular engine note through the speakers, were quietly rebuffed.

Car companies are increasingly wary of alerting buyers that they might not be hearing the real thing, and many automakers have worked with audio and software engineers to make their cars’ synthesized engine melody more realistic.

Volkswagen uses what’s called a “Soundaktor,” a special speaker that looks like a hockey puck and plays sound files in cars such as the GTI and Beetle Turbo. Lexus worked with sound technicians at Yamaha to more loudly amplify the noise of its LFA supercar toward the driver seat.

Some, including Porsche with its “sound symposer,” have used noise-boosting tubes to crank up the engine sound inside the cabin. Others have gone further into digital territory: BMW plays a recording of its motors through the car stereos, a sample of which changes depending on the engine’s load and power. …

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In one of our wonderful days with NO selections about Washington miscreants, we start with pictures of an underside of an iceberg. It’s the topside now, since it flipped just before the photos were taken. The article is from the Smithsonian, so we have to be treated to a lecture about how this is happening more often now because of guess what ? ? ? ? ? 

You got it!        Global Warming!

Is there anything it can’t do?

It can flip icebergs. Sorry about the regulation BS, but the photos are stunning and not often seen.

… Cornell’s guide suggested that the iceberg had recently flipped. Icebergs form when chunks of freshwater ice calve—or break off—from glaciers and ice shelves, as well as other icebergs. Because of the varying densities of ice and saltwater, only about 10 percent of an iceberg will ever show at the surface, and that protruding tip will gather dirt and snow. Melting can trigger calving, but it can also change the equilibrium of an iceberg, causing it to flip.

In the case of this jewel-like iceberg, the ice is probably very old. In glaciers, years of compression force out air pockets and gradually make the ice denser, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. “When glacier ice becomes extremely dense, the ice absorbs a small amount of red light, leaving a bluish tint in the reflected light, which is what we see.” In addition, minerals and organic matter may have seeped into the underwater part of the iceberg over time, creating its vivid green-blue color. …

Gretchen Reynolds writes on the good that comes from lunch hour walks. 

To combat afternoon slumps in enthusiasm and focus, take a walk during the lunch hour.

A new study finds that even gentle lunchtime strolls can perceptibly — and immediately — buoy people’s moods and ability to handle stress at work.

It is not news, of course, that walking is healthy and that people who walk or otherwise exercise regularly tend to be more calm, alert and happy than people who are inactive.

But many past studies of the effects of walking and other exercise on mood have focused on somewhat long-term, gradual outcomes, looking at how weeks or months of exercise change people emotionally.

Fewer studies have examined more-abrupt, day-to-day and even hour-by-hour changes in people’s moods, depending on whether they exercise, and even fewer have focused on these effects while people are at work, even though most of us spend a majority of our waking hours in an office.

So, for the new study, which was published in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports this month, researchers at the University of Birmingham and other universities began by recruiting sedentary office workers at the university.

Potential volunteers were told that they would need to be available to walk for 30 minutes during their usual lunch hour three times a week. …

Discover Magazine reports on the exciting future of thorium nuclear energy because it doesn’t use a chain reaction that could go rogue, and the byproducts cannot be used in nuclear weapons.  

Nuclear power has long been a contentious topic. It generates huge amounts of electricity with zero carbon emissions, and thus is held up as a solution to global energy woes. But it also entails several risks, including weapons development, meltdown, and the hazards of disposing of its waste products.

But those risks and benefits all pertain to a very specific kind of nuclear energy: nuclear fission of uranium or plutonium isotopes. There’s another kind of nuclear energy that’s been waiting in the wings for decades – and it may just demand a recalibration of our thoughts on nuclear power.

Nuclear fission using thorium is easily within our reach, and, compared with conventional nuclear energy, the risks are considerably lower. …

… Conventional nuclear power using a fuel cycle involving uranium-235 and/or plutonium-239 was seen as killing two birds with one stone: reducing America’s dependence on foreign oil, and creating the fuel needed for nuclear bombs. Thorium power, on the other hand, didn’t have military potential. And by decreasing the need for conventional nuclear power, a potentially successful thorium program would have actually been seen as threatening to U.S. interests in the Cold War environment.

Today, however, the situation is very different. Rather than wanting to make weapons, many global leaders are worried about proliferating nuclear technology. And that has led several nations to take a closer look at thorium power generation. …

From the Smithsonian, we learn a startling fact. There are more tigers in captivity in the U. S. than there are wild tigers in the whole world. 

Clayton James Eller loved going to his aunt’s house in Millers Creek, North Carolina, where he got to visit Tigger, her 317-pound pet Bengal tiger. One December day in 2003, ten-year-old C.J. was shoveling snow near Tigger’s outdoor pen when the animal attacked him from an opening in the chain-link fence and dragged him under. C.J.’s uncle grabbed his rifle and shot the tiger, but the boy died before he reached the hospital.

Tiger attacks in the United States are always dramatic news—there were 27 reported between 1990 and 2006, with seven people and most of the tigers killed. But maulings aren’t the only problem arising from the perhaps surprising fact that there are more captive tigers in the U.S. than there are wild tigers on earth.

Conservationists estimate that about 3,200 wild tigers remain around the world, while there are some 5,000 tigers in captivity in the U.S., according to the World Wildlife Fund. Even that number is probably low, says Carole Baskin, the founder of Big Cat Rescue, an animal sanctuary in Tampa, Florida, because reporting is “based on the honor system, and we’re dealing with a lot of people that are really dishonorable.” Edward J. Grace, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s deputy assistant director for law enforcement, estimates that the nation is home to more than 10,000 captive tigers. Only about 350 of those, says the WWF, are held in facilities accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums. …

Why Files posts on the return of the carnivores to Europe.

A surprising new study shows that four big carnivores (brown bear, lynx, wolverine and wolf) are doing quite nicely in Europe, thank you very much, even without the wilderness protection that benefits some large predators in the United States.

“We find that in Europe we have twice as many wolves as in the lower 48 (American) states, on half the land area, with two times the human population density,” says Guillaume Chapron of the SwedishUniversity of Agricultural Sciences, the corresponding author of the new study.

In Europe, as in North America, large carnivores face ingrained hostility. It’s not just their ferocity, but also their need for a large range and lots of meat that makes them natural competitors.

Add it up, and both Europe and the United States had severe losses of carnivore populations by the 1960s.

Wilderness reserves and national parks in North America are intended to separate animals from people, but the new study points to other ways to ensure predator survival. “If we had followed the North American model of wilderness in Europe, we would not have predators, because in Europe everything is developed, we have roads everywhere,” Chapron says. …

The Atlantic tells us how Jelly Belly invents flavors.

In an echoing, high-ceilinged chamber in Northern California, there spin row upon row of what look like small cement mixers. The gleaming metal drums churn for hours on end while white-uniformed technicians pour in sugar, corn starch, color, and certain other, more miraculous concoctions. Out of one drum comes a whiff of red apple, conjuring a fall afternoon spent picking fruit; from another comes the buttered-popcorn scent of an evening at the movies. Out of drum after drum, all down the room, come smells evoking everything from apple pie to piña coladas to freshly mown grass.

Here, at the Jelly Belly candy factory, memories are reincarnated as jelly beans.

Flavor and scent are beloved for their ability to bring back memories long buried in the sensory deluge, a point made by Proust with his madeleine decades before modern science let us peer into the physiology of flavor. The flavor designers at the Jelly Belly Candy Company make it their business to speak this sensory language, and, through a process alternately technical and zany, to suss out exactly what it is that makes those tastes—and by extension, those memories—jump.

All Jelly Belly flavors, from toasted marshmallow to cappuccino—there are around 100 on the market at any given point—grow from ideas submitted by company employees, members of the public, retailers, and others, but the execution depends on a four-person team of food scientists, led by head of research and development Ambrose Lee and aided by the company’s marketing and executive teams. …

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Charles Krauthammer notes how President Talks-A-Lot has been mostly silent about the attacks in Paris.

… As for President Obama, he never was Charlie, not even for those 48 hours. From the day of the massacre, he has been practically invisible. At the interstices of various political rallies, he issued bits of muted, mealy-mouthed boilerplate. Followed by the now-famous absence of any high-ranking U.S. official at the Paris rally, an abdication of moral and political leadership for which the White House has already admitted error.

But this was no mere error of judgment or optics or, most absurdly, of communications in which we are supposed to believe that the president was not informed by staff about the magnitude, both actual and symbolic, of the demonstration he ignored. (He needed to be told?)

On the contrary, the no-show, following the near silence, precisely reflected the president’s profound ambivalence about the very idea of the war on terror. Obama began his administration by purging the phrase from the lexicon of official Washington. He has ever since shuttled between saying that (a) the war must end because of the damage “keeping America on a perpetual wartime footing” was doing to us, and (b) the war has already ended, as he suggested repeatedly during the 2012 campaign, with bin Laden dead and al-Qaeda “on the run.” …

From the president who normally can’t shut up, to the pope who also can’t shut up. David Harsanyi posts on the latest from Rome. 

We heathens can leave the theological debate to others.

But Pope Francis, the Bishop of Rome and world leader of the Catholic Church, has some ideas about laws governing the secular world. We expect Francis to defend the dignity of faith, to bring clarity to the Catholic position. Yet instead the Pope, while en route to the Philippines, offered a number of comments about freedom of expression that ranged from the unclear to the contradictory.

More than simply saying that poking fun at religion was ugly, he argued that there should be limits on freedom of expression and on mocking faith. (All this with the caveat that the Pope’s words were not misrepresented or taken out of context, as they so often are by the media.) …

… then the Vicar of Christ goes on to explain that those who mock faith should expect to be punched in the face. “If my good friend Dr. Gasparri says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch,” says Francis. “It’s normal. It’s normal. You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others.”

The Pope is unimpressed by provocateurs. He wants them barred.

Someone should ask the Pope if provocateurs should expect an asymmetrical response? For instance, if Gasparri uttered a curse word against the Pope’s mother, should he expect to his family blown up? That would be a more pertinent analogy. …

If that wasn’t enough, now he’s trying out slurs on Catholics saying they don’t have to breed “like rabbits.” USA Today has the story. We’re beginning to understand King Henry II when he asked, “Will No One Rid Me of This Meddlesome Priest?” 

Pope Francis, after a visit to the largest Catholic nation in Asia, says Catholics may have a moral responsibility to limit the number of their children and need not reproduce “like rabbits.”

But the pope also reaffirmed the church’s ban on artificial means of birth control and said Catholics should practice “responsible parenting.”

His comments on the subject of birth control, made aboard the papal jet returning to Rome from the Philippines, were described as apparently unprecedented by the National Catholic Reporter, an independent news organization that follows the Vatican. …

Matthew Continetti thinks liberals defending Charlie Hebdo freedoms are noticeably absent elsewhere in the struggle to be free.

… The unanimity of outrage expressed on Twitter, the unthinking allegiance to the cause of the hour whatever that cause might be, the social positioning of writers struggling to be the most pure, the most righteous, the most moving in their indignation—all of these things remind me of other scandals, of other rages, in which the targets were not Islamic terrorists but men and women who disagree with elements of liberal dogma.

Do liberals actually believe in the right to offend? Their attitude seems to me to be ambivalent at best. And this equivocation was apparent within hours of the attack, when news outlets censored or refused to publish the images for which the Charlie Hebdo editors were killed. Classifying satire or opinion as “hate speech” subject to regulation is not an aberration. It is commonplace.

Indeed, the outpouring of support for free speech in the aftermath of the Paris attack coincides with, and partially obscures, the degradation of speech rights in the West. Commencement last year was marked by universities revoking appearances by speakers Condoleezza Rice and Ayaan Hirsi Ali for no other reason than that mobs disagreed with the speakers’ points of view. I do not recall liberals rallying behind Condi and Hirsi Ali then.

Nor do I recall liberals standing up for the critics of global warming and evolutionary theory, of same-sex marriage and trans rights and women in combat, of riots in Ferguson and of Obama’s decision to amnesty millions of illegal immigrants. On the contrary: To dissent from the politically correct and conventional and fashionable is to invite rebuke, disdain, expulsion from polite society, to court the label of Islamophobe or denier or bigot or cisnormative or misogynist or racist or carrier of privilege and irredeemable micro-aggressor. For the right to offend to have any meaning, however, it cannot be limited to theistic religions. You must have the right to offend secular humanists, too.

Brendan Eich donated a thousand dollars to Proposition Eight in 2008. Six years later it cost him his job. In 2014, when Charles Krauthammer merely stated his agnosticism on the question of what causes global warming, liberals organized a petition demanding his removal from the Washington Post. A rather touchy climate scientist named Michael Mann—subtly parodied in Interstellar—has sued National Review and Mark Steyn for disagreeing with him. Last May, after some sensitive souls complained, the Chicago Sun-Times removed from its site a column by Kevin D. Williamson critical of transgender activism. No one wept for Kevin. …

Yes President Ungracious did speak last night. Byron York has some of the details.

Perhaps the most striking thing about the 2015 State of the Union address was not the president at the podium but the audience in the seats. The joint session of Congress listening to President Obama Tuesday night included 83 fewer Democrats than the group that heard Obama’s first address in 2009 — 69 fewer Democrats in the House and 14 fewer in the Senate. The scene in the House Chamber was a graphic reminder of the terrible toll the Obama years have taken on Capitol Hill Democrats.

Not that the president would ever acknowledge that. Indeed, in more than an hour of speaking, Obama never once acknowledged that there was a big election in November and that the leadership of the Senate has changed. Obama’s silence on that political reality stood in stark contrast to George W. Bush’s 2007 State of the Union address, in which he graciously and at some length acknowledged the Democrats’ victory in the 2006 midterms. Bush said it was an honor to address Nancy Pelosi as “Madam Speaker.” He spoke of the pride Pelosi’s late father would have felt to see his daughter lead the House. “I congratulate the new Democrat majority,” Bush said. “Congress has changed, but not our responsibilities.”

If one cannot imagine Obama saying such a thing — well, he didn’t. …

… Beyond failing to acknowledge the new reality on Capitol Hill, Obama at times seemed equally out of touch with reality both in the nation and the world.

“In Iraq and Syria, American leadership — including our military power — is stopping ISIL’s advance,” Obama said, referring to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. The claim left some foreign policy observers aghast, since there is a general consensus that the Islamic State is making progress in the face of limited American air attacks. “That just isn’t the case, according to military officials I’ve been speaking to,” NBC foreign correspondent Richard Engel said of Obama’s statement. “[The Islamic State] are taking new territory.” Of Obama’s description of a world in which the Islamic State is retreating, Afghanistan is on the road to peace, and terrorists are on the run from South Asia to North Africa, Engel concluded, “It sounded like the president was outlining a world that he wishes we were all living in.” …

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The president’s pompous idiot John Kerry finally shows up in France. And he arrives with a minstrel show. Kevin Williamson has fun with it.

… The spectacle of the Obama administration’s dispatching Secretary of State John Kerry to “share a big hug with Paris” as James Taylor — who still exists — crooned “You’ve Got a Friend” is the perfect objective correlative for American decline: The pathetic self-regard of John Kerry and James Taylor’s Baby Boomers meets the cynical, self-serving, going-through-the-motions style of Barack Obama’s Generation X as disenchanted Millennials in parental basements across the fruited plains no doubt injured their thumbs typing “WTF?” It is the substitution of celebrity for power, of sentiment for analysis, of sloppy gesture for clear-headed commitment. …

… James Taylor may in fact be the quintessential man of his generation. He is the son of two highly accomplished parents, his father a physician and dean of the University of North Carolina medical school who served in the Arctic with Operation Deep Freeze, his mother a soprano who studied at the New England Conservatory of Music. A child of affluence bringing up the rear of the Age of Aquarius, he was in a mental institution by the time he was of high-school age, and then tried to launch a musical career but launched a career as a full-time junkie instead. His fortunes turned around when he inherited money and used his new status to move to London and exploit his social connections to link up with Paul McCartney and become rich and famous with a catchy song about what a complete screw-up he had been his entire life. At some point, this man who is so colorlessly country-club that he makes the Fox News weekday lineup look like the original cast of Hair declared himself a “churning urn of burning funk.” For the next few decades he proceeded to burden the world with a burgeoning catalog of insipid mediocrity until, finally, he descended to the lowest point a musician ever reaches, three steps down from busking in subway stations: He became a hired hand for politicians, playing with MoveOn.org’s “Vote for Change” tour through swing states on behalf of — small world! — John Kerry, our national personification of vanity, a kept man, dilettante, and Democratic time-server whose career was both launched and sustained by self-serving accounts of his service in the Vietnam War, a conflict that Taylor avoided by being declared mentally unfit to serve. …

Jonathan Tobin treats us to more.

One of the basic rules of satire is that it is virtually impossible to satirize something that is already inherently ridiculous. That axiom is brought to mind as America belatedly sought to reaffirm its friendship with France in the wake of the administration’s decision to snub the Paris unity rally that commemorated the terror attack on the Charlie Hebdo office and a kosher market. Neither the president nor the vice president or even Secretary of State John Kerry bothered to come to a gathering attended by over 40 world leaders. But to make up for this, Kerry brought folk rock singer James Taylor to Paris to serenade French officials with a version of Carol King’s classic ballad, “You’ve Got a Friend.” This is something so absurd that it isn’t clear even the cleverest minds at Saturday Night Live or even Charlie Hebdo could adequately convey the sophomoric nature of a lame attempt to make up for a gaffe. …

… Kerry’s cringe-inducing turn hosting his friend Taylor isn’t the dumbest thing he has done at the State Department by a long shot. Having faith in Mahmoud Abbas as a champion of peace and signing a weak nuclear deal with Iran are hard to top. But is an iconic moment that will symbolize Obama and Kerry’s ham-handed approach to allies. A song, even a folk rock classic that allows Kerry to reminisce about his youth spent falsely testifying against his fellow Vietnam vets, can’t substitute for a strong stand against Islamists or even the ability to say the word. Prior to this, it was possible to argue that U.S. foreign policy had become a joke. But after Taylor had finished warbling, even the president and his inner White House circle must be wondering what sort of a fool they’ve unleashed on the world.

Editors of the NY Daily News think the stunt shows as much disrespect as the presidential blowoff.  

John Kerry has given new meaning to the term “tone deaf.”

There America’s secretary of state was, on the visit to Paris that he should have made when world leaders linked arms in solidarity against Islamist terror.

There he was, to belatedly convey the resolve of the United States of America in defending civilization and the values of free democracy after the Charlie Hebdo and kosher supermarket massacres of 17 people.

And there he was, forgoing a clarion call for global solidarity in favor of a hum-along with gentle, guitar-strumming folkie James Taylor.

It’s absurd but it’s not funny. It’s as bad a diss as President Obama’s no-show failure to appreciate the gravity of this moment in the war on terror. …

Andrew Malcolm lists five reasons to blow off President Real Good Talker. Pickerhead can list five reasons too; A&E is showing reruns of Storage Wars, USA has Modern Family, Kentucky is going to host Vanderbilt for a roast of their men’s basketball team, Discovery has Moonshiner reruns, and Bravo has Beverly Hills Housewives. Storage Wars is the beer drinker’s Antiques Roadshow and it’s not true watching it burns off IQ points.

For once, Barack Obama pays attention tonight to the Constitution, which requires that a president “from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union.”

There’s nothing in that sacred document about turning it into a pie-in-the-sky, political wish list, criticizing Supreme Court justices to their faces or going on for over an hour on prime-time TV and pre-empting some of our most popular shows. There’s not even any mention of a president delivering the required information in person or verbally — very verbally.

Obama’s State of the Union Addresses have been among the longest in modern history, averaging nearly 65 minutes. Not as long as the 71-minute average of Bill Clinton, who also liked to hear himself talk. But way surpassing the 37 minutes of Ronald Reagan, who was more interested in communicating. …

It’s your patriotic duty not to watch SOTU. Charles Cooke says it’s un-American.

… As a matter of basic constitutional propriety, there is something unutterably rotten about the State of the Union. The essential principle of the American settlement, Thomas Jefferson confirmed in a 1797 letter, “is that of a separation of legislative, Executive and Judiciary functions.” And as far as possible, he added, it is incumbent upon “every friend of free government” to keep it that way. Why, then, each and every January are we happy to watch the head of the executive branch walk slap bang into the middle of the legislature and deliver an unchallenged, immoderate, and entirely self-serving lecture about himself and his desires? Why do we permit one branch to issue a campaign speech in the heart of enemy territory? How do we imagine we are serving the interests of fractured government by assembling all of its moving parts in one place?

Within the English system of government — in which the executive and the legislature are fused — such an arrangement would make perfect sense. Within the Madisonian system, however, it is little short of preposterous — especially when one considers that the legislature is accorded no opportunity whatsoever to push back. Explaining his decision to abolish the practice in 1801, President Thomas Jefferson contended that the new country should not tolerate a pageant so similar in nature to the British Speech from the Throne, and announced instead that he would be fulfilling his constitutional duties in writing. …

It can certainly not be hoped that this chief executive (That would be president narcissist) will limit himself in the name of abstract, Jeffersonian principle — nor, for that matter, is it likely that his successor will, either. But why, one has to wonder, does Congress continue to applaud the charade?

Circling back to Kerry’s stunt in Paris, Clarice Feldman says it’s so dumb there’s no room for parody.

I was sound asleep when the phone rang and so I cannot be absolutely sure the conversation was not a dream, but it seemed real enough.

“Hello,” the caller began. “My name is Mr. Mensch, I am president of the Parodists of the World, professional comedy writers, and we want to engage you in a suit against the administration for tortious interference with our livelihood.”

“What exactly are you alleging, I mean specifics?” I responded.

He then launched into a litany of grievances against the administration which the Parodists claimed had made it impossible for them to continue making a living.

“First, our country sent no one to the important anti-terrorism demonstration in Paris, and then there’s Valerie Jarrett calling the march against the slaughter of innocents in Paris a ‘Parade’, as if this were some sort of celebration.‘ Certainly We Would Have Loved To Participate In The Parade,” But We “Got The Substance Right”’.” She said and then proceeded to claim that Holder couldn’t attend because he was in a very important terrorism conference at the time, forgetting that we knew everyone else at the conference made it to the march except Holder. So at the time of the march he was meeting with himself, it seems.”

“Well, that was silly, “I agreed.  “And?” I waited for the next item.

“Then our secretary of state, John Kerry, whose entire life has been fashioned around his self-imagined superior diplomatic skills and international affairs expertise, shows up speaking execrable high school level French, accompanied by  an aging ex-druggie who sings to the grieving French ‘You’ve Got a Friend’”

“I have to agree that was preposterous and really embarrassing. One wag suggested the French ought to respond by having Carly Simon sing, ‘You’re so Vain’ to the President and his Secretary of State. ‘Send in the Clowns’ comes to mind.” …

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Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, published a blockbuster last week. Here’s what a liberal foreign affairs expert thinks of the president’s efforts. We have been saying for years that the narcissist is a rank amateur. Clueless, feckless, worthless are just some of the words we’ve used in this regard. Now we hear from an expert;

Here’s why America’s failure to be represented at the Paris unity march was so profoundly disturbing. It wasn’t just because President Obama’s or Vice President Biden’s absence was a horrendous gaffe. More than this, it demonstrated beyond argument that the Obama team lacks the basic instincts and judgment necessary to conduct U.S. national security policy in the next two years. It’s simply too dangerous to let Mr. Obama continue as is—with his current team and his way of making decisions. America, its allies, and friends could be heading into one of the most dangerous periods since the height of the Cold War. …

… First, Mr. Obama will have to thank his senior National Security Council team and replace them. The must-gos include National Security Adviser Susan Rice, Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, chief speech writer/adviser Ben Rhodes, and foreign policy guru without portfolio Valerie Jarrett. They can all be replaced right away, and their successors won’t require senatorial confirmation.

Here’s who could succeed them and inspire great confidence immediately at home and abroad: first rate former top officials and proven diplomats Thomas Pickering, Winston Lord, and Frank Wisner; Republicans with sterling records like Robert Zoellick, Rich Armitage, Robert Kimmitt, and Richard Burt; or a rising young Democrat of proven ability and of demonstrated Cabinet-level quality, Michele Flournoy. Any one of them would make a huge difference from Day 1 in a top role. Others among them could be brought on to the NSC as senior advisers without portfolio to take the lead on specific problems. These are not just my personal opinions about these individuals; they are practically universal ones.

The State Department really needs help, too. Anthony Blinken, the new No. 2 there, is quite good and should stay. But Secretary of State John Kerry has been described even by the faithful in this administration as quixotic. …

Steve Hayward of Power Line posts on Gelb’s article.

I remember as a mere callow college student when I made out that Jimmy Carter was finished: when liberals turned on him. For example, Ken Bode, then the revered moderator of “Washington Week in Review” on PBS, wrote in 1979 “It’s Over For Jimmy” in The New Republic: “The past two weeks will be remembered as the period when President Carter packed it in, put the finishing touches on a failed presidency” (There’s lots more in this vein recounted in the first volume of my Age of Reagan books.)

So it shouldn’t surprise us that people are saying Obama’s no-show in Paris last weekend was his “diplomatic Katrina.” More serious is the Daily Beast article out yesterday from Leslie Gelb, who doesn’t come any more Establishmenty than a Harvard-trained Rockefeller. Gelb, notable for chiefly being boring, is the kind of Establishment figure who usually tut-tuts Republican presidents for being too bellicose. But he thinks Obama is circling the drain on foreign policy: …

John Fund’s recent piece on Valerie Jarrett is germane.

It’s high time the news media paid more attention to Valerie Jarrett. An old Chicago friend of both Barack and Michelle Obama’s, she exercises unusual influence in the White House as a “senior adviser.” Many in Washington believe that she is at the heart of the disappointment the Obama administration has become. They are unwilling to say so in public. But the evidence keeps piling up.

One who is isn’t afraid to speak up is Steven Brill, the author of a searing new book analyzing American health care called “America’s Bitter Pill.” Brill is a liberal and still thinks that Obamacare should have been passed. But in his exhaustively researched book (he spoke with 243 people over a 27-month period), he slams “incompetence in the White House” for the catastrophic launch of Obamacare in 2013: “Never [has there] been a group of people who more incompetently launched something.” During an interview on NPR’s “Fresh Air” last week, he lay much of the blame at Jarrett’s doorstep. “The people in the administration who knew it was going wrong went to the president directly with memos, in person, to his chief of staff,” he told NPR’s Terry Gross. But “the president was protected, mostly by Valerie Jarrett, from doing anything.” Although Obama had no idea of the issues until they ultimately reared their head, he still bears the blame, Brill said. “At the end of the day, he’s responsible. . . . The president, whatever we can say about him on policy and on giving speeches, as a manager, he failed. He didn’t know what was going on in the single most important initiative of his administration.” …

… But Jarrett isn’t any ordinary staffer. There are several things noteworthy about her. 1) Jarrett seems to be the only close Obama aide who entered the administration and is still there; 2) Jarrett has been highly successful in keeping new people with fresh ideas she doesn’t like from the president; and 3) she appears to suffer more than most staffers from a severe case of hero worship of her boss.

Consider what she told David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, in an interview for The Bridge, his 2010 book on Obama:

“He knows exactly how smart he is. . . . I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually. . . . So what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but someone with extraordinary talents that they had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy. . . . He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do. He would never be satisfied with what ordinary people do.”

As columnist George Will noted in astonishment: “Leave aside the question of whether someone so smitten can be in any meaningful sense an adviser. About what can such a paragon as Obama need advice?” …

John Steele Gordon posts on one of the “new ideas” that will come out of the prancing fool’s state of the union address Tuesday night.

… As for taxes, his one idée fixe has been to raise taxes on the rich, an idea that goes back to the 1840s. Consider his proposal regarding inherited property, to be unveiled in the State of the Union speech this Tuesday. It calls for heirs to inherit not only the property but also the original cost basis of the property, subjecting it to far higher capital gains taxes when the heirs sell it. As it stands now, the heirs’ cost basis is the price on the date of death.

But the heirs of large estates would have already paid as much as a whopping 40 percent under the estate tax, which is nothing more nor less than a capital gains taxes triggered by death instead of sale. Obama also wants to raise the capital gains tax to 28 percent, so the total tax take might be as high as 56.8 percent. But many capital assets, such as real estate and shares in a company founded by the decedent, are held for decades and the capital gains and estates taxes are not indexed for inflation.

So much of the value taxed away would be illusory, a tax on phantom gains. An investment worth $1 million in 1970 would have to be worth $6.1 million today for there to be any real gain at all. That won’t stop the president from calling his proposal “fair” and “the right thing to do.” It is, of course, neither, just the same century-old leftist, stick-it-to-the-rich boilerplate.

Fortunately these proposals have zero chance of getting through the new Republican Congress. Still, it’s going to be a long two years until January 20, 2017, a date that will mark what my new favorite bumper sticker calls ‘The End of an Error.”

Randy Barnett, law professor and Volokh contributor has an interesting post on the president’s duty to act in good faith. This is pretty complex and it is difficult to come up with a pithy pull quote. Perhaps it should have waited until just before the weekend. But it is a worthwhile read.

… According to this theory of good faith performance, “scarcity of enforcement resources” is an appropriate motive for exercising prosecutorial discretion, but disagreement with the law being enforced is not. The same holds true with exercising prosecutorial discretion to enforce marijuana laws in states that have made it legal under state law. Prioritizing seriousness of offenses is one thing; disagreeing with the policy of the Controlled Substances Act (as I do) is another.

But how do you tell the difference? Here is where the President’s previous statements about the scope of his powers, about his legislative priorities, and his frustration with Congress’s “inaction” become legally relevant. His prior statements go to the President’s state of mind or motive, which is dispositive of the issue of “good faith.” If the President believed that the law precluded these actions but he was exercising the discretion he was given under the law to accomplish them nonetheless, he was abusing his discretion and acting in bad faith. Whether or not the law gave him discretion is not the answer to the question, it is the problem that a doctrine of good faith performance is devised to address. …

Business Insider says there’s a reason you won’t waste your time watching the state of the union.

Sure, the pageantry and theatrics of the annual presidential address will all be there. The stem-winder of a speech from President Barack Obama. The standing ovations from his supporters, and strategic smirks and scowls from his opponents. The wall-to-wall media coverage and cable news countdown clocks.

But viewership is falling, with 20 million fewer people watching last year’s State of the Union compared to Bill Clinton’s address at the same point in his presidency.

Congress rarely follows through on the policy proposals the president unveils. And this year, the battle lines between Obama and the new Republican-led Congress will have already been set before the president arrives on Capitol Hill for the annual address to a joint session of Congress and a television audience of millions.

The dwindling impact of the big speech has sent the White House searching for new ways to break through. It’s now thinking of the State of the Union as an “organizing principle” rather than a single, communal event. …

But, we do have lots of SOTU cartoons with attitude.

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Jeff Jacoby writes on the damage anti-Semitism is causing to the culture of France.

Even before last week’s terrorist attacks in Paris, the French prime minister was concerned about the continued viability of Jewish life in France. In an interview with The Atlantic prior to the Charlie Hebdo and kosher supermarket massacres, Manuel Valls made a grim prediction:

“If 100,000 Jews leave, France will no longer be France. The FrenchRepublic will be judged a failure.”

His misgivings were far from groundless. An exodus of French Jews is already underway and accelerating rapidly. In 2012, there were just over 1,900 immigrants to Israel from France. The following year nearly 3,400 French Jews emigrated; in 2014 approximately 7,000 left. For the first time ever, France heads the list of countries of origin for immigrants to Israel, and the ministry of immigration absorption expects another 10,000 French Jews to arrive in 2015.

That would mean more than 22,000 Jews fleeing France for Israel in the space of just four years, nearly 4.5 percent of the country’s Jewish population. The departure of 100,000 French Jews might once have been inconceivable. No longer. In a survey last spring of France’s Jewish community, the largest in Europe, three out of four respondents said they were considering emigrating. …

Jeff Jacoby alluded to a piece on anti-Semitism by the British historian Paul Johnson. It appeared in the June 2005 issue of Commentary. We tracked it down and have included it.

The intensification of anti-Semitism in the Arab world over the last years and its reappearance in parts of Europe have occasioned a number of thoughtful reflections on the nature and consequences of this phenomenon, but also some misleading analyses based on doubtful premises. It is widely assumed, for example, that anti-Semitism is a form of racism or ethnic xenophobia. This is a legacy of the post-World War II period, when revelations about the horrifying scope of Hitler’s “final solution” caused widespread revulsion against all manifestations of group hatred. Since then, racism, in whatever guise it appears, has been identified as the evil to be fought.

But if anti-Semitism is a variety of racism, it is a most peculiar variety, with many unique characteristics. In my view as a historian, it is so peculiar that it deserves to be placed in a quite different category. I would call it an intellectual disease, a disease of the mind, extremely infectious and massively destructive. It is a disease to which both human individuals and entire human societies are prone.

Geneticists and experts in related fields may object that my observation is not scientifically valid. My rejoinder is simple: how can one make scientific judgments in this area? Scientists cannot even agree on how to define race itself, or whether the category exists in any meaningful sense. The immense advances in genetics over the last half-century, far from simplifying the problem, have made it appear more complex and mysterious. [1] All that scientists appear able to do is to present the evidence, often conflicting, of studies they have undertaken. And this, essentially, is what a historian does as well. He shows how human beings have behaved, over long periods and in many different places, when confronted with the apparent fact of marked racial differences.

The historical evidence suggests that racism, in varying degrees, is ubiquitous in human societies, so much so that it might even be termed natural and inevitable (though not irremediable: its behavioral consequences can be mitigated by education, political arrangements, and intermarriage). It often takes the form of national hostility, especially when two countries are placed by geography in postures of antagonism. Such has been the case with France and England, Poland and Russia, and Germany and Denmark, to give only three obvious examples.

By contrast, anti-Semitism is very ancient, has never been associated with frontiers, and, although it has had its ups and downs, seems impervious to change. The Jews (or Hebrews) were “strangers and sojourners,” as the book of Genesis puts it, from very early times, and certainly by the end of the 2nd millennium B.C.E. Long before the great diaspora that followed the conflicts of Judea with Rome, they had settled in many parts of the Mediterranean area and Middle East while maintaining their separate religion and social identity; the first recorded instances of anti-Semitism date from the 3rd century B.C.E., in Alexandria. Subsequent historical shifts have not ended anti-Semitism but merely superimposed additional archaeological layers, as it were. To the anti-Semitism of antiquity was added the Christian layer and then, from the time of the Enlightenment on, the secularist layer, which culminated in Soviet anti-Semitism and the Nazi atrocities of the first half of the 20th century. Now we have the Arab-Muslim layer, dating roughly from the 1920′s but becoming more intense with each decade since.

What strikes the historian surveying anti-Semitism worldwide over more than two millennia is its fundamental irrationality. It seems to make no sense, any more than malaria or meningitis makes sense. In the whole of history, it is hard to point to a single occasion when a wave of anti-Semitism was provoked by a real Jewish threat (as opposed to an imaginary one). In Japan, anti-Semitism was and remains common even though there has never been a Jewish community there of any size. …

… In the 1890′s, the Czarist secret police, anxious to “prove” the reality of the Jewish threat to Russia, had asked its agent in Paris (then, with Vienna, the world center of anti-Semitism) to provide corroborating materials. He took a pamphlet written by Maurice Joly in 1864 that accused Napoleon III of ambitions to dominate the world; re-wrote it, substituting the Jews for Napoleon and dressing up the tale with traditional anti-Semitic details; and titled it The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It resurfaced in Russia after the 1917 coup by the Bolsheviks, who were widely believed by their White Russian opponents to be Jewish-led, and thence made its way to the Middle East. When Weizmann arrived in Jerusalem in 1918, he was handed a typewritten copy by the British commander, General Sir Wyndham Deedes, who said: “You had better read all this with care. It is going to cause you a great deal of trouble in the future.”

In 1921, after a full investigation, the London Times published a series of articles exposing the origins of the tract and demonstrating beyond all possible doubt that it was a complete invention. But by then the damage that Deedes had warned about was done. Among those who read, and believed, the forgery was Adolf Hitler. Another was Muhammad Amin al-Husseini, head of the biggest landowning family in Palestine. Al-Husseini was already tinged with hatred of Jews, but the Protocols gave him a purpose in life: to expel all Jews from Palestine forever. He had innocent blue eves and a quiet, almost cringing manner, but was a dedicated killer who devoted his entire life to race-murder. …

 

… Over the last half-century, anti-Semitism has been the essential ideology of the Arab world; its practical objective has been the destruction of Israel and the extermination of its inhabitants. And this huge and baneful force, this disease of the mind, has once again had its customary consequence. Just as Hitler ended his life a suicide, having failed in his mission of destroying the Jewish people, so 100 million or more Arabs, marching under the banner of anti-Semitism, have totally failed, despite four full-scale wars and waves of terrorism and intifadas without number, to extinguish tiny Israel.

In the meantime, by allowing their diseased obsession to dominate all their aspirations, the Arabs have wasted trillions in oil royalties on weapons of war and propaganda — and, at the margin, on ostentatious luxuries for a tiny minority. In their flight from reason, they have failed to modernize or civilize their societies, to introduce democracy, or to consolidate the rule of law. Despite all their advantages, they are now being overtaken decisively by the Indians and the Chinese, who have few natural resources but are inspired by reason, not hatred.

Yet still the Arabs feed off the ravages of the disease, imbibing and spreading its poison. Even as they keep alive the Protocols itself, now published in tens of millions of copies in major Arab capitals, they have embellished its lurid fantasies with their own, homegrown mythologies of Jewish wickedness. Recently the Protocols was made into a 41-part TV series, filmed in Cairo and disseminated throughout the Muslim world. Turkey, once a bastion of moderation, with a thriving economy, is now a theater of anti-Semitism, where hatred of Israel breeds varieties of Islamic extremism. At a time when at long last there is real hope of democracy taking root in the Arab and Muslim world, the paralysis continues and indeed is spreading.

In Europe, too, anti-Semitism has returned after being supposedly banished forever in the late 1940′s. Fueled by large and growing Muslim minorities, whose mosques and websites propagate hatred of Jews, it has also been nourished by indigenous elements, both intellectual and political. It has even penetrated mainstream parties anxious to garner Muslim votes — New Labor in Britain being a disturbing example. …

Ruth Wisse makes the case that anti-Semitism is the beard for cultures that hate modernity. 

… If we mistakenly imagine that this is “about” the Jews, however, we fall into the trap that anti-Semitism sets for us by deflecting attention from perpetrators to victims. The trail of terror leads not to the Jews but from those who organize against them. Fingering the Jews—in their homeland or elsewhere—is a pretext. In every case, Jews are convenient targets standing in for the liberalizing aspects of individual freedom, democratic governance and modernity complete with its anxieties. Anti-Jewish politics aims at the tolerant societies in which Jews flourish.

One of those societies is Israel. Adjusting our sights, if we follow the trail of Middle East terror back, past its current practitioners—Islamic State, al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and various offshoots and affiliates—we arrive at the Palestine Liberation Organization.

The PLO was founded in 1964—three years before the war launched by the Arab states from which Israel emerged in possession of some disputed territory on the west bank of the Jordan River. Until 1967, the PLO and its offshoots had existed in Jordan but been suppressed; after the war, as the PLO focused its terror exclusively against the Jews, money began to flow to the organization from the Arab states. A pure product of ideological anti-Semitism, the PLO and its terrorism formed but one weapon in the Arab war that was failing to destroy Israel by other means.

Here we reach the heart of the matter. Opposition to Israel was the unifying feature of an otherwise splintered Arab League that found in anti-Zionism the same ideological energy that Europeans had found in anti-Semitism. Other ideologies pit left against right; religious against secular; reactionaries against progressives. Anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism unite otherwise contentious parties against a common target.

After World War II, Arab leaders in Syria, Egypt and elsewhere welcomed fleeing Nazi officers for their military, technological and political expertise. The radical differences between the two cultures did not preclude collaboration in a unified strategy focused on the same Jewish target.

Those Arab leaders made a poor choice. With their countries almost unscathed by the war, they might have concentrated on regional improvement, following the lead of Jordan’s King Abdullah I, who was prepared to settle for the lion’s share of Mandate Palestine. Instead they found in Israel a scapegoat and, in the Palestinians, a pawn whom they condemned to perpetual refugee status as a pretext for their own perpetual belligerence. No doubt they believed they could control potential domestic unrest by channeling popular anger at a foreign “invader.” …

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Turns out, according to Wired, squinting actually helps us see better. 

Recently, I bellied up to a bar waiting for what seemed like an eternity to order my beer. It’s not that the place was busy, in fact the bartender was waiting for me. But I’d forgotten my glasses, so reading the tap list—hung high on the back wall—was slow going, even though it was written in six-inch chalk letters. Just before I made my choice, I caught a glance of myself in the back mirror. I was squinting like a sea captain steering through a gale. With wide open eyes, the list would have been unreadable.

Why do people squint to see better? For the longest time, I thought squeezing my eyelids somehow reshaped my faulty eyeballs. And while squinting does slightly change the shape of your lenses, the real answer has to more to do with the back of your eye than the front. …

The Verge has an article on New York City’s deer problem. Deer (rats with hooves) have become a serious problem throughout the country. This piece is a bit long, but it expands its focus beyond Staten Island to the whole country.

Just before Christmas of last year, John Caminiti, who lives in Staten Island, New York City’s least populated borough, watched traffic come to a standstill outside the Staten Island Mall. “It got quiet all of a sudden,” Caminiti told me. “I look around, and there was a big buck, standing right on the fringe of the wilderness and the mall. A calm came over people.”

Staten Island is located a half-hour by ferry off the southern tip of Manhattan, and the Caminitis have lived here for almost a century. “My grandmother was a baby when my great-grandfather brought her over here,” he said. At that time, the island had practically no deer. Then the island had a few deer. Now there are a lot of deer, and they are everywhere.

Nobody really knows where the herds came from. The Staten Island Advance reported sightings as far back as 1991; according to The New York Times, deer began appearing “with some frequency” around 2000.

In 2008, the New York Department of Environmental Conservation conducted a survey of Staten Island’s deer population. The biologist who searched the woods estimated there were approximately 24 white-tailed deer in the borough. Last winter, the New York City Parks Department conducted an aerial, infrared survey of the island and found 793 individuals — an apparent 3,304 percent increase in just six years.

Deer on the island have gone from a rarity to a delight to a problem with no immediate solution. …

… White-tailed deer are not particularly large animals, but they are muscular and athletic, some reportedly able to jump over fences 10 feet high. The tails from which they derive their name stick up jauntily over their rears as they run away from you.

Before European colonization, North America was home to somewhere between 24 and 33 million white-tailed deer, most widely distributed east of the Rocky Mountains. In the following centuries, that population was destroyed — first by traders operating out of coastal cities, making deals with Native Americans for pelts; then by settlers moving out West. Deer died by the hundreds of thousands as the market grew for their meat and hides.

But it was the second half of the 19th century that truly decimated animal populations across the United States. In his book Nature Wars, wildlife historian, journalist, and hunter Jim Sterba writes, “All wildlife suffered, from bison to songbirds. Demand for wild products soared as immigrants poured in and the US population grew to 76 million. Any wild species with any value was killed for meat, fur, or feathers.”

The white-tailed population plummeted to an estimated low of 350,000 animals in 1890. According to Serba, “by the end of the 19th century white-tailed deer were so scarce that market hunters no longer bothered with them.”

“By the end of the 19th century white-tailed deer were so scarce that market hunters no longer bothered with them.”

Then, thanks to a set of concepts and policies referred to as the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation, the deer made a tremendous comeback. The model, encouraged by a rising American bourgeoisie that yearned for recreational hunting, established a series of principles to promote rebounding deer populations: create protected green spaces where commercial hunting was banned; foster safe and abundant spaces for regulated, recreational hunting; and further discourage predator species that had essentially already been eradicated. The logic was simple: you can’t hunt the deer if all the deer are already dead.

As a result, the United States now has over 30 million white-tailed deer, much more densely populated than they ever were before Europeans arrived. Unchecked by wolves, cougars, and bears, the herds wreak havoc: a 2012 Rutgers University study alleges that white-tailed deer are responsible for most of the $4.5 billion worth of crops that US agriculture loses to wildlife annually; they account for three to four thousand car collisions a day. New Jersey alone had 31,192 deer collisions from 2011 to 2012. Unchecked by predators or hunters, only starvation will limit population growth.

To bring a native species back from the brink of eradication should be cause for celebration — in this respect, the revival of white-tailed deer is one of the conservation movement’s finest accomplishments. But our understanding of what is best for the deer, for people, and for the wider ecosystem is, perhaps, changing. And success is starting to resemble failure. …

Kevin Williamson has some cogent observations on the drop in crude oil prices.

Whatever happened to the go-juice cartel?

When gasoline prices rise, there is inevitably a great deal of ill-informed and irresponsible talk about conspiracies, price-fixing, “gouging” poor drivers, etc. After a spike in gasoline prices in 2007, opportunistic House Democrats passed a bill that would have empowered the federal government to lock American citizens in prison for selling gasoline at prices that displeased the president. (Clapping people into prison is the unwavering gut instinct of so-called liberals.) When Republicans in the Senate blocked the Democrats’ patently insane plan to — repeat — lock human beings in cages for a decade for selling gasoline at presidentially unapproved prices, the Democrats instantly retreated even farther into conspiracy theory, claiming that corrupt Republicans had sold their votes to Big Oil.

Among the leading gasoline-conspiracy theorists during the Great Gasoline Kerfuffle of 2004 were Ed Markey, who was in the House at the time but has since been elevated to the Senate by Massachusetts masochists, and Frank Pallone of New Jersey, who co-authored a letter (signed by another 51 Democrats) demanding that the attorney general investigate displeasing gasoline prices, which they blamed on “the Bush administration’s cozy relationship with big oil companies” rather than the usual interaction of supply and demand. Apparently, gasoline prices should command the personal attention of the attorney general at least, if not that of the president.

The mind-boggling fact is that state attorneys general from Arizona to Texas to Illinois actively monitor gasoline prices — and, to make sure that everybody knows they’re serious, Illinois refers to its price monitors as the gasoline “SWAT” team. …

… Where’s the conspiracy now, when oil prices and retail gasoline prices are plunging? If the goblins in Nancy Pelosi’s head are correct in their insistence that higher gas prices must necessarily be the result of a criminal conspiracy, does it not follow that lower gas prices also must be the result of that same conspiracy? Either nasty wicked Big Oil controls gas prices or it doesn’t. A mind as narrow and uncomplicated as Pelosi’s shouldn’t be that difficult to make up.

Inevitably, the same authoritarian mentality that seeks to police gas prices that are too high also seeks to police gas prices that are too low. George Will relates the sorry story of Raj Bhandari of Merrill, Wis., who brought down upon himself the full force of the state when he committed the crime of giving oldsters a 2-cent-a-gallon discount on gas, and then compounded his misdeed by offering supporters of local youth-sports programs a 3-cent-a-gallon discount. Wisconsin law mandates that retailers sell their gas at no less than 9.18 percent above the price they are charged by wholesalers. (I’ll bet the story of how that precise 9.18 percent figure was arrived at is a fascinating study in political thinking.) Bhandari faced a $2,000-a-day fine and the possible loss of his business for cutting his elderly and community-minded neighbors a break without permission from politicians. …

 Science20.com posts on the idiot John Holdren who in the 70′s predicted a new ice age and who now is claiming it has been forestalled by “human caused” global warming. This wouldn’t be much of a story if the man hadn’t been named by the president to be his “science advisor.” It’s true, perfectly ignorant fools wherever you look in the narcissist’s administration.

… In “Open For Questions with Dr. John Holdren” a Facebook commenter asks a fairly softball question, if and how humans are affecting the climate, and instead of just answering it the way rational scientists would he goes all eugenics on modern climate science, takes us back to the 1970s kind, which logically leads the public to believe the policies of his boss are hurting business and actually helping no one – because global warming is preventing the new Ice Age.

“In their current phases, moreover, they would be gradually cooling the earth – taking us to another ice age – if they weren’t being more than offset by human-caused warming.”

Yes, Dr. Holdren says our global warming ‘pause’ is just climate change fighting off the Ice Age. Global warming is our friend. Well, order my Escalade then, I care about the environment too much to want Fresno to look like Alaska.

Throw on some custom 22s, also. The crisis is over.