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The China Money Reports on China’s new Silk Road, the overland trade route between China and Western Europe, and other changes in the country.

… Moscow and Beijing are at work planning a new high-speed rail remix of the fabled Trans-Siberian Railroad. And Beijing is committed to translating its growing strategic partnership with Russia into crucial financial and economic help, if a sanctions-besieged Moscow, facing a disastrous oil price war, asks for it.

To China’s south, Afghanistan, despite the 13-year American war still being fought there, is fast moving into its economic orbit, while a planned China-Myanmar oil pipeline is seen as a game-changing reconfiguration of the flow of Eurasian energy across what I’ve long called Pipelineistan.

And this is just part of the frenetic action shaping what the Beijing leadership defines as the New Silk Road Economic Belt and the Maritime Silk Road of the twenty-first century. We’re talking about a vision of creating a potentially mind-boggling infrastructure, much of it from scratch, that will connect China to Central Asia, the Middle East, and Western Europe. Such a development will include projects that range from upgrading the ancient silk road via Central Asia to developing a Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar economic corridor; a China-Pakistan corridor through Kashmir; and a new maritime silk road that will extend from southern China all the way, in reverse Marco Polo fashion, to Venice. …

 

… If you are following this frenzy of economic planning from Beijing, you end up with a perspective not available in Europe or the U.S. Here, red-and-gold billboards promote President Xi Jinping’s much ballyhooed new tagline for the country and the century, “the Chinese Dream” (which brings to mind “the American Dream” of another era). No subway station is without them. They are a reminder of why 40,000 miles of brand new high-speed rail is considered so essential to the country’s future. After all, no less than 300 million Chinese have, in the last three decades, made a paradigm-breaking migration from the countryside to exploding urban areas in search of that dream.

Another 350 million are expected to be on the way, according to a McKinsey Global Institute study. From 1980 to 2010, China’s urban population grew by 400 million, leaving the country with at least 700 million urban dwellers. This figure is expected to hit one billion by 2030, which means tremendous stress on cities, infrastructure, resources, and the economy as a whole, as well as near-apocalyptic air pollution levels in some major cities.

Already 160 Chinese cities boast populations of more than one million. (Europe has only 35.) No less than 250 Chinese cities have tripled their GDP per capita since 1990, while disposable income per capita is up by 300%.

These days, China should be thought of not in terms of individual cities but urban clusters — groupings of cities with more than 60 million people. The Beijing-Tianjin area, for example, is actually a cluster of 28 cities. Shenzhen, the ultimate migrant megacity in the southern province of Guangdong, is now a key hub in a cluster as well. China, in fact, has more than 20 such clusters, each the size of a European country. Pretty soon, the main clusters will account for 80% of China’s GDP and 60% of its population. So the country’s high-speed rail frenzy and its head-spinning infrastructure projects – part of a $1.1 trillion investment in 300 public works — are all about managing those clusters. …

 

… In terms of Chinese advantages, keep in mind that the future of the global economy clearly lies in Asia with its record rise in middle-class incomes. In 2009, the Asia-Pacific region had just 18% of the world’s middle class; by 2030, according to the DevelopmentCenter of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, that figure will rise to an astounding 66%. North America and Europe had 54% of the global middle class in 2009; in 2030, it will only be 21%.

Follow the money, and the value you get for that money, too. For instance, no less than 200,000 Chinese workers were involved in the production of the first iPhone, overseen by 8,700 Chinese industrial engineers. They were recruited in only two weeks. In the U.S., that process might have taken more than nine months. The Chinese manufacturing ecosystem is indeed fast, flexible, and smart — and it’s backed by an ever more impressive education system. Since 1998, the percentage of GDP dedicated to education has almost tripled; the number of colleges has doubled; and in only a decade, China has built the largest higher education system in the world. …

 

… The extent and complexity of China’s myriad transformations barely filter into the American media. Stories in the U.S. tend to emphasize the country’s “shrinking” economy and nervousness about its future global role, the way it has “duped” the U.S. about its designs, and its nature as a military “threat” to Washington and the world.

The U.S. media has a China fever, which results in typically feverish reports that don’t take the pulse of the country or its leader. In the process, so much is missed. One prescription might be for them to read The Governance of China, a compilation of President Xi’s major speeches, talks, interviews, and correspondence. It’s already a three-million-copy bestseller in its Mandarin edition and offers a remarkably digestible vision of what Xi’s highly proclaimed “China Dream” will mean in the new Chinese century.

Xi Dada (“Xi Big Bang” as he’s nicknamed here) is no post-Mao deity. He’s more like a pop phenomenon and that’s hardly surprising. In this “to get rich is glorious” remix, you couldn’t launch the superhuman task of reshaping the Chinese model by being a cold-as-a-cucumber bureaucrat. Xi has instead struck a collective nerve by stressing that the country’s governance must be based on competence, not insider trading and Party corruption, and he’s cleverly packaged the transformation he has in mind as an American-style “dream.”

Behind the pop star clearly lies a man of substance that the Western media should come to grips with. You don’t, after all, manage such an economic success story by accident. It may be particularly important to take his measure since he’s taken the measure of Washington and the West and decided that China’s fate and fortune lie elsewhere. …

From a modern Silk Road to stone age trade. In the Financial Times we learn Britain imported wheat from the Mediterranean 2,000 years before it was cultivated indigenously.

Trade in agricultural commodities has been part of the British economy for at least 8,000 years, archaeologists have discovered.

Investigation of a submerged Stone Age site off Bouldnor Cliff shows that people living there around 6,000BC were consuming a primitive form of wheat.

Yet Britain’s hunter-gatherer population did not grow the crop then. The nearest cultivation was 1,000km (620 miles) away near the Mediterranean — cereal farming is believed to have started in Britain 2,000 years later.

The researchers, working at several UK universities, say the explanation is that “sophisticated social networks” promoted trade between the Mesolithic inhabitants of northern Europe and the more technologically advanced Neolithic peoples farther south, who were already farming. The study appears in the journal Science. …

Scientific American has more.

Early farming began in the Near East about 10,500 years ago. Farming first reached the Balkans in Europe some 8 to 9,000 years ago, and then crept westward. Locals in Britain, separated from the mainland by the relatively newly formed English Channel, did not start farming until about 6,000 years ago.

But an analysis of sediment from a submerged British archaeological site called Bouldner Cliff found something unexpected.

“Amongst our Bouldner Cliff samples we found ancient DNA evidence of wheat at the site, which was not seen in mainland Britain for another 2,000 years.” Robin Allaby of the University of Warwick.

“However, wheat was already being grown in southern Europe. This is incredibly exciting because it means Bouldner’s inhabitants were not as isolated as previously thought. In fact, they were in touch, one way or another, with more advanced Neolithic farming communities in southern Europe.”  …

It wasn’t just wheat that moved through these ancient trade routes. A NY Times article reports on differing theories about the spread of the Proto Indo-European language; from which came all languages from England to India. (One notable exception is Georgian which is totally different. Stalin and Lavrenty Beria, head of the NKVD, both Georgians, used to have sidebar conversations in Georgian during Politburo meetings. Must have terrified the other participants.)

The peoples of India, Iran and Europe speak a Babel of tongues, but most — English included — are descended from an ancient language known as proto-Indo-European. Scholars have argued for two centuries about the identity and homeland of those who spoke this parent language, but a surprisingly sudden resolution of this longstanding issue may be at hand.

Many origins have been proposed for the birthplace of the Indo-European languages, but only two serious candidates are now under discussion, one of which assumes they were spread by the sword, the other by the plow. …

… From the reconstructed vocabulary, the speakers of proto-Indo-European seem to have been pastoralists, familiar with sheep and wheeled vehicles. Archaeologists find that wheeled vehicles emerged around 4000 B.C., suggesting the proto-Indo-European speakers began to flourish some 6,500 years ago on the steppe grasslands above the Black and CaspianSeas. This steppe theory, favored by many linguists, holds that the proto-Indo-European speakers then spread their language to Europe, India and western China, whether by conquest or the appeal of their pastoral economy. …

Using core samples from Cape Cod ponds, researchers have found some periods of mega-storms on the northeast coast of the US. Forgetting the globalony stuff, the cycles are interesting. We get this from Futurity.org.

Ancient sediments from a coastal pond in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, show that enormous storms have battered the region for 2,000 years.

The hurricane strikes deposited a distinct layer of sand mobilized from the adjacent beach.

The analysis, published in the journal Earth’s Future, suggests some of the hurricanes would have dwarfed recent storms like Hurricane Sandy in 2012 that caused $65 billion in damages. …

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Ben Domenech in the Federalist writes about how the undying enmity of Wisconsin’s left/liberals created the national candidacy of Scott Walker.

… Brandon Finnigan outlines how the Wisconsin left chose to pursue the recall fight, with county-by-county analysis which illustrates how Walker united the right in response:

“The attempt to boot Walker by Wisconsin progressives and labor activists accomplished a rare feat: absolute party unity. But instead of unifying Democrats enough to unseat him, it created a brief moment where libertarian, establishment, Tea Party, and traditional conservative members of the Republican Party united to defend him… The Democrats spent millions of dollars and thousands of hours digging, scooping, ad-cutting, and hammering. They threw the kitchen sink at the guy in 2012, threw their neighbor’s sink at him in 2014, and now nobody on the block will let them inside to pee… Had the Democrats not targeted Walker with a recall, that massive fundraiser network, the national profile, the party unity, and his highly developed get-out-the-vote team almost certainly wouldn’t exist. He may have still won re-election, but he would be just another Midwestern Republican governor who enacted reforms and faced push-back, not the conservative folk hero of a party longing for a win.” …

Charles Cooke in National Review has an interesting take on the Media’s “gotcha” questions for Scott Walker. He mentions Chris Hitchens – and we get reminded how much he is missed.

… To grasp just how farcical this game is, one needs only to run an eye across the list of those who are now feigning high dudgeon. Yesterday, on CBS’s Face the Nation, Obama’s former adviser David Axelrod pretended to be surprised at Walker’s remarks: “I don’t know why there is confusion,” Axelrod proclaimed, indignantly. Really? At present, Axelrod is running around the country promoting a book in which he confesses bluntly that Obama’s well-documented objections to gay marriage were nothing more than opportunistic lies. In 2008, Axelrod recalls in one chapter, “opposition to gay marriage was particularly strong in the black church.” In consequence, he adds, Obama “accepted the counsel of more pragmatic folks like me, and modified his position to support civil unions rather than marriage, which he would term a ‘sacred union.’” Elsewhere, Obama would tell audiences that, being “a Christian, . . . my religious beliefs say that marriage is something sanctified between a man and a woman”; and that, “as a Christian — for me — for me as a Christian . . . God’s in the mix.” Axelrod’s admission that this was baloney will sell him a lot of books.

Such suspicions are routinely expressed on the left. At various points during Obama’s tenure, public figures such as Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Bill Maher have openly suggested that President Obama is either an atheist or an agnostic, and that he is merely pretending to be a Christian to placate the rubes in the middle of the country. “You know who’s a liar about [his faith],” Maher suggested last year, “is Obama. He’s a drop-dead atheist, absolutely.” “Our new president,” Christopher Hitchens toldFrance 24 in 2009, “I’m practically sure he is not a believer.” Richard Dawkins, meanwhile, has noted correctly that this theory is popular among progressives. “Like many people,” he averred in 2014, “I’m sure that Obama is an atheist.” These statements lacked the modesty of Scott Walker’s effective “dunno.” In fact, they were far, far harsher. And yet they were met with relative indifference. Are we to conclude that the bien pensant class considers it to be more honorable for a person to suggest that the president of the United States is lying than to say that he does not know and does not care? …

More on the media hoard’s treatment of Walker from Ed Morrissey.

… Over the past week, media reporters have tried to hold Republicans accountable for any personal attacks by anyone on Barack Obama, going out of their way to demand that GOP candidates defend Obama’s honor — especially Scott Walker, who has emerged as a top-tier candidate in the early campaign. This trend reached its nadir when two reporters from the Washington Post, Dan Balz and Robert Costa, demanded that Walker answer whether he thought Obama was a Christian — despite the fact that Walker has never brought up that topic. When Walker scolded them for their irrelevancies, the media instead took it as Walker “othering” Obama.

Here’s what Walker said in response to the question:

“I don’t know. . . . I’ve actually never talked about it or I haven’t read about that. I’ve never asked him that. You’ve asked me to make statements about people that I haven’t had a conversation with about that. How [could] I say if I know either of you are a Christian? To me, this is a classic example of why people hate Washington and, increasingly, they dislike the press. The things they care about don’t even remotely come close to what you’re asking about.”

Conservatives have no reason to mourn the Chris Christie collapse. Jennifer Rubin posts on what happened. 

… It is not hard to see how Christie lost the inside track with donors and establishment Republicans. His reputation as a lively, blunt, competent and inclusive Republican seems like a distant memory. He is now seen as erratic, gaffe-prone and lacking substance. This is the antithesis of what his natural audience (businesspeople, moderates, big donors, discerning independents) looks for. He seems to have morphed into a moderate version of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) minus the foreign policy acumen, or perhaps the reincarnation of the 2012 version of then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry. There are lessons here for all the 2016 contenders.

First, you cannot win the presidential nomination on personality. You have to be able to get in front of a room of donors, across from an interviewer or in front of a crowd and sell yourself as a man with a plan — how to win, how to govern, how to appeal to non-Republicans, how to bring the party together. You can dazzle them with wonkery, as Bush is doing, or impress supporters with grit and focus, as Walker does. But you cannot vamp your way through a presidential race. In a long campaign, recycling the same shtick (be it Jersey guy or tea party rabble-rouser) wears thin, especially when there is no interesting agenda being offered.

Second, running for president takes a unique combination of humility and hubris. …

Kevin Williamson starts out the humor section for the end of the week with a post on Marie Harf. Who’s that, you ask? Does “jobs for jihadis” ring a bell? Trouble is, even thought she is a hoot, the juxtaposition of jihadist terror with an airhead like her in our government is terrifying.

Marie Harf, the cretinous propagandist and campaign veteran installed by the Obama administration at the State Department — the misfit who plays Messy Marvin to Jen Psaki’s feckless Pippi Longstocking — has called down upon herself a Malibu mudslide of mockery and derision for suggesting that what’s really needed in the war against the Islamic State et al. is better employment opportunities — “jobs for jihadis,” as her critics put it. She later explained that her observations unfortunately were “too nuanced” for the simple minds of the dunderheads who twice elected her boss president of these United States. That a member of the Obama administration should say something stupid about world affairs is about as newsworthy as Joe Biden’s being creepy and handsy with women in public, but Harf’s particular breed of wrongness is worth considering inasmuch as it illuminates one of the principal reasons that we are not winning — and will not win — what we insist on calling the “war on terror.” …

Continuing our humor section, we have John Podhoretz asking when the media will point out that Joe Biden is a moron. This was the other moron’s first big decision as president and what did he do? He offered up a national joke.

It was just another Tuesday for the vice president of the United States, and another week in which the mainstream media turned their genteel eyes away from the highly questionable conduct of the figure of low comedy whom tragedy might make our president.

On Tuesday morning, Joe Biden was photographed placing his hands in a cringe-inducingly inappropriate manner on the shoulders of a much younger woman — the wife of the about-to-be-sworn-in secretary of defense — and keeping them there . . . and keeping them there . . . and keeping them there . . . for 28 full seconds.

When Biden let her go at last, you could see Stephanie Carter relax her shoulders a little after having had them tensed up while he rested his hands upon them. Go watch it on YouTube. Some enterprising director will surely adapt the scene for one of those found-footage horror movies — “Paranormal Activity VI: The Bidening.”

Biden’s day of creepiness was far from over. In the afternoon, he spoke at the White House summit to combat violent extremism and made reference to the people of Somalia, who have suffered for decades under the yoke of warlords and Islamists.

Of the Somalis living in his home state of Delaware in the capital of Dover, he said this: “If you come to the train station with me, you’ll notice I have great relationships with them because there’s an awful lot driving cabs and are friends of mine. For real. I’m not being solicitous. I’m being serious.”

The thing is, he was being serious.

He was actually claiming to possess special knowledge of the woes of Somalis from having taken rides in their taxis. Aside from the offense provided by the some-of-my-best-friends-are-black trope here, does anyone actually believe that Biden has ever let a cab driver, Somali or otherwise, get a word in edgewise? Or anyone else, for that matter? …

Late night humor from Andy Malcolm.

Meyers: Joe Biden was seen massaging Ashton Carter’s wife as he spoke. How’s the new Defense Secretary gonna protect us from ISIS if he can’t protect his own wife from Joe?

Fallon: Michelle Obama has banned boxed macaroni and cheese from the White House. It’s been tough on Joe Biden. He couldn’t make his wife any jewelry for Valentine’s Day.

The NY Times from 30 years ago was just as dumb as today’s. Here’s a Times article from Dec. 1985 on laptop computers.

… Was the laptop dream an illusion, then? Or was the problem merely that the right combination of features for such lightweight computers had not yet materialized? The answer probably is a combination of both views. For the most part, the portable computer is a dream machine for the few.

The limitations come from what people actually do with computers, as opposed to what the marketers expect them to do. On the whole, people don’t want to lug a computer with them to the beach or on a train to while away hours they would rather spend reading the sports or business section of the newspaper. Somehow, the microcomputer industry has assumed that everyone would love to have a keyboard grafted on as an extension of their fingers. It just is not so. …

… But the real future of the laptop computer will remain in the specialized niche markets. Because no matter how inexpensive the machines become, and no matter how sophisticated their software, I still can’t imagine the average user taking one along when going fishing.

And the cartoons are very good today.

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Peter Wehner posts on the presidential penchant for making things up. 

President Obama is fond of invoking the term “narrative,” so it’s worth considering several instances in which he invokes exactly the wrong narrative–the wrong frame–around events.

The most obvious is the president’s repeated insistence that militant Islam is utterly disconnected from the Islamic faith. As this much-discussed essay in the Atlantic points out: …

… Here, then, are three separate examples of the president imposing a false narrative on events. (I could cite many others.) Which makes Mr. Obama a truly post-modern president, in which there is no objective truth but simply narrative. Mr. Obama doesn’t just distort the facts; he inverts them. He makes things up as he goes along. This kind of thing isn’t unusual to find in the academy. But to see a president and his aides so thoroughly deconstruct truth is quite rare, and evidence of a stunningly rigid and dogmatic mind.

The sheer audacity of Mr. Obama’s multipronged assault on truth is one of the more troubling aspects of his deeply troubling presidency.

Michael Barone writes on the presidential penchant for reckless disregard of the law.

… Reckless disregard of the law is an ingrained habit in President Obama’s administration. After six years its legal interpretations have been rejected by unanimous rulings of the Supreme Court more often than in the eight years of George W. Bush’s administration.

The Court ruled 9-0 that Obama couldn’t make recess appointments when the Senate said it was not in recess. It ruled 9-0 that the government couldn’t decide whom a church could classify as clergy. It ruled 9-0 that the government couldn’t fine landowners $75,000 a day to appeal an administrative order blocking construction in an alleged wetland.

The Constitution authorizes Congress to pass laws and requires the president to faithfully execute them. Obama seems to take that as not so much a requirement as a suggestion, one he sees fit to ignore when he wants to “change the law.”

The Constitution’s framers wrote the faithful execution clause because they remembered that King James II claimed and exercised the power to suspend laws passed by Parliament whenever he liked. James was forced to flee England in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and in 1689 Parliament passed a Bill of Rights declaring “that the pretended power of suspending the laws or the execution of laws by regal authority without consent of Parliament is illegal.” …

What about the presidential penchant for claiming to have ended the war in Iraq? Andrew Malcolm has some thoughts.

.. Ending the war in Iraq was the original cornerstone of Obama’s ambition for higher office first, the Senate, then the presidency. In 2010, Biden told Larry King that pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq the next year would be just one of Obama’s “great achievements.”

Now, of course, Obama is sending U.S. troops back into Iraq to try stemming the bloody onslaught of ISIS, which he called a JV team just a year ago. Obama maintains terrorism is not a serious homeland threat. Climate change is.

But for some inexplicable reason, Obama’s Pentagon spokesmen have publicly announced an April attack to retake Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul. Hopefully, ISIS doesn’t watch the news. …

Telegraph,UK wonders if, after a celebrity presidency, will our country be ready for someone to do some hard work and display some courage? 

He is balding and frankly – even his supporters would concede – a little bit boring. So how has Scott Walker, the governor of the Midwestern state of Wisconsin, suddenly pulled into the front rank of Republican candidates for president?

With neither an instantly recognisable name – like Jeb Bush – nor a balloon-sized ego that craves media attention – like Chris Christie – Mr Walker reached near-parity with Mr Bush in the polls this week in the electorally pacesetting states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

In an era where politics has become increasingly intertwined with celebrity, Mr Walker, the 47-year-old son of a bookkeeper and a Baptist minister, has ploughed a very different furrow, earning his stripes in the bare-knuckled world of state-level politics, far away from a detached and deadlocked Washington.

While rivals like Ted Cruz, the Texas senator and Tea Party darling, were grandstanding around the capital shutting down the Federal government, Mr Walker’s pitch is that he was workin’ in Wisconsin, bashing the unions, balancing budgets and slashing nearly $2 billion-worth (£1.3 billion) of taxes. …

Larry Kudlow posted on what Scott Walker has been saying.

… In his opening, Governor Walker stressed growth, reform, and safety. During the question-and-answer period, he emphasized sweeping Reagan-like tax cuts. And he frequently referred to his successful efforts in Wisconsin to curb public-union power as a means of lowering tax burdens, increasing economic growth and reducing unemployment.

Noteworthy, Walker argued that when Reagan fired the PATCO air-traffic controllers over their illegal strike, he was sending a message of toughness to Democrats and unions at home as well as our Soviet enemies abroad. Similarly, Walker believes his stance against unions in Wisconsin would be a signal of toughness to Islamic jihadists and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

Walker was also highly critical of President Obama’s conduct in the war against radical Islamism, and said the U.S. must wage a stronger battle in the air and on the ground against ISIS.

He stressed the need for a positive Republican message in 2016, and bluntly criticized Mitt Romney for spending too much time on the pessimistic economic negatives emanating from Obama’s policy failures.

And in an unmistakable rip at both Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton, he called for a new generation and fresh faces to turn America back in the right direction. …

Washington Post says drink more coffee and don’t sweat the cholesterol.

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Time to have a Hillary day. We’ll let the mainstream left start us out. Here’s Maureen Dowd.

… Once the Clintons had a War Room. Now they have a Slime Room.

Once they had the sly James Carville, fondly known as “serpenthead.” Now they have the slippery David Brock, accurately known as a snake.

Brock fits into the Clinton tradition of opportunistic knife-fighters like Dick Morris and Mark Penn.

The silver-haired 52-year-old, who sports colorful designer suits and once wore a monocle, brawled his way into a Times article about the uneasy marriage between Hillary Clinton’s veteran attack dogs and the group of advisers who are moving over from Obamaland.

Hillary hasn’t announced a 2016 campaign yet. She’s busy polling more than 200 policy experts on how to show that she really cares about the poor while courting the banks. Yet her shadow campaign is already in a déjà-vu-all-over-again shark fight over control of the candidate and her money. It’s the same old story: The killer organization that, even with all its ruthless hired guns, can’t quite shoot straight. …

… Hillary’s inability to dispense with brass-knuckle, fanatical acolytes like Brock shows that she still has an insecure streak that requires Borgia-like blind loyalty, and can’t distinguish between the real vast right-wing conspiracy and the voices of legitimate concern.

Money-grubbing is always the ugly place with the Clintons, who have devoured $2.1 billion in contributions since 1992 to their political campaigns, family foundation and philanthropies, according to The Old (Good) NewRepublic. …

… what Republicans say about government is true of the Clintons: They really do believe that your money belongs to them.

Someday, they should give their tin cup to the Smithsonian. It’s one of the wonders of the world.

Kimberley Strassel wants to call a spade a spade. She says the Clinton Foundation is just a political action committee or PAC. 

Republican presidential aspirants are already launching political-action committees, gearing up for the expensive elections to come. They’ll be hard-pressed to compete with the campaign vehicle Hillary Clinton has been erecting these past 14 years. You know, the Clinton Foundation.

With the news this week that Mrs. Clinton—the would-be occupant of the White House—is landing tens of millions from foreign governments for her shop, it’s long past time to drop the fiction that the Clinton Foundation has ever been a charity. It’s a political shop. Bill and Hillary have simply done with the foundation what they did with cattle futures and Whitewater and the Lincoln Bedroom and Johnny Chung—they’ve exploited the system.

Most family charities exist to allow self-made Americans to disperse their good fortune to philanthropic causes. The Clinton Foundation exists to allow the nation’s most powerful couple to use their not-so-subtle persuasion to exact global tribute for a fund that promotes the Clintons.

Oh sure, the foundation doles out grants for this and that cause. But they don’t rank next to the annual Bill Clinton show—the Clinton Global Initiative event—to which he summons heads of state and basks for a media week as post-presidential statesman. This is an organization that in 2013 spent $8.5 million in travel expenses alone, ferrying the Clintons to headliner events. Those keep Mrs. Clinton in the news, which helps when you want to be president.

It’s a body that exists to keep the Clinton political team intact in between elections, working for the Clintons’ political benefit. …

Matthew Continetti weighs in.

The Wall Street Journal reported this past week that the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation has quietly dropped its ban on foreign contributions and is accepting donations from the governments of “the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Australia, Germany, and a Canadian government agency promoting the Keystone XL pipeline.” The Journal’s conclusion: Since 2001 “the foundation has raised at least $48 million from overseas governments.”

Needless to say, the gargantuan troll-like conflict of interest that arises as soon as the foundation of the leading candidate for the presidency of the United States begins accepting money from overseas is apparent to every sentient being on the planet except members of the Clinton family and the growing number of advisers, consultants, strategists, pollsters, groupies, allies, and hangers-on whose livelihood depends on that family’s political success. “These contributions,” the foundation said in a statement to the Journal, “are helping improve the lives of millions of people across the world, for which we are grateful.”

What I love about this statement is its flip shamelessness, the way in which its airy sentimental public relations gobbledygook is both a denial of what is obviously a corrupt practice and an implicit endorsement of it. …

Jennifer Rubin too.

… Clinton behaves as she does because the press enables her by playing down the significance of her ethical obtuseness. Why stop if she can get away with virtually anything? It’s not a double standard so much as no standards being applied to her. She is sui generis and therefore is not only coddled but also praised for philanthropy and ultimately endorsed as the great defender of the weak and poor. All ethical judgment is suspended by those who whip themselves into outrage over the most trivial offense by other pols. In some parallel universe, some liberal pundit would declare that years of ethical slumming and unbridled greed make Clinton unfit for high office. Period.

This is a test of sorts for the Democratic Party: Is it so afraid of the Clintons and so lacking in any reasonable alternative to Hillary Clinton’s candidacy that it and all potential rivals will remain mum about this? Oh, let’s not kid ourselves. The people who raised a stink about Mitt Romney’s blind trust that had Cayman Islands mutual funds will continue to treat her as political royalty.

And Rubin says it is Hillary that should be disqualified, not Scott Walker.

… I have not heard Hillary Clinton denounce the leaks from the administration badmouthing the prime minister of Israel. She has not criticized the president for misleading Americans that they could keep their health-care insurance and their doctors. She did not decry the president’s assertion that gunning down Jews in a kosher market in France was “random.” She never condemned the remarks of former Middle East negotiator Martin Indyk blaming Israel for the breakdown in peace talks or of her successor in suggesting that America couldn’t protect Israel or stave off boycotts of Israel if it didn’t make peace with the Palestinians. And let’s not get started on all the idiotic utterances Vice President Joe Biden has made. While President George W. Bush was in office, Clinton never denounced a host of comments questioning his motives, honesty, etc. Frankly, she has not been asked about such things because, well, why would she have to answer for everyone in her party who ever said something off-putting? If they can drag her into an interview, the media should ask her all these questions and more. If she refuses to answer, out of the race, they must declare! Yeah. Right.

Forget comments about others’ comments. Clinton won’t tell us — for she is in perpetual hiding — what she thinks about the compelling issues of the day. She can’t give her opinion on the Keystone XL pipeline. Anyone ask her if she thinks we are winning the war against the Islamic State, if we have improved our standing with Arab allies, if we have violated our promise to Ukraine to provide security in exchange for having given up its nukes, if Iran can be allowed to just “unplug” its centrifuges as the U.S. negotiators are apparently suggesting, or her opinion on any of hundreds of other knotty foreign or domestic issues? Isn’t it pure cowardice for her to remain silent about an imminent deal that would leave Iran with thousands of centrifuges? Really, now is the  time for candor and leadership. Knowing how untenable a nuclear-armed Iran would be, her silence is irresponsible. I wonder why the media aren’t pestering her for her position and decrying her silence as disqualifying for the job as commander in chief. …

Eliana Johnson has more on the Brock hissy fit.

There isn’t even a Hillary Clinton presidential campaign yet, and already the sort of vicious infighting that brought down her 2008 campaign is underway. It sprang to the surface on Monday when David Brock, the founder of the liberal group Media Matters as well as the pro-Clinton PACAmericanBridge angrily resigned his board membership at another pro-Clinton super PAC, Priorities USA Action. Like the political-action committees that have been established in recent months by the potential Republican candidates, from Jeb Bush to Chris Christie to Scott Walker, a trio of pro-Clinton groups, Media Matters, American Bridge, and Priorities USA, are together serving as a nascent campaign apparatus, doing fundraising and opposition research and hiring in top Democratic staffers. …

And we close with the liberal media. Ron Fournier gets his licks. 

This is sleazy and stupid. Just as Hillary Clinton is getting ready to run for president again, her family’s charitable foundation secretly lifted a ban on accepting money from foreign governments.

The Wall Street Journal discovered the ethical breach during a search of donations of more than $50,000 posted on the foundation’s online database. “Recent donors include the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Australia, Germany, and a Canadian government agency promoting the Keystone XL Pipline,” reported James V. Grimaldi and Rebecca Ballhaus. 

This is sleazy because of the clear conflicts of interest. What do these foreign countries expect in exchange for their donations? What pressure would Clinton face as president to return financial favors? …

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“Countering violent extremism?” Mark Steyn is on it.

Even the Obammyboppers of an otherwise adoring media seem to understand his big conference on “countering violent extremism” is a bit of a joke.

Undeterred, President Obama has unveiled the summit’s bumper sticker: “Religions Don’t Kill People. People Killed People.” It got him through to the next round in the middle-school debate-team county quarter-finals, so who knows the impact it will have on the Islamic State. I’m thrilled to discover that my tax dollars are now going to fund something called the International Center for Excellence in Countering Violent Extremism. Seriously. It’s in Dubai. But perhaps we can open a branch office in Mosul, and Derna, and Sana’a and Kandahar and Copenhagen. One is reminded of the Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence. Indeed, given the style and production values that the Islamic State have brought to Islamic snuff videos, perhaps this conference could prevail on the Oscars to introduce an Academy Award for Outstanding Excellence in the Field of Extremism.

Marie Harf, meanwhile, assures CNN that her argument is “too nuanced” for you rubes to appreciate, with its exciting plans for community-college retraining programs in al-Baghdadi and midnight basketball in Raqaa. Sure, they don’t have enough basketballs, so they have to use severed heads. But c’mon, it’s a start… …

… Europe’s Jews are living history rather than reading it. They are living through a strange, freakish coda to the final solution that, quietly and remorselessly, is finishing the job: the total extinction of Jewish life in Europe – and not at the hands of baying nationalist Aryans but a malign alliance of post-national Eutopians and Islamic imperialists. Sure, it’d be nice to read a book – maybe Obama could recommend one on the Crusades. But you’ve got to be careful: in France, in 2015, you can be beaten up for being seen with the wrong kind of book on public transportation. As Max Fisher says, we could all stand to read a little history, and the Jewish Museum in Brussels has a pretty good bookstore, but, if you swing by, try not to pick one of the days when they’re shooting visitors.

This is Europe now, 2015. What will 2016 bring, and 2020, 2025? And yet France or Denmark is all you’ve ever known; you own a house, you’ve got a business, a pension plan, savings accounts… How much of all that are you going to be able to get out with? These are the same questions the Continent’s most integrated Jews – in Germany – faced 80 years ago. Do you sell your home in a hurry and take a loss? Or maybe in a couple of years it’ll all blow over. Or maybe it won’t, and in five years the house price will be irrelevant because you’ll be scramming with a suitcase. Or maybe in ten years you won’t be able to get out at all – like the Yazidi or those Copts.

If you’re living history as opposed to reading it in a sophomoric chatroom with metrosexual eunuch trustiefundies, these are the calculations you make – in Mosul, in Raqaa, in Sirte, in Sana’a, in Donetsk, in Malmö, Rotterdam, Paris…

Even the blind left media can see. The Daily Caller quotes Andrea Mitchell. 

The White House’s Summit on “Countering Violent Extremism” may be on day two, but some left-of-center personalities think the ongoing response from the Obama administration is nothing more than a charade.

On her Wednesday show, MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell called the White House’s summit on terrorism “a dog and pony show” due to the lack of high level officials from foreign nations.

“Here he has the summit, no heads of government coming, the participation has not been at a particularly high level. We’ll have foreign ministers, we’ll be speaking to the Egyptian foreign minister shortly, who will be participating,” Mitchell said. “But there hasn’t been a whole lot of support from Europe or the Middle East at a very high level for what the president is setting out here.”

“It seems to be more of a dog and pony show,” Mitchell added. …

The last eight years of the economy have been the worst run in 62 years. Pajamas Media has the story.

… A couple of publications have noted that 2014 was the ninth consecutive year during which the U.S. economy grew by less than 3 percent.

They’re being too kind. Last year was the eighth year in a row of sub-2.5 percent growth, following four straight years (2003-2006) of higher growth.

It’s hardly a coincidence that the first year of that awful 2007-2014 streak just so happens to have been the same year that the Democratic Party took legislative control in Washington.

The nation’s political and media elites were quite pleased with themselves when the November 2006 elections brought about that result, largely because their daily hostility to all things Republican and/or conservative contributed mightily to it. They were absolutely ecstatic when Barack Obama, Mr. Perfectly Creased Pants, won the November 2008 presidential election and took office in January 2009.

As will be seen shortly, the former event marked the beginning of the U.S. economy’s worst eight-year stretch since 1945-1952. Obama’s presence in the Oval Office until January 2017 virtually ensures that we’ll have at least two more years of the policies which brought on that miserable result. …

Michael Goodwin says the president is on a rampage. 

He can’t bring himself to call Islamic terrorists what they are, but President Obama finally said something with which we can all agree. Speaking of his remaining time in office, he said: “Two years is a long time.”

He can say that again — and did, attaching a scary promise about his plans for the twilight of his ­tenure.

“Two years is also the time in which we’re going to be setting the stage for the next presidential election and the next 10 years of American policy,” he told wealthy ­donors in San Francisco. “So I intend to run through the tape and work really hard, and squeeze every last little bit of change.”

There you have it. Instead of cleaning up the messes he’s created, Obama is hell-bent on making more of them.

The word that comes to mind is “rogue.” As in, the president is going rogue. Like an elephant on a rampage, he’s breaking free of all constraints.

That makes the next two years extremely dangerous. Not just for Americans, but also for people around the world who count on us for their security and well-being. …

After the flap that greeted Rudy Giuliani’s comments about the president’s lack of love for the country, Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit reminds us of 2008 obama comments questioning Bush’s patriotism.

In 2008 then Senator Obama called President Bush “unpatriotic” for adding trillions to the national debt. Bush added about four trillion to the debt in eight years after the 9-11 attacks and mortgage crisis. Barack Obama then added the same amount of debt in less than three years.
Via Flopping Aces:

You certainly didn’t hear any reporters lecturing Obama for his uncivil rhetoric after that outrageous attack.

This week former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani accused President Obama of not loving America. He promptly received death threats. The Obama White House said Giuliani’s comments were “horrible.”

Kevin Williamson says the president does not even like this country.

… Does Barack Obama like America? The people around him certainly seem to have their reservations. Michelle Obama said — twice, at separate campaign events — that her husband’s ascending to the presidency meant that “for the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country.” She was in her mid 40s at the time, her “adult lifetime” having spanned decades during which she could not be “really proud” of her country. Barack Obama spent years in the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s church as the churchman fulminated: “God Damn America!” The Reverend Wright’s infamous “God Damn America!” sermon charges the country with a litany of abuses: slavery, mistreatment of the Indians, “treating citizens as less than human,” etc. A less raving version of the same indictment can be found in the president’s own speeches and books. His social circle includes such figures as Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who expressed their love of country by participating in a murderous terrorist campaign against it.

Does Barack Obama love his country? Call me a rube for saying so, but it’s a fair question.

To ask the question is not the same as venting the familiar swamp gasses: that he’s a foreigner, at heart if not in fact; that he’s a Manchurian candidate sent to undermine the republic; that he’s a secret Marxist or secret jihadist sympathizer; etc. Put it this way: Why would anybody who sees the world the way Barack Obama does love America?

For the progressive, there is very little to love about the United States. Washington, Jefferson, Madison? A bunch of rotten slaveholders, hypocrites, and cowards even when their hearts were in the right places. The Declaration of Independence? A manifesto for the propertied classes. The Constitution? An artifact of sexism and white supremacy. The sacrifices in the great wars of the 20th century? Feeding the poor and the disenfranchised into the meat-grinder of imperialism. The gifts of Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Morgan, Astor? Blood money from self-aggrandizing robber barons.

There is a personality type common among the Left’s partisans, and it has a name: Holden Caulfield. He is adolescent, perpetually disappointed, and ever on the lookout for phoniness and hypocrisy. …

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Noted environmentalist Bjørn Lomborg says in a USA Today OpEd that the benefits of electric cars are myths. 

It is time to stop our green worship of the electric car. It costs us a fortune, cuts little CO2 and surprisingly kills almost twice the number of people compared with regular gasoline cars.

Electric cars’ global-warming benefits are small. It is advertised as a zero-emissions car, but in reality it only shifts emissions to electricity production, with most coming from fossil fuels. As green venture capitalist Vinod Khosla likes to point out, “Electric cars are coal-powered cars.”

The most popular electric car, a Nissan Leaf, over a 90,000-mile lifetime will emit 31 metric tons of CO2, based on emissions from its production, its electricity consumption at average U.S. fuel mix and its ultimate scrapping. A comparable diesel Mercedes CDI A160 over a similar lifetime will emit 3 tons more across its production, diesel consumption and ultimate scrapping.

The results are similar for the top-line Tesla car, emitting about 44 tons, about 5 tons less than a similar Audi A7 Quattro.

Yes, in both cases the electric car is better, but only by a tiny bit. Avoiding 3 tons of CO2 would cost less than $27 on Europe’s emissions trading market. The annual benefit is about the cost of a cup of coffee. Yet U.S. taxpayers spend up to $7,500 in tax breaks for less than $27 of climate benefits. That’s a bad deal. …

The New Scientist reports that internal combustion engines may soon use lasers instead of spark plugs.

… For a week last November an internal combustion engine hummed away in a lab near Chicago. Why the excitement? This particular engine sets fire to fuel with lasers instead of spark plugs, burning fuel more efficiently than normal. Laser-fired engines could lead to cleaner, greener cars.

In a normal combustion engine, a mix of fuel and air enters a chamber where it is ignited by a spark plug. Hot, expanding gases from the burning fuel then exert force on a moving part such as a piston – generating mechanical energy that can be used to turn the wheels of a car, for example. But because each combustion cycle happens very quickly, it is hard to get all of the fuel mixture to burn. The problem is that spark plugs can only ignite the fuel at one end of the chamber, says Chuni Ghosh, CEO of New Jersey-based Princeton Optronics, the firm that developed the new ignition system.

In Ghosh’s engine, a laser ignites the fuel in the middle of the chamber instead, burning more of the fuel and improving combustion efficiency by 27 per cent. Laser ignition could boost the fuel efficiency of a car from 40 kilometres per litre up to around 50, for example. The more complete burn also emits fewer polluting by-products such as nitrogen dioxide. …

Harvard Business Review speculates about Apple making cars. The iCar? 

Apple fanboys and Samsung’s “Next Big Thing”ers would hoot with derisive laughter if The Wall Street Journal or Financial Times reported that GM or Ford planned to rewrite the rules of smartphone innovation. But when media coverage suggests Apple may redesign the automobile, even the most cynical car-lovers quiver with righteous curiosity. They should. …

…  Steve Jobs’ successors are at least an order of magnitude more credible as disruptive innovators than the heirs of Ford and Sloan. The computer, software, telecoms, music, broadcast, publishing, photography, retail, and consumer electronics industries certainly believe so. Apple demonstrably understands design, UX, and global supply chain alignment in ways few organizations ever have. According to data from Yahoo finance, company’s market cap exceeds that of Toyota, BMW, Volkswagen, Ford, GM, Honda, Fiat Chrysler, Tesla, and Daimler combined. Apple’s cash hoard currently tops $175 billion.

If Apple truly wants to fundamentally transform the driving experience and global automobile business, it surely has the ingenuity and resources to do so. …  … Unlike commercial aviation, automobile economics brilliantly reward the brilliant. Apple is brilliant. Don’t bet against them.

Who knows what an iCar might look, feel, or drive like? I don’t. But the better and more challenging question is, how would the automotive industry’s incumbents respond to genuinely disruptive competition? …

Juan Williams of Fox with a WSJ OpEd on Clarence Thomas calling him “America’s most influential thinker on race.” 

In his office hangs a copy of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery in America. When his critics, and he has many, call him names, he likes to point to it and shout out, “I’m a free man!” This black history month is an opportunity to celebrate the most influential thinker on racial issues in America today—Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas .

Justice Thomas, who has been on the court nearly a quarter-century, remains a polarizing figure—loved by conservatives and loathed by liberals. But his “free”-thinking legal opinions are opening new roads for the American political debate on racial justice.

His opinions are rooted in the premise that the 14th Amendment—guaranteeing equal rights for all—cannot mean different things for different people. As he wrote in Fisher v. University of Texas (2013), he is opposed to “perpetual racial tinkering” by judges to fix racial imbalance and inequality at schools and the workplace. Yet he never contends racism has gone away. The fact that a 2001 article in Time magazine about him was headlined “Uncle Tom Justice” reminds us that racism stubbornly persists. …

Comic Kelly MacLean survives Whole Foods.

… Unlike Vegas, Whole Foods’ clientele are all about mindfulness and compassion… until they get to the parking lot. Then it’s war. As I pull up this morning, I see a pregnant lady on the crosswalk holding a baby and groceries. This driver swerves around her and honks. As he speeds off I catch his bumper sticker, which says ‘NAMASTE’. Poor lady didn’t even hear him approaching because he was driving a Prius. He crept up on her like a panther.

As the great, sliding glass doors part I am immediately smacked in the face by a wall of cool, moist air that smells of strawberries and orchids. I leave behind the concrete jungle and enter a cornucopia of organic bliss; the land of hemp milk and honey. Seriously, think about Heaven and then think about Whole Foods; they’re basically the same.

The first thing I see is the great wall of kombucha — 42 different kinds of rotten tea. Fun fact: the word kombucha is Japanese for ‘I gizzed in your tea.’ Anyone who’s ever swallowed the glob of mucus at the end of the bottle knows exactly what I’m talking about. I believe this thing is called “The Mother,” which makes it that much creepier. …

San Francisco Chronicle reports on MLB’s efforts to speed up games.

Baseball games will be quicker-paced in 2015.

The game will use a clock, batters will be forced to keep one foot in the batter’s box and managers won’t trot onto the field for every replay challenge.

The news comes in just the second month of the Rob Manfred administration. He replaced commissioner Bud Selig in January.

“These changes represent a step forward in our efforts to streamline the pace of play,” Manfred said. “The most fundamental starting point for improving the pace of the average game involves getting into and out of breaks seamlessly. In addition, the batter’s box rule will help speed up a basic action of the game.”

Here are the specifics; …

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The Examiner’s Tim Carney posts on a New Yorker article on Libya’s chaos.

President Obama attacked Libya in 2011 without congressional authority, and then shirked any responsibility to help stabilize the country after deposing its dictator.

By 2013, Libya had become a chaotic hellhole mired in a permanent war. Today it is a new beachhead and recruiting ground for the Islamic State.

Obama’s illegal, ill-considered, and immoral drive-by war in Libya ought to be a permanent stain on his presidency. The recent video of masked ISIS killers beheading 21 Egyptian Christians in Libya deserves to be the emblem of this president’s rash foreign policy.

“There is no overstating the chaos of post-Qaddafi Libya,” writes veteran war journalist Jon Lee Anderson in the New Yorker. “Two competing governments claim legitimacy. Armed militias roam the streets. The electricity is frequently out of service, and most business is at a standstill….”

Wars in Libya in the past year alone have taken about as many lives as 9/11 did. Those who can get out flee. Anderson reports that “nearly a third of the country’s population has fled across the border to Tunisia.”

The militants of the Islamic State are actually late arrivals to the “scumbag Woodstock” Libya has become, in the words a military contractor quoted by Daily Beast reporter Eli Lake. …

… At every stage, though, the administration behaved shamefully. Obama never tried to persuade Americans his war was just. He never sought the congressional action that would have made his war — sorry, his “kinetic military action” — legal. At one point, administration officials even floated the idea that they could frustrate the intent of the 1973 War Powers Resolution and its 60-day limit on unauthorized wars by momentarily stopping and then immediately restarting U.S. involvement. Obama never told the truth, perhaps for fear it would make his war more unpopular. And he never made the commitment to staying and rebuilding that could have made his war a success.

For some reason, Obama’s Libya war has received scant attention, both from his critics and from media commentators assessing his presidency. The people of Libya and surrounding countries, however, don’t have the luxury of ignoring the consequences.

The left media can no longer ignore the administration’s foreign policy failures and follies. Even The New Yorker can’t continue to look away. Tim Carney’s above article posted on a New Yorker piece. Here that is. It is organized around the story of Gen. Khalifa Haftar who left his 20 year home in Northern Virginia to lead one of the factions fighting in Libya. This is 7,000 words. Sorry about that, but at least this is the last posting for the week.

Early last year, General Khalifa Haftar left his home in northern Virginia—where he had spent most of the previous two decades, at least some of that time working with the Central Intelligence Agency—and returned to Tripoli to fight his latest war for control of Libya. Haftar, who is a mild-looking man in his early seventies, has fought with and against nearly every significant faction in the country’s conflicts, leading to a reputation for unrivalled military experience and for a highly flexible sense of personal allegiance. In the Green Mountains, the country’s traditional hideout for rebels and insurgents, he established a military headquarters, inside an old airbase surrounded by red-earth farmland and groves of hazelnut and olive trees. Haftar’s force, which he calls the Libyan National Army, has taken much of the eastern half of the country, in an offensive known as Operation Dignity. Most of the remainder, including the capital city of Tripoli, is held by Libya Dawn, a loose coalition of militias, many of them working in a tactical alliance with Islamist extremists. Much as General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has boasted of doing in Egypt, General Haftar proposes to destroy the Islamist forces and bring peace and stability—enforced by his own army. …

… There is no overstating the chaos of post-Qaddafi Libya. Two competing governments claim legitimacy. Armed militias roam the streets. The electricity is frequently out of service, and most business is at a standstill; revenues from oil, the country’s greatest asset, have dwindled by more than ninety per cent. Some three thousand people have been killed by fighting in the past year, and nearly a third of the country’s population has fled across the border to Tunisia. What has followed the downfall of a tyrant—a downfall encouraged by NATO air strikes—is the tyranny of a dangerous and pervasive instability. …

… Libyans gradually learned to navigate the violence. A young Tripoli businessman who asked to be called Mohamed told me of getting a call last July, telling him that two militias were fighting on the road to the airport. “The morning it started, my partner tried to drive to our office and got turned back,” he said. Mohamed headed to the office anyway; their employees’ payroll money was held in a safe there, and he wanted to retrieve it before it was destroyed or looted. “There were literally bullets flying right overhead,” he said. He managed to get the money and leave the city, negotiating the militia roadblocks using a credential that a highly placed friend had given him. “All along the airport road, there were no-go zones, with separate battles going on, and both sides ransacking people’s houses.”

With the fighting in Tripoli, two opposing armies took shape. The group aligned against Haftar, Libya Dawn, is an uneasy coalition; it includes former Al Qaeda jihadists who fought against Qaddafi in the nineties, Berber ethnic militias, members of Libya’s branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, and a network of conservative merchants from Misrata, whose fighters make up the largest block of Libya Dawn’s forces. Haftar’s army is composed mainly of Qaddafi-era soldiers and federalists seeking greater autonomy for the eastern region of Cyrenaica, mixed with tribal fighters from the west and the south. …

… The regional implications of Libya’s breakdown are vast. The southern desert offers unguarded crossings into Algeria, Niger, Chad, and Sudan, where armed bands—including human traffickers and jihadists from Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb—roam freely in four-wheel-drive convoys. Huge numbers of migrants, mostly Africans but also some Middle Easterners, are being smuggled through Libya. At the Mediterranean coast, they are placed in overcrowded boats and pointed toward Italy, where the fortunate ones are picked up by the coast guard or by passing cargo ships. Last year, the number of migrants reaching Italy in this fashion rose to a hundred and seventy thousand; more than three thousand are believed to have drowned at sea. In early February, another three hundred died.

Libya has long been an isolated and constricted place, and the revolution has done little to change that. Since July, Tripoli’s only functioning airport has been Mitiga, a former U.S. airbase that Qaddafi took over in 1970. Then Haftar’s bombers struck Mitiga, and for a time there were no flights there, either.

Many of the young Libyans I met during the revolution are now in Tunisia, Egypt, Bulgaria, London—anywhere but Libya. The exiles who came back to build a new country have largely left. The people who have remained are those who can’t get out, and they mostly stay close to home. In any case, there’s little to do. Many shops are closed during the day, opening for a few hours after evening prayers; there are no women to be seen on the streets. There are sporadic bursts of gunfire and explosions, and it is impossible to tell whether someone is being shot or someone is cleaning a gun on a rooftop. Nobody asks; Libyans have become inured to war, and, in any case, decades of secret-police surveillance have conditioned them not to inquire into the causes of violence. …

… Benjamin Rhodes, the deputy national-security adviser and a close confidant of Obama’s, acknowledged that Libya’s situation was grim. “Getting the technocrats and the guys with the guns on the same page has been very difficult,” he said. “The first task is to get them in conversation where they can receive help from us. We’re doing this through a U.N. initiative, plus some quiet diplomacy behind the scenes.” He noted that there has also been occasional military action. Last June, Delta Force operatives abducted Ahmed Abu Khattala, an Ansar member who is suspected of leading the attack that killed Ambassador Stevens. Khattala is now awaiting trial in the U.S. “The trick is for us to help people get back to the point where the Libyans can achieve what their revolution was about in the first place,” Rhodes said. “But it’s probably not going to happen on Washington’s timeline.”

Rhodes was one of the aides who, along with Clinton, Susan Rice, and Samantha Power, helped persuade Obama to join the intervention. In spite of the chaos that followed, he stands by that decision. “We saved a lot of lives in Benghazi and the rest of the country,” he said. “If Qaddafi had gone into Benghazi, I think Libya would look more like Syria today.” He added, “What did we do wrong? Even the President would acknowledge that it’s been extremely difficult to fill the vacuum in Libya. We were keen for the Libyans to take the lead. Everyone knows the dangers of a completely U.S.-owned postwar environment. We might have used a heavier hand, but there’s no guarantee it would have made a difference.” …

First the New Yorker, and from Power Line we learn the Brookings Institution can’t avoid the trainwreck.

… The center-liberal Brookings Institution reported last week on the range of surveys of presidential experts (mostly liberals one can safely assume) who rank Obama as no more than middling. But Brookings decided to do their own survey of academic political scientists, and some of it is rather brutal for The One:

“First, President Obama ranks 18th overall, but beneath the surface of the aggregate figures lurks evidence of significant ambivalence. For example, those who view Obama as one of the worst American presidents outnumber those who view him as one of the best by nearly a 3-1 margin. Similarly, nearly twice as many respondents view Obama as over-rated than do those who consider him under-rated. One area where there is significant expert consensus about the president, however, concerns how polarizing he is viewed as being – only George W. Bush was viewed as more a more polarizing president.

Next, Obama does not perform well on more specific dimensions of presidential greatness, often viewed as average or worse. For example, he is the midpoint in terms of both personal integrity and military skill (e.g., 10th of 19 in both categories), but falls to 11th when it comes to diplomatic skill and 13th with respect to legislative skill. . .

What can we take away from this? First, it is easy to infer that scholars and the public alike expected greatness from Obama early on and awarded it to him prematurely. . .

Second, scholars seem to hold Barack Obama in high regard personally, but view his skills and performance as mediocre to poor. Few think of Obama as an excellent president, while many more rate his presidency quite low. . .

It could be worse for Obama. Barring unforeseen scandal, he’s unlikely to become significantly less popular. .”

That closer is a real vote of confidence. …

Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.

Meyers: A Tennessee lawmaker is pushing to make the Bible the official state book. It would replace Tennessee’s current state book, the menu at Cracker Barrel.

Conan: A Glasgow man was attacked in a movie theater by three rowdy women during “Fifty Shades of Grey.” The police handcuffed the women, so their plan worked perfectly.

Fallon: Congress is considering a law to allow commuters to bring their dogs and cats on Amtrak trains. It’s all part of its plan to make Amtrak smell BETTER.

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We left off yesterday with items about the importance of Scott Walker’s incomplete college experience. Pickerhead thinks the less time spent in classes conducted by America’s professoriate; the better. James Huffman, former law prof and law dean writes on the current problems of legal education. This is a microcosm of the failures of higher education today.

The theme of the recent Association of American Law Schools annual meeting was “legal education at the crossroads.” Legal education is at a crossroads, but you would hardly know it from the AALS convention program, from the American Bar Association’s recent revision of its accreditation standards, or from what law schools are actually doing in response to a six-year decline in applications.

To head off the crisis, legal educators should be talking about an entirely new business model. That the existing model has failed should be evident to any thoughtful observer. But because most law faculty view themselves as public servants and legal education as a public good, they reject the very idea that legal education can even be thought of in business terms. …

… Through the first half of the last century law schools relied on small faculties to teach large classes in facilities consisting of a few lecture halls, offices, and a library. Today large faculties teach small classes in elaborate facilities housing high tech classrooms, court rooms, cafes, lounges, suites of faculty, administrative and student organization offices, computer labs, libraries, and even workout rooms in a few schools. Faculty teach not only smaller, but fewer, classes, with frequent sabbaticals and research leaves. Little wonder tuition has risen in excess of inflation for four decades.

As someone who promoted all of the above as a law school dean and benefitted from it all as a law professor, it pains me to acknowledge that during my nearly four-decade career legal education, I abandoned frugality for profligacy. Some of the rise in cost resulted from program expansions in response to a plethora of new legal specialties and from steady pressure from the American Bar Association for more training in lawyering skills that requires a much lower student-faculty ratio.

But the core factor in the escalating cost of legal education is that the guild of law school professors long ago captured the combined regulatory apparatus of the American Bar Association (ABA) and the AALS. We law professors have constructed a legal education model that, first and foremost, serves faculty interests—higher salaries, more faculty protected by tenure, smaller and fewer classes, shorter semesters, generous sabbatical and leave policies, and supplemental grants for research and writing. We could not have done better for ourselves, except that the system is now collapsing. …

John Steele Gordon says Walker’s treatment by the mainstream media means they’re worried. 

It is a measure how much the Scott Walker boomlet is worrying the left that there is suddenly a plethora of attacks on him, each and every one, of course, tendentious.

Gail Collins of the New York Times wrote a column on Friday, entitled “Scott Walker Needs an Eraser,” denouncing Walker for cutting Wisconsin school funding in 2010, causing teacher layoffs. Despite the prodigious depth of her research, she failed to notice that he took office in 2011. Finally, on Sunday, the Times applied an eraser to Collins’s column and ran a correction. As Hot Air points out, the rest of the column doesn’t make much sense without the sentence that was deleted.

The Times itself ran an editorial on February 6 denouncing Walker for proposing a cut in the budget of the University of Wisconsin, implicitly arguing that a university with 180,000 students and 26 campuses could not possibly run a tighter ship. It claims he came to prominence in 2011 “with his attacks on collective bargaining rights and attempts to curtail the benefits of state workers,” as though it is impossible for state workers to have excessive benefits or too many collective bargaining rights.

It’s at it again this morning. Expect this to become a regular drum beat; the higher Walker gets in the polls the more the drum will be beaten. …

Since Ann Althouse lives in Wisconsin, teaches at U of W law school, and has blogged for more than ten years, she has many posts on Scott Walker. She is trying to refrain, but the silly Gail Collins got to her.

… At this point, it’s very hard to deal with every Walker topic that comes up as it comes up, especially since I don’t want to be an all-Walker-all-the-time blog. But after 4+ years of following Scott Walker, it feels as though I’m doing something wrong if there’s a significant Walker topic that non-Wisconsinites are blogging and I haven’t even acknowledged its existence.

So here I am at 4:48 in the morning, driven by a weird sense of obligation to pay attention to that foolish Gail Collins column The New York Times published on Friday the 13th: “Scott Walker Needs an Eraser.”

You’d think columnists who want to wield influence would be more careful about letting their murderous intentions glare. But Collins stupidly overreached, perhaps fed by the Wisconsin Walker-haters who’ve been chewing over a set of stock topics for years and now pass along the gooey pulp of their contempt.

Collins built her column on the story of a young teacher who won an award for excellence but then got fired due to budget cuts. Walker’s name is associated with budget austerity, so Walker must be to blame for her job loss. This was a gross error, the teacher having lost her job the year before Walker became governor. It took 2 days for the Times to edit out the mistaken assertion (which left the column not making much sense). Walker’s reforms were aimed at saving money at the school-district level and making it possible to keep excellent new teachers. …

Time to declare war on the mainstream media says John Steele Gordon.

… Why is it up to Boehner to bend instead of the Democrats doing so? The answer is simple. As Jonah Goldberg tweeted, “So when GOP holds up things in Dem-run Senate, GOP is to blame. When Dems hold things up in GOP-run Senate, GOP is to blame. I see a trend.” Even Chris Wallace—the fairest and best of the Sunday morning talk show hosts—thinks that when push comes to shove on Capitol Hill, it is the Republicans who must yield, even when they hold majorities in both houses as they do now. Why? Because that is the way the mainstream media will always play the story.

What should Boehner do? I think he, and every Republican, should do what George H.W. Bush did to Dan Rather as the 1988 presidential race was heating up: eat the mainstream media alive. They are the enemies of the Republican Party and should be treated as such. Stop trying to curry favor because you won’t get it. Bush laid a trap for Rather, insisting on the interview being live so it couldn’t end up on the cutting room floor. It totally flustered Rather, greatly energized Bush’s campaign, put the kibosh on his too-much-a-nice-guy image, and helped mightily to propel him to the White House. Make mainstream media bias the issue. Throw loaded questions and those premised on liberal assumptions back in their faces. Accuse them of bias when they are biased. Don’t be Mr. Nice Guy. …

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Taking some time out from contemplating our present predicaments, Victor Davis Hanson reminds us of last month’s 50 year anniversary of the death of Winston Churchill.

Fifty years ago this Saturday, (January 24, 1965) former British prime minister Winston Churchill died at age 90.

Churchill is remembered for his multiple nonstop careers as a statesman, cabinet minister, politician, journalist, Nobel laureate historian, and combat veteran. He began his career serving the British military as a Victorian-era mounted lancer and ended it as custodian of Britain’s nuclear deterrent.

But he is most renowned for an astounding five-year-tenure as Britain’s wartime prime minister from May 10, 1940, to June 26, 1945, when he was voted out of office not long after the surrender of Nazi Germany.

Churchill took over the day Hitler invaded Western Europe. Within six weeks, an isolated Great Britain was left alone facing the Third Reich. What is now the European Union was then either under Nazi occupation, allied with Germany, or ostensibly neutral while favoring Hitler.

The United States was not just neutral. It had no intention of entering another European war — at least not until after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor a year and half later.

From August 1939 to June 1941, the Soviet Union was an accomplice of the Third Reich. Russian leader Joseph Stalin was supplying Hitler with critical resources to help finish off Great Britain, the last obstacle in Germany’s path of European domination.

Some of the British elite wished to cut a peace deal with Hitler to save their empire and keep Britain from being bombed or invaded. They understandably argued that Britain could hardly hold out when Poland, Denmark, Norway the Netherlands, Belgium, and France all had not. Yet Churchill voiced defiance and vowed to keep on fighting. …

Back to the present predicament – the one where we have a rogue president. A president, incidentally, who on day one removed a bust of Winston Churchill from the oval office. City Journal with a good post on “faithful execution” of laws.

… Lots of debate will ensue over the extent to which the administration’s non-deportation policy finds support in the maze of statutes comprising American immigration laws. But stepping back from the minutiae, one is struck by the gulf between the legal arguments proffered by the administration and the substance of its policy. The OLC (Office of Legal Counsel of the Justice Department) memo asserts that the president’s policy of systematic nonenforcement, far from thwarting Congress, actually “is consistent with the removal priorities established by Congress,” in light of the scarcity of funds that Congress appropriates for deportations. Yet in his remarks announcing the policy, President Obama stressed that his action was necessary precisely because Congress had not passed legislation “fixing this broken immigration system.” Similarly, the OLC memo tries to downplay the impact of the administration’s action, asserting that it is not “an absolute, inflexible policy of not enforcing the immigration laws in certain categories of cases” but instead a general framework that “provides for case-by-case determinations” based on each “individual alien’s circumstances,” leaving “ample room for the exercise of individualized discretion by responsible officials.” Yet the documents make no serious attempt to explain how or why individuals meeting the policy’s broad standards would ever be singled out for harsher treatment—and Obama, to the contrary, announced to all illegal immigrants satisfying these conditions that “you’ll be able to apply to stay in this country temporarily without fear of deportation. You can come out of the shadows and get right with the law. That’s what this deal is.”

Most important, where OLC concludes that the president’s policy does not, “under the guise of exercising enforcement discretion, attempt to effectively rewrite the laws to match [his] policy preferences,” the president speaks to the contrary. “I just took an action to change the law,” he told an audience days after the OLC issued its analysis.

It is this unbridgeable gap between the president’s actions and the Justice Department’s rationalizations that reveals Obama’s failure to satisfy his constitutional obligation to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Though a certain degree of statutory under-enforcement is tolerable (and often laudable) under our constitutional framework, the president is not “faithful” when his approach is fundamentally dishonest. “[T]he constitutional charge to the President to take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” wrote Attorney General William Wirt to President James Monroe in 1823, requires the president to see that each of his officers “performs his duty faithfully—that is, honestly: not with perfect correctness of judgment, but honestly.” The emphasis on the words “faithfully” and “honestly” in that quotation comes from Wirt himself. The current president and attorney general would do well to emphasize faithfulness and honesty, too.

We entered the 21st Century looking for better and better ways to store energy. Jeff Jacoby wrote a Valentine to the best way to store energy – a barrel of oil.

… Here on Planet Earth, the booming use of petroleum, coal, and natural gas has fueled an almost inconceivable amount of good. All human technologies generate costs as well as benefits, but the gains from the use of fossil fuels have been extraordinary. The energy derived from fossil fuels, economist Robert Bradley Jr. wrote last spring in Forbes, has “liberated mankind from wretched poverty; fueled millions of high-productivity jobs in nearly every business sector; been a feedstock for medicines that have saved countless lives; and led to the development of fertilizers that have greatly increased crop yields to feed the hungry.” Far from wrecking the planet, the harnessing of carbon-based energy makes it safer and more livable.

The rise of fossil fuels has led to dramatic gains in human progress — whether that progress is measured in terms of life expectancy, income, education, health, sanitation, transportation, or leisure. Nearly everything that is comfortable and convenient about modern civilization depends on the ready availability of energy, and nearly 90 percent of our energy comes from oil, gas, and coal. Pro-divestment activists know better than to push people to give up electricity, air travel, computers, or central heating — all of which would vanish without the fossil fuel industry. Instead they demonize the industry, reasoning that it will be easier to turn Big Oil into a pariah than to convince the public to abandon its cars and smartphones. …

Megan McArdle posts on Scott Walker’s college career. 

The Washington Post has a lengthy article on Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s college career and his decision to drop out of MarquetteUniversity during his senior year. I read it carefully, and I think that this piece raises a pretty important question about Walker’s presidential campaign.

Namely: Who cares?

We’re talking about events that happened almost 30 years ago. None of them are illegal, or even, frankly, very interesting. (He got a D-minus in French!) So why are we talking about this? …

… The fact that we seem so fixated on events decades past is its own dire signal — of the way that America’s Mandarin class is starting to think about college education not merely as the basic credential required for many of the best-paying jobs, but also the basic credential required for being a worthy, capable person. This is not merely untrue, but also a giant middle finger raised to the majority of upstanding American citizens who also didn’t graduate from college. …

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has more on the subject we will explore often in the next year few years. Reynolds thinks the election of Walker “might bring reality back to an Ivy League-suffocated government.” It would be a refreshing change because only people who have sat in years of classes from this country’s professoriate could be as dumb as what we have running the government today.

A lot of people don’t know much about him yet, and he may not even be running, but if Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is elected president in 2016, he’ll immediately accomplish something that no other candidate being talked about can: He’ll lay to rest the absurd belief that you’re a nobody if you don’t have a college degree. And he might even cut into the surprisingly recent takeover of our institutions by an educated mandarin class, something that just might save the country.

Though Walker attended Marquette University, he left before graduating, which has caused some finger-wagging from the usual journalistic suspects. After all, they seem to believe, everyone they know has a college degree, so it must be essential to getting ahead. As the successful governor of an important state, you’d think that Walker’s subsequent career would make his college degree irrelevant, but you’d be wrong.

And that’s why a President Walker would accomplish something worthwhile the moment he took office. Over the past few years in America, a college degree has become something valued more as a class signifier than as a source of useful knowledge. When Democratic spokesman Howard Dean (who himself was born into wealth) suggested that Walker’s lack of a degree made him unsuitable for the White House, what he really meant was that Walker is “not our kind, dear” — lacking the credential that many elite Americans today regard as essential to respectable status.

Of course, some of our greatest presidents, from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln to Harry S. Truman, never graduated from college. But the college degree as class-signifier is, as I note in my book, The New School, a rather recent phenomenon. …

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The mendacity capacity of the president and his minions comes through in the latest from Caroline Glick. She deals with the preposterous claim by Prez Trainwreck that the murders of four in the Paris deli was some sort of random violence directed towards “a bunch of folks.” Caroline has some strong words.

US President Barack Obama is mainstreaming anti-Semitism in America.

This week, apropos of seemingly nothing, in an interview with Mathew Yglesias from the Vox.com website, Obama was asked about terrorism. In his answer the president said the terrorism threat is overrated. And that was far from the most disturbing statement he made.

Moving from the general to the specific, Obama referred to the jihadists who committed last month’s massacres in Paris as “a bunch of violent vicious zealots,” who “randomly shot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris.”

In other words, Ahmedy Coulibaly, the terrorist at Hyper Cacher, the kosher supermarket he targeted, was just some zealot. The Jews he murdered while they were shopping for Shabbat were just “a bunch of folks in a deli,” presumably shot down while ordering their turkey and cheese sandwiches.

No matter that Coulibaly called a French TV station from the kosher supermarket and said he was an al-Qaida terrorist and that he chose the kosher supermarket because he wanted to kill Jews. …

 

… As subsequent statements from administration spokespeople made clear, Obama’s statement was not a gaffe. When questioned about his remarks, both White House spokesman Josh Earnest and State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki doubled down on Obama’s denial of the anti-Semitic nature of the massacre at Hyper Cacher. Earnest said that the Jews who were murdered were people who just “randomly happened to be” at the supermarket.

Psaki said that the victims didn’t share a common background or nationality, pretending away the bothersome fact that they were all Jews.

Just as bad as their denials of the anti-Jewish nature of the attack on Hyper Cacher, were Psaki’s and Earnest’s belated revisions of their remarks. After coming under a storm of criticism from American Jews and from the conservative media, both Psaki and Earnest turned to their Twitter accounts to walk back their remarks and admit that indeed, the massacre at Hyper Cacher was an anti-Semitic assault.

Their walk back was no better than their initial denial of the anti-Jewish nature of the Islamist attack, because it amplified the very anti-Semitism they previously denied promoted attack.

As many Obama supporters no doubt interpreted their behavior, first Obama and his flaks stood strong in their conviction that Jews are not specifically targeted. Then after they were excoriated for their statements by Jews and conservatives, they changed their tune.

The subtext is clear. The same Jews who are targeted no more than anyone else, are so powerful and all controlling that they forced the poor Obama administration to bow to their will and parrot their false and self-serving narrative of victimization. …

 

…Today, the most outstanding example of Obama’s exploitation of anti-Semitic tropes to diminish US support for Israel is his campaign to delegitimize Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu ahead of his scheduled speech before the joint houses of Congress on March 3.

 

As we belatedly learned from a small correction at the bottom of a New York Times article on January 30, contrary to the White House’s claim, Netanyahu did not blindside Obama when he accepted Speaker of the House John Boehner’s invitation to address the Congress. He informed the White House of his intention to accept Boehner’s offer before he accepted it.

Netanyahu did not breach White House protocol.

He did not behave rudely or disrespectfully toward Obama.

The only one that behaved disrespectfully and rudely was Obama in his shabby and slanderous treatment of Netanyahu. It was Obama who peddled the lie that Netanyahu was using the speech not to legitimately present Israel’s concerns regarding the prospect of a nuclear armed Iran, but to selfishly advance his political fortunes on the back of America’s national security interests and the independence of its foreign policy.

It was Obama and Vice President Joe Biden who spearheaded efforts to coerce Democratic lawmakers to boycott Netanyahu’s speech by announcing that they would refuse to meet with the leader of the US’s closest ally in the Middle East during his stay in Washington. …

Victor Davis Hanson posts on President Snark.

Snark is a popular word used for a particular sort of off-putting sarcasm. Snarkiness can manifest itself as adolescent cheap shots, snide condescension, or simple ad hominem patronizing — a sort of “I know you are, but what am I?” schoolyard name-calling. Its incessant use is typically connected with a peevishness born out of juvenile insecurity, and sometimes fed by an embarrassing envy. All politicians are snarky at times; but few obsessively so, given the wages of monotony and insecurity that the snark earns.

President Obama is well known both for ad hominem dismissals of his supposed enemies — everyone from Fox News to the Tea Party to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity — and for his evocations of nefarious straw men who, he claims, if left unchecked, would uninsure the poor, pollute the environment, hurt the illegal immigrant, and wage perpetual war abroad. But Obama’s snarky putdowns and condescending afterthoughts are a particularly disturbing subset of these rhetorical devices, used by him in the grand world of diplomacy as well as in often petty domestic contexts.

Vladimir Putin is the dangerous autocrat of a nuclear-armed superstate. He has trampled on the rights of his own people while trying to bully the former Soviet republics back into a czarist Orthodox version of the Soviet Empire. So Putin is many disturbing things, but for Obama he is reduced to some archetypal high-schooler to be snarked at: “My sense is that’s part of his shtick back home politically as wanting to look like the tough guy.” Putin, in Obama’s putdown, has “got that kind of slouch, looking like the bored kid at the back of the classroom.” Gratuitously reducing Putin’s aggression to the work of an adolescent rival show-off may be dangerous when combined with the past six years of Obama’s mostly seeming indifferent to that aggression. Snarking loudly while carrying a tiny stick is particularly unwise. …

… Obama is supposedly friends with basketball legend Michael Jordan. But the latter made a terrible mistake when he chided the golf-obsessive Obama as in fact a “hack” and a “sh***y” golfer. Obama quickly fired back that Jordan “was not well informed.” He then went after Jordan himself as the less than successful basketball-team owner: “He might want to spend more time thinking about the Bobcats — or the Hornets.” Snark is now exemplified by the president of the United States stooping to engage in a kindergarten tit-for-tat over relative golf skills with an ex-NBA player: “But there is no doubt that Michael is a better golfer than I am. Of course if I was playing twice a day for the last 15 years, then that might not be the case.” Note the “He might want” and “If I was playing twice a day . . .” …

Seth Mandel thinks it is time we discuss the president’s ignorance. 

In the wake of the controversy over President Obama’s offensive labeling of anti-Semitic violence as “random,” it became clear that regardless of whether he chose his words carefully, he certainly chose his audience carefully. He was not challenged by his interviewer at Vox for his undeniably false characterization of the Paris attacks. And now, having given an interview to BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith, he has continued exposing his own ignorance in the hope that he would continue not to be called on it by his interviewers. He was in luck yet again.

BuzzFeed has posted the transcript of the interview, and when the subject turns to Russia, Obama said this:

“You know, I don’t want to psychoanalyze Mr. Putin. I will say that he has a foot very much in the Soviet past. That’s how he came of age. He ran the KGB. Those were his formative experiences. So I think he looks at problems through this Cold War lens, and, as a consequence, I think he’s missed some opportunities for Russia to diversify its economy, to strengthen its relationship with its neighbors, to represent something different than the old Soviet-style aggression. You know, I continue to hold out the prospect of Russia taking a diplomatic offering from what they’ve done in Ukraine. I think, to their credit, they’ve been able to compartmentalize and continue to work with us on issues like Iran’s nuclear program.”

As people pointed out immediately, Obama is wrong about Putin and the KGB. Ben Judah, a journalist who recently wrote a book on Putin’s Russia, responded: “The interesting and informative thing about Obama’s view on Putin is how uninsightful and uniformed it is.” …

 

… it’s a comprehensive historical ignorance. And on matters of great significance–the major world religions, the Middle East, Russia. And the president’s unwillingness to grasp the past certainly gives reason for concern with Iran as well–a country whose government has used the façade of negotiations to its own anti-American ends for long enough to see the pattern.

They’re not just minor gaffes or verbal blunders. They serve as a window into the mind of a president who acts as if a history of the world before yesterday could fit on a postcard. We talk a lot about the defects of the president’s ideology, but not about his ignorance. The two are related, but the latter is lately the one causing a disproportionate amount of damage. …

John Hinderaker of Power Line posts on the disasters hidden in the unconstitutional amnesty executive order. It’s lies all the way down.  

As the implications of President Obama’s illegal executive amnesty orders come into focus, more adverse consequences are being identified on almost a daily basis. Here are two that have recently come to light.

First, illegals who are given Social Security cards under Obama’s amnesty will be eligible for billions of dollars in cash payments from the federal government. That’s right: we will reward them for coming here illegally, and encourage others to do the same: …

 

… Then there is the matter of citizenship and voting rights. From the Democrats’ perspective, the key benefit of opening the immigration floodgates and legalizing millions of illegal aliens is that these actions will create a large pool of Democratic voters. That is contemplated by Obama’s executive orders, too. Senator Jeff Sessions says:

“We’ve learned that illegal immigrants will be given billions in free cash tax credits. We’ve learned that illegal immigrants will be given trillions in lifetime federal entitlement benefits through Social Security and Medicare. We’ve learned that illegal immigrants will be given driver’s licenses, creating new avenues for voter fraud. We’ve learned that the President’s edict will allow companies to replace American workers with illegal workers instead.

Our laws have been dismantled, stripped bare.

Now today House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte has unearthed a new scandal. In his executive decree, the President has opened up the possibility that hundreds of thousands of individuals illegally in the United States will be “paroled” and given U.S. citizenship. Such a policy extends birthright citizenship to the foreign-born who unlawfully set their feet upon American soil.

It is an offense to the very idea of citizenship as something sacred, precious, and treasured.” …

What are we to make of a country so dumb that it returned this vast criminal enterprise to office for four more years?