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Streetwise Professor posts on the strange juxtaposition of the president, who blew up the Iraqi Status of Forces Agreement because the Iraqi Parliament had not approved it. Now the same idiot is saying our legislature is not entitled to comment on his cave to the Iranians.

@libertylynx points out a very interesting contrast. The awful developments in Iraq over the last several years, most notably the rampage of Isis and the dramatic expansion of Iranian influence in the country, are directly attributable to Obama’s decision to withdraw all US military forces.  He did so after failing to negotiate a Status of Forces agreement with the Maliki government. This occurred primarily because of a particular demand that Obama made of Maliki: namely, that the Iraqi premier get his parliament’s approval of any agreement. Obama stated that such approval was necessary to make the deal credible and viable. He said legislative buy in was essential. Of course, this did not happen, and almost certainly Obama knew it would not happen. This gave him the pretext to bug out.

Fast forward 3-4 years. Whereas Obama had insisted on Iraqi legislative approval of a deal with the US, now Obama is dead set against letting the American legislative branch have any say whatsoever in a deal with Iran. So much for the need for legislative approval to give a deal credibility.

Obama obviously has no principled view of the role of the legislature in foreign policy. He didn’t want a Status of Forces agreement, so he insisted on Iraqi legislative approval because he knew it would not be forthcoming. He desperately wants a deal with Iran, so he adamantly opposes American legislative approval because he knows it is not likely to happen. His views on legislative involvement in diplomacy are not principled, but merely instrumental and change with the circumstances. …

Now we learn from The One that the rise of ISIS is George Bush’s fault! Is there a more contemptible person in DC? Pajamas Media has the story.

OBAMA: “Two things. One is ISIL is a direct outgrowth of al Qaeda in Iraq that grew out of our invasion which is an example of unintended consequences — which is why we should generally aim before we shoot.”

I never saw such a classless American president. He knows perfectly well that President George W. Bush won’t defend himself, because he — unlike Obama — does have a sense of decorum. So Obama quickly tries to put the blame for his own failures on Bush.

This isn’t about left versus right, but about being a gentleman rather than a bore. It’s clear which one Obama is.

Of course he isn’t just rude, he’s also lying. George W. Bush made some tragic mistakes, but ISIS’ rise is all on Obama. He was informed about the group’s potential a full year before it started its reign of terror, yet did nothing.

Ron Christie writes on Ferguson and how, as always, President Agitator made things worse.

… The fact is, most Americans never should have even heard about a shooting involving Michael Brown and police officer Darren Wilson. Every day in communities large and small, criminals commit crimes that elicit interaction from the police. In the instant case, it is a fact that Michael Brown committed a crime in a small town on August 9, 2014, failed to heed Officer Wilson’s instructions, and was shot to death when the officer thought his life was in danger. The shooting never should have happened—a young man never should have committed a crime and never should have rushed at a police officer.

Sadly, this incident provided the perfect opportunity for those who think that America is inherently racist and permanently ensconced in a 1965 Selma, Alabama, mindset with an opportunity: an opportunity to declare that a racist cop had gunned down an innocent black youth as the teen shouted “Hands up, Don’t Shoot”—a fictional account that never happened.

On matters of race involving local police investigations, President Obama has not been shy about injecting himself into the narrative while shaping the desired outcomes. In 2009 when Harvard Professor Henry Louis “Skip” Gates had a disagreement with a Cambridge police officer outside of his home leading to his arrest, the president opined that the officer “acted stupidly.” Never mind that Mr. Gates didn’t have his keys and was thought to be breaking into a home by the police officer in question. What I found revealing at the time is that the president offered the Gates incident as showing how “race remains a factor in this society today” when the facts revealed race had nothing to do with the interaction between a professor and a police officer.

Turning to the ginned-up cauldron of race that is now Ferguson, the president was once again quick to offer his opinion on local matter on which he knew nothing of the facts at hand. …

Turning to another disgusting DC denizen, John Fund writes on Hillary’s cover team.

Hillary Clinton explains her use of a private e-mail account and a secret server to conduct State Department business as a matter of “convenience.” But congressional investigators are almost as interested in the fact that two of her closest advisers, personal aide Huma Abedin and chief of staff Cheryl Mills, also had e-mail addresses on the secret server. Were they also interested in “convenience” or intent on shielding their work from public-record requests?

For many years, the two women have served as Hillary’s inner-palace guard. In turn, she has gone the extra mile to keep them close. In 2012, Abedin was granted status as a “special government employee,” allowing her to collect a State Department paycheck while skirting disclosure rules about her holding down lucrative private-sector jobs — among them work with the controversial Clinton-family foundation.

Cheryl Mills’s link with Mrs. Clinton goes back even further than Abedin’s. The 49-year-old Stanford Law graduate joined Team Clinton before Bill Clinton was even sworn in as president in 1993, serving as deputy general counsel for his transition team. …

… The Post noted that Mills had “endeared herself to the Clintons with her never-back-down, share-nothing, don’t-give-an-inch approach,” the same style prevalent today in Hillary’s e-mail controversy.

And that style is also prevalent in the way that various officials seem to have exerted efforts to ensure that the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi won’t embarrass Hillary. Ray Maxwell, a former assistant secretary of state for North Africa, has told reporters that Mills was one of several Clinton aides who on a Sunday afternoon “separated” out Benghazi-related documents that might put Clinton or her team in a “bad light.”  …

George Shultz was lately learning us about what Reagan would have done on the climate. Steve Hayward begs to differ and reminds Shultz of a few things.

I love George Shultz, Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state and one of the heroes of the endgame of the Cold War. He began every meeting with a Soviet official with a specific human rights complaint about a dissident the Soviets had locked up, just to get under their skin and keep the pressure on. He was magnificent in his meetings with the Soviets after the shootdown of KAL 007, and in his one-on-one’s with Gorbachev in the Kremlin. He was the ideal complement to and instrument for Reagan’s Cold War grand strategy. His memoir of those years, Turmoil and Triumph, is well worth reading.

So it is a regrettable duty to disagree with his Washington Post article Friday entitled “A Reagan Approach to Climate Change,” in which Shultz argues that Reagan would have embraced a revenue-neutral carbon tax “as an insurance policy” against climate change because Reagan embraced the Montreal Protocol that eliminated chloro-flourocarbons (CFCs) in order to reduce damage to the stratospheric ozone layer.

Leave aside the carbon tax argument for a moment. One of the greatest mistakes of the climate change enterprise was adopting the Montreal Protocol as a diplomatic and policy model for greenhouse gases, and Shultz perpetuates this mistake, even as some of the smarter environmentalists (yes, there are a few) have come to understand this mistake. …

… I once heard Shultz tell the story that when oil prices fell sharply in the mid-1980s, and hence gasoline prices went down to something like 79 cents a gallon, he proposed to Reagan that it was a perfect time to embrace a 50-cent-a-gallon gas tax that would promote conservation and reduce the federal budget deficit. Reagan, he recalled, smiled in a way that made clear to Shultz that Reagan wasn’t about to consider the idea for a second. And neither would Reagan come anywhere near a carbon tax. I’m wondering if Shultz’s pal Tom Steyer wrote this article for him?

Filed under “you just can’t make it up.” We learn from Power Line that one day last week the president and the first lady went to LA on separate f**king flights!!!!!!

It’s been nearly a month since Glenn Reynolds voiced his recurring refrain: “I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ANOTHER GODDAMN THING ABOUT MY CARBON FOOTPRINT.” Glenn reserves the refrain for links to stories reporting egregious overconsumption of carbon-based fuels by liberal hypocrites concerned about your contributions to  climate change.

Glenn’s refrain comes to mind in connection with the recent story reporting “Obama, first lady fly to Los Angeles on same day but take separate flights.” The linked story also touches on the costs incurred and would probably elicit a bonus reference to Louis XIV or Marie Antoinette by Glenn as well. Let’s go with the graphic below.

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We have a bunch of stuff on fossil fuels and how they will save the world. WSJ Weekend Essay is first. 

The environmental movement has advanced three arguments in recent years for giving up fossil fuels: (1) that we will soon run out of them anyway; (2) that alternative sources of energy will price them out of the marketplace; and (3) that we cannot afford the climate consequences of burning them.

These days, not one of the three arguments is looking very healthy. In fact, a more realistic assessment of our energy and environmental situation suggests that, for decades to come, we will continue to rely overwhelmingly on the fossil fuels that have contributed so dramatically to the world’s prosperity and progress.

In 2013, about 87% of the energy that the world consumed came from fossil fuels, a figure that—remarkably—was unchanged from 10 years before. This roughly divides into three categories of fuel and three categories of use: oil used mainly for transport, gas used mainly for heating, and coal used mainly for electricity.

Over this period, the overall volume of fossil-fuel consumption has increased dramatically, but with an encouraging environmental trend: a diminishing amount of carbon-dioxide emissions per unit of energy produced. The biggest contribution to decarbonizing the energy system has been the switch from high-carbon coal to lower-carbon gas in electricity generation.

On a global level, renewable energy sources such as wind and solar have contributed hardly at all to the drop in carbon emissions, and their modest growth has merely made up for a decline in the fortunes of zero-carbon nuclear energy. …

 

… Although the world has certainly warmed since the 19th century, the rate of warming has been slow and erratic. There has been no increase in the frequency or severity of storms or droughts, no acceleration of sea-level rise. Arctic sea ice has decreased, but Antarctic sea ice has increased. At the same time, scientists are agreed that the extra carbon dioxide in the air has contributed to an improvement in crop yields and a roughly 14% increase in the amount of all types of green vegetation on the planet since 1980.

That carbon-dioxide emissions should cause warming is not a new idea. In 1938, the British scientist Guy Callender thought that he could already detect warming as a result of carbon-dioxide emissions. He reckoned, however, that this was “likely to prove beneficial to mankind” by shifting northward the climate where cultivation was possible.

Only in the 1970s and 1980s did scientists begin to say that the mild warming expected as a direct result of burning fossil fuels—roughly a degree Celsius per doubling of carbon-dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere—might be greatly amplified by water vapor and result in dangerous warming of two to four degrees a century or more. That “feedback” assumption of high “sensitivity” remains in virtually all of the mathematical models used to this day by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC.

And yet it is increasingly possible that it is wrong. As Patrick Michaels of the libertarian Cato Institute has written, since 2000, 14 peer-reviewed papers, published by 42 authors, many of whom are key contributors to the reports of the IPCC, have concluded that climate sensitivity is low because net feedbacks are modest. They arrive at this conclusion based on observed temperature changes, ocean-heat uptake and the balance between warming and cooling emissions (mainly sulfate aerosols). On average, they find sensitivity to be 40% lower than the models on which the IPCC relies. …

 

… We should encourage the switch from coal to gas in the generation of electricity, provide incentives for energy efficiency, get nuclear power back on track and keep developing solar power and electricity storage. We should also invest in research on ways to absorb carbon dioxide from the air, by fertilizing the ocean or fixing it through carbon capture and storage. Those measures all make sense. And there is every reason to promote open-ended research to find some unexpected new energy technology.

The one thing that will not work is the one thing that the environmental movement insists upon: subsidizing wealthy crony capitalists to build low-density, low-output, capital-intensive, land-hungry renewable energy schemes, while telling the poor to give up the dream of getting richer through fossil fuels.

Also from the Wall Street Journal we learn a new wave of fracked oil is held in reserve by producers and will hit the market when prices stabilize.

The ocean of oil from U.S. shale drove crude prices back toward six-year lows Friday, and American energy companies say they are poised to unleash a further flood that would keep prices from returning to lofty levels for a long time.

The International Energy Agency reinforced the prospect of a prolonged slump in energy prices Friday, saying U.S. oil output was surprisingly strong in February and rapidly filling all available storage tanks. The Paris-based energy watchdog said this could lead to another sharp drop in crude prices, which fell by about 50% late last year.

The report sent oil prices tumbling around the world, with the global benchmark Brent crude falling $2.41 to $54.67 a barrel. The U.S. benchmark West Texas Intermediate lost $2.21 to settle at $44.84, less than 40 cents above a six-year low it reached in late January. Last summer, both traded well above $100.

It was only last month that the IEA said a price recovery seemed inevitable because the U.S. production boom was likely to cool. Instead, “U.S. supply so far shows precious little sign of slowing down,” the agency said Friday. “Quite to the contrary, it continues to defy expectations.”

Independent shale-oil producers have slashed their planned 2015 spending on drilling by $50 billion, compared with last year’s, but have promised to increase production by focusing on their best oil fields. Total U.S. crude oil production hit a high of 9.4 million barrels a day in the week ended March 6, according to federal data.

Now many are adopting a new strategy that will allow them to pump even more crude as soon as oil prices begin to rise. They are drilling wells but holding off on hydraulic fracturing, or forcing in water and chemicals to free oil from shale formations. The delay in the start of fracking lets companies store oil in the ground in a way that enables them to tap it unusually quickly if they wish—and flood the market again. …

Walter Issacson writes on innovation.

… Some of those advances seem almost trivial, but progress comes not only in great leaps but also from hundreds of small steps. Take for example punch cards, like those Babbage saw on [weaving] looms and proposed incorporating into his Analytical Engine. Perfecting the use of punch cards for computers came about because Herman Hollerith, an employee of the U.S. Census Bureau, was appalled that it took close to eight years to manually tabulate the 1880 census. He resolved to automate the 1890 count.

Drawing on the way that railway conductors punched holes in various places on a ticket in order to indicate the traits of each passenger (gender, approximate height, age, hair color), Hollerith devised punch cards with twelve rows and twenty-four columns that recorded the salient facts about each person in the census. The cards were then slipped between a grid of mercury cups and a set of spring-loaded pins, which created an electric circuit wherever there was a hole. The machine could tabulate not only the raw totals but also combinations of traits, such as the number of married males or foreign-born females. Using Hollerith’s tabulators, the 1890 census was completed in one year rather than eight. It was the first major use of electrical circuits to process information, and the company that Hollerith founded became in 1924, after a series of mergers and acquisitions, the International Business Machines Corporation, or IBM.

One way to look at innovation is as the accumulation of hundreds of small advances, such as counters and punch-card readers. At places like IBM, which specialize in daily improvements made by teams of engineers, this is the preferred way to understand how innovation really happens. Some of the most important technologies of our era, such as the fracking techniques developed over the past six decades for extracting natural gas, came about because of countless small innovations as well as a few breakthrough leaps. …

Steve Hayward posts on the closing of SweetBriarCollege.

Along with the OU expulsions, the big story in higher education over the last week or so is the surprise announcement that Sweet Briar College will be closing its doors at the end of this academic year. Although the college as an endowment somewhere near $90 million, declining enrollment at the all-womens’ college has led the trustees to conclude that there is no future for a single-sex school out in rural Virginia. Sweet Briar’s fate is being heralded as a harbinger of the coming collapse of the “higher education bubble” (Glenn ReynoldsTM), especially small liberal arts colleges, which wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing.

But there is an amazing failure of imagination here—rooted in the institutional liberalism pervasive in higher ed—and a terrific opportunity for an educational entrepreneur.

One of the claims about why the college has no future is that its location is too remote from the attractions of urban civilization necessary for today’s students. Excuse me, but has anyone around Sweet Briar ever heard of Hillsdale College, which is much more remote than Sweet Briar, and yet thrives for the simple reason that it is self-consciously different (that is, conservative) from other liberal arts colleges.

So what if Sweet Briar had decided that instead of trying to compete head-to-head with Smith and Wellesley, they self-consciously set out to be the anti-Smith and anti-Wellesley? I have little doubt that a women’s college that advertised its deliberate rejection of the gender politics of “mainstream” womens’ educational institutions would have no shortage of applicants for admission.

This would have required an act of imagination on the part of Sweet Briar’s president, James F. Jones, Jr., and the trustees. But of course Jones is your typical mediocre liberal. …

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We go back 19 years to William Safire’s famous column on Hillary.

Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our First Lady — a woman of undoubted talents who was a role model for many in her generation — is a congenital liar. …

Charles Krauthammer brings us to the present day. 

She burned the tapes.

Had Richard Nixon burned his tapes, he would have survived Watergate. Sure, there would have been a major firestorm, but no smoking gun. Hillary Rodham was a young staffer on the House Judiciary Committee investigating Nixon. She saw. She learned.

Today you don’t burn tapes. You delete e-mails. Hillary Clinton deleted 30,000, dismissing their destruction with the brilliantly casual: “I didn’t see any reason to keep them.” After all, they were private and personal, she assured everyone.

How do we know that? She says so. Were, say, Clinton Foundation contributions considered personal? No one asked. It’s unlikely we’ll ever know. We have to trust her.

That’s not easy. Not just because of her history — William Safire wrote in 1996 that “Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our first lady . . . is a congenital liar” — but because of what she said in her emergency news conference on Tuesday. Among the things she listed as private were “personal communications from my husband and me.” Except that, as the Wall Street Journal reported the very same day, Bill Clinton’s spokesman said the former president has sent exactly two e-mails in his life, one to John Glenn, the other to U.S. troops in the Adriatic. …

Jonah Goldberg says it’s not following Hillary’s script.

Her disastrous press conference on Tuesday was supposed to be about her gender, not her e-mail.

In the wake of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s fairly disastrous press conference at the United Nations on Tuesday, there’s only one conclusion shared by all parties: This was not how it was supposed to go.

This was supposed to be the month Clinton led with her chief selling point: her gender. She had put together a whole “I Am Woman, Hear Me Bore” speaking tour in which women’s issues — particularly the women’s issues that poll well among women who care a lot about women’s issues — would be the main subject. …

… It was all carefully scripted, because everything Hillary Clinton does is carefully scripted. Normally, that’s a figurative expression. But with Clinton, when things are carefully scripted, they are literally carefully scripted.

Jennifer Rubin says Hill is even less candid than we thought.

A scathing Time magazine piece on Hillary Clinton has this nugget:

‘For more than a year after she left office in 2013, she did not transfer work-related email from her private account to the State Department. She commissioned a review of the 62,320 messages in her account only after the department–spurred by the congressional investigation–asked her to do so. And this review did not involve opening and reading each email; instead, Clinton’s lawyers created a list of names and keywords related to her work and searched for those. Slightly more than half the total cache–31,830 emails–did not contain any of the search terms, according to Clinton’s staff, so they were deemed to be “private, personal records.” ’

What?! How in the world did they think not reading the e-mails to check for words that may not have been in the search terms was a legitimate way to go about this? It wasn’t, and it wasn’t designed to be. It was designed to let her say: Trust me. Only private e-mails were destroyed. …

Ed Klein says it’s Valerie who’s going after Hillary.

It’s the vast left-wing conspiracy.

Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett leaked to the press details of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail address during her time as secretary of state, sources tell me.

But she did so through people outside the ­administration, so the story couldn’t be traced to her or the White House.

In addition, at Jarrett’s behest, the State Department was ordered to launch a series of investigations into Hillary’s conduct at Foggy Bottom, including the use of her expense account, the disbursement of funds, her contact with foreign leaders and her possible collusion with the Clinton Foundation. …

… The sabotage is part of an ­ongoing feud between the two Democrat powerhouses.

Last fall, during the run-up to the 2014 midterm elections, Jarrett was heard to complain bitterly that the Clintons were turning congressmen, senators, governors and grass-root party members against Obama by portraying him as an unpopular president who was an albatross around the neck of the party.

Jarrett was said to be livid that most Democrats running for election refused to be seen campaigning with the president. She blamed the Clintons for marginalizing the president and for trying to wrestle control of the Democratic Party away from Obama.

And she vowed payback. …

And we close with another Times column. This time Maureen Dowd.

SINCE open letters to secretive and duplicitous regimes are in fashion, we would like to post an Open Letter to the Leaders of the Clinton Republic of Chappaqua:

It has come to our attention while observing your machinations during your attempted restoration that you may not fully understand our constitutional system. Thus, we are writing to bring to your attention two features of our democracy: The importance of preserving historical records and the ill-advised gluttony of an American feminist icon wallowing in regressive Middle Eastern states’ payola.

You should seriously consider these characteristics of our nation as the Campaign-That-Must-Not-Be-Named progresses.

If you, Hillary Rodham Clinton, are willing to cite your mother’s funeral to get sympathy for ill-advisedly deleting 30,000 emails, it just makes us want to sigh: O.K., just take it. If you want it that bad, go ahead and be president and leave us in peace. (Or war, if you have your hawkish way.) You’re still idling on the runway, but we’re already jet-lagged. It’s all so drearily familiar that I know we’re only moments away from James Carville writing a column in David Brock’s Media Matters, headlined, “In Private, Hillary’s Really a Hoot.”

When you grin and call out to your supporters, like at the Emily’s List anniversary gala, “Don’t you someday want to see a woman president of the United States of America?” the answer is: Yes, it would be thrilling.

But therein lies the rub.

What is the trade-off that will be exacted by the ChappaquaRepublic for that yearned-for moment? When the Rogue State of Bill began demonizing Monica Lewinsky as a troubled stalker, you knew you could count on the complicity of feminists and Democratic women in Congress. Bill’s female cabinet members and feminist supporters had no choice but to accept the unappetizing quid pro quo: The Clintons would give women progressive public policies as long as the women didn’t assail Bill for his regressive private behavior with women. …

The cartoonists had a field day with Hillary.

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Jonathan Tobin posts on the Netanyahu treatment the administration is giving to Egypt. Makes sense; the president apparently dislikes this country so much that anyone wanting to be our ally is suspect.

In a Middle East where Islamist terror groups and the Iranian regime and its allies have been on the offensive in recent years, the one bright spot for the West in the region (other, that is, than Israel) is the way Egypt has returned to its old role as a bulwark of moderation and opposition to extremism. The current government led by former general Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has clamped down on Hamas terrorists and has been willing to deploy its armed forces to fight ISIS in Libya while also clamping down on a Muslim Brotherhood movement that seeks to transform Egypt into another Islamist state. Yet despite this, the Obama administration is unhappy with Egypt. Much to Cairo’s consternation, the United States is squeezing its government on the military aid it needs to fight ISIS in Libya and Sinai terrorists. As the Israeli government has already learned to its sorrow, the Egyptians now understand that being an ally of the United States is a lot less comfortable position than to be a foe like Iran.

The ostensible reason for the holdup in aid is that the Egyptian government is a human-rights violator. Those concerns are accurate. Sisi’s government has been ruthless in cracking down on the same Muslim Brotherhood faction that was running the country until a popular coup brought it down in the summer of 2013. But contrary to the illusions of an Obama administration that hastened the fall of Hosni Mubarak and then foolishly embraced his Muslim Brotherhood successors, democracy was never one of the available options in Egypt.

The choice in Egypt remains stark. It’s either going to be run by Islamists bent on taking the most populous Arab country down the dark road of extremism or by a military regime that will keep that from happening. …

Perhaps, says Craig Pirrong, the prez is channeling his inner Woodrow Wilson.

I have compared Obama to a previous progressive president enamored of executive power and impatient with checks and balances: namely, Woodrow Wilson. Obama is now moving into the League of Nations phase of Wilson’s presidency, intent on ramming through a foreign policy deal in defiance of intense Senate opposition.

Actually, this comparison is unfair. To Wilson. At least he submitted the treaty to the Senate for ratification. It failed because he refused to compromise on Article X. Obama in contrast, refuses to involve Congress in any way, least of all by submitting any agreement for ratification. He scorns the very idea.

Today Obama stooped to a new low. In response to a letter from 47 Republican senators warning him that without ratification, Obama’s deal with the mullahs would not bind a future president or Congress, Obama responded by questioning their loyalty: “It’s somewhat ironic to see some members of Congress wanting to make common cause with the hardliners in Iran.” …

Kevin Williamson thinks it’s just dandy the Senate is doing something.

What, exactly, is the point of that great big hulking building with the cast-iron faux Roman dome in Washington? Joe Biden worked there for many years, and Barack Obama worked there for about five minutes, and neither of them has figured it out.

“Biden Rebukes Senate Republicans over Letter to Iran,” harrumphs the New York Times, Gomer Pyle and Forrest Gump apparently having been otherwise occupied. Joe Biden is a national figure of fun, and it is difficult to remember that Barack Obama’s campaign brought him into the fold for his special brand of gravitas, which is, like the subtle notes of freshly cut grass and charred orange rind emanating from a freshly decanted bottle of fine wine, detectable only by the rarest breed of connoisseur and the most common sort of bulls–t artist. Before becoming president, Barack Obama’s main foreign-policy experience had been gazing wistfully at a Rand McNally desktop globe and trying to figure out which spot on earth would place him the farthest from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Joe Biden was added to the ticket purportedly to ease our national mind about the question of whose hand was on The Button. People joke that Biden’s real role in the Obama administration is acting as a human insurance policy against assassination, and, if you think about the key Democrat players of the Obama years — Biden, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Janet Napolitano, Eric Holder — there does seem to be a walk-tall-among-the-dwarves strategy in place.

Biden is tumescent with indignation because 47 senators reminded the president — by reminding the Iranians with whom he is engaged in nuclear negotiations — that the president does not have the authority to enter into a binding, long-term international agreement based on nothing more than his own juice. If he cuts a bad deal, Congress can reject it — something the Atomic Ayatollahs ought to have in mind.

Naturally, the Left is in convulsions: …

Rick Richman points out how obama has reneged on commitments made by the country during the Bush administration.

The White House “outrage” at the “open letter” to Iran signed by 47 senators, led by Sen. Tom Cotton, was reinforced by Vice President Biden’s formal statement, which intoned that “America’s influence depends on its ability to honor its commitments,” including those made by a president without a vote of Congress. Perhaps we should welcome Biden’s belated insight. As Jonathan Tobin notes, President Obama on taking office in 2009 refused to be bound by the 2004 Gaza disengagement deal in the letters exchanged between President George W. Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. His secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, announced that such commitments were “unenforceable”–that they were non-binding on the new administration. In 2009, Obama disregarded previous commitments not only to Israel but also to Poland, the Czech Republic, and Georgia; he “fundamentally transformed” America’s previous commitments, as he likes to describe the essential element of his entire presidency. …

And John Hinderaker reminds us how obama undercut the Bush administration’s nuclear negotiations with Iran.

In 2008, the Bush administration, along with the “six powers,” was negotiating with Iran concerning that country’s nuclear arms program. The Bush administration’s objective was to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. On July 20, 2008, the New York Times headlined: “Nuclear Talks With Iran End in a Deadlock.” What caused the talks to founder? The Times explained:

“Iran responded with a written document that failed to address the main issue: international demands that it stop enriching uranium. And Iranian diplomats reiterated before the talks that they considered the issue nonnegotiable.”

The Iranians held firm to their position, perhaps because they knew that help was on the way, in the form of a new president. Barack Obama had clinched the Democratic nomination on June 3. At some point either before or after that date, but prior to the election, he secretly let the Iranians know that he would be much easier to bargain with than President Bush. Michael Ledeen reported the story last year:

“During his first presidential campaign in 2008, Mr. Obama used a secret back channel to Tehran to assure the mullahs that he was a friend of the Islamic Republic, and that they would be very happy with his policies. The secret channel was Ambassador William G. Miller, who served in Iran during the shah’s rule, as chief of staff for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and as ambassador to Ukraine. Ambassador Miller has confirmed to me his conversations with Iranian leaders during the 2008 campaign.” …

Thomas Freidman’s Adelson Derangement Syndrome gets more attention from Jonathan Tobin. 

Regular readers of Thomas Friedman’s column in the New York Times are aware of the fact that he doesn’t like the fact that a bipartisan pro-Israel coalition predominates in the U.S. Congress. Friedman is stuck in the conspiratorial world of the Walt-Mearsheimer “Israel Lobby” thesis that falsely alleges that backing for the Jewish state is purchased by the cash of pro-Israel donors. And the most conspicuous of those donors is casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who seems to be occupying a rather large space in Friedman’s head these days. Last week after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress, Friedman repeated the slurs against the pro-Israel community and Adelson that he first lobbed in 2011. That he doubled down on those charges in today’s column is of little interest. But what is worth noting is Friedman’s attack on Israel Hayom, the Israeli newspaper Adelson owns. According to the columnist, the paper is subverting Israeli democracy in the manner that Adelson and other donors are supposedly undermining American foreign policy. But what we really learn from this piece is that Friedman likes neither democracy nor freedom of the press.

Friedman believes the ovations Netanyahu received from Congress in 2011 and last week were “bought and paid for by the Israel Lobby.” This is a profound misunderstanding of the way American democracy works. Members of Congress are pleased to accept contributions from pro-Israel donors, but those relationships help solidify the alliance. If that stand were not popular with the overwhelming majority of Americans, of whom more than 98 percent of are not Jewish, no amount of money could purchase it. …

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Canada’s MacLeans Magazine says habits are a key to a life of happiness. 

After every trip to the bathroom when he’s at home or in a hotel room, BJ Fogg will get down on the ground and do two push-ups. Then he’ll wash his hands. It sounds kind of weird, if you stop to think about it, but Fogg doesn’t think about it anymore. It’s a habit he has worked to develop over the past two years to help get in shape. Now, the push-ups come automatically and he gets a surge of energy each time. Often he doesn’t stop at two. On some trips, he might do 10 or 25. “I probably did 50 or 60 push-ups yesterday,” he says.

Fogg is perfectly placed to train himself into a healthy habit. He is an expert on the subject, having studied human behaviour for 20 years, mostly at StanfordUniversity, where he’s the director of the Persuasive Technology Lab. From his research, he’s learned that the best way to automate a new habit is to set the bar incredibly low. Ergo, just two pushups. “You pick something so small, it’s easy to do. Motivation isn’t required to do it,” he says. Even though he’s become much stronger, he says, he’ll never raise the minimum. The goal remains two push-ups, and anything more is a bonus. “If you want to maintain the habit, you will always be okay with just doing the tiny version of it,” he says.

Habits are important because, as Gretchen Rubin puts it, “what we do every day matters more than what we do once in a while.” When Rubin published the massively bestselling The Happiness Project, she laid out personal commandments and explored the overarching principles in her year-long journey to enjoy life to the fullest. In her new book, Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives, Rubin narrows her view dramatically, turning to the daily routine actions that make up our days. “Habits are the invisible architecture of our lives,” Rubin says in an interview. …

Jay Leno wrote a column for Autoweek on the problems with ethanol. Most of ethanol can be blamed on the W Bush administration so this post can be considered non-political. Both sides, GOP and Dems suck on this issue.

There have been a lot of old-car fires lately. I went through the ’70s, the ’80s and most of the ’90s without ever having read much about car fires. Suddenly, they are happening all over the place. Here’s one reason: The ethanol in modern gasoline—about 10 percent in many states—is so corrosive, it eats through either the fuel-pump diaphragm, old rubber fuel lines or a pot metal part, then leaks out on a hot engine … and ka-bloooooie!!!

As someone who collects old cars, and keeps them up religiously, I am now replacing fuel-pressure regulators every 12 to 18 months. New cars are equipped with fuel lines that are resistant to ethanol damage, but with older cars, the worst can happen—you’re going down the road, and suddenly your car is on fire.

There’s more. I find that gasoline, which used to last about a year and a half or two years, is pretty much done after a month or so these days. If I run a car from the teens or ’20s and fill it up with modern fuel, then it sits for more than two months, I often can’t get it to start.

Ethanol will absorb water from ambient air. In a modern vehicle, with a sealed fuel system, ethanol fuel has a harder time picking up water from the air. But in a vintage car, the water content of fuel can rise, causing corrosion and inhibiting combustion.

It gets worse. Ethanol is a solvent that can loosen the sludge, varnish and dirt that accumulate in a fuel tank. That mixture can clog fuel lines and block carburetor jets. …

Scientific American has a report on the solar powered airplane that is in the process of circumnavigating the globe.

A pioneering flight around the world will use nothing but sunshine for fuel. In the dusty peach dawn of a desert day the Solar Impulse 2 airplane took flight at 11:12 PM Eastern time on March 8 from the United Arab Emirate of Abu Dhabi on the first leg of a bid to fly around the world exclusively powered by electricity generated from sunlight.

At a top speed of 45 kilometers-per-hour the single-seat airplane flew to Muscat in neighboring Oman over roughly 10 hours, touching down at roughly 2:13 PM Eastern time, after a few hours spent circling and waiting for the right weather conditions to land. The plane is an upgraded version of the original Solar Impulse, which flew across the U.S. in 2013; both planes were built by the Solar Impulse group, led by Swiss adventurers Bertrand Piccard and Andre Borschberg. …

Sail in the America’s Cup for Larry Ellison and make $300,000 per year. Wall Street Journal reports on filings in a lawsuit that point to those numbers.

A lawsuit against Larry Ellison ’s sailing squad, which has led to the seizure of one of his million-dollar boats, is also revealing how much the Oracle Corp. founder is willing to spend to win the America’s Cup: $300,000 a year for a rank-and-file sailor.

The litigation is the latest in a series of legal battles that have surrounded the billionaire’s sailing successes.

On Monday morning, two federal marshals walked into the San Francisco waterfront base of the sailing squad, Oracle Team USA, and seized three gray, whale-size containers holding the disassembled parts of a 45-foot-long, seven-story-tall yacht called an AC45, according to the plaintiff’s lawyer and a U.S. Marshals spokesman.

The marshals tagged the three containers, which can’t be moved until a judge issues a ruling on the seizure or allows the team to post a bond on the boat. The vessel, a smaller version of Oracle’s victorious 72-foot-long boat in the 2013 America’s Cup, is being held as a lien, or collateral, in the case. The plaintiff asked for the seizure.

The plaintiff is Joe Spooner, who spent a decade as an Oracle sailor until the team dismissed him in January. A 41-year-old New Zealand native, Spooner in February sued the team for $725,000 in wages over a 2½-year span, as well as double-wage penalties, punitive damages and legal fees, alleging the squad wrongfully discharged him without cause.

Australian Geographic reports on the 10 most destructive tsunamis in history.

Tsunamis have occurred often throughout history. So frequently in Japan, in fact, that they invented the word specifically for the phenomenon: ‘tsu’ meaning harbour and ‘nami’ meaning wave.

“It’s actually quite frightening to think that this [Japanese tsunami] event is smaller than the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, smaller even than the 1960 Chilean tsunami, yet the damage to Japan’s people and economy is still profound,” says Professor James Goff, co-director of the Australian Tsunami Research Centre and Natural Hazards Research Lab at the University of New South Wales. “It’s a horrendous tragedy, caused by a completely unpredictable event.”

Because little historical data exist on the size of tsunami waves, how many occur in one event, or how far they advance on shore, scientists rank them according to how much damage they wreak. However, assessing just how much damage a single tsunami event causes may take many months to years; and it may be some time before the Japan earthquake and tsunami can be truly rated on a historical scale. …

BBC News reports coffee may be good for your heart. 

Drinking a few cups of coffee a day may help people avoid clogged arteries – a known risk factor for heart disease – Korean researchers believe.

They studied more than 25,000 male and female employees who underwent routine health checks at their workplace.

Employees who drank a moderate amount of coffee – three to five cups a day – were less likely to have early signs of heart disease on their medical scans.

The findings reopen the debate about whether coffee is good for the heart. …

Machines Like Us says you can have too much of a good thing like vitamin D.

In terms of public health, a lack of vitamin D has long been a focal point. Several studies have shown that too low levels can prove detrimental to our health. However, new research from the University of Copenhagen reveals, for the first time, that also too high levels of vitamin D in our blood is connected to an increased risk of dying from a stroke or a coronary.

The results have just been published in the world-renowned Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism.

“We have studied the level of vitamin D in 247,574 Danes, and so far, it constitutes the world’s largest basis for this type of study. We have also analysed their mortality rate over a seven-year period after taking the initial blood sample, and in that time 16,645 patients had died. Furthermore, we have looked at the connection between their deaths and their levels of vitamin D”, Professor at the Department of Clinical Medicine, Peter Schwarz explains. …

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Kevin Williamson writes on the serial collapse of the left’s silly dreams. This time in Venezuela.

Venezuela had a good run of it for about five minutes there, at least in public-relations terms. When petroleum prices were booming, all it took was a few gallons of heating oil from Hugo Chávez to buy the extravagant praise of House members, with Representative Chaka Fattah (D., Philadelphia) issuing statements praising Venezuela’s state-run oil company “and the Venezuelan people for their benevolence.” Lest anybody feel creeped out by running political errands for a brutal and repressive caudillo, Joseph Kennedy — son of Senator Robert Kennedy — proclaimed that refusing the strongman’s patronage would be “a crime against humanity.” Kennedy was at the time the director of Citizens Energy, which had a contract to help distribute that Venezuelan heating oil — Boss Hugo was a brute, but he understood American politics.

Celebrities came to sit at his feet, with Sean Penn calling him a “champion” of the world’s poor, Oliver Stone celebrating him as “a great hero,” Antonio Banderas citing his seizure of private businesses as a model to be emulated in the rest of the world, Michael Moore praising his use of oil for political purposes, Danny Glover celebrating him as a “champion of democracy.” His successor, Nicolás Maduro, continued in the Chávez vein, and even as basics such as food and toilet paper disappeared the American Left hailed him as a hero, with Jesse Myerson, Rolling Stone’s fashionable uptown communist, calling his economic program “basically terrific.” Some of the more old-fashioned liberals at The New Republic voiced concern about Venezuela’s sham democracy, its unlimited executive authority, political repression, the hunting down of government critics, the stacking of elections and the government’s perpetrating violence inside polling places — but Myerson insisted that Venezuela’s “electoral system’s integrity puts the U.S.’s to abject shame.” Never mind that opposition leaders there are hauled off to military prison after midnight raids.

Vice President Biden, who can always be counted on to cut straight to the heart of any political question, ran into Maduro in Brazil and, noting the potentate’s thick mane, commented: “If I had your hair, I’d be president of the United States.” Tragically for the Sage of Delaware, hair transplants don’t work that way.

That is all going down the memory hole. …

Another serial fraud of the left/media has been demolished by the Ferguson outcome. Bret Stephens has that story.

Darren Wilson has been exonerated, again, in last August’s shooting death of Michael Brown, and that ought to be as much a vindication for the onetime Ferguson, Mo., police officer as it is a teachable moment for the rest of America.

It won’t be. The story line has failed, so the statistics have been put to work.

That the claims made against Mr. Wilson were doubtful should have been clear within days of Brown’s death, and again in November after a grand jury, having heard from some 60 witnesses, declined to indict the officer—an outcome one outraged commentator denounced as having “openly and shamelessly mocked our criminal justice system and laid bare the inequality of our criminal jurisprudence.”

Yet if anyone was openly and shamelessly mocking the criminal-justice system, it was so much of the media itself, credulously accepting or sanctimoniously promoting the double fable of Ferguson: that a “gentle giant” had been capriciously slain by a trigger-happy cop; and that a racist justice system stood behind that cop.

At least half that fable was put to rest last week by an exhaustive Justice Department report. …

Business News Factor tallys the cost of the year’s serial snow storms in New England. Not as bad, they say, as last year’s mid-west polar vortex.

Ignore anyone who tells you snow is free. Every work day lost during New England’s historic winter has meant millions of dollars taken out of the regional economy.

IHS Global Insight, an economic analysis firm, estimates Massachusetts alone suffered roughly $1 billion in lost wages and profits, as storm after storm pummeled the region, delivering over eight feet of snow in roughly a month.

Retailers and restaurants were among the hardest hit, as customers held off on big purchases or chose to stay at home rather than enjoy a night on the town.

A survey released this week by Massachusetts business groups representing those and other industries reported sales dropped an average of 24 percent and payroll dropped about 7 percent among their small businesses members.

Car dealers and real estate agents complained the poorly-timed storms — many of which hit on or around weekends — were disastrous to business. And with the exception of the region’s famed ski resorts, many New England hotels, transportation companies and other businesses in the travel and tourism trade say they’ve struggled too. …

Popular Science posts on Panama Canal expansion.

Over the past 20 years or so, traffic on the world’s oceans has quadrupled. Ships now carry 95 percent of the cargo imported to American shores. To move those goods more quickly and cheaply, cargo ships have grown nearly four times bigger–and many are now too large to fit through the Panama Canal.

A $5.25 billion expansion project, scheduled for completion this year, will create two new lock complexes and a third lane of traffic. The new Panama Canal will be roomy enough for boats nearly three times the current maximum size.

Approximately 52 percent of container ships that leave Asia for the East Coast today opt to traverse the arguably less secure Suez Canal, which cuts through Egypt to connect the Mediterranean and Red Seas. The Panama Canal’s upgrade may soon bring the bulk of intercontinental traffic its way. The expansion will shake up shipping patterns and make trade more efficient by requiring less time, fuel, and money to get more products to U.S. ports–just as the original canal’s opening did in 1914. …

Washington Post says daylight “savings” time doesn’t mean savings. 

Back in 1784, hanging out in Paris and heady with Enlightenment, Benjamin Franklin had an idea. Struck by the fact that Parisians were sleeping during sunlight hours and then staying up late at night by candlelight, he calculated the number of candles that were being wasted — and came up with an impressive number, 64 million pounds worth of them. Franklin therefore jokingly proposed a massive schedule change, noting that a fortune could be saved through “the economy of using sunshine instead of candles,” and even suggested at one point that perhaps cannons be fired at sunrise to get everybody out of bed.

Such was the germ of the idea that would eventually lead to daylight saving time — that if we patterned our lives to rise and set with the sun itself, we’d save energy and money. Flash forward 230 years later, and this remains the basic reason why many of us will wake up Sunday and realize that it’s darker outside than we’re used to. After “falling back” in November to standard time — setting our clocks back an hour — we’ll have sprung forward, adopting daylight savings time. Daylight savings moves an hour of light we had in the morning to the evening, which may make us a little groggy Sunday but at least promises to end the miserable practice of leaving work in the dark.

But there’s a problem with this (well-lit) practice. It is increasingly looking like Franklin’s idea about saving energy was wrong. …

CBS News had pictures of chunks of ice washed up on the shore of Wellfleet in Cape Cod. More likely, these are chunks of snow tossed into Boston harbor from the Boston Snow Party.

The historic winter of 2015 has left giant chunks of ice on the Cape Cod National Seashore.

Cape Cod photographer Dapixara captured images of a person standing next to the massive pieces of ice that washed ashore in Wellfleet over the past few days. …

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We can’t get our eyes off the trainwreck that is the Hillary campaign. Ron Fournier is at it again.

“Follow the money.” That apocryphal phrase, attributed to Watergate whistle-blower “Deep Throat,” explains why the biggest threat to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential dreams is not her emails. It’s her family foundation. That’s where the money is: corporate money, foreign money, gobs of money sloshing around a vanity charity that could be renamed “Clinton Conflicts of Interest Foundation.”

What about the emails? Hillary Clinton’s secret communications cache is a bombshell deserving of full disclosure because of her assault on government transparency and electronic security. But its greatest relevancy is what the emails might reveal about any nexus between Clinton’s work at State and donations to the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation from U.S. corporations and foreign nations.

Under fire, Bill Clinton said his namesake charity has “done a lot more good than harm”—hardly a ringing endorsement. One of his longest-serving advisers, a person who had worked directly for the foundation, told me the “longtime whispers of pay-to-play are going to become shouts.” This person, a Clinton loyalist and credible source, has no evidence of wrongdoing but said the media’s suspicions are warranted. “The emails are a related but secondary scandal,” the source said. “Follow the foundation money.” …

… What did these companies and countries expect in return for their cash? Did the Clintons promise any favors? Those are fair questions—not partisan questions and not media “gotcha” questions. The Clintons are responsible for the management of their foundation. Hillary Clinton is responsible for stashing her emails in a secret server. She is running for president. The rest of us should follow the money.

NY Post OpEd follows the logic.

Here’s the bottom line of the latest HillaryWorld scandals: Clinton Inc. embodies what’s wrong with America.

It’s about getting stinking rich from the inside connections forged in a life of public service.

It’s about using your “charity” and your high government office as adjuncts of your political machine.

It’s about refusing to play by the rules even as you want to set the rules for everyone else.

Start with the latest shocker, the email lunacy. You don’t get to keep your government work a secret from the government.

Anyone with a regular job gets it: Your work product belongs to the folks who sign your paycheck. How can that not be even more obvious when the signature is Uncle Sam’s?

That the question never occurred to Hillary is just one more sign of her overinflated sense of entitlement — as is the fact that she set the whole thing up right when she was taking the job.

And that none of her staff at State ever raised a question tells you what a pack of flunkies she gathered ’round herself.

(I mean, she installed the private email server in her home. Who, other than exiled Nigerian princes looking for our help, does that?) …

Peter Wehner thinks one of the worst effects of Emailgate is the all the Clinton flacks that assault our senses. 

Good grief.

Over the last few days we’ve seen one former Clinton aide and acolyte after another come out of the woodwork to defend yet another Clinton from yet another series of scandals.

It’s like a tired, awful syndicated series that’s been cancelled but just won’t go away.

In one corner, it was Lanny Davis being methodically taken apart by Fox News’s Chris Wallace. In another corner was the Ragin’ Cajun, James Carville, whining about “cockamamie right wing talking points” being responsible for this story. (The New York Times is well known, of course, for writing its stories based on right-wing talking points.) And what would Old Home Week be without the man Jon Stewart once pounded to dust, the always classy Paul Begala, insisting that voters “do not give a sh*t. They do not even give a fart” about the story that Mrs. Clinton set up a private email account while she was Secretary of State. If those three weren’t enough, there was the right-wing-hit-man-turned-left-wing-hit-man, David Brock, appearing on MSNBC’s Morning Joe to defend Mrs. Clinton.

Watching these men react like trained seals is pathetic, causing a wave of Clinton Fatigue to once again wash over America. But it’s also poignant, at least to this degree: The Clintons have a long history of pulling people, including some undoubtedly decent people, into their orbit–and once having done so, sending them out to defend the Clintons’ various and sundry corruptions. And that, in turn, has a corrupting effect on the Clintons’ defenders. …

Ed Morrissey provides an example of Clinton defenders.

If people want a peek at the defense on the e-mail scandal that will come from Team Hillary will mount — sans Hillary Clinton, at least for a while — check out this exchange between Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace and longtime Clintonland figure Lanny Davis. His very presence on FNS shows just how much Hillary wants to stand up for herself, and after watching this exchange, it’s pretty clear why. Davis insists that Hillary didn’t do anything illegal, but also that she did nothing wrong, and Wallace can’t believe it: …

Roger Simon says America is being tested.

… Okay, what’s clear is the American public is being given a test.  Are they going to elect Hillary Clinton, a serial liar who purposefully hides her communications from the public and the government she is supposed to be leading while making Foundation deals with Qatar and Algeria in the middle of a war against militant Islam?  If they do that, after everything that has been revealed and is going to be revealed, after Benghazi during which this deeply immoral woman was able to tell the father of a man who was just murdered in a now proven jihadi terror attack that “they would get that man who made that video,” we are all screwed. I don’t know what we can do.  Head to Texas and help it secede? …

And Seth Mandel says the “Hillary as champion of women” narrative is beginning to unravel. 

Hillary Clinton’s decision to base her 2016 presidential campaign on the fact that she’s a she is running into some problems. DNC vice chairwoman Donna Brazile wrote last week that “This time, Hillary will run as a woman.” Brazile said Hillary spent “much of her 2008 campaign seemingly running away from the fact that she is a woman,” and that this time she’s clearly made the decision to run toward her womanity. Whatever that means in practice, the recent Clinton Foundation scandals have converged with her unimpressive record as secretary of state to complicate the narrative.

Last week I wrote about Carly Fiorina’s longshot candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination, highlighting her CPAC speech and her effective line of attack against Hillary Clinton. We’re now seeing just how effective it is. Two of Fiorina’s sound bites in particular stand out. Of Clinton, she said: “She tweets about women’s rights in this country, and takes money from governments that deny women the most basic human rights.” And: “Like Mrs. Clinton, I too have traveled the globe. Unlike Mrs. Clinton, I know that flying is an activity, not an accomplishment.”

Those attacks have now found their way into a New York Times story on the hypocrisy of Hillary talking up women’s rights while her foundation was accepting hefty donations from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other countries with poor records on women’s rights. And it threatens to turn the Hillary campaign’s entire raison d’être into a liability.

From the Times’s Amy Chozick: …

Apologies for this day of more Hillary stuff. We promise to follow some other stories tomorrow. It is interesting though, to see the left/media trying to move her out of the way. They know she’s toxic and they need to sideline her before she’s the nominee and they go down to sure defeat. For example there is no more reliable Dem clown in the media than Eugene Robinson. The title of his column yesterday was “Is Hillary Hiding Something?” A NY Times reporter has even started to hint about Hillary’s drinking. They want her to go away.

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Yesterday was Bibi’s speech day. Today is Hillary’s day. And luckily, it’s beginning to look like we might not have many more of these. Mark Steyn goes first again.

Re; President-Designate Clinton not using a government email address for her entire tenure as Secretary of State, a reader from Oregon writes:

“When I got my security training at the State Department in 2012 using a private email account was considered to be a security risk. A Lack of public record is one thing but communicating Top Secret material without secure communication is a crime. Note that Petraeus is pleading guilty for less.”

Well, as I said yesterday, to the Clintons rules are for the little people – like General Petraeus. I don’t doubt that using your own email is a security risk, and I would bet that somewhere out there on the planet the Chinese, the Russians, the Norks and/or Isis have plenty of fascinating Hillary emails on Benghazi and a lot of other stuff US archivists will never see.

But she did it to evade public scrutiny. I wrote previously that what the Times calls a “personal” email account is, in fact, a secret account – and consciously created as such: The domain clintonemail.com was apparently registered on the first day of her Senate confirmation hearing.

Then we’ll get a couple of comments from left/liberal/media types like Ron Fournier, who says maybe it’s time for HRC to retire her White House idea. The email revelations have opened a flood gate of liberals who say they’ve had enough.

Perhaps Hillary Rodham Clinton shouldn’t run for president.

Maybe she should stay at the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation, where the former secretary of State could continue her life’s work of building stronger economies, health care systems, and families. Give paid speeches. Write best-selling books. Spend time with Charlotte, her beloved granddaughter.

Because she doesn’t seem ready for 2016. Like a blast of wintry air in July, the worst of 1990s-style politics is intruding on what needs to be a new millennium campaign: Transparent, inspirational, innovative, and beyond ethical reproach. 

Two weeks ago, we learned that the Clinton Foundation accepted contributions from foreign countries. Assurances from the Obama administration and Clinton aides that no donations were made during her tenure as secretary of State were proven false. 

I called the actions sleazy and stupid. Sleazy because any fair-minded person would suspect the foreign countries of trying to buy Clinton’s influence. Stupid because the affair plays into a decades-old knock on the Clintons: They’ll cut any corner for campaign cash. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton and his top aides used the White House as a tool to court and reward big donors. 

Now The New York Times is reporting that Clinton used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of State, an apparent violation of federal requirements that her records be retained. …

The day after Ron Fournier wrote the above, Hillary tweeted she wanted everyone to read her email. Fournier responded; 

A cornered Clinton is a craven Clinton, which is why we should view Hillary Rodham Clinton’s latest public relations trick with practiced skepticism. “I want the public to see my email,” she tweeted Wednesday night. “I asked State to release them. They said they will review them for release as soon as possible.”

If she wants us to see her email, why did she create a secret account stored on a dark server registered at her home? 

If she wants us to see her email, why didn’t she give State all of her email rather than a self-censored fraction of the correspondence?

If she wants us to see her email, Clintonshould turn over every word written on her dark account(s) for independent vetting. Let somebody the public trusts decide which emails are truly private and which ones belong to the public. 

Like everything else about the response to this controversy, Clinton’s tweet is reminiscent of the 1990s, when her husband’s White House overcame its wrongdoing by denying the truth, blaming Republicans, and demonizing and bullying the media. It’s a shameless script, unbecoming of a historic figure who could be our next president – and jarringly inappropriate for these times. …

Next left/liberal/media type to column on the emails was Maureen Dowd.

… The Times’s Michael Schmidt reported that, as secretary of state, Hillary did not preserve her official correspondence on a government server and exclusively used a private email account. She used a private server linked to her Chappaqua home, only turning over cherry-picked messages in December at the State Department’s request.

Given the paranoid/legalese perspective that permeates Clintonland, this made sense: It’s hard to request emails from an account you don’t know exists. And your own server can shield you from subpoenas and other requests. If you want records from the Clinton server, you have to fight for them. Clinton Inc. can tough it out and even make stuff disappear. Instead of warning the secretary that she could be violating regulations, her aides fetishized her clintonemail.com account as a status symbol. Chelsea took on the pseudonym Diane Reynolds.

Near midnight on Wednesday, Hillary tweeted that she had asked the State Department to release the emails she had coughed up when pressed, noting: “I want the public to see my email.”

Less true words were never spoken. …

Finally, Kevin Williamson lets it all hang out.

As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton schemed to subvert record-keeping and transparency rules for reasons that are probably more or less communicated by her surname: The Clintons are creeps and liars and scoundrels and misfits, always have been, always will be. They are the penicillin-resistant syphilis of American politics. The Democrats’ response to Herself’s trouble has taken three main forms: 1) What she did wasn’t technically illegal, says David Brock and other slavish Clinton retainers, even hauling out that old Al Gore classic, “no controlling legal authority”; 2) What about Scott Walker, huh? say the Democratic-party operators, pointing out that as a county executive Walker also used a private email system — and, to be honest, Walker’s response to the terrorist assault on Milwaukee County’s consulate in Benghazi has never been explained to my satisfaction; and 3) the president repeats his favorite mantra:

Wuddint me!

As Politico put it: “White House press secretary Josh Earnest took care to point out that Obama himself was unaware of any issues with Clinton’s email.” And that declaration from the president’s wildly inaptronymic spokesweasel might very well be true: The president has minions for that sort of thing. But he is responsible for the conduct of his minions, and it is impossible to believe that none of them knew about Mrs. Clinton’s “homebrew” email system, because that would require us to believe that nobody ever said, “Hey, CC the secretary of state personally on that internal memo,” or “Email the secretary of state about that meeting.” Oh, but the president, our national lightworker, he didn’t know!

One of the unfortunate facets of our increasingly religious attitude toward the presidency is that we invest the question of whether the divine imperator himself was aware of a situation with great moral weight: Not a sparrow falls, etc. Still, we call it an “administration” for a reason, and Barack Obama is the chief administrator of the executive branch. But he sits in a lofty place, and the principle of fecal gravity must be intensely attractive when viewed from such a great height. …

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More on Netanyahu’s speech. This time from Mark Steyn. 

Our leftie friends at Mother Jones put it this way:

“Benjamin Netanyahu just mansplained Iran to Obama.”

Er, okay. Glad you said that because there’d be no end to it if some rightie guy sneered that Obama was our first female president.

For what it’s worth, I prefer mansplaining to ‘Bamsplaining, where he peddles a lot of gaseous pap interrupted by cheap digs at straw men and all delivered in that set-your-watch-by-it left-right prompter-swivel. (To stick with the Mother Jones shtick, real men don’t use prompters.)

But, if this was “mansplaining”, it was a big man doing the ‘splaining. The shout-out to Harry Reid, the “my long-time friend John Kerry” schmoozeroo, all this was brilliant – not because everyone doesn’t understand how fake it is, but because the transparent fakery underlines how easy it is to be big and generous and magnaninmous and get the snippy parochial stuff out of the way to concentrate on what really matters.

Obama could have done this. He could have said yesterday, “Hey, my good friend Bibi and I don’t see eye to eye on everything, but I’d have to be an awfully thin-skinned insecure narcissistic little dweeb to make that a capital offense, wouldn’t I? So, since he’s in town anyway, I’ve asked him to swing by the White House for an hour to shoot the breeze – and maybe we can have that dinner we missed out on the last time, right, Prime Minister? Hur-hur-hur.” …

And Jennifer Rubin.

Looking over the past week, it is hard to miss how unfavorably President Obama compares to other world leaders. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with excessive graciousness toward his tormentor, gave a powerful, important address. His clarity and presence command our attention. When Obama sneered at a press avail that there was nothing new in Netanyahu’s remarks, he looked so very small, so very petty. …

… It is not just Israel’s leader who regularly proves to be more clear-headed and inspiring than Obama. Consider Czech President Milos Zemen, who declared at AIPAC this week: “The CzechRepublic has been the single island of democracy in central Europe. And [Israel] is the single island of democracy in the Middle East. …

… Then there is Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a brave and stalwart friend of the United States and of Israel. In a speech in Israel last year, Harper had this to say about the BDS movement (recall that Secretary of State John Kerry said that if Israel didn’t make a deal with the Palestinians, there’d be nothing to stop the BDS movement’s growth.)

“Some civil-society leaders today call for a boycott of Israel. … Most disgracefully of all, some openly call Israel an apartheid state. Think about that. Think about the twisted logic and outright malice behind that. A state, based on freedom, democracy and the rule of law, that was founded so Jews can flourish as Jews, and seek shelter from the shadow of the worst racist experiment in history. That is condemned, and that condemnation is masked in the language of anti-racism. It is nothing short of sickening.” …

Charles Krauthammer has more.

… It was an important moment, especially because of the libel being perpetrated by some that Netanyahu is trying to get America to go to war with Iran. This is as malicious a calumny as Charles Lindbergh’s charge on Sept. 11, 1941, that “the three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration.”

In its near-70 year history, Israel has never once asked America to fight for it. Not in 1948 when 650,000 Jews faced 40 million Arabs. Not in 1967 when Israel was being encircled and strangled by three Arab armies. Not in 1973 when Israel was on the brink of destruction. Not in the three Gaza wars or the two Lebanon wars.

Compare that to a very partial list of nations for which America has fought and for which so many Americans have fallen: Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Vietnam, Korea, and every West European country beginning with France (twice).

Change the deal, strengthen the sanctions, give Israel a free hand. Netanyahu offered a different path in his clear, bold and often moving address, Churchillian in its appeal to resist appeasement. This was not Churchill of the 1940s, but Churchill of the 1930s, the wilderness prophet. Which is why for all its sonorous strength, Netanyahu’s speech had a terrible poignancy. After all, Churchill was ignored.

Karl Rove is next.

… It is interesting that Mr. Obama’s antipathy has recently been focused not on the planet’s most evil regimes, including Iran, but on America’s most dependable ally, Israel, a vibrant nation that is a champion of liberty and human rights and a beacon of freedom in a sea of oppression.

The president’s behavior has provided ample additional evidence that he lacks the skills and patience to deal with allies with whom he disagrees. He and his team of public-relations geniuses couldn’t have bungled this affair worse had they tried.

Jonathan Tobin posts on Tom Friedman’s recycled slurs.

… Friedman concludes his piece by saying that it “rubs me the wrong way” to see a foreign leader pointing out the mistakes of an American president in front of Congress. But in that paragraph he lets us on to his real problem with the speech and the entire discussion about Iran: the existence of a solid pro-Israel coalition in Congress that thinks Netanyahu’s concerns are worth a hearing. Friedman says, “I have a problem with my own Congress howling in support of a flawed foreign leader.”

With this phrase he reminds us of his reaction to Netanyahu’s last speech to Congress in 2011. At that time, Friedman couldn’t restrain his bile and claimed that the ovations the prime minister received were “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby,” a smear that was reminiscent of the Walt-Mearsheimer thesis about a vast Jewish conspiracy controlling U.S. foreign policy to benefit Israel. The point of that thinly disguised piece of anti-Semitic invective was to delegitimize supporters of Israel who had the temerity to back Netanyahu against the Obama administration’s assault on the alliance between the two democracies.

Friedman didn’t go quite as far as that sort of libel this time though his contempt for a Congress “howling” in support of Netanyahu betrayed his animus. But he did let down his hair a bit in an interview with Israel’s Channel 2. Friedman claimed the only reason Netanyahu received tumultuous applause for his brilliant speech was that he was speaking in “Sheldon’s world” a reference to casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, a leading Jewish philanthropist and pro-Israel political donor.

Whatever you may think of Adelson’s politics, the point of that comment is to reintroduce Friedman’s 2011 slur about Congress being purchased by a ruthless Jewish minority. This is a classic anti-Semitic trope in which Jews are accused of using money to insinuate themselves into power and subverting the interests of the nation in favor of their own agenda. It is, of course, pure tripe, since support for Israel is overwhelming throughout the country and undiminished by either the media barrage against Netanyahu or the efforts of the administration to distance itself from the Jewish state.

Friedman then claimed that had Netanyahu spoken to the real America, rather than the Congress that is supposedly owned by the Jews, he would have gotten a different response. His example of a real American venue is the University of Wisconsin. It’s true that if Netanyahu or any friend of Israel were to speak at a leftist enclave such as the one in Madison, they would not be cheered. But who, other than Friedman, actually thinks that opinion there is representative of anything but the prejudices of liberal academics.

But the truth is, as a poll suggests, most Americans agree with Netanyahu on Iran, not Obama or Friedman. That’s why Friedman’s canard about Congress, Adelson and the “Israel lobby” is a lie. But like Obama’s Iran policy, Friedman is as undaunted by the prospect of repeating untruths about Israel as his newspaper is unashamed about printing them.

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“Bibi’s Grand Slam” says John Podhoretz. 

On Tuesday, Bibi Netanyahu gave the speech of his life before a joint session of Congress — and he has Barack Obama to thank for it.

Yes, the very same Barack Obama who hates Bibi, the same Obama who was furious the speech was being given at all, walked the bases full for Netanyahu and served up the sucker pitch he hit for a grand slam.

For six weeks, the president and his team have been letting it be known just how angry they are that the leader of the House of Representatives invited the Israeli prime minister to speak about the threat from Iran.

The enraged leaks and overt hostility toward the head of state of an ally have been unprecedented.

The White House even tried to engineer a mass Democratic boycott of the speech, an effort that either (take your pick) met with success because 50 members of his party agreed to it, or was a failure because 75 percent of elected Democrats on Capitol Hill defied him and chose to attend.

What did all of this do? It made the Netanyahu speech the most important political event of 2015 by far.

It elevated Netanyahu’s powerful case against a nuclear deal with Iran to the highest level possible — so that the leader of a country of 8 million people roughly the size of New Jersey now possesses as much authority to discuss the issue as the leader of the free world. …

Andrew Malcolm also had kudos for Netanyahu’s speech.

Well, now we all can understand why unidentified Obama aides sought so hard to cancel, delay, snipe and ultimately undermine Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to a joint meeting of Congress Tuesday.

In his idiomatic English and speaking as a friend, Israel’s superior spokesman firmly delivered an eloquent, detailed and damning 3,900-word indictment of both Iran and the sell-out nuclear deal that the Obama administration is in the closing stages of drafting in Geneva. Netanyahu’s delivery was Churchillian. Indeed, the 65-year-old former special forces captain just became only the second foreign leader after Sir Winston to address Congress three times.

Despite dozens of Democrats boycotting the 40-minute address, the House chamber was packed with extra folding chairs squeezed in by pages. Netanyahu spoke with a broad historical stroke. He moved smoothly from Biblical times to the Holocaust to Iran’s provocative military exercises this week. He talked of centrifuges and even quoted Robert Frost.

The prime minister was interrupted by applause some 40 times. He was alternately moving, exhortatory, almost angry, determined and humble and grateful to both Americans and, surprisingly, Barack Obama, whom he praised profusely for his aid to Israel.

Embarrassingly, the American president could not find it in his conniving heart to rise above his innate political pettiness. In a forced photo-op, Obama spent 11 minutes claiming dismissively that he did not even watch the address. …

The increasing lack of economic mobility in our country is the subject of a long form essay by Yuval Levin. It’s close to 5,000 words, but worthwhile. And, at least it is the end of our week. We have taken particular care with the pull quotes which themselves total 2,000 words, so at least they provide a shorter alternative.

We Americans have always prided ourselves on the extraordinary degree of mobility this country has long made possible for its citizens—the idea that, with hard work and a little luck, an immigrant or a child of poor parents can start out with nothing and end up successful and rich. We still believe this about ourselves: International comparisons of public opinion find that Americans express far greater confidence than citizens of other developed nations that hard work is rewarded and that everyone has a real chance to rise out of poverty. But in fact, by many measures, the United States actually does not stand out among advanced economies in terms of economic mobility, and it has not for decades.

Many of us surely sense this even if we do not know all the facts and figures. There is a divergence between what many Americans want to believe about their country and what they know to be true about the way they and their friends and family live now. Americans at the bottom of the income scale do not have enough opportunities to move up, Americans in the middle feel stuck, younger Americans are having trouble getting started, and Americans in general seem less inclined to follow after opportunities. These various challenges are all distinct, but they stem from the same core problem: immobility.

The degradation of this central aspect of the so-called American dream is finally beginning to take shape as a potent political issue. The headline of a front-page story in the Washington Post in January put its finger on an increasingly evident shift in our economic debates: “Both parties agree: Economic mobility will be a defining theme of 2016 campaign.”

That the two parties would agree even on the subject of our economic arguments is quite a change from recent years, when they have mostly been talking past each other. And more remarkable still is that they seem to have turned to the right subject, too. Serious attention to the state of economic mobility could help us overcome the peculiar mix of acrimony and nostalgia that has enveloped our politics since this century began and could help us see far more clearly some of the most pressing challenges our country now confronts. …

 

… Relative mobility refers to a person’s economic status in relation to the nation as a whole. Economists often describe it in terms of moving up the income quintiles—the five slices of the American pie that measure the economic division in the country from poorest to richest—while the rest of us tend to think of it in the form of rags-to-riches stories. Can someone born in poverty today rise into the middle class and beyond it? Does the child of a middle-class family stand a reasonable chance of ending up wealthy? Or are people destined to end up roughly where they start?

For most of American history, these questions would have been answered in a manner flattering to the country’s own sense of itself as the world’s beacon of opportunity. No longer. By some measures, in fact, in terms of relative mobility, we are now lagging behind Canada and much of northern Europe. …

 

… Why, then, have our anxieties about mobility intensified only recently? The answer can be found in the state of absolute mobility, which tells a more complicated story. Absolute mobility involves changes in people’s living standards not relative to society as a whole but relative to their own past or to the prior generation. Are you better off than you were four years ago? Are you wealthier than your parents were at your age?

By this measure, America looks rather good over the long run but rather bad over a shorter run—and the difference is why mobility has now become a priority. Data from the Pew Economic Mobility Project show that the vast majority of Americans, about 84 percent, now have a higher income than their parents did at their age, adjusted for both inflation and family size. Such intergenerational absolute mobility is actually highest among the poor: Fully 93 percent of Americans in the lowest fifth of earners have higher incomes and greater purchasing power than their parents did at their age, compared with 70 percent of Americans in the top fifth. Overall American living standards have risen over time, and this has lifted essentially everyone’s living standards some, even if it has not done much to change people’s relative positions in society.

But the significance of this good news is limited in two ways that will help us to clarify the mobility challenge as policymakers must now confront it. First, strong absolute mobility amid weak relative mobility means that while people are more comfortable where they are in life, they are not moving ahead in skills or status. The mother working long days behind a restaurant counter in the expectation that her children should have better opportunities than she did would not be satisfied to hear that her children will be a little better paid for working behind that same counter all their lives.

Second, and perhaps most important, absolute mobility has declined significantly in the last two decades, so that while most Americans are doing better than their parents did at the same age, they are often not doing as well as similarly situated families (and maybe even their own families) were doing ten or even 20 years ago. This is the most pressing way in which many Americans are feeling the sting of immobility these days, with stagnant wages creating the sense that they’re running in place.

The simplest way to illustrate this trend is to consider the median family. Adjusted for inflation and expressed in 2013 dollars, the median American family income was $52,432 in 1989 and $51,939 in 2013, according to Census Bureau data. In other words, the purchasing power of the median family has actually declined a little over the course of the last quarter century. …

 

… What, then, might a response look like? Having sharpened our sense of the problem a little, it may be helpful to think in terms of five categories of steps that policymakers could take, at least for a start.

The first is the most general and the easiest for Republicans to embrace: growth. Because growth is a necessary if not sufficient condition for improved economic mobility, policymakers need to create and sustain the right environment for economic dynamism.

This means a growth-friendly tax code, …

 

… The second category of needed reforms would seek to address persistently low mobility among poor and lower-middle-class Americans. It involves clearing up bottlenecks, often created by public policy, which hold people back from pursuing opportunity and prosperity. A bottleneck is a particular kind of obstacle: It is a function of a narrowing of options. The upward path into and through the middle class has clearly gotten narrower in America in recent decades.

One primary culprit is our higher-education system. A college degree has become an increasingly essential ticket into middle-class life even as higher education has grown more expensive and less edifying. Tuition costs have tripled over the past three decades, so that an average year of college now costs about half the annual income of the average American family. …

 

… The third facet of a mobility agenda would involve lifting burdens imposed on the middle class and the poor by some perverse incentives and distortions in today’s welfare state. For instance, the structure of our entitlement and tax systems means that parents are overtaxed—paying for today’s entitlements while bearing the costs of sustaining tomorrow’s. A significant increase in the child tax credit that could reduce families’ payroll-tax burdens as well as their income-tax burdens would make an enormous difference to millions of middle-class families pressed by stagnating wages. And such tax relief for families would be a natural companion to the corporate tax reform necessary for stronger growth.

The unintentional marriage penalties in the tax code also burden many middle-class families, and similar penalties in most welfare programs (from the Earned Income Tax Credit to Medicaid, food stamps, and others) create disincentives to marriage that hurt the poor and counteract the very aims of these programs. No less perversely, many means-tested aid programs create disincentives to work, since working leads to benefit cuts that in many cases can outweigh the appeal of earned income. Correcting such disincentives would be no simple matter, but a number of conservatives have proposed promising ideas for doing so in recent years. …

 

… The fourth element of a mobility agenda would go beyond lifting burdens and focus on the most difficult and important part of the mobility puzzle: the curse of entrenched poverty. This would involve the next stage of welfare reform, and it’s the arena where a conservative approach to problem solving can do the most good.

The overwhelming fact about our half century of intense and costly efforts to combat entrenched poverty is that they have not worked. …

… This was the essence of Paul Ryan’s anti-poverty proposal last year. Ryan would let states choose to replace the full amount of money they now receive to administer means-tested federal welfare programs (such as food stamps, housing assistance, utilities subsidies, and others) with a single, consolidated “opportunity grant.” They could then develop their own approaches to spending the money to help their poor residents rise, provided that these approaches involve programs that require work, emphasize reaching self-sufficiency, and prove their effectiveness over time. And states would have to provide each service through at least two competing providers, only one of which can be a state agency.

Liberals tend to see proposals like this as embodiments of some kind of fetish to privatize. But in fact, they are expressions of humility. Experimentation is what you do when you do not know the answer. …

 

… Finally, the fifth element of a conservative mobility agenda should involve drawing a clear distinction between welfare assistance and disability benefits. In particular, the Social Security Disability Insurance program has come to function as a kind of welfare system of last resort, but it is very badly suited to that purpose. The share of working-age adults on SSDI has more than doubled since 1980, from 2.3 percent to 5 percent of the workforce, or about 9 million Americans. The increase is quickly bankrupting the program (its trust fund will be depleted next year) while contributing to the decline in workforce participation in America.

Part of the increase is driven by the aging of the population, as many baby boomers are now in the age range most prone to disabling injuries and health problems. But the actual prevalence of disability in the working-age population has grown at nowhere near the rate of SSDI claims. …

 

…These are, of course, only the barest outlines of an agenda. But these five categories of steps—sustaining an environment for growth, clearing up bottlenecks, removing policy burdens, enabling vigorous experimentation in welfare and education, and separating welfare from disability support—offer the beginning of a conservative answer to the riddle of mobility.

Conservatives are far better positioned than liberals to take up the challenge of mobility. The left is wedded to the structure of our welfare state and persuaded that moving money around will address the problems we confront. But when we consider the particulars of the mobility puzzle, we can see that what is missing—as the very term mobility suggests—is not so much money as dynamism and energy. Injecting our economy with such energy requires us to allow more Americans to benefit from our free-market system, rather than shielding people from it, and would therefore require us to move beyond the liberal welfare state rather than expand it. …

 

… In a message to Congress on the Fourth of July, 1861, amid the painful early setbacks of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln sought to articulate what made the struggle worthwhile. When it came to describing what we valued in our government, Lincoln said this:

On the side of the Union it is a struggle for maintaining in the world that form and substance of government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all, to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance, in the race of life. Yielding to partial and temporary departures from necessity, this is the leading object of the government for whose existence we contend.

America has often been gloriously successful in advancing that cause, but it has been notably less so in recent decades. We have ignored that fact for too long and must now work to ensure that the rhetorical turn toward mobility in our national politics is followed up with substance and action.