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We have Paul Greenberg today because of this delightful quote he brings us from Tom Lehrer.

“When I was in college, there were certain words you couldn’t say in front of a girl. Now you can say them, but you can’t say ‘girl.’ “  –Tom Lehrer …

 

… Today, to quote Joseph Epstein in a recent issue of the Weekly Standard:

“Owing to the spread of victimhood, we have today a large aristocracy of the suffering, the put-upon and the unlucky. Blacks, gays, women, American Indians, Hispanics, the obese, Vietnam veterans, illegal immigrants, the handicapped, single parents, fast-food workers, the homeless, poets and anyone else able to establish underdog bona fides can now claim to be victims. Many years ago, I watched a show on television that invited us to consider the plight of unwed fathers. We are, it sometimes seems, a nation of victims.”

Victimhood is no longer something to be overcome but celebrated. And the can-do American spirit has become the can’t-do, which is not a good sign for any country.

Roger Simon says Hillary Clinton might be America’s most boring speaker. 

Forget that she lies incessantly and stands for virtually nothing that’s discernible other than her own self-interest, Hillary Clinton is one of the most boring public speakers extant.  I have heard better speeches at high school, maybe even grammar school, graduations than HRC gave in New York Saturday in the second — or is it the third — debut speech of her campaign.

It was problem after problem, cliché after cliché until you couldn’t listen anymore.  Needless to say, there wasn’t a fresh idea. No new solutions to these problems on offer, only generalities. (In case you didn’t know it, she’s for equal pay for women and supports people with disabilities.)  This was a generic speech out of the last twenty years.  I kept wondering who were these automatons waving their flags in the audience.  Maybe they were worried about the high cost of Ambien. Elect Hillary and we won’t need a sleeping pill ever again. …

… But best of all she nattered on about “secret unaccountable money that is distorting our elections.”  What a howler.  From the woman behind the Clinton Foundation?  Were we listening to Saturday Night Live or was it The Onion? …

Daily Beast also posted on Clinton’s relaunch.

… Clinton formally declared her candidacy for the Democratic nomination almost exactly a month ago, in April, with a 2:15 video. “Everyday Americans need a champion,” she said then. “And I wanna be that champion.”

Since that time, Clinton has not been heard from much as she has traveled around, talking to some voters and ignoring questions from the media and trying to seem as normal as possible despite being anything but. Saturday’s event was designed to highlight her champion-ness by contrasting her with the New Deal Democrat, whose Four Freedoms she has attempted to mimic with her own “Four Fights,” the economy, families, campaign finance and national security.

Saturday’s event, according according to The New York Times, was organized by a small group of Clinton insiders including Huma Abedin, Clinton’s longtime aide and the vice chair of her campaign and Jim Margolis, who helped orchestrate both inaugurations for President Obama.

The result felt borderline dystopian.

Roosevelt Island, transformed by architects in the 1930s to serve as a “living memorial,” looks like a cross between something out of Grand Theft Auto and a ghost town. It has a fake forest, and brutalist apartment complexes. Its abandoned insane asylum was turned into a luxury highrise.

Roosevelt Island’s Amalgamated Bank, owned by unions and serving unions, now sports a sign declaring it proud to be the bank of Hillary For America. …

Jonathan Tobin posts on HRC’s reintroduction.

… Like past attempts by politicians to re-imagine themselves (“new Nixon”), Hillary’s second start to her campaign was to a large degree a sleight of hand maneuver. Her problems stemmed from blows to her reputation from revelations about her bizarre use of private emails and the ethical questions that arose once the press began scrutinizing the Clinton Family Foundation. Clinton’s inability or unwillingness to candidly address these issues dovetailed with her refusal to speak to the press after she began her campaign to give her the impression of a woman trying to run for president in a bubble.

Clinton is supposed to start giving interviews to local press outlets this week while still shunning more aggressive national reporters. But the problem goes deeper than whether she’s dodging the press altogether as opposed to giving canned and evasive answers to questions. If Clinton’s trust and favorability ratings are under water, it’s not because she hasn’t given interviews. It’s because the public understands that she is a chameleon who will change her positions as often as she changes her accent. Her willingness to adopt a southern drawl in the south and then drop it when north of the Mason-Dixon line is one of the most obvious and shameless bits of pandering by a politician since Thomas Edison first recorded sound. But while that might be forgiven, the country has also noticed that Clinton has made a hard left turn on both foreign and domestic issues that gives the lie to her pose as a “fighter.”

The most obvious instance this past week was her steadfast refusal to take a stand one way or the other on the trade bill that failed in the House last Friday because rank and file Democrats opposed President Obama. Clinton had been on record supporting this concept throughout her time as secretary of state and before that in the Senate. But she stayed silent as Obama went down to a humiliating defeat and then said nothing about it the next day in her speech. …

Jennifer Rubin takes her turn. 

After a lackluster relaunch speech, Hillary Clinton continued to hide from the media, thereby leaving the stage to her less than capable flacks and her critics, including increasingly frustrated reporters and hostile pundits. The speech was nothing special (“It seemed to me to highlight some of her weaknesses as a campaigner; there was a rote quality to her speeches, a certain leaden quality, even the audience to me looked a little bit rote,” observed Peggy Noonan), but it was certainly better than what followed.

Karen Finney and John Podesta both stumbled as they tried to explain why Clinton could not say now precisely what her position on trade authority is. Jake Tapper cracked, “I had Karen Finney on the show yesterday, and I thought I was going to have an aneurysm trying to get a position from her.” In telling us Clinton needs to see the deal first, her aides are in essence saying she has no position of her own, no vision of what a trade deal should look like. Chris Wallace admonished Finney that Clinton didn’t need to know what was in the deal to take a position on trade authority. (“Karen, we’re not talking about the trade deal here. We’re talking about giving President Obama the same authority that President Clinton had on NAFTA so that when he finally does negotiate a deal, he can give it to Congress and they can either vote it up-or-down but they can’t amend it.”) Following Finney, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) told Wallace, “That was one of the most painful interviews I think I have watched in a long time. I just — I can’t believe that — pick a position. I mean, I — that’s what leaders do.”

Nor could Finney explain why Clinton wasn’t a hypocrite for condemning hedge fund managers while taking a quarter of a million dollars in speaking fees. If her message on Saturday was raw meat for the liberal base, her biography can’t be forgotten. …

… It is telling that the son of one president and the brother of another is more accessible, more revealing and more direct than Hillary Clinton. In failing to even attempt to speak for herself and stand up to questioning, she repeated the cardinal sin that has defined her first few months as a candidate: She lacks the political courage and skill to expose herself and tell voters what she really thinks. You can’t run for president while running from your record, the voters and the media — especially if you have as many flaws as she does.

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Streetwise Professor posts on ethanol. Remember Bush the W was responsible for the mandate, proving the GOP can’t be trusted either. It’s incredibly stupid, so you would assume President Trainwreck was the culprit, but it was W.

About 19 months ago I wrote about RINsanity, i.e., the United States’ nutty ethanol (and other biofuel) program. RINsanity has long outlived the phenomenon (Lin-sanity) that inspired the neologism. A couple of weeks ago, the EPA announced the ethanol and biodiesel quotas . . . for 2014. Who said time travel is impossible? That Einstein. What an idiot!  (The EPA also announced quotas for 2015 and 2016.)

In a nutshell, despite protestations to the contrary, the EPA largely conceded to the reality of the E10 “blend wall” (the fact that the vast bulk of auto engines are incapable of burning fuel with more than 10 percent ethanol), and announced quotas that were (a) smaller than the market expected, and (b) smaller than the statutory amounts that Congress specified in its farseeing omniscience 10 years ago. At the same time, the EPA decreed larger quotas for biodiesel.

As a result, the market did the splits. The price of ethanol RIN credits that count towards the ethanol quota plunged, while the price of biodiesel RIN credits that count towards the biodiesel quota rose. Scott Irwin and Darrell Good have all the gory details here. (Those are the guys to follow on this issue, folks. I’m just kibitzing.)

As a result, pretty much everyone is upset. The nauseating biofuel lobby is screaming bloody murder because the ethanol quota is too small, and is threatening to go to court. Those holding ethanol credits are fuming due to the forty plus percent price decline.

This all points out the dysfunctional nature of environmental markets in which the supply is set by some opaque politicized bureaucratic process unhinged from economic reality. (The European CO2 credit market is another classic example.) …

… Of course it’s not just that the market is crazy: it’s crazy that there is a market. Ethanol is an economic and environmental and humanitarian monstrosity. Yes, ethanol would play a role without subsidies or mandates. But a much smaller role. Forcing and inducing its use is costly, not environmentally beneficial, and raises the price of food, which hits the poorest the hardest. So this crazy market shouldn’t exist in the first place. I think I need another drink.

The beginning of the week should not pass without comment on the congressional defeat for the president. Noah Rothman says it signals the end of his regime.

President Barack Obama wanted Congress to pass a variety of trade-related proposals, and he didn’t want to have to rely on Republican votes in order to see that happen. He lobbied his fellow Democrats in favor of trade, and he lobbied them hard. In the end, it wasn’t enough. On Friday, the president endured a stern censure from the very members of the party for whom he once served as a savior. Barack Obama’s presidency is all but over. It’s Hillary Clinton’s party now, but she does not seem inclined to lead it so much as to emerge as its supervisor by default and through a process of attrition. She is not in a hurry to rush that process, and there is no alternative Democratic leader waiting in the wings. Inadvertently, what House Democrats did on Friday was to decapitate their own party. …

Politico was not much nicer.

President Barack Obama responded to a stinging defeat dealt by his own party by declaring victory.

It is a common tactic in Washington to downplay bad news, but the White House brought it to a new level on Friday after House Democrats soundly defeated a package of free trade legislation that the president had personally implored them to pass. The White House chose to highlight the fact that one part of the package passed, even though two approvals were necessary to give Obama the trade authority he needs to negotiate the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership.

“It’s déjà vu all over again,” a chipper White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Friday, praising what he called “bipartisan support” for the legislation. The 126-302 defeat of a key trade measure was just a glitch: “To the surprise of very few, another procedural snafu has emerged. These kinds of entanglements are endemic to the House of Representatives.’’

But the truth was more complex, and more troubling for the president. …

Roger Simon posts on the NY Times’ Rubion Derangement Syndrome. 

It took several years of George W. Bush’s presidency for the mainstream media to develop full-blown Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS),  but the New York Times — the MSM’s very flagship — seems to have contracted Rubio Derangement Syndrome (RDS) over a year before there is even a Republican nominee, let alone a sitting president.

First the Times exposed Rubio for being some senatorial version of Speed Racer (sorry, Marco, four traffic violations in seventeen years just won’t cut it) and now they’re after him for the cardinal sin of having difficulty paying off his student loans.  Perhaps they would prefer a super rich candidate who would never have such problems like, say, Nancy Pelosi or, um, Hillary Clinton.

But never mind.  Rubio exhibited prolifigacy by buying himself what the Times characterized as an $80,000 “luxury speedboat.”   One can assume the reporters — Steve Eder and Michael Barbaro — have never heard J. P. Morgan’s saying about such purchases or have never  been to Monte Carlo (or even seen its tennis tournament on TV) if they think you can pick up a “luxury speedboat” or a luxury anything aquatic for a measly eighty grand. Those things usually start at about twenty times that figure.  As it turns out, Rubio bought a family fishing boat. …

More from Andrew Malcolm who has pictures of Rubio’s “luxury speedboat” and John Kerry’s $7,000,000 sailboat.

You may have noticed virtually all actual and potential Republican candidates for president have been attacking Hillary Clinton for months. That’s a factor of her own actions like violating government rules to use a private email server while Secretary of State, among other questionable behavior.

And it’s a measure of her currently being the prohibitive favorite to become the Democrat nominee for 2016.

Who gets attacked most is usually a reliable sign of who is feared most. Recall the Washington Post invested a few thousand words last winter on Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker, revealing that he not only did not attend an Ivy League school but left MarquetteUniversity for a job before completing his fourth year.

So, it was surprisingly revealing in recent days when the liberal N.Y. Times went after Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio as part of its spotty vetting of select candidates. Rubio has been steadily in the top tier of GOP candidates since announcing. …

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WSJ’s Weekend Interview is with Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College. A school, which in a weak moment in the late 60′s, conferred a degree on Pickerhead. 

… “The overwhelming argument now for education—at all levels and from the government—is that it’s a preparation to make you a better factor of production,” Mr. Arnn says. By way of response, he quotes Churchill, which he can do better than most. From 1977-80, while studying in London, Mr. Arnn assisted Martin Gilbert, Churchill’s authorized biographer, with research, conducting interviews and sorting through official papers. As we sit in Hillsdale’s office in Washington and Mr. Arnn relates Churchill’s thoughts on education, the British statesman glowers down at us from a large painting on the wall.

“Engines were made for men, not men for engines,” Churchill said at the University of Miami in 1946. “Expert knowledge, however indispensable, is no substitute for a generous and comprehending outlook upon the human story with all its sadness and with all its unquenchable hope.”

Yet the humanities have fallen on hard times. Unquenchable hope is all well and good, a critic might say, but it doesn’t pay the electric bill. This spring SweetBriarCollege, a century-old liberal-arts school in Virginia with about 700 students, announced that it would soon close its doors for good. The college’s president lamented that financial obstacles couldn’t be overcome, and that too few young people were interested in attending a rural school in the Blue Ridge Mountains. “We are 30 minutes from a Starbucks,” he said.

That’s about 10 minutes closer to a Starbucks than Hillsdale. When I point this out to Mr. Arnn, he replies that students can get their coffee fix at A.J.’s Cafe on campus—but he takes the point. “HillsdaleCollege is 40 minutes from anywhere,” he says. “And you know, also, it’s cold up there, and small. The town’s small. We think of those as advantages. Because you need to come to college for the right reason. They’re not coming to our place for the beach. We like that—and manage to recruit, better and better.”

Figures provided by the college bear this out: In 1996, Hillsdale had 1,131 students, whose average high-school GPA was 3.5. Slightly over half—56%—hailed from outside Michigan. Last year undergraduates numbered 1,437. Their average high-school GPA was 3.8, and two-thirds came from out of state.

This is all the more impressive considering that Hillsdale students aren’t allowed to receive federal aid, such as Pell grants. In 1966 Hillsdale’s board decided the school wouldn’t accept any money directly from the government. “We thought that direct aid to the colleges was illegitimate,” Mr. Arnn says. “We’re the trainers of citizens and statesman. If the government funds us, it’s controlling that process.” …

John Fund posts on the election in Turkey.

It’s hard to exaggerate the importance of Turkey’s election yesterday. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has run a one-man political show in Turkey for 13 years with his AK party dominating politics. It has now in the words of the BBC “has just taken a very big kick” and Turkey’s democracy will be the better for it.

While Turkey grew economically under Erdogan, he increasingly engaged in arbitrary measures, from curtailing judicial independence to trying to shut down social-media platforms like Twitter he didn’t like. He announced during the campaign he was hoping the AKP would win enough seats (367 are needed to change the constitution directly, 330 to call a referendum to change the system) to amend the constitution to give the job of president much more power.

Instead, Erdogan’s party lost almost ten percentage points, down to 41 percent. …

Kevin Williamson writes on the politicians who campaign against their citizens.

We are ruled by criminals.

Consider the case of Rodney Thompson, the school superintendent in Berkeley County, S.C., who is currently collecting a $168,714 salary while he awaits trial on a public-corruption charge related to the misuse of government resources for a political campaign.

The campaign in question was a referendum to raise taxes in order to facilitate more spending on schools — no surprise that the school managers were all-in behind it. Thompson has been indicted on a misdemeanor charge; the district’s press officer was indicted on a similar charge and then on a felony forgery charge — investigators say she doctored documents to mislead them. The interim superintendent serving while Thompson’s legal troubles are sorted out is under investigation in the affair as well.

Never forget: They do it for the children.

This sort of thing is as common as dirt. Conservative activists complain — and have produced evidence — that school personnel in Jefferson County, Colo., did exactly the same thing, using public resources to campaign for a tax hike, the purpose of which was to increase their paychecks and decrease their workloads. Other critics have raised questions about the district’s financial arrangements with a firm that supported the tax-hike campaign. Construction companies, as it turns out, adore government-school building projects.

In Connecticut, a Waterbury smoke shop was the locus of a federal conspiracy and election-law investigation related to the congressional campaign of Chris Donovan, a Democratic activist who had been speaker of the state house. His campaign finance director and a longtime aide have been convicted. The complaints against them included — this will not surprise you — the misuse of public resources for campaign purposes.

And so it goes. …

Slate Star Codex with a rambling post on Bernie Sanders’ suggestion that college should be free to all. It closes with this;

… If I were Sanders, I’d propose a different strategy. Make “college degree” a protected characteristic, like race and religion and sexuality. If you’re not allowed to ask a job candidate whether they’re gay, you’re not allowed to ask them whether they’re a college graduate or not. You can give them all sorts of examinations, you can ask them their high school grades and SAT scores, you can ask their work history, but if you ask them if they have a degree then that’s illegal class-based discrimination and you’re going to jail. I realize this is a blatant violation of my usual semi-libertarian principles, but at this point I don’t care.

Ann Althouse posts on the anti-Semitic slur tossed towards Bernie Sanders by NPR’s Diane Rehm. 

… It was only last weekend that Bernie Sanders shocked the Clinton campaign in the Wisconsin straw poll by getting 41% to Hillary’s 49%. He’s not an amusing sideline anymore. What can be done to keep Democrats from drifting his way?

An outright lie about him doesn’t work, does it? Well, yes it does! It made everyone take notice that Bernie Sanders is Jewish. He’s not an Israeli citizen. That’s cleared up, but the impression remains: He’s Jewish. That stirs up any free-floating anti-Jewishness that may be useful to his opponent. It stirs up suspicion that Sanders feels affiliated with Israel in a way that is inconsistent with the American presidency. I’m sure many people hadn’t even noticed that Sanders is Jewish, and now we all know that, and we know additional facts. From the first link above, which goes to Politico: “Sanders, who is Jewish, has visited Israel several times and spent several months working on a communal farm called a Kibbutz in the 1960s.”

That’s all powerfully useful to Hillary. Am I supposed to believe this was a mere oopsie by a nice old lady? She’s 78, give her a pass? Did you know Diane Rehm is an Arab?

David Bernstein posts on Rehm’s slur in Volokh Conspiracy.

… I’m not suggesting that Rehm herself is hostile to Jews in any way. In fact, the opposite may very well be true; in educated American mainstream liberal circles, the level of anti-Semitism is quite low, which can lower can lower the “immune system” of liberals like Rehm when real anti-Semitism pops up. Even the individuals noted above–Cole, Bromwich, etc.–likely have nothing against Jews, per se; they just are hostile to Israel or at least its current policies.

As a result, in some cases they don’t mind playing on age-old anti-Semitic themes to advance their agenda. In other cases, they are so certain that their negative views of Israel are correct that they truly can’t believe that anyone would disagree with them unless they were blinded by loyalty to Israel. When they make what might otherwise seem to be scurrilous accusation, they are not being disingenuous.

In any event, strange accusations about supporters of Israel, especially Jewish supporters, have become sufficiently commonplace that what should have seemed like an obvious anti-Semitic hoax didn’t ring any alarm bells. …

Speaking of H. Clinton, this is from a post by Instapundit linking to Nick Gillespie’s interview with Camille Paglia.

Paglia; … “Hillary is a mess. And we’re going to award the presidency to a woman who’s enabled the depredations and exploitation of women by that cornpone husband of hers? The way feminists have spoken makes us blind to Hillary’s record of trashing [women]. They were going to try to destroy Monica Lewinsky. It’s a scandal! Anyone who believes in sexual harassment guidelines should have seen that the disparity of power between [Bill] Clinton and Monica Lewinsky was one of the most grotesque ever in the history of sex crime. He’s a sex criminal! We’re going to put that guy back in the White House? Hillary’s ridden on his coattails.” …

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Noah Rothman posts on the president’s “contemptibly casual war on ISIS.” 

It was the gaffe so good, he made it twice. Apparently, the president does not see his shamelessly lackadaisical approach to conducting the war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria as a failure of which his administration should be ashamed. After conceding that he didn’t have a comprehensive ISIS strategy, much less one that would result in unambiguous victory, last August, President Barack Obama reiterated that admission on Monday. 

The president’s admission in August, exactly 20 days after the start of renewed airstrikes in Iraq targeting ISIS, that “we don’t have a strategy yet” was met with shocked gasps and myriad disapproving opinion pieces. Many saw the fact that the commander-in-chief did not have a clear and executable strategy for victory even after sending American forces into combat as the height of irresponsibility. Today, exactly 10 months after the beginning of new coalition combat operations over Iraq, the president said that he still has no clear vision for victory in the war against ISIS.

“We don’t yet have a complete strategy,” Obama said at a press conference at the G-7 gathering in Germany, “because it requires commitments on the part of the Iraqis as well about how recruitment takes place, how that training takes place. And so the details of that are not yet worked out.”

It was deplorable that an American commander of the armed forces did not have a plan for victory after the fall of a major Iraqi city to a terrorist organization, but it is simply reprehensible for the president to continue to cling to a failing war plan even amid cascading losses. …

Perhaps the administration’s problems come from what Noemie Emery calls his lousy temperament.

… At home and abroad, Obama makes mistakes over and over, with the same result, and takes nothing from them. He disses his friends, placates aggressors and seems surprised that aggressors advance and whole regions catch fire.

He refuses to bargain with Congress, insults opponents, imposes unpopular policies by fiat and seems surprised when his measures result in court challenges, when polarization increases, opposition solidifies, divisions harden and gridlock prevails. Deal-making is the essence of politics, but Obama finds it demeaning, so he resorts to brute force when he has the means to (as in the still-festering matter of healthcare). Alternatively, as with immigration, Obama resorts to executive actions that stir angry resistance and are frequently halted by courts.

This has gone on since 2009, but Dana Milbank noticed only when Obama began slighting Democrats, whereupon he began taking offense. “Rather than accept that they have a legitimate beef, he shows public contempt for them,” the Washington Post columnist complains, writing that Obama dissed fellow Democrats to friendly reporters as being short-sighted and dense. (Of course, he’s done that for years to Republicans, but they seem not to matter.) If Franklin Roosevelt was described as having a commonplace intellect but a brilliantly tempered political character, Obama seems to be his ultimate opposite: A man with an intellect that delights the elite but a temperament that is counterproductive in matters of government. This combination seems to work much less well. …

Editors of the NY Post write on the president’s fictions of the day.

It’s plainly liberating for President Obama to simply deny reality and declare everything just peachy, as he did again Monday at the G7 summit in Germany. Sadly, reality’s not cooperating.

One of his fictions du jour: All’s well with Obama­Care. No joke. …

… Yet the biggest news is that Obama actually told the truth at one point Monday: “We don’t yet have a complete strategy” for training Iraqi forces to fight against ISIS.

Nine months and there’s still no strategy even just to train Iraqis?

By the time Team Obama comes up with one, there may no Iraqis left to train — given ISIS’s success in carving up Iraq and slaughtering anyone in its path.

It’s depressingly easy to see why Obama prefers fiction to reality.

More on President Delusional from Editors of Investor’s Business Daily.

President Obama was in Germany the last few days, but too many of his recent remarks sound like he’s been in high orbit — around another planet.

America has never been held in greater esteem than under Obama’s leadership. Counterterrorism worked well in Yemen until the emergency evacuation of embassy and Special Ops forces — and the loss of millions in arms.

The president’s half-hearted “war” on the Islamic State is also a “success.” As is ObamaCare, never been working better. Just as he promised.

Jobs are finally humming along with unemployment numbers down (because so many gave up looking). The economy actually shriveled in the first quarter, but that’s because of some unexpected phenomenon called winter.

The Mexican border is secure now because the president says so. Since Bill Clinton was already named the first black president, the actual first black president claims he’s given such staunch support to Israel that he’s in reality the first Jewish president. …

 

Kristin Roberts in National Journal says ISIS is not just Iraq’s problem it is also ours.

… According to Obama, arresting ISIS is an Iraqi responsibility. 

This is dishonest. That he takes this position, however, is understandable. The man ushered into office in part on a promise to get America out of Iraq (and Afghanistan) does not want to be the man who did that only to watch that state fail and then go back in. …

… The United States—under Barack Obama or the next president—can choose to sit this out, to let Sunni fight Shia and then Wahhabi fight Sunni until some resolution is found. The risk associated with this option is that what remains standing could be the slave-holding, woman-raping, Christian- and Jew-killing territory known as the Islamic State, which will not pause to relish victory but instead set sights on Europe and the United States 

Or the United States—under Barack Obama or the next president—can choose to engage aggressively, hoping that a greater assault than what’s being accomplished by U.S. airpower and on-the-ground training will stop ISIS from destroying the governments in the region that still take Washington’s calls. The cost of this choice is great: money and, more importantly, blood. …  

… No matter the answer, that’s a more honest question to consider than whether the Iraqi army is trained well enough.

Michael Oren, historian, and for four years Israeli ambassador to the US, has written a book about the administration’s treatment of Israel during his tenure. John Podhoretz reviews.

… It’s not that there’s lots of breaking news in “Ally” that will startle people. Rather, it makes news on almost every page with its incredibly detailed account of the root hostility of the Obama administration toward the Jewish state.

What makes the details especially credible is that Oren is no flame-breathing Israeli right-winger but very much (and at times distressingly) an Establishment creature and one, moreover, who makes it clear he drank the Obama hope-and-change Kool-Aid in 2008. (Indeed, he now serves in Israel’s Knesset not as a member of Bibi Netanyahu’s Likud but of the new centrist Kulanu party.)

On major matters, the administration seemed to hold Israel accountable for problems it had nothing to do with.

Example: The Palestinian Authority made moves toward seeking a declaration of statehood at the United Nations in 2011, which would’ve triggered a law shutting down their US mission and suspending all aid to the PA and to UN agencies that recognized Palestine.

In response, Deputy Secretary of State Tom Nides called Oren into his fancy Foggy Bottom office and screamed at him: “You don’t want the f - - - ing UN to collapse because of your f - - - - ing conflict with the Palestinians, and you don’t want the f - - - king Palestinian Authority to fall apart either.”

To which Oren replied that Israel didn’t want the United Nations to collapse “but there are plenty of Tea Party types who would, and no shortage of Congress members who are wondering why they have to keep paying Palestinians who spit in the president’s eye.” …

Inquistitr.com runs the story of how the Red Cross raised half a billion dollars for Haiti disaster relief and built six homes. Sounds like heading up that organization will be a perfect fit for The Real Good Talker when he is done with creating havoc in our country and the world.

After the devastating 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti in 2010, the American Red Cross has raised almost half a billion dollars in disaster relief to help the Caribbean country recover.

Since then, the charity organization publicly celebrated their efforts and claimed to have provided homes for more than 130,000 people in Haiti.

But a new report by ProPublica and NPR says otherwise.

The report brought to light not only the disarray behind the scenes of the organization — with emails from concerned top officers and accounts of frustration and disappointments from broken promises and squandered donations — but also the fact that only a total of six permanent houses were built with the money raised.

Red Cross had also launched a multi-million dollar project called LAMIKA, which was started in 2011 with the focus of building hundreds of permanent homes for Haitians in the poor Port-au-Prince area of Campeche.

However, today, not even one home has been built in the dismal neighborhood. Many residents continue to live in metal sheet shacks with no drinking water, electricity, or basic sanitation. …

To make up for missing a day and running too many items on President Trainwreck, we close with a double dose of Late Night Humor from Andy Malcolm.

Meyers: Hillary Clinton’s Super PAC has reportedly been struggling to raise money. It’s gotten so bad, they may have to start reaching out to Americans.

Fallon: The rapper 50 Cent said that he is going to be supporting Hillary Clinton for president. Hillary would be excited, but she doesn’t even get out of bed for less than a million cents.

Meyers: Vladimir Putin reportedly scored eight goals during a hockey game in Sochi recently. And the goalie only had one save: His own life.

Fallon: Obama has encouraged the Patriots quarterback Tom Brady to be mindful of being a role model. Then Obama stubbed out his cigarette and went golfing at noon on a weekday.

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Robert Tracinski, in the Federalist, details what the NY Times has finally learned about the fraud Paul Ehrlich has been running since his book, The Population Bomb, was published 40 some years ago. We have taken up the subject of the famous Julian Simon wager that Ehrlich lost 30 years ago before. The last time we did that was in Pickings last February 1st.

The New York Times just published an extraordinary “retro report”—a short video paired with an article—looking back at Paul Ehrlich’s “population bomb” theory, the fear that an uncontrolled human population would outstrip the ability of the Earth to support it.

The Times lays out some of the evidence for the theory’s failure, including the fact that the world’s population was about 3.5 billion when Ehrlich first made his apocalyptic prognostications in 1968. It’s 7 billion now, and we haven’t starved, we haven’t run out of resources, and we’re better off than we’ve ever been.

This report wouldn’t be extraordinary anywhere else. In the right-leaning press, it would be considered a pretty mild take on Ehrlich and his crackpot theories. The only thing that makes it extraordinary is that it isn’t in a right-leaning publication but in the citadel of the establishment left.

The video features two particularly good moments. In one of them, Indian development economist Gita Sen explains why Ehrlich’s theories became irrelevant in her country, which was supposed to be the first to starve. Instead, “the Green Revolution came to India with a big bang and a boom in such a rapid way that India has never looked back.” In the other, Stewart Brand, a former disciple of Ehrlich’s, asks: “How many years do you have to not have the world end to decide that it didn’t end because that reason was wrong?”

Most remarkable, however, is Ehrlich’s answer. Yes, he’s still around, the Times interviewed him, and they asked him that question. I got the impression it may have been the first time someone prominent has asked Ehrlich to answer this directly, and his guard seems to have been down, probably because he remembers all the puffball coverage he’s gotten from the New York Times over the years. So he answered it, and it has to be heard to be believed. He said: “One of the things that people don’t understand is that timing, to an ecologist, is very, very different from timing to an average person.” I wonder, is BS still the same for an ecologist as it is for an average person?

It is such an obviously arrogant, dishonest, evasive answer that the Times report features it prominently, and not in a positive way. They captured in one line the sudden realization that Ehrlich is a charlatan who has been conning the highest levels of the culture for years. …

… But there is one big omission in the report: the triumph of Ehrlich’s intellectual antipode, Julian Simon. He isn’t mentioned at all in the video, even though plenty of people who have been influenced by him are still around. (For example, they might have interviewed Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist and 2012 winner of the Julian Simon Memorial Award.) Simon gets only a semi-dismissive mention in the accompanying text.

‘Some preternaturally optimistic analysts concluded that humans would always find their way out of tough spots. Among them was Julian L. Simon, an economist who established himself as the anti-Ehrlich, arguing that “humanity’s condition will improve in just about every material way.” In 1997, a year before he died, Mr. Simon told Wired magazine that “whatever the rate of population growth is, historically it has been that the food supply increases at least as fast, if not faster.” ‘

But the story is way more interesting than that. In 1980, Simon and Ehrlich made a famous bet about the future prices of commodities. If Ehrlich was right and a rising population was burning through the Earth’s resources, this ought to show up in commodities prices. As metals all got scarce, they should become more expensive. Instead, they all got cheaper—as they have done for the past century while the world’s population has more than tripled—and Simon won the bet handily. …

Kevin Williamson posts on the NY Times running errands for Democrat operatives.

… A couple of Times reporters spent Friday morning basking in praise for their “nice scoop” — the less-than-remarkable public knowledge that Marco Rubio was written four traffic tickets over the course of two decades — but, as Brent Scher of the Washington Free Beacon pointed out, neither of the reporters in the byline — Alan Rappeport and Steve Eder — nor the researcher also credited by the Times for the piece — Kitty Bennett — ever accessed the traffic records in question. But somebody did: American Bridge, a left-wing activist group, had pulled the records just before the Times piece appeared, and the Times employed some cagey language, with the relevant sentence beginning: “According to a search of the Miami-Dade and Duval County court dockets. . . . ” A search? Yes. Whose search? A piece of the news that apparently is not fit to print.

That the New York Times’s political desk is thick with lazy partisans who take their cues — and in some cases, their research — from Democratic interest groups is not a secret, though the Times really ought to have, if not the honesty and the institutional self-respect, then at least the sense of self-preservation (these things do come to light) to disclose that it is being fed opposition research and choosing to publish it as though it were news. …

… In the annals of bad political driving, the Rubios do not even merit a footnote. The standard case study was Senator Edward Kennedy, but one of the examples that stands out in my mind is that of George Stephanopoulos — who, when he was running the Clinton White House, managed to get himself arrested for leaving the scene of an accident and driving with an expired license after failing to negotiate a parking space in front of a bar in Georgetown. He popped a bunch of mints; there was no drunk-driving charge. I remember the episode because of one detail: Stephanopoulos was driving an old Honda CRX, which I found disappointing at the time — I’d assumed that senior White House advisers drove better cars. …

Glenn Reynolds in his USA Today column with more.

… Rappeport, Eder and Bennett’s earth-shattering traffic scoop produced rather a lot of mockery from people on the right, and from some on the left. Longtime political correspondent Jeff Greenfield tweeted: “Rubio TrafficTicketGate? This a parody of political journalism gone nuts, right?”

Yeah, pretty much. To add to the embarrassment, the Times, though it has since silently corrected the piece, referred to Marco Rubio’s Ford F-150 pickup as a “sports utility vehicle,” displaying the level of automotive literacy expected of Manhattan residents.

Folks on Twitter mocked the Times with the #RubioCrimeSpree hashtag, featuring such other alleged crimes as “Drank milk after the expiration,” “Red wine with fish,” and my favorite, “Called Chris Matthews, asked him if his refrigerator was running.”

Even most of the major newspapers and networks declined to treat the Times’ story seriously. Fox News emphasized the hit-piece style of the story, and The Wall Street Journal mocked it; CNN was mum; and The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple warned the Times it is setting itself up for criticism if it doesn’t hold other presidential candidates to the same level of scrutiny. Of the major networks, only MSNBC gave the story the time of day. …

Instapundit reminds us what a creep Jimmy Carter is and was.

Former President Jimmy Carter spoke recently to an AARP group, telling them, “Americans still have racist tendencies or feelings of superiority to people of color.”  Nice to hear such pro-American words from a former President.

Carter’s other recent gems include an oped last August in which Carter accused Israel of committing war crimes against Palestinians.  He also defended Obama’s decision to miss the unity rally in Paris after the Charlie Hebdo shootings, saying, “President Obama’s just come back from vacation, and I know how it is when you’ve been gone for a week or two.”

The similarities between Carter and Obama are growing day by day– although a poll last summer had Obama beating Carter for the title of “worst President since World War II” by five percentage points.  I suspect Obama’s lead in that poll would be much higher today.

Craig Pirrong has another go at the Elon Musk windmill.

In one of my periodic Quixotic moments, I tilted at the Cult of Elon Musk. First, I argued that he or someone manipulated the prices of Tesla and Solar City stocks: I stand by that analysis. Second, I argued that the supposed visionary’s true genius was for feeding lustily at the taxpayer teat.

It is a testament to my great influence that the Cult of Musk has grown only larger in the two years since I made a run at him. But maybe the spell is breaking. For the LA Times just ran a long article detailing just how much his fortune was picked from our pockets. According to the LAT, Musk companies have raked in $4.9 billion in various subsidies and tax breaks, give or take.

That’s 10 figures, people.

That’s bad enough. What’s worse is Musk’s “defense.” It is a farrago of intellectual dishonesty, logical fallacies, condescension, and arrogance.

Musk only replied to the LAT after repeated inquiries, but it is good that the paper persisted. Musk’s rationalizations have to be seen to be believed. …

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The next Nobel Medicine prizes will go to researchers at The University of Virginia. Huffington Post tells us about the stunning discovery of vessels that connect the brain to the lymphatic system.

Neuroscientists have uncovered a previously unknown direct connection between the brain and the immune system — a finding that could have significant implications for the treatment of brain disorders like Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis and autism.

The discovery came as a surprise to Dr. Kevin Lee, chairman of the University of Virginia’s neuroscience department.

“The first time these guys showed me the basic result, I just said one sentence: ‘They’ll have to change the textbooks,’” Lee said in a press release Monday.

The study’s lead author, Dr. Jonathan Kipnis of the University of Virginia’s Center for Brain Immunology and Glia, echoed the sentiment.

“When we discovered the lymphatic vessels we were very very surprised, because based on the textbooks — these vessels do not exist,” Kipnis said in an email to The Huffington Post. … 

… A next step of the research is to determine how the vessels might be involved in diseases involving the brain and the immune system, such as multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer’s.

“We believe that for every neurological disease that has an immune component to it, these vessels may play a major role,” Kipnis said.

Though the findings are preliminary, the researchers hope they’ll open up a number of new possibilities for treating these and other neurological disorders through therapies that target the lymphatic vessels of the brain.

For example, Kipnis explained that the findings could shed light on why large protein chunks accumulate in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. “We think they may be accumulating in the brain because they’re not being efficiently removed by these vessels,” he said. …

More from Machines Like Us.

That such vessels could have escaped detection when the lymphatic system has been so thoroughly mapped throughout the body is surprising on its own, but the true significance of the discovery lies in the effects it could have on the study and treatment of neurological diseases ranging from autism to Alzheimer’s disease to multiple sclerosis.

“Instead of asking, ‘How do we study the immune response of the brain?,’ ‘Why do multiple sclerosis patients have the immune attacks?,’ now we can approach this mechanistically – because the brain is like every other tissue connected to the peripheral immune system through meningeal lymphatic vessels,” said Jonathan Kipnis, a professor in U.Va.’s Department of Neuroscience and director of U.Va.’s Center for Brain Immunology and Glia. “It changes entirely the way we perceive the neuro-immune interaction. We always perceived it before as something esoteric that can’t be studied. But now we can ask mechanistic questions.”

He added, “We believe that for every neurological disease that has an immune component to it, these vessels may play a major role. [It’s] hard to imagine that these vessels would not be involved in a [neurological] disease with an immune component.”

The desire of humans to trade has many ancient markers. Science20.com reports on gold trade between Ireland and the Cornish coast as many as 2,500 years BCE. That would mean a sea voyage of over 150 miles across unfriendly waters.

Archaeologists have found evidence of an ancient gold trade route between the south-west of the UK and Ireland, which would mean people were trading gold between the two countries as far back as the early Bronze Age, 2500 B.C.

The finding was made after measuring the chemical composition of early gold artifacts in Ireland and discovering that the objects were actually made from imported gold, rather than Irish. The gold is most likely to have come from Cornwall, which means the symbiotic link between Ireland and England is even farther back then believed. …

Smithsonian has interesting trips for your bucket list. They list five sites where large meteors have hit the earth and rearranged the landscape.

Early in the morning of October 6, 2008, astronomers at the University of Arizona detected an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. When other sightings cropped up across the world, the astronomers’ suspicions were confirmed—the asteroid was going to hit our planet. It was the first time in history an asteroid had been observed before impact. Within hours, the asteroid entered the Earth’s atmosphere (and thus became a meteor) and broke up into tiny pieces. These fragments—known as meteorites—landed in a remote location in northern Sudan.

Luckily for Earth, this meteor wasn’t the big one that NASA scientists are warning could one day crash into our planet (and that Bruce Willis once blew up in a movie). But throughout history, meteorites have left their beautiful—if destructive—scars upon the globe. Here are some of the best places to see meteorite impact sites this summer: …

 

The cartoonists have some fun with Caitlyn Jenner.

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Harvard used to restrict Jews, now it’s Asians. Kate Bachelder with a WSJ OpEd – Harvard’s Chinese Exclusion Act.

… First, a few facts. Asian-Americans are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population, and the share of college-age Asian-Americans climbed to 5.1% in 2011 from 3% in 1990. Yet according to independent research cited in the complaint, members of this 5% make up roughly 30% of National Merit semifinalists, a distinction earned by high-school students based on PSAT scores. Asian-American students seem to win a similar share of the Education Department’s Presidential Scholar awards, “one of the nation’s highest honors for high-school students,” as the website puts it. By any standard, Asian-Americans have made remarkable gains since 1950. They constituted 0.2% of the U.S. population then, due in part to the legacy of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

Harvard admissions do not reflect these changes or gains. The percentage of Asian-American students has held remarkably steady since the 1990s. This spring, 21% of the students admitted to Harvard were Asian-American; in 1993 it was about 20%. Harvard selects students based on criteria it calls “holistic,” taking into consideration subjective qualities such as, according to the university’s website, “interests,” “character” and “growth.”

Yet look how Harvard stacks up against schools that explicitly don’t consider ethnicity in admissions. At the California Institute of Technology, the share of Asian-American students hit 42.5% in 2013—double Harvard’s and a big jump from Caltech’s 26% in 1993. At the University of California-Berkeley it is more than 30%; the state’s voters banned the state schools from using racial preferences in a 1996 referendum. The trend is also observable at elite high schools with race-neutral admissions: New York City’s HunterCollegeHigh School was 49% Asian-American in 2013. …

Continuing with higher ed, Michael Barone says colleges and universities have grown bloated and dysfunctional.

American colleges and universities, long thought to be the glory of the nation, are in more than a little trouble. I’ve written before of their shameful practices — the racial quotas and preferences at selective schools (Harvard is being sued by Asian-American organizations), the kangaroo courts that try students accused of rape and sexual assault without legal representation or presumption of innocence, and speech codes that make campuses the least rather than the most free venues in American society.

In following these policies, the burgeoning phalanxes of university and college administrators must systematically lie, insisting against all the evidence that they are racially nondiscriminatory, devoted to due process and upholders of free speech. The resulting intellectual corruption would have been understood by George Orwell. …

… A glut of Ph.D.s and an ever-increasing army of administrators have produced downward pressure on faculty pay. Universities increasingly hire Ph.D.s as underpaid adjuncts, with low wages and no job security.

The last half-century has seen a huge increase in the percentage of Americans who go to college and a huge increase in government aid to them. The assumption was that if college is good for some, it’s good for everyone. But not everyone is suited for college: witness the increasing ranks of debt-laden nongraduates.

And the huge tranches of government money have been largely mopped up by the ever-increasing cadres of administrators. Do students get their money’s worth from the masses of counselors, facilitators, liaisons and coordinators their student loans pay for? Or would they be better off paying for such services only as needed, as most other adults do? …

Editors of NY Daily News opine on campus thought crimes. 

Madness has been unleashed on college campuses — not by drunken frat boys but by the White House.

A wildly mishandled Obama administration campaign to combat student sexual assaults has morphed under a federal gender-equality law into a nightmarish weapon against free speech and academic freedom.

The statute, called Title IX, obligates colleges to act on sexually related complaints to protect students from a hostile environment. But enforcement now encompasses any member of a college community deemed by an accuser to have prompted discomfort in connection with his or her sex.

As NorthwesternUniversity film professor Laura Kipnis discovered, that includes writing or saying the wrong thing. Defying a gag order, she has gone public with a hair-raising account of being accused under Title IX after writing an article about Northwestern’s recent ban on sexual relations between faculty and students. …

Huffington Post has more campus hijinks. 

Six weeks ago, Northwestern University President Morton Schapiro wrote a fine op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in which he offered a ringing endorsement of academic freedom. As he observed, a university must have “a compelling reason to punish anyone — student, faculty member, staff member — for expressing his or her views, regardless of how repugnant you might find those views.” Indeed, he added, “freedom of speech doesn’t amount to much unless it is tested,” and if freedom of speech isn’t aggressively protected “on college campuses, where self-expression is so deeply valued, why expect it to matter elsewhere?”

It is therefore both surprising and disappointing that NorthwesternUniversity recently found itself embroiled in two embarrassing violations of the core principles of academic freedom. Sadly, a university that should be a national leader in promoting and protecting these values allowed itself to lose sight of its very reason for being. …

Kimberley Strassel wonders why the IRS can’t take a look at the Clinton shakedown foundation. 

The scandal of the century at the IRS was that agency’s secret targeting of conservative nonprofits. Perhaps a close second is the scandal of what the IRS hasn’t been investigating: the Clinton Foundation.

The media’s focus is on Hillary Clinton’s time as secretary of state, and whether she took official actions to benefit her family’s global charity. But the mistake is starting from the premise that the Clinton Foundation is a “charity.” What’s clear by now is that this family enterprise was set up as a global shakedown operation, designed to finance and nurture the Clintons’ continued political ambitions. It’s a Hillary super PAC that throws in the occasional good deed.

That much is made obvious by looking at the foundation’s employment rolls. Most charities are staffed by folks who have spent a lifetime in nonprofits, writing grants or doing overseas field work. The Clinton Foundation is staffed by political operatives. It has been basically a parking lot for Clinton campaign workers—a comfy place to draw a big check as they geared up for Hillary’s presidential run.

The revolving door is spinning quickly these days. There’s Dennis Cheng, a finance director for Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 bid, who went to the Clinton Foundation as its chief development officer. There he built a giant donor file, which he earlier this year took with him to head up fundraising for the Clinton 2016 campaign. There’s Katie Dowd, who raised $100 million as Mrs. Clinton’s new media director in 2008, then went to a Clinton PAC, then to the State Department, then to the foundation as a “tech adviser.” She’s now at Clinton 2016 as digital director.

Some operatives don’t even bother feigning separation. Longtime aide Cheryl Mills served as general counsel to Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 campaign, then worked at State. She then joined the board of directors of the foundation and remains on it still, even as she works on Clinton 2016. Nick Merrill, an aide to Mrs. Clinton at State, has continued on as her press liaison. Last year his name popped up on a news release as a contact person for the Clinton Foundation. Mr. Merrill will be a campaign spokesman for Clinton 2016. …

Great post from Free Beacon on the comedians who suck up to the president and the clintons.

… Stephen Colbert had on Hillary Clinton for a supposedly humorous name-dropping segment about her memoir Hard Choices last June that was so obsequious even the Washington Post called it “embarrassing.” In the end, he told viewers to visit the show’s website to purchase copies. Colbert, in his super-edgy fake conservative persona, also allowed Obama to take over hosting his show last December at GeorgeWashingtonUniversity.

Colbert’s a top-level satirist, and he’s still letting the two top Democrats in the country use his show for their own interests? Gag.

NBC comedian Seth Meyers, in “A Closer Look” segment on Late Night in April, took it upon himself to identify the perceived biases of Clinton Cash author Peter Schweizer, while failing to reveal that he’d hosted the Clinton Global Citizen Awards last year. Ironically, Meyer felt Schweizer’s conservative leanings and former work as a George W. Bush speechwriter helped debunk the findings of his book on pay-for-play allegations against Hillary Clinton at the State Department, findings that were followed up on by decidedly non-conservative outlets like the New York Times and ABC.

It added up to a decidedly weak attempt to be like John Oliver. …

Kevin Williamson on the proposed liberal gulag.

… Sheldon Whitehouse is a sitting United States senator, writing in the Washington Post, arguing for racketeering charges against those who hold heterodox opinions on global warming. 

How about we ask the candidates what they think about this? Does Mrs. Clinton support the proposal to lock people up as mafiosi for seeking to publicize their views on political issues? Does Senator Sanders? Senator Warren? 

Follow-up question: Which other unpopular political views should we be locking people in cages over?

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Joel Kotkin writes on the things that have made our economy unsafe for small business. 

For those of us who covered the great entrepreneurial explosion of the 1980s, it seemed that we were heading toward a new era of economic diversity and decentralization. In 1985, for example, technology guru John Seybold spoke of an emerging “entrepreneurial age” – driven by competition among young, people-centered companies. Similar pronouncements were issued by futurists ranging from John Naisbitt to more serious analysts like Alvin Toffler and Taichi Sakaiya.

Yet, a funny thing has happened to our entrepreneurial age. Instead of a growing presence of smaller, entrepreneurial firms, we are witnessing a resurgence of Big Business. Indeed, over the past two decades, the Fortune 500’s share of nominal gross domestic product has grown from 58 percent in 1994 to 73 percent in 2013. More revealing still, the fastest growth has taken place among the top 100 firms, which now represent 63 percent of all revenue, up from 57 percent in 1994.

At the same time, smaller firms clearly are struggling. The country’s rate of new business creation, which peaked about decade ago, notes the Kaufmann Foundation, plunged more than 30 percent during the economic collapse that started in 2008 and has been slow to bounce back following the recession. Indeed, in 2012-13, entrepreneurial activity actually declined. This is particularly troubling at a time when we are experiencing a rapid expansion of the ages 25-34 workforce, traditionally a harbinger of obstreperousness. But now, younger people, as a whole, seem either too stressed by tough circumstances or too lacking in assets – normally, a house – to get the critical loans they need to start a business.

The financial equation

The economic reasons for this vary, suggests FiveThirtyEight’s Andrew Flowers, including such things as globalization, merger mania and the success of firms such as Apple. But there may also be political factors at work, most particularly the confluence of large business interests and those of the ever-expanding regulatory regime. …

And William McGurn has more on the way to escape poverty in Baltimore – leave. He has some reference to the Joel Kotkin essay that started this week in May 31st Pickings.

Of all the “solutions” for post-riot Baltimore, the best—at least for African-Americans trapped in poverty—appears to be the one that attracts the least notice: Find a new town to call home.

The message comes via two new studies of upward mobility. The first is from Harvard’s The Equality of Opportunity Project. It finds that a poor child whose family leaves a bad neighborhood for a good one will have better long-term economic prospects.

The other, by Joel Kotkin’s Center for Opportunity Urbanism, measures (by median household income, self-employment, housing affordability and population growth) the best and worst cities for America’s racial minorities. Its finding puts self-styled progressives to shame: Of the top 15 cities for African-Americans today, 13 are in the former Confederacy.

Let’s not mince words. The Harvard study identifies Baltimore as the city where the odds are most stacked against a child’s escaping poverty. Mr. Kotkin says his center’s study underscores “the relative worthlessness of good intentions.”

It also underscores the worthlessness of most of the conversations about Baltimore’s future. These include President Obama’s urging more federal “investment” in the city. Or Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s looking to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for $20 million to pay for the riot damage. Or former Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley’s run for president on the same government-first orthodoxies that help explain all those boarded up buildings that Americans saw during last month’s televised riots. …

A couple of our favorites have turned their attention to Bernie Sanders. Richard Epstein tries an economics lesson. Good luck washing away Bernie’s tiresome and appalling ignorance.

Senator Bernie Sanders’ quixotic presidential campaign received some unexpected attention for an off-the-cuff comment he made in Iowa this past week. The sentence that has raised some eyebrows is short and to the point: “You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country.” For Sanders, the market economy that provides consumers with such choices is fundamentally at odds with society’s duty to take care of the vulnerable.

Fortunately, it is impossible to take Sanders’s pronouncement out of context. It was delivered in casual conversation as a stand-alone one-sentence indictment of what is wrong with America. Unpacking it helps expose Sanders’ profound misunderstanding of how a well-functioning market system operates. …

… it is instructive to ask, what should be done if in fact we conclude that 23 varieties of underarm deodorants and 18 types of sneakers aren’t necessary in a world with starving children? What next? It will surely not do to operate with no types of deodorants or sneakers. But if open markets generate too many alternatives for these and thousands of other market goods, just who is responsible for deciding what firms can offer what products at what prices, and why?

That problem solves itself in a market economy through the mechanism of decentralized consumer choice. …

… The socialist Sanders cannot take any comfort in these decentralized processes, but wishes to put in place cumbersome administrative processes to make those choices. It is there that the agony begins. …

… The history on this point is clear. I doubt very much that Bernie Sanders has any familiarity with the socialist calculation debate of the 1930s, which proved that no central planner has the information to make intelligent judgments on the question of which products should be sold and at what price. There are of course many things that government has to do to maintain competitive markets, but none of them rely on the heavy-handed forms of intervention that rolled effortlessly off Bernie Sanders’ lips. …

Matthew Continetti compares Sanders’ “fossil socialism” to the Clinton campaign.

… Bernie Sanders, for reasons of age and experience, is an old-school socialist, more concerned with quantitative justice than with the hierarchy of grievances. He didn’t mention Baltimore in his announcement speech because he thinks it’s just a symptom of economic breakdown. Or as an article on the World Socialist Website recently put it: “The fundamental division in Baltimore—as in American society as a whole—is class, not race.”

It’s fitting that Sanders’s opponent Hillary Clinton has decided on the opposite strategy. Petrified of once again losing the nomination unexpectedly, she’s pandering to the constituencies that reelected President Obama. So she’s called for an end to “mass incarceration,” she’s pledged to “go further” than Obama’s unconstitutional executive amnesty, she’s playing the gender card, and her aides deny she ever changed her position on same-sex marriage.

Meanwhile she’s coy on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which the unions oppose, and on the Keystone Pipeline, which the unions support. Her 200 policy advisers haven’t come up with an economic plan as detailed or coherent as Sanders’s because she’s far less antagonistic to the market than he is, and she doesn’t see our social and political dysfunction as a reflection of material imbalances, like he does.

And how could she—she’s a millionaire many times over, a featured speaker at Goldman Sachs, a jet-setter who decided to run for president while vacationing at Oscar de la Renta’s villa in Punta Cana. She may have authorized a leak to the New York Times in which she fantasized about “toppling” the One Percent, but no one really believes her. …

No corner of the economy is free of government’s dead hand. The hand that Bernie Sanders likes. George Will tells us how they mess with raisin growers.

In oral arguments Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear the government defend its kleptocratic behavior while administering an indefensible law. The Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act of 1937 is among the measures by which New Dealers tried and failed to regulate and mandate America back to prosperity. Seventy-eight years later, it is the government’s reason for stealing Marvin and Laura Horne’s raisins.

New Dealers had bushels of theories, including this: In an economic depression, prices fall, so a recovery will occur when government compels prices to stabilize above where a free market would put them. So Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “brains trust” produced “price stabilization” programs by which the government would fine-tune the supply of and demand for various commodities. In 1949, this regulatory itch was institutionalized in the Raisin Administrative Committee (RAC). Today it wants the Hornes to ante up about $700,000. They could instead have turned over more than 1 million pounds of raisins — at least four years of their production. …

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Heather Mac Donald writes on the new nationwide crime wave. With office holders like the president and the mayors of New York and Baltimore, we’re quickly seeing the fruits of left/liberal ideas.

The nation’s two-decades-long crime decline may be over. Gun violence in particular is spiraling upward in cities across America. In Baltimore, the most pressing question every morning is how many people were shot the previous night. Gun violence is up more than 60% compared with this time last year, according to Baltimore police, with 32 shootings over Memorial Day weekend. May has been the most violent month the city has seen in 15 years.

In Milwaukee, homicides were up 180% by May 17 over the same period the previous year. Through April, shootings in St. Louis were up 39%, robberies 43%, and homicides 25%. “Crime is the worst I’ve ever seen it,” said St. Louis Alderman Joe Vacarro at a May 7 City Hall hearing.

Murders in Atlanta were up 32% as of mid-May. Shootings in Chicago had increased 24% and homicides 17%. Shootings and other violent felonies in Los Angeles had spiked by 25%; in New York, murder was up nearly 13%, and gun violence 7%.

Those citywide statistics from law-enforcement officials mask even more startling neighborhood-level increases. Shooting incidents are up 500% in an East Harlem precinct compared with last year; in a South Central Los Angeles police division, shooting victims are up 100%.

By contrast, the first six months of 2014 continued a 20-year pattern of growing public safety. Violent crime in the first half of last year dropped 4.6% nationally and property crime was down 7.5%. Though comparable national figures for the first half of 2015 won’t be available for another year, the January through June 2014 crime decline is unlikely to be repeated.

The most plausible explanation of the current surge in lawlessness is the intense agitation against American police departments over the past nine months. …

… Contrary to the claims of the “black lives matter” movement, no government policy in the past quarter century has done more for urban reclamation than proactive policing. Data-driven enforcement, in conjunction with stricter penalties for criminals and “broken windows” policing, has saved thousands of black lives, brought lawful commerce and jobs to once drug-infested neighborhoods and allowed millions to go about their daily lives without fear.

To be sure, police officers need to treat everyone they encounter with courtesy and respect. Any fatal police shooting of an innocent person is a horrifying tragedy that police training must work incessantly to prevent. But unless the demonization of law enforcement ends, the liberating gains in urban safety over the past 20 years will be lost.

While a lot of the increased crime comes from policies of foolish mayors, the US Justice Dept. also bears much of the responsibility according to Thomas Sowell.

… The Department of Justice has threatened various local police departments with lawsuits unless they adopt the federal government’s ideas about how police work should be done.

The high cost of lawsuits virtually guarantees that the local police department is going to have to settle the case by bowing to the Justice Department’s demands — not on the merits, but because the federal government has a lot more money than a local police department, and can litigate the case until the local police department runs out of the money needed to do their work.

By and large, what the federal government imposes on local police departments may be summarized as kinder, gentler policing. This is not a new idea, nor an idea that has not been tested in practice.

It was tested in New York under Mayor David Dinkins more than 20 years ago. The opposite approach was also tested when Dinkins was succeeded as mayor by Rudolph Giuliani, who imposed tough policing policies — which brought the murder rate down to a fraction of what it had been under Dinkins.

Unfortunately, when some people experience years of safety, they assume that means that there are no dangers. That is why New York’s current mayor is moving back in the direction of Mayor Dinkins. It is also the politically expedient thing to do.

And innocent men, women and children — most of them black — will pay with their lives in New York, as they have in Baltimore and elsewhere.

And the lawlessness also extends to many prosecutors says Kevin Williamson.

The GOP should turn its attention to prosecutorial misconduct.

As the old Vulcan proverb has it, “Only Nixon can go to China.” And only Nixon’s political heirs can fix the persistent — and terrifying — problems that continue to plague this country’s law-enforcement agencies and prosecutors’ offices.

Exhibit A: Orange County, California.

The sunny Southern California county with a population surpassing that of nearly half the states has a Republican district attorney, Tony Rackauckas, and a big problem on its hands: Its entire prosecutorial apparatus — all 250 lawyers in the district attorney’s office — have been disqualified from participation in a high-profile capital-murder case following revelations that the office colluded with the Orange County sheriff’s department to systematically suppress potentially exculpatory evidence in at least three dozen cases, committing what legal scholars have characterized as perjury and obstruction of justice in the process.

One of the questions involves a secret database of jail records related to confessions obtained via informants. Sheriff’s officers denied the database even existed, and their deception was abetted by prosecutors, leading an exasperated judge to issue an order noting that they “have either intentionally lied or willfully withheld material evidence from this court during the course of their various testimonies. For this court’s current purposes, one is as bad as the other.” The judge unsubtly recommends prosecution. …

WSJ OpEd on our country’s betrayal of Iraqi friends. 

As the fight to retake Ramadi from Islamic State, also known as ISIS, heats up, I can’t help thinking of my visit to the capital of Iraq’s Anbar province nearly eight years ago, and of America’s broken promises since then.

In September 2007, I was in Ramadi for a gathering of Iraqi and American military commanders, politicians and local tribal leaders who had joined forces with the U.S. to defeat al Qaeda in Iraq. Then-Sen. Joseph Biden was there. “These are difficult days,” he told our Iraqi allies. “But as you are proving, you can forge a future for Iraq that is much brighter than its past. If you continue, we will continue to send you our sons and our daughters, to shed their blood with you and for you.”

It was a noble promise, and Iraqis believed it. The surge in U.S. forces and the “Anbar Awakening” had succeeded beyond all hopes. U.S. troops patrolled casually where just a few months before Marines couldn’t fight their way in. There as a journalist, I walked through one village east of Ramadi where an old vegetable vendor waved to me and said, a grandson smiling on his knee, “Thank you coalition.” …

Mark Steyn posts on this week’s cover of the smug self-satisfied tiresome leftist New Yorker.

The New Yorker cover at right has attracted a lot of comment. It shows Hillary Rodham Clinton outside the locker room trying to get in. But the locker room is full of white Republican males – Walker, Paul, Bush, Cruz, Rubio… Okay, the last couple are Hispanic, but let’s not get hung up on details. And Bush identifies as Hispanic on voter registration forms, but let’s not get hung up on the paperwork…

But, in fact, the GOP has already let a female into the locker room – Carly Fiorina – plus a black guy – Ben Carson – and an Indian – Bobby Jindal. So nothing celebrates diversity like the locker room for the Republican primary debate: whites, blacks, browns, Hispanics, men, women, old, young… Over in the Dem locker room, there’s hardly anybody in there, and the few that are all white, and old: Hillary, Bernie, Elizabeth Warren.

By the way, is there a whiter cultural artifact than The New Yorker? Mark Ulriksen is the cartoonist, and a useful reminder of why I’ll take the Charlie Hebdo crowd any day. He should do a picture of Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina and Bobby Jindal banging to get in the door of his outmoded Republican stereotype.

Also by the way, I hate having to talk like this – to buy into the left’s hideous civilization-sapping trope that identity politics is the only thing that matters: We’ve got two Hispanics; where’s yours? Where’s your Indian? Where’s your transgender candidate? It’s pathetic, but what can you do with an artist who thinks “provocation” means “pandering to the delusion of upscale white liberal solipsists”? …

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Orin Kerr, law prof at GeorgeWashingtonUniversity has a comment on the country’s political class.

If I understand the history correctly, in the late 1990s, the President was impeached for lying about a sexual affair by a House of Representatives led by a man who was also then hiding a sexual affair, who was supposed to be replaced by another Congressman who stepped down when forced to reveal that he too was having a sexual affair, which led to the election of a new Speaker of the House who now has been indicted for lying about payments covering up his sexual contact with a boy.

Yikes.

John Fund says not long after Denny Hastert’s thing become public, people started to wonder where he got the cash. 

Denny Hastert — the former House speaker now indicted for violating regulations on bank withdrawals that were originally meant to snare drug dealers — was a man of integrity according to his former House colleagues.

By the sketchy standards of Illinois politics, that might well have been true. But his fall from grace should prompt other questions about how a former high-school teacher who held elective office from 1981 to 2007 could leave Congress with a fortune estimated at $4 million to $17 million. When he entered Congress in 1987, he was worth at most $275,000. Hastert was the beneficiary of very lucky land deals while in Congress; and since leaving office, he has earned more than $2 million a year as a lobbyist. That helps explain how he could agree to pay $3.5 million to a former student to cover up an ancient sex-abuse scandal.

Denny Hastert used to visit the Wall Street Journal, where I worked while he was the speaker. He was a bland, utterly conventional supporter of the status quo; his idea of reform was to squelch anyone who disturbed Congress’s usual way of doing business. I saw him become passionate only once, when he defended earmarks — the special projects such as Alaska’s “Bridge to Nowhere” that members dropped at the last minute into conference reports, deliberately leaving no time to debate or amend them. Earmarks reached the staggering level of 15,000 in 2005, and their stench helped cost the GOP control of Congress the next year. …

The NY Times continues to pound the Clintons. This was front page above the fold on Saturday.

To commemorate the 10th anniversary of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, Petra Nemcova, a Czech model who survived the disaster by clinging to a palm tree, decided to pull out all the stops for the annual fund-raiser of her school-building charity, the Happy Hearts Fund.

She booked Cipriani 42nd Street, which greeted guests with Bellini cocktails on silver trays. She flew in Sheryl Crow with her band and crew for a 20-minute set. She special-ordered heart-shaped floral centerpieces, heart-shaped chocolate parfaits, heart-shaped tiramisù and, because orange is the charity’s color, an orange carpet rather than a red one. She imported a Swiss auctioneer and handed out orange rulers to serve as auction paddles, playfully threatening to use hers to spank the highest bidder for an Ibiza vacation.

The gala cost $363,413. But the real splurge? Bill Clinton.

The former president of the United States agreed to accept a lifetime achievement award at the June 2014 event after Ms. Nemcova offered a $500,000 contribution to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation. The donation, made late last year after the foundation sent the charity an invoice, amounted to almost a quarter of the evening’s net proceeds — enough to build 10 preschools in Indonesia.

Happy Hearts’ former executive director believes the transaction was a quid pro quo, which rerouted donations intended for a small charity with the concrete mission of rebuilding schools after natural disasters to a large foundation with a broader agenda and a budget 100 times bigger.

“The Clinton Foundation had rejected the Happy Hearts Fund invitation more than once, until there was a thinly veiled solicitation and then the offer of an honorarium,” said the former executive director, Sue Veres Royal, who held that position at the time of the gala and was dismissed a few weeks later amid conflicts over the gala and other issues. …

… Outside Cipriani, protesters, mostly Haitian-Americans frustrated with the earthquake reconstruction effort, stood behind barricades holding signs.

“Clinton, where is the money?” they chanted. “In whose pockets?”

Jonathan Tobin posts on the above NY Times story.

… But the main point to be gleaned from this incident isn’t just that Clinton has established a lucrative personal appearance business that beggars anything ever attempted by any other retired public official, let alone a former commander-in-chief. The problem is that Happy Hearts is a real charity that does hands-on good works in the Third World. The Clinton Foundation is, at best, a charitable middleman, that funds events where people talk about charity and how best to strategize its implementation. As we’ve learned since Schweizer’s book appearance, the foundation does relatively little actual charity work on its own. Only ten percent of the vast sums it raises from the wealthy and the powerful around the world is spent on charitable efforts. The rest goes to funding conferences where the Clintons and their donors pose as philanthropists and to pay the salaries and travel expenses of those who work for the foundation. That means the money goes to feather the nests of Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton and, to a lesser extent, does the same for many of their faithful family retainers such as Clinton attack machine hit man Sidney Blumenthal.

So while the large army of Clinton fans and apologists can say that there is nothing illegal going on here, what they aren’t saying is that the Clintons don’t merely leech off the rich. They also live off of the money they extract from smaller charities that do real good works. That’s not merely “distasteful,” it’s disgraceful and unethical. …

Jack Kelly has more on Clinton corruption.

… In more than two decades in national politics, Hillary Clinton has succeeded only at peddling influence and orchestrating smear campaigns against women her husband molested. Ms. Clinton is greedy and corrupt. She has a reckless disregard for the truth and national security. She has a record barren of achievement.

Ms. Clinton is popular with her party despite all this. What that says about Democrats isn’t flattering.

Not only does Clinton hardly ever leave her bubble, Jennifer Rubin says when she steps out she takes her bubble with her. 

More interesting than Bill Clinton’s shell company and the Clinton Foundation’s receipt of thousands of dollars from the just-indicted and widely reviled FIFA (but arguably a FIFA beneficiary, Qatar, whom also sent the foundation money, is much worse ethics-wise), is the newest Clinton pretense. Not the Southern accent — the other pretense. The New York Times dutifully tells us (because the Clinton campaign told them!) that she has “immersed herself in dense briefing papers” (yet has no views we can easily discern) and brings snippets of information from her roundtables back to her policy team. This is nearly as bad as taking and passing on Libya analysis from Sid Blumenthal.

Remember these are handpicked participants. So she is getting information from people who the campaign has made certain will not create discord, disagreement or doubt. Aside from the monochromatic composition of the group, she picks up whatever stray phrase one of these participants happen to use. She now wants to call education an “opportunity system” because one of her hand-picked attendees used that pretentious buzz phrase.

It is remarkable that even when she ventures outside her bubble, it is not actually outside the bubble. She brings her bubble with her in the form of a preselected, fully vetted, non-combative audience.