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Jonathan Tobin says the Egyptians are right to ignore advice coming from our government.
The Obama administration has been forced to navigate a difficult path in the past week. The fall of the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt has forced it to balance its rhetorical support of democracy with the necessity to acknowledge that the military coup that forced Mohamed Morsi from office was a product of a popular backlash against the Brotherhood’s excesses and drive for total power. But as much as Washington has slowly begun distancing itself from the strategy of embracing the Brotherhood that characterized U.S. policy for the past year, the president still can’t quite grasp the realities of the conflict in Cairo. The U.S. decision to pressure the military to release Islamists they have arrested, or to include them in a new government, is exactly the sort of tone deaf advice that has cratered America’s reputation in Egypt.
But the fact that the military is rejecting Obama’s advice and thereby endangering the more than $2 billion a year they get in U.S. aid shows just how out of touch the administration is with the reality on the ground. The administration is treading a bit more carefully on Egypt than it was a year ago, when they were strong-arming the army into letting the Brotherhood take over. But Obama and his foreign policy team need to wrap their brains around a basic truth that the Egyptian generals are forced to deal with: the conflict with a group like the Brotherhood is a zero-sum game. Allowing the Islamists freedom to organize or letting Morsi re-enter the government would merely give the Brotherhood a leg up in its effort to seize back the reins of power. And anyone, include the fools in the State Department and the White House, who thinks the Brotherhood will stop at anything once they gain back what they have lost, understands nothing about the movement. …
Good column from David Goldman on the problems of blacks.
My earliest memory is looking up at a circle of black and white faces. I was seated in the living room of the family home in Edison Township, N.J., and the group I saw was the local chapter of the NAACP. My association with the civil rights movement goes back to the age of two. The year would have been 1953 or 1954, and my parents were left-wing activists, among the very few white people involved at the time. Their activism was deep. In 1950, my father drove from New York with a group of ColumbiaUniversity students to protest the impending execution of Willie McGee, a black man convicted and eventually electrocuted for the alleged rape of a white woman in Mississippi. I followed my parents’ example: in my senior year of high school I organized and led a student civil rights demonstration and marched next to Andrew Young. You can look it up.
I believe in civil rights as much now as I did then. That’s why it’s painful to watch the degeneration of the NAACP with its silly petition to persuade the Justice Department to bring a civil rights case against George Zimmerman. The leaders of what used to be a civil rights movement want to talk about everything but the main problem afflicting black people in the United States. That is the breakdown of the black family.
Just 29% of black women over the age of 15 were married in 2010, according to the Census Bureau’s comprehensive Current Population Survey. That compares to 54% of white women. At all ages, black women were about half as likely to be married as white women. That is an astonishing number.
The percentage of out-of-wedlock births has risen from 18% in 1980 to 40% in 2010. 29% of white births were non-marital, against 73% for black births. That’s nearly three-quarters of all black births. …
John Fund reports on progress in the IRS investigation.
Finally we may be getting somewhere in the IRS scandal involving the targeting and harassment of tea-party groups applying for tax exemptions. At Thursday’s House Government Reform and Oversight hearing, some names were at last attached to some of the IRS’s most questionable actions in the scandal.
Back in May, top IRS officials Steven Miller and Lois Lerner insisted that “rogue” agents in the Cincinnati office acted without direction from IRS headquarters in Washington. But Elizabeth Hofacre, who was the Cincinnati agent in charge of reviewing flagged tea-party applications, says she “had no autonomy or authority” to act on applications and so she simply sat on them. She blamed Carter Hull, an IRS lawyer in Washington, for the delays, saying that he directed her in how to treat problem cases but never gave her any feedback.
For his part, Hull said he had tried to tackle the growing pile of applications, but he was told they must first go through a multi-tier review that involved Lerner’s office and that of William Wilkins, the IRS’s chief counsel. Wilkins, a political appointee of President Obama’s, has been involved in Democratic politics as a staffer and campaign donor for over 30 years. Wilkins’s office did not have its first meeting with IRS officials on the tea-party applications until August 2011; at that point the applications had been pending for so long that it was decided that the IRS needed to demand updated information from the tea-party groups, further slowing down the process. Hull says that the behavior of IRS management during this whole process was “unusual.”
It’s taken nearly three months to begin to peel back the onion and discover the chain of command in the IRS scandal. …
Peggy Noonan adds some details.
… When the scandal broke two months ago, in May, IRS leadership in Washington claimed the harassment of tea-party and other conservative groups requesting tax-exempt status was confined to the Cincinnati office, where a few rogue workers bungled the application process. Lois Lerner, then the head of the exempt organizations unit in Washington, said “line people in Cincinnati” did work that was “not so fine.” They asked questions that “weren’t really necessary,” she claimed, and operated without “the appropriate level of sensitivity.” But the targeting was “not intentional.” Ousted acting commissioner Steven Miller also put it off on “people in Cincinnati.” They provided “horrible customer service.”
House investigators soon talked to workers in the Cincinnati office, who said everything they did came from Washington. Elizabeth Hofacre, in charge of processing tea-party applications in Cincinnati, told investigators that her work was overseen and directed by a lawyer in the IRS Washington office named Carter Hull.
Now comes Mr. Hull’s testimony. And like Ms. Hofacre, he pointed his finger upward. Mr. Hull—a 48-year IRS veteran and an expert on tax exemption law—told investigators that tea-party applications under his review were sent upstairs within the Washington office, at the direction of Lois Lerner.
In April 2010, Hull was assigned to scrutinize certain tea-party applications. He requested more information from the groups. After he received responses, he felt he knew enough to determine whether the applications should be approved or denied.
But his recommendations were not carried out.
Michael Seto, head of Mr. Hull’s unit, also spoke to investigators. He told them Lois Lerner made an unusual decision: Tea-party applications would undergo additional scrutiny—a multilayered review. …
The IRS is still a scandal and ethanol is still a boondoggle says Walter Russell Mead.
… This is a mess even before you consider the foibles of the source of the lion’s share of this ethanol: corn. Before the Renewable Fuel Standard set these arbitrarily high targets, the US used just 23 percent of its corn to produce ethanol. Last year 43 percent of our corn crops went towards producing the biofuel. That shift has driven up global prices for corn, starving the world’s poor and potentially fueling food riots. And to what end? Corn ethanol is categorized as a biofuel, but it doesn’t reduce emissions. Advanced biofuels produced from such sources as sugarcane and algae pass the green test, but they haven’t yet proven their commercial viability. …
Michael Walsh celebrates Jay Leno unbound.
… As Jay Leno nears the end of his nearly 22-year run as the host of The Tonight Show, the lantern-jawed comic with the thick Boston accent finds himself in an unusual predicament. Having won the War of Johnny Carson’s Succession (1992), successfully fended off a challenge from upstart Conan O’Brien during a brief interregnum (2009–10), and gracefully bowed to the inevitable with the accession of Jimmy Fallon to the late-night throne next year, Leno now finds himself cast in a new role: conservative hero.
Leno’s always played his politics, or lack of them, close to the vest, insisting that his job as host of The Tonight Show is business, not politics. And he’s right, of course. Hard as it may be for younger readers to believe, there was a time in this country when not everything was political, and you could get through one whole day at work without talking about #$%@BUSH!*&@ or Barry with your co-workers.
At the same time, comics used to play their historical role as jesters to the hilt, mocking the Kennedys at the height of Camelot (Vaughn Meader), whaling away at a scowling Tricky Dick (David Frye), impersonating a bumbling Gerald Ford (Chevy Chase) or an inarticulate George H. W. Bush (Dana Carvey). Reagan and Clinton also came in for substantial comic abuse during their administrations, and Will Ferrell made an entire cottage industry out of ridiculing George W. Bush.
And then, with the election of Barack Obama, it all stopped. Suddenly, there was nothing funny about the president of the United States — not his massive ego, his pomposity, his Bush-like inability to speak extemporaneously, his golf game, even his jump shot. “The only person that’s made jokes about President Obama in the last five years is him,” observed comic Colin Quinn. “He has to do it at the White House Correspondents Dinner. That’s how bad it’s gotten.”
Enter Leno Unbound. …
Whadaya know? Good advice from the NY Times – low tech mosquito deterrent.
… our friends had come up with a solution that saved us from having to deal with bug repellents or, worse, bites and itches.
On a low table, they set up a small electric fan, perhaps 12 inches high, that swept back and forth, sending a gentle breeze across the grassy area where people were sitting.
That was it. No citronella candles, no bug zappers, no DEET, nothing expensive or high-tech. Yet amazingly, it worked. As far as I could tell, no mosquitoes flew into the vicinity of the simulated wind; nobody was bitten.
As we left, I asked our hosts about the fan idea; they credited a mutual friend at the barbecue. He, in turn, paid tribute to a friend of his: Frank Swift, president of Swift Food Equipment Inc. in Philadelphia.
So I reached out to Mr. Swift, who replied by e-mail. “The solution came from trying to think like a bug,” he explained, “and realizing I don’t like flying into a 15 m.p.h. wind.” …