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John Fund thinks the IRS investigation is making progress.
… The IRS scandal is growing, not shrinking. Perhaps that’s one reason the Obama administration is changing its tune. The White House has come a long way since Obama’s May statement that he wanted “to make sure we find out exactly what happened on this.”
Since then, Obama’s loyal troops in Congress have gone out of their way not to uncover the truth but to attack the integrity and competence of IRS Inspector General George. Obama’s admonition last month that we ignore the “phony scandals” has been picked up by many of his elite media supporters. As any journalist who has followed the trajectory of most Washington scandals knows, such behavior is a clue that those looking into the IRS scandal might be getting warm.
Mark Steyn contemplates the “transition” being managed by H & H (Huma and Hillary).
Let us put aside, as he so rarely does, Anthony Weiner’s spambot penis, and consider his wife and putative First Lady. By universal consent, Huma Abedin is “smart, accomplished” (The Guardian), “whip-smart” (The Week), “accomplished” (Time), “smart and accomplished” (The Daily News) – oh, and did I mention “accomplished” (Forbes)?
So, if she’s so smart, what has she accomplished? Let us put aside her Muslim Brotherhood family background – let us put it aside in the same corner as Anthony Weiner’s infidel penis, the Muslim Brotherhood being one of the few things on the planet rising even more spectacularly than Anthony. Instead, consider merely the official résumé. Huma Abedin’s present employment is as “head of Hillary Clinton’s transition team.” Mrs. Clinton, you may recall, was once Secretary of State. This was way back in January. Since then, she has been “transitioning away from government to become more involved in her family’s charitable foundation.” You can’t make a “transition” without a “transition team.” Well, not in America. Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands recently abdicated and managed to transition away from being Queen back to the non-Queen sector without benefit of a “transition team.” But it would be entirely unreasonable to expect U.S. Cabinet officials to attempt the same tricky maneuver.
In 2001, Bill Clinton was struggling with his own “transition back to private life.” He was reported by his ever-reliable New York Times stenographer Adam Nagourney to be having difficulty “trying to place his own telephone calls.” The telephone is a technology many older people can have problems with, particularly if they had a full-time staff to place their calls throughout the Nineties. The 1890s, that is. So, alone in retirement at Chautauqua, a bewildered Bill would pick up the speaking tube and bark, “Hello, Central, get me Gennifer Flowers.” Fortunately, he was able to make a full recovery, and has since earned (according to CNN) $89 million in “speaking fees.” But few others could manage their “transition” quite that adroitly. So, for the past six months, the smart, accomplished Huma Abedin has been the executive supremo of Mrs. Clinton’s “transition team.” …
… My old boss Conrad Black recently pointed out that “the economy can’t recover as it did in the past until more people are adding value” – making and doing, something real. Instead, 40 percent of Americans perform minimal-skilled service jobs about to be rendered obsolete by technology, and almost as many pass their productive years shuffling paperwork from one corner of the land to another in various “professional services” jobs that exist in order to facilitate compliance with the unceasing demands of the microregulatory state. The daily Obamacare fixes – which are nothing to do with “health” “care” but only with navigating an impenetrable bureaucracy – are the perfect embodiment of the Republic of Paperwork.
But nobody adds lack of value like America’s present leadership class – diversicrats, community organizers, and “power couples” comprising somebody handling the transition of a government official and somebody handling the transition in his boxers. If this is “smart” and “accomplished,” no wonder Putin’s laughing his head off.
Mark with a Corner post on the closing embassies.
Today, across Africa, Araby and Asia, from Nouakchott to Dhaka, the diplomatic facilities of the United States are closed. There’s a Tsarnaev out there, somewhere – could be the Mahgreb, the Levant, the Horn of Africa, the Indian sub-continent – who knows? So, as Richard Fernandez writes, “Shelter in place, this time globally.”
Maybe it will work. Maybe by the end of the day there will be, unlike Benghazi a year on, men in custody. But if not? Daniel Pipes:
Don’t know about you, but I find this pre-emptive cringing unworthy of a great country, even humiliating. Why do we allow a bunch of extremist thugs to close us down, rather than the reverse? For what purpose do we pay for the world’s best military and largest intelligence services if not to protect ourselves from this sort of threat?
He’s right: This is unseemly and, for a supposedly serious power, deeply damaging. You can always tell the US consulate from those of other western governments pretty much anywhere on the planet – from the line of US citizens outside the gates shuffling slowly but patiently along the sidewalk in hopes of penetrating the security perimeter before everybody goes home for the day. It’s not a consulate or embassy as those terms were traditionally understood; it’s a fort. That’s why the municipal authorities prefer new ones to be built out on the edge of town as far away as possible, rather than wrecking and disfiguring everything in the heart of downtown.
So we no longer fly the flag on Main Street, but build ugly, impenetrable fortresses walled off from the communities they’re meant to be part of – the antithesis of “diplomacy”, in many respects. So Daniel’s question deserves an answer: What’s the point of building fortresses if they “pre-emptively cringe” before terrorist threats?
The United States is “sheltering in place” across the entire Muslim world. How is that not a victory for our enemies – and one bought without having to blow up a single thing?
Matthew Continetti with a tour de force as he writes about the suck up culture of the NY Times as displayed in their latest interview with the president.
I have been studying the transcript of the recent New York Times interview of President Barack Obama. It is a remarkable document—remarkable not for the facts it contains, but for the way it reveals the mentalities of the participants. Remarkable, too, in so far as the transcript allows a curious reader to see, in detail, how journalism is manufactured. Through a process of extraction, distillation, production, transportation, and marketing no less sophisticated than the global supply chain that brings Southeast Asian textiles to your neighborhood big-box store, a rambling, snobbish, and platitudinous discussion between three well-compensated Washingtonians is transformed into “news” stories such as “Obama Says Income Gap Is Fraying U.S. Social Fabric,” “Obama Says He’ll Evaluate Pipeline Project Depending on Pollution,” and—in a brilliant but assuredly non-ironic instance of begging the question—“Obama Intends to Let Health Care Law Prove Critics Wrong by Succeeding.”
I use quotation marks to surround the word “news” because none of the stories that resulted from the Times interview contained information I did not already know. Income inequality has been the president’s justification for higher taxes and spending since at least 2005, when he spoke at Galesburg, Ill., for the first time as a senator. Earlier this summer, in a ballyhooed speech at Georgetown University, he announced the criteria by which he would decide the fate of the Keystone Pipeline. “Proving the critics wrong by succeeding” is more of an aspiration than a thought or deed: a form of self-assertion, a challenge to opponents, a boast—the mental equivalent of listening to amped-up music before Coach O delivers a motivational speech to the team.
A sort of pep talk to the liberal bourgeoisie, Democrat and Republican, is what the New York Times under Jill Abramson has become. One reads it to confirm rather than challenge one’s perceptions of the world. No mystery what those perceptions are: The Republicans are no good, the president is doing the best he can, equality marches on, America is powerless to influence other countries, illegal immigration has no downside, the government should not be trusted except when it regulates the economy, “institutional” (i.e., invisible) racism plagues contemporary society, traditional religion is a curiosity, etc. Reading the transcript of the president’s interview is valuable because it allows you to see just how self-contained the bobo world is. The paper and its intended audience, in this case the president, form a closed circuit. …
… The Times has participated in an act of political evasion breathtaking in its shamelessness. One might object that the range of topics was limited to the subject of the president’s speaking tour on the economy. But if that were the case, why did the Times agree to such ground rules in the first place? Aren’t the readers of the New York Times interested in hearing President Obama’s answers to tough questions about the various controversies at home and crises abroad? Perhaps they are not. Perhaps they are far more interested in having their public morality, their view of the world, of who is bad and who is good, of what is important and what is not, confirmed for them in a series of advertisements for President Obama and the Democratic Party. Perhaps they are more interested in sitting back and watching, passively, as the president shifts the public’s attention away from scandal and turmoil, and defines his domestic opponents in preparation for budget and debt fights. Perhaps readers of the Times and writers of the Times and editors of the Times are not interested in information per se. What interests them is affirmation.
“Thanks, guys. Appreciate you,” the president says as the reporters leave the room. Of that I have no doubt.
Fortune with a good post on the jobs report.
… Industry-wise, retail, as well as restaurants and bars, have accounted for the largest share of the job gains: In July, the retail industry added 47,000 jobs and 352,000 over the past 12 months. Within leisure and hospitality, employment in food services and drinking places rose by 38,000 in July and 381,000 over the year.
To be sure, there are more low-wage jobs in the economy overall than there are high-wage jobs. Nonetheless, low-wage jobs have made up more of the recent job gains than usual. Retail, restaurant, and bar workers make up about 22% of the overall workforce. But in July, those categories accounted for over 52% of the job growth. ..