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Someone who is objective and qualified to know, has written about more of the devastating results of this president. Michael Oren’s book is reviewed by Matthew Continetti.

By the summer of 2013, President Obama had convinced several key Israelis that he wasn’t bluffing about using force against the Iranian nuclear program. Then he failed to enforce his red line against Syrian dictator Bashar Assad—and the Israelis realized they’d been snookered. Michael Oren, the former Israeli ambassador to the United States, recalls the shock inside his government. “Everyone went quiet,” he said in a recent interview. “An eerie quiet. Everyone understood that that was not an option, that we’re on our own.”

Reading Oren’s new memoir Ally, it’s clear that Israel has been on her own since the day Obama took office. Oren provides an inside account of relations between the administration of Barack Obama and the government of Bibi Netanyahu, and his thesis is overwhelming, authoritative, and damning: For the last six and a half years the president of the United States has treated the home of the Jewish people more like a rogue nation standing in the way of peace than a longtime democratic ally. Now the alliance is “in tatters.”

Oren is not a conservative looking to make a political issue of support for Israel. Indeed, by Washington Free Beacon standards, he’s something of a squish. The author of a classic history of U.S. involvement in the Middle East and a sometime professor at Yale, Harvard, and Georgetown, Oren served for five years as a contributor to the New Republic, has contributed to the New York Review of Books, and supports what he calls a “two-state situation” focused on institution-building and economic aid to the West Bank. He’s a member of the Knesset, but not of Netanyahu’s Likud Party. He joined the comparatively dovish Kulanu Party last December.

Oren’s credentials and relationships make him hard to dismiss. …

Michael Rubin posts on the reception of Oren’s book by the administration. 

The Obama administration is reportedly furious with Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States, for publishing a behind-the-scenes account of U.S.-Israeli relations during the early portion of President Obama’s administration. Suffice to say, the Oren memoir did not stick to Obama administration talking points.

The umbrage that Obama administration officials and the State Department take is just a bit hypocritical. After all, multiple Obama administration officials were veterans of earlier administrations and, during the Republican interlude, wrote books. For example, former George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton administration diplomat Dennis Ross castigated Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in The Missing Peace, his 2004 memoir of behind-the-scenes efforts to win Palestinian-Israeli peace. For example, he wrote for just one example, “What went wrong? To put it simply, Netanyahu was not willing to concede anything.” Never mind Yasser Arafat’s terrorism and two-faced behavior; it was Netanyahu’s fault. How awkward, then, it must have been to return to Obama’s National Security Council to work on Middle East issues after having badmouthed Netanyahu, who had also returned to office in the meantime. …

John Hinderaker says the president has disgraced himself again.

I haven’t written anything about the murders in Charleston, mostly because I haven’t had time. I expect to talk about the murders tomorrow on the Laura Ingraham show, where I will be guest hosting. I would encourage you to tune in for that. In the meantime, one obvious point can be made: Barack Obama has disgraced himself, once again, by trying to make political hay out of the murders:

“I have had to make statement like this too many times. Communities like this have had to endure tragedies like this too many times,” Obama said. “We don’t have all the facts. But we do know that once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun.”

Murder is a terrible thing, but thankfully, the homicide rate in the United States is dropping. It was lower in 2014 than in 2013, and lower in 2013 than in 2012. Today, it is only about half what it was during the Clinton administration. In the intervening years, private handgun ownership has exploded. Many argue, and statistics support the claim, that broader gun ownership has contributed to this stunning reduction in the homicide rate. …

The president is hostage to a fact free brain so David Harsanyi tries to help.

President Barack Obama responded to the horrific shooting at a historic black church in Charleston that left nine dead with an earnest statement—well, other than that contention that was completely untrue.

Once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun. … We as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries.

Let’s set aside the assertion that it’s too easy to obtain guns in America and deal with the implication that we are somehow uniquely violent or that “mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries.” The president has made this claim in various ways and with various qualifiers.

Parlez vous Hebdo? Because surely the president recalls that in January of this year two gunmen entered the office of a satirical magazine in France with an assortment of guns and murdered 11 people (and injured 11 more). After leaving, they killed a police officer. And in a marketplace catering to Jews another five were murdered and 11 wounded. France is, allegedly, an advanced country, is it not? Perhaps if Obama had attended the anti-terror rally in Paris like every other leader of advanced countries did, his recollection would be sharper.

It only takes some quick research to discover that rampage killers, acts of terror (as the Charleston shooting most certainly is), school attacks, spree killers are not unique to the United States. …

Ilya Somin writes on the tenth anniversary of the infamous Supreme Court Kelo decision.

June 23 marks the 10th anniversary of Kelo v. City of New London, when the Supreme Court held in a 5-4 ruling that government could use eminent domain to take private property for “economic development.” At issue in the case were 15 homes, including a little pink house owned by Susette Kelo, in the city of New London, Conn., which wanted to transfer the properties to a private nonprofit with plans to revitalize the area. But after the court ruled and the houses were razed (with the exception of Ms. Kelo’s, which was moved at private expense), those plans fell through.

The condemned land remains empty, housing only a few feral cats. After Hurricane Irene in 2011, the city used it as a dumping ground for debris. Yet the first real development since the Supreme Court’s controversial decision might now be on its way: New London Mayor Daryl Finizio, who was elected in 2011 as a critic of the government taking, recently announced a plan to turn the former site of Ms. Kelo’s house into a park that will “serve as a memorial to all those adversely affected by the city’s use of eminent domain.”

It would be a fitting tribute. Although the Supreme Court’s decision in Kelo was consistent with precedent, it was nonetheless a serious error. …

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Some of our favorites comment on Trump. Andrew Malcolm is first.

… When was the last time a really rich guy said he wanted to take the presidency from incompetent, untrustworthy pols and restore America’s grandeur? 1992. Ross Perot.

The tiny Texas billionaire with the personal grudge against George H.W. Bush bought his way on to sufficient state ballots to split the conservative vote and hand the White House to — Oh, look! — these same Clintons.

Coincidence?

Trump’s very presence on a crowded Republican debate stage with serious contenders not only denies a genuine candidate priceless national exposure. It makes a mockery of those putting themselves through the rigorous selection process of a political party’s leader. And of conscientious voters watching.

Remember now, Trump was an original birther who credits himself with forcing Obama to release his birth certificate. There’s a qualification to occupy the Oval Office, right?

Yes, Trump is a TV/casino/real estate showman. “You’re Fired!” So was Barnum. Both provided popular entertainment. But Barnum focused on harmless hoaxes like the Fiji Mermaid and General Tom Thumb, the “Smallest Person Ever to Walk Alone.” …

Peter Wehner calls Trump a stain on the GOP.

… What, then, could possibly be the attraction of Trump to conservatives? For some, it seems, the attraction is found in the Trump style, which is precisely the concern. Mr. Trump’s announcement speech was rambling, vague, shallow, simplistic, insulting, ad hominem, and self-obsessed. He has no governing agenda and no governing philosophy; all he has is an attitude. And that attitude is crude and off-putting. Trump would be temperamentally and intellectually unqualified to run for the state legislature; running for president is ludicrous. But that’s where we are.

I’m not quite sure what the Republican Party and the conservative movement can do about Trump. If he polls well enough to be invited to participate in the debates, it’s hard to keep him out. Doing so might become a rallying point for him and his supporters. But here’s what I know they shouldn’t do, which is to be sympathetic towards him and his candidacy. Nor should they speak as if Trump has something to useful and constructive to offer. To say, as Fox’s Eric Bolling did, that Trump is “refreshing.” He isn’t.

Donald Trump is a stain on the Republican Party and conservatism, and leaders of the party shouldn’t be afraid to say so.

Michael Gerson says it is politics by hammer.

… Trump’s policy agenda is too skeletal or absurd to analyze. He will pick better generals to defeat the Islamic State. He will slap a 25 percent tariff on Chinese goods. He will build a wall across the continent and make Mexico pay for it.

There is little chance that Trump will have much influence when votes are tallied — even the most celebrity-blinded Republican is unlikely to forget Trump’s political contributions to Harry Reid — but there is plenty of time for mischief between now and then. And the largest risk, in the end, is not to Republicanism but to populism.

Trump’s form of populism promises not reform but deliverance. The answer to every problem is a leader who can make deals, knock heads and get results. The defects of democracy, in this view, are remedied by the strongman. It is not a coincidence that Trump expresses admiration for Vladimir Putin. “He’s doing a great job,” says Trump, “in rebuilding the image of Russia and also rebuilding Russia, period.”

This is populism as Caesarism. The fact that Trump is laughable in the role of Caesar does not make the argument less pernicious. And it tells you a lot about the blind anger of the anti-establishment right that Rush Limbaugh is more favorable to Donald Trump than to Jeb Bush.

Jonathan Tobin says Trump means the GOP has joined the circus. 

If you thought the 2016 Republican presidential race was going to be a sober affair, Donald Trump had other ideas. Trump jumped into the GOP race today with a long rant in which he boasted of his prowess as a negotiator and dismissed his competitors as a bunch of unintelligent losers who deserve to be thrown off a game show. It was a characteristically bizarre as well as an oddly compelling piece of political theater. But rather than attempting to analyze the laundry list of positions on the issues that he put forward in his speech, pundits would do better to ask whether Trump really intends to spend the next several months attempting to win the Republican nomination. If Trump is prepared to invest the time and the considerable personal wealth he has at his disposal in this enterprise, then the attitude toward his candidacy should not be limited to the mixture of dismay and mockery with which it was greeted by most of the press. A clownish, albeit opinionated celebrity, Trump doesn’t deserve serious consideration from the voters. But his presence will disrupt the race in ways that we can’t predict. Like it or not, if he meant what he said today, the Republican Party has just joined the Donald Trump circus.

Given Trump’s history as publicity hound rather than an actual office seeker, it’s entirely possible that this announcement was, like his past flirtations with presidential runs, merely a stunt that will soon be retracted. If so, the rest of the GOP field will breathe a sigh of relief. Though not even the least interesting or intelligent of the Republican presidential wannabes need fear a comparison with Trump as a potential commander-in-chief, they should all be worried about the way the developer/television personality has of sucking the oxygen out of a room. …

Last, but not least, we have Kevin Williamson continuing his evisceration of the Donald.

… Trump brings out two of the Right’s worst tendencies: the inability to distinguish between entertainers and political leaders, and the habit of treating politics as an exercise in emotional vindication.

Whatever Trump’s appeal is to the Right’s populist elements, it isn’t policy. He is a tax-happy crony capitalist who is hostile to free trade but very enthusiastic about using state violence to homejack private citizens — he backed the Kelo decision “100 percent” and has tried to use eminent domain in the service of his own empire of vulgarity — and generally has about as much command of the issues as the average sophomore at a not especially good college, which is what he was (sorry, Fordham) until his family connections got him into Penn.

If it’s not the issues, it’s certainly not the record of the man himself. Never mind that he’s a crony capitalist, he’s not even an especially good crony capitalist: The casino racket is protected from competition by a strict cartel-oriented licensing regime, but Trump, being the type of businessman who could bankrupt a mint, managed to be the biggest loser in Atlantic City, which is no small feat. He is a lifelong supporter of Democratic politicians, including Chuck Schumer and, awkwardly, the woman against whom he is pretending to run: Hillary Rodham Clinton. He is dishonest (“Oh, he lies a great deal,” said architect and collaborator Philip Johnson) and has shown himself to be a bad bet for bankers, business partners, and wives, among others.

“But he speaks his mind!” shout the Trumpkins. Indeed, he does, in a practically stream-of-consciousness fashion: His announcement speech was like Finnegans Wake as reimagined by an unlettered person with a short attention span. The value of speaking one’s mind depends heavily on the mind in question, and Trump’s is second-rate. …

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Two Eyes Watching has more on the newly discovered link between the brain and the immune system.

In last week’s issue of Nature, researchers led by University of Virginia neuroscientist Jony Kipnis describe their discovery of lymphatic vessels in the tissues beneath a mouse’s skull. Their observation was unexpected, to say the least. Lymphatic vessels complement the body’s blood vessels, carrying immune cells throughout the body instead of blood. But for decades, researchers had assumed that the lymphatic system stopped short of the brain. Kipnis’ team’s discovery turns that assumption on its head. “They’ll have to change the textbooks,” Kevin Lee, PhD, chairman of the UVA Department of Neuroscience, recounted telling his colleaguesupon hearing of their finding.

The science linking the brain and the body has come a long way in the past decade. Disorders like autism are anecdotally associated with gastrointestinal problems in children, and mouse models of autism have been empirically associated with the balance of their gut microbes. Similarly, an over-reacting immune system is associated with autism-like behaviors in mice, and can even transform strep throat into a psychiatric illness called PANDAS, a deceivingly cuddly acronym that stands for pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders associated with streptococci.

But how are gut microbes, the immune system, and neurons connected in the first place? Until recently, this was anyone’s bet. …

From Debrief Daily, a member of AA takes exception to the poor press the group is receiving.

… It seems every few years a new study comes out saying how Alcoholics Anonymous isn’t effective, or is a cult, or that something else has come along that is better. I’m not going to link to them, but they’re easily found online. I’m only here to share my own experience, since that’s the only thing that I can speak on with any authority. YMMV and all that.

To say I was a mess when I arrived in AA would be an understatement. If you’re interested in what got me to AA in the first place, you can read it all here. So any amount of hope was a welcomed change of pace. And I got that hope in AA. The hope that maybe I wouldn’t die drunk in the streets, or worse yet crud away like one of those old drunks you see. “But isn’t AA a cult?” you ask? It might be. I’ve never been in a cult. I will say that AA doesn’t fit the full definition of a cult, in that the requested behavior isn’t what I would call “deviant”. They ask that I not drink, turn my life over to god as I understand god, and help others do the same. Let’s look at their own description for a minute:

Alcoholics Anonymous is an international fellowship of men and women who have had a drinking problem. It is nonprofessional, self-supporting, multiracial, apolitical, and available almost everywhere. There are no age or education requirements. Membership is open to anyone who wants to do something about his or her drinking problem.

Oh yeah, the god thing. This is the hangup I most often see. …

Mental Floss has a list of 15 amazing things aluminum foil can do. Pickerhead says it’s still not bacon which can do anything.

Aluminum foil is more than just a handy way to wrap leftovers. The thin metal sheets are all-purpose powerhouses around the house, ready to help you with your cooking, cleaning, laundry, and even home decorating. There are plenty of unusual ways to put foil to use. You can use it as a …

1. Dish scrubber

When the rough side of your sponge isn’t enough for set-in grease and food remains, use a balled-up piece of foil to wipe your baking dishes clean. Foil works just as well on a dirty grill. 

2. Scissor sharpener 

Fold a piece of aluminum foil several times. Cut a few straight lines through the foil with your dull scissors. This cleans and sharpens the blade, sort of like a razor strop. …

So where do hummingbirds go in the winter? Garden and Gun has answers.

Where do they go? It’s what every Southern gardener wonders at some point after the ruby-throated hummingbirds disappear. These “glittering garments of the rainbow,” as John James Audubon called them, delight us all summer not only with their beauty, but also with their antics. They’re better than daytime drama. They are the bold and the beautiful, the young and the restless. Despite their appearance on genteel needlepoint pillows, they are not genteel. Despite eating sugar water, they are not sweet. At home in Oxford, Mississippi, I love to watch the dominant male who perches in our Bradford pear, hidden among the leaves, waiting for another hummer to even think about sipping his nectar. Should one try, he zings after it and bullies it off, then loops back to his perch and resettles himself with a cartoonish fluffing of his throat gorget. But round about time the maples start to redden and Ole Miss has started conference play, I realize we haven’t seen him in a day or two. And the feeder activity is definitely lighter. Then, a week later, the hummers have disappeared entirely. Long after the last sugar water has been dumped and the feeders washed and stored, the question remains. Where do they go?

As it turns out, they go exactly where many of us would go: due south for the winter. In late summer, the rubythroats start drifting down through North America, and when they reach the Gulf states, they linger. They gorge until they’ve doubled their weight, to roughly a nickel’s worth. Then they lift off one evening and fly through the night without stopping, a trip of five hundred miles, to winter in Mexico and Central America. Their migratory route appears to be hardwired into the genetic codes packed inside their BB-size brains. …

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Victor Davis Hanson in an essay points out the politics and hypocrisy of the left’s charges of racism and sexism.

… Certainly, few on the left worried much about the slurs against Sarah Palin during and after her vice-presidential run. America’s overclass in the media and leftist politics constructed a sexist portrait of a clueless white-trash mom in Wasilla, Alaska, mindlessly having lots of kids after barely graduating from the University of Idaho. …

… The Black Caucus rarely if ever comes to the defense of Justice Clarence Thomas when, periodically, liberal commentators suggest that he was and is unqualified, and is largely a token black conservative. No one suggests that the New York Times is on an anti-Latino crusade against Marco Rubio in trying to fashion a story of recklessness from the paltry evidence of his receiving one traffic ticket every four years. … 

… Would Elizabeth Warren really have become a Harvard law professor had she not, during her long years of academic ascent, identified herself (at least privately, on universities’ pedigree forms) as a Native American? Ward Churchill, with his beads and Indian get-up, won a university career that otherwise might have been scuttled by his mediocrity, his pathological untruths, and his aberrant behavior. Why would the current head of the NAACP in Spokane, Wash., a white middle-class woman named Rachel Dolezal, go to the trouble of faking a genealogy, using skin cosmetics and hair styling, and constructing false racist enemies to ensure that she was accepted as a victimized black woman?

The obvious inference is that Ms. Dolezal assumed that being a liberal black woman brought with it career opportunities in activist groups and academia otherwise beyond her reach as a middle-class white female of so-so talent. …

… Poor George Zimmerman. His last name stereotyped him as some sort of Germanic gun nut. But had he just ethnicized his maternal half-Afro Peruvian identity and reemerged as Jorgé Mesa, Zimmerman would have largely escaped charges of racism. He should have taken a cue from Barack Obama, who sometime in his late teens at OccidentalCollege discovered that the exotic nomenclature of Barack Obama radiated a minority edge, in a way that the name of his alter ego, Barry Soetoro, apparently never quite had. …

… Fourth, sexism and racism are abstractions of the liberal elite that rarely translate into praxis. Barack Obama could have done symbolic wonders for the public schools by taking his kids out of Sidwell Friends and putting them into the D.C. school system. Elizabeth Warren could have cemented her feminist populist fides by vowing to stop flipping houses. Feminist Bill Clinton could have renounced all affairs with female subordinates. Eric Holder could have vowed never to use government jets to take his kids to horse races. In solidarity with co-eds struggling with student loans, Hillary Clinton could have promised to limit her university speaking fees to a thousand dollars per minute rather than the ten thousand dollars for each 60 seconds of chatting that she actually gets, and she might have prefaced her public attacks on hedge funds by dressing down her son-in-law. …

Some of our favorites have comments on Rachel Dolezal – the fake black. Peter Wehner is first.

There is something comedic and pathetic about the story of Rachel Dolezal. Ms. Dolezal, 37, is the president of the NAACP local chapter in Spokane, Washington and a part-time Africana Studies professor at EasternWashingtonUniversity. It turns out that after claiming for years that she was black – including on applications, posting pictures on a Facebook page of an African-American man she falsely claimed was her father, and insisting that her adopted brother (who is black) was her child – Ms. Dolezal is actually white. Her birth certificate proves it. And her biological parents, Ruthanne and Lawrence Dolezal, have confirmed it.

“Rachel has wanted to be somebody she’s not. She’s chosen not to just be herself but to represent herself as an African American woman or a biracial person. And that’s simply not true,” Ruthanne Dolezal said. Her mother said Rachel began to “disguise herself” in 2006 or 2007.

This interview shows Dolezal being caught in her lie. It also seems quite likely that her claim that she’s received racially motivated hate letters and pictures was a ruse. (Police are still investigating, but say that whoever placed the mail must have had access to the mailbox, as it was not processed through the regular mail.) …

Jonathan Tobin is next.  

… it is precisely the sort of race-baiting activism that Dolezal (who was an active participant in the Baltimore protests over the killing of a black man by the police) has engaged in that makes such a goal unattainable. Ironically, rather than working to create a post-racial society in which the barriers between the races are demolished, Dolezal and many of her adopted comrades in what now styles itself the civil rights movement seek to entrench the divides between us and even to enshrine them in law. It is the advocates of affirmative action and other counter-productive race entitlements that hold onto the notion that America is a country primarily motivated by old hatreds long after such notions have become marginal or altogether discarded. Rather than the virtually non-existent supporters of Jim Crow being the problem, it is the Al Sharptons and their lesser-known acolytes such as Dolezal who do the most to render us a nation divided by race in 2015. …

John Hinderaker quotes a comment to one his Power Line posts.

… Maybe there is a silver lining to the Rachel Dolezal / Sen. Elizabeth Warren race frauds. If racial identity and gender identity have become matters of personal preference, i.e., how you choose to identify yourself is how the world should treat you, then the entire race-based / gender-based affirmative action apparatus could be brought to its knees. Suppose all the Asian students denied admission to Harvard decided to check the “African-American” box on their applications, instead of the “Asian” box? When challenged, they would simply say, “Well, I always felt more African-American than Asian; heck, I’ve never even been to Asia.” Suppose every single “White” or “Asian” student randomly checked a “Latino,” “African-American” or “Native-American” box on their applications? How would the affirmative-action apparatus sort out what the applicant’s “real” races are? Would they administer blood tests? Demand photographs (which would be far from conclusive)? How would they deal with the ever-increasing numbers of applicants with mixed racial origins?

If self-declaration is all that’s necessary, then why shouldn’t all students declare the “race” that maximizes their chances of admission? A mass protest of this nature would expose the affirmative-action apparatus for what it is: a quota system based upon self-proclaimed ethnic origin. What if an entire class of high-school seniors all agreed to check the same box, as a form of protest? “We’re all Native Americans, here!” What would the race-baiters do? …

Kevin Williamson writes on the Trump entrance in a piece titled “Witless Ape Rides Escalator.”

… Donald Trump, being Donald Trump, announced his candidacy at TrumpPlaza, making a weird grand entrance via escalator — going down, of course, the symbolism of which is lost on that witless ape. But who could witness that scene — the self-made man who started with nothing but a modest portfolio of 27,000 New York City properties acquired by his millionaire slumlord father, barely out of his latest bankruptcy and possibly headed for another one as the casino/jiggle-joint bearing his name sinks into the filthy mire of the one U.S. city that makes Las Vegas look respectable, a reality-television grotesque with his plastic-surgery-disaster wife, grunting like a baboon about our country’s “brand” and his own vast wealth — and not see the peerless sign of our times?

On the substance, Trump is — how to put it gently? Oh, why bother! — an ass. Not just an ass, but an ass of exceptionally intense asininity. China? “China’s leaders are like Tom Brady, and the U.S. is like a high-school football team,” Trump says. And so, we should do what? …

… We’ve been to this corner of Crazytown before. If we’re going to have a billionaire dope running for the presidency, I prefer Ross Perot and his cracked tales of Vietnamese hit squads dispatched to take him out while Lee Atwater plotted to crash his daughter’s wedding with phonied-up lesbian sex pictures. …

Speaking of crackpots, Bjørn Lomborg has ideas about how Pope Ignoramus could really help the poor. 

Pope Francis’s concern for the poor is clear, so it is understandable that climate change is the topic of his forthcoming Encyclical — a Papal letter that is sent out to the world. Climate change will hit the most destitute people first and worst.

But the Pope after his letter is officially published, he should tread carefully. The climate policies of today will do little for the poor.

A cruel truth is that almost every significant challenge on Earth hits the poor more than the wealthy: hunger, a lack of clean drinking water, malaria, indoor air pollution. The question then is how we make the most difference for the most vulnerable.

A reasonable starting point is to listen to the world’s citizens. A United Nations survey of 7.5 million people found that many other issues are deemed more urgent. The top priorities were education, health, jobs, corruption and nutrition. Of 16 problems, the climate was rated the lowest priority.

One reason may be that today’s climate policies themselves have a cost, which predominantly hits the poor.

Cuts in electricity consumption require price hikes that hurt the worst-off and elderly. Relying on expensive green energy sources like wind and solar power makes electricity pricier and less available for those who desperately need it.

The biggest problem with today’s climate change policies is that they will cost a fortune for very little good. …

The cartoonists have fun with the two frauds – Rachel Dolezal and Donald.

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John Fund writes on the expected summer of our discontent.

It’s hard to get 96 percent of people to agree on anything, but last month’s Wall Street Journal/NBC poll found that 96 percent of those surveyed believe we are in for a summer of racial unrest. In the wake of Ferguson and Baltimore, it’s time for some reflection on how we got here.

This year marks two significant anniversaries. In August 1965, the Watts riots broke out in Los Angeles, leading to 34 deaths and $300 million in property damage. Coming after the passage of well-intentioned Great Society welfare programs, the riots made clear that government spending wasn’t going to solve all the problems of urban America.

Indeed, another 50th anniversary we mark this year is that of a seminal work that helped explain why government would be no panacea: Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s “The Negro Family: A Call for National Action.” Published in 1965 and known as “the Moynihan Report,” it burst many bubbles of liberal thinking.

After analyzing reams of relevant social-science research, Moynihan concluded that the decline of the two-parent family was fueling the growth of poverty and unemployment, and leading to rising crime rates in black neighborhoods and schools without discipline.

“At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family. It is the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community at the present time,” Moynihan argued. Families that consisted solely of single female parents weakened the role of black men as authority figures in the lives of children. Moynihan also warned: “The steady expansion of welfare programs, as of public assistance programs in general, can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States.”

Sadly, as soon as Moynihan’s report was leaked to the media, it came under withering assault from his fellow liberals. …

… We cannot ignore culture. “The poverty rate among black married couples has been in single digits every year since 1994,” the economist Thomas Sowell has noted. “Behavior matters and facts matter, more than the prevailing social visions or political empires built on those visions.” …

Heather Mac Donald has more on the people who try to explain away the new crime wave in our cities.

I recently observed in these pages that violent crime is rising sharply in many cities. Having spoken with police officers and commanders, I hypothesized that the growing reluctance of cops to engage in proactive policing may help explain the spike in violent crime. The past nine months have seen unprecedented antipolice agitation dedicated to the proposition that bias infects policing in predominantly black communities, a message echoed at the highest reaches of government and the media. Officers in urban areas are encountering high levels of resistance and hostility when they try to make an arrest.

Faced with the prospect of ending up in a widely distributed video if an arrest goes awry, and possibly being indicted, officers tell me that they are increasingly reluctant to investigate suspicious behavior. St. Louis police chief Sam Dotson last fall called the relationship between decreased enforcement and increased crime the “Ferguson effect.” I noted that if it continues the primary victims will be the millions of law-abiding residents of inner-city neighborhoods who rely on police to keep order.

A sharply critical response from some quarters greeted the article. It belonged to a “long line of conservative efforts to undermine racial equality,” wrote ColumbiaUniversity law professor Bernard Harcourt in the Guardian, decrying the article as “crime fiction” intended to undermine “the country’s newest civil rights movement.” Charles Blow of the New York Times called me a “fear-mongering iron fist-er” who was using “racial pathology arguments” and “smearing the blood running in the street onto the hands holding the placards.” The article was part of a “growing backlash against police reform,” an attempt to “shame people who dare to speak up about police abuse,” wrote journalist Radley Balko in the Washington Post. …

Thomas Sowell shows how the left is promoting “micro-totalitarianism.”

… Word games are just one of the ways of silencing politically incorrect ideas, instead of debating them. Demands that various conservative organizations be forced to reveal the names of their donors are another way of silencing ideas by intimidating people who facilitate the spread of those ideas. Whatever the rationale for wanting those names, the implicit threat is retaliation.

This same tactic was used, decades ago, by Southern segregationists who tried to force black civil rights organizations to reveal the names of their donors, in a situation where retaliation might have included violence as well as economic losses.

In a sense, the political left’s attempts to silence ideas they cannot, or will not, debate are a confession of intellectual bankruptcy. But this is just one of the left’s ever-increasing restrictions on other people’s freedom to live their lives as they see fit, rather than as their betters tell them.

Current attempts by the Obama administration to force low-income housing to be built in middle class and upscale communities are on a par with forcing people to buy the kind of health insurance the government wants them to buy — ObamaCare — rather than leaving them free to buy whatever suits their own situation and preferences.

The left is not necessarily aiming at totalitarianism. But their know-it-all mindset leads repeatedly and pervasively in that direction, even if by small steps, each of which might be called “micro-totalitarianism.”

During celebrations of the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta, George Will points out the 1803 SCOTUS decision of Marbury v. Madison was part of the picket fence of defenses of the original document. 

Americans should light 800 candles for the birthday of the document that began paving the meandering path to limited government. Magna Carta laid down the law about “fish weirs” on English rivers, “assizes of darrein presentment,” people being “distrained to make bridges,” and other “liberties. . . to hold in our realm of England in perpetuity.” But what King John accepted at Runnymede meadow on June 15, 1215, matters to Americans because of something that happened 588 years later in the living room of Stelle’s Hotel in Washington, where the Library of Congress now sits.

Although the “great charter” purported to establish certain rights in “perpetuity,” almost everything in it has been repealed or otherwise superseded. Magna Carta led to parliamentary supremacy (over the sovereign — the king or queen) but not to effective limits on government. The importance of the document was its assertion that the sovereign’s will could be constrained.

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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. …