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Like a spoiled child who must always be the center of attention, the president promises to double down on the lawless presidency with an executive edict on immigration. Jonathan Tobin posts on what might result.

… Hispanics may be grateful for the temporary end of the deportations but it will not escape their notice that in doing so the president has ended any chance of immigration reform for the rest of his term. Nor will they be unaware that a GOP successor will invalidate amnesty with a stroke of the pen as easily as the president has enacted them. Republicans will rightly understand that there is no dealing with an administration that would rather go outside the law than first negotiate in good faith with a newly elected Congress on immigration. Nor can they be blamed for thinking any deal based on promises on border enforcement will be worthless with a president who thinks he has the right to simply order non-enforcement of the laws he doesn’t like.

Even more to the point, the orders will create a backlash among the rest of the electorate that always results when presidents begin to run afoul of both the law and public opinion. A lawless presidency is something that is, by definition, dysfunctional, and that is a term that has already defined Obama’s second term up until this point. Democrats who are counting on wild applause from their base should understand that just as Republicans learned that domination by their Tea Party wing undermines their electoral viability, they too should be wary of governing from the left.

The spectacle of mass amnesty without benefit of law will shock ordinary voters, including many who are Democrats or who think the immigration system should have been fixed. After the orders, responsibility for the failure to do so will rest on Obama, not the Republicans. What the president may be doing with these orders is to remind the voters that parties that grow too comfortable with exercising authority without benefit of law must be taught a lesson, one that will be paid for by his would-be Democratic successor in 2016. Rather than building his legacy, the president may actually be ensuring that his time in office is remembered more for his lack of respect for the rule of law than any actual accomplishments.

Free Beacon staff post on liberal Ron Fournier’s reaction to GruberGate.

… “The problem is the central attribute you have to have as any leader, in any walk of life and certainly in government is trust,” Fournier said. “This president has destroyed the credibility of his administration himself and government itself.”

Fournier said the administration’s mistakes, on top of fallout over Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber’s embarrassing comments, have made Obamacare increasingly difficult to defend.

“In the long run, as somebody who would like to see this bill work, I think they have really undermined it,” Fournier said. “And it’s going to be harder to defend it.”

Scott Johnson of Power Line calls our attention to six great minutes on Special Report Monday night.

What is Grubergate all about? It’s about more than Gruber’s obnoxious account of the passage of Obamacare, an account that exposes the illegitimacy of the law’s enactment. It is about more than the corruption through which he has profited handsomely in selling the law. It is about more than the sewage he pumped out for distribution by the White House, by Democratic leaders and officeholders, and by the mainstream media adjunct of the Democratic Party; the sewage was intended for consumption by the American public.

Grubergate is about all of these things and more. I haven’t seen anything that captures the phenomenon better than this six-minute video produced by the team at Fox News Special Report with Bret Baier (below). The video names names and cites sources. It is a superb piece of work and a genuine contribution to understanding. …

Real Clear Politics links to video and transcripts of last night’s Special Report by Brett Baier.

BRET BAIER, SPECIAL REPORT: In Brisbane, President Obama tried hard to downplay Jonathan Gruber’s role in the formation of his health care bill. Gruber, who was not only paid by HHS, but eventually made millions from other federal agencies and states has talked often about his time dealing directly with President Obama.

JONATHAN GRUBER: We had a meeting in the oval office with several experts including myself. …

… SEN. JOHN KERRY: According to Gruber, who has been our guide on a lot of this, it’s somewhere in the vicinity of an $8 billion cost. …

… REP. NANCY PELOSI: I don’t know if you have seen Jonathan Gruber’s of MIT’s analysis, in comparison to the status quo vs. what will happen in our bill. …

… SEN. HARRY REID: Jonathan Gruber is one of the most respected economists in the world said in today’s Washington Post, here’s a quote — “here’s a bill that reduces the deficit, covers 30 million people, 30 million more people and has a promise of lowering premiums. …

Peter Wehner says now the president is lying about his lies.

This is getting pathological. According to this story in Politico, President Obama, when asked whether he had intentionally misled the public in order to get the law passed, he replied: “No. I did not.” He actually did, repeatedly. Here’s just one example–on the president’s pledge that “If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan, period”–that comes to us courtesy of Glenn Kessler, who works for that well-known right-wing outlet the Washington Post. …

… No American can take joy in saying this, but the evidence clearly warrants it: We have a president who is lying about his lies. It’s not good for him, for the office of the presidency, or for our political culture. He might try telling the truth. At this point it won’t salvage his presidency, but it might begin to repair some of the extraordinary damage to his credibility.

Craig Pirrong, The Streetwise Professor, is in good form when posting on presidential lies.

The Gruber Gone Wild video collection (with a release a day!) demonstrates graphically that Obamacare is a 900+ ply tissue of lies. And Obama himself was the lead retailer of those lies.

Today gives another example of Obama’s mendacity. He came out against Keystone, again, but this time on the grounds that it just helps Canada, and doesn’t benefit the US one whit:

“Understand what this project is: It is providing the ability of Canada to pump their oil, send it through our land, down to the Gulf, where it will be sold everywhere else. It doesn’t have an impact on U.S. gas prices,” …

… The mendacity is not all that’s appalling about this statement. One of Obama’s worst habits has been giving allies the back of his hand, while he sucks up to sworn enemies. Canada is a close ally, and has been for decades. Indeed, even now Canada is actually contributing military force to Obama’s otherwise farcical anti-ISIS coalition.

Fat lot of good that it does them. Who needs friends like Canada when you have Iran? Can Canada help Obama build a legacy? No! So what good are they? (Please ignore the fact that the legacy will really be a nuclear arms race in the other Gulf: the Arab/Persian one.)

The sad thing is that we are in for two years of this mendacity. It will be all Alinsky, all the time. Non-stop demagoguery in the service of progressive causes. He lost, but we’ll pay.

So we will have to update Twain. No longer should you say “lies, damn lies, and statistics.” The version that will describe the next two years is: “lies, damn lies, and Obamaisms.”

Matthew Continetti rightly points out some of the big losers will be the Central and South Americans who’ll hit the road north. He also has suggestions for a GOP response to unilateral executive actions.

Last summer the southern border disappeared. Unaccompanied minors from Central and South America surged across the Rio Grande. Desperate parents had sent their children thousands of miles north. The impoverished girls and boys were housed in ramshackle facilities before being sent elsewhere. The images were heartbreaking. They seemed drawn from a post-apocalyptic future. And they were entirely preventable.

Government policy caused the border crisis of 2014. Not the 2008 law granting special protections to unaccompanied minors from countries other than Mexico, an ex post facto explanation meant to blame George W. Bush. It was after Obama’s 2012 authorization of deferred action and work permits for illegal immigrants who arrived in the United States as children that such migration spiked. This blatant political move, as well as the president’s repeated pledge to amnesty the rest of the illegal migrant population, spurred the uptick in border crossings. The humanitarian tragedy followed.

Now Obama wants to repeat history. Indeed, he wants to expand the 2012 program so that it encompasses not hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants but millions of them. …

Jennifer Rubin also posts advice for how the GOP can react.

The Republicans are wrestling with a knotty question: How do they thwart President Obama’s unilateral power grab on immigration reform without splintering the GOP, damaging their prospects in 2016 and assenting to a dangerous precedent?

It would seem any approach in response to an executive edict legalizing millions of people should take into account these three concerns, but with two caveats.

First, it may not be possible to stop the president. Nevertheless, they should make sure that the GOP has the most to gain and the Democrats the most to lose if he proceeds.

Second, prospective 2016 presidential candidates will differ widely on what they consider damaging to the party’s prospects, and theirs. Governors who intend to run against WashingtonD.C. might not care if the GOP shuts down the government, wreaks havoc on the country and gets bogged down in a war with the president. They are going to run against D.C., against Hillary Clinton (who will be forced to cheer the action) and against any GOP senators who contributed to the mess. Among the 2016 GOP presidential aspirants in the Senate, Ted Cruz (Tex.) is the most at risk of a meltdown or another government shutdown. He was largely responsible for the first shutdown and another one would eviscerate any hope he might have of being seen as a responsible figure. Meanwhile, he and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) must satisfy their core supporters whose sense of political realism is shaky. …

The immigration move is so outrageous, even David Brooks is aghast.

… This move would also make it much less likely that we’ll have immigration reform anytime soon. White House officials are often misinformed on what Republicans are privately discussing, so they don’t understand that many in the Republican Party are trying to find a way to get immigration reform out of the way. This executive order would destroy their efforts.

The move would further destabilize the legitimacy of government. Redefining the legal status of five million or six million human beings is a big deal. This is the sort of change we have a legislative process for. To do something this seismic with the stroke of one man’s pen is dangerous.

Instead of a nation of laws, we could slowly devolve into a nation of diktats, with each president relying on and revoking different measures on the basis of unilateral power — creating unstable swings from one presidency to the next. If President Obama enacts this order on the transparently flimsy basis of “prosecutorial discretion,” he’s inviting future presidents to use similarly flimsy criteria. Talk about defining constitutional deviancy down.

I’m not sure why the Obama administration has been behaving so strangely since the midterms. Maybe various people in the White House are angry in defeat and want to show that they can be as obstructionist as anyone. Maybe, in moments of stress, they are only really sensitive to criticism from the left flank. Maybe it’s Gruberism: the belief that everybody else is slightly dumber and less well-motivated than oneself and, therefore, politics is more about manipulation than conversation. …

We close with a Washington Post Editorial. 

DEMOCRATS URGING President Obama to “go big” in his executive order on immigration might pause to consider the following scenario:

It is 2017. Newly elected President Ted Cruz (R) insists he has won a mandate to repeal Obamacare. The Senate, narrowly back in Democratic hands, disagrees. Mr. Cruz instructs the Internal Revenue Service not to collect a fine from anyone who opts out of the individual mandate to buy health insurance, thereby neutering a key element of the program. It is a matter of prosecutorial discretion, Mr. Cruz explains; tax cheats are defrauding the government of billions, and he wants the IRS to concentrate on them. Of course, he is willing to modify his order as soon as Congress agrees to fix what he considers a “broken” health system.

That is not a perfect analogy to Mr. Obama’s proposed action on immigration. But it captures the unilateral spirit that Mr. Obama seems to have embraced since Republicans swept to victory in the midterm elections. He is vowing to go it alone on immigration. On Iran, he is reportedly designing an agreement that he need not bring to Congress. He already has gone that route on climate change with China. …

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The 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall was noted by John Fund.

… Who brought about the fall of the Berlin Wall and then the end of the Cold War? The ordinary people of Eastern Europe, especially those who rose up in protest, deserve pride of place. But for different reasons, history will record two paramount figures: Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. Reagan first saw the Wall in 1978, when he told his aide Peter Hannaford: “We’ve got to find a way to knock this thing down.” After he became president, he returned in 1982 and enraged the Soviets by taking a couple of ceremonial steps across a painted borderline. Then, in 1987, he overruled his own State Department by giving a momentous speech in which he implored the Soviet general secretary directly: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

Peter Robinson, a former Reagan speechwriter, tells the fascinating story of how the president’s entreaty came to symbolize the desire for freedom in Europe. After Robinson inserted the now-famous phrase into a draft of the speech, it became a topic of bitter dispute inside the administration. Officials tried over and over to have the section removed, judging that it was too provocative and theatrical. White House officials believed the language would embarrass Gorbachev. A June 2, 1987, memo from a National Security Council aide called the speech “mediocre” and said it represented a “lost opportunity.” The edited draft that was attached to this memo had the entire “tear down this wall” section crossed out.

But Reagan insisted on leaving his sock-it-to-’em lines in, and they proved a hit with the many thousands of people who heard it — they cheered for a full 20 seconds. Many Reagan aides remained unconvinced, but two and a half years later, the Wall had been entirely swept away. …

Israeli technology finds ways to store fruits and vegetables with much less spoilage. Times of Israel has the story. This would do much to end world hunger.

Between a third and half of the food grown today never makes it to market. Produce of all kinds is “lost” to spoilage and disease, due mostly to transportation, storage, and other logistics issues. As a result, hundreds of millions of people still go hungry – but they don’t have to, thanks to an invention by Israel’s Pimi Agro. By applying a formula based on hydrogen peroxide — “with a few key additions,” said Nimrod Ben-Yehuda, CTO and co-founder of Pimi – fruits and vegetables remain fresh and viable for up to 10 weeks, significantly cutting losses due to rot and deterioration during the transportation process.

Technology like this, he believes, could make a major dent in world hunger. In the coming months, Pimi plans to introduce these inventions to the United Nations and other international institutions. “For places like India, China, and Africa, this is huge, especially because the transportation systems in those areas are slow and refrigeration is hard to come by,” said Ben-Yehuda. “You could walk from one end of India to the other over a period of 10 weeks, and the vegetables and fruit you carry will still be fresh for the entire time.” …

… Although Pimi’s business prospects appear great, it’s not just about profit for Ben-Yehuda. “We see this technology as something that can really help to alleviate world hunger, and we plan to submit a report to the UN, the World Bank, and other international groups, showing how wide-scale deployment of our methods could help feed many more people,” he said. “The world – especially the developing world – loses half of what it grows to rot and disease. More produce means more food to feed hungry people, and our methods don’t require the deployment of dangerous chemicals or expensive and questionable genetic reformulations of fruits and vegetables. With our products, we believe there will be enough to go around to make a real dent in world hunger.”

The Atlantic has an article on a new type of old playground. This is long but thought provoking. It calls into question the ways children are raised today.

A trio of boys tramps along the length of a wooden fence, back and forth, shouting like carnival barkers. “The Land! It opens in half an hour.” Down a path and across a grassy square, 5-year-old Dylan can hear them through the window of his nana’s front room. He tries to figure out what half an hour is and whether he can wait that long. When the heavy gate finally swings open, Dylan, the boys, and about a dozen other children race directly to their favorite spots, although it’s hard to see how they navigate so expertly amid the chaos. “Is this a junkyard?” asks my 5-year-old son, Gideon, who has come with me to visit. “Not exactly,” I tell him, although it’s inspired by one. The Land is a playground that takes up nearly an acre at the far end of a quiet housing development in North Wales. It’s only two years old but has no marks of newness and could just as well have been here for decades. The ground is muddy in spots and, at one end, slopes down steeply to a creek where a big, faded plastic boat that most people would have thrown away is wedged into the bank. The center of the playground is dominated by a high pile of tires that is growing ever smaller as a redheaded girl and her friend roll them down the hill and into the creek. “Why are you rolling tires into the water?” my son asks. “Because we are,” the girl replies.

It’s still morning, but someone has already started a fire in the tin drum in the corner, perhaps because it’s late fall and wet-cold, or more likely because the kids here love to start fires. Three boys lounge in the only unbroken chairs around it; they are the oldest ones here, so no one complains. One of them turns on the radio—Shaggy is playing (Honey came in and she caught me red-handed, creeping with the girl next door)—as the others feel in their pockets to make sure the candy bars and soda cans are still there. Nearby, a couple of boys are doing mad flips on a stack of filthy mattresses, which makes a fine trampoline. At the other end of the playground, a dozen or so of the younger kids dart in and out of large structures made up of wooden pallets stacked on top of one another. Occasionally a group knocks down a few pallets—just for the fun of it, or to build some new kind of slide or fort or unnamed structure. Come tomorrow and the Land might have a whole new topography.

Other than some walls lit up with graffiti, there are no bright colors, or anything else that belongs to the usual playground landscape: no shiny metal slide topped by a red steering wheel or a tic-tac-toe board; no yellow seesaw with a central ballast to make sure no one falls off; no rubber bucket swing for babies. There is, however, a frayed rope swing that carries you over the creek and deposits you on the other side, if you can make it that far (otherwise it deposits you in the creek). The actual children’s toys (a tiny stuffed elephant, a soiled Winnie the Pooh) are ignored, one facedown in the mud, the other sitting behind a green plastic chair. On this day, the kids seem excited by a walker that was donated by one of the elderly neighbors and is repurposed, at different moments, as a scooter, a jail cell, and a gymnastics bar.

The Land is an “adventure playground,” although that term is maybe a little too reminiscent of theme parks to capture the vibe. In the U.K., such playgrounds arose and became popular in the 1940s, as a result of the efforts of Lady Marjory Allen of Hurtwood, a landscape architect and children’s advocate. Allen was disappointed by what she described in a documentary as “asphalt square” playgrounds with “a few pieces of mechanical equipment.” She wanted to design playgrounds with loose parts that kids could move around and manipulate, to create their own makeshift structures. But more important, she wanted to encourage a “free and permissive atmosphere” with as little adult supervision as possible. The idea was that kids should face what to them seem like “really dangerous risks” and then conquer them alone. That, she said, is what builds self-confidence and courage.

The playgrounds were novel, but they were in tune with the cultural expectations of London in the aftermath of World War II. Children who might grow up to fight wars were not shielded from danger; they were expected to meet it with assertiveness and even bravado. Today, these playgrounds are so out of sync with affluent and middle-class parenting norms that when I showed fellow parents back home a video of kids crouched in the dark lighting fires, the most common sentence I heard from them was “This is insane.” (Working-class parents hold at least some of the same ideals, but are generally less controlling—out of necessity, and maybe greater respect for toughness.) That might explain why there are so few adventure playgrounds left around the world, and why a newly established one, such as the Land, feels like an act of defiance. …

 

 … I used to puzzle over a particular statistic that routinely comes up in articles about time use: even though women work vastly more hours now than they did in the 1970s, mothers—and fathers—of all income levels spend much more time with their children than they used to. This seemed impossible to me until recently, when I began to think about my own life. My mother didn’t work all that much when I was younger, but she didn’t spend vast amounts of time with me, either. She didn’t arrange my playdates or drive me to swimming lessons or introduce me to cool music she liked. On weekdays after school she just expected me to show up for dinner; on weekends I barely saw her at all. I, on the other hand, might easily spend every waking Saturday hour with one if not all three of my children, taking one to a soccer game, the second to a theater program, the third to a friend’s house, or just hanging out with them at home. When my daughter was about 10, my husband suddenly realized that in her whole life, she had probably not spent more than 10 minutes unsupervised by an adult. Not 10 minutes in 10 years.

It’s hard to absorb how much childhood norms have shifted in just one generation. …

 

… In 1972, the British-born geography student Roger Hart settled on an unusual project for his dissertation. He moved to a rural New England town and, for two years, tracked the movements of 86 children in the local elementary school, to create what he called a “geography of children,” including actual maps that would show where and how far the children typically roamed away from home. Usually research on children is conducted by interviewing parents, but Hart decided he would go straight to the source. The principal of the school lent him a room, which became known as “Roger’s room,” and he slowly got to know the children. Hart asked them questions about where they went each day and how they felt about those places, but mostly he just wandered around with them. Even now, as a father and a settled academic, Hart has a dreamy, puckish air. Children were comfortable with him and loved to share their moments of pride, their secrets. Often they took him to places adults had never seen before—playhouses or forts the kids had made just for themselves.

Hart’s methodology was novel, but he didn’t think he was recording anything radical. Many of his observations must have seemed mundane at the time. For example: “I was struck by the large amount of time children spend modifying the landscape in order to make places for themselves and for their play.” But reading his dissertation today feels like coming upon a lost civilization, a child culture with its own ways of playing and thinking and feeling that seems utterly foreign now. The children spent immense amounts of time on their own, creating imaginary landscapes their parents sometimes knew nothing about. The parents played no role in their coming together—“it is through cycling around that the older boys chance to fall into games with each other,” Hart observed. The forts they built were not praised and cooed over by their parents, because their parents almost never saw them. …

 

… When Claire Griffiths, the Land’s manager, applies for grants to fund her innovative play spaces, she often lists the concrete advantages of enticing children outside: combatting obesity, developing motor skills. She also talks about the same issue Lady Allen talked about all those years ago—encouraging children to take risks so they build their confidence. But the more nebulous benefits of a freer child culture are harder to explain in a grant application, even though experiments bear them out. For example, beginning in 2011, Swanson Primary School in New Zealand submitted itself to a university experiment and agreed to suspend all playground rules, allowing the kids to run, climb trees, slide down a muddy hill, jump off swings, and play in a “loose-parts pit” that was like a mini adventure playground. The teachers feared chaos, but in fact what they got was less naughtiness and bullying—because the kids were too busy and engaged to want to cause trouble, the principal said.

In an essay called “The Play Deficit,” Peter Gray, the BostonCollege psychologist, chronicles the fallout from the loss of the old childhood culture, and it’s a familiar list of the usual ills attributed to Millennials: depression, narcissism, and a decline in empathy. In the past decade, the percentage of college-age kids taking psychiatric medication has spiked, according to a 2012 study by the American College Counseling Association. Practicing psychologists have written (in this magazine and others) about the unique identity crisis this generation faces—a fear of growing up and, in the words of Brooke Donatone, a New York–based therapist, an inability “to think for themselves.”

In his essay, Gray highlights the work of Kyung-Hee Kim, an educational psychologist at the College of William and Mary and the author of the 2011 paper “The Creativity Crisis.” Kim has analyzed results from the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking and found that American children’s scores have declined steadily across the past decade or more. The data show that children have become:

“less emotionally expressive, less energetic, less talkative and verbally expressive, less humorous, less imaginative, less unconventional, less lively and passionate, less perceptive, less apt to connect seemingly irrelevant things, less synthesizing, and less likely to see things from a different angle.”

The largest drop, Kim noted, has been in the measure of “elaboration,” or the ability to take an idea and expand on it in a novel way.

The stereotypes about Millennials have alarmed researchers and parents enough that they’ve started pushing back against the culture of parental control. Many recent parenting books have called for a retreat, among them Duct Tape Parenting, Baby Knows Best, and the upcoming The Kids Will Be Fine. In her excellent new book, All Joy and No Fun, Jennifer Senior takes the route that parents are making themselves miserable by believing they always have to maximize their children’s happiness and success. …

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John Podhoretz on the electorate’s repudiation of the president.

… So why did the anti-Obama focus fail in 2012 but win in 2014? The president wants to believe it’s because he’s being blamed for Washington’s dysfunction. But consider just a partial list of horribles the American people have had to face since 2012.

ObamaCare went live in October 2013, and the billion-dollar website that was supposed to guide people through their choices died. Americans learned that the Veteran’s Administration had been falsifying data to hide its dreadful record of failed care. Border states were flooded with tens of thousands of children who had been led to believe that they (and eventually their parents) would be legalized after their horrific journeys. The Internal Revenue Service acknowledged that it had targeted groups hostile to the president, then denied it, and then claimed the emails detailing the actual events had somehow vanished. Americans were given contradictory and confusing details about how authorities were going to prevent the spread of Ebola inside the United States. After we were told the war on jihadist terror was basically a thing of the past, there came the rise of ISIS. The president erased his own “red line” when it came to Syria’s use of chemical weapons. Vladimir Putin took a bite out of a neighboring country and is getting ready to take another. That is quite a record to take to the electorate.

No one believes that the Republican Party is popular. And yet, on Election Day, Republicans won eight new Senate seats (with a ninth on the way). The party will have its largest majority in the House of Representatives since 1946. Republicans reside in 31 of the nation’s 50 governor’s mansions, by far the highest number in modern times. In 24 states, the GOP holds the governorship and both houses of the state legislature; Democrats are in the same position in only six states. Republicans will now control 67 of the nation’s 98 state legislative chambers, up from 59. And all this despite the fact that no one believes that the Republican Party is popular.

The New York Times reported on election night that the president did not feel “repudiated.” At his press conference, Obama said the Republicans had had a “good night.” They had indeed, but only because he had been repudiated. 

As the president sneaks up to his immigration move, Ross Douthat asks if he will go ahead and disgrace himself. 

In the months since President Obama first seem poised — as he now seems poised again — to issue a sweeping executive amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants, we’ve learned two important things about how this administration approaches its constitutional obligations.

First, we now have a clear sense of the legal arguments that will be used to justify the kind of move Obama himself previously described as a betrayal of our political order. They are, as expected, lawyerly in the worst sense, persuasive only if abstracted from any sense of precedent or proportion or political normality.

Second, we now have a clearer sense of just how anti-democratically this president may be willing to proceed. …

… we do seem to be in an era whose various forces — our open-ended post-9/11 wars, the ideological uniformity of the parties — are making a kind of creeping caudillismo more likely.

But if that evil must come, woe to the president who chooses it. And make no mistake, the president is free to choose. No immediate crisis forces his hand; no doom awaits the country if he waits. He once campaigned on constitutionalism and executive restraint; he once abjured exactly this power. There is still time for him to respect the limits of his office, the lines of authority established by the Constitution, the outcome of the last election.

Or he can choose the power grab, and the accompanying disgrace.

The Lid posts on CNBC telling anchors to go easy on the president and the healthcare act.

During her Friday program on the “Fox Business Network,” Melissa Francis made a truly scandalous revelation. “when I was at CNBC, I pointed out to my viewers that the math of Obamacare simply didn’t work. Not the politics by the way; just the basic math. And when I did that, I was silenced.” Francis eventually brought on Charlie Gasparino another FBN employee who used to work at CNBC who told of the time the network’s anchors where called into Jeff Immelt the head of GE’s office (GE owned CNBC at the time) for a discussion whether or not the network was being fair to President Obama and his economic policies.

Francis began her program with two of the recent Jonathan Gruber videos where he talks about in crafting Obamacare, he picked verbiage that would fool the stupid Americans. Francis who has a degree in economics from Harvard, followed the clip with her account of being taken out to the woodshed at CNBC explaining that the basic math of Obamacare didn’t make sense”

“Straight from the horse’s mouth, Jonathan Gruber telling you that the architects of Obamacare think you’re stupid and most importantly, they are absolutely counting on your lack of economic understanding. They aren’t the only villains in this story though. They are also depending on the liberal media to help them cover up the truth. So far NBC, ABC, The L.A. Times” and Associated Press and others, have been only too happy to comply. Those outlets have not even mentioned the video evidence, from Jonathan Gruber. It is shocking.” …

The Wall Street Journal reports on areas in the country populated by investment brokers with issues.

DELRAY BEACH, Fla.—At Burt & Max’s Bar and Grille one day this summer, stockbroker Rafael Golan gave a group of elderly people a financial seminar. After his hourlong talk on topics from real estate to annuities, the free food arrived.

Dinners like this have landed him clients before. Some later lodged complaints against him, making him part of a cluster of brokers with troubled regulatory records that a Wall Street Journal analysis identified in this corner of Florida.

Among those clients were Pinny and Rebecca Slotnick, octogenarians who became Mr. Golan’s customers in 2003 after a dinner and later filed a complaint with regulators alleging he mishandled their accounts. He paid them a $125,000 settlement this year. He denies any wrongdoing in this or any other case.

A Wall Street Journal investigation, analyzing the records of about 550,000 stockbrokers, identified 16 U.S. hot spots like this one where troubled brokers tend to concentrate. Parts of New York’s Long Island and South Florida, long notorious for “boiler room” operators, made the list. But so did areas around Detroit, Las Vegas and California cities not known for problem brokers.

Within 10 miles of Mr. Golan’s office here were about 3,000 brokers. One in 17 had three or more disciplinary red flags over their careers that they are required by regulators to report—an industry measure of a troubled broker. That is three times the national average.

Mr. Golan, whose record has five such flags, is what some in the industry call a “plate-licker,” a broker who trolls for clients with dinners in a tactic Wall Street’s self-regulator has warned can involve excessive sales pressure.  …

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The Gruber story has become a firestorm. Pickerhead doesn’t consider it news that fans of government are liars and cheats. They know they are governing against the will of the people and they lie to hide their intent. Our favorites have comments and we’ll go through them today. Charles Krauthammer is first. 

It’s not exactly the Ems Dispatch (the diplomatic cable Bismarck doctored to provoke the 1870 Franco-Prussian War). But what the just-resurfaced Gruber Confession lacks in world-historical consequence, it makes up for in world-class cynicism. This October 2013 video shows MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber, a principal architect of Obamacare, admitting that, in order to get it passed, the law was made deliberately obscure and deceptive. It constitutes the ultimate vindication of the charge that Obamacare was sold on a pack of lies.

“Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” said Gruber. “Basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.” This was no open-mic gaffe. It was a clear, indeed enthusiastic, admission to an academic conference of the mendacity underlying Obamacare. …

Craig Pirrong is next.

… The latest episode in the Gruber Gone Wild video collection is his performance at a conference at U Penn, where he said that key elements of the ACA had been written in a misleading way to conceal deliberately their true intent and effect. Gruber said that the law was written in a “tortured” way to ensure that CBO would not score it as taxes, and to hide the fact that the healthy would be subsidizing the sick. If these things had been transparent, the bill never would have passed. But fortunately, sayeth Gruber, American voters are too stupid to see through this.

How Leninist of him. The ends justify the means. Who-whom (the Smart People giving it to the Great Unwashed, but only for their own good).

Gruber again sends his regrets for his incautious language. No apology needed. His ex post honesty is welcome, if his (and the drafters’) contemporaneous dishonesty is not.

And there’s apparently a third video, in which Gruber again insults American voters.

Quite the franchise he’s got here.

Gruber’s revelations makes it clear that Obamacare was a fraud, passed (by the thinnest of margins) using utterly dishonest means. …

Roger Simon compares and contrasts the lies of obamacare and the recently announced climate “deal” with the Chinese.

… So, as I said, Mitch McConnell should relax.  Not that he shouldn’t oppose the deal, but in the end this will be the least of his problems. Obama is only making a fool of himself, at least in the eyes of the Chinese and probably most people who see the reality of the situation.

But not as a big a fool as Jonathan Gruber, the MIT professor and putative architect of Obamacare, who has been caught on three videos explaining why it was necessary to overcomplicate and lie about the Affordable Care Act in order to pass it. (At least he read it.  I doubt Obama did and I know Pelosi didn’t.)  Besides the professor’s sleazy Gramscian elitism that doesn’t do much for the reputation of MIT, Gruber has something unconscious and disconnected about him that suggests a personality disorder.   He doesn’t seem to quite get why people might be upset that his deliberate obscurantism completely undermines democracy and the founding documents of our country.  After all, he means well. (The ends justify the means meets Asperger Syndrome)

In fact, it’s actually quite fascist, reminiscent of Mussolini in a way.  But that makes Gruber the perfect adviser for Barack Obama, whose approach to governing is becoming ever closer to Il Duce’s statism. … 

The videos of Jonathan Gruber have been hiding in plain sight for more than a year. American Thinker posts on the man who found them.

The story about Rich Weinstein, an unknown investment advisor who poured through hours and hours of YouTube videos, radio interviews, and other media featuring Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber is both incredible and inspiring.

It is Weinstein who is responsible for ferreting out Gruber’s toxic comments about the “stupidity of the American people” and, more importantly, Gruber’s insistence that Obamacare subsidies were limited to state exchanges and should not be made available at the federal level. …

Another post from American Thinker on private citizens doing the job that investigative reporters won’t do. But then, Glenn Reynolds has said media types are just Democrat operatives with bylines.

As explained here yesterday, Rich Weinstein, an investment banker and private citizen, with just average computer skills and higher than average persistence, uncovered the video of MIT professor Jonathan Gruber admitting that voter stupidity and deliberate lack of government transparency were necessary for the passage of the (Un-)Affordable Care Act, aka ObamaCare, in which he was involved.  

This revelation raises the question: why didn’t any investigative reporter with access to the right people, a basic understanding of the problems involved with the ACA, paid for persistence and – most importantly – a chance for a career-making scoop undertake the investigative part of the job and make the discovery?  And where were the fabled watchdogs – governmental and non-governmental – when they were so desperately needed? …

National Review catches Dems trying to send Gruber down the memory hole.

Jonathan Gruber? “I don’t know who he is,” Nancy Pelosi told reporters on Thursday.

To jog the former speaker’s memory: Jonathan Gruber is, of course, the MIT economist widely hailed for his work as the “architect” of Obamacare. His sudden demotion comes after video surfaced over the weekend of a 2013 interview with Gruber at the University of Pennsylvania, where he told listeners that a “lack of transparency” was crucial to passing Obamacare through Congress in 2010, given the “stupidity of the American voter.” Three more videos have followed, all showing Gruber making substantially similar remarks.

Nancy Pelosi’s ignorance of Gruber is odd for two reasons. First, she was speaker of the House at the time that the Affordable Care Act was passed. Second, she cited Gruber — by name — at a press conference in 2009: “I don’t know if you have seen Jonathan Gruber of MIT’s analysis. . . . ” Around the same time, his work was quoted and linked on her website.

In Pelosi’s defense, she may only have been following the lead of Maine senator Angus King, who told the hosts of Fox & Friends earlier this week, “I don’t know who this guy is.” …

More on the memory loss from Jonathan Tobin.

… Just to put this in perspective, here’s what Pelosi said today about Gruber while refusing to answer a question about his admissions:

I don’t know who he is and he didn’t help write our bill.

Here’s what she said in November 2009:

We’re not finished getting all of our reports back from CBO, but we’ll have a side by side to compare. But our bill brings down rates. I don’t know if you have seen Jonathan Gruber of MIT’s analysis of what the comparison is to the status quo versus what will happen in our bill for those who seek insurance within the exchange. And our bill takes down those costs, even some now, and much less preventing the upward spiral.

Judging by Pelosi’s convenient memory loss today, the conviction among those who foisted ObamaCare on the nation that they can always count on “the stupidity of the American voter” wasn’t just something invented by Gruber. …

From Pajamas Media, a fifth Gruber video has surfaced.

… In the 2011 video shot by TrueNorthReports.com and sent to Watchdog.org on Thursday, Gruber appears before the Vermont House Health Care Committee to present recommendations for a universal, publicly financed health care program. The recommendations were part of the 2011 “Hsiao Report” submitted to the Legislature by economist William C. Hsiao and co-written by Gruber.

As Gruber sits listening, the committee chair reads a comment from a Vermonter who expresses concern that the economist’s plan might lead to “ballooning costs, increased taxes and bureaucratic outrages,” among other things.

After hearing the Vermonter’s worries, Gruber responds, “Was this written by my adolescent children by any chance?”

The remark was met with uproarious laughter…. 

… Contrary to Gruber’s snarky insult, the comment was not written by an adolescent.

“It was actually written by a former senior policy adviser in the White House who knew something about health care systems,” said John McClaughry, a two-term Vermont state senator and adviser to President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. …

Daily Caller finds Gruber in a PBS Frontline interview saying one of the deceptions was crafted in a meeting with the president.

… The Gateway Pundit highlighted a clip from Gruber’s 2012 interview with the PBS program Frontline in which the professor admitted that he worked together with the president in the Oval Office to conceal the political impact of their plan to get more tax revenue out of employer-sponsored health insurance plans by imposing a new “Cadillac tax” on companies. The Gateway Pundit also confirmed that Gruber checked into the West Wing for a meeting with the president on July 20, 2009, according to White House visitor logs.

“And Obama was like, ‘Well, you know’ — I mean, he is really a realistic guy. He is like, ‘Look, I can’t just do this.’ He said: ‘It is just not going to happen politically. The bill will not pass. How do we manage to get there through phases and other things?’ And we talked about it. And he was just very interested in that topic,” Gruber continued.

“Once again, that ultimately became the genesis of what is called the Cadillac tax in the health-care bill, which I think is one of the most important and bravest parts of the health care law and doesn’t get nearly enough credit,” Gruber added. …

Ed Morrissey says it’s true Gruber was paid $400,000 by the feds for his work crafting the Democrat subterfuge. That’s just the feds. States paid him $1.6 million. 

Or, if you prefer a more acerbic conclusion, taxpayers paid Jonathan Gruber in the mid-six-figures to lie to them, and then brag about it to all of his friends and fans later. Glenn Kessler fact-checked an assertion made by Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) about Gruber’s paid involvement with ObamaCare while Nancy Pelosi et al kept claiming amnesia about the man called the “architect” of the law. Normally, Kessler jumps in to correct factually lacking claims, but this one gets the rare check mark.

The story begins in February 2009, when HHS signed Gruber to a contract to provide a micro-simulation model for four months at $95,000. They later added an eight-month contract for $297,000, bring the total known value of “almost $400,000,” exactly what Barrasso stated. For his year or so on the job — which would have been just a little more than the ObamaCare legislative effort lasted (June 2009 – March 2010) — Gruber received roughly what the President of the United States makes in a year. That’s not too bad for an MIT professor. …

Last, but not least, we get liberal Ron Fournier’s Gruber take.

… Gruber’s remarks struck a nerve with me.

Appearing on an academic panel a year ago, this key Obamacare adviser argued that the law never would have passed if the administration had been honest about the fact that the so-called penalty for noncompliance with the mandate was actually a tax.

“And, basically, call it ‘the stupidity of the American voter,’ or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass,” Gruber said.

He called you stupid. He admitted that the White House lied to you. Its officials lied to all of us—Republicans, Democrats, and independents; rich and poor; white and brown; men and women.

Liberals should be the angriest. Not only were they personally deceived, but the administration’s dishonest approach to health care reform has helped make Obamacare unpopular while undermining the public’s faith in an activist government. A double blow to progressives.

On top of that, Gruber has helped make the legal case for anti-Obamacare lawyers. In July, a year-old video surfaced in which Gruber said Washington legally withholds money from states that don’t create their own health care exchanges. That could be construed by the Supreme Court to buttress the case against health insurance subsidies.

Last year, The Post helped document how Obama and his advisers knowingly misled the public during his 2012 reelection campaign by repeatedly saying that, under Obamacare, people could keep their doctors and keep their health plans. To knowingly mislead is to lie. …

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Roger Simon says Hispanics are the next target of the liberal racism machine. 

Roughly ninety-five percent of racism in America today now either emanates from liberals or is generated by them.  The Democratic Party relies on racism because, without the perception of serious ongoing racism in our culture, the identity politics on which the party depends would disintegrate.   As presently constituted, they wouldn’t win another national or statewide  election.  This makes the Democratic Party by necessity a virtual racism-manufacturing machine.

The Al Sharptons and Jesse Jacksons are not anomalies.  They are the motor that drives the car.  Barack Obama could in no way be a post-racial president as promised, even if he wanted to be (doubtful).   He wouldn’t have had a party anymore.

Do I exaggerate? Actually it’s worse.  Because economic policies such as tax preferences for disadvantaged neighborhoods a la Jack Kemp that could have benefited black people are anathema to Obama and liberals, African Americans have little chance of improving their condition.  No original ideas are instituted.  It’s always the same old, same old from the days of Lyndon Johnson.  Result: seventy percent of black children born out of wedlock and all the other horrifying statistics that are only a key stroke or two away for anyone with a computer — numbers on food stamps , unemployed, black-on-black crime, etc. …

Megan McArdle posts on the Supreme’s second look at the healthcare act.

Just as those of us who covered the Affordable Care Act were investigating new topics to cover, the Supreme Court yanks us back in.  Today they agreed to hear a set of cases involving the availability of insurance subsidies on federally operated insurance exchanges.  (I will henceforth refer to this collective body as the Halbig case for ease of reading.) 

Sounds kind of boring, right?  Actually, this could severely damage, even potentially kill, Obama’s signature program.  I won’t recap all the issues that an adverse ruling would create for our health-care overlords, but if you are interested in the details, read my write-up from this summer.  For the rest of you, suffice to say that this case could ultimately determine whether the program survives, and if so, in what form. …

Ed Morrissey reports on WaPo’s slams of the president.

This hasn’t exactly been a banner week for Democrats, but especially so for Barack Obama. The Washington Post corrected him twice this week on claims made by the President’s denial of reality in his post-election press conference, the first time in a formal fact-check from Glenn Kessler. Obama tried arguing that the election results didn’t really reflect on ObamaCare despite the success of Republicans in defeating Democrats who supported it — or even those who refused to answer the question — because ObamaCare has reduced the costs of health care in every year since its passage. That assumes facts not in evidence in terms of causal relationship, Kessler notes, and isn’t true on the facts anyway:

 ”In fact, despite the president’s claim of a decrease of every year, the White House’s own chart shows that the 2013 estimate represents a slight uptick from 2012, when adjusted for inflation and population. As the White House report puts it, “the three years since 2010 will have recorded the three slowest health-care spending growth rates since record keeping began in 1960.” That is impressive, but it is not the same as health costs going down “every single year” since the law was passed in 2010. …” …

Politico piece calls for the firing of Valarie Jarrett. Pickerhead thinks this would be a mistake. She is probably more responsible for administration mistakes than anyone else. We need her next to the president, whispering in his ear telling him how wonderful he is.

Almost since the start of Barack Obama’s presidency, people who have actual, real duties in the West Wing of the White House—the working, executive part of the government, that is—have been urging him to do something about Valerie Jarrett. Push her into the East Wing, where she can hang out with Michelle Obama and the White House social secretary, or give her an ambassadorship—or something—but for Pete’s sake get her out of the way of the hard work of governing that needs to be done.

Now it’s really time to do it.

Let’s stipulate right away that it would be unfair to blame Jarrett, the longtime Obama family friend and confidante, for the walloping that the president and his party suffered at the polls on Tuesday. And Jarrett will no doubt be needed in the weeks ahead to comfort her old pals, Barack and Michelle. What happened on Tuesday almost couldn’t be worse for Obama personally—not just the Senate’s going Republican but all those governorships lost, including Illinois Governor Pat Quinn’s defeat in Obama’s adopted home state, even after the president and first lady came to Illinois to campaign for him. The morning after the elections, Democrats and their top staffers were hopping mad, blaming Obama and, by extension, his staff for the defeat.

But let’s also face facts—and expect the president to do so as well. We’re at that point in an already long-toothed presidency when things inside really need to change. In the days before anyone knew how brutally the Democrats would get beaten, politicians and staffers and pundits were urging a shakeup of the White House staff. …

The New Republic has more on Jarrett.

Even at this late date in the Obama presidency, there is no surer way to elicit paranoid whispers or armchair psychoanalysis from Democrats than to mention the name Valerie Jarrett. Party operatives, administration officials—they are shocked by her sheer longevity and marvel at her influence. When I asked a longtime source who left the Obama White House years ago for his impressions of Jarrett, he confessed that he was too fearful to speak with me, even off the record.

This is not as irrational as it sounds. Obama has said he consults Jarrett on every major decision, something current and former aides corroborate. “Her role since she has been at the White House is one of the broadest and most expansive roles that I think has ever existed in the West Wing,” says Anita Dunn, Obama’s former communications director. Broader, even, than the role of running the West Wing. This summer, the call to send Attorney General Eric Holder on a risky visit to Ferguson, Missouri, was made by exactly three people: Holder himself, the president, and Jarrett, who were vacationing together on Martha’s Vineyard. When I asked Holder if Denis McDonough, the chief of staff, was part of the conversation, he thought for a moment and said, “He was not there.” (Holder hastened to add that “someone had spoken to him.”)

Jarrett holds a key vote on Cabinet picks (she opposed Larry Summers at Treasury and was among the first Obama aides to come around on Hillary Clinton at State) and has an outsize say on ambassadorships and judgeships. She helps determine who gets invited to the First Lady’s Box for the State of the Union, who attends state dinners and bill-signing ceremonies, and who sits where at any of the above. She has placed friends and former employees in important positions across the administration—“you can be my person over there,” is a common refrain.

And Jarrett has been known to enjoy the perks of high office herself. When administration aides plan “bilats,” the term of art for meetings of two countries’ top officials, they realize that whatever size meeting they negotiate—nine by nine, eight by eight, etc.—our side will typically include one less foreign policy hand, because Jarrett has a standing seat at any table that includes the president.

Not surprisingly, all this influence has won Jarrett legions of detractors. They complain that she has too much control over who sees the president. That she skews his decision-making with her after-hours visits. That she is an incorrigible yes-woman. That she has, in effect, become the chief architect of his very prominent and occasionally suffocating bubble.

There is an element of truth to this critique. While aboard Air Force One at the end of the 2012 campaign, Jarrett turned to Obama and told him, “Mr. President, I don’t understand how you’re not getting eighty-five percent of the vote.” The other Obama aides in the cabin looked around in disbelief before concluding that she’d been earnest. …

 

Late Night from Andrew Malcolm.

Fallon: Joe Biden will soon visit Turkey, Ukraine and Morocco. So, Biden’s advisers are learning how to say “I’m sorry” in all three languages.

Meyers: On Sunday, a couple got married on a Southwest Airlines flight. They didn’t want to get married, but the seats were so close together, they had to.

Fallon: A new study finds that babies hear three times as many words from their moms as from their dads. My wife said “That’s so fascinating!” I said “Cool.”

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Jennifer Rubin picks Scott Walker as the Distinguished Pol of The Week.

… But this week special praise goes to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker who won his third race in four years, once again standing up to Big Labor and withstanding an influx of out of state money. As Betsy Woodruff wrote, “While Walker was repeating the same simple pitch throughout the state, national labor organizations were running ads targeting the governor and [Mary]Burke was hobnobbing with the president and first lady in the state’s two most liberal cities, Madison and Milwaukee. If Burke bet on this being an anti-incumbent election cycle, Walker bet on its being anti-Washington. And he bet right.”

Walker has perfected the pitch to middle- and working-class voters, fashioning himself as their advocate against elites, Washington bureaucrats and liberal special interests. His rhetoric is simple but direct and effective, serving to accentuate his Midwest roots and blue-collar ethos.

Every prominent politician these days is evaluated as a prospective presidential candidate. Walker may lack foreign policy know-how or charisma, but his skill and competency in his present role are evident. He is an excellent governor who was able to show results from his reforms. And he is a model campaigner for Republicans trying to break through in purple and blue states. And for that we can say, well done, Gov. Walker.

Walker was also the subject of the WSJ Weekend Interview. Hearing how he addressed the headquarters crowd election night, you would think he just participated in a Passover Seder. And remember, he is the only potential 2016 candidate without a college degree. We’ve had enough of government by A students. We need drop-outs and C students.

‘Wow. First off, I want to thank God for his abundant grace and mercy. Win or lose, it is more than sufficient for each and every one of us,” Scott Walker said, taking the podium on Tuesday night at the Wisconsin state fair grounds after being re-re-elected for governor. It was a curious register, given that Mr. Walker’s religious faith, even though his father was a pastor, has never seemed central to his economic and political identity. But then maybe the intervention of a higher power is as good an explanation as any for the commanding victory that unions and liberals went all-out to prevent. …

… The race Mr. Walker won this week was close-run and became a referendum on his first term. His opponent, Mary Burke, a former executive of Trek Bicycle Corp., ran as a not-Walker. The governor calls her “almost the bionic candidate,” in the sense that her intelligence, business experience, gender and noncommittal up-the-middle platform were focus-group-tested as the perfect foil for his agenda and his track record of the past few years.

In June 2012, Mr. Walker became the only governor in American history to survive a recall election—initiated to reverse his enormously controversial 2011 budget-repair bill, Act 10, which limited the collective-bargaining powers of public-employee unions, as well as automatic dues collection and health and pension benefits. Big Labor and national Democrats returned this year to avenge their loss, though the irony was that Ms. Burke declined to relitigate Act 10 or even take a coherent position. The election turned on competing accounts of economic progress under Mr. Walker, such as job creation and rising household incomes.

Surveys indicated that Mr. Walker and Ms. Burke were statistically tied through the summer and most of the fall, though Mr. Walker observes that “those polls consistently showed that the opinion of the state in terms of right-track/wrong-track was still very positive. A solid majority felt the state was headed in the right direction.” He was confident that he would receive those votes in the end. …

Before the election, Victor Davis Hanson posted on the campaign the Dems could not run.

… Foreign policy?

Consider the failed Russia “reset,” the bugout from Iraq, the “leading from behind” in Libya, the Benghazi scandal, the Iranian soon-to-be bomb, the smearing of Israel, the special relationship with a thuggish Erdogan, the dissolving Middle East, the eroding NATO, and an ever more bullying China. No Democrat will run on something like, “I fully support the Obama foreign policy initiatives and the brilliant work of Secretaries Clinton and Kerry.” Foreign policy, then, cannot be a campaign issue, in the positive sense of defending the status quo. No Democrat even made the attempt.

How about bigger and competent government?

No Democratic congressman would wish to campaign on, “Obama made government work for you — just look at the new and dynamic IRS, VA, ICE, GSA, NSA, and Secret Service.” “Not a smidgen of corruption” is not a viable campaign theme. No candidate even tried that.

Why don’t Sens. Landrieu, Pryor, and Udall play up their support for the Obama economy?

We did not see a candidate commercial like the following: “I was instrumental in keeping interest rates at zero percent for six years. I made sure that we borrowed another $7 trillion and oversaw the $1 trillion stimulus. We kept GDP above 1% and unemployment below 7%.” Apparently avoiding a depression is not felt to be an economic renaissance, and thus not a winning message.

How about Democratic ads trumpeting new big-ticket government initiatives? …

Remember “Julia?”  Kevin Williamson says she lost last week.

A funny thing happened in the “war on women” — Mia Love and Joni Ernst won, Wendy Davis and Sandra Fluke lost. The representative who will be the youngest woman ever to have served in Congress, Elise Stefanik, is a Republican who won a formerly Democratic seat — not in Oklahoma or Texas but in New York. Senator-elect Ernst is a 21-year veteran of the Army Reserve and National Guard who served overseas during the Iraq war; Representative-elect Love, a daughter of Haitian immigrants who came to the United States fleeing the Tonton Macoutes, is a former city councilman and mayor of Saratoga Springs, Utah.

The difference could not be more dramatic: The Democrats’ vision of an American woman’s life was best expressed in the Obama campaign’s insipid “Julia” cartoons, in which a faceless, featureless woman at every crossroads in her life turns to the federal government, as personified by Barack Obama, for succor and support. From negotiating a salary to managing her pregnancy, Julia cannot do anything for herself — at every turn, she is reminded that she enjoys political patronage “under President Obama,” in the campaign’s psychosexually fraught and insistently reiterated phrase. So much for the Democrats. And the Republican women of 2014? They helped fight wars and made new lives for themselves on foreign shores. They were women who ran for office on policy platforms, not on their uteruses. …

Peter Wehner comments on the GOP wave.

… There are plenty of reasons for Republicans to be buoyed. They have very impressive people, including people in their ’30s and ’40s, at every level. Of the two parties, the GOP seems to be the one of greater energy and ideas. The Democratic Party, and liberalism more broadly, seems stale, aging, and exhausted. And of course the GOP has now strung together massive, back-to-back midterm wins. But it’s still worth keeping in mind that Republicans had spectacular showings in 1994 and 2010–and they were defeated by rather large margins in the presidential races two years after those wins. The danger is that a victory like the one Republicans experienced on Tuesday creates a false dawn, a sense of false confidence. Winning midterms elections is important; but midterm elections are different than presidential elections. The GOP still has repair work to do and things to build on. But progress is being made–and the results of this week’s election are the best evidence of that fact.

WSJ’s Allysia Finley says “teacher’s unions flunked their mid-terms.”

… Reformers like Republican Govs. Rick Snyder in Michigan, Scott Walker in Wisconsin, Nathan Deal in Georgia and Sam Brownback in Kansas did cut through a torrent of negative union ads and prevailed.

Teachers unions this election provided an object lesson in how to lie with statistics by lambasting school reformers across the country for “cutting” education spending. According to one ad, Mr. Brownback signed the “largest single cut to education in Kansas history.” Florida Gov. Rick Scott stood accused of taking a $1.3 billion sledgehammer to schools, and Mr. Snyder of slashing $1 billion from education.

Yet in Kansas, total per pupil spending has increased to $12,960 from $12,283 since Mr. Brownback was elected in 2010, despite a $412 per pupil decline in federal aid. Mr. Snyder has increased education spending by $660 per student over his four-year tenure, while Mr. Scott has increased annual state funding for schools by 20%—nearly $2 billion—over the past four years.

The teachers unions also whacked Mr. Scott for expanding private-school scholarships for low-income kids, eliminating tenure, and linking pay to performance for new teachers. “Florida’s private-school voucher programs are a risky experiment that gambles taxpayers’ money and children’s lives,” Florida Education Association vice president Joanne McCall warned in a local newspaper op-ed. “Voucher schools are largely unregulated.”

So far as we know, there have been no reports in Florida of death-by-voucher. …

More on the union losses from the Washington Post. There was an interesting contest in CA where two Dems squared off for state schools superintendent. The reformer was narrowly beaten by the old pol in a race that served as a metaphor for the problems facing Democrats throughout the country.  

… And in the white-hot battle in California for state schools superintendent, the union’s choice, Tom Torlakson (D), was narrowly reelected, beating back Marshall Tuck (D) by 52 percent to 48 percent.

While both are Democrats, they differ over the best way to improve public education, reflecting a schism within the national Democratic Party. Torlakson pushed for more investment in public schools, does not believe student test scores should be used to assess teachers, and said charter schools need more oversight. Tuck supports expansion of public charter schools, argued for more accountability for teachers and said California’s teacher tenure laws are an obstacle to improving schools.

The down-ballot contest generated $30 million in spending, three times as much as the race for governor, with money pouring in from around the country. Torlakson received heavy support from teachers unions while Tuck had the backing of billionaire philanthropists such as Bloomberg, the heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton, and Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. …

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Tailgating at The University of Mississippi is covered in the NY Times. And the Times didn’t look down its Northeast nose at the event.

OXFORD, Miss. — Perhaps there isn’t a word for the ritualized pregame revelry on the University of Mississippi campus. “Tailgating” certainly does not do it justice. It might be a gathering of football fans before a game, but it hardly resembles those celebrated scenes in Green Bay and Kansas City, which are modest by comparison.

For one, there are the $71,000 portable toilets. And then there’s this fall’s $750,000 university budget for the quintessentially Southern marvel known as the Grove. The price tags, and the orchestration, just keep getting grander.

“We want to put on the dog here,” one fan said, using regional vernacular for “over the top.”

Rebels fans began putting on the dog in high fashion again Friday night, when an estimated 2,500 tents were erected for Saturday’s game between Mississippi, ranked seventh in The Associated Press Top 25, and Auburn, ranked fourth. To help set the stage, here is a tour of one of the country’s most elaborate pregame gatherings. …

 

… In many tents, food is served on silver trays, drinks splash through fountains and chandeliers hang from the metal supports. Fur coats abound. Jackets, ties and cowboy boots are common.

Prominent chefs are hired to cater meals, and chicken is a favored entree. “You don’t want to be a chicken in northern Mississippi on game day,” said Tim Walsh, the executive director of alumni affairs.

The tents themselves can be fashion statements. Some fans hire interior decorators. One tent on the Walk of Champions (the Grove’s Main Street) is painted with zebra stripes. One of its owners is Jane Foster, a converted MississippiState fan. She brings in a rock band once a year. …

Dilbert’s Blog reviews the iPhone 6.

After a month-long wait – and salivating the entire time – I finally got my iPhone 6 Plus. I don’t know how Apple manipulates my emotions so effectively but I am thoroughly impressed at the mental anguish they put me through while I waited.

My heart was racing as I removed the phone from its strikingly well-designed packaging. Apple makes the process of opening a box feel as if you are winning a prize. Every color, shape, texture and probably smell has been studied and tweaked to perfection. Simply touching the product or its associated packaging is a tactile joy.

The experience of getting the iPhone 6 Plus was like getting a puppy. …

… But I needed a case. I tried to imagine my anguish if I accidentally dropped this new member of my family and cracked it. I needed protection.

So I went to the Verizon store and bought the only cover they had left that doesn’t look like a six-year old girl’s bedroom wall. The color of my new case could best be described as Colonoscopy Brown. It is deeply disturbing. But because I love my iPhone 6 Plus, and want to keep it safe, I put it on. …

Jewish World Review article downplays the efficacy of Tamiflu. But it does recommend chicken noodle soup. What, you wanted gefilte fish?

Neuraminidase inhibitors including Tamiflu and Relenza are recommended by government health agencies for treating and preventing symptoms of the influenza virus in both children and adults. A review conducted by the Cochrane Collaboration has now revealed these treatment options may cause more harmful side effects compared to their ability to reduce and prevent flu-like symptoms. …

… There are certain household treatments people suffering from flu-like symptoms can apply in order to achieve a natural remedy. For example, our best defense against any bodily ailment is staying hydrated. Drinking and avoiding alcohol, coffee, and soda can go a long way in maintaining a healthy immune system. With its anti-inflammatory properties, chicken noodle soup can also serve as a natural, at-home remedy for boosting the movement of immune system cells. Lastly, avoid dry places where cold viruses thrive and seek humidity. Adding moisture to your home via a humidifier can prevent a stuffy nose and scratchy throat by dampening our airways’ mucous membrane.

From Fight Aging we learn dementia may be the result of many small strokes.

… The researchers conducted an intensive study to observe the development of this white matter disease over a short period of time, rather than on an annual basis – the interval at which previous studies have performed repeat brain imaging. The study involved 5 patients with white matter disease undergoing detailed MRI scanning of their brains every week for 16 consecutive weeks. The weekly MRI scans revealed new tiny spots arising in the brain’s white matter that were, based on their MRI appearance, characteristic of small new strokes (cerebral infarcts). The lesions had no symptoms but, with time, came to resemble the existing white matter disease in the subjects’ brains. In the study’s random sampling, the majority of subjects had this phenomenon: Tiny strokes occurring without symptoms, and developing into the kind of white matter disease that causes dementia. …

US Naval Institute says China’s new stealth fighter has the attention of our pilots.

China’s new Shenyang J-31 stealth fighter — making its debut next week at the Zhuhai international airshow — could eventually become more than a match for American stealth fighters in battle, several U.S. military and industry officials told USNI News.

The J-31 is China’s latest crack at developing a modern so-called fifth-generation stealth fighter — equivalent in ability to Lockheed Martin’s F-22 Raptor or F-35 Lighting II Joint Strike Fighter.

“They’re still in the glossy brochure phase of development, so they still look ten feet tall and bulletproof,” one senior U.S. fighter pilot familiar with the F-35 program told USNI News.

“I think they’ll eventually be on par with our fifth gen jets — as they should be, because industrial espionage is alive and well.” …

WSJ writes on the growing amount of unused retail space that is being converted to other uses.

The Internet is moving to a shopping center near you.

In Fort Wayne, Ind., a vacated Target store is about to be home to rows of computer servers, network routers and Ethernet cables courtesy of a local data-center operator. In Jackson, Miss., a former McRae’s department store will get the same treatment next year. And one quadrant of the Marley Station Mall south of Baltimore is already occupied by a data-center company that last year offered to buy out the rest of the building.

As America’s retailers struggle to keep up with online shopping, the Internet is starting to settle into some of the very spaces where brick-and-mortar customers used to shop. The shift brings welcome tenants to some abandoned stretches of the suburban landscape, though it doesn’t replace all the jobs and sales-tax revenue that local communities lost when stores left the building.

Venyu Solutions LLC, a data-center operator that is renovating the former department store in Jackson, sees more opportunity for conversion because of sheer amount of distressed retail properties. “Who else wants them?” said Brian Vandegrift, the company’s executive vice president of sales. “You’re not competing with people in substantial businesses who want those spaces.”

Many malls and neighborhood shopping centers are still grappling with vacancies five years after the recession. …

Ever wonder while waiting to board a plane whether there’s a faster way? Wired has a piece on how boarding could be improved.

No, there’s not much chance it will be adopted. Just wanted you to know people are trying.

I was at the airport last week, and all I wanted to do was sit down, strap in, and lift off. Of course I couldn’t, because there were a bunch of people standing in my way. As the line crept along, I scanned ahead for malingerers, but everyone seemed sufficiently ready to board. I couldn’t help but wonder, is there a more efficient way for airlines to put get our butts into our seats, and into the air?

Millions of other people probably have pondered this question. At least one wrote a computer program to find the answer. Jason Steffen is an astrophysicist at NorthwesternUniversity, and several years ago he modeled different airline boarding methods to see what made them so slow. He also figured out how airlines could get us on board much faster. …

ARS Technica says LED bulbs have pulled ahead of compact fluorescents in efficiency.

A few years back, when I got my first LED-based lightbulb, it seemed natural to stick it into a wattmeter to get a sense of its efficiency. At under 15 Watts of power drawn, it clearly beat any incandescent bulbs I’d ever put into the same lamp. But I was disappointed to find that it wasn’t any better than a compact fluorescent bulb.

Based on the graph shown above, my experience was hardly unique; in fact, it was decidedly average. Although the technology behind LEDs had the potential to be far more efficient than any other lighting source, the complete LED bulb package wasn’t doing that much better at the time than the far more mature fluorescent bulbs, which output roughly 60 lumens for every Watt put in.

After some small boosts in 2013, however, a new generation of more efficient LEDs hit the market this year, raising the typical efficiency to nearly 100 lumens per Watt. The increased efficiency is coming at a time when prices for the bulbs continue to drop; given their expected lifetimes, they’re now far and away the most economical choice for most uses.

The graph also nicely displays why incandescents have been booted off the market for a failure to achieve sufficient efficiency, as they have flatlined at around 15 lumens per Watt.

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We start today with a WaPo blog post on how Harry Reid’s senior aide ripped the administration. 

You almost never see this in politics. David Krone, the chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D), launches a major attack on the White House in this blockbuster story by my colleagues Philip Rucker and Robert Costa:

“At a March 4 Oval Office meeting, Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and other Senate leaders pleaded with Obama to transfer millions in party funds and to also help raise money for an outside group. “We were never going to get on the same page,” said David Krone, Reid’s chief of staff. “We were beating our heads against the wall.”

The tension represented something more fundamental than money — it was indicative of a wider resentment among Democrats in the Capitol of how the president was approaching the election and how, they felt, he was dragging them down. …”

Here’s the Post article by Phillip Rucker and Robert Costa. (Costa, btw, was a reporter for The National Review until the start of this year.)

One night in early September, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called a longtime colleague, Sen. Pat Roberts, from his living room in Louisville, furious about the 78-year-old Republican’s fumbling and lethargic reelection campaign.

Roberts had raised a paltry $62,000 in August. He was airing no ads. His campaign staff, mostly college students, had gone back to school. Most worrisome, McConnell had in his hands a private polling memo predicting Roberts would lose in Kansas — an alarming possibility that could cost the GOP a Senate majority.

McConnell was blunt. A shake-up was needed. Roberts unleashed a flurry of expletives at McConnell. Ultimately, though, the ex-Marine gave in. The next day, he led campaign manager Leroy Towns, 70, a retired college professor and confidant, into a Topeka conference room and fired him. There were tears. “It hurt,” Towns said.

Eleven hundred miles away in Richmond, Va., Chris LaCivita, a hard-charging Republican fixer, was on his back deck picking apart steamed crabs and drinking beer with friends when he got the order to fly to Kansas. The Republican rescue was underway. …

 

… From the outset of the campaign, Republicans had a simple plan: Don’t make mistakes, and make it all about Obama, Obama, Obama. Every new White House crisis would bring a new Republican ad. And every Democratic incumbent would be attacked relentlessly for voting with the president 97 or 98 or 99 percent of the time.

But none of that would work if Republicans did not get the right candidates, a basic tenet that had eluded them in recent elections. This time, party officials pushed bad candidates out, recruited and coached contenders with broad appeal and resuscitated two flailing incumbents, Roberts and Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi. …

 

… In New Hampshire, Scott Brown, the former senator from neighboring Massachusetts, waffled about taking on Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D). Brown said he would pull the trigger only if the party met an eight-point list of demands that included not allowing another government shutdown or a loose-cannon conservative like Akin to become the nominee in another state. Party operatives assured him they would do their best, and Brown was in.

But just such a candidate was on the rise down in Mississippi.

Chris McDaniel, a tea party conservative and former talk-radio host, was making a run for the Senate. Republican leaders, wary about McDaniel, had lined up Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann to run against him, on the assumption that Sen. Thad Cochran would retire.

Cochran upended those plans when he made a surprise announcement in December, a day shy of his 76th birthday, that he would seek a seventh term. The primary was set: the firebrand McDaniel vs. the veteran Cochran.

Republicans across the country worried that Democrats would turn McDaniel, with his history of inflammatory statements, into the face of their party and link every other candidate to him. Just last month, Collins pulled an anti-McDaniel mailer out from his desk and opened it to play sound of McDaniel referring to Hispanic women as “mamacitas” — demonstrating that McDaniel as the nominee would have been what Collins called “an existential threat to the entire party.”

Researchers at the NRSC pored over McDaniel’s radio tapes, searching for damaging audio. Within a month, they had uncovered a slew of incendiary racial remarks. But fearful that McDaniel could still win the nomination, they leaked only a small slice of the material — about “one-50th,” Dayspring estimated.

For much of the primary, Cochran was sleepy and might have been defeated outright were it not for a late push from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which aired a pro-Cochran testimonial from football legend Brett Favre on his farm in Hattiesburg, Miss.

McDaniel, a state senator, won the primary — though not by enough to avoid a runoff. The Republican establishment, as well as some black Democrats, rallied to Cochran’s side, and the incumbent narrowly prevailed.

McDaniel, bitter to this day, has refused to concede. “You had the entire Republican Party in Washington doing everything they could to keep the true conservative out,” he said. …

Joel Kotkin says changing demographics hurt Democrats this year.

… It can be argued that changing demographics will make this year’s blowout a temporary setback. Among Latinos, a key constituency for the Democrats’ future, economic hardships and disappointment at the Democrats’ failure to achieve immigration reform have blunted but hardly reversed voting trends. This year, according to exit polls, Latinos remained strongly Democratic, but down from the nearly three-quarters who supported President Obama in 2012 to something slightly less than two-thirds.

One encouraging sign for Republicans: Texas Governor-elect Abbott won 44% of the Hispanic vote.

Perhaps the more serious may be shifts among millennials, a generation that, for the most part, stands most in danger of proleterianization. Once solidly pro-Democratic, this generation has become increasingly alienated as the economy has failed to produce notable gains. In states across the country, the Republican share of millennial votes grew considerably. According to exit polls, their deficit with voters under 30 has shrunk to 13%. The Republicans actually won among white voters under 30, 53% to 44%, even as they lost 30- to 44-year-olds, 58 to 40. If these trends hold, the generation gap that many Democrats saw as their long-term political meal ticket may prove somewhat less compelling. …

A Power Line post highlights Dem malpractice.

1. Reid cleverly gets Baucus (MT) to resign early to be appointed ambassador. The Dem governor than appoints a senator who can run as an “incumbent.” They appoint a guy who has plagiarism problems and has to drop out. They can only find some whacko woman to run instead. Easy R pick up.

5. Mark Uterus (CO) runs a campaign focusing on the war on womyn, disgusting almost everyone. R pick up.

10. Mary Landrieu claims her independence from Obama, but because Reid won’t let anything of substance come to the Senate floor her voting record is 97% with Obama. She will lose the run-off in December.

Michael Barone on the shrinkage of the obama majority.

Some observations on the election:

(1) This was a wave, folks. It will be a benchmark for judging waves, for either party, for years.

(2) In seriously contested races Republican candidates were generally younger, more vigorous, more sunny and optimistic than Democrats. The contrast was sharpest in Colorado and Iowa, which voted twice for President Obama. Cory Gardner and Joni Ernst seemed to be looking forward to the future. Their opponents grimly championed the stale causes of feminists and trial lawyers of the past.

Democrats see themselves as the party of the future. But their policies are antique. The federal minimum wage dates to 1938, equal pay for women to 1963, access to contraceptives to 1965. Raising these issues now is campaign gimmickry, not serious policymaking.

Democratic leading lights have been around a long time. The party’s two congressional leaders are in their 70s. The governors of the two largest Democratic states are sons of former governors who won their first statewide elections in 1950 and 1978. …

Peggy Noonan turned out her best column in years.

The drubbin’, thumpin’, poundin’ was a two-part wave, a significant Republican rise in the U.S. Senate and a Democratic collapse in the governorships.

It was one of those nights neither party ever forgets.

Republicans won not only because of a favorable map. In solid Democratic states, they won big or came close. Nor were the results due only to low midterm turnout. Nate Cohn, in the New York Times , noted that turnout in Colorado was up over 2010, yet Republican Cory Gardner beat incumbent Sen. Mark Udall with room to spare. The sheer number of blowouts was mind-boggling. …

 

… But that is only one of the amazing things that happened this week. The second is how the president responded.

A sweep this size tends to resolve some things. The landscape shifts, political figures accommodate themselves to it.

Common sense says a chastened president would acknowledge the obvious—some things aren’t working, he has made some mistakes—and, in Mr. Obama’s case, hit the reset button with Congress. Reach out, be humble. Humility has power. It shows people that you have some give—you get the message, you are capable of self-correcting.

That is not what he’s doing. The president is instead doubling down on hostility, antagonism and distance.

What a mistake. What a huge, historic mistake, not only for him but also for his party. …

 

… The president here is doing what he has been doing for a while, helping Republicans look good. …

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Roger Simon sets the tone for how we might think about  last week’s results.

… Too bad there’s no time to celebrate.  We almost lost our country.  There’s no time to lose getting it back.

Depending on whether Barack Obama decides to behave like an adult or not in the face of massive defeat, all Hell can break loose in the next few months.  He can subvert Congress and initiate an absurd amnesty program that nobody wants except for perhaps some random aging members of La Raza.  Just as bad, or maybe worse — it involves weapons of mass destruction — he can subvert Congress again and sign a deal with the Iranian mullahs that, on latest reports, relies on our good friends the Russians to police the Iranian nuclear program. How insane is that? Ask any Ukrainian.

And that’s only getting started.  The litany of possible mischief small and large is endless from Obamacare to accusations  of racism (how else could Obama lose?) to that monumental absurdity the “War on Women.”  (That one doesn’t seem to be working out too well lately with the Senate filling up with Republican women.) …

… Okay, now I’m going to celebrate.  But just for a few hours.  In the end, it’s just like tennis.  The minute you think you’re ahead, you start to lose. Stay hungry.

Craig Pirrong at Streetwise Professor has a note of caution.

… Practically, however, I think the results will be fairly barren, and may in fact set the stage for a Constitutional crisis, or crises. Obama is still president, and can block any substantive legislation emerging from the solidly Republican Congress. More ominously, given Obama’s personality, ideological rigidity, and hatred of Republicans (and I do think he viscerally hates them), confrontations are inevitable. Obama will not take his whipping and emerge more conciliatory and willing to compromise. To the contrary, to someone of his narcissistic temperament, yesterday’s repudiation is an existential affront that he must confront. He will channel his inner Alinsky, and attempt to use every executive power to achieve results that he cannot implement through legislation. He will double down on the divisive rhetoric and policies that he has employed in the past couple of years. A Constitutional confrontation over immigration, or some other issue (climate?), could well result when Obama attempts to exert executive power unilaterally.

Perhaps most importantly, his obsession with completing a deal with Iran, which has warped virtually every aspect of American foreign policy (Syria most notably) lays the groundwork for confrontation as he will likely attempt to implement it without Congressional approval. The substantive ramifications of such a deal are also very frightening, because they could lead to an even greater crisis in the Middle East and an intensification of the Shia-Sunni/Arab-Persian conflict that is already the source of chaos and misery. It is beyond bizarre that a man who claims to strive for nuclear disarmament is pursuing, Ahab-like, a deal that would likely lead to the nuclearization of the most unstable and conflict-ridden part of the world. …

Jennifer Rubin posts on Wednesday’s presser.

President Obama is a singularly ungracious and non-self-reflective person. In his press conference today he refused yet again to acknowledge reality.

He tried to downplay the Democrats’ loss of the Senate by talking to the two-thirds of people who did not vote. He tried to insinuate that it was a bipartisan rejection. He reminded us several times that he is still president. (“I’m the guy elected by everybody.”) He boasted about an economy most voters think is rotten. He has, however, learned nothing. After a historic repudiation, he is staying the course and still threatens unilateral action by year’s end on immigration reform. One would have thought his policies were not on the ballot or that his party saw historic losses in consecutive midterm elections. He defiantly announced that he will veto some bills and that Congress won’t like his executive actions. He insisted it had to be his way: “If there are ideas that the Republicans have that I have confidence will make things better for ordinary Americans, the fact that the Republicans [are] suggesting it, as opposed to a Democrat — that’ll be irrelevant to me. I want to just see what works.” In other words he sees no reason to compromise; Republicans must agree with him. …

David Harsanyi on the press conference too.

In his post-midterm press conference today, President Barack Obama reaffirmed his commitment to taking executive action on immigration, “before the end of the year.” Obama argued that most Americans desire reform and consequently he has an imperative to act. Because, as everyone knows, polls, rather than elections, are by far the best measurement of what the electorate desires.

If Obama moves forward a number of things are bound to happen: First, and most definitely, there will be no way Republican leadership can engage the administration in any meaningful bipartisan legislation for the next two years. With a freshly enraged base, the GOP will be powerless to work with the White House unless it’s willing to risk civil war. Second, kicking off a new round of needless acrimony highlights the fiction that Obama has any intention of recalibrating his strategy and finding common ground moving forward.

An example of perfect puerile presidential petulance comes from the tete a tete with Michael Jordan. Yahoo Sports has the story of Jordan saying The One was a “sh*tty” golfer. We didn’t include any of that in Pickings because it was of little consequence, but then the childish chief narcissist had to respond and it became a story.

“[T]here is no doubt that Michael is a better golfer than I am,” Obama said. “Of course if I was playing twice a day for the last 15 years, then that might not be the case.”

Obama rounded out his response with a final burn on Jordan, whose NBA franchise returned to its original name this season, saying, “He might want to spend more time thinking about the Bobcats — or the Hornets.”

Given the nationwide Republican wave in Tuesday’s elections, perhaps Obama has bigger problems than what His Airness thinks of his golf game.

Scott Johnson of Power Line also posted on the Michael Jordan kerfuffle and then compares that to reactions to the election.

President Obama is a man who does not respond well to criticism. He can’t even fake it. When Michael Jordan recently observed that Obama is a “shitty golfer,” to take just one small example, Obama responded in a Milwaukee radio interview that he gave to lend his magic touch to Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke the day before the midterm elections: “[T]here is no doubt that Michael is a better golfer than I am.” Obama couldn’t leave it at that: “Of course, if I was playing twice a day for the last 15 years, then that might not be the case. You know, he might want to spend more time thinking about the Bobcats — or the [NBA's Charlotte] Hornets.” (Jordan is part of the Hornets ownership group and the team if off to a poor start.)

This unfunny gibe wasn’t enough for Obama. He deepened his critique of Jordan: “I love the man, though. He brought [the Chicago Bulls] a lot of championships. He does like talking trash sometimes, even when he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” Obama’s sympathetic radio interviewer found this hilarious. The New York Daily News has posted the entire interview at the link. I’m embedding it below. You can check it out yourself.

I may be wrong about that example, but I’m not wrong about this one. Obama is seething with anger in response to the repudiation he and his policies received in the midterm elections. It comes through loud and clear in the press conference he held to address the results of the midterm elections (White House video below, White House transcript here, Washington Post transcript here). I can also say with certainty Obama rejected the good advice that Peggy Noonan offered him before the votes were counted. Noonan advised him to be gracious in defeat and gave him a good example. (The example was George W. Bush’s, and it was brilliant.) Sorry, but Obama doesn’t do gracious. …

Now even Chris Matthews is fed up. We get this from National Review.

MSNBC host Chris Matthews expressed dismay over President Obama’s post-election press conference on Wednesday, calling him entirely deaf to the millions of Americans who voted against his plan to grant executive amnesty for as many as 6 million illegal immigrants. 

“The people, if you look at the polling, their problem is illegal immigration,” he said. “He says, ‘I’m going to fix the problem.’ He doesn’t mean he’s gonna stop illegal immigration. He’s not going to do anything to stop illegal hiring, which is the magnet for illegal immigration, really. He’s going to basically say, ‘I’m going to deal with them by giving them green cards.’”

“What bothered me about him tonight — he keeps talking about common ground,” Matthews said. “Damnit, there’s very little common ground between left and right! But what there is, is compromise.”

“There’s something in this guy that just plays to his constituency, and acts like there’s no other world out there,” the MSNBC host lamented. “And that’s going to be a collision at the end of this year like you’ve never seen. I do believe it’s will be waving a red flag in front of the bull. I think Mitch McConnell’s headed for a fight with the president.”

Jonathan Tobin has more on the presser.

… Rather than taking a page from Bill Clinton’s book and understanding that he had to adjust his policies and ideas to political reality, Obama seems to think he has no lessons to learn from the voters who broadly rejected the policies that he told us last month were on the ballot yesterday.

Asked several times by members of the press if he was prepared for genuine compromise, all he gave them was the usual boilerplate he’s been employing throughout his presidency about being willing to listen to Republicans if they come up with reasonable ideas. The only problem with that: he believes the only one with reasonable ideas is Barack Obama. …

And Tobin also had lists of the biggest winners and biggest losers in the Wave of 2014. 

The 2014 midterms turned out to be the wave election that Republicans dreamed of and Democrats dreaded. But amid the debris of what turned out to be a stunning repudiation of the administration, there are some people who must be judged to be the big winners and losers on both sides. Here’s my list:

The Winners:

The first and most obvious winner is Mitch McConnell who will be the majority leader in January. Earlier in the year, he looked to be under siege in his race for reelection but ran among the smartest campaigns in the country as he first swamped a Tea Party challenger and then destroyed Alison Lundergan Grimes, the candidate the Clintons helped handpick to oppose him, in the general election. McConnell finally gets his chance to run the Senate and the man in position to put the heat on President Obama even if he won’t have an easy time with some members of his caucus.

Tom Cotton came into 2014 as the most hyped GOP Senate candidate but was thought to have run a lackluster campaign that turned an easy win into a nail biter. In the end, he won his Arkansas seat in a landslide. That puts him back into the conversation as the most highly regarded young (37) Republican and a future leader of his party.

In the course of the last year Joni Ernst …

Boston Herald columnist posts on the results from Hillary’s perspective.

Hillary Clinton put her political clout and even her political future on the line in this election — from Massachusetts to New Hampshire and in races clear across the country — and as the dust settles this morning we’ll see how it paid off.

The news that Republicans took control of the Senate despite Clinton’s best efforts doesn’t bode well for her desire to become the next president of the United States. …

… But don’t worry about Hillary. To explain away any weak points in the national Democratic mosaic, Hillary Clinton has what every political Clinton needs — a fall guy.

That would be President Obama. Expect to see Obama shoulder a lot of the blame for a lot of Democratic woes, thanks to his abysmal job approval ratings and back-to-back scandals, from Obama­care’s stumbling launch, to the renewal of combat operations in Iraq and now Syria, to Ebola … the list goes on.

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Next week we can rehash the vote.

Today we spend some time looking at QE (Quantitative Easing). Pickerhead has always thought this was nonsense on steroids. But, some of our regulars have a more favorable view. First up is James Pethokoukis.

Many conservatives loved pointing to Europe when its debt crisis seemed to be spiraling out of control. A cautionary tale, they said, of what can happen when government spending goes wild.  But they had the story wrong, or at least incomplete. Europe’s sovereign debt crisis was as much about slow growth as high debt. Anyway, these folks don’t talk much about Europe any more. And maybe that’s because it is now a cautionary tale of what happens when you combine fiscal austerity and tight money. That’s the exact deflationary formula some have been recommending for America the past few years. And as Europe’s experience shows, that would have been an utter disaster. Economist Michael Darda of MKM Partners: …

Power Line’s Scott Johnson posts a reader’s letter with similar thoughts.

… During the Depression, the Fed did nothing like QE and the Treasury wanted to force liquidation of excess assets and inventories and debts. The result is economic cataclysm, especially in a leveraged economy with a fractional reserve banking system. Banks cannot liquidate and satisfy their depositors need for cash. Deposits are borrowings for the bank. They in turn lend out the money they have on deposit to generate a return, and this pays savers a return. But when an economy goes into recession, this system malfunctions because the credit that originally justified the loan can no longer support it. This is the natural course of the business cycle. But the banking system on the way down is equivalent to the problem of a fire in a crowded theater. Everybody cannot get out at once. Not even close. It’s a fire in a vault really. Those lines of depositors waiting to take their money out cannot be satisfied.

It is easy to castigate the Fed and the Treasury for “bailing out” lenders and management teams, but the truth is more complicated. They were backstopping a system which holds the savings for the vast majority of Americans. As for the continuance of QE, I would revert to the Depression data and again observe that the Fed allowed the money supply to collapse by 1/3. This was devastating to the economy. Allowing monetary contraction through forced liquidation (which is the policy antidote to QE) would be beyond cataclysmic – it would make the Depression or today’s Greece a walk in the park. Unemployment would be 30%, people’s savings would be wiped out all at once – and the beneficiaries would be a tiny fraction of wealthy who would be able to buy assets for pennies from desperate sellers.

The primary criticism viz QE is that we are destroying the dollar and sowing the seeds of inflation. Maybe. But we are currently not inflating. At all. Commodity prices are falling or have fallen dramatically – gold, oil, you name it. The dollar has strengthened viz its alternative currencies, including gold and silver. There may be particular areas of price rises, but that means it’s not a uniform monetary phenomenon. Measured inflation is tame. One of the “inputs” which drives inflation is something called monetary velocity, or the speed with which people spend their money on items. As it did in the depression, it has collapsed. During the depression, it was this particular input which was responsible for the collapse in the money supply. You can think of QE as effectively offsetting the decline in velocity. …

Here’s the Power Line post that  the above letter.

We are approaching the end of year six of the regime of Quantitative Easing (QE) engineered by the Federal Reserve under Fed chairmen Ben Bernanke and now Janet Yellen. In place of responsible economic policy to revive economic growth and employment, we have had QE and the explosive growth of job-killing regulations (including Obamacare). In a recent look back at QE, New York Post columnist John Crudele credits QE with some good effects, but adds this inarguable observation, consistent with the avowed goals of QE:

“There’s one more thing that QE accomplished: it has made the stock market soar. Interest rates have remained so low for so long that investors have had no other choice but to move their money into the stock market, thus creating a bubble.

Even those adverse to risk were forced to chase the better yields in stocks, no matter how dangerous that was.

But for every winner in QE there are 99 losers. While the richest 1% of the US population has been loving the rise in stock prices and other QE amenities, Fed policy has been taxing on the masses of savers. …”

For a first, we have an item from Hollywood Reporter. It is an interview with Sharly Attkisson. It is long but interesting. Thankfully it’s the end of the week so there’s time to read it.

Sharyl Attkisson is an investigative journalist who became the story when she quit CBS News after two decades amid allegations that the network refused to run some of her stories that were critical of President Barack Obama. Ahead of the Tuesday release of her book Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama’s Washington, she spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about her struggles with CBS executives and her assertion that her computers were hacked, possibly by Obama operatives.

Who did you tell at CBS that your computers were hacked?

The first person I spoke to was Washington bureau chief Chris Isham.

Did he believe you?

He appeared to.

Did CBS care? Did they do anything about it?

God, you know, there’s a lot of people there. He seemed to care. He hired a separate computer forensics firm to look at the computers. They, too, agreed that there had been highly sophisticated remote intrusion of my computers. They decided to dig deeper and embark upon a process that spanned a number of months, during which time the situation with the Associated Press and the government spying on Fox News reporter James Rosen was disclosed, as well as Edward Snowden’s NSA information. …

Now for the important stuff. Slate’s Explainer tells us why ghosts say. “Boo!”

… Variations of the word boo—including bo and boh—have been found in books as published as far back as 500 years ago. While the Oxford English Dictionary notes the similarity between bo and the Latin boāre and the Greek βοãv, both meaning “to cry aloud, roar, shout,” it’s unlikely that bo and boo—as nonsensical exclamations—derived  from these words. An etymological dictionary of Scottish from 1808 notes that the sound  might denote “a sound in imitation of the cry of a calf,” or be related to menacing creatures like the bu-kow and the bu-man (a possible ancestor of the modern bogeyman).

The combination of the voiced, plosive b- and the roaring -oo sounds makes boo a particularly startling word. Some linguists argue that the “ooh” or “oh” sounds can be pronounced at a higher volume than other vowel sounds, such as the “ee” in “wheel.” Since boo is a monosyllable, it can also be said very quickly, which may add to its scariness.

If you want to frighten someone in Spain, you can say uuh (pronounced like ooh in English), and in France you can say hou. A Czech ghost might say baf. In most European languages, including non-Romance languages like Polish, the sound boo is also understood as an attempt to scare someone, but it comes in different spellings.* For example, the Spanish version is written as ¡bú! …