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October 22, 2012 just a few days before the election, the clueless president tweeted this;

FACT: President Obama kept his promise to end the war in Iraq. Romney called the decision to bring our troops home “tragic.”

Scott Johnson of Power Line asked a friend how it is the president looks so smart, yet is so ignorant. Here is part of the answer.

… I think with Obama it starts with ignorance which in his formative years became a required doctrine of the intelligentsia when it came to understanding the way the world works in matters of international security; to be considered politically correct you had to spurn and despise such painfully developed concepts and practices as the balance of power, the necessity of using strength and diplomacy in tandem, etc.

This was allied with a personal drive for High Moralism, the felt need to build a castle around yourself behind a moat of 12-foot thick walls from behind which you could shoot moral arrows at everyone else to demonstrate your superiority and quickly destroy any emerging criticism of yourself. So from this position of invincible ignorance allied with moral perfection and then allied with power, you could become able to cross a line in history to reach a new world shaped by your conviction of your perfected sensibility.

This would mean, 1.) taking the US out of its despicable role of world leadership, which has been immoral and has caused almost all the world’s problems over at least the past century, and 2.) “Transforming” American into a country moral enough to be worthy of you, a kind of big Belgium. As the wicked of the world have refused to fall into line behind this vision, it has made the president increasingly sour and feeling put upon. …

Charles Krauthammer writes on amnesty as impeachment bait. 

President Obama is impatient. Congress won’t act on immigration, he says, and therefore he will. The White House is coy as to exactly what the president will do. But the leaks point to an executive order essentially legalizing an enormous new class of illegal immigrants, perhaps up to 5 million people.

One doesn’t usually respond to rumors. But this is an idea so bad and so persistently peddled by the White House that it has already been preemptively criticized by such unusual suspects as (liberal) constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley, concerned about yet another usurpation of legislative power by the “uber presidency,” and The Post editorial page, which warned that such a move would “tear up the Constitution.”

If this is just a trial balloon, the time to shoot it down is now. The administration claims such an executive order would simply be a corrective to GOP inaction on the current immigration crisis — 57,000 unaccompanied minors, plus tens of thousands of families, crashing through and overwhelming the southern border.

This rationale is a fraud. …

WSJ Article on the tunnels built by Hamas and the failure of Israel to totally understand what was being prepared for them. We have some good pictures of the tunnels; one of which is amusing.

Israel’s early failure to detect the vast Hamas tunnel network that its forces destroyed in Gaza is triggering a wave of recriminations within the country’s security and political establishment.

As Israel and the Palestinians agreed to a fresh cease-fire in Gaza that started at midnight there, efforts already were under way in Israel to address the latest challenge to the country’s security. Just as Israel built a separation wall to stem a wave of suicide bombings and developed the Iron Dome air-defense system to blunt rocket attacks, it is already casting for deterrents to address the newest Palestinian threat.

Questions over why the tunnel threat was underestimated, and why investment in technology that could detect more of the passages was neglected, are becoming hotly debated in Israel. So is the question of how Hamas was able to obtain the thousands of tons of cement and other materials to build the tunnels.

Meir Sheetrit, a former member of parliament’s foreign affairs and defense committee, said there was a troubling lack of knowledge about the tunnel building. “I don’t think our intelligence knew how many tunnels were dug, the location of the tunnels or how many of them were planned for assault,” Mr. Sheetrit said.

“We don’t have the technology to detect the tunnels from afar currently. That means we have to rely on information coming from somebody who knows where the tunnel actually is,” he added. “Of course, it’s not easy for Israel to get human intelligence in Gaza.”

Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, an Israeli army spokesman, rebuffed suggestions of any intelligence lapse, saying the military has known about Hamas’s “strategic project” to build tunnels for years.

“We knew the vastness of the project, and we knew the specific points on the ground to a great extent,” he said.

The underground network was painstakingly constructed by throngs of Palestinian workers, who used sophisticated machinery and thousands of tons of cement in a massive multiyear underground construction project into Israeli territory, according to current and former Israeli and U.S. officials. …

American Thinker posts on the children killed digging the Hamas tunnels.

… Hamas killed hundreds of children in the construction of its extensive tunnel network, built partly to carry out attacks on children across the Gaza border in Israel. That report–confirmed by Hamas itself–emerged in 2012, not from the Israeli government, but the sympathetic Journal of Palestine Studies, in an article that otherwise celebrated the secret tunnel system as a symbol of Palestinian resistance to the Israeli “siege” of the Gaza Strip. (snip)

Hamas is not only using child labor, but likely child slavery, in building its terror tunnel network. While the world worries obsessively over the child casualties of Israeli attacks on Hamas targets in Gaza, it has ignored Hamas’s deliberate killing of hundreds of Palestinian children, over the objections of the local populace.

The knowledge that Hamas used children to dig tunnels for smuggling and terror up to 25 meters below ground changes the moral calculation of the war significantly. Not only does Hamas show extreme indifference to the lives of Palestinian children by using them as human shields, placing rockets in UN schools and the like, but it actively destroys those lives by sending Palestinian children to die underground in 19th century conditions. …

And now Power Line posts on reports some of the children were executed so the tunnels would remain secret.

Digging tunnels for Hamas and living to tell about it is no sure thing. At least 160 Palestinian children reportedly died while performing the hazardous duty that the tunnel digging for Hamas entails. This number was reported in a pro-Palestinian journalist based on statements by Hamas officials in Gaza.

But surviving the digging was only half the battle. Hamas reportedly executed dozens more diggers in the past few weeks out of fear that they would provide information to Israel about where the tunnels are located.

The executions were reported on an Israeli military blog, based on statements by Palestinians involved in the digging. The Times of Israel could not independently confirm the report. But who can doubt that Hamas, which reportedly spent 40 percent of its budget on the digging and used child labor, would take the most extreme measures to keep the locations secret from Israel?

Humor seems misplaced today, but for some relief, here’s Andy Malcolm with late night.

Conan: Monday was President Obama’s 53rd birthday. His age is now higher than his approval rating.

Meyers: A New York restaurant has created the Rice Burger, which replaces normal burger buns with rice patties. The restaurant also replaces customers with empty chairs.

Fallon: A man in Maryland claims that he found one of President Obama’s custom golf balls in the woods near the golf course where the President played over the weekend. Yep, Obama said he’d been looking for his balls for a while. Then, Democrats said, “Yeah, we know.”

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Joel Kotkin says CA Dems risk blue collar rebellion.

If California is to change course and again become a place of opportunity, the impetus is likely to come not from the perennially shrinking Republican Party but from working-class and middle-class Democrats.

This group, long quiescent, has emerged most notably in opposition to the state’s anti-global warming cap-and-trade policies, which will force up energy prices. Recently, some 16 Democratic Assembly members, led by Fresno’s Henry Perea, asked the state to suspend the cap-and-trade program, which will add as much as a dollar to what already are among the highest gasoline prices in the nation.

In some senses, this budding blue-collar rebellion exposes the essential contradiction between the party’s now-dominant gentry Left and its much larger and less well-off voting base. For the people who fund the party – public employee unions, Silicon Valley and Hollywood – higher energy prices are more than worth the advantages. Public unions get to administer the program and gain in power and employment while venture capitalists and firms, like Google, get to profit on mandated “green energy” schemes.

What’s in it for Hollywood? Well, entertainment companies are shifting production elsewhere in response to subsidies offered by other states, localities and companies, so high energy costs and growing impoverishment across Southern California doesn’t figure to really hurt their businesses. Furthermore, by embracing “green” policies, the famously narcissistic Hollywood crowd also gets to feel good about themselves, a motivation not to be underestimated.

This upside, however, does not cancel out hoary factors such as geography, race and class. One can expect lock-step support for any proposed shade of green from most coastal Democrats. Among lawmakers, the new Democratic dissenters don’t tend to come from Malibu or PortolaValley. They often represent heavily Latino areas of the Inland Empire and Central Valley, where people tend to have less money, longer drives to work and a harder time affording a decent home. Cap and trade’s impact on gasoline prices – which could approach an additional $2 a gallon by 2020 – is a very big deal in these regions. …

Sherman Frederick posts on Lois Lerner’s salty language.

If you want government to live up to the ideals under which this country was formed, you’re going to be called names.

Get used to it, because periodically the people who run government grow drunk with power and become a toxic combination of corrupt, cruel and petty. It can happen to a president; it can happen to a dogcatcher; and it can happen to all stripes of bureaucrats in between.

There’s no better example of this than how the federal government treats the tea party.

Sen. Harry Reid, Rep. Nancy Pelosi and President Barrack Obama have all tried to marginalize the tea party movement because it threatens their tax-’n’-spend status quo. Respectively, they have called these citizens “extremists,” “Astroturf” (the opposite of grass roots) and “haters.”

But perhaps the insult that best captures the attitude of government gone adrift came from embattled former Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner. She calls them “ass—–.”

Lois Lerner isn’t the first government employee to go sour. And Reid, Pelosi and Obama won’t be the last pompous politicians to forget the power of a country founded upon extending dignity toward every human being, regardless of race, gender, religion, politics, financial status and all such other external means of discrimination. …

Mark Tapscott thinks it is time to view the administration as a criminal enterprise. 

See a tree with 20 apples hanging on it and reasonable people conclude it’s an apple tree. So is it a criminal conspiracy when 20 government employees illegally destroy important official emails?

If that seems like an extreme question, consider the steadily accumulating evidence about the Obama administration’s modus operandi with potentially incriminating documents subpoenaed by Congress: A scandal erupts. Congressional hearings are held. Documents are requested and withheld. Subpoenas are issued. Contempt charges threatened. A few documents dribble out.

Then come the admissions that, oh by the way, emails required by multiple federal laws to be preserved have either been destroyed or “lost.”

The latest example comes from the Department of Health and Human Services, which admitted Wednesday that hundreds of Obamacare emails subpoenaed in 2013 by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform were destroyed months ago. …

Sharyl Attkisson has more on elusive federal documents.

When it comes to accountability questions, one owes the benefit of the doubt to the U.S. government, whoever may be in charge. Managing the massive federal bureaucracy isn’t easy. Responding to the demands from the public, the press and Congress for public information can be time consuming.  However, it becomes increasingly difficult to suspend disbelief in the multiple instances in which the Obama administration is obstructing the release of, or losing, documents in major investigations.

In Fast and Furious, President Obama declared executive privilege to withhold documents in a controversy that the White House claimed revealed no evidence of White House involvement. Of course, if all the evidence isn’t turned over, then how is one to be confident no evidence exists? Further, multiple federal agencies have refused to turn over many documents requested in the case under the Freedom of Information Act as far back as 2011.

In the instance of Benghazi, the Obama administration failed to turn over requested documents when asked by Congress and requested under Freedom of Information law. Only recently, nearly two years after-the-fact, under court order, did it produce some withheld material to the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, which sued the State Department for failing to respond to its Freedom of Information requests. The documents continue to contradict the Obama administration’s narratives surrounding the September 11, 2012 Benghazi attacks.

With the IRS, President Obama insisted there wasn’t a “smidgen” of corruption surrounding the tax agency’s targeting of conservatives. But a key IRS official, Lois Lerner, refused to testify to Congress. And the IRS “lost” subpoenaed documents generated by Lerner and other key officials. These may include documents that Lerner sent to outside agencies and officials. Though the IRS says it will turn over tens of thousands of other documents, it’s hard to feel confident that the most damning ones, if any existed, will have been miraculously saved. …

Further proof of “gangster government” the Examiner editors write on obstruction of inspectors general.

Billions of tax dollars are being lost every day to waste, fraud and corruption in the federal government, but President Obama’s administration is blocking inspectors general — the officials who are most likely to find and expose such wrongdoing — from doing their jobs. That’s the disturbing message given to Congress and the American people this week from a majority of the federal government’s 78 IGs. The blocking occurs when agency lawyers deny the authority of IGs to gain access to relevant documents and officials.

The 47 IGs minced no words: “Each of us strongly supports the principle that an inspector general must have complete, unfiltered, and timely access to all information and materials available to the agency that relate to that IG’s oversight activities, without unreasonable administrative burdens. The importance of this principle, which was codified by Congress in Section 6(a)(1) of the Inspector General Act of 1978, as amended (the IG Act), cannot be overstated. Refusing, restricting, or delaying an IG’s access to documents leads to incomplete, inaccurate, or significantly delayed findings or recommendations, which in turn may prevent the agency from promptly correcting serious problems and deprive Congress of timely information regarding the agency’s performance. …

Jennifer Rubin posts on lateness.

The Post documents what anyone following President Obama’s speeches and press conferences knows: He is really late. A lot. “Obama has been a cumulative 2,121 minutes late to events in 2014. That’s 35 hours, 21 minutes — or almost a day and a half — that his audiences have been waiting for him to speak.” On average, that is only 11 minutes per event, but in some cases (for his Wednesday afternoon press conference, for example) he can be an hour late. (George W. Bush was famously punctual.)

But why is he so late? We can only speculate. But it’s a widely studied behavior in the population as a whole, so there is some informed analysis on the topic. Psychologists have several explanations for habitual lateness:

Angry people who behave with almost exaggerated calm and courtesy might nevertheless express their anger through passive means, …

… lateness is the most obvious form of procrastination. We don’t procrastinate tasks that we are adept at and from which we derive satisfaction or praise. In the case of Obama, it’s understandable that he procrastinates, given how poorly his speeches and press conferences have been received of late. He is often angry, defensive or evasive — and, more than ever before in his political career, challenged openly. Mainstream media figures routinely rip his performances as either dishonest (e.g. refusing to admit he lied on “you can keep your doctor”) or lackadaisical and detached. I’m sure he’d rather hang around with aides who tell him what a swell job he is doing, how mean his opponents are and how misinformed everyone else is.

We don’t really know precisely why he’s late, but one thing is for certain. If he cared about keeping others waiting or acknowledged that his behavior is downright rude, he wouldn’t do it.

IFL Science says if you forget to get out in the sun, you might forget to. 

Adding to an ever-growing body of evidence, a new study has found that vitamin D deficiency is associated with a substantially increased risk of developing Alzheimer’s and dementia. While previous studies have drawn similar conclusions, this is the largest, most robust study carried out to date. The results have been published in the journal Neurology.

Vitamin D is an essential vitamin that is produced by the body upon exposure of the skin to sunlight, but it can also be found in small amounts in certain foods such as oily fish. It plays a variety of roles in the body and over recent years our understanding of how it helps to maintain optimum health has dramatically increased. For example, it’s thought to reduce the risk of certain bone diseases, bacterial and viral infections and autoimmune diseases.

Interestingly, some studies have hinted that vitamin D may play a neuroprotective role. In support of this idea, several recent studies have found links between vitamin D deficiency and the risk of dementia and cognitive decline. However, one study also found no associations in men.

To find out more, an international team of researchers, headed by scientists at the University of Exeter, …

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Before we return to the latest disasters, foreign and domestic, that have overcome our hapless clueless feckless government, we’ll spend time today on the success Israel has had in its campaign against Hamas.

Gabriel Schoenfeld compares Israel’s careful forays into Gaza with the Allied bombing of Germany and Japan.

Condemnation of Israel for its conduct of Operation Protective Edge in Gaza continues unabated. The chief accusation, heard time and again, is that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have either been cavalier about civilian casualties or are intentionally inflicting them. Israel and its defenders, for their part, have been at pains to point out the great lengths the IDF has gone to avoid injuring civilians, while at the same time noting the innumerable ways in which Hamas has violated the laws of war. 

The debate over these matters has been almost as intense as the fighting itself. All too often, historical and moral perspective have been lost in the rhetorical smoke. No nation can survive with hundreds of rockets raining on its cities day after day while its borders are simultaneously penetrated by armed fighters seeking to spirit out hostages via underground tunnels. Once again, Israel has found itself waging a war for its survival. In such a war, the question becomes: What is forbidden and what is permitted? 

As is well known but bears restating, the campaign Israel has been conducting to suppress Hamas rocket fire and destroy its tunnel network employs precision guided munitions. The attacks from land, air, and sea are designed to destroy Hamas’s command and control facilities and those structures in or from which it has been manufacturing, storing, or firing its huge arsenal of rockets. Before the IDF attacks any buildings where civilians are known to be living or congregating, it issues numerous alerts by dropping leaflets, making telephone calls and sending text messages, and firing warning shots.

In a conflict in which its adversary employs innocent women and children as human shields and fires offensive weapons from or near hospitals, schools, and U.N. shelters, Israel’s effort to reduce civilian casualties has clearly not succeeded in every case. But the effort itself, if not unique in the annals of warfare, is certainly far from the norm. Notably, it stands in the starkest possible contrast to the way Great Britain and the United States conducted their own war for survival. …

… This brings us back to Hamas. Its illegal use of Israeli uniforms in combat is but one of many practices that reveal the group to be not a government or a governing party, but a terrorist organization. Indeed, its fighters fall into the same category of “unlawful enemy combatants” that applies to al Qaeda. In fighting such an adversary, one is allowed to take off certain gloves, as the United States has been doing in Afghanistan under both Presidents Bush and Obama. Our forces there have routinely used a variety of tactics to kill our enemies that entail the inadvertent but extensive loss of civilian life.

All this is overlooked by the wolf pack that constitutes Israel’s critics. So too is the ocean of civilian blood flowing in Syria and Iraq at the hands of Islamic butchers of various religio-ideological stripes, about which Israel’s critics are thunderously silent. President Obama fully participates in the hypocrisy by publicly chastising Israel for causing civilian deaths when such deaths have occurred with regularity as a consequence of the drone strikes carried out in Afghanistan and elsewhere at his own orders, and for which the United States has on frequent occasion felt compelled to apologize. …

Evelyn Gordon reports on just one of the ways Hamas has created a humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

There has been a lot of talk lately about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. What has gone curiously unmentioned by all the great humanitarians from the UN and “human rights” groups, however, is the degree to which this crisis was deliberately fomented by Hamas: Aside from starting the war to begin with, Hamas has done its level best to deprive Gazans of everything from food to medical care to housing, despite Israel’s best efforts to provide them.

Take, for instance, the widely reported shortages of medicines and various other essentials. Many of these products are imported, and since Egypt has largely closed its border, Gaza has only one conduit for these vital imports: the Kerem Shalom crossing into Israel. Thus if Gaza’s Hamas government had any concern whatsoever for its citizens, ensuring that this crossing was kept open and could function at maximum efficiency would be a top priority.

Instead, Hamas and other terrorist groups subjected Kerem Shalom to relentless rocket and mortar fire throughout the 29-day conflict, thereby ensuring that the job of getting cargo through was constantly interrupted as crossing workers raced for cover. Hamas also launched at least three tunnel attacks near Kerem Shalom, each of which shut the crossing down for hours. …

Seth Mandel on what we now know about Hamas’ tactics.

The fog of war often means the first draft of history makes the greatest impact but needs to be corrected by later drafts. After the Cold War was over, historian John Lewis Gaddis called his updated book on the conflict “We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History.” More famous is Kinglsey Amis’s suggestion that Robert Conquest call his new edition of The Great Terror “I Told You So, You F—ing Fools.” Yet now we have a rare opportunity in Gaza to apply what we now know to additional fighting in a war thought to be over.

With no deal reached for a permanent truce between Israel and Hamas, the terrorist organization in Gaza wasted no time in renewing its attacks on Israel today. And it’s worth wondering if the atrocious media coverage of the war, which abided by Hamas’s threats and only showed what Hamas wanted the world to see, will be any different for this round of fighting. After all, as Israeli ground troops left Gaza and journalists went with them, reporters began to admit: we now know.

We now know, that is, that Hamas was firing rockets from civilian areas and among neighborhoods where journalists were staying. That meant they were getting a twofer: reporters wouldn’t expose their war crimes and they would draw return fire from Israel that would endanger foreign journalists and Palestinian civilians. As we know from the Tet Offensive, if you can spook the reporters you can get your sky-is-falling coverage made to order. …

Victor Davis Hanson makes the case for Israel coming out of this war stronger than before.

In postmodern wars, we are told, there is no victory, no defeat, no aggressors, no defenders, just a tragedy of conflicting agendas. But in such a mindless and amoral landscape, Israel in fact is on its way to emerging in a far better position after the Gaza war than before.

Analysts of the current fighting in Gaza have assured us that even if Israel weakens Hamas, such a short-term victory will hardly lead to long-term strategic success — but they don’t define “long-term.” In this line of thinking, supposedly in a few weeks Israel will only find itself more isolated than ever. It will grow even more unpopular in Europe and will perhaps, for the first time, lose its patron, America — while gaining an enraged host of Arab and Islamic enemies. Meanwhile, Hamas will gain stature, rebuild, and slowly wear Israel down.

But if we compare the Gaza war with Israel’s past wars, that pessimistic scenario hardly rings true. Unlike in the existential wars of 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973, Israel faces no coalition of powerful conventional enemies. Syria’s military is wrecked. Iraq is devouring itself. Egypt is bankrupt and in no mood for war. Its military government is more worried about Hamas than about Israel. Jordan has no wish to attack Israel. The Gulf States are likewise more afraid of the axis of Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood than of Israel — a change of mentality that has no historical precedent. In short, never since the birth of the Jewish state have the traditional enemies surrounding Israel been in such military and political disarray. Never have powerful Arab states quietly hoped that Israel would destroy an Islamist terrorist organization that they fear more than they fear the Jewish state. …

Craig Pirrong at Streetwise Professor posts on Putin’s pique over the West’s sanctions.  

In retaliation for US and EU sanctions, Russia is banning the importation of large categories of food products from each: food imports from the US are pretty much banned altogether.

These sanctions are aimed at an industry that is politically powerful far beyond its numbers. Chicken farmers in the US will squawk at the loss of about 1 percent of their revenues, and European dairy producers will bellow in anger. But the economic impact on the affected countries will be trivial. The US exports about $300 million in chicken to Russia (down substantially from a few years ago), which is essentially rounding error in US GDP. European net food exports to Russia are about 12 billion euros, or less than .1 percent of the EU’s 13 trillion Euro economy.

The impact on Russia’s people will be substantially greater. Russia imports about 35 percent of its food, about half of that from Europe and the US. Higher value, non-staples are disproportionately affected. This will lead to an appreciable increase in the cost of food, which represents a very large fraction of Russian household budgets. Whereas US consumers spend about 6.5 percent of their total expenditures on food, in Russia the figure is about 32 percent. A rise in food prices hits hard. A 10 percent increase, which is not unrealistic, cuts Russian living standards about 3 percent.

Putin ordered the government to find ways to increase food production, because, you know, that ukases always work as the Tsar intends. Russian food output will no doubt rise in response to higher prices, but in the short run the elasticity of supply is likely to be very low, especially for vegetables and dairy. Anyways, this increased output will only mitigate the price increases. If Russian firms/farms could produce more at current prices, they’d be doing so.

I predict that since increased Russian domestic production will have little effect on prices, Putin will soon resort to the tried-and-false nostrum of price controls, just like Russia did when food price inflation spiked in 2007. This will lead to lines and empty shelves, so Russians can party like it’s 1989: to those nostalgic for the USSR, be careful what you ask for. I note that Russia also adopted price controls, to disastrous effect, in WWI. Putin is idealizing Russia’s role in that war of late, and employs WWI reenactors to lead subversion campaigns in Ukraine, so maybe he’ll think it’s a great idea to reenact the price controls too. …

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Victor Davis Hanson says by always taking the easy route in the short term, the current administration has guaranteed longer term trouble.

The Obama administration often either denies any responsibility for the current global chaos or claims that it erupted spontaneously. Yet most of the mess was caused by, or made worse by, growing U.S. indifference and paralysis.

Over the last five and a half years, America has had lots of clear choices, but the administration usually took the path of least short-term trouble, which has ensured long-term hardship.

There was no need to “reset” the relatively mild punishments that the George W. Bush administration had accorded Vladimir Putin’s Russia for invading Georgia in 2008. By unilaterally normalizing relations with Russia and trashing Bush, Barack Obama and then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton only green-lighted further Russian aggression, which has since spread to Crimea and Ukraine.

There was no need for Obama, almost immediately upon assuming office, to distance the U.S. from Israel by criticizing Israel’s policies and warming to its enemies, such as Hamas and the authoritarian Turkish prime minister Recep Erdogan.

Any time Israel’s enemies have glimpsed growing distance in the U.S.–Israeli friendship, they seek only to pry it still wider. We see just that with terrorists in Gaza who launch hundreds of missiles into Israel on the expectation that the U.S. will broker a favorable deal that finds both sides equally at fault. …

Lacking the courage and willpower to stop Russia’s hegemonic leaps, the president settles for denigrating Putin and the country. Craig Pirrong has the story. While avoiding short term pain, President Pretend says he’s taking the long view.

Before departing on his I’ll Golf While the World Burns Vacation and Birthday Party, Obama gave an interview for The Economist. It is beyond belief.

Here is what jumped out at me (from a Reuters article summarizing the interview):

‘President Barack Obama dismissed Russia as a nation that “doesn’t make anything” . . .

Obama downplayed Moscow’s role in the world, dismissing President Vladimir Putin as a leader causing short-term trouble for political gain that will hurt Russia in the long term.

“I do think it’s important to keep perspective. Russia doesn’t make anything,” Obama said in the interview.

“Immigrants aren’t rushing to Moscow in search of opportunity. The life expectancy of the Russian male is around 60 years old. The population is shrinking,” he said.

Obama told Putin last week that he believes Russia violated the 1988 Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces treaty designed to eliminate ground-launched cruise missiles.

Speaking of Russia’s “regional challenges,” Obama said in the interview: “We have to make sure that they don’t escalate where suddenly nuclear weapons are back in the discussion of foreign policy.” ‘

Of all the Obama idiocies, this has to rank near the top.

Jennifer Rubin posts on the current state of the US-Israel relationship.

… The bottom line is relations with Israel have never been so bad for so long. The Times muses that “the chronic nature of this tension is unusual — and, according to current and former officials, rooted in ill will at the very top. ‘You have a backdrop of a very acrimonious relationship between the president and the prime minister of Israel,’ said Robert M. Danin, a Middle East expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.”

It’s not really the president per se, but the policies and rhetoric he’s used, starting with the Cairo speech (that analogized Palestinians to enslaved African Americans and implied that Israel’s claim to the land was based on Holocaust guilt), continuing through the out-of-control condemnations of Israel issuing building permits in its capital and up to the administration blaming Israel for the collapse of the “peace process” and negotiating a rotten interim deal with Iran, which seeks to wipe Israel off the map. Ambushing Netanyahu with a new position on the “1967 borders” didn’t help either.

It’s almost a certainty that if the president hadn’t gone bonkers over settlements, hadn’t staked his foreign policy on an impossible peace process, had stood his ground in the P5+1′s talks with Iran and not berated Israel publicly for failing to use sufficient caution (what do they possibly know about how much caution is being taken?), relations would be better. How do we know most of the rift is Obama’s fault? Our other allies — Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, etc. — are just as fed up with him as is Israel. Only in Obama’s mind is everything someone else’s fault.

Noemie Emery writes on the “genius” president.

It’s now two and a half years to the can’t-come-too-soon end of President Obama’s adventure, but his legacy seems to be settled already; he is the smartest man in all of U.S. history to screw up so many big things.

That he is brilliant is something we already knew. “This is a guy whose IQ is off the charts,” Michael Beschloss said of Obama, who was the “smartest guy” to be president. Christopher Buckley said he was first class in temperament and intellectual prowess, boosting him two slots above Franklin D. Roosevelt in the gray matter arena. “You could see him as a NewRepublic writer,” said David Brooks, closing the argument.

But fact that this genius has become a disaster became clear in mid-June when the Middle East imploded, matching his health care debacle with its foreign equivalent. The non-connection of political wisdom to what intellectuals think makes for intelligence was never more painfully clear.

Democrats are quick to lay claim to the mantle of intellect, at least in the more modern age: Jimmy Carter was said to be smarter than Gerald Ford, everyone was said to be smarter than Ronald Reagan, Michael Dukakis was said to be smarter than George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton said to be smarter than all except his wife, Hillary, and Al Gore and John Kerry much smarter than George W. Bush, whose SAT scores, the New York Times told us, had to be much, much lower than Kerry’s, until it was found they were not. …

Thomas Sowell wonders if thinking has become obsolete.

Some have said that we are living in a post-industrial era, while others have said that we are living in a post-racial era. But growing evidence suggests that we are living in a post-thinking era.

Many people in Europe and the Western Hemisphere are staging angry protests against Israel’s military action in Gaza. One of the talking points against Israel is that far more Palestinian civilians have been killed by Israeli military attacks than the number of Israeli civilians killed by the Hamas rocket attacks on Israel that started this latest military conflict.

Are these protesters aware that vastly more German civilians were killed by American bombers attacking Nazi Germany during World War II than American civilians killed in the United States by Hitler’s forces?

Talk show host Geraldo Rivera says that there is no way Israel is winning the battle for world opinion. But Israel is trying to win the battle for survival, while surrounded by enemies. Might that not be more important? …

NY Times article suggests running just 5 minutes a day has important benefits.

Running for as little as five minutes a day could significantly lower a person’s risk of dying prematurely, according to a large-scale new study of exercise and mortality. The findings suggest that the benefits of even small amounts of vigorous exercise may be much greater than experts had assumed.

In recent years, moderate exercise, such as brisk walking, has been the focus of a great deal of exercise science and most exercise recommendations. The government’s formal 2008 exercise guidelines, for instance, suggest that people should engage in about 30 minutes of moderate exercise on most days of the week. Almost as an afterthought, the recommendations point out that half as much, or about 15 minutes a day of vigorous exercise, should be equally beneficial.

But the science to support that number had been relatively paltry, with few substantial studies having carefully tracked how much vigorous exercise is needed to reduce disease risk and increase lifespan. Even fewer studies had looked at how small an amount of vigorous exercise might achieve that same result.

So for the new study, …

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Charles Krauthammer writes on John Kerry; Clueless in Gaza.

John Kerry is upset by heavy criticism from Israelis — left, right and center — of his recent cease-fire diplomacy. But that’s only half the story. More significant is the consternation of America’s Arab partners, starting with the president of the Palestinian Authority. Mahmoud Abbas was stunned that Kerry would fly off to Paris to negotiate with Hamas allies Qatar and Turkey in talks that excluded the PA and Egypt.

The talks also undermined Egypt’s cease-fire proposal, which Israel had accepted and Hamas rejected (and would have prevented the vast majority of the casualties on both sides). “Kerry tried through his latest plan to destroy the Egyptian bid,” charged a senior Palestinian official quoted in the Arab daily Asharq Al-Awsat — a peace plan that the PA itself had supported.

It gets worse. Kerry did not just trample an Egyptian initiative. It was backed by the entire Arab League and specifically praised by Saudi Arabia. With the exception of Qatar — more a bank than a country — the Arabs are unanimous in wanting to see Hamas weakened, if not overthrown. The cease-fire-in-place they backed would have denied Hamas any reward for starting this war, while what Kerry brought back from Paris granted practically all of its demands.

Which is what provoked the severe criticism Kerry received at home. When as respected and scrupulously independent a national security expert as David Ignatius calls Kerry’s intervention a blunder, you know this is not partisan carping from the usual suspects. This is general amazement at Kerry’s cluelessness. …

… Whatever his intent, Kerry legitimized Hamas’s war criminality. Which makes his advocacy of Hamas’s terms not just a strategic blunder — enhancing a U.S.-designated terrorist group just when a wall-to-wall Arab front wants to see it gone — but a moral disgrace.

Andrew Malcolm analyzes President Part-timer bragging about last month’s job report.

… Take this June, for instance. Obama boasts the economy under his administration helped to create “about 300,000 new jobs.” (Actually, 288,000.)

OK. Let’s look inside those numbers. During that month the United States, in fact, lost 523,000 full-time jobs. They were replaced by 811,000 new jobs.

That might look good, until you realize that only 12,000 of those new jobs — 1.4% — were full-time. The other 799,000 “new jobs” — nearly 99% — that Obama’s claiming credit for were only part-time.

Apparently, in his remarks President Obama can’t find time to go into such detail. We’re pleased to help him out.

Nate Silver has an extensive analysis of the chances for the GOP to snag the Senate. This is worth reading carefully and bookmarking because on election night if you see Gardner in Colorado and Ernst in Iowa winning, then it will be a very good night for Republicans.

If Americans elected an entirely new set of senators every two years — as they elect members of the House of Representatives — this November’s Senate contest would look like a stalemate. President Obama remains unpopular; his approval ratings have ticked down a point or two over the past few months. But the Republican Party remains a poor alternative in the eyes of many voters, which means it may not be able to exploit Obama’s unpopularity as much as it otherwise might.

Generic Congressional ballot polls — probably the best indicator of the public’s overall mood toward the parties — suggest a relatively neutral partisan environment. Most of those polls show Democrats with a slight lead, but many of them are conducted among registered voters, meaning they can overstate Democrats’ standing as compared with polls of the people most likely to vote. Republicans usually have a turnout advantage, especially in midterm years, and their voters appear to be more enthusiastic about this November’s elections. Still, the gap is not as wide as it was in 2010.

The problem for Democrats is that this year’s Senate races aren’t being fought in neutral territory. Instead, the Class II senators on the ballot this year come from states that gave Obama an average of just 46 percent of the vote in 2012.

Democrats hold the majority of Class II seats now, but that’s because they were last contested in 2008, one of the best Democratic years of the past half-century. That year, Democrats won the popular vote for the U.S. House by almost 11 percentage points. Imagine if 2008 had been a neutral partisan environment instead. We can approximate this by applying a uniform swing of 11 percentage points toward Republicans in each Senate race. In that case, Democrats would have lost the races in Alaska, Colorado, Louisiana, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Carolina and Oregon — and Republicans would already hold a 52-48 majority in the Senate.

It therefore shouldn’t be surprising that we continue to see Republicans as slightly more likely than not to win a net of six seats this November and control of the Senate. A lot of it is simply reversion to the mean. This may not be a “wave” election as 2010 was, but Republicans don’t need a wave to take over the Senate. …

Jennifer Rubin has a great idea. Why not “pull the plug on those phony Sunday talk shows?”

On the Sunday talk shows, American politicians come in three categories. The first are there to impart spin that neither the host nor the audience buys. The second are there to be the subject of ridicule by the mainstream media and thereby prove helpful to Democrats. The third are there for the media to test and prod potential candidates for something. (Obtaining information from pols or determining their position on an issue is a minor concern. With 24/7 news, social media and uber-partisanship, it is rare that a pol ever says something new, informative or surprising.) All three categories were on full display Sunday.

We’ve noted before that when it comes to laughable spin on an Obama administration scandal or political ploy, the White House often resorts to sending out Dan Pfeiffer, who seems incapable of being shamed and will gladly say anything. It has gotten to the point that when he appears, you know something laughably false is going to be said. We were not disappointed on ABC’s “This Week”: …

The Koch Bros. gave $25 million to the United Negro College Fund. Armstrong Williams defends the fund against the leftists who have criticized the fund for accepting the gift. 

During the first week of June, the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) received a generous $25 million donation from conservative/libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch.

At a time when historically black colleges and universities are struggling to obtain funding for hopeful African Americans students, you would think that the UNCF and other prominent African American leaders would rejoice over the fifth largest donation in UNCF history.

Instead, the reaction to the $25 million donation has been anything but thankful. Some individuals on twitter wrote “UNCF literally sells ‘their soul to the devil’ accepting checks from the Koch Brothers without knowing their evil history” or “Koch donation to UNCF tells children everywhere that money is first and integrity is unnecessary.”

Executive director of Color for Change, Rashad Robinson, said, “Charity is not justice. Giving someone a check at the end of spending years putting in laws to suppress them is not justice. It’s cover. It’s maybe allowing the Kochs to sleep well at night.” …

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Richard Epstein, once of U. of Chicago Law, and now of the Hoover Institution, and Mario Loyola penned a look at the federal takeover of state governments.

The tug of war between the president and Congress is steadily escalating. The most recent sign of incipient institutional breakdown is House Speaker John Boehner’s suit against President Obama for rewriting laws and stepping on Congress’s turf.

But lurking in the wings is a second separation-of-powers issue, just as important, that Americans have mostly overlooked—the separation between federal and state government. In many areas, that vital divide is fast disappearing, owing to a relentless expansion of federal power. And both political parties share the blame.

Programs like Medicaid, Common Core, the Clean Air Act, and the federal highway system enjoy popular support because they appear to allow the federal government to accomplish things all Americans want, at least in the short run. But those programs often turn states into mere field offices of the federal government, often against their will, in turn creating a  host of structural problems.

Federal officials exert enormous influence over state budgets and state regulators, often behind the scenes. The new federalism replaces the “laboratories of democracy” with heavy-handed, once-size-fits-all solutions. Uniformity wins but diversity loses, along with innovation, local choice, and the Constitution’s necessary limits on government power. 

Take Medicaid. …

The impeachment wish continues to get critical media attention. This time from Ross Douthat of the NY Times.

… in political terms, there is a sordid sort of genius to the Obama strategy. The threat of a unilateral amnesty contributes to internal G.O.P. chaos on immigration strategy, chaos which can then be invoked (as the president did in a Friday news conference) to justify unilateral action. The impeachment predictions, meanwhile, help box Republicans in: If they howl — justifiably! — at executive overreach, the White House gets to say “look at the crazies — we told you they were out for blood.”

It’s only genius, however, if the nonconservative media — honorable liberals and evenhanded moderates alike — continue to accept the claim that immigration reform by fiat would just be politics as usual, and to analyze the idea strictly in terms of its political effects (on Latino turnout, Democratic fund-raising, G.O.P. internal strife).

This is the tone of the media coverage right now: The president may get the occasional rebuke for impeachment-baiting, but what the White House wants to do on immigration is assumed to be reasonable, legitimate, within normal political bounds.

It is not: It would be lawless, reckless, a leap into the antidemocratic dark.

And an American political class that lets this Rubicon be crossed without demurral will deserve to live with the consequences for the republic, in what remains of this presidency and in presidencies yet to come.

John Fund thinks censure is an appropriate remedy.

… It is important for our overall political health that we focus our criticism on President Obama’s unconstitutional acts and omissions rather than on the president himself. Lawmakers can word a censure resolution carefully to do this. Impeachment, on the other hand, would inevitably be viewed by many as a personal attack on President Obama.

But while impeachment isn’t appropriate, Congress must not simply acquiesce to President Obama’s numerous violations of the first Article of the Constitution, which is: “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States.” In the 1830s, Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky offered a Senate resolution denouncing as unconstitutional President Andrew Jackson’s actions against the Bank of the United States. He warned his fellow Senators: “The premonitory symptoms of despotism are upon us; and if Congress does not apply an instantaneous and effective remedy, the fatal collapse will soon come on.”

A resolution of censure would serve as a warning, a sort of constitutional yellow card, that Congress and the American people will not tolerate abuses of power indefinitely and that presidents who so overreach risk having a permanent blot on their record. President Obama should not be removed from office, but we will need more than mere criticism or even a lawsuit to remind him that his first duty is to uphold the laws, and that he is falling short.

WSJ OpEd on sailing making a comeback with commercial shipping.

As the shipping industry struggles with high fuel costs and tepid demand, some innovators say that high-tech sails may hold the secret to cheaper and cleaner fuel.

Chief among them is a group of maritime veterans whose company, Windship Technology, is working to revive the wind-powered merchant ship with sails made from metal alloys and carbon fibers.

A few companies have tried harnessing wind energy for shipping, though the technology is still largely in its initial development phase. Concepts have ranged from giant parachutes to towering cylindrical rotors. Rolls Royce and U.K.-based B9 Shipping are jointly developing a sail-natural gas hybrid system for small cargo ships.

London-based Windship is unique in moving into a higher weight class of long-haul cargo vessels—larger than 40,000 tons, and up to a quarter-mile long. …

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John Fund has more on the Dems impeachment dreams.

The simplest explanation for the bizarre spectacle of President Obama’s allies practically begging for Republicans to impeach him is that it’s a sign of political weakness, not of strength.

“Dems Fear A Debacle on Turnout,” read the front-page headline of the Capitol Hill newspaper the Hill this week. Turnout in this year’s congressional primaries hit record lows in a majority of states, with Democratic turnout lagging most. “A Pew poll out last week showed 45 percent who said they planned to vote Republican reported being more enthusiastic about voting this year than in years prior, while only 37 percent of those who supported a Democratic candidate said the same,” the Hill reported.

While the parties are roughly even in polls where voters are asked to choose between a generic Democratic or Republican candidate, that is cold comfort for those Democrats who remember they enjoyed a six-point lead in the Gallup poll on that question in early August 2010. Three months later they lost six Senate seats, control of the House, and a slew of governorships.

One way for Democrats to boost turnout is to rile up their base voters with horror stories that Republicans are planning to impeach President Obama. …

Ed Morrissey says the GAO review of the building of the healthcare website is more proof of the incompetence of the obama command economy.

Prepare yourselves for a shock –- federal government bureaucracies produce incompetence. These days, the evidence of this is almost impossible to ignore, whether it’s the Department of Veterans Affairs and its wait-list fraud, or the IRS and its epidemic of hard drive failures that was curiously confined to those targeting conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status. One would be hard put to find evidence of government-produced excellence at any level, and most of us would be satisfied to discover a modicum of competence.

In this case, though, the government itself has confirmed its own bureaucratic incompetence. The Government Accountability Office has concluded its investigation into the debacle of HHS’ federal exchange for health insurance, Healthcare.gov, and the overall rollout of Obamacare last October. No one will faint from shock to learn that the GAO’s independent review confirms that management failures and a lack of accountability led to the disastrous rollout of the central marketplace to service the command economy created by the Affordable Care Act.

With more on government incompetence, Virginia Postrel writes on the lack of full time jobs in President Part-Time’s economy. She explores the effects on the labor forced to work part-time.

The worst thing about being on jury duty isn’t actually serving on a jury. It’s having to check in every day — possibly several times a day, depending on your local system — to see whether you’ll be needed. You can’t plan either your work or your personal life. Your schedule is unpredictable and completely out of your control.

For many part-time workers in the post-crash economy, life has become like endless jury duty. Scheduling software now lets employers constantly optimize who’s working, better balancing labor costs and likely demand. The process demands enormous flexibility from part-time workers, sometimes requiring them to be on call all the time without knowing when they’ll work or how much they’ll earn. That puts the kibosh on the age-old strategy of working two or more part-time jobs to make ends meet. As my colleague Megan McArdle writes, “No matter how hard you are willing to work, stringing together anything approaching a minimum income becomes impossible.”

The problem, she concludes, is the weak job market: “As long as the demand for low-skilled labor significantly lags the supply, workers will continue to struggle.” It’s an obvious conclusion. But it’s missing something important. …

Howard Kurtz updates us on the Lois Lerner emails just discovered and the lack of interest in much of the media. 

The new batch of Lois Lerner emails may or may not be a smoking gun. But they’re something of a Rorschach test for the media.

For the former IRS official to be branding conservative commentators as “crazies” and “a–holes” is a telling moment in this scandal—but some in the media could care less.

To be sure, this investigation has dragged on a long time without proving a link between the White House and the Cincinnati office’s targeting of advocacy groups, especially on the right, for special scrutiny of their tax-exempt status. Critics say that conservative outlets such as Fox have tried to keep the story alive.

But the administration has done a decent job of bringing the story back to the headlines. The IRS acknowledged that it could not find two years’ worth of lost emails written or received by Lerner, who pleaded the Fifth when summoned by Congress. And the commissioner, William Koskinen, sounded downright arrogant when he showed up on the Hill.

Now the Republicans have found three emails in which Lerner disparaged conservatives.

What did the New York Times give the story? One measly paragraph, written by the AP, in a roundup column. …

As a reminder that our country does not always send such disgusting people to electoral success, Max Boot reviews a new book about the Reagan era.

Rick Perlstein has established himself as one of our foremost chroniclers of the rise of the modern conservative movement. It’s an unexpected niche for a card-carrying liberal. But if he’s occasionally tart in his comments about conservatives, he is not entirely unsympathetic either. In fact, he reserves some of his most cutting barbs (and there are many in his well-crafted if slightly over-caffeinated works) for clueless establishment liberals who all too readily dismissed the significance of conservative champions such as Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. …

 

… “In the years between 1973 and 1976, America suffered more wounds to its ideal of itself than at just about any other time in its history,” he claims. And he provides ample evidence to back up that assertion.

First and foremost, of course, was the defeat in Vietnam. Then, too, there was the first-ever resignation of a president and the Arab oil embargo, which led to nationwide shortages and rationing. Along with, as Mr. Perlstein writes, “A recession that saw hundreds of thousands of blue-collar workers idled during Christmastime [of 1974]; crime at a volume and ghastliness greater, according to one observer, ‘than at any time since the fifteenth century.’ Senate and House hearings on the Central Intelligence Agency that accused American presidents since Dwight Eisenhower of commanding squads of lawless assassins.”

These were just a few of the headline events. An assiduous researcher, Mr. Perlstein has unearthed numerous “smaller traumas,” too, such as “the near doubling of meat prices in the spring of 1973, when the president’s consumer advisor went on TV and informed viewers that ‘liver, kidney, brains and heart can be made into gourmet meals with seasoning, imagination, and more cooking time.’ ”

Mr. Perlstein suggests that this accumulation of crises had the potential to remake the U.S. into a very different kind of country. He quotes, for example, the editor of Intellectual Digest magazine writing in 1973: “For the first time, Americans have had at least a partial loss in the fundamental belief in ourselves. We’ve always believed we were the new men, the new people, the new society. The ‘last best hope on earth,’ in Lincoln’s terms. For the first time, we’ve really begun to doubt it.”

Liberals hoped to harness such self-doubt to redefine what it truly meant to “believe in America.” They wanted to displace wave-the-flag patriotism with a supposedly higher form of loyalty rooted in the freedom “to criticize, to interrogate, to analyze, to dissent,” and to replace boundless belief in America’s potential with a conviction that, as Jerry Brown (then, as now, governor of California) put it during his 1976 presidential campaign: “We have fiscal limits, we have ecological limits, we even have human limits.”

Mr. Perlstein argues that this revolution in American thought was effectively thwarted by the ascent of that perpetual optimist Ronald Reagan, who insisted on seeing even the most traumatic events in his own life (such as his father’s alcoholism or his own divorce) as being part of a providential design for the greater good. Reagan made no concessions to the self-critical weltanschauung of the 1970s.

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Caroline Glick writes on this administration’s disastrous Mid East policy.

When US President Barack Obama phoned Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Sunday night, in the middle of a security cabinet meeting, he ended any remaining doubt regarding his policy toward Israel and Hamas.

Obama called Netanyahu while the premier was conferring with his senior ministers about how to proceed in Gaza. Some ministers counseled that Israel should continue to limit our forces to specific pinpoint operations aimed at destroying the tunnels of death that Hamas has dug throughout Gaza and into Israeli territory.

Others argued that the only way to truly destroy the tunnels, and keep them destroyed, is for Israel to retake control over the Gaza Strip.

No ministers were recommending that Israel end its operations in Gaza completely. The longer our soldiers fight, the more we learn about the vast dimensions of the Hamas’s terror arsenal, and about the Muslim Brotherhood group’s plans and strategy for using it to destabilize, demoralize and ultimately destroy Israeli society.

The IDF’s discovery of Hamas’s Rosh Hashana plot was the last straw for any Israeli leftists still harboring fantasies about picking up our marbles and going home. Hamas’s plan to use its tunnels to send hundreds of terrorists into multiple Israeli border communities simultaneously and carry out a massacre of unprecedented scope, replete with the abduction of hostages to Gaza, was the rude awakening the Left had avoided since it pushed for Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza.

In other words, in their discussion Sunday night, Netanyahu and his ministers were without illusions about the gravity of the situation and the imperative of winning – however defined.

But then the telephone rang. And Obama told Netanyahu that Israel must lose. He wants an unconditional “humanitarian” cease-fire that will lead to a permanent one.

And he wants it now. …

… The problem is that in every war, in every conflict and in every contest of wills that has occurred in the Middle East since Obama took office, he has sided with Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood, against America’s allies.

Under Obama, America has switched sides.

More from Jennifer Rubin.

There is growing bipartisan awareness that the entire President Obama/Hillary Clinton/John Kerry foreign policy, not simply in Gaza or even Israel generally, is a disaster. The public realizes this. The latest Associated Press-GfK poll finds that 59 percent of voters disapprove of Obama’s handling of foreign policy (“U.S. role in world affairs”), with only 39 percent approving. In handling relations with other countries, 43 percent approve, 55 percent don’t; on Ukraine, 41 percent approve, 57 percent don’t; on Israel, 37 percent approve, 60 percent do not; on Iraq, 41 percent approve and 57 percent don’t; and on Afghanistan, 38 percent approve and 60 percent do not. Obama has managed to hand the advantage on national security back to the GOP, as voters favor Republicans to protect the country over Democrats (33 to 18 percent). On maintaining the United States’ image (27 to 24 percent) and handling international crises (29 to 20 percent), Republicans also best Democrats. …

… It is therefore a mistake to treat the Obama/Clinton/Kerry foreign policy debacle as a series of discrete errors. Rather, it is their entire worldview that has been flawed from the start. The chickens are only now coming home to roost. To fix what is wrong will require new people, a new outlook and new resources. Those who counseled retreat, retrenchment and reduction in our armed forces should not be entrusted with fixing what they wrecked.

Obama and his minions are so hoping for impeachment that even the mainstream media have noticed. Here’s Time’s Joe Klein on the administration’s transparently disgraceful wish.

… So, this is smart strategy on the part of the Obama political operation, right? Well, grudgingly, yes. But it’s also cynical as hell. The White House is playing with fire, raising the heat in a country that is already brain-fried by partisan frenzy. There is something unseemly, and unprecedented, about an administration saying “Bring it on” when it comes to impeachment. Clinton’s White House certainly never did publicly, even though it was clear from polling that the spectacle would be a disaster for Republicans. Of course, President Clinton had done something immoral, if not impeachable, and Obama has not. Another impeachment ordeal would be terrible for the country.

Also terrible for the country, if all too common, is the DCCC’s impeachment begging—and the President’s constant fat-cat fundraising in a summer of trouble. What if he simply said, “I’m done with fundraising. This is an important election, but there’s just too much going on in the world right now”? His political folks would hate it, but I suspect it might be more effective, and presidential, than sending out tin-cup emails.

Ben Domenech at The Federalist says the president will not be impeached but he will be disgraced.

There’s nothing that President Obama’s current distasteful impeachment trolling resembles so much as Alex Rodriguez in 2004. The slumping hitter, frustrated after a difficult season, triggered a bench-clearing brawl in Boston after being hit by a pitch from Bronson Arroyo. Rodriguez threw down his bat, glared, and started cussing at the pitcher. Red Sox catcher Jason Varitek rushed into his path, and as A-Rod cursed the pitcher and accused him of hitting him on purpose, legend has it Varitek shot back, “We don’t throw at .260 hitters!” …

… So Republicans and Independents keep dropping jaws and cracking monocles, but it’s not going to do any good, and there’s no referee to throw the flag or umpire to call out the president for slapping the glove (well, there is that god-awful record at the Supreme Court, but that works on a delay). Paul Ryan has said that the GOP’s current political differences with the president don’t add up to high crimes and misdemeanors. But even if Obama does this (mass amnesty), and even if the base concludes this is a step too far, there’s really nothing Republicans can do other than to laugh at how much of a failed presidency this has become, at the sheer absurdity and elitism of engaging in mass amnesty at a time when the working class is struggling so much, and get back to winning the argument with the people.

Don’t throw at .260 hitters. Impeachment won’t stop disrespect of the rule of law from this crew. Only crafting a new governing majority will. …

Paul Mirengoff thinks crying impeachment might be a Dem mistake.

The Democrats have been fundraising like crazy based on claims that President Obama is in danger of being impeached by House Republicans. Last night, John wondered whether it’s good idea to tell your party’s members repeatedly that the leader of their party is in danger of being impeached.

The answer, I think, is that it is a good idea to the extent the message is heard only by party members. Few Democrats will be able to conceive of a rationale for impeaching their leader and nearly all will view the alleged threat of impeachment as confirmation that House Republicans are evil.

And the money will pour in.

But money isn’t the key to saving endangered Democrat-held Senate seats and making inroads into the House Republicans majority. Only the votes of independents and true moderates can accomplish these goals.

The Democrats can’t keep the “news” of possible impeachment to themselves. The question thus becomes whether it is a good idea for Democrats to cause independents and moderates to believe that President Obama is in danger of being impeached.

I don’t think so. …

Ordinarily we concentrate on the criminal miscreants in DC, but today Kevin Williamson turns our attention to Illinois and New York. Of course, here in Virginia we have our own problems. Our last GOP governor is on trial for corruption and our present governor is a former Clinton bagman. 

There must be something in the DNA of Democratic governors that gives them a very specific sort of superpower — the ability to endure doses of irony that would disable an ordinary mortal, or at least cause him to blush. In my recent jaunt through Illinois (National Review subscribers can read about my adventures here), I frequently was reminded of the intensity of the violent crime plaguing its cities — not only in murder-happy Chicago (“Gangsterville”) but also in the bedeviled city of East St. Louis, where the incidence of criminal violence is five times Chicago’s rate. Illinois is of course a wildly corrupt state — its prisons function as pension homes for its politicians — and Governor Pat Quinn, either through sheer fecklessness or with malice aforethought, allowed his signature antiviolence program to be converted into a political slush fund, currently being investigated by federal criminal authorities. Which is to say, Governor Quinn’s main anticrime measure is being investigated as a criminal enterprise.

I have a writer’s superstition that the fundamental truth about a politician can be revealed through anagrams, though the best I can do for Governor Pat Quinn is “porn-quoting raven,” which sounds like it ought to be a literary motif from the poems of Edgar Allan Hoe. Andrew Cuomo’s anagram — “Owed ACORN . . . Um?” — is probably more fitting. And Cuomo the Lesser is having some troubles quite similar to those of the flighty Quinn, having empaneled an inquisition into corruption in New YorkState government, known as the Moreland Commission. The Moreland Commission was supposed to be independent, but it wasn’t, and Governor Cuomo is accused of having “interfered” with it, the usage of that word in the context of Albany bringing to mind the ancient euphemism “interfering with children.” According to the New York Times, the executive director of the commission, Regina Calcaterra acted as Governor Cuomo’s spy on the panel and as his factotum, notably by blocking subpoenas directed at the state real-estate board. Real-estate interests have been among Governor Cuomo’s most reliable financial supporters. …

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Before we get to other subjects, one more item on Israel and Hamas. This from David Harsanyi asking what in the world John Kerry is doing? 

… It seems like a rather big deal that Egypt, Israel, Fatah, Jordan, Saudi Arabia—ostensibly, all allies of ours—agree on anything. This development, one imagines, might be something the United States would be interested in fostering rather than destroying. Certainly, the idea that Hamas’ power should be neutralized and the influence of the “moderate” Palestinian authority expanded, sounds like a plan worth pursuing.

Or so you would think. But instead, it looks like Kerry ignored an Egyptian-led ceasefire effort and handed Israelis a document that offered them this:

Rather than empowering Fatah, it recognizes Hamas as the legitimate authority in the Gaza Strip, although it’s considered a terrorist organization by the Justice Department and an entity that’s founding principle and driving purpose is to eliminate Israel and replace it with an Islamic state.

Rather than choking off this organization’s lifeline, the agreement would have allowed them to collect billions in ‘charity’ that would be been able to use to rearm, retrench, and re-engage in hostilities.

And all the while, it would have made no demands on Hamas to purge itself of rockets, or tunnels, or other weaponry that destabilizes the area—while at the same, the ceasefire would have limited Israel’s ability to take them out. (Update: This final point is disputed by U.S. officials.)

Hamas would have conceded nothing. No nation would have accepted such terms, not after what’s transpired, and naturally it was rejected unanimously by an Israeli cabinet that includes the ideological left, center, and right. Not only did the proposal irritate Israel—a nation often accused of warmongering for kicks—but it also upset Egypt and the Palestinian Authority. …

Kevin Williamson points out what a disaster liberal government is for the middle class.

… there exists a spectrum of possible configurations of government, and the fundamental political debate of our time is whether we’re on the right side of that spectrum or the wrong side. Conservatives want to prune back the vines, and progressives want them to grow thicker.

How’s that working out in the laboratories of the Left?

Progressives argue that we need deeper government involvement in the economy in order to assuage the ill effects of economic inequality. But, as Joel Kotkin points out, inequality is the most pronounced in places where progressives dominate: New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago. The more egalitarian cities are embedded in considerably more conservative metropolitan areas in conservative states. “Part of the difference,” Mr. Kotkin writes, “is the strong growth of higher-paid, blue-collar jobs in places like Houston, Oklahoma City, Salt Lake, and Dallas compared to rapidly de-industrializing locales such as New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Even Richard Florida, the guru of the ‘creative class,’ has admitted that the strongest growth in mid-income jobs has been concentrated in red-state metros such as Salt Lake City, Houston, Dallas, Austin, and Nashville. Some of this reflects a history of later industrialization but other policies — often mandated by the state — encourage mid-income growth, for example, by not imposing high energy prices with subsidies for renewables, or restricting housing growth in the periphery. Cities like Houston may seem blue in many ways but follow local policies largely indistinguishable from mainstream Republicans elsewhere.” In Detroit, Chicago, and Philadelphia, African Americans earn barely half of what whites earn —  and in San Francisco, African Americans earn less than half of what whites earn. Hispanics in Boston earn 50 percent of what whites make; but it is 84 percent in Riverside County, Calif., a traditional Republican stronghold (it holds the distinction of being one of only two West Coast counties to have gone for Hoover over FDR and is Duncan Hunter’s turf), and the figures are comparable in places such as Phoenix and Miami.

Progressivism is a luxury good for college-educated white people. It is the Hermes sneaker of political tendencies. California is not an especially wealthy state — its median income is right between Wyoming’s and Nebraska’s — but it is a state in which one needs to be pretty well off to live decently. …

… Public-school teachers are insistent on maintaining their monopoly status, but in big cities such as Chicago they are unusually likely to send their own children to private schools. Similarly, Barack Obama thinks that school choice is great — for his daughters, but not for yours. They can make a mess of your schools, your neighborhoods, your community — they don’t live there.

That, too, is why conservatives favor government on the modest, manageable, local level. And that is why progressives want to centralize political power in Washington, and why they have more success in big cities such as Los Angeles and New York: If you were screwing the poor and the struggling while alleging to act on their behalf, would you be able to look them in the eye? Would you want to?

A WSJ OpEd with good examples of how the 1% gains and the great middle suffers this time at the hands of the Fed. 

Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen has said the central bank’s goal is “to help Main Street not Wall Street,” and many liberal commentators seem convinced that she is advancing that goal. But talk to anyone on Wall Street. If they are being frank, they’ll admit that the Fed’s loose monetary policy has been one of the biggest contributors to their returns over the past five years. Unwittingly, it seems, liberals who support the Fed are defending policies that boost the wealth of the wealthy but do nothing to reduce inequality. …

… Over the past decade, easy-money policies also have fueled the rise of an industry that transforms raw commodities—from soybeans to steel and oil—into financial products, such as exchange-traded funds, that can be traded like stocks. Hundreds of billions of dollars have poured into these products. In many cases, large investors hold the commodities in storage, driving up demand and the price.

On average, prices for commodities from oil to coffee to eggs are up 40% since 2009, double the typical commodity-price rebound in postwar recoveries. Though rising prices for staples such as these are inconsequential expenses to the rich, they are burdens for the poor, who spend about 10% of their income on energy and a third of it on food. Meanwhile, since bottoming in 2011, median house prices have risen four times faster than incomes, putting homes out of reach for many first-time buyers.

Leading Wall Street figures such as Stanley Druckenmiller and Seth Klarman are warning that the Fed is blowing dangerous asset-price bubbles. These warnings—given political suspicion of the financial community—seem only to confirm liberal faith in the Fed. Economists including Joseph Stiglitz and Brad DeLong cling to the hope that at least some of the easy money helps to create growth and jobs. Yet the abnormally low cost of capital is giving companies another incentive to invest in technologies that replace workers, rather than hiring more workers. …

Laura Ingraham is profiled in The Times, UK by Toby Harnden.

SHE has adopted a daughter from Guate­mala and was a speechwriter under President Reagan, who introduced an “amnesty” for three million illegal immigrants in the 1980s.

With her striking good looks and her status as the most listened-to woman on American radio talk programmes, she might have seemed the ideal person to deliver a softer Republican message, as the party hopes to appeal to Hispanic voters.

Laura Ingraham is having none of it, however. Instead, she is fast becoming the most powerful conser­vative voice denouncing any compromise on immigration and call­ing for the deportation of the Latin American children who are amassing on the southern border of the United  States.

At a raucous campaign event in Nashville last week, Ingraham accused President Barack Obama of “fomenting a crisis at our border that seeks to undermine the very fabric of American rule of law, our sovereignty, our national identity”.

Her most withering contempt was aimed at her own party’s estab­lish­ment — the “good old boys” and “go along to get along Republican politicians doing backroom backslapping” with Democrats, being as eff­ective as “beige wallpaper”.

Ingraham has already claimed the scalp of Representative Eric Cantor, the third most powerful Republican in the House of Representatives, by headlining a massive rally that helped to propel his obscure opponent to a shock victory in a party primary last month.

Her appearance in Nashville was on behalf of Joe Carr, a rough-edged candidate from Tennessee who has support from the grassroots Tea Party movement. He is standing on a “no amnesty” platform to oust Senator Lamar Alexander, a genteel deal-maker on Capitol Hill, in an August 7th primary. …

Turning our attention to another race in the South, an article from the Atlanta Journal Constitution reports on the most recent stumble of the Michelle Nunn campaign.

A hallmark of the primary season on the Democratic side was Senate candidate Michelle Nunn’s studied determination not to define herself. As of today, that’s no longer possible for her — and it’s her own campaign’s fault.

A series of internal campaign memos, totaling 144 pages and covering everything from fund-raising goals and targets to staffing needs, was leaked to National Review, which published it today. The campaign itself reportedly uploaded the plan to the Internet back in December, before quickly taking it back down. But someone found it during that brief period and — this is the impressive part — had the patience to sit on it until after the GOP run-off was over.

While much of the plan details the mundane minutia of planning a year-long, statewide campaign, other parts of it are damaging to the Nunn campaign. National Review’s Eliana Johnson, who wrote the publication’s story about the memo, puts some of those problems right at the top: …

Here is the aforementioned Eliana Johnson piece.

Michelle Nunn can come across as a “lightweight,” “too liberal,” not a “real Georgian.” While she served as CEO for the Points of Light Foundation, the organization gave grants to “inmates” and “terrorists.” And her Senate campaign must feature images of her and her family “in rural settings with rural-oriented imagery” because the Atlanta-based candidate will struggle to connect with rural voters

These may sound like attacks from the Senate candidate’s Republican rival, but in fact, those are a few of the concerns expressed in her own campaign plan, which sources say was posted online briefly in December and appears to have been drafted earlier that month. Drawing on the insights of Democratic pollsters, strategists, fundraisers, and consultants, the document contains a series of memos addressed to Nunn and her senior advisers.

From all appearances, the document was intended to remain confidential. It outlines the challenges inherent in getting Nunn, who grew up mostly in Bethesda, Md., elected to the Senate in a state with a large rural population. Her father, Sam Nunn, was elected to the Senate when she was six, and Michelle Nunn attended Washington’s prestigious National Cathedral School and then the University of Virginia and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government before returning to Georgia to do nonprofit work and, now, to seek higher office. …

Power Line has more on Nunn and we end where we started today; with Hamas.

… The Nunn campaign is concerned, as it should be, about the political implications of Points of Light’s financial contribution to Islamic Relief, USA. Eliana reports that an internal campaign strategy memo that was posted online (inadvertently, I assume) cites the contribution as a vulnerability.

One would hope so. Apart from being Sam Nunn’s daughter, Michelle Nunn’s tenure as CEO of Points of Light is just about her only credential for political office.

Nor has candidate Nunn been willing to take a stand on certain key issues, including Obamacare. For this, she has been criticized by the likes of Mika Brzezinski, Chuck Todd, and Stuart Rothenberg.

The fact that Points of Light, Nunn’s only substantive calling card, has funneled money to an organization with ties to Hamas should certainly tarnish her reputation and harm her campaign, which probably has little margin for error.

Late Night Humor from Andy Malcolm.

Meyers: A Japanese artist is launching a bonsai tree into space. Now if only he could think of something to yell during the launch.

Conan: New York Democrat Gov. Andrew Cuomo has been accused of ethics violations. If the charges prove true, the Governor of New York would be forced to step down and become the Governor of New Jersey.

Fallon: So, Montana Sen John Walsh – who’s up for re-election – plagiarized his thesis. Even worse, it’s mostly TRIPLE-spaced and he REALLY went in on the margins.

Click on WORD oe PDF for full content

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The Jerusalem Post examines European anti-Semitism.

The acclaimed British novelist Howard Jacobson opened his speech at the B’nai B’rith World Center in Jerusalem last October with piercing sarcasm: “The question is rhetorical. When will Jews be forgiven the Holocaust? Never.”

However, there has been a shift in the underpinnings of anti-Semitism. Israel has become the collective Jew among the nations, as the late French historian Léon Poliakov said about the new metamorphosis of Jew-hatred.

Jacobson was piggy-backing on the eye-popping insight of the Israel psychoanalyst Zvi Rex, who reportedly said: “The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.”

The anti-Semitic logic at work here is Europe’s pathologically guilt-filled response to the Holocaust, which, in short, is to shift the onus of blame to the Jews to cleanse one’s conscience. Two German-Jewish Marxist philosophers – Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno – coined an esoteric sociological term for what unfolded in post-Shoah Germany: Guilt-defensiveness anti-Semitism.

On the one hand, Adorno and Horkheimer may come across as kitchen-sink psychology. On the other hand, the explanatory power behind anti-Semitic guilt animating hatred of Jews and Israel can provide a window into Europe’s peculiar obsession with the Jewish state. …

Evelyn Gordon explains why the short-lived FAA ban on air travel to Israel was a big mistake.

… Whether the FAA’s decision was actually political I don’t know. Perhaps the agency was merely spooked by the previous week’s downing of a commercial airliner over Ukraine. Yet the fact that the ban was reversed two days later even though the security situation hadn’t changed, combined with the fact that major airlines like British Airways never suspended flights to begin with, support the contention that the decision, as Haaretz military analyst Amos Harel put it, “had no substantive professional basis,” and was intended primarily to browbeat Israel into accepting Secretary of State John Kerry’s completely unacceptable cease-fire proposal. 

If so, to quote Harel again, it reflected “a fundamental lack of understanding of the Israeli mindset”–and not just about the cease-fire. That single FAA decision did more than any political argument ever could to ensure that Israel won’t be leaving the West Bank anytime soon. 

Having long argued that such a withdrawal would be untenably dangerous, I’m certainly not sorry. But for the Obama administration, it was definitely an old goal.

Matthew Continetti thinks Israel can prevail as long as Hamas is not saved by this administration.

… And yet the immediate danger to the success of this necessary war does not come from the electronic intifada. It does not come from resurgent anti-Semitism, or the United Nations Human Rights Council, or the failure of so many Western elites to recognize the causes of this war, their inability to distinguish between a democratic country struggling to protect its people and a terror state using children as hostages. Hate, law-fare, decadence—they are all challenges for Israel. But Israel can endure them for now. Israel is used to it.

What Israel should not endure is the premature conclusion of hostilities. Disarming Hamas—seizing its rocket caches, collapsing its tunnels, killing and capturing its forces—is vital to Israeli security. And an artificial ceasefire imposed by outside powers, a ceasefire written in terms favorable to Hamas, would undermine the security gains Israel has made to date. President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have given no sign that they recognize this fact. Or maybe they understand it all too well: The Obama administration’s top priority is imposing a ceasefire at exactly the moment when Israel’s military success is becoming clear.

Secretary Kerry arrived in Cairo earlier this week. No one wanted him there. Egypt’s ruler, General Sisi, has no interest in saving Hamas through international diplomacy: The Muslim Brotherhood is his mortal enemy. Kerry then went from Cairo to Jerusalem, where he met with U.N. Secretary Ban Ki-moon, who flew to the meeting on a plane chartered by Qatar, Hamas’ primary source of cash. Kerry also met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is too gracious to tell the secretary to go back to Boston. (Israel’s former ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, has said publicly what the Israeli government will not: Kerry is an unwelcome guest.) Next up was Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, who honored Kerry’s presence by endorsing Hamas’s call for a “Day of Rage” in the West Bank. Kerry “will soon decide if Hamas and Israel are willing to agree on a Gaza ceasefire,” Reuters says.

Kerry will decide? Who died and made him king? …

Bret Stephens says Palestine can make you dumb. But, Pickerhead says bringing dumb to this administration is like bring coals to Newcastle. 

Of all the inane things that have been said about the war between Israel and Hamas, surely one dishonorable mention belongs to comments made over the weekend by Benjamin J. Rhodes, deputy national security adviser for strategic communications.

Interviewed by CNN’s Candy Crowley, Mr. Rhodes offered the now-standard administration line that Israel has a right to defend itself but needs to do more to avoid civilian casualties. Ms. Crowley interjected that, according to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Jewish state was already doing everything it could to avoid such casualties.

“I think you can always do more,” Mr. Rhodes replied. “The U.S. military does that in Afghanistan.”

How inapt is this comparison? The list of Afghan civilians accidentally killed by U.S. or NATO strikes is not short. Little of the fighting in Afghanistan took place in the dense urban environments that make the current warfare in Gaza so difficult. The last time the U.S. fought a Gaza-style battle—in Fallujah in 2004—some 800 civilians perished and at least 9,000 homes were destroyed. This is not an indictment of U.S. conduct in Fallujah but an acknowledgment of the grim reality of city combat.

Oh, and by the way, American towns and cities were not being rocketed from above or tunneled under from below as the Fallujah campaign was under way.  ….

Roger Simon wants to know how much the UN knew about the Hamas tunnels.

… How much did the UN workers actually know about the secret tunnels? Many of them have been living in Gaza pretty much full time since the Israelis vacated Gaza voluntarily in 2005. Those of us who have been paying even partial attention to the situation remember the UN workers’ frequent complaints — augmented by the naifs in Israeli peace groups like B’Tselem – that the poor Gazans weren’t getting sufficient concrete to build their society.

Now that we know Gaza had more than enough concrete to build Olympic stadiums and chose to build terror tunnels instead, was that innocence or just a flat-out lie — and an evil one at that? We will see soon enough the proximity of tunnel entrances to UN facilities. (The Israelis have been taking pictures.)

If the UN is going to investigate the behavior of Israel, as Alan Dershowitz points out, it should investigate Hamas and the Palestinians as well. Beyond that, however, someone (Congress?) should investigate the UN. Of course, it’s possible all those UN workers were wearing ear plugs for those nine years of digging, but I wouldn’t want to bet on it. Occam’s Razor tells us there’s treachery afoot. It’s one thing, as is generally accepted, that the United Nations is one of the world’s centers of corruption and money laundering, but something else again if it’s an accessory to mass murder. …

In spite of all the facts on Israel’s side, Ron Fournier says Netanyahu should be worried.

… Every nation has a story. Israel’s is that Arabs have long been unwilling to negotiate with the Jewish state, and that terrorists among the Palestinians want to destroy it. For decades, three significant factors helped make this the dominant Middle East narrative. First, it’s correct, at least when applied to the dangerous minority of Palestinians. Second, elite opinion-makers, including journalists and politicians in the West, embraced and amplified the Israeli case. Finally, public opinion in the West, and particularly in the United States, firmly supported Israel.   

The first factor still holds. The United States would not hesitate to respond fiercely to attacks like those of Hamas. No country would. Israel has the absolute right to defend itself, and Netanyahu stood on firm ground as he described to Wallace the motives and tactics of Hamas.

The danger lies with the last two factors, starting with the near-monopoly Israel once enjoyed over the mind share of public-opinion elites. Israel must learn to act in a world of democratized media, where tweets and posts and pictures about Gazan casualties reach the global community instantaneously and without filter.

The newly interconnected world includes mainstream journalists, whose coverage of a decades-old story now includes an expanded array of sources who don’t work for a government, a lobby, or an activist group. The past few weeks have exposed a subtle but significant shift in coverage—a more empathic view of the plight of Gazans, and a greater focus on the consequences of Israel’s actions. …

Here’s a music video on the Mid-East titled Maximum Restraint. You’ll like.