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John Hinderaker of Power Line reproduced some of the IRS emails dredged up by FOIA requests by Judicial Watch. Here we find Lois Lerner suggesting “one IRS prosecution would make an impact” as she goaded DOJ and the FEC, pushing them towards criminal filings against Tea Party groups. This from the women who said all this came from “rogue agents” in Cincinnati. See for yourself the face of modern American tyranny. This woman is a liar who needs to see the inside of a cell.

Earlier today, Judicial Watch made public a batch of documents that it received from the IRS in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. The documents consists of a series of emails relating to the IRS’s treatment of applications for 501(c)(4) status from “Tea Party” or otherwise conservative organizations.

I am still working my way through the emails, but have a few preliminary observations. First, the most significant ones I have seen so far have already been widely discussed. The email below documents a call from the Department of Justice about whether non-profits that “lied” about doing political activity can be criminally prosecuted. This was an idea that Senator Sheldon Whitehouse raised at a committee hearing. It was picked up on by DOJ, and there was some coordination among DOJ, the IRS and the FEC. …

More from US News & World Report.

The so-called “smoking gun” proving the Internal Revenue Service played politics with conservative groups seeking official non-profit, social welfare status over the last several years may finally have been found.

In a rash of documents provided under the Freedom of Information Act to Judicial Watch, a non-partisan public interest law group, is an April 2013 email written by David Fish, acting manager of IRS Exempt Organizations Technical Guidance and Quality Assurance and sent to, among others, former IRS Director of Exempt Organizations Lois Lerner. It was part of a thread discussing a recent U.S. Senate hearing on the potential for the abuse of the 501(c)(4) tax status by organizations intervening inappropriately or improperly in candidate elections.

Responding to a message “What can I say?” from Lerner, Fish responds, “Tell Ruth she needs to get on the stick and that the next election cycle is around the corner. This is obviously a wonderful idea (that’s why we suggested it). I think you told Greg all you can tell him, unless you want to tell him that we’re taking guidance plan suggestions.”  

The email is dated April 15, 2013 – well after initial allegations that the IRS had “slow-walked” the applications of conservative groups had been made and, by the agency, denied.

The “Ruth” mentioned in the message refers to Ruth Madrigal, an official at the U.S. Treasury Department. The “Greg” mentioned in Fish’s message is apparently a San Francisco-based attorney named Gregory Colvin, who started this chain with an e-mail to Lerner and Madrigal letting them know he has just testified before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism on the issue of whether officers of (c)(4) organizations who made false statements under penalty of perjury on tax returns “could be criminally prosecuted.”

The Obama administration has insisted from the beginning that conservative groups were not singled out and that electoral considerations did not factor into what clearly went on. They prefer to adhere to the fiction that anything untoward that occurred generated spontaneously in branch offices among low level staff and not at the direction of anyone in Washington.

The particular mention by Fish of the idea that “the next election cycle is around the corner” seems to any reasonable person to confirm or at least suggest higher-ups at the IRS including Lerner knew exactly what they were doing, had used their positions for partisan political purposes, and were continuing to do so even though the word about what they were doing had leaked out.  …

Bryan Preston of PJ Media posts on the terrifying implications of all this. 

Thank God for Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell George. His investigation of what turned out to be the IRS abuse scandal may well have saved the Constitution and the nation.

For his fair and impartial investigation into the Internal Revenue Service’s abuse of Americans who dissent from President Obama’s agenda, Democrats have called for an investigation of him. George should not be investigated, but perhaps the Democrats who want him investigated — Reps. Gerry Connolly (D-VA) and Matt Cartwright (D-PA) — should be. Their call for an investigation of the investigator might constitute interference with the ongoing investigation of the IRS abuse scandal. That would be obstruction of justice, in what may turn out to be the most widespread and damaging scandal in American history.

The implications of today’s email disclosure are stunning and terrifying.

Lois Lerner intended to use her position atop the IRS’ tax exempt approval office to coordinate the prosecution of political speech. The Department of Justice under Attorney General Eric Holder had at least tentatively bought into that. The Federal Elections Commission was being roped in as well. Lerner’s emails prove that beyond doubt.

Democrats in Congress were involved. Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) appears to have led the anti-constitutional attack on free speech in the House. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) led it from the Senate.

Two days before Lerner was forced to publicly disclose the scandal, she was moving forward with an insidious plan to stamp out conservatives and Tea Party activists’ ability to organize and raise money, by working with the IRS commissioner’s office and the Department of Justice. At the same time, there was no plan for any government crackdown on groups who agreed with President Obama. The traffic was entirely one-way. It was nakedly political, and everyone involved knew it. They also had reason to believe that they would succeed, or they would not have engaged in it. DOJ would serve two roles: Prosecute conservatives, and protect the bureaucrats who were pushing those prosecutions.

Was there a full-fledged plan to use the full power of the federal government to take the abuse, delay and invasive questioning of conservatives to a new level after President Obama’s re-election? Was there a plan to criminalize the mere act of being a conservative activist? Was there a plan to drum up false charges of “lying” on applications in order to put conservatives in jail?

Lois Lerner’s communications with the Justice Department strongly suggest that there was. …

Jonathan Tobin posts on yet another spineless obama move on the Keystone Pipeline.

After a lengthy study of the plans for the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, the U.S. State Department issued an 11-volume report back in January confirming what most experts had already concluded long before then: the vital project would not damage the environment or increase the rate of carbon pollution. But liberal activists weren’t happy and have used the 90-day automatic review process that followed that report to furiously lobby the administration to stop the construction of the 1,700-mile pipeline from Alberta to the Gulf Coast refineries. The key player in that effort was Tom Steyer, the billionaire environmental extremist who has pledged to give $100 million to Democratic candidates who do his bidding. Though President Obama has flirted at times with doing the right thing and letting the project proceed, the result of the push from Steyer and the rest of the global warming alarmist crowd was as predictable as it was politically motivated. In a Friday afternoon news dump to guarantee minimal news coverage, the State Department announced that it would indefinitely postpone the decision on approval of Keystone. …

… The Keystone delay is also symbolic of the way Obama’s indifference to energy independence has hindered U.S. foreign policy. At a time when European dependence on Russia as well as the Middle East has hampered efforts to defend Ukraine’s independence or to rally the world behind the cause of stopping Iran’s nuclear quest, the administration’s politically-motivated foot-dragging on Keystone is more evidence of how an unwillingness to lead by example has hamstrung Obama.

But the bottom line of the Keystone delay is that for all their talk about the Kochs and the supposedly malevolent forces financing the right, there is no longer any doubt that this administration is far more dependent as well as more in the pocket of men like Steyer than the Republicans are on any single contributor or group. When faced with a choice between Steyer’s $100 million and doing the right thing for both the economy and energy independence, Obama’s decision was never really in doubt. Democrats who think voters are too stupid to make this connection may rue this corrupt and foolish move in November.

For some reason, author William Cohan decided to write a revisionist rehash of the Duke Lacrosse scandal of a few years back. He shouldn’t have wasted his time. Anybody who wants to issue counter-factual speculations about the case better wait until Stuart Taylor has passed, because as long as he draws breath nobody can hide from the facts. Taylor wrote his debunking piece for The New Republic. Another good essay was written by Peter Berkowitz of the Hoover Institution. Follow the link if you want, but it is long and we don’t have enough space. 

The most striking thing about William D. Cohan’s revisionist, guilt-implying new book on the Duke lacrosse rape fraud is what’s not in it.

The best-selling, highly successful author’s 621-page The Price of Silence: The Duke Lacrosse Scandal, the Power of the Elite, and the Corruption of Our Great Universities adds not a single piece of significant new evidence to that which convinced then–North Carolina attorney general Roy Cooper and virtually all other serious analysts by mid-2007 that the lacrosse players were innocent of any sexual assault on anyone.

Unless, that is, one sees as new evidence Cohan’s own stunningly credulous interviews with three far-from-credible participants in the drama who themselves add no significant new evidence beyond their counterfactual personal opinions.

They are Mike Nifong, the disbarred prosecutor and convicted liar; Crystal Mangum, the mentally unbalanced rape complainant and (now) convicted murderer, who has dramatically changed her story more than a dozen times; and Robert Steel, the former Duke chairman and Goldman Sachs vice chairman, who helped lead the university’s notorious rush to judgment against its own lacrosse players.

Cohan is not deterred by the fact that Nifong admitted and Steel said, quite unequivocally, both in April 2007, that the lacrosse players were innocent of committing any crimes during the March 13–14, 2006 spring break party at their captains’ house, where Mangum and Kim Roberts were hired to strip. Nifong said on July 26, 2007 that “there is no credible evidence” that any of the three indicted lacrosse players committed any crime involving Mangum. Steel said on April 11, 2007 that Cooper’s exoneration of them that day “explicitly and unequivocally establishes [their] innocence.” Nifong has since all but retracted his admission and Steel has waffled on his.

Cohan duly but inconspicuously includes these statements in his semi-free-association narrative. At the same time, he implies dozens of times that one or more players sexually assaulted Mangum in a bathroom during the party. In recent interviews, Cohan has made his thesis more explicit: “I am convinced, frankly, that this woman suffered a trauma that night” and that “something did happen in that bathroom,” Cohan told Joe Neff of the Raleigh News & Observer. In an April 8 Bloomberg TV interview, he ascribed the same view to his three main sources: “Between Nifong, Crystal, and Bob Steel, the consensus seems to be something happened in that bathroom that no one would be proud of.” He said much the same on MSNBC’s fawning “Morning Joe” the next day.

Cohan also asserted in a Cosmopolitan interview that Mangum now “describes it as somebody shoving a broomstick up her. All I know is that the police believed her, district attorney Mike Nifong believed her, and the rape nurse Tara Levicy believed her.” This seems doubtful, since none of Mangum’s many stories in March 2006 and for years thereafter mentioned anything about a broomstick being used to assault her, a scenario also ruled out by the physical evidence.

(Disclosure: I coauthored, with KC Johnson, a 2007 book concluding that all credible evidence points to the conclusion that no Duke lacrosse player ever assaulted or sexually abused Crystal Mangum in any way. I have also become friendly with some of their parents and lawyers. I thus have both a lot of relevant information and an obvious interest in discrediting Cohan’s book. I have no complaint about its references to me.)

The rape-by-broomstick and other Cohan innuendos and assertions are not supported—indeed, they are powerfully refuted—by the long-established facts that his own book repeats, not to mention some facts that he studiously leaves out.

This has not prevented an amazing succession of puff-piece reviews in The Wall Street Journal, FT Magazine, the Daily News, Salon, the Economist, the Daily Beast, and The New York Times, whose reviewer (unlike the others cited above) at least knew enough to write that “Cohan hasn’t unearthed new evidence” and that “[t]here is still nothing credible to back up the account of an unreliable witness.” …

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At the end of March we posted on our Ukraine policy. Time to again look at “clueless, hapless, feckless, and hopeless.” Craig Pirrong is first.

The farce involving Ukraine continues. Today John “Charlie Brown” Kerry and Sergei “Lucy” Lavrov met in Geneva, the scene of many previous Kerry pratfalls, mostly involving Syria. (Yeah, the Euros were there. Like that matters. Well, I guess someone has to make sure the places are set properly, with the forks in the right spot and all that stuff.)

Even after having Lucy pull the ball away time and again, Charlie Brown had another go at “diplomacy,” which in Russian means “war continued by other means.” In military terms, the Russians treat diplomacy with the US as a delaying action, knowing the US won’t do anything meaningful as the “process” is “working.” In Syria, Assad has used Russian diplomatic cover to turn the tide of war decisively in his favor.

Kerry and Obama have apparently never heard Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results. Maybe Kerry should hop the train to Bern and visit the Einstein museum. Maybe he’ll collect a clue. …

… To give you an idea of Putin’s mindset, and how little he cares about Obama’s incredible threats to push for some measures that could impose some costs at some ill-defined future date, the Russian president used the term Novarossiya (New Russia) to refer to parts of Ukraine. Meaning that his irredentist goals remain, undeterred. (And does anybody else notice that the only thing that Putin criticizes the leaders of the USSR for is their penchant for redrawing borders in ways that put traditional Russian territories outside of the RussianSovietSocialistFederativeRepublic?)

Russia is weak economically, demographically, and militarily. The US is none of those things. It is weak by choice, and letting Putin proceed in his irredentist and revanchist mission.

We are so screwed.

Spengler says “Putin is not a genius, we are complete idiots”.

Vladimir Putin happily allowed the Kiev authorities to shoot a few pro-Russian demonstrators while keeping his military forces on ice across the border. I predicted (and am sticking to my story) that Russia will not seize more territory in Eastern Ukraine–not for the time being, in any case. Russia will stand back and watch Ukraine implode, the way Egypt did during the two years following the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak. Before the Maidan coup, Putin was willing to sit on $15 billion in arrears to Gazprom and put up $18 billion in new money. Now he wants $35 billion in back gas bills, on top of Ukraine’s $15 billion a year current account deficit. The IMF wants massive cuts in subsidies, which will make the Kiev government an object of hatred without putting  a dent into the problem. Western taxpayers won’t cough up $50 billion for Ukraine, not even a small fraction of it.

Yankee Doodle went to Maidan, stuck a feather in his hat and called it democracy. Our foreign policy ideologues are like UFO cultists who are so convinced that space aliens are invading the earth that they see moon men in every glare of swamp gas. In this case, it isn’t moon men, but aspiring republicans. First Tahrir Square, then Maidan, were glorious proof of the Manifest Destiny of Western democracy. …

Jonah Goldberg says soon we will “let slip the socks of war.”

… In a sense, arguing with the Russian bear is like arguing with a real bear. No matter how eloquently you explain to the bear that it should not eat your face, it’s going to eat your face if it wants to eat your face — that is, if you do nothing tangible to stop it.

Obama seems to think that’s what he’s been doing. He told CBS, “Each time Russia takes these kinds of steps that are designed to destabilize Ukraine and violate their sovereignty, there are going to be consequences.”

Unfortunately, the credibility of Obama’s “consequences” took a big hit when he was unwilling — or unable — to make good on his vow that the use of chemical weapons in Syria would amount to a “red line” for the U.S.

And then there are the consequences Putin has already faced as a result of his annexation of Crimea. The Obama administration did impose sanctions targeted at a few of Putin’s henchmen and cronies. They publicly laughed them off, but it was worth a try.

Beyond that, though, Obama’s consequences haven’t even been inconsequential; they’ve had the opposite of their intended effect. Rather than send the Ukrainians weapons or useful intelligence, we sent them a bunch of MREs (“Meals Ready to Eat”). And even that we were unwilling to do in too provocative a way. We didn’t use Air Force cargo-planes, but rather sent the snacks in by civilian trucks. Meanwhile, pleas from allies to deploy more assets to Poland and other front-line NATO states were rebuffed by the White House.

On April 12, the Wall Street Journal reported that the White House was still weighing requests from the Ukrainian government for other supplies such as “medical kits, uniforms, boots and military socks.” …

Michael Barone says the real danger is not in Ukraine.

… The real danger may lie not in Ukraine but farther west. Obama’s dismissal of his red line in Syria and his tepid actions on Ukraine may lead Putin to believe he will not back up other commitments.

Putin says he is protecting Russian minorities in Ukraine; what if he does so in the Baltic republics?

The British historian Christopher Clark, author of The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, warns of “the danger, in trying to avoid conflagration in Ukraine, that Western leaders fail to provide clear signals to Putin.”

The West, he says, must show “firmness and clarity in defending the real red lines established by NATO.” That means more U.S. and NATO military forces in the Baltics and Poland. And beefing up U.S. and NATO militaries.

Putin’s goal may be to dismantle NATO as he believes NATO dismantled the Soviet Union — the greatest geopolitical tragedy of 21st century. Obama must not allow that to happen.

What are we to make of a government that is so weak abroad, but flexes SWAT muscles intimidating ordinary citizens? John Fund writes on the SWAT troopers deployed by ordinary public safety goobers.

Regardless of how people feel about Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s standoff with the federal Bureau of Land Management over his cattle’s grazing rights, a lot of Americans were surprised to see TV images of an armed-to-the-teeth paramilitary wing of the BLM deployed around Bundy’s ranch.

They shouldn’t have been. Dozens of federal agencies now have Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams to further an expanding definition of their missions. It’s not controversial that the Secret Service and the Bureau of Prisons have them. But what about the Department of Agriculture, the Railroad Retirement Board, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Office of Personnel Management, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service? All of these have their own SWAT units and are part of a worrying trend towards the militarization of federal agencies — not to mention local police forces.

“Law-enforcement agencies across the U.S., at every level of government, have been blurring the line between police officer and soldier,” journalist Radley Balko writes in his 2013 book Rise of the Warrior Cop. “The war on drugs and, more recently, post-9/11 antiterrorism efforts have created a new figure on the U.S. scene: the warrior cop — armed to the teeth, ready to deal harshly with targeted wrongdoers, and a growing threat to familiar American liberties.”

The proliferation of paramilitary federal SWAT teams inevitably brings abuses that have nothing to do with either drugs or terrorism. Many of the raids they conduct are against harmless, often innocent, Americans who typically are accused of non-violent civil or administrative violations. …

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Richard Fernandez of Belmont Club posted on Leland Yee the California Dem caught in a gun running scandal. He closed the post with the following pull quote. You can forget about the rest unless you wish to learn about the ins and outs of CA Dem politics.

… America was founded on the notion that most politicians can only be expected to be ornery,  low-down, crooks. Nobody in those days was fool enough to believe they could be Light-workers, Messiahs and create a world without guns. Thus in the Founder’s view the only way to guard against rogues was to ensure that government remained as small as possible relative to its essential jobs; to change those in office frequently and often, like we change underwear.

The Founders saw roguery as the byproduct of high office.  And so they wrote a constitution — you know, the document more than a hundred years old that nobody smart reads any more — to keep the weeds down. For they knew better than our modern enlighteneds that any politician sufficiently powerful to disarm the people is sufficiently powerful to sell missiles bought from Russia to Muslim rebels in Mindanao.

Unless one remembers this there is no defense against crooks in high places. The Yee scandal highlights the single most important problem in contemporary American politics: the absence of an anti-central government insurgency within the Democratic Party.  The Democrats and Republicans are now two factions of one party: the Party of the Establishment.

Only the Tea Party, and groups loosely occupying the same political space, are actively fighting for smaller government. They represent a faction which threatens to divide the GOP and may  deny nominal Republicans the success which the Democratic Party has so far achieved.  Like them or hate them, they are an authentic rebellion which is why the Washington establishment despises them so.

But for some reason the Democratic Party has no equivalent. The base will never vote against the collectivists.  In the end better a Yee or a “D” than Tea. Success has been bought at the price of betraying one of the founding tenets of America, limited government. Democrats of all persuasions are agreed that more government is better; that the individual is the enemy; that the collective is the wave of the future. This lockstep guarantees the permanent majority. If so then such a party — whether you call it Democrat or Republican — has traded off that guaranteed majority for the expense of an unlimited number of Leland Yees.

Perhaps the choice is not between Democrat and Republican in the long run — but between individual liberty or subordination to rank hypocrisy. If history is any guide many, perhaps even the majority, will choose welfare over freedom. Give me bread and call me stupid, but only give me bread. Lord Bevin boasted upon creating the welfare state “I stuffed their mouths with gold.”  People today are not so demanding.  They’ll be happy with chump change.

This is fun. Steven Malanga in City Journal writes about an anthropologist whose research results defied conventional wisdom. Malanga describes it as “Napoleon Chagnon’s study of human nature in the Amazon—and the academy.” The savages in the academic world are the more dangerous. Rousseau’s idea of the noble savage, which has created more mischief than any other philosophical concept, has never been debunked as well as by Chagnon’s studies. No wonder he has to be attacked by the bien pensants.

Anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon’s heart was pounding in late November 1964 when he entered a remote Venezuelan village. He planned to spend more than a year studying the indigenous Yanomamo people, one of the last large groups in the world untouched by civilization. Based on his university training, the 26-year-old Chagnon expected to be greeted by 125 or so peaceful villagers, patiently waiting to be interviewed about their culture. Instead, he stumbled onto a scene where a dozen “burley, naked, sweaty, hideous men” confronted him and his guide with arrows drawn.

Chagnon later learned that the men were edgy because raiders from a neighboring settlement had abducted seven of their women the day before. The next morning, the villagers counterattacked and recovered five of the women in a brutal club fight. As Chagnon recounts in Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes—The Yanomamo and the Anthropologists (originally published in 2013 and now appearing in paperback), he spent weeks puzzling over what he had seen. His anthropology education had taught him that kinsmen—the raiders were related to those they’d attacked—were generally nice to one another. Further, he had learned in classrooms that primitive peoples rarely fought one another, because they lived a subsistence lifestyle in which there was no surplus wealth to squabble about. What other reason could humans have for being at one another’s throats?

Chagnon spent decades studying the Yanomamo first-hand. What he observed challenged conventional wisdom about human nature, suggesting that primitive man may have lived in a Hobbesian state of “all against all”—where the concerns of group and individual security were driving factors in how society developed, and where a sense of terror was widespread. His work undercut a longstanding politically correct view in anthropology, which held that Stone Age humans were noble savages and that civilization had corrupted humanity and led to increasing violence. Chagnon’s reporting on the Yanomamo subsequently became unpopular and was heavily attacked within some academic circles. He endured accusations and investigations. Noble Savages is Chagnon’s engrossing and at times hair-raising story of his work among the Yanomamo and the controversies his discoveries stirred up. …

… Chagnon’s observations led him into dangerous intellectual areas. From his initial contacts with the Yanomamo, he’d noticed how prevalent violence was in their culture. He determined that as many as 30 percent of all Yanomamo men died in violent confrontations, often over women. Abductions and raids were common, and Chagnon estimated that as many as 20 percent of women in some villages had been captured in attacks. Nothing in his academic background prepared him for this, but Chagnon came to understand the importance of large extended families to the Yanomamo, and thus the connection between reproduction and political power. As Chagnon notes, biologists found his observations unsurprising and consistent with much they already knew; but to anthropologists, the notion that primitive societies fought extensively, and did so over women for the sake of reproductive rights, made Chagnon a heretic.

Undaunted, Chagnon plunged even further into the thicket of political incorrectness. In a 1988 Science article, he estimated that 45 percent of living Yanomamo adult males had participated in the killing of at least one person. He then compared the reproductive success of these Yanomamo men to others who had never killed. The unokais—those who had participated in killings—produced three times as many children, on average, as the others. …

… Critics, meanwhile, charged Chagnon with faking his data and branded him a racist. He found it difficult to get back into Venezuela to continue his studies. His problems intensified as the field of anthropology changed and cultural anthropologists increasingly began to reject the scientific method that Chagnon pursued in favor of a postmodernist approach. Chagnon calls these new anthropologists believers, not scientists. They saw their field not as a path of inquiry but as a means of social change—one that condemned the industrialized, capitalist nations for exploiting natural resources and “peaceful” primitive peoples. …

We have a few items that look at GOP fortunes in coming elections. Paul Mirengoff looks forward to 2016 and sees Wisconsin’s Scott Walker doing well.

Scott Walker has a 16 point lead (56-40) among likely voters in his race for governor, according to a poll from Wisconsin Public Radio/St. Norbert’s. Among registered voters, his lead is essentially the same (55-40).

The survey was conducted between March 24 and April 3. A Marquette University survey conducted between March 20-23 also showed Walker with a nice, though smaller, lead. In that poll, Walker outdistanced Democrat Mary Burke 48-41.

Revealingly, Walker fares well in an electorate that does not seem particularly conservative and that, if anything, appears to be slightly to the left of American voters in general. Among those surveyed in the WPR/St. Norbert’s poll, 48 percent had a favorable view of President Obama; 50 percent had an unfavorable view. Obama generally fares worse than that in national polling. In addition, Wisconsin’s liberal Senator Tammy Baldwin had a positive rating — 44 percent approve; 33 percent disapprove.

In this context, Walker’s popularity is particularly striking. 59 percent approve of his performance, while only 39 percent disapprove. …

Jennifer Rubin says Virginia Republicans are starting to smile.

Ed Gillespie’s Senate campaign is touting big fundraising numbers, $2.2 million in the first quarter, for the GOP adviser-turned candidate who is challenging Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.). Campaign manager Chris Levitt announced in a statement: “In less than a full quarter, the Gillespie campaign raised more money than any other Republican Senate challenger in the country. Virginia voters know that they have an opportunity not only to replace a Senator who’s voted 97 percent of the time with President Obama, but to replace Harry Reid as Senate Majority Leader. Our first quarter report shows strong support from across the Commonwealth and reflects enthusiasm for Ed Gillespie’s plans to put Virginians first and unleash job creation.” He will need that money since Warner is a prodigious fundraiser himself (bringing in $2.7 million during the first quarter).

Gillespie’s numbers reflect a few positive trends for the GOP. The Virginia state party was down in the dumps just a few months ago after losing the gubernatorial and two other statewide races in the wake of the federal government shutdown. Now with a viable Senate candidate, donors and activists have perked up. …

And Jason Riley says there will be a race in New Hampshire.

In the second half of March, Republican Scott Brown raised an impressive $275,000 to challenge incumbent Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire.

“That sum came despite Brown not holding any fundraisers or paying any staff to work on raising money for him,” reports the Hill newspaper. It came “simply from donations contributed to his website or via check in the mail, while he toured New Hampshire in his truck on a listening tour.”

Before Mr. Brown entered the race, Ms. Shaheen was expected to win in a walk; the closest GOP challenger, former U.S. Sen. Bob Smith, trailed her by 14 points. Ms. Shaheen is still the favorite, but Mr. Brown’s fundraising ability and name I.D. mean that she now has a real race on her hands. …

Mirengoff also posts on FL -13, the race that was so closely watched a month ago.

There will be no replay this November of that closely-watched special congressional election in Florida last month in which Republican David Jolly defeated Democrat Alex Sink. The Democrat says she will not run.

This leaves the Dems searching for a respectable candidate to challenge Jolly. Meanwhile, Jolly can accrue the advantages, financial and otherwise, of incumbency.

Rep. Steve ( “Not all Republican law makers are racists”) Israel, the Democratic Campaign Committee Chairman, had lobbied hard for Sink to have another go, according to the Washington Post. Now he is trying to put a happy face on his latest setback:

Pinellas residents have voted time and again for commonsense solutions instead of reckless partisanship, which is why we are confident our Democratic nominee can prevail on Election Day.

I’m sure Bill Young, the longtime Republican congressman from Pinellas for whom Jolly once worked, would have appreciated the compliment.

Not all Democrat politicians are bullshiters, but Israel is.

The Republican take is closer to the mark. “Washington Democrats can’t even convince their die-hard career politicians to walk the plank this November,” said Katie Prill, a spokeswoman for the National Republican Congressional Committee.

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We start with a couple of items about the relationship between Russia and Germany. On trips to Russia in the early 90′s Pickerhead was struck with how Germany was referred to by Russians when discussing the Second World War. When discussing the manifold German atrocities would never say “Germans” it was always ” the Nazis.” Without going into detail, suffice it to say the Germans were guilty of the most unspeakable and disgusting things. That there were any Germans left alive in areas controlled by the Russians at the end of the war, is a demonstration of Russian forbearance.

Craig Pirrong of Streetwise Professor is first.

In a sign of the impending apocalypse, Der Spiegel has run several articles that evaluate critically Germany’s all too accepting and “understanding” approach to Russia, including during the Ukraine and Crimea crises. The articles argue that there is a volatile brew of psychology (neuroses, actually), philosophy, and ideology, which when combined with the economic interests of German industry, makes Germany ambivalent at worst about Russia.

World War II of course plays a central role in this. One of the articles notes that the Germans are acutely conscious of the horrific things they did in the East, and that despite that, the Russians do not really hold that over the Germans. This impels the Germans to make amends, and makes them somewhat grateful to the Russians. In contrast American moralism about German actions during the war rankles the Germans deeply: this helps explain why the Germans revel in shrieking about American transgressions, notably Viet Nam and more lately, Snowden. If the Americans are morally tainted, Germans can feel less guilty about their past. (Similar considerations apply with force to German attitudes towards Israel.)

One point that the articles all make is the deep anti-western streak in German thought and attitudes. The similar anti-westernism in Russia, which is central to Putin’s new ideology, therefore resonates deeply in Germany and makes Germans think that Russians are kindred spirits.  These attitudes are particularly pronounced in the former GDR.

More specifically, there is a strong element of anti-Anglo Saxon-ism in both German and Russian thought. …

And here’s Christian Neef, Der Spiegel’s Foreign Editor.

Since the start of the Crimea crisis, we’ve constantly heard that Germans somehow understand Russians. Indeed, hardly any other view has been repeated as often. But nothing could possibly be more misleading. The Germans don’t understand Russians: They understand less about the Russians than they do about the British, Spanish or French.

It’s true that Germany had a special relationship with the Russian Empire long ago. Germans served as czars and czarinas, once as the Russian prime minister, and they were officers, doctors and teachers in the royal court in St. Petersburg. German engineers operated ore mines in the Ural Mountains, German farmers plowed land along the Volga and Dnieper rivers. In turn, they were introduced to Russian writers. Pushkin introduced Germans to the strange but likable Russian soul. And cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg wouldn’t be what they are today without Germans. That’s the romanticized side of German-Russian relations.

Then came the wars of the past century and the devastation the Germans unleashed on the Soviet Union. Since then, the image Germans have of Russia is inaccurate.

The postwar generation grew up with a latent fear of the Russians. In the east of Germany, people saw them as an occupying force, while in the west many believed that an invasion was imminent. Then came Gorbachev. The Germans celebrated him because he gave them the gift of reunification. In one blow, the aversion of the 1960s and 1970s to everything that came out of the Kremlin seemed to be forgotten. It was a time of enthusiasm and relief, especially in the West. Gorbachev became a much-admired figure for Germans. They projected their fantasies for a new relationship between Germans and Russians on him and the new Russia. The Germans believed the Russians might somehow become just like them.

But Russia isn’t Europe, and it never will be. Russia never went through any period of enlightenment after the destruction wrought by Stalin on the country’s soul. Germans never seriously considered that fact, because it would have interfered with their image of Russia.

They should have been warned. Not only because Mikhail Gorbachev in no way represented the kind of hard-nosed leaders the Russians had become accustomed to over hundreds of years. Nor did they listen to what Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had to say about perestroika’s inventor. He said Gorbachev’s leadership style wasn’t governance, but rather “a thoughtless renunciation of power.” Gorbachev ultimately became the most unpopular Kremlin leader in recent history.

The Soviet Union’s implosion, which they blame on Gorbachev, didn’t just rob them of their homeland. It also plunged them headfirst into a kind of capitalism that was even more reckless than Manchester capitalism. In no time at all, a handful of oligarchs appropriated the country’s most precious assets and a majority of the Russian people fell into poverty. …

A couple of our favorites have posted on the issue of women’s wages. Thomas Sowell is first.

The “war on women” political slogan is in fact a war against common sense.

It is a statistical fraud when Barack Obama and other politicians say that women earn only 77 percent of what men earn — and that this is because of discrimination.

It would certainly be discrimination if women were doing the same work as men, for the same number of hours, with the same amount of training and experience, as well as other things being the same. But study after study, over the past several decades, has shown repeatedly that those things are not the same.

Constantly repeating the “77 percent” statistic does not make them the same. It simply takes advantage of many people’s ignorance — something that Barack Obama has been very good at doing on many other issues. …

And then Michael Barone.

… The Democrats’ problem is that sex discrimination by employers was outlawed by the Equal Pay Act signed by John Kennedy in 1963 — 51 years ago. To make “the war on women” an issue and rally single women to the polls, the Obama Democrats have had to concoct legislation putting new burdens on small employers and ginning up business for their trial lawyer contributors, as the 2009 Lilly Ledbetter Act’s extended statute of limitations did.

Such legislation attacks a problem very largely solved. The male-female pay differential for those working at similar levels has been reduced nearly, but not quite, to the vanishing point. Remaining differences result almost entirely from personal choices by women and men.

Those choices shifted sharply 40 years ago but haven’t changed much lately. The percentage of mothers seeing full-time work as an ideal, Pew Research Center reports, was 30 percent in 1997 and 32 percent in 2012.

By any realistic standard the equal pay problem is minor, certainly in comparison to the growth-stifling effects of the current tax code and the unsustainable trajectory of current entitlement programs.

But this president, unlike his two predecessors, has chosen not to address such major problems in his second term. …

Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.

Fallon: Hugh Hefner’s friends threw him a big 88th birthday party today. They had a naked woman jump out of a giant bran muffin.

Fallon: Top movie this weekend was ‘Captain America.’ Earned $303 million worldwide. In other words, Captain America has more money than regular America

Conan: There’s a new website that helps people write elaborate works of personalized fiction. It’s called “Match.com.”

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It’s Eric Holder Day as we examine another appointment, which like Kerry and Hagel, is a perfect compliment to the president. John Fund and Hans Von Spakovsky are first up.

A veteran Justice Department lawyer says that Attorney General Eric Holder has politicized the department in a way he hadn’t seen before. In short, “Holder is the worst person to hold the position of attorney general since the disgraced John Mitchell.”

Now in his sixth year as attorney general, Holder has increasingly tilted the department in an ideological direction. It’s one thing to emphasize President Obama’s legal priorities. It’s quite another to decide not to enforce certain federal laws — such as the ban on marijuana — or urge state attorney generals to refuse to defend local laws on same-sex marriage. Legal changes are achieved through legislation, not through a sudden whim not to enforce them. No other attorney general has acted in this manner. …

Victor Davis Hanson posts on the divisive attorney general.

… is this not the same Attorney General Holder who once called the nation collectively “cowards” and referred to African Americans as “my people” — not to mention a president who has called for some “to punish our enemies”? All that sounds pretty divisive and ugly.

And wasn’t Holder making his allegations of unprofessionalism while speaking before the demagogic Mr. Sharpton’s group? This is the same Al Sharpton who is on record inflaming the Crown Heights riots, provoking violence at the fatal Freddie Fashion Mart riot, helping to invent the Tawana Brawley caper, defaming and attempting to destroy the career of Duchess County prosecutor Steven Pagones, and with a long history of racist outbursts and threats (“white interloper,” “white folks was in caves . . .”, “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house”), homophobic outbursts (“We taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it”), …

Peter Wehner says Holder can, “Man up.” 

Attorney General Eric Holder, in a speech to the National Action Network, accused his congressional critics of launching “unprecedented, unwarranted, ugly and divisive” attacks on him and the Obama administration.

“Forget about me [specifically]. Look at the way the attorney general of the United States was treated yesterday by a House committee,” Holder said. “What attorney general has ever had to deal with that kind of treatment? What president has ever had to deal with that kind of treatment?”

Let’s take these topics in reverse order. What president has been on the receiving end of such ugly and divisive attacks? Try George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, just for openers. For example, Senator Ted Kennedy declared, from the well of the United States Senate, that “before the [Iraq] war, week after week after week after week, we were told lie after lie after lie after lie.” He also accused President Bush of hatching a phony war, “a fraud … made up in Texas” to boost his political career. Prominent Democrats made these kind of charges all the time against Bush. …

Corner post with more.

… Holder’s notion that past attorneys general have escaped widespread criticism, or that criticism directed toward him is solely race-based, overlooks incidents of those before him, including one of his most recent predecessors. As Mediaite’s Noah Rothman points out, Bush-era attorney general Alberto Gonzales faced calls for his impeachment during his time in the office.

In 2007, seven Democratic representatives, including some still in Congress, urged the House Judiciary Committee to investigate fully whether sufficient grounds existed for the House of Representatives to impeach Gonzales for “​high crimes and misdemeanors.”​

Additionally, Reagan-era attorney general Edwin Meese hardly escaped criticism while in office. Taking issue with his handling of the Iran-Contra investigation, among other issues, critics of Meese and the administration printed posters and t-shirts with the phrase “Meese is a Pig”​ in an effort to remove him.

NY Post Editors too.

… if General Holder checked the record, he’d see the chief reason he’s the first sitting Cabinet member held in contempt of Congress is that — unlike previous cabinet members who faced this sanction — he obstinately refused any accommodation.

Naomi Schaefer Riley says it’s not just athletes who get screwed by colleges.

In its recent ruling that athletes at Northwestern University have the right to unionize, the National Labor Relations Board cited the case of senior quarterback Kain Colter, who naively thought that he could pursue a pre-med degree while also playing on the school’s football team.

When he attempted to enroll in a required chemistry class during his sophomore year, “Colter testified that his coaches and advisors discouraged him from taking the class because it conflicted with morning football practices. Colter consequently had to take this class in the summer session, which caused him to fall behind his classmates who were pursuing the same pre-med major. Ultimately he decided to switch his major to psychology which he believed to be less demanding.”

In other words, despite the fact that Division I athletes are making oodles of money for their schools, their interests are not being served by coaches or administrators. Athletes’ academics and future career prospects are being sacrificed for a few more points on the field.

But athletes are not alone. Regular students are also contributing to the university’s bottom line through tuition payments and the spigot of federal financial aid — yet their interests are not being served, either.

In exchange for their eye-popping tuition checks, students are getting a dizzying array of pointless classes that don’t prepare them for the real world. Colleges have gotten more and more esoteric in what they teach, more specialized to the point of being useless to anything but . . . academia. …

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Charles Krauthammer writes on the left’s totalitarian efforts to find and purge the “deniers” in our midst.

Two months ago, a petition bearing more than 110,000 signatures was delivered to The Post, demanding a ban on any article questioning global warming. The petition arrived the day before publication of my column, which consisted of precisely that heresy.

The column ran as usual. But I was gratified by the show of intolerance because it perfectly illustrated my argument that the left is entering a new phase of ideological agitation — no longer trying to win the debate but stopping debate altogether, banishing from public discourse any and all opposition.

The proper word for that attitude is totalitarian. It declares certain controversies over and visits serious consequences — from social ostracism to vocational defenestration — upon those who refuse to be silenced.

Sometimes the word comes from on high, as when the president of the United States declares the science of global warming to be “settled.” Anyone who disagrees is then branded “anti-science.” And better still, a “denier” — a brilliantly chosen calumny meant to impute to the climate skeptic the opprobrium normally reserved for the hatemongers and crackpots who deny the Holocaust.

Then last week, another outbreak. The newest closing of the leftist mind is on gay marriage. Just as the science of global warming is settled, so, it seems, are the moral and philosophical merits of gay marriage.

Mark Steyn posts on Brandeis’ disinvitation of Ayann HIrsi Ali.

Today, BrandeisUniversity announced that it was reversing its decision to award an honorary degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, following complaints from faculty, an online petition, and pressure from the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which represents nobody but is flush with Saudi cash. The biases of the academy are well known: Robert Spencer is in no danger of getting an honorary degree any time soon, nor Douglas Murray. Nevertheless, in this instance, BrandeisUniversity is stiffing someone who’s a black feminist atheist from Somalia. Which makes their decision the most explicit recognition yet that, in the hierarchy of identity-group politics, Islam trumps everything, including race, gender and secularism.

Brandeis said they had changed their mind about Ms Hirsi Ali’s degree because “we cannot overlook certain of her past statements that are inconsistent with Brandeis University’s core values“. Presumably, Tony Kushner’s statement that the state of Israel shouldn’t exist is entirely consistent with BrandeisUniversity’s core values, because no one bothered rescinding his honorary degree. …

… So getting an honorary degree at Brandeis, like serving on the board at Mozilla, is open only to those who make sure they never cross the Conformity Enforcers. And apostates to Islam, as Ayaan is regarded, must accept that they are apostates to American campus conformity, too, and be prepared to lead a life without the consolations of honorary degrees. Accepting the loss of A-list commencement gigs doesn’t take a lot of courage, but it still takes more than Frederick Lawrence has displayed. And ultimately, as I said re Brandon Eich, such a land will be bloody boring – and a society in decline. …

Ross Douthat writes on the similarities between Brandeis and Mozilla.

… What both cases illustrate, with their fuzzy rhetoric masking ideological pressure, is a serious moral defect at the heart of elite culture in America.

The defect, crucially, is not this culture’s bias against social conservatives, or its discomfort with stinging attacks on non-Western religions. Rather, it’s the refusal to admit — to others, and to itself — that these biases fundamentally trump the commitment to “free expression” or “diversity” affirmed in mission statements and news releases.

This refusal, this self-deception, means that we have far too many powerful communities (corporate, academic, journalistic) that are simultaneously dogmatic and dishonest about it — that promise diversity but only as the left defines it, that fill their ranks with ideologues and then claim to stand athwart bias and misinformation, …

… And with the pretense, increasingly, comes a dismissive attitude toward those institutions — mostly religious — that do acknowledge their own dogmas and commitments, and ask for the freedom to embody them and live them out.

It would be a far, far better thing if Harvard and Brandeis and Mozilla would simply say, explicitly, that they are as ideologically progressive as Notre Dame is Catholic or B. Y.U. is Mormon or Chick-fil-A is evangelical, and that they intend to run their institution according to those lights.

I can live with the progressivism. It’s the lying that gets toxic.

Matthew Continetti uses divorce proceedings to write on what he calls “Washington’s rotten core.”

I see lobbying,” Tony Podesta has said, “as getting information in the hands of people who are making decisions so they can make more informed decisions.” Last week the information Tony Podesta was giving was the divorce complaint he had filed in D.C. Court against his wife, Heather. The hands receiving that information belonged to a gossip columnist for the Washington Post, who made the “informed decision” to report on it. Later in the day Heather, who is also a lobbyist, gave the Post the text of her counter-suit. It published a follow-up.

The documents, which you can read below, did not become available to the rest of us until yesterday. They tell stories not only of a May–December romance gone sour but of how obscene wealth can be amassed through rent-seeking and influence-peddling in Washington, D.C., and of the hoary means by which the princelings of the capital and their consorts maintain and grow that wealth. They tell stories not only of an ugly divorce but of the power of lobbying, of how one family maneuvered to the center of the nation’s dominant political party, of the transactional relationships, gargantuan self-regard, and empty posturing that insulate, asbestos-like, the D.C. bubble.

That the broken couple now uses the tools of their trade — the phone call to a friend, the selective leaking of documents, the hiring of attorneys, the launch of a public-relations campaign — against one another is more than ironic. It is fitting. Tony and Heather Podesta reached the pinnacle of wealth and influence in Barack Obama’s Washington. Now they, like he, are in eclipse. …

An Instapundit reader with an interesting discourse on Swiss and American education.

… My opinion: the United States has a high structural unemployment rate (including a low ‘labor participation rate’) due to a seriously flawed educational model beginning with Kindergarten. You are losing an understanding of the founding principles of your country, such as what is the Natural Law. The role of parents in your system is no longer understood or deemed important. Study the Swiss model. It has practical answers that serve a free people and a free society based on private enterprise. There is no occupational or religious coercion. But, there is a well defined Judeo-Christian societal role of parents; of teachers, advisors, testing authorities and of course the students. There is no “Common Core”. Our cantons are all somewhat different in their academic curricula for the primary and secondary levels because the cantons are different. But they are united in the objective that as young men and women approach maturity, they complete rational paths that yield life skills having value within the society, and for which their remuneration is based on “the market”.

I would be pleased to try to answer any questions you might have. I love the United States, and it pains me to see a problem there that could be fixed, but requires a sustained effort to change attitudes toward trades, and the important role of parentage. …

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Recently there has been a lot of activity in the investigation of the IRS. Kimberley Strassel starts off our review. 

Nearly a year into the IRS scandal, we still don’t know exactly what happened—though we are finally getting an inkling. That’s thanks to the letter House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp sent this week to the Justice Department recommending a criminal probe of Lois Lerner.

The average citizen might be dizzied by the torrent of confusing terms—BOLO lists, Tigta, 501(c)(4)—and the array of accusations that have made up this IRS investigation. Mr. Camp’s letter takes a step back to remind us why this matters, even as it provides compelling new information that goes to motive and method—and clarifies some of the curious behavior of Democrats during the investigation.

Motive: Republicans began this investigation looking for a direct link between the White House and IRS targeting. The more probable explanation all along was that Ms. Lerner felt emboldened by Democratic attacks against conservative groups to do what came naturally to her. We know from the record that she disdained money in politics. And we know from her prior tenure at the Federal Election Commission that she had a particular animus against conservative organizations.

As the illuminating timeline accompanying the Camp letter shows, Ms. Lerner’s focus on shutting down Crossroads GPS came only after Obama adviser David Axelrod listed Crossroads among “front groups for foreign-controlled companies”; only after Senate Democrats Dick Durbin, Carl Levin, Chuck Schumer and others demanded the IRS investigate Crossroads; only after the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee launched a website to “expose donors” of Crossroads; and only after Obama’s campaign lawyer, Bob Bauer, filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission about Crossroads. …

The Editors of National Review have more.

… That a not inconsiderable portion of the moral credibility of the United States government now rests in the hands of Eric Holder is not a comforting thought. Mr. Holder holds the title of attorney general, but he is in effect very little more than a political enabler. The president himself denies that there exists a “smidgen” of corruption at the IRS. The evidence says otherwise. What the attorney general will say is anybody’s guess.

Now that the Oversight Committee has voted, the contempt proceedings against Ms. Lerner will go to a vote of the full House. If the House votes to proceed, it may either hand the case over to the U.S. attorney or move forward with its own tribunal. If she is found in contempt, Congress can press suit, wait for the DOJ to prosecute, or demand that she comply with a subpoena and have her incarcerated — where she belongs — if she refuses. The criminal case is in the end more important than the contempt proceedings, but we would be astounded if it went anywhere under the leadership of Eric Holder, who evinces very little enthusiasm for doing his job when he could be doing the political bidding of his president.

The Democrats are determined to turn a blind eye to all this — every one of them voted against holding her in contempt. Here is a taste of what they intend to tolerate:

Ms. Lerner, in direct contravention of federal law, specifically directed the IRS to target Crossroads GPS, the conservative activist outfit associated with Karl Rove, and when the IRS did not act with satisfactory alacrity demanded to know why the organization had not been audited and its application for tax-exempt status denied. She specifically directed IRS employees to make sure that all actions regarding Crossroads were coordinated with her office. The targeting of Crossroads by the IRS came directly after Illinois Democratic senator Dick Durbin sent the IRS commission a letter demanding such an investigation. In correspondence, Lerner did not write that the Crossroads application was under review; she wrote that “we are working on a denial of the application.” According to the House document, the IRS agent working on the Crossroads case reported that “specific guidance” was given to him by Ms. Lerner’s office as to the desired result — i.e., that the application was to be denied. All the while, Democrats maintained that there was no intentional political targeting. …

And Jennifer Rubin.

President Obama’s comment that there’s “not even a smidgen of corruption [at the IRS] may prove to be as accurate as “If you like your plan, you can keep it.”

Yesterday it was reported: “For the first time since it released President Nixon’s tax returns in 1974, a House committee voted Wednesday to release confidential tax documents as part of a request for a criminal investigation into the Internal Revenue Service. This time, the House Ways and Means Committee is seeking criminal charges against former Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner.” Of particular concern are Lerner’s e-mails appearing to push IRS employees to disallow the GOP group American Crossroads its tax-exempt status while she was angling for a political job with Organizing for America. (“The letter to Holder alleges that Lerner singled out Crossroads GPS, a group co-founded by former George W. Bush political aide Karl Rove, for an audit and a denial of tax-exempt status after meeting with campaign finance reform activists in January 2013. That same month, Lerner spoke of hoping to get a job at Organizing for Action, an Obama-affiliated group that was also seeking tax-exempt status. ‘Oh — maybe I can get the DC office job!’ she wrote in an e-mail.” Holder is unlikely to do anything about Lerner, but the House Republicans made their point: There is a smidgen of something going on at the IRS. …

We’ll close this section with a WSJ Editorial.

… The most troubling new evidence are documents showing that Ms. Lerner actively corresponded with liberal campaign-finance groups Democracy 21 and the Campaign Legal Center, which had asked the IRS to investigate if conservative groups including Crossroads GPS were violating their tax-exempt status. After personally meeting with the two liberal outfits, Ms. Lerner contacted the director of the Exempt Organizations Examinations Unit in Dallas to ask why Crossroads had not been audited.

“You should know that we are working on a denial of the application,” Ms. Lerner wrote in an email. “Please make sure all moves regarding the org are coordinated up here before we do anything.” The Cincinnati agent assigned to the case at the time, Joseph Herr, noted on his timesheet, “[b]ased on conference, begin reviewing case information, tax law and draft/template advocacy denial letter, all to think about how best to compose the denial letter.”

Mr. Herr had not made any indications in 2012 of an intent to deny the application, nor was any denial recommendation contained in the November 2011 analysis of the group by Exempt Organizations lawyer Hillary Goehausen. Crossroads GPS, which was cofounded by Journal contributor Karl Rove, says it applied for tax-exempt status in 2010 but still hasn’t received formal IRS approval.

Ways and Means also discloses that in January 2013 Ms. Lerner asked her staff to examine five conservative groups that the website ProPublica had called “controversial dark money groups,” including Americans for Responsible Leadership, Freedom Path, Rightchange.com, America is Not Stupid, and A Better America. Four of those five groups ultimately got the IRS deluxe scrutiny treatment and three were audited. …

John Fund went to London for a few days and saw the future. 

London – Americans can’t really snigger about political correctness in other countries too much. After all, this week a six-year-old Colorado boy was accused of sexual harassment for kissing a fellow student on the hand. He was suspended and the incident will be entered on his record.

But a three-day trip to Britain has convinced me that the country that gave the world Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, and free trade has gone far beyond us in kowtowing to political correctness. (Or is the use of “kowtowing” now impermissible?)

The papers here this week were full of the story of Tracey Trigg, a 51-year-old social worker in Lincolnshire, who was twice barred from buying wine at a supermarket because she was accompanied by her children. On the first occasion she was with her 24-year-old son, Josh, and then with both Josh and her 13-year-old daughter, Ella. Both had gone with her to help her carry her Christmas shopping home. Since they had just strolled to the store from home, neither child was carrying full ID. …

Priceonomics posts on UPS and its no left turns policy.

… When better tracking systems emerged in 2001, the package delivery service took a closer look at how trucks performed when delivering packages. As a logistics company with some 96,000 trucks and several hundred aircraft, much of UPS’s business can be distilled to a series of optimization problems around reducing the amount of fuel used, saving time, and using space more efficiently. (Trucks in UPS facilities park just a few inches apart with their side mirrors overlapping to save space.)

UPS engineers found that left-hand turns were a major drag on efficiency. Turning against traffic resulted in long waits in left-hand turn lanes that wasted time and fuel, and it also led to a disproportionate number of accidents. By mapping out routes that involved “a series of right-hand loops,” UPS improved profits and safety while touting their catchy, environmentally friendly policy. As of 2012, the right turn rule combined with other improvements — for the wow factor, UPS doesn’t separate them out — saved around 10 million gallons of gas and reduced emissions by the equivalent of taking 5,300 cars of the road for a year. …

Twisted Sifter has cool pics of Queen Mary II’s captain standing on the liner’s bulbous bow.

Cunard recently captured dramatic photographs of Captain Kevin Oprey, Master of Queen Mary 2, standing on the ship’s bulbous bow a mile off the coast of Bali during the ship’s World Cruise in her 10th anniversary year.

A bulbous bow is a protruding bulb at the bow (or front) of a ship just below the waterline. The bulb modifies the way the water flows around the hull, reducing drag and thus increasing speed, range, fuel efficiency, and stability. Large ships with bulbous bows generally have 12-15% better fuel efficiency than similar vessels without them. A bulbous bow also increases the buoyancy of the forward part and hence reduces the pitching of the ship to a small degree. …

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Jennifer Rubin spots the difference between two presidents.

Secretary of State John Kerry’s testimony on Tuesday served to remind us how a single presidential decision can have monumental effects. For the president who said a decade of war was ending, the decision not to act in a bloody war in which WMD’s had been repeatedly used was the tipping point in an already floundering foreign policy. The contrast with his predecessor is stark.

George W. Bush’s arguably finest moment as president and President Obama’s worst moment involved a similar dilemma: When does the commander in chief put country above politics and lead on foreign policy despite the adverse political consequences? When the chips were really down, Bush championed the surge in Iraq; when the chips were down in Syria for violation of the red line, Obama blinked.

Bush went outside the chain of command to find experts and a general to devise a new strategy when he saw the war strategy wasn’t going well. Obama hid behind obvious catastrophizing by the military when he decided to avoid holding to his red line.

Bush took full responsibility for the strategy. Obama claimed it wasn’t “his red line,” but Congress’s and the international community’s.

Bush knew it would cost him politically and his party the House. (It did.) Obama saw the results of the vote in the British parliament and ran for cover. He punted the decision at the last moment to Congress to provide him with a vote on authorization for use of force. …

Jonathan Tobin explains Kerry’s lies about Israel.

… Kerry probably thinks no harm can come from blaming the Israelis who have always been the convenient whipping boys of the peace process no matter what the circumstances. But he’s wrong about that too. Just as the Clinton administration did inestimable damage to the credibility of the peace process and set the stage for another round of violence by whitewashing Yasir Arafat’s support for terrorism and incitement to hatred in the 1990s, so, too, do Kerry’s efforts to portray Abbas as the victim rather than the author of this fiasco undermine his efforts for peace.

So long as the Palestinians pay no price for their refusal to give up unrealistic demands for a Jewish retreat from Jerusalem as well as the “right of return” for the 1948 refugees and their descendants and a refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and end the conflict, peace is impossible no matter what the Netanyahu government does. Appeasing them with lies about Israel, like the efforts of some to absolve Arafat and Abbas for saying no to peace in 2000, 2001, and 2008, only makes it easier for the PA to go on saying no. Whether they are doing so in the hope of extorting more concessions from Israel or because, as is more likely, they have no intention of making peace on any terms, the result is the same.

Telling the truth about the Palestinians might make Kerry look foolish for devoting so much time and effort to a process that never had a chance. But it might lay the groundwork for future success in the event that the sea change in Palestinian opinion that might make peace possible were to occur. Falsely blaming Israel won’t bring that moment any closer.

Charlie Gasparino provides another grown-up look at Michael Lewis’ book about high frequency trading.

It’s easy to bash Wall Street as the root cause of all financial problems (and some non-financial ones), which is why Michael Lewis is getting away with blowing so much smoke about the latest supposed ripoff of the “little guy.”

Easy, but completely and utterly disingenuous.

The “scandal” Lewis points to in a new book (and in his high-profile publicity campaign) is something called high-frequency trading, or HFT. In a scam of epic proportions, we’re told, smart Wall Street fellows can miraculously figure out when, where and how much stock you, the individual investor, want to buy — and then rip you off.

The HFT guys supposedly do this by jumping in front of your order at the speed of light and forcing you to pay more for a stock than you would’ve if the high-speed computer never existed. Even as the market hits record highs, Lewis wants you to believe the system is rigged.

The book is a fast read — as long as you suspend your disbelief over Lewis’ thesis: These evil traders are screwing the American people once again, just as they did during the financial crisis.

But, as with that easy lefty interpretation of the 2008 crisis, Lewis conveniently leaves out some important facts …

Well, here’s something to burst some bubbles! According to a study from Great Britain the consumption of organic foods does little to help women avoid cancer. You’ll learn a new word here – boffin. It is British slang for scientist or technical expert. Sounds derogatory, but it’s not. So you wouldn’t call someone a boffo boffin because it would tend to be redundant. The story come from The Register, which looks to be a Brit equivalent to Wired.

One of the primary drivers of the growth in organic food sales over the last couple of decades is the perception that organic food is healthier than conventionally farmed food.

It stands to reason, doesn’t it? After all conventional crops depend on chemicals and organic food doesn’t.

And we all know that chemicals, in this case mainly pesticides, are bad for you. Ergo organic food should be healthier, and the strong growth in organic food sales (up 2.8 per cent last year, after a few years of downturn during the recession) attests to how popular opinion has accepted this assertion.

This is why the results of a new UK study that looked at cancer risk and the consumption of organic food is so damned inconvenient. Where organic food advocates have pushed organics as a way of reducing cancer risk, the study shows that it makes little difference one way or another. Hence uncomfortable headlines from the likes of the Daily Mail: Eating organic foods does NOTHING to reduce the cancer risk among women, says new study.

The study in question appears in the latest edition of the British Journal of Cancer and is by OxfordUniversity cancer epidemiology boffin Dr Kathryn Bradbury and co-workers. Part of the Million Women Study funded by Cancer Research UK and the Medical Research Council, this particular bit of research tracked 623,080 middle-aged British women for almost 10 years and looked at their pattern of organic food consumption and the incidence of 16 different cancer types, as well as overall cancer incidence. …

Since we’re in the business of bursting bubbles today, how about a blind taste test for violins? Do you think the $3 million Stradivari did well? A blog named Phys.Org has the answers.

Ten world-class soloists put costly Stradivarius violins and new, cheaper ones to a blind scientific test. The results may seem off-key to musicians and collectors, but the new instruments won handily.

When the lights were dimmed and the musicians donned dark glasses, the soloists’ top choice out of a dozen old and new violins tested was by far a new one. So was the second choice, according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Of the six old violins tested, five were by made by the famous Stradivari family in the 17th and 18th centuries. The newer violins were about 100 times cheaper, said study co-author Joseph Curtin, a Michigan violin maker. But the Strads and other older Italian violins have long been considered superior, even almost magical.

The idea was to unlock “the secrets of Stradivari,” the study said.

So the study tries to quantify something that is inherently subjective and personal, the quality of an instrument, said Curtin and lead author Claudia Fritz of Pierre and MarieCurieUniversity in France. A few years earlier, the duo tested violins blind in an Indianapolis hotel room, but this one was more controlled and comprehensive, putting the instruments through their paces in a rehearsal room and concert hall just outside Paris. They even played with an orchestra, the results of which will be part of a future study.

“I was surprised that my top choice was new,” said American violinist Giora Schmidt. …

Late night humor from Andy Malcolm.

Conan: Did you know, Texas was an independent nation that bordered the U.S. from 1836 to 1845? And then in 1845, the U.S. surrendered to Texas.

Fallon: The White House says it’s surpassed its goal for people enrolled in ObamaCare. Man, it’s amazing what you can achieve when you make something mandatory and fine people if they don’t do it, and keep extending the deadline for months.

Fallon: If you don’t enroll in ObamaCare you might get a penalty of 1% of your salary. Then Americans said, “Man — good thing I don’t have a job!” …

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Michael Barone has a thoughtful piece on how history can determine thoughts and opinions.

… It seems farfetched to suppose that centuries-old events and migrations could be reflected in the election results of 2010 and the overthrow of a regime in 2014. But you can see the mark of history on current electoral politics elsewhere, in Europe and North America.

Take Poland. In its 2010 election one candidate carried the regions that were part of the German Empire and most that were in Austria-Hungary before 1918; the other carried the areas that were part of Czarist Russia except for metro Warsaw.

Or move west to Germany. In post-World War II politics, the Christian Democrats have carried most regions that were Catholic after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, and the Social Democrats have carried most regions that were Protestant.

And then there is the United States. Southern whites remained overwhelmingly Democratic for almost 100 years after the Civil War. During that period, the Republican strongholds were northern areas settled by New England Yankees and their progeny.

Party allegiances were reversed in a process that took half a century, but the regions are still distinctive, with southern whites heavily Republican and the Yankee diaspora generally Democratic.

Many counties in the Appalachian chain still vote as they fought in 1861. Exceptions are coal counties, which swung Democratic with unionization and now swing Republican thanks to Barack Obama’s “war on coal.” …

Joel Kotkin calls it “the debate is over syndrome” and says the left is becoming increasingly totalitarian.

On climate and other issues, many in academia, media, government insist their viewpoint is unassailable and won’t tolerate dissent.

The ongoing trial involving journalist Mark Steyn – accused of defaming climate change theorist Michael Mann – reflects an increasingly dangerous tendency among our intellectual classes to embrace homogeneity of viewpoint. Steyn, whose column has appeared for years on these pages, may be alternatingly entertaining or over-the-top obnoxious, but the slander lawsuit against him marks a milestone in what has become a dangerously authoritarian worldview being adopted in academia, the media and large sections of the government bureaucracy.

Let’s call it “the debate is over” syndrome, referring to a term used most often in relationship with climate change but also by President Barack Obama last week in reference to what remains his contentious, and theoretically reformable, health care plan. Ironically, this shift to certainty now comes increasingly from what passes for the Left in America.

These are the same people who historically have identified themselves with open-mindedness and the defense of free speech, while conservatives, with some justification, were associated more often with such traits as criminalizing unpopular views – as seen in the 1950s McCarthy era – and embracing canonical bans on all sorts of personal behavior, a tendency still more evident than necessary among some socially minded conservatives. …

… Political uniformity is certainly in vogue. A remarkable 96 percent of presidential campaign donations from the nation’s Ivy League faculty and staff in 2012 went to Obama, a margin more reminiscent of Soviet Russia than a properly functioning pluralistic academy.

Writing in the Telegraph, UK, Christopher Booker says future generations will find it hard to understand the globalony hysteria of the left.

When future generations come to look back on the alarm over global warming that seized the world towards the end of the 20th century, much will puzzle them as to how such a scare could have arisen. They will wonder why there was such a panic over a 0.4 per cent rise in global temperatures between 1975 and 1998, when similar rises between 1860 and 1880 and 1910 and 1940 had given no cause for concern. They will see these modest rises as just part of a general warming that began at the start of the 19th century, as the world emerged from the Little Ice Age, when the Earth had grown cooler for 400 years.

They will be struck by the extent to which this scare relied on the projections of computer models, which then proved to be hopelessly wrong when, in the years after 1998, their predicted rise in temperature came virtually to a halt. But in particular they will be amazed by the almost religious reverence accorded to that strange body, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which by then will be recognised as having never really been a scientific body at all, but a political pressure group. It had been set up in the 1980s by a small band of politically persuasive scientists who had become fanatically committed to the belief that, because carbon dioxide levels were rising, global temperatures must inevitably follow; an assumption that the evidence would increasingly show was mistaken. …

Also in the Telegraph, Charles Moore has more on globalony.

… The theory of global warming is a gigantic weather forecast for a century or more. However interesting the scientific inquiries involved, therefore, it can have almost no value as a prediction. Yet it is as a prediction that global warming (or, as we are now ordered to call it in the face of a stubbornly parky 21st century, “global weirding”) has captured the political and bureaucratic elites. All the action plans, taxes, green levies, protocols and carbon-emitting flights to massive summit meetings, after all, are not because of what its supporters call “The Science”. Proper science studies what is – which is, in principle, knowable – and is consequently very cautious about the future – which isn’t. No, they are the result of a belief that something big and bad is going to hit us one of these days.

Some of the utterances of the warmists are preposterously specific. In March 2009, the Prince of Wales declared that the world had “only 100 months to avert irretrievable climate and ecosystem collapse”. How could he possibly calculate such a thing? …

… The origins of warmism lie in a cocktail of ideas which includes anti-industrial nature worship, post-colonial guilt, a post-Enlightenment belief in scientists as a new priesthood of the truth, a hatred of population growth, a revulsion against the widespread increase in wealth and a belief in world government. It involves a fondness for predicting that energy supplies won’t last much longer (as early as 1909, the US National Conservation Commission reported to Congress that America’s natural gas would be gone in 25 years and its oil by the middle of the century), protest movements which involve dressing up and disappearing into woods (the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, the Mosleyite Blackshirts who believed in reafforestation) and a dislike of the human race (The Club of Rome’s work Mankind at the Turning-Point said: “The world has cancer and the cancer is man.”).

These beliefs began to take organised, international, political form in the 1970s. …

Associated Press reports on efforts to clear the Great Lakes of ice.

U.S. and Canadian Coast Guard crews kept up their battle Monday to clear pathways for vessels hauling vital raw materials on the ice-clogged Great Lakes, where a shipping logjam forced a weeklong shutdown of the nation’s largest steel (mill).

Traffic remained largely at a crawl after a winter that produced some of the heaviest ice on record across the five inland seas, where more than half the surface area remained solid this week. Icebreaking ships slogging across Lake Superior were still encountering ice layers 2 feet to 3 feet thick. In some areas, wind and wave action created walls of ice up to 14 feet high.

United States Steel Corp.’s plant in Gary, Ind., had resumed limited operations after receiving a shipment over the weekend of iron ore from a company mill near Detroit, which was sending one additional load, spokeswoman Courtney Boone said.

Two ships were scheduled to arrive Tuesday with ore from mines in northern Minnesota following a two-week voyage across Lake Superior, which ordinarily would take three days.

Other companies were hoping their supplies would be adequate to avoid significant disruptions. …

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Time to have a look at the healthcare act. Peggy Noonan calls it “A Catastrophe Like No Other.”

… Support it or not, you cannot look at ObamaCare and call it anything but a huge, historic mess. It is also utterly unique in the annals of American lawmaking and government administration.

Its biggest proponent in Congress, the Democratic speaker of the House, literally said—blithely, mindlessly, but in a way forthcomingly—that we have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it. It is a cliché to note this. But really, Nancy Pelosi‘s statement was a historic admission that she was fighting hard for something she herself didn’t understand, but she had every confidence regulators and bureaucratic interpreters would tell her in time what she’d done. This is how we make laws now. … 

… There’s a brute test of a policy: If you knew then what you know now, would you do it? I will never forget a conversation in 2006 or thereabouts with a passionate and eloquent supporter of the decision to go into Iraq. We had been having this conversation for years, he a stalwart who would highlight every optimistic sign, every good glimmering. He argued always for the rightness of the administration’s decision. I would share my disquiet, my doubts, finally my skepticism. One night over dinner I asked him, in passing, “If we had it to do over again, should we have gone in? would you support it?”

And he said, “Of course not!”

Which told me everything.

There are very, very few Democrats who would do ObamaCare over again. Some would do something different, but they wouldn’t do this. The cost of the blunder has been too high in terms of policy and politics.

They, and the president, are trying to put a good face on it.

Republicans of all people should not go for the happy face. They cannot run only on ObamaCare this year and later, because it’s not the only problem in America. But it’s a problem, a big one, and needs to be hard and shrewdly fought.

Peter Ferrara documents how statistics are used to lie about the healthcare act. He goes on to propose alternatives.

The population of the U.S. is 314 million. On the day Obamacare was passed, the estimate of the uninsured was 60 million. So in this context, the supposed 7 million Americans signed up for insurance on the Obamacare Exchanges, even if that is a valid number, and all of those have actually started paying premiums, both of which are highly dubious, does not mean any significant success for Obamacare.

That is especially so since at least 6 million Americans have lost their health insurance due to Obamacare, so far, with more to come once the illegally and arbitrarily delayed employer mandate becomes effective, if it is ever allowed to do so. The estimate based on a new Rand Corporation study is that only 858,000 Americans signed up on the Obamacare Exchanges were previously uninsured. That is barely a dent of just over 1% in the original number of uninsured, from the historic Obamacare program that was supposed to provide “universal” coverage.

Yes, there are other sources of coverage under Obamacare. President Obama told us in his celebratory, hocus pocus, Obamacare address on April Fools’ Day that “more than 3 million young adults have gained insurance under this law by staying on their family’s plan.”

But that number is a publicly documented fabrication. It comes from a 2010 survey by the highly politicized Department of Health and Human Services estimating coverage for 19 to 25 year olds from all sources, including taxpayer financed Medicaid, and private insurance, which includes employer provided insurance and individually purchased plans, not just coverage from their parents’ health insurance, as David Hogberg explained at Spectator.org on April 2.

Moreover, that data is now outdated, as later HHS surveys show that health coverage for 18 to 25 year olds has since declined from 2010, Hogberg adds. That is why HHS has not released any new data on the point for almost two years now. …

 

… Obama doesn’t get it. He said further on April Fools’ Day, Obamacare is “helping people from coast to coast, all of which makes the lengths to which some critics have gone to scare people or undermine the law, or try to repeal the law without offering any plausible alternative so hard to understand. I’ve got to admit, I don’t get it. Why are folks working so hard for people not to have health insurance?”

Many readers are not going to understand this. But my job here is to tell the truth, not to play politically correct footsie with you. What our President is telling us here, actually, is that he has so carefully avoided hearing any of the debate on this issue, that he actually does not understand the issue, on which he imagines himself as the historic founding father of American health care.

The plan I support to replace Obamacare, root and branch, is the reform proposal developed by John Goodman, President of the NationalCenter for Policy Analysis. That proposal, unlike Obamacare, actually would ensure universal health care. But it would do so at far less cost. It would do so, again unlike Obamacare, while actually reducing health costs. That proposal is actually far more plausible than Obamacare, which has already proven itself implausible in the real world. That is why Obama has already acted to change the enacted Obamacare law without the approval of Congress, in violation of the Constitution and his own oath of office.

But Obama continued, “Many of the tall tales that have been told about this law have been debunked. There are still no death panels.” Mr. Obama, the death panel in the law is called the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). You have carefully avoided appointing members to this board and making it operative, until after the mid-term elections.

He knows what he is doing here, but not what he is talking about. …

 

… the tragedy of Obamacare extends beyond health care.

Obamacare has been a major drag on the economy, preventing full recovery from the recession. Employers trying to avoid the costs of the employer mandate have reduced many full time jobs to part time jobs. Or they have frozen hiring, and the associated costs due to Obamacare. This is contributing to income stagnation and decline for the middle class, the working class, and the poor. And it is actually increasing inequality.

The new taxes of Obamacare are also deterring job creating investment, or capital investment that would increase worker productivity, and consequently wages and incomes. The costly regulatory burdens of Obamacare are increasing rather than reducing health insurance costs, which is a further drag on the economy.

The alternative, John Goodman, NCPA plan would achieve universal health care, with no employer mandate, no individual mandate, reduced taxes and spending, and sharply reduced regulatory burdens and costs as compared to Obamacare. All of that would be sharply pro-growth, and promote more jobs, and higher wages.

But Obama says that would not be a plausible alternative. The real problem is that he is not plausible as President. Only once he leaves the White House can the American economy be liberated to grow, and American health care be liberated to once again serve the sick, especially the most sick and in need of health care.

During his April Fool’s Day remarks on healthcare, the president offered his ideas on what is news. Carl Cannon schools the bystanding president.

… As a student, Barack Obama attended ColumbiaUniversity, which has a world-class journalism program. Unfortunately, he didn’t study journalism. After graduation, he attended another famed Ivy League institution, HarvardLawSchool, where he honed his skills as an advocate. So he is well-trained to engage in adversarial discourse, and he excels at it. As an appraiser of journalism, however, he has neither training nor the temperament. So let’s help him:

When a president campaigns for his sweeping new law while claiming repeatedly that it won’t impact those who already have health insurance—and this turns out to be utterly false—that is news.

When the same president repeatedly assures voters who already have insurance that they can keep their doctors—and wins re-election while stressing this fallacious claim—that is news.

When it turns out that the federal government, despite a three-year rollout, isn’t competent enough to provide the service it is making people purchase – yes, that is news. If it keeps happening in the future, sorry, Mr. President, that is news.

When the president states that 7.1 million Americans signed up via the government-run health care exchanges because of his own selfless efforts and those of his allies—but his administration claims it has no idea how many of those people enrolled because their private sector plans were canceled—that is news.

When respected third party organizations estimate that between two-thirds and three-fourths of those who bought the government plan did so because their previous plan was canceled due to the Affordable Care Act—that is also news. …