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Charles Krauthammer writes on bigotry in the academic world.

For decades, the American Studies Association labored in well-deserved obscurity. No longer. It has now made a name for itself by voting to boycott Israeli universities, accusing them of denying academic and human rights to Palestinians.

Given that Israel has a profoundly democratic political system, the freest press in the Middle East, a fiercely independent judiciary and astonishing religious and racial diversity within its universities, including affirmative action for Arab students, the charge is rather strange.

Made more so when you consider the state of human rights in Israel’s neighborhood. As we speak, Syria’s government is dropping “barrel bombs” filled with nails, shrapnel and other instruments of terror on its own cities. Where is the ASA boycott of Syria?

And of Iran, which hangs political, religious and even sexual dissidents and has no academic freedom at all? Or Egypt, where Christians are being openly persecuted? Or Turkey, Saudi Arabia or, for that matter, massively repressive China and Russia?

Which makes obvious that the ASA boycott has nothing to do with human rights. It’s an exercise in radical chic, giving marginalized academics a frisson of pretend anti-colonialism, seasoned with a dose of edgy anti-Semitism.

And don’t tell me this is merely about Zionism. The ruse is transparent. Israel is the world’s only Jewish state. To apply to the state of the Jews a double standard that you apply to none other, to judge one people in a way you judge no other, to single out that one people for condemnation and isolation — is to engage in a gross act of discrimination.

And discrimination against Jews has a name. It’s called anti-Semitism. …

John Podhoretz tells us why the IRS scandal is ignored while the media flog bridgegate.

Most government scandals involve the manipulation of the system in obscure ways by people no one has ever heard of. That is why George Washington Bridgegate is nearly a perfect scandal — because it is comprehensible and (as they say in Hollywood) “relatable” to everyone who has ever been in a car. This is the reason this one is not going to go away so easily, even if one accepts the contention that Gov. Chris Christie had nothing whatsoever to do with it.

Government officials and political operatives working for Christie, for weird and petty reasons, chose to make traffic worse. That’s the takeaway. When they are reminded of the fact that people working on Christie’s behalf thought it was a good political game to mire tens of thousands of their fellow Americans in the nightmarish gridlock that is a daily dreaded prospect for tens of millions, they will be discomfited by that and by the politician in whose name it was done.

And yet, you know what is also something everybody would find “relatable”? Politicians who sic the tax man on others for political gain. Everybody has to deal with the IRS and fears it. Last year, we learned from the Internal Revenue Service itself that it had targeted ideological opponents of the president for special scrutiny and investigation — because they were ideological opponents.

That’s juicy, just as Bridgegate is juicy. It’s something we can all understand, it speaks to our greatest fears, and it’s the sort of thing TV newspeople could gab about for days on end without needing a fresh piece of news to keep it going.

And yet, according to Scott Whitlock of the Media Research Center, “In less than 24 hours, the three networks have devoted 17 times more coverage to a traffic scandal involving Chris Christie than they’ve allowed in the last six months to Barack Obama’s Internal Revenue Service controversy.”

Why? Oh, come on, you know why. Christie belongs to one political party. Obama belongs to the other. You know which ones they belong to. And you know which ones the people at the three networks belong to, too: In surveys going back decades, anywhere from 80% to 90% of Washington’s journalists say they vote Democratic.

Scandals are not just about themselves; they are about the media atmosphere that surrounds them. …

Canada’s National Post reviews the Gates book. 

A newly published account of Barack Obama’s White House confirms the worst that outsiders have imagined: The Obama staff is over-politicized, over-confident and desperate to oversee every aspect of government. In questions of national security, it’s the most controlling administration since Richard Nixon’s in the 1970s.

This portrait emerges from Robert Gates’ book, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, published this week. Till now, we have been given only a few private glimpses of the Obama team, such as the famous “home alone” anecdote in Ron Suskind’s 2011 book, Confidence Men. He reported that in Obama’s first year, the chairman of the National Economic Council warned a colleague: “We’re really home alone. There’s no adult in charge.”

But that was second hand. The Gates book is an eyewitness account, and a rare one: Unlike most cabinet memoirs, it describes a president while he’s still in office. Gates was secretary of defence for two years with George Bush and stayed for two more with Obama. Earlier, he had served in the CIA for two decades and directed it under George H. W. Bush. According to a Washington Post book reviewer, Gates is considered the best of the 22 defence secretaries since the Second World War. …

Michael Goodwin says the Gates book just confirms what we already knew. The president is a fool. 

With media attention focused on Chris Christie and Bridgegate, it was easy to miss a more important Washington story last week. The other shoe dropped on the Obama presidency.

Still battered at home by the ObamaCare debacle and the permanently sluggish economy, the last thing the White House wanted was bad news on foreign policy. But that’s exactly what it got, and then some, thanks to the shockingly scathing book by Robert Gates.

The former defense secretary offers the most devastating critique to come from an Obama insider. He paints the president as estranged from the very Afghan military surge he ordered and suspicious of and hostile toward top leaders of the armed forces.

Gates is especially critical of Vice President Joe Biden, writing that he has been “wrong on nearly every major foreign-policy and national-security issue over the past four decades.”

He blames Biden and others for leading Obama to believe that military leaders were giving the president “the bum’s rush” in seeking more troops in Afghanistan in 2009, according to excerpts. …

Thinking about Valerie Jarrett’s government requires some off-setting humor. Here’s late night from Andrew Malcolm.

Leno: President Obama’s approval is the lowest of any president after five years since Richard Nixon. Jimmy Carter says that’s unfair. If he had a fifth year, he’s sure he’’d have won.

Leno: Over the weekend Obama’s healthcare website was down again. Fortunately, no Americans were affected. Because they never knew it was up.

Leno: President Obama names an ex-Microsoft executive to fix the awful ObamaCare website. How about fixing Windows first? Can you start there please?

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Craig Pirrong posts on Bob Gates’ revelations.

… And it’s not just Afghanistan.  As I posted a few days ago, riffing off a WSJ article, this was Obama’s MO in Syria.  He didn’t want to take decisive action, but he didn’t want to make it look like he was abandoning the opposition.  So he took half-measures to support the rebels, and ostentatiously drew a red line–until Assad called his bluff, and left Obama scrambling for a face saving exit, which Putin oh-so-graciously provided.

This is beyond dispiriting.  The office of president carries with it awesome burdens and responsibilities.  Obama shirked those burdens, attempting to avoid politically unpalatable choices by deciding not to decide, or taking middle paths that were doomed to failure.  And doomed to cost thousands of American lives for no purpose in Afghanistan, not to speak of many more thousands of Afghan lives.  And doomed to cost tens-of-thousands of lives in Syria, not to mention the imponderable costs associated with making the United States appear hopeless and feckless in a region where such appearances encourage the wolves. (Not to mention the effect this has on, say, China.)

Obama has not taken his awesome responsibilities seriously, treating them instead as ancillary to his domestic political concerns.  Tens of thousands are paying the price in Southwest Asia.  Who knows what price is to be paid in the future.

Gates has only had the temerity to call attention at this very late date to what was obvious to those that had been paying attention, but which the political class had collectively decided to avert its eyes from. …

More from Ed Morrissey at Hot Air.

When the first excerpts of former Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ new memoir My Duty emerged before its January 14 release date, they seemed calculated to do maximum damage to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.  Without a doubt, the quotes released had significant sensational value — accusing Obama of sending more troops to a war he didn’t think he could win, and Clinton of admitting that nothing nore than baldfaced politics lie in her opposition to the 2007 surge that salvaged — for a time, anyway — western Iraq. Those quotes did get people talking, but will the damage last, or does this just confirm long-embraced narratives?

In my column for The Fiscal Times, I predict that nothing much will come of these releases, especially the context in which Gates frames them in the book:

The decision in December 2009 to increase force strength by adding 30,000 combat troops to the theater followed from Obama’s campaign pledge to put the “distraction” of Iraq behind the US and focus on the legitimate front of the war on terror. However, in private discussions, Gates writes that Obama was “skeptical if not outright convinced it would fail,” even while ordering the troops into combat.

Needless to say, this feeds into a lot of pre-existing opinions of President Obama. Conservatives, especially those in favor of a robust forward military strategy, never believed that Obama was in it for victory. In fact, many pointed out at the time that the President never once included the word “victory” in his speech announcing the escalation. …

Roger Simon reacts to the latest jobs report.

Tell all your “Objectivist” friends and the libertarian gang at Reason magazine to break out the champagne. Americans may have skipped the movie of Atlas Shrugged, nor have many read any of Ayn Rand’s works, but they have taken the author’s advice anyway and gone John Galt, quitting the work force in record numbers.  According to Zero Hedge, the latest figures show the labor participation rate at 35 year low.

Realistically, it’s even more than 35 because that figure reflects an employment bump when larger numbers of women joined the work force in the seventies and eighties.  (They’re gone now, with or without Gloria Steinem.)

Currently a record 91.8 million Americans are no longer looking for work. That’s almost one and a half times the entire population of France.

Although I admit to libertarian tendencies, I don’t think any of us can celebrate because of this.  It’s an economic disaster that should be blowing even Chris Christie off the front pages. …

P. J. O’Rourke has a suggestion for curing Detroit’s ills – turn it into Hong Kong. 

Detroit is beautiful—though you probably have to be a child of the industrial Midwest, like me, to see it. As you may have heard, the city is in trouble. At the end of the 2013 fiscal year, Detroit had a balance sheet with liabilities of $9.05 billion. The city’s emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, estimates long-term debt at $18 billion.

But I know how to fix Detroit, because it reminds me of another favorite place, Hong Kong—two things so opposite that they evoke each other the way any Kardashian is a reminder that you love home and mother.

Hong Kong’s per capita GDP is among the highest in the world. But it was once a worse mess than Detroit. Devastated by Japanese occupation, the British colony’s population had declined from 1.6 million in 1941 to 600,000 by 1945. Then, after the 1949 communist victory on the mainland, a million refugees arrived. Most of them were penniless. Britain’s Labor government was penniless, too. Maybe Hong Kong could have gone into Chapter 9. But who would have been the bankruptcy judge? Chairman Mao?

Instead Hong Kong had the good fortune to get John (later Sir John) Cowperthwaite, a young official sent out to push the colony’s economy toward recovery. “I did very little,” he once said. “All I did was to try to prevent some of the things that might undo it.”

Such as taxes. Even now, Hong Kong has no sales tax; no VAT; no taxes on capital gains, interest income or earnings outside Hong Kong; no import or export duties; and a top personal income-tax rate of 15%.

Cowperthwaite was financial secretary from 1961 to 1971, Hong Kong’s period of fastest economic growth. Sir John, however, wouldn’t allow collection of economic statistics for fear they’d lead to political meddling. Some statistics nonetheless: During Cowperthwaite’s tenure, Hong Kong’s exports grew by an average of 13.8% a year, industrial wages doubled and the number of households in extreme poverty shrank from half to 16% …

According to a blog called Quartz, there are some who have to curtail or shift shopping at the dollar stores because of weakness in our economy.

… Economists argue that things like food stamps and unemployment act as crucial bits of stimulus when the economy is weak. Cutting them can act as a headwind to growth. That’s certainly the case for low-end retailers such as Family Dollar. The store chain’s shares fell sharply this week after it reported disappointing earnings.

Family Dollar CEO Howard Levine had this to say on the subject:

For the last several quarters, we’ve discussed the economic challenges our customers are facing. Over the last two years, I think we’ve seen a growing bifurcation in households. Higher-income households who have benefited from market gains, better employment opportunities, or improvements in the housing markets have become more comfortable and confident in their financial situation. But our core lower-income customers have faced high unemployment levels, higher payroll taxes, and more recently reductions in government-assistance programs. All of these factors have resulted in incremental financial pressure and reduction in overall spend in the market.

Translation? As poor Americans come under more and more pressure, more and more of Family Dollar’s revenue is tied to low-margin sales of necessities like food. (Sales were strongest during the first fiscal quarter in Family Dollar’s “consumables” category, especially in areas like frozen food.)

The fact that so many Americans are being forced to curtail spending at the cheapest discount retailers should give anybody cheering the US recovery something to think about.

Megan McArdle with a great post on the real issues for small business owners.

Health insurance just isn’t high on the list of small-business owners’ worries.

Warren Meyer, whose company operates campgrounds, is getting the hell out of Dodge, by which I mean Ventura County, California:

“Never have I operated in a more difficult environment. VenturaCounty combines a difficult government environment with a difficult employee base with a difficult customer base.

It took years in VenturaCounty to make even the simplest modifications to the campground we ran. For example, it took 7 separate permits from the County (each requiring a substantial payment) just to remove a wooden deck that the County inspector had condemned. In order to allow us to temporarily park a small concession trailer in the parking lot, we had to (among other steps) take a soil sample of the dirt under the asphalt of the parking lot. It took 3 years to permit a simply 500 gallon fuel tank with CARB and the County equivalent. The entire campground desperately needed a major renovation but the smallest change would have triggered millions of dollars of new facility requirements from the County that we simply could not afford.

In most states we pay a percent or two of wages for unemployment insurance. In California we pay almost 7%. Our summer seasonal employees often take the winter off, working only in the summer, but claim unemployment insurance anyway. They are supposed to be looking for work, but they seldom are and California refuses to police the matter. Several couples spend the whole winter in Mexico, collecting unemployment all the while. So I have to pay a fortune to support these folks’ winter vacations.” …

… We tend to talk of entrepreneurship and business growth as if it were a matter of tweaking a few simple policy buttons: lowering taxes, making health insurance cheaper, hamstringing the EPA. Unsurprisingly, these issues map well onto big national policy battles. And yet, when I talk to small-business owners, I’m more likely to get an earful about their state’s workers’ compensation scheme or the local utility’s pricing schedule than I am about the federal tax rate. Yet almost none of the policy journalists I know could even describe in detail how workers’ compensation insurance works, much less articulate a coherent policy agenda for it.

Then there are the sort of soft institutional issues that Meyer highlights, such as whether the local legal system encourages frivolous lawsuits, or some arcane regulatory issue that’s specific to businesses. These things matter a lot, but they’re hard to measure and even harder to fix.

There are a few lessons in this: If you want to encourage entrepreneurship, talk to business owners, not policy wonks. And you often need to think local, not global.

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Peter Schiff says the party will be over soon.

… Based on nothing but pure optimism, the market believes that the Fed can somehow contract its $4 trillion balance sheet without pushing up rates to the point where asset prices are threatened, or where debt service costs become too big a burden for debtors to bear. Such faith would have been impossible to achieve in the time before the crash, when most assumed that the laws of supply and demand functioned in the market for mortgage and government debt. Now we “know” that the demand is endless. This mistakes temporary geo-political paralysis and financial sleepwalking for a fundamental suspension of reality.

The more likely truth is that this widespread mistake will allow us to drift into the next crisis. Now that the European Union has survived its monetary challenge, (the surging euro was one of the surprise stories of 2013), and the developing Asian economies have no immediate plans to stop their currencies from rising against the dollar, there is little reason to expect that the dollar will rally in the coming years. In fact, there has been little notice taken of the 5% decline in the dollar index since a high in July. Similarly, few have sounded alarm bells about the surge in yields of Treasury debt, with 10-year rates flirting with 3% for the first time in two years.

If interest rates rise much further, to perhaps 4% or 5%, the stock and real estate markets will be placed under pressure, and the Fed and the other “Too Big to Fail” banks will see considerable losses on their portfolios of Treasury and mortgage-backed bonds. Such developments could trigger widespread economic turmoil, forcing the Fed to expand its QE purchases. Such an embarrassing reversal would add to selling pressure on the dollar, and might potentially trigger an exodus of foreign investment and an increase in import prices. I believe that nothing can prevent these trends from continuing to the point where a crisis will be reached. It’s extremely difficult to construct a logical argument that avoids this outcome, but that hasn’t stopped our best and brightest forecasters from doing just that.

So while the hallelujah chorus is ringing in the New Year with a full-throated crescendo, don’t be surprised by sour notes that will bubble to the top with increasing frequency. Ultimately the power of monetary policy to engineer a real economy will be proven to be just as ridiculous as the claims that housing prices must always go up.

Peter Schiff was notable for predicting the 2008 collapse. He did that in 2006 and 2007. Here’s a video of him getting ridiculed by all the bien pensants in the financial media.

Roger Simon posts on Dem losers. 

It shouldn’t be that much of an embarrassment to lose a U.S. presidential election.  After all, you made it to the top of the ticket in one of the two major parties in the most powerful country on Earth (at least for now).

Yet, if you judge by the post-defeat activities of Al Gore and John Kerry, you would think their losses were a personal disaster of untold proportions that had to be made  up for in some monumental manner that would cement their (positive) reputations into posterity.  Call it Extreme Narcissism Deficit Disorder (ENDD).  And the closer the election, the more severe the symptoms.

These days, both men’s compulsive need to make their mark against all odds are highly on display — and very much to all of our detriments.

The more ludicrous example — when the wind chill factor is approaching record lows of minus fifty and a group of  so-called climate scientists have been stuck in Antarctic ice for weeks with much of the MSM trying desperately to hide that they were there to investigate global warming in the first place –  is Mr. Gore’s determination to insist that anthropogenic global warming is settled science, that the world must stop everything it’s doing and devote its scant economic resources to preventing this looming catastrophe (not to mention filling Mr. Gore’s bank account).  Only an imbecile, a corrupt UN diplomat, a New York Times or Guardian reporter, or a scientist on the dole could believe that.

Scratch that.  A number of members of Congress plus our president seem to sort of believe it too. …

… The bigger problem is the other presidential loser who, also at this moment in time, is wielding a much greater influence in the world, thanks to our president — John Kerry.  The nonsensical and actually inscrutable Obama foreign policy from  Clinton through Kerry has taken our country — and the world — from bad to worse.  But an announcement from Mr. Kerry today trumped all.

Today our secretary of State informed us that one of the countries at the table at the Syria peace talks this month might be… Iran. …

Bret Stephens with a history lesson about Frank Kellogg U. S. Secretary of State who abolished war in 1928 when 62 countries signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Similar foolishness abounds today in John Kerry’s wake. 

An American secretary of state was once awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for outlawing war. In describing how 62 countries came to sign (and 85 U.S. senators to ratify) the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, the Scottish historian D.W. Brogan observed: “The United States, which had abolished the evils of drink by the Eighteenth Amendment, invited the world to abolish war by taking the pledge. The world, not quite daring to believe or doubt, obeyed.”

John Kerry hasn’t yet captured Frank B. Kellogg’s crown. But he’s trying.

Mr. Kerry announced last week that he’d like to see Iran participate “from the sidelines” in the talks, scheduled to begin in Geneva later this month, to end the Syrian civil war. He’s working overtime on a “framework” agreement for Israeli-Palestinian peace. And then there’s the nuclear deal to finalize with Iran.

Geneva II, as the Syrian talks are known in diplospeak, is based on a June 2012 international communiqué calling on the Syrian government and the opposition to come together and form a “transitional” government. When the communiqué was issued, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton insisted that its terms barred Bashar Assad from remaining in power, while Sergei Lavrov, her Russian counterpart, insisted the contrary.

Otherwise, solid agreement.

Eighteen months, multiple chemical attacks, a spiraling regional crisis, tens of thousands dead and two million refugees later, we come to Geneva II. …

Walter Russell Mead says the higher ed bubble will burst soon too.

Megan McArdle has an excellent essay up at Bloomberg about the sorry state of the job market for PhDs that’s very much worth your time. The crux of her argument:

“The fundamental issue in the academic job market is not that administrators are cheap and greedy, or that adjuncts lack a union. It’s that there are many more people who want to be research professors than there are jobs for them. And since all those people have invested the better part of a decade in earning their job qualifications, they will hang around on the edges of academia rather than trying to start over. Such a gigantic glut of labor is bound to push down wages and working conditions.”

The business model for PhDs is functionally off. Graduate schools are minting far more PhDs than the market can absorb.

The problem as we see it is that the post-World War 2 university system was built on the assumption of an ever expanding population of students needing more and more higher ed. Therefore there was a need for each generation to produce more professors than the last. (This is not all that dissimilar, by the way, to the way many pension systems and social programs like Medicaid were built on the assumption that a bigger generation would roll around to pay the bills for the current enrollees.)

The situation is just as bad for bachelor degrees. WSJ OpEd with the story.

… A college degree’s declining value is even more pronounced for younger Americans. According to data collected by the College Board, for those in the 25-34 age range the differential between college graduate and high school graduate earnings fell 11% for men, to $18,303 from $20,623. The decline for women was an extraordinary 19.7%, to $14,868 from $18,525.

Meanwhile, the cost of college has increased 16.5% in 2012 dollars since 2006, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ higher education tuition-fee index. Aggressive tuition discounting from universities has mitigated the hike, but not enough to offset the clear inflation-adjusted increase. Even worse, the lousy economy has caused household income levels to fall, limiting a family’s ability to finance a degree.

This phenomenon leads to underemployment. A study I conducted with my colleague Jonathan Robe, the 2013 Center for College Affordability and Productivity report, found explosive growth in the number of college graduates taking relatively unskilled jobs. We now have more college graduates working in retail than soldiers in the U.S. Army, and more janitors with bachelor’s degrees than chemists. In 1970, less than 1% of taxi drivers had college degrees. Four decades later, more than 15% do.

This is only partly the result of the Great Recession and botched public policies that have failed to produce employment growth. It’s also the result of an academic arms race in which universities have spent exorbitant sums on luxury dormitories, climbing walls, athletic subsidies and bureaucratic bloat. More significantly, it’s the result of sending more high-school graduates to college than professional fields can accommodate.

In 1970, when 11% of adult Americans had bachelor’s degrees or more, degree holders were viewed as the nation’s best and brightest. Today, with over 30% with degrees, a significant portion of college graduates are similar to the average American—not demonstrably smarter or more disciplined. Declining academic standards and grade inflation add to employers’ perceptions that college degrees say little about job readiness. …

Good day of Cartoons.

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Here’s Don Imus as he opened his show this morning,

“And now Bob Gates, former secretary of defense, has a book that would give you an erection. He drops a safe on the president. … This guy is the worst president, I can’t even think of a worse president.”  The new Gates book will be in the news so we have a little bit today and then more starting next week. Paul Mirengoff of Power Line says this just confirms what we all thought about cynical Dem politicians.

… (Bob) Woodward describes Gates’ report as one of the more serious charges that a defense secretary could make against a commander in chief sending forces into combat. That’s an understatement. Expending American blood on behalf of a strategy one has devised but doesn’t believe in is despicable, if not criminal.

John Kerry came to prominence as a young soldier demanding to know who would be the last to die for a mistake. But at least in Vietnam, the president was in the process of withdrawing from the war — one which had been ramped up under his predecessor. In 2010, by which time Gates says Obama did not believe in the ramp-up strategy he had formulated, the U.S. was forging ahead with that strategy. Phased withdrawal did not begin until mid-2011.

Gates reveals other similarly despicable behavior by both Obama and Hillary Clinton. He writes:

“Hillary told [Obama] that her opposition to the [2007] surge in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary. . . . The president conceded vaguely that opposition to the Iraq surge had been political.”

Gates was surprised when he heard this conversation. But the only surprising thing is that Obama and Clinton had it with Gates present. Modern Democrats consistently make decisions about war and peace based on political calculation, rather than on what’s best for America. …

More from Steve Hayward.

So the first of what has become a pastime of recent two-term presidencies is out today: a critical memoir from a senior cabinet official.  Former defense secretary Bob Gates has a memoir coming out that looks to be very hard on Obama, but perhaps even harder on Obama’s would-be successors Joe Biden and Hillary.

Of Slow-Joe Biden, Gates writes that “I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades,” and that he nearly resigned in 2009 over Obama’s dithering over Afghanistan.

As usual, Bob Woodward seems to have the inside track on Gates’s forthcoming book, noting that the book “reflects outright contempt for Vice President Joe Biden and many of Obama’s top aides.” …

Last on this subject for now from Seth Mandel.

… Today both the Washington Post and New York Times published revelations from former Secretary of Defense Bob Gates’s forthcoming memoir. The Post’s account, written by Bob Woodward, notes that Clinton apparently admitted to President Obama that her opposition to the “surge” was pure politics, since Obama was opposed to the surge and they were in competition at the time. Picking up from that, Woodward’s Post colleague Chris Cillizza speculates on how the excerpt could harm Clinton’s prospects:

But, remember this is Hillary Clinton we are talking about.  And, the criticism that has always haunted her is that everything she does is infused with politics — that there is no core set of beliefs within her but rather just political calculation massed upon political calculation. Remember that she began slipping in the 2008 Democratic primary when her opponents seized on an overly political answer on giving drivers’ licenses to illegal immigrants during a debate in  late 2o07.

Gates’s version of why Clinton opposed the surge fits perfectly into this existing good-politics-makes-good-policy narrative about the former secretary of state. And that’s what makes it dangerous for her —  and why you can be sure she (or her people) will (and must) dispute Gates’s recollection quickly and definitively.

Whether it hurts Clinton might depend largely on who runs against her in the Democratic primary. But he’s right that the reputation of both Clintons has always been not to say a single word that hasn’t been focus-grouped into the ground. If Clinton was hoping her time as secretary of state would temper that reputation, the Gates memoir is yet another example of how difficult it can be for a politician to shake an entrenched narrative, especially one, like this, that is accurate.

The Post story isn’t kind to Biden either. (It’s brutal toward the Obama White House in general, but Obama has no more presidential elections ahead of him.) …

Larry Sabato launched his column at Politico with the teasing thought the GOP could win both houses next November.

Another midterm election beckons, and over the next 10 months we’ll see headlines about a thousand supposedly critical developments—the “game changers” and the “tipping points.” But we all know there aren’t a thousand powerful drivers of the vote. I’d argue that three factors are paramount: the president, the economy and the election playing field. And, at least preliminarily, those three factors seem to be pointing toward Republican gains in both houses in the 2014 midterms. …

… But Obama’s popularity has sagged badly in his fifth year. While some unforeseen event in 2014 might add some points to his job approval average, the odds are against a full restoration; it’s just as likely Obama’s polling average, currently in the low 40s, will decline further—though Obama may have a relatively high floor because of consistent backing from minority voters and other elements of the Democratic base.

As 2014 begins, the environment for the Democrats in this election year is not good. The botched, chaotic rollout of the Affordable Care Act is the obvious cause, but it is broader than that: the typical sixth-year unease that produces a “send-them-a-message” election. Fortunately for Democrats, the GOP-initiated shutdown of the federal government in October has tempered the public’s desire for a shift to the Republican side, too. “None of the above” might win a few races in November if voters had the choice. …

Walter Russell Mead posts on the 10 biggest winners of 2013. One thing the winners have in common is they are arrayed against president bystander. Meaning they have little competition.

Looking back at 2013, some actors on the international scene, both state and non-state, notched up significant achievements and advances. Others didn’t do as well. In developing our list of the world’s biggest winners and losers in 2013, AI didn’t make moral judgments. This is a realist calculation, looking at who gained power during the year and who lost.

1. President Vladimir Putin and Russia

The champagne corks were popping in the Kremlin after a banner 2013. With Edward Snowden ensconced in Moscow, Putin can celebrate Russia’s biggest embarrassment of the United States since the fall of the Soviet Union. But that’s only the beginning. Russia’s client Assad defied bloodcurdling White House threats of bombing raids and demands that “Assad must go” in Russia’s biggest geopolitical victory over the United States since Brezhnev was in power. As icing on the cake, a desperate, fumbling White House had to accept a Russian proposal to escape from the trap President Obama built for himself. Russian foreign policy makers hadn’t had this much fun since the Bay of Pigs. Finally, to complete the Kremlin’s annus mirabilus, a clueless European Union lost out to Russia in a battle to bring Ukraine into a trade association with the rich western bloc. What makes this string of impressive victories even more impressive is that President Putin is playing with a weak hand. His economy is in trouble, his army is rife with corruption, his population is in decline, and his country faces a growing Chinese superpower to the east and a growing threat from terrorists in the south. Underfunded, underequipped, and underrespected, Vladimir Putin danced rings around Barack Obama, John Kerry and Angela Merkel this year.  Western stupidity is his chief strategic asset, and in 2013 at least, there was a lot of that going around.

2. Iran

Close behind Vladimir Putin as the biggest winner of 2013 comes the Islamic Republic of Iran. …

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Tim Carney says de Blasio’s attack on the “rich” will miss them and fall instead on the middle class. 

As New York City’s crusading liberal Mayor Bill de Blasio takes up his pitch fork, don’t worry too much about the wealthy bankers he plans to tax — they can fend for themselves. The potential victims of de Blasio’s “march toward a fairer, more just, more progressive place” are the small businesses and voluntary associations that make up civil society.

Charter schools, crisis pregnancy centers, small businesses and private charities are all in de Blasio’s crosshairs. These are government’s rivals in the business of getting people what they want and need — and a growing government doesn’t tolerate rivals.

Charter schools have long irked the teachers’ unions and many others on the Left. They are publicly funded schools, but they are run by private bodies. This decentralizes power, weakens the unions and applies competitive pressure to public schools.

But charter schools’ worst offense may be offering a different educational experience. The Left puts a huge emphasis on solidarity, which is a virtue. But sometimes “solidarity” can mutate into uniformity. If some New York City kids are at a stellar charter school while others are at mediocre public schools, then we have, to use de Blasio’s favorite phrase, “two cities.” This is intolerable to many activists and journalists on the Left, some of whom pen out op-eds declaring it a sin to send your kids to private school. …

John Hinderaker picks up a Cato post about the 1987 NY Times arguments against the minimum wage. That’s right, the paper that is now a reliable organ of the Dem party used to have some independent thoughts.

… The Times editorialists failure to mention that until very recently, they themselves (or their predecessors on the editorial board) agreed that the minimum wage hurts employment–the “party line theory” that is now “discredited.” David Boaz of the Cato Institute recounts the Times’s history on the issue:

The New York Times gets the prize for its stark decline in economic understanding. …

[F]or decades the Times’s editors knew better. Sure, Henry Hazlitt wrote some of their editorials back in the 1930s. But that doesn’t explain the paper’s continuing criticisms of the minimum wage into the 1990s. Bruce Bartlett reported some of the history in 2004:

When I first began clipping Times editorials on the minimum wage back in the 1970s, they were unambiguous in their condemnation of it as misdirected, inefficient, and having negative consequences for most of those it was supposed to help. For example, an August 17, 1977, editorial stated, “The basic effect of an increase in the minimum wage … would be to intensify the cruel competition among the poor for scarce jobs.” For this reason, it said, “Minimum wage legislation has no place in a strategy to eliminate poverty.”

In the 1980s, the Times became even more aggressive in its denunciations of the minimum wage. Rather than simply argue against increases, it actively campaigned for abolition of the minimum wage altogether. Indeed, a remarkable editorial on January 14, 1987, was entitled, “The Right Minimum Wage: $0.00.”

Everything in that editorial is still true today. “There’s a virtual consensus among economists that the minimum wage is an idea whose time has passed,” it said. “Raise the legal minimum price of labor above the productivity of the least skilled workers and few will be hired,” it correctly observed. In conclusion, “The idea of using a minimum wage to overcome poverty is old, honorable — and fundamentally flawed. It’s time to put this hoary debate behind us, and find a better way to improve the lives of people who work very hard for very little.”

Even in the 1990s, the Times remained skeptical about the value of raising the minimum wage. An April 5, 1996, editorial conceded that a proposed 90 cent increase in the minimum wage would wipe out 100,000 jobs. It said that Republican critics of the minimum wage as a “crude” antipoverty tool were right.

One would think that the Times owes its readers an explanation of why it has done a 180-degree turn on this issue, but none has ever been offered. …

Even the president used to know the truth of the Times’ position. Now he is a fulltime demagogue. Or perhaps back then Valerie Jarrett didn’t have full control. Byron York has the story.

In coming weeks President Obama and Hill Democrats will launch a new campaign to raise the minimum wage. Working with labor unions and activist groups, Democrats hope to increase the federal minimum wage from its current $7.25 to $10.10. “It’s well past the time to raise a minimum wage that in real terms right now is below where it was when Harry Truman was in office,” the president declared in his Dec. 4 speech on inequality.

Republicans will argue that raising the minimum wage will hurt the economy, as employers, especially small businesses, hire fewer low-wage workers. It’s an argument Obama expects to hear a lot. “Now, we all know the arguments that have been used against a higher minimum wage,” he said December 4. “Some say it actually hurts low-wage workers — businesses will be less likely to hire them. But there’s no solid evidence that a higher minimum wage costs jobs, and research shows it raises incomes for low-wage workers and boosts short-term economic growth.”

Perhaps the key word in that passage is “solid” — the president seems to acknowledge that there is evidence a higher minimum wage costs jobs, but he doesn’t find it “solid.” A few years ago, though, in his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope, Obama seemed much more open to the evidence that raising the minimum wage results in less hiring.

“It may be true — as some economists argue — that any big jumps in the minimum wage discourage employers from hiring more workers,” then-Sen. Obama wrote. Nevertheless, Obama still wanted to do it, so he laid out his best case: “When the minimum wage hasn’t been changed in nine years and has less purchasing power in real dollars than it did in 1955, so that someone working full-time today in a minimum-wage job doesn’t earn enough to rise out of poverty, such arguments carry less force,” Obama added.

Little of Obama’s 2006 case applies today. …

John Hinderaker also posts on the lies constructed by Rachel Maddow.

MSNBC has had a hard time lately. The network fired Martin Bashir and Alec Baldwin for craziness, on-air and off-air respectively. Melissa Harris-Perry was forced to apologize, first on Twitter and then, tearfully, on the air, for making political hay out of Mitt Romney’s adopted grandson. The network put Ed Schulz out to pasture, and most people wrote Chris Matthews off as a hysteric long ago, so that pretty much leaves Rachel Maddow–amazingly enough–as MSNBC’s supposed voice of sanity. Eliana Johnson has reported on Maddow’s status as the “queen” of MSNBC, who wields more control than anyone else over the network’s often-crazed content.

But is Maddow any better than the rest? A recent incident suggests that if anything, she is worse.

Last Thursday, 45 minutes before Maddow’s show began, her producer sent this email to representatives of Koch Industries, with which MSNBC has long been obsessed. …

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Deroy Murdock says the blog posts of the leader of the expedition trapped in sea ice give proof the trip was supposed to highlight the lack of sea ice.

Chinese choppers on Thursday evacuated 52 passengers who had been marooned near the South Pole since Christmas Eve aboard the Russian science vessel MS Akademik Shokalsky. It will take far more than helicopters, however, to salvage the theory of so-called “global warming.” It remains trapped in Antarctic ice.

“We’re stuck in our own experiment,” said Chris Turney, a professor of climate change at Australia’s University of New South Wales. The voyage’s leader was no mere guide, and his fellow travelers were not just tourists. While news accounts portrayed these people as star-crossed adventurers, the frustrated Australasian Antarctic Expedition (AAE) was supposed to “discover and communicate the environmental changes taking place in the south,” Turney explained.

“There is an increasing body of evidence, including by the AAE members, that have identified parts of the East Antarctic which are highly susceptible to melting and collapse from ocean warming,” AAE’s website stated. “We are going south to . . . determine the extent to which human activity and pollution has [sic] directly impacted on this remote region of Antarctica.” …

Newsbusters posts on the media’s lack of interest in the fact the ship was on a “global warming” mission.

A group of climate change scientists were rescued by helicopter Jan. 2, after being stranded in the ice since Christmas morning. But the majority of the broadcast networks’ reports about the ice-locked climate researchers never mentioned climate change.

The Russian ship, Akademic Shokalskiy, was stranded in the ice while on a climate change research expedition, yet nearly 98 percent of network news reports about the stranded researchers failed to mention their mission at all. Forty out of 41 stories (97.5 percent) on the network morning and evening news shows since Dec. 25 failed to mention climate change had anything to do with the expedition.

In fact, rather than point out the mission was to find evidence of climate change, the networks often referred to the stranded people as “passengers,” “trackers” and even “tourists,” without a word about climate change or global warming.

Chris Turney, the expedition’s leader, is a professor of climate change at the University of New South Wales. According to Turney’s personal website, the purpose of the expedition is to “discover and communicate the environmental changes taking place in the south.” …

The NY Times is involved in a project to help Hillary clear away the Benghazi problem. Andrew McCarthy starts off a look at the controversy.

What was the commander-in-chief of the United States armed forces doing through the night of September 11, 2012, while he knew Americans were under jihadist siege in Libya? You won’t learn the answer to that question by reading the mini-book-length, six-“chapter” revisionist history of the Benghazi massacre cooked up by David D. Kirkpatrick and the New York Times.

The Times report is a labor of love in the service of President Obama and, in particular, the Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign ramp-up. Former secretary of state Clinton, of course, was a key architect of Obama’s Libya policy. She was also chiefly responsible for the protection of American personnel in that country, including our murdered ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens, and the three other Americans killed by Muslim terrorists — State Department technician Sean Smith and a pair of former Navy SEALs, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods. Still, the Times is banking on your not noticing that in its laborious 7,500 words, Kirkpatrick’s account utters the word “Clinton” exactly . . . wait for it . . . zero times.

The word “Obama” comes in for a mere six mentions, four of which are impersonal references to the current administration. The other two are telling, though fleeting.

One is a rehearsal of the president’s vow to exact “justice” against anyone found responsible for this “terrible act” of killing four Americans, including the formal representative of our nation. As it happens, the only person on the planet to have felt the lash of Obama’s justice is Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the California-based “producer” who filmed the infamous “anti-Mohammed” movie trailer, Innocence of Muslims. In a despicable violation of constitutional free-speech principles, and a bow to sharia blasphemy rules that forbid criticism of Islam, Obama and Clinton publicly portrayed Nakoula and his “film” as the Benghazi culprits — implicitly accepting the Islamic-supremacist premise that verbal insults, no matter how obscure and trifling, justify mass-murder attacks.

In large part, the Times’ autopsy is a futile attempt to breathe new life into this demeaning farce. …

Stephen Hayes of Fox and the Weekly Standard with an exhaustive look.

Let’s start by giving David Kirkpatrick credit. Kirkpatrick, the Cairo bureau chief of the New York Times and author of this weekend’s much-discussed piece on Benghazi, provides many new on-the-ground, minute-by-minute details of the attacks and the weeks and months leading up to them. Some of the reporting is incredible. Kirkpatrick describes the vase in the living room of the home belonging to the mother of Abu Khattala, a main suspect in those attacks. He reports on how the fighting in the consulate paused when Abu Khattala entered the compound, a revealing fact. Citing security camera video footage, the author describes how one of the attackers paused amidst the bedlam in the consulate to pour some Hershey’s chocolate syrup down his throat. Kirkpatrick obviously spent considerable time on the ground in Benghazi and interviewed several anti-Western Islamists, including some involved in the attacks. There’s little doubt he took considerable risks as he reported his piece.

While much of Kirkpatrick’s reporting is admirable and while these details add to our knowledge of certain aspects of the attack, they do not tell the whole story. And that’s where the piece ultimately fails. 

The piece makes two main claims that challenge much of the previous reporting about Benghazi: 1) The Times asserts that there is “no evidence that al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault;” and, 2) that the attack “was fueled in large part by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam.”

We’ll focus on the first one.

There is, in fact, evidence that terrorists linked to al Qaeda had a role in the Benghazi attacks. Indeed, there’s a fair amount of that kind of evidence. As Representative Adam Schiff, a California Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence put it on Sunday when asked about the Times report: “The intelligence indicates that al Qaeda was involved, …

Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post has a somewhat different take on the Times’ efforts on behalf of Hillary and Barry.

The New York Times just delivered a mortal blow to the Obama administration and its Middle East policy.

Call it fratricide. It was clearly unintentional.

Indeed, is far from clear that the paper realizes what it has done.

Last Saturday the Times published an 8,000-word account by David Kirkpatrick detailing the terrorist strike against the US Consulate and the CIA annex in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012. In it, Kirkpatrick tore to shreds the foundations of President Barack Obama’s counterterrorism strategy and his overall policy in the Middle East.

Obama first enunciated those foundations in his June 4, 2009, speech to the Muslim world at Cairo University. Ever since, they have been the rationale behind US counterterror strategy and US Middle East policy.

Obama’s first assertion is that radical Islam is not inherently hostile to the US. As a consequence, America can appease radical Islamists. Moreover, once radical Muslims are appeased, they will become US allies, (replacing the allies the US abandons to appease the radical Muslims).

Obama’s second strategic guidepost is his claim that the only Islamic group that is a bona fide terrorist organization is the faction of al-Qaida directly subordinate to Osama bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Only this group cannot be appeased and must be destroyed through force.

The administration has dubbed the Zawahiri faction of al-Qaida “core al-Qaida.” And anyone who operates in the name of al-Qaida, or any other group that does not have courtroom-certified operational links to Zawahiri, is not really al-Qaida, and therefore, not really a terrorist group or a US enemy.

These foundations have led the US to negotiate with the Taliban in Afghanistan. They are the rationale for the US’s embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood worldwide. They are the basis for Obama’s allegiance to Turkey’s Islamist government, and his early support for the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Syrian opposition.

They are the basis for the administration’s kneejerk support for the PLO against Israel.

Obama’s insistent bid to appease Iran, and so enable the mullocracy to complete its nuclear weapons program. is similarly a product of his strategic assumptions. So, too, the US’s current diplomatic engagement of Hezbollah in Lebanon owes to the administration’s conviction that any terror group not directly connected to Zawahiri is a potential US ally. …

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Roger Simon posts on the ludicrous de Blasio inauguration. 

Back when I was a kid, I used to think Republicans were the party of the rich — white guys who belonged to country clubs and drove Fleetwoods.  Of course, that was long before I heard of the likes of George Soros, Bill  Gates, Warren Buffet, Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison — white guys who fly Gulf Streams and have mansions in Gstaad.  (Well, Buffett lives a little more circumspectly.)  Or went to work in Hollywood, land of Jeff Katzenberg, David Geffen, Oprah Winfrey, etc. There’s rich and then there’s REALLY RICH, if you know what I mean.  And a fair number, maybe the majority, of the latter are Democrats and profess to be liberals or progressives or something.  (And there’s Fidel Castro, who is evidently a billionaire, and professes to be a communist.)

These days, when everybody’s insurance agent or accountant drives around in a Mercedes because interest rates are so low and why not, when it comes to true conspicuous consumption, when it comes to really being the true modern plutocrats, the Democrats are now the party of the rich — Sheldon Adelson excepted, of course.

So  when I watched the broadcast of the inauguration of New York City’s new mayor Bill de Blasio with all the talk of income equality and two New Yorks blablabla, all I could do is snort — that is after checking out the cut of the expensive topcoats on De Blasio and Bill Clinton. Good schmeck, I believe they used to call it  in the Garment District.

But whatever they called it, the entire event, including Harry Belafonte’s  comments straight out of the Third International, smacked or schmecked of high comedy. Income inequality — my fat fanny!  These guys (and girls) can’t be serious. …

Similar thoughts from Seth Mandel. 

While it’s tempting for politicians to interpret an election victory as a mandate that aligns with their personal priorities over those of the electorate, the disconnect is especially glaring in the case of Bill de Blasio. The new mayor of New York City was sworn in yesterday in a downright bizarre spectacle. During a procession of speeches, the New York City of 2013-14 was notably absent to make room for the New York City of the progressives’ fevered imaginations, completely at odds with how New Yorkers generally view their home.

A majority of black and Hispanic New Yorkers believe race relations in their city are “generally good.” Yet the chaplain who gave yesterday’s invocation claimed the city was a “plantation.” New York has seen a steady drop in the murder rate–to historic lows, in fact–for over a decade at the same time as its incarceration rate has plummeted. Yet de Blasio’s inauguration featured a speech by Harry Belafonte in which the crowd was treated to his false depiction of the city: “While it is encouraging to know that the statistics have indicated a recent drop in our city’s murder rate, New York alarmingly plays a tragic role in the fact that our nation has the largest prison population in the world.”

But demonstrably false progressive propaganda on race and crime are just the opening acts. The main event, of course, is income inequality. …

City Journal has more.

Ahistorical anger and slow-witted oafishness were front and center on the steps of City Hall New Year’s Day, as Mayor Bill de Blasio took his ceremonial oath of office. There was significant irony, too, even if it wasn’t quite so obvious.

Harry Belafonte’s bitterness; a black pastor’s fantastical ramblings on race relations; Public Advocate Letitia James’s embarrassing presentation of Dasani Coates, the 11-year-old homeless child from Brooklyn; the seething dismissal of Mike Bloomberg and his real accomplishments—they’re all part of the Inauguration Day record now, and there’s not much new to be said about them.

Except perhaps for this: if nothing else, New Yorkers got a glimpse of how leaders of the de Blasio coalition really think. By and large, they are new to the big tent; before de Blasio’s ascension, nobody cared what they thought about anything, and so it never occurred to them to hold their tongues. Certainly they didn’t Wednesday, and the new mayor’s implicit acceptance of the ugliness was sad and ominous. The speakers represent a large part of the de Blasio base, and his refusal to admonish them sent an unhappy message of its own: stand by for more. …

John Fund says even the NY Times had trouble stomaching the leftist blech.

Bill de Blasio’s inauguration as New York mayor is already in the history books as perhaps the rudest transfer of power for a major U.S. political office anyone can remember. A parade of speakers trashed outgoing mayor Michael Bloomberg and delivered doses of divisive racial rhetoric.

It was all too much for even the New York Times’ editorial board, which has swooned over all things de Blasio for months. In the Times’ editorial today it praised de Blasio for articulating an “ambitious, admirable agenda” at his inauguration. But it then laced into the speakers he allowed to share the podium with him for a series of “backward-looking speeches both graceless and smug.” It singled out Letitia James, the new public advocate, who “made a prop of a 12-year-old girl named Dasani, who had to hold the Bible and Ms. James’ hand as . . . Ms. James turned her into Exhibit A of an Inauguration Day prosecution: the People v. Mayor Bloomberg.”

The Times also zinged other speakers for “pointless and tacky haranguing,” especially radical activist Harry Belafonte for making the “utterly bogus claim” that New York’s prison population was growing and its justice system was “deeply Dickensian.” …

And a card carrying left media type, Peter Beinart says all this is making the Dems the party of John Edwards. It’s quite something when someone like Beinart is making fun of these folks.

In his inaugural address Wednesday, incoming New York Mayor Bill de Blasio tried to establish an intellectual pedigree for his focus on economic inequality. He invoked Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Franklin Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, Al Smith, Frances Perkins, Fiorello La Guardia, Jacob Riis, David Dinkins, Mario Cuomo, and Harry Belafonte. It reminded me of when Democrats, eager to prove their national-security bona fides, tell audiences they hail from the party of Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy. As if there wasn’t some other Democrat after Kennedy who dabbled at war and peace, some guy from Texas.

De Blasio’s speech was a bit like that. He left out the politician who more than any other kindled the Democrats’ renewed interest in economic inequality because that politician has been airbrushed from Democratic Party history. His name is John Edwards.

 

Edwards, of course, was not the first national politician to decry the gap between rich and poor. …

… Now, of course, in the wake of Occupy Wall Street, Elizabeth Warren, and Pope Francis, economic inequality has become motherhood and apple pie for Democrats. Obama will reportedly make it a centerpiece of his final years in office. Meanwhile, John Edwards, having endured more public disgrace than any recent American politician not named Anthony Weiner, has launched a small plaintiff’s law firm in Raleigh, North Carolina. He recently told The News & Observer that he hopes “to give regular people who have been treated unfairly a chance against really powerful opponents and well-funded opponents.” Some things never change.

Jennifer Rubin has 2014 predictions. 

There will be no final deal with Iran in six months.

Sen. Max Baucus’s early retirement will not secure his Montana Senate seat for Democrats.

Republicans will win a Senate seat in either New Hampshire, Iowa or Michigan.

Republican governors in Florida and Pennsylvania will lose reelection bids.

The president’s State of the Union address will be too long, partisan and boring, prompting calls to go back to submitting the SOTU in writing only. …

The cartoonists have fun with the globalony touring ship stuck in Antarctic ice. The US Coast Guard is sending the Polar Star to break the two ships out.

The Australian Maritime Safety Authority’s Rescue Coordination Centre (RCC Australia) has requested the US Coast Guard’s Polar Star icebreaker to assist the vessels MV Akademik Shokalskiy and Xue Long which are beset by ice in CommonwealthBay.

The US Coast Guard has accepted this request and will make Polar Star available to assist.

The Polar Star has been en route to Antarctica since 3 December, 2013 – weeks prior to the MV Akademik Shokalskiy being beset by ice in CommonwealthBay. The intended mission of the Polar Star is to clear a navigable shipping channel in McMurdo Sound to the National Science Foundation’s Scientific Research Station. Resupply ships use the channel to bring food, fuel and other goods to the station. The Polar Star will go on to undertake its mission once the search and rescue incident is resolved. …

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Daniel Greenfield posts on how our country has been left behind. So to speak.

American progressives like to think of their country as backward and reactionary compared to Europe. And they have never been more right than now when Europe and the rest of the First World have gone right while America under Obama has been left back.

In America Alone, Mark Steyn envisioned the United States as a beleaguered hope in a dying West. Seven years later, American politics are much less healthy than those of the rest of the free world.

America does stand alone. It stands alone in embracing the rule of the left.

Recently Australia, Japan and Norway welcomed in conservative governments. Tony Abbott, Australia’s new prime minister, is a former heavyweight boxer who attended Oxford and is putting a spoke in the wheel of the Global Warming ecohoax. Japan is casting off its pacifism and standing up to the People’s Republic of China and Norway gave its left-wing government the boot and moved in “Iron Erma” in a coalition with the libertarian Progress Party which opposes taxes and immigration and supports free enterprise.

Australia, Japan and Norway are not outliers. The majority of First World countries now have conservative governments.

Canada has embraced a patriotic foreign policy and energy exploration under Prime Minister Stephen Harper. In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his conservative Likud party have continued to move Israel’s economy toward free enterprise. And even in the UK, Prime Minister David Cameron, for all his follies, is a conservative, even if he is more McCain than DeMint, and has pushed for deregulation and welfare reform.

Sweden’s center-right coalition government has won re-election for the first time in a century. …

Want to know how sick parts of our country are? John Fund writes on the inauguration of New York’s idiot mayor.

We all knew we were in for something completely different when the inauguration of self-described “progressive” Bill de Blasio as New York’s mayor began with a keynote from pro-Communist activist Harry Belafonte.

The 86-year-old singer has a history of extremism. He has been an infamous house guest of Fidel Castro, called Colin Powell and Condi Rice “house slaves” of the Bush administration, and last year compared the free-market Koch brothers to the Ku Klux Klan.

“We will be no longer a divided city,” he proclaimed as he compared today’s New York to a “Dickensian” nightmare, as departing mayor Mike Bloomberg looked on stone-faced. “We can become America’s DNA for the future.”

He was followed by the Reverend Fred Lucas Jr., whose talk was dominated by slavery metaphors and analogies. He compared New York’s five boroughs to a “plantation” and managed to cram into his short speech other references to slavery, such as “shackles,” “bondage,” “auction blocks,” “the Emancipation Proclamation,” the “Civil War,” and the “Reconstruction Era.”

It was almost a relief to then hear Letitia James, a former Legal Aid Society lawyer who is now the city’s new public advocate. She railed against “a gilded age of inequality,” “stop-and-frisk abuses,” and “land grabs for more luxury condos.” (There’s actually some truth in that last phrase.) …

Forbes OpEd on DC’s attitude that Americans don’t deserve to be free.

President Obama’s Kansas speech is a remarkable document. In calling for more government controls, more taxation, more collectivism, he has two paragraphs that give the show away. Take a look at them.

“there is a certain crowd in Washington who, for the last few decades, have said, let’s respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. “The market will take care of everything,” they tell us. If we just cut more regulations and cut more taxes–especially for the wealthy–our economy will grow stronger. Sure, they say, there will be winners and losers. But if the winners do really well, then jobs and prosperity will eventually trickle down to everybody else. And, they argue, even if prosperity doesn’t trickle down, well, that’s the price of liberty.

Now, it’s a simple theory. And we have to admit, it’s one that speaks to our rugged individualism and our healthy skepticism of too much government. That’s in America’s DNA. And that theory fits well on a bumper sticker. (Laughter.) But here’s the problem: It doesn’t work. It has never worked. (Applause.) It didn’t work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression. It’s not what led to the incredible postwar booms of the ’50s and ’60s. And it didn’t work when we tried it during the last decade. (Applause.) I mean, understand, it’s not as if we haven’t tried this theory.”

Though not in Washington, I’m in that “certain crowd” that has been saying for decades that the market will take care of everything. It’s not really a crowd, it’s a tiny group of radicals–radicals for capitalism, in Ayn Rand’s well-turned phrase.

The only thing that the market doesn’t take care of is anti-market acts: acts that initiate physical force. That’s why we need government: to wield retaliatory force to defend individual rights. …

For a great example of how things really work in Washington, Tim Carney has the story of how corporations got the government to ban incandescent bulbs.

Say goodbye to the regular light bulb this New Year.

For more than a century, the traditional incandescent bulb was the symbol of American innovation. Starting Jan. 1, the famous bulb is illegal to manufacture in the U.S., and it has become a fitting symbol for the collusion of big business and big government.

The 2007 Energy Bill, a stew of regulations and subsidies, set mandatory efficiency standards for most light bulbs. Any bulbs that couldn’t produce a given brightness at the specified energy input would be illegal. That meant the 25-cent bulbs most Americans used in nearly every socket of their home would be outlawed.

People often assume green regulations like this represent the triumph of environmental activists trying to save the plant. That’s rarely the case, and it wasn’t here. Light bulb manufacturers whole-heartedly supported the efficiency standards. General Electric, Sylvania and Philips — the three companies that dominated the bulb industry — all backed the 2007 rule, while opposing proposals to explicitly outlaw incandescent technology (thus leaving the door open for high-efficiency incandescents).

This wasn’t a case of an industry getting on board with an inevitable regulation in order to tweak it. The lighting industry was the main reason the legislation was moving. As the New York Times reported in 2011, “Philips formed a coalition with environmental groups including the Natural Resources Defense Council to push for higher standards.” …

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A week ago in Time Magazine, Camille Paglia defended men in a debate titled, “Are Men Obsolete?”

… A peevish, grudging rancor against men has been one of the most unpalatable and unjust features of second- and third-wave feminism. Men’s faults, failings and foibles have been seized on and magnified into gruesome bills of indictment. Ideologue professors at our leading universities indoctrinate impressionable undergraduates with carelessly fact-free theories alleging that gender is an arbitrary, oppressive fiction with no basis in biology.

Is it any wonder that so many high-achieving young women, despite all the happy talk about their academic success, find themselves in the early stages of their careers in chronic uncertainty or anxiety about their prospects for an emotionally fulfilled private life? When an educated culture routinely denigrates masculinity and manhood, then women will be perpetually stuck with boys, who have no incentive to mature or to honor their commitments. And without strong men as models to either embrace or (for dissident lesbians) to resist, women will never attain a centered and profound sense of themselves as women.

From my long observation, which predates the sexual revolution, this remains a serious problem afflicting Anglo-American society, with its Puritan residue. In France, Italy, Spain, Latin America and Brazil, in contrast, many ambitious professional women seem to have found a formula for asserting power and authority in the workplace while still projecting sexual allure and even glamour. …

That led to a WSJ Weekend Interview with Ms. Paglia. 

‘What you’re seeing is how a civilization commits suicide,” says Camille Paglia. This self-described “notorious Amazon feminist” isn’t telling anyone to Lean In or asking Why Women Still Can’t Have It All. No, her indictment may be as surprising as it is wide-ranging: The military is out of fashion, Americans undervalue manual labor, schools neuter male students, opinion makers deny the biological differences between men and women, and sexiness is dead. And that’s just 20 minutes of our three-hour conversation.

When Ms. Paglia, now 66, burst onto the national stage in 1990 with the publishing of “Sexual Personae,” she immediately established herself as a feminist who was the scourge of the movement’s establishment, a heretic to its orthodoxy. Pick up the 700-page tome, subtitled “Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, ” and it’s easy to see why. “If civilization had been left in female hands,” she wrote, “we would still be living in grass huts.”

The fact that the acclaimed book—the first of six; her latest, “Glittering Images,” is a survey of Western art—was rejected by seven publishers and five agents before being printed by Yale University Press only added to Ms. Paglia’s sense of herself as a provocateur in a class with Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern. But unlike those radio jocks, Ms. Paglia has scholarly chops: Her dissertation adviser at Yale was Harold Bloom, and she is as likely to discuss Freud, Oscar Wilde or early Native American art as to talk about Miley Cyrus.

Ms. Paglia relishes her outsider persona, having previously described herself as an egomaniac and “abrasive, strident and obnoxious.” Talking to her is like a mental CrossFit workout. One moment she’s praising pop star Rihanna (“a true artist”), then blasting ObamaCare (“a monstrosity,” though she voted for the president), global warming (“a religious dogma”), and the idea that all gay people are born gay (“the biggest canard,” yet she herself is a lesbian). …

Writing in Bloomberg, Richard Vedder calls for an end to the athletics “arms race.”

With the college football bowls under way, all most of us will care about are the winners. But as a nation purporting to care about the costs of higher education, we should pay far more attention to the many losers.

Thanks to a newly available database, we can grasp the ugly truth: Universities are increasing their spending on intercollegiate sports exponentially, far faster than they are investing resources in teaching and research, and at rates that force higher institutional subsidies, usually paid by students.

The trove of information comes from the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, a group dominated by past and present university presidents and committed to “restoring the balance” of costs and benefits to college sports.

Consider this eye-popping figure: Among the more than 100 top athletic powers (the football bowl subdivision), which enroll more than 3 million students, inflation-adjusted academic spending per student rose a modest 8 percent from 2005 to 2011. Meanwhile, “athletic spending per athlete” rose by more than 38 percent. (This is based on the 90 schools for which data were available.) At the same time, university subsidies — “institutional funding for athletics per athlete” — expanded on average by an extraordinary 51 percent, despite rising television and ticket revenue. Commercial receipts covered only 74 cents of each extra dollar of costs incurred in this athletics arms race. …

Neatorama tells us about a forbidden island in the Bay of Bengal.

Late on the night of August 2, 1981, a Hong Kong freighter navigating the choppy waters of the Bay of Bengal ran aground on a submerged coral reef. The ship, called the Primrose, was hopelessly stuck. But there was no danger of it sinking, so after radioing for assistance, the captain and crew settled in for a few days’ wait until help arrived.

The following morning, as it became light, the sailors saw an island a few hundred yards beyond the reef. It was uninhabited, as far as anyone could tell: There were no buildings, roads, or other signs of civilization there -just a pristine, sandy beach and behind it, dense jungle. The beach must have seemed like an ideal spot to wait for a rescue, but the captain ordered the crew to remain aboard the Primrose. It was monsoon season, and he may have concerned about lowering the men into the rough sea in tiny lifeboats. Or perhaps he’d figured out just which tiny island lay beyond the reef: It was North Sentinel -the deadliest of the 200 islands in the Andaman Island chain.

A few days later, a lookout aboard the Primrose spotted a group of dark-skinned men emerging from the jungle, making their way toward the ship. Was it the rescue party? It seemed possible …until the men came a little closer and the lookout could see that every one of them was naked.

Naked …and armed, but not with guns. Each man carried either a spear, a bow and arrows, or some other primitive weapon. The captain made another radio distress call, this one much more urgent: “Wild men! Estimate more than 50, carrying various homemade weapons, are making two or three wooden boats. Worrying they will board us at sunset.”

After a tense standoff lasting a few more days, the crew of the Primrose were evacuated by helicopter to safety. They were lucky to get away: It was their misfortune to have run aground just offshore of one of the strangest islands on Earth, and probably the very last of its kind. Anthropologists believe the men who appeared on the beach that morning in 1981 are members of a hunter-gatherer tribe that has lived on the island for 65,000 years. That’s 35,000 years before the last ice age, 55,000 years before the great woolly mammoths disappeared from North America, and 62,000 years before the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids at Giza. These people are believed to be the direct descendants of the first humans out of Africa.

The outside world has known about NorthSentinelIsland for centuries, but the islanders have been almost completely cut off from the rest of the world all that time, and they fiercely maintain their isolation to this day. …

The year closes with great news about another “arms race.” This is the one between bacteria and antibiotics.  Researchers at Hebrew University in Jerusalem have discovered one of the ways bacteria have resisted medical efforts against them.      We’re not aware of similar research results from studies at Muslim University of Cairo,  or Baghdad,  or Tehran,  or Riyadh,  or Tripoli,  or Rabat,  or Ankara,  or Damascus,  or Amman,  or Tunis,  or Algiers,  or  . . . . .

The mechanism by which some bacteria are able to survive antibacterial treatment has been revealed for the first time by Hebrew University of Jerusalem researchers. Their work could pave the way for new ways to control such bacteria. In addition to the known phenomenon by which some bacteria achieve resistance to antibiotics through mutation, there are other types of bacteria, known as “persistent bacteria,” which are not resistant to the antibiotics but simply continue to exist in a dormant or inactive state while exposed to antibacterial treatment. These bacteria later “awaken” when that treatment is over, resuming their detrimental tasks, presenting a dilemma as to how to deal with them. .

Until now, it had been known that there is a connection between these kind of bacteria and the naturally occurring toxin HipA in the bacteria, but scientists did not know the cellular target of this toxin and how its activity triggers dormancy of the bacteria.

Now, the HebrewUniversity researchers, led by Prof. Gadi Glaser of the Faculty of Medicine and Prof. Nathalie Balaban of the Racah Institute of Physics, have been able to demonstrate how this comes about. …

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John Fund thinks 2014 might be a Dem disaster.

If a panic button existed in the offices of vulnerable Democrats in Congress right now, they might be pressing it so often it wouldn’t have time to reset.

A new CNN poll this week found that support for Obamacare is down to an all-time low of 35 percent. That helps explain the dramatic partisan reversal in another question CNN asked — about which party respondents would vote for in their congressional district. Two months ago, Democrats had a 50–42 percent lead on that critical “generic ballot” question. Now, Republicans have taken a 49–44 lead. Other private polls taken in the last few days confirm the trend of the CNN poll.

Of course, Democratic leaders insist that Obamacare won’t hurt their party in the 2014 elections. House speaker Nancy Pelosi told a conference call with reporters this week that the bill she once said had to be passed “so that you can find out what is in it” was “worth the trouble, it’s going to be a glorious thing.” She insisted it would help Democrats pick up House seats next year.

Senate majority leader Harry Reid doesn’t go so far as to rhapsodize like Pelosi about Obamacare, but he still insisted to The Hill newspaper on December 18 that “for sure it will be a net positive” in the elections.

Pelosi and Reid have a point: A lot can happen politically over the next ten months. …

Mega Dittos from Byron York who says this is the year the Dems will pay for obamacare.

As Democrats survey a troubled 2014 political landscape, it’s easy to forget how optimistic they seemed less than a year ago.

“I would expect that Nancy Pelosi is going to be speaker again pretty soon,” President Obama told cheering House Democrats at a party retreat last February.

In the rosy scenario that took hold in some Democratic circles, the party was positioned to recapture the House in 2014 and maintain control of the Senate, allowing Obama to defy the history of second-term presidential decline. Great successes and good years lay ahead.

Had Democrats forgotten Obamacare, the law they passed in 2010 that was scheduled to take effect in 2014? It almost seemed as if they had.

Obama and his allies put off the arrival of Obamacare until after the president faced re-election in 2012. His administration also delayed releasing key rules regarding the law until after the election for fear of angering voters. But now they can’t put it off any longer. 2014 will be the year Democrats pay for Obamacare. …

Peter Wehner on why we’re tired of the president. 

A new Gallup poll finds President Obama’s approval rating at 39 percent and his disapproval rating at 54 percent. But it’s not just that the public is increasingly displeased with the job Mr. Obama is doing; they are growing weary of the whole packaged deal. They are frustrated with the president, his style, his attitude, his approach to the job.

The Boston Herald reports:

President Obama’s tanking approval rating in newly released polls shows Americans are tired of his whining, according to some experts, who also see a fighting chance for Republicans to rack up coast-to-coast victories in the 2014 midterm congressional races.

“We think of presidents as being morale leaders … and he goes out and complains,” according to Richard Benedetto, a retired White House correspondent and a journalism professor at AmericanUniversity. “He complains about the fact that he doesn’t get enough cooperation from the other side. ‘It’s not my fault, it’s the Republicans’ fault.’ And that message gets old for the American public. … It’s not a good sign for Democrats in Congress going into next year.” …

For some reason Jennifer Rubin posts on how the president can have a better 2014. 

The president’s final news conference of the year was hardly inspiring. One senses he’s adrift, maybe even disoriented. The once political messiah is now widely derided, ignored and/or disliked.  Still, we all have three years of this to go. What would help to make 2014 a better year for the president?

1. Stop accusing opponents of operating in bad faith. One of the low moments in a very low news conference was his accusation that senators advocating sanctions are only interested in their own reelection. This particular insult was aimed at Democrats as well as Republicans, but his accusations of mendacity make him look small and even mean. Moreover, it simply incentivizes his opponents to strike back.

2. A better staff. The most respected Cabinet official in his entire presidency arguably was defense secretary Robert Gates, with defense secretary and then CIA director Leon Panetta a distant second. Who does he have now? Literally no one who has credibility. One and all they are perceived as partisan and spinners. Obama needs to give up his security blanket of yes-men and flunkies, hire some esteemed advisers and then listen to them.

3. No more government by whimsy and fiat. …

Paul Mirengoff calls attention to a Michael Barone column.

Michael Barone has written an important column about the relationship between the breakdown of the American family and income inequality and lack of social mobility. Barone relies in part on Nick Shultz’s book Home Economics: The Consequences of Changing Family Structure which I have not read.

Barone’s thesis — that growing up outside of a two-parent family means lower income, less social mobility, and less “human capital” — is not controversial among social scientists. It is affirmed, Barone says, by undoubted liberals such as Harvard’s David Ellwood and Christopher Jencks.

Yet this fact seems vastly underappreciated in public policy debates. …

Naturally, we have Barone’s piece.

Christmastime is an occasion for families to come together. But the family is not what it used to be, as my former American Enterprise Institute colleague Nick Schulz argues in his short AEI book Home Economics: The Consequences of Changing Family Structure.

It’s a subject that many people are uncomfortable with. “Everyone either is or knows and has a deep personal connection to someone who is divorced, cohabiting, or gay,” Schulz writes. “Great numbers of people simply want to avoid awkward talk of what are seen as primarily personal issues or issues of individual morality.”

Nonetheless, it is an uncomfortable truth that children of divorce and children with unmarried parents tend to do much worse in life than children of two-parent families. (I’ll leave aside the sensitive issue of children of same-sex marriages because these haven’t existed in a non-stigmatized atmosphere long enough to produce measurable results.) …

Examiner Blog post on the losers in the Duck Dynasty flap.

Now that A&E executives have surrendered to the will of hundreds of thousands of “Duck Dynasty” fans and welcomed Phil Robertson back to the show nearly 10 days after creating a firestorm when they suspended him for expressing views about sexuality that are shared by many other conservative Christians, it’s time to see who the winners and losers are.

The winners: Robertson and his family.They held fast to their values and learned how deep their fan base really is. The family’s admission of regret about his statements to GQ was no surrender, given that his comments were never about hate as opponents had insinuated.

The losers: A&E executives, of course, who knew all along that the Robertson family members were conservative Christians, yet did the world’s worst imitation of Claude Rains in “Casablanca” when gay rights groups complained.

And while we’re on that subject, the other big loser is GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Discrimination, which showed how far it had strayed off the path of encouraging tolerance into the dark woods where conformity is enforced by witch hunts and demands for blood sacrifices. GLAAD’s intolerance sparked what its leaders called the worst backlash they’d ever seen — a backlash that included prominent members of the gay community such as Andrew Sullivan and Camille Paglia.

That’s right: Two groups of smug, urban sophisticates got outsmarted by a backwoodsman who shoots ducks for a living.

Heckuva job, folks.