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Pickerhead is a major fan of shopping online with Amazon; especially Amazon OneClick. If you haven’t tried it, you’re missing out on something that will make your life much simpler; to say nothing of the savings enjoyed from consistently low prices. Business Week had a major profile of the company and Jeff Bezos the CEO.

Within Amazon.com (AMZN) there’s a certain type of e-mail that elicits waves of panic. It usually originates with an annoyed customer who complains to the company’s founder and chief executive officer. Jeff Bezos has a public e-mail address, jeff@amazon.com. Not only does he read many customer complaints, he forwards them to the relevant Amazon employees, with a one-character addition: a question mark.

When Amazon employees get a Bezos question mark e-mail, they react as though they’ve discovered a ticking bomb. They’ve typically got a few hours to solve whatever issue the CEO has flagged and prepare a thorough explanation for how it occurred, a response that will be reviewed by a succession of managers before the answer is presented to Bezos himself. Such escalations, as these e-mails are known, are Bezos’s way of ensuring that the customer’s voice is constantly heard inside the company.

One of the more memorable escalations occurred in late 2010. It had come to Bezos’s attention that customers who had browsed the lubricants section of Amazon’s sexual wellness category were receiving personalized e-mails pitching a variety of gels and other intimacy facilitators. When the e-mail marketing team received the question mark, they knew the topic was delicate and nervously put together an explanation. Amazon’s direct marketing tool was decentralized, and category managers could generate e-mail campaigns to customers who had looked at certain product categories but did not make purchases. The promotions tended to work; they were responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in Amazon’s annual sales. In the matter of the lubricant e-mail, though, a low-level product manager had overstepped the bounds of propriety. But the marketing team never got the chance to send this explanation. Bezos demanded to meet in person.

At Amazon’s Seattle headquarters, Jeff Wilke, the senior vice president for North American retail, Doug Herrington, the vice president for consumables, and Steven Shure, the vice president for worldwide marketing, waited in a conference room until Bezos glided in briskly. He started the meeting with his customary, “Hello, everybody,” and followed with “So, Steve Shure is sending out e-mails about lubricants.”

Bezos likes to say that when he’s angry, “just wait five minutes,” and the mood will pass like a tropical squall. Not this time. He remained standing. He locked eyes with Shure, whose division oversaw e-mail marketing. …

 

… It’s easy to forget that until recently, people thought of Amazon primarily as an online bookseller. Today, as it nears its 20th anniversary, it’s the Everything Store, a company with around $75 billion in annual revenue, a $140 billion market value, and few if any discernible limits to its growth. In the past few months alone, it launched a marketplace in India, opened a website to sell high-end art, introduced another Kindle reading device and three tablet computers, made plans to announce a set-top box for televisions, and funded the pilot episodes of more than a dozen TV shows. Amazon’s marketplace hosts the storefronts of countless smaller retailers; Amazon Web Services handles the computer infrastructure of thousands of technology companies, universities, and government agencies.

Bezos, 49, has a boundless faith in the transformative power of technology. He constantly reinvests Amazon’s profits to improve his existing businesses and explore new ones, often to the consternation of shareholders. He surprised the world in August when he personally bought the Washington Post newspaper, saying his blend of optimism, innovation, and long-term orientation could revive it. One day a week, he moonlights as the head of Blue Origin, his private rocket ship company, which is trying to lower the cost of space travel.

Amazon has a few well-known peculiarities—the desks are repurposed doors; meetings begin with everyone in the room sitting in silence as they read a six-page document called a narrative. It’s a famously demanding place to work. And yet just how the company works—and what Bezos is like as a person—is difficult to know. …

 

…Bezos fits comfortably into this mold. His drive and boldness trumps other leadership ideals, such as consensus building and promoting civility. While he can be charming and capable of great humor in public, in private he explodes into what some of his underlings call nutters. A colleague failing to meet Bezos’s exacting standards will set off a nutter. If an employee does not have the right answers or tries to bluff, or takes credit for someone else’s work, or exhibits a whiff of internal politics, uncertainty, or frailty in the heat of battle—a blood vessel in Bezos’s forehead bulges and his filter falls away. He’s capable of hyperbole and harshness in these moments and over the years has delivered some devastating rebukes. Among his greatest hits, collected and relayed by Amazon veterans:

“Are you lazy or just incompetent?”

“I’m sorry, did I take my stupid pills today?”

“Do I need to go down and get the certificate that says I’m CEO of the company to get you to stop challenging me on this?”

“Are you trying to take credit for something you had nothing to do with?”

“If I hear that idea again, I’m gonna have to kill myself.”

“We need to apply some human intelligence to this problem.” …

We carried the story of the 83 year-old adjunct professor who died penniless in the Pittsburgh area in September 22nd Pickings. There was a follow-on story in USA Today about the efforts of unions to organize these people. Can’t see how that will help long term. Hopefully college administrators will be shamed into taking better care of their vulnerable employees.  

The death last month of an 83-year-old French professor in Pittsburgh has become a rallying cry for part-time college instructors nationwide in their push for better pay, greater job security and access to health insurance. It comes as college administrators around the country are monitoring teaching loads in preparation for the Affordable Care Act, set to go into effect in 2015.

The story of Margaret Mary Vojtko, who taught for 25 years at DuquesneUniversity and had recently been let go, went viral after the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published it. Nearly homeless and struggling with cancer, she died Sept. 1 of a heart attack and was “laid out in a simple, cardboard casket” at her funeral, wrote Daniel Kovalik, a lawyer with United Steelworkers.

Duquesne adjuncts voted to join the steelworkers union last year as part of a coordinated national strategy to focus on metro areas with multiple colleges. Over the past year, adjuncts at American, George Washington and Georgetown universities in Washington, D.C., have affiliated with the Service Employees International Union. In the Boston area, Tufts adjuncts just voted to affiliate with SEIU, nearby BentleyCollege is awaiting vote results, and Northeastern adjuncts have formed an organizing committee. Similar efforts are underway in the Seattle area, Los Angeles and Philadelphia, SEIU President Mary Kay Henry says. …

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We haven’t focused on the problems of the healthcare system rollout since any new effort is bound to have shortcomings. Time now though to take a look. The Free Beacon reports on NBC News’ ridicule.

NBC’s Nightly News reported on the disastrous rollout of Obamacare Thursday night, with correspondent Tom Costello calling the website “the focus of ridicule” and quoting experts who could hardly fathom a “worse launch of a nationwide site.”

Anchor Brian Williams introducded the segment by acknowledging Obamacare’s problems would be receiving more media attention if not for the government shutdown.

“If it weren’t for the shutdown dominating the news, we admittedly would be hearing and covering a lot more about how things are going for these new health care exchanges, which were rolled out ten days ago,” Williams said. “Millions of uninsured Americans are being encouraged to go to healthcare.gov to sign up for coverage but it’s been a very rocky start.”

“By most accounts the website has been a complete mess, locking up, crashing and kicking off potential customers,” Costello said. “Of the 260 people who tried to sign up at this Miami clinic in the first week, only a single person got through.” …

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reports on the disaster when the Health Sec showed up to tout her program. Steelers chairman Dan Rooney was there to help her. So Steelers fans now you know why your team is 0 -4. Your team’s owner is an old fool.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius had a front-row view of the problems plaguing the website that the government established to allow people to shop for health insurance under Obamacare.

Sebelius and Steelers Chairman Dan Rooney were at an enrollment and education event on Thursday at Heinz Field to promote Healthcare.gov, but people who showed up encountered problems in signing up for coverage on the website.

Unable to handle heavy online traffic and riddled with technical glitches, the website has been a source of criticism of the Obama administration and the new Affordable Care Act since its start on Oct. 1.

Sebelius, who is making similar trips to cities across the country to spread the word about the website, told the audience of about 100 people that Healthcare.gov was “open for business.”

“Believe me, we had some early glitches,” said Sebelius, who was introduced by Rooney, a backer of the law. “But it’s getting better every day.”

At the back of the room, it was a different story. About 20 people armed with laptops and certified by the government to sign up people for coverage were meeting with uninsured people, answering questions and fruitlessly trying to access the website.

LaKesha Lowry, 41, came to the event to find out about her health insurance options. But the North Side resident said she was not able to access the site, even with the help of a certified application counselor. …

 

Andrew McCarthy posts on Wolf Blitzer’s disgust with the roll out.

Andrew presents the clip of Wolf Blitzer bewailing the patent, nigh comical unreadiness of Obamacare implementation (which Charles described earlier — the “wreck” before we even get to the “train wreck“). Rush also played it this afternoon, giving the report legs CNN usually doesn’t have. So now we have Obama’s own media advising that Obama should take the “advice” he’s gotten from Republicans (Wolf couldn’t quite bring himself to utter the words “Ted Cruz,” “Mike Lee,” or “House conservatives”) and delay Obamacare for another year. …

Even the NY Times has figured it out.

In March, Henry Chao, the chief digital architect for the Obama administration’s new online insurance marketplace, told industry executives that he was deeply worried about the Web site’s debut. “Let’s just make sure it’s not a third-world experience,” he told them.

Two weeks after the rollout, few would say his hopes were realized.

For the past 12 days, a system costing more than $400 million and billed as a one-stop click-and-go hub for citizens seeking health insurance has thwarted the efforts of millions to simply log in. The growing national outcry has deeply embarrassed the White House, which has refused to say how many people have enrolled through the federal exchange.

Even some supporters of the Affordable Care Act worry that the flaws in the system, if not quickly fixed, could threaten the fiscal health of the insurance initiative, which depends on throngs of customers to spread the risk and keep prices low.

“These are not glitches,” said an insurance executive who has participated in many conference calls on the federal exchange. Like many people interviewed for this article, the executive spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying he did not wish to alienate the federal officials with whom he works. “The extent of the problems is pretty enormous. At the end of our calls, people say, ‘It’s awful, just awful.’ ”  …

Digital Trends posts.

It’s been one full week since the flagship technology portion of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) went live. And since that time, the befuddled beast that is Healthcare.gov has shutdown, crapped out, stalled, and mis-loaded so consistently that its track record for failure is challenged only by Congress.

The site itself, which apparently underwent major code renovations over the weekend, still rejects user logins, fails to load drop-down menus and other crucial components for users that successfully gain entrance, and otherwise prevents uninsured Americans in the 36 states it serves from purchasing healthcare at competitive rates – Healthcare.gov’s primary purpose. The site is so busted that, as of a couple days ago, the number of people that successfully purchased healthcare through it was in the “single digits,” according to the Washington Post. …

… At this point I can only speculate on the total cost to build out Healthcare.gov and the overall technology portion of the FFEs. Based on the available data, however, a conservative estimate puts the cost so far at over $500 million. Considering the GAO estimates it will cost approximately $2 billion to build-out and operate the FFEs in 2014, this is, if anything, likely far too low. …

… Unlike some Americans, I actually want the Obamacare exchanges to succeed. I’ve given the state-specific options a try (there are 15 of them, including WashingtonD.C.’s) and they seem to greatly simplify the process of buying healthcare. And the rates do appear to come in far lower than what many people without health insurance from an employer have had to bear until now. It’s not government-run healthcare. There are no death panels. And, from what I can tell, the world will not end if more people have health insurance – quite the opposite, in fact.

What I cannot stand is a nation that has vast technological resources in its citizenry spending $500 million of our collective money to slap together a product that, thus far, has only managed to waste people’s precious minutes. So the next time our government comes up with any bright idea that relies upon a massive website, let’s all be sure to ask how they plan to build it. Because the standard operating procedure at the moment is just plain sick.

Tom Bevan of Real Clear Politics asks; “Why does Sebelius still have a job?”

Unlike the real world, where managers and employees are judged on results and held accountable for their performance, in Washington, D.C., loyalty and partisanship almost always come first. Accountability comes later, if it comes at all.

This happens in every administration, and President Obama’s is no different, as we’ve seen with the fatal mistakes made regarding the Fast & Furious gun program and in the assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. Democrats, claiming to see these as partisan witch hunts designed to hurt the administration politically, circled the wagons. Obama stood loyally by Eric Holder and Hillary Clinton.

Loyalty is generally a good thing, in politics, as in life. But Kathleen Sebelius and her agency’s rollout of Obamacare is different.

Sebelius’ department had 3½ years to prepare to implement the Affordable Care Act. No one ever suggested that commandeering one-sixth of the American economy would be an easy task. (Many Republicans suggested the opposite and were dismissed as killjoys for their efforts.) But after the debacle of the last two weeks, liberals and Democrats—not conservatives or Republicans—should be calling for Sebelius’s head.

The administration’s handling of the implementation of Obamacare over the past three years has been a slow-moving train wreck: a mixture of embarrassing delays, hard-to-justify waivers, and assorted bad news about the unintended consequences of the law. …

Peggy Noonan says it should be delayed for a year.

The Obama administration has an implementation problem. More than any administration of the modern era they know how to talk but have trouble doing. They give speeches about ObamaCare but when it’s unveiled what the public sees is a Potemkin village designed by the noted architect Rube Goldberg. They speak ringingly about the case for action in Syria but can’t build support in the U.S. foreign-policy community, in Congress, among the public. Recovery summer is always next summer. They have trouble implementing. Which, of course, is the most boring but crucial part of governing. It’s not enough to talk, you must perform.

There is an odd sense with members of this administration that they think words are actions. Maybe that’s why they tweet so much. Maybe they imagine Bashar Assad seeing their tweets and musing: “Ah, Samantha is upset—then I shall change my entire policy, in respect for her emotions!”

That gets us to the real story of last week, this week and the future, the one beyond the shutdown, the one that normal people are both fully aware of and fully understand, and that is the utter and catastrophic debut of ObamaCare. Even for those who expected problems, and that would be everyone who follows government, it has been a shock.

They had 3½ years to set it up! They knew exactly when it would be unveiled, on Oct. 1, 2013. On that date, they knew, millions could be expected to go online to see if they benefit.

What they got was the administration’s version of Project ORCA, the Romney campaign’s computerized voter-turnout system that crashed with such flair on Election Day. …

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Mark Steyn continues with his look at the villainous behavior of the park service.

… Eighty-three percent of the supposedly defunded government is carrying on as usual, impervious to whatever restraints the people’s representatives might wish to impose, and the 800,000 soi-disant “non-essential” workers have been assured that, as soon as the government is once again lawfully funded, they will be paid in full for all the days they’ve had at home.

But the one place where a full-scale shutdown is being enforced is in America’s alleged “National Park Service,” a term of art that covers everything from canyons and glaciers to war memorials and historic taverns. The NPS has spent the last two weeks behaving as the paramilitary wing of the DNC, expending more resources in trying to close down open-air, unfenced areas than it would normally do in keeping them open. It began with the war memorials on the National Mall — that’s to say, stone monuments on pieces of grass under blue sky. It’s the equivalent of my New Hampshire town government shutting down and deciding therefore to ring the Civil War statue on the village common with yellow police tape and barricades.

Still, the NPS could at least argue that these monuments were within their jurisdiction — although they shouldn’t be. Not content with that, the NPS shock troops then moved on to insisting that privately run sites such as the Claude Moore Colonial Farm and privately owned sites such as Mount Vernon were also required to shut. When the Pisgah Inn on the Blue Ridge Parkway declined to comply with the government’s order to close (an entirely illegal order, by the way), the “shut down” Park Service sent armed agents and vehicles to blockade the hotel’s driveway.

Even then, the problem with a lot of America’s scenic wonders is that, although they sit on National Park Service land, they’re visible from some distance. So, in South Dakota, having closed Mount Rushmore the NPS storm troopers additionally attempted to close the view of Mount Rushmore — that’s to say a stretch of the highway, where the shoulder widens and you can pull over and admire the stony visages of America’s presidents. Maybe it’s time to blow up Washington, Jefferson & Co. and replace them with a giant, granite sign rising into the heavens bearing the chiseled inscription “DON’T EVEN THINK OF PARKING DOWN THERE.” …

Jonathan Last with more on the park service’s performance during the shutdown.

… The conduct of the National Park Service over the last week might be the biggest scandal of the Obama administration. This is an expansive claim, of course. Benghazi, Fast and Furious, the IRS, the NSA, the HHS mandate​—​this is an administration that has not lacked for appalling abuses of power. And we still have three years to go.

Even so, consider the actions of the National Park Service since the government shutdown began. People first noticed what the NPS was up to when the World War II Memorial on the National Mall was “closed.” Just to be clear, the memorial is an open plaza. There is nothing to operate. Sometimes there might be a ranger standing around. But he’s not collecting tickets or opening gates. Putting up barricades and posting guards to “close” the World War II Memorial takes more resources and manpower than “keeping it open.”

The closure of the World War II Memorial was just the start of the Park Service’s partisan assault on the citizenry. There’s a cute little historic site just outside of the capital in McLean, Virginia, called the Claude Moore Colonial Farm. They do historical reenactments, and once upon a time the National Park Service helped run the place. But in 1980, the NPS cut the farm out of its budget. A group of private citizens set up an endowment to take care of the farm’s expenses. Ever since, the site has operated independently through a combination of private donations and volunteer workers.

The Park Service told Claude Moore Colonial Farm to shut down.

The farm’s administrators appealed this directive​—​they explained that the Park Service doesn’t actually do anything for the historic site. The folks at the NPS were unmoved. And so, last week, the National Park Service found the scratch to send officers to the park to forcibly remove both volunteer workers and visitors.

Think about that for a minute. The Park Service, which is supposed to serve the public by administering parks, is now in the business of forcing parks they don’t administer to close. As Homer Simpson famously asked, did we lose a war? …

Ed Morrissey says federal workers have become the president’s private army.

The United States established the Civil Service 142 years ago, in response to the massive corruption that followed from the previous “spoils system” in WashingtonDC.  Prior to that, all federal employees served at the pleasure of the President, and jobs got handed out to those who boosted the fortunes of the party in power. 

The result was rampant abuses of power, payoffs and kickbacks, and unaccountable performances at the federal level.  It took nearly 40 years to transform the federal workforce into an independent and professional corps, and almost 70 years before Congress formally forbade civil-service workers from conducting political activities, through the Hatch Act of 1939.

Seventy-four years later, the civil-service system has been exposed as a failure – at least in this administration.  Instead of an independent workforce of professionals who implement federal regulation in an even-handed and competent manner, we have returned to the era of partisan retribution and politically-motivated malevolence.

This goes far beyond the simple incompetence of government eminently displayed by the Department of Health and Human Services in its rollout of the Affordable Care Act exchanges.  Despite having three and a half years between the passage of the ACA and the start date of the exchanges, the federal and state websites launched on October 1st – and promptly crashed.  

Media outlets tried finding someone, anyone, who successfully navigated the system, only to come up with one person who just happened to be a volunteer at Organizing for America – which spent all year promoting Obamacare.  CBS News called this a “unicorn” hunt , while USA Today ripped the Obama administration for the “inexcusable mess” and “nightmare” of the exchanges. …

Michael Ramirez, who we see most often as a cartoonist has more. And the first five cartoons today are his also.  

Word came this week that the National Institutes of Health has suspended therapy-dog visits to sick children at its clinical center because of a 25% reduction in staff, even though volunteers run the program.

Seems the veterinarians who evaluate the dogs have been furloughed. So how about the frequently used dogs that have already been evaluated? No deal.

Last week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid refused to fund NIH clinical trials for children with cancer. When asked why, if it could mean saving a single child, Reid replied: “Why would we do that?”

These are just kids, after all. Who cares if they’re in pain or die because of his intransigence and lack of compassion?

It’s comforting to know, however, that the House and Senate gyms are still open, that the government had enough money to buy a mechanical bull and, while the feds barricaded the open-air National Mall and threatened to fine and arrest those who walk there, they’ll let an immigration amnesty rally take place on those same grounds. …

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Here on the Virginia Peninsula bordered on the north by the York River, east by the Chesapeake Bay and south by the James, we have many federal facilities including those owned and operated by the national park service, the folks Mark Steyn said have become the “shock troops of the punitive bureaucracy.” The local paper, The Daily Press had a story today about one small business caught up in the country wide problems caused by the federal government’s Barrycades.

When Carrot Tree manager Glenn Helseth ran into the family of a long-time patron over the weekend who had hoped to celebrate her 100th birthday this week at the restaurant’s Yorktown location, he knew what he had to do.

“That’s when my resolve to open up began,” he said Tuesday.

The Carrot Tree restaurant’s Yorktown location opened at 11 a.m. Tuesday after being closed for a week as a result of the federal government shutdown. The restaurant was forced to close on Oct. 1 because of its location on Main Street in the Cole Digges House, which is owned by the National Park Service.

Park service policy requires that all concessions close during a federal government shutdown. The Carrot Tree is considered a concessioner. Rep. Rob Wittman‘s Yorktown office, which is located in a park service building next door to the Carrot Tree, is allowed to remain open because it operates under a lease that does not provide services to visitors. …

John Fund reminds us of the 100th birthday of the income tax.

… The income tax has also changed America. In 1956, Howard Buffett, a former conservative Nebraska congressman and the father of the much more liberal investor Warren Buffett, gave a speech decrying the tax’s pernicious effects:

“The last 40 years have seen a gigantic expansion of political power over economic affairs by the federal government. The change is linked by many scholars to the passage of the income tax law of 1913. This law revolutionized the taxing system in two ways:

1. It gave the government new powers over the economic status of the individual. This change has curtailed the ability of the individual to achieve economic independence.

2. The part of his production taken from the producer cumulatively increases the power of the federal government proportionately with the increase in its income. This power is not created. It is simply taken away from the people.”

Some will claim the government-shutdown fight is about Obamacare. Others will say it is about the long-term debt we are loading onto future generations. Liberals will claim it’s about Republicans’ petulance in the face of bills we must pay. But in no small part it is also about the size and scope of the federal government that the income tax ushered in exactly a century ago. That’s why it’s so fitting that the shutdown battle is happening right now. It’s time for rhetoric that rises above partisanship. It’s time for some reflection about what kind of country we’ve become — thanks to the income tax.

A happier celebration comes from the 30th anniversary of the month of September 1983 when the Reagan recovery was starting to take effect. That was the month when our economy added 1,114,000 jobs. The administration throws a party when the number gets north of 200,000 and that’s with an economy one third larger. Even factoring in the 640,000 jobs created by the end of an AT&T strike, we still had a growth of 750,000 in one month. James Pethokoukis has the story.

No September jobs report today, but oh to have been covering the economy when the September 1983 jobs report came out.

Back then, the BLS reported net new payrolls of 1,114,000. That’s right, over a million net new jobs in just one month. The Reagan Recovery was on.

That number is even more amazing when you consider the US labor force was a third smaller back then. The equivalent number of jobs today would be more like 1.6 million. In a single month. By contrast, analysts were looking for nonfarm payroll growth this month of around 180,000.

For all 1983, the US economy added 3.5 million new jobs, followed by 3.9 million in 1984.

Update: It has been noted that the September 1983 jobs number benefited roughly 640,000 AT&T workers returning from a strike. But even if you factor those jobs out, there were roughly 750,000 jobs created that month on a 2013 equivalent basis. Now that’s a jobs recovery!

Remember back in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina when people who flooded the area with needed items were often referred to in derogatory terms for their “profiteering.” How is that different from one of the left’s heroes – Warren Buffett?  WSJ has the story of his profits from the troubles of others during the storm that hit our financial system in the last few years. The vigorish on the loan to B of A would make a loan shark proud. Pickerhead thinks people should be free to contract whether paying a high price for a generator or for a loan.

Billionaire Warren Buffett tossed lifelines to a handful of blue-chip companies during the financial crisis. Five years later the payoff on those deals is becoming clear: $10 billion and counting.

Mr. Buffett approached that figure after he collected another hefty payment last week, bringing to nearly 40% the pretax income on his crisis-era investments, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.

The bounty is a vivid illustration of one of Mr. Buffett’s favorite investing maxims: “Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful.” …

… Mr. Buffett’s stake in Bank of America could pay off for years. Berkshire invested $5 billion in the bank in 2011, which adds about $300 million in annual pretax income. Bank of America Chief Executive Brian Moynihan recently said he doesn’t plan to buy back the preferred shares any time soon. Berkshire also has until 2021 to exercise warrants for 700 million common shares for an additional $5 billion at $7.14 a share. Based on the bank’s current stock price of about $14, the warrants create a paper profit of nearly $5 billion.

We opened today with a story about federal thugs making life difficult for citizens. We close with an editorial from the San Diego Union-Tribune which notes the administration had plenty of warning about the looming problems paying death benefits to fallen soldiers, but did nothing.

… On Wednesday, CNN reported that on Sept. 27, days before the shutdown began, the Pentagon was already telling reporters it planned to suspend death benefits.

So for two weeks, the Obama administration has been anticipating this nightmare would come to pass — and did nothing to pre-empt it. Only when the Pentagon began denying death benefits and the backlash began did the White House realize this ploy was a political misstep and seek a fix.

It is an appalling commentary on the president and his administration that they chose to bully the families of dead American soldiers for perceived political gain.

Shame on Barack Obama.

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NY Times Magazine with the story of the development of the iPhone. Believe it or not, Apple released the phone less than seven years ago.

The 55 miles from Campbell to San Francisco make for one of the nicest commutes anywhere. The journey mostly zips along the Junipero Serra Freeway, a grand and remarkably empty highway that abuts the east side of the Santa CruzMountains. It is one of the best places in Silicon Valley to spot a start-up tycoon speed-testing his Ferrari and one of the worst places for cellphone reception. For Andy Grignon, it was therefore the perfect place for him to be alone with his thoughts early on Jan. 8, 2007.

This wasn’t Grignon’s typical route to work. He was a senior engineer at Apple in Cupertino, the town just west of Campbell. His morning drive typically covered seven miles and took exactly 15 minutes. But today was different. He was going to watch his boss, Steve Jobs, make history at the Macworld trade show in San Francisco. Apple fans had for years begged Jobs to put a cellphone inside their iPods so they could stop carrying two devices in their pockets. Jobs was about to fulfill that wish. Grignon and some colleagues would spend the night at a nearby hotel, and around 10 a.m. the following day they — along with the rest of the world — would watch Jobs unveil the first iPhone.

But as Grignon drove north, he didn’t feel excited. He felt terrified. …

 

…Grignon had been part of the iPhone rehearsal team at Apple and later at the presentation site in San Francisco’s MosconeCenter. He had rarely seen Jobs make it all the way through his 90-minute show without a glitch. Jobs had been practicing for five days, yet even on the last day of rehearsals the iPhone was still randomly dropping calls, losing its Internet connection, freezing or simply shutting down. …

 

… Grignon knew the iPhone unveiling was not an ordinary product announcement, but no one could have anticipated what a seminal moment it would become. In the span of seven years, the iPhone and its iPad progeny have become among the most important innovations in Silicon Valley’s history. …

 

… It’s hard to overstate the gamble Jobs took when he decided to unveil the iPhone back in January 2007. Not only was he introducing a new kind of phone — something Apple had never made before — he was doing so with a prototype that barely worked. Even though the iPhone wouldn’t go on sale for another six months, he wanted the world to want one right then. In truth, the list of things that still needed to be done was enormous. A production line had yet to be set up. Only about a hundred iPhones even existed, all of them of varying quality. …

 

… Remarkably, Jobs had to be talked into having Apple build a phone at all. It had been a topic of conversation among his inner circle almost from the moment Apple introduced the iPod in 2001. The conceptual reasoning was obvious: consumers would rather not carry two or three devices for e-mail, phone calls and music if they could carry one. But every time Jobs and his executives examined the idea in detail, it seemed like a suicide mission. Phone chips and bandwidth were too slow for anyone to want to surf the Internet and download music or video over a cellphone connection. E-mail was a fine function to add to a phone, but Research in Motion’s BlackBerry was fast locking up that market.

Above all, Jobs didn’t want to partner with any of the wireless carriers. Back then the carriers expected to dominate any partnership with a phone maker, and because they controlled the network, they got their way. Jobs, a famed control freak, couldn’t imagine doing their bidding. …

 

… Jon Rubinstein, Apple’s top hardware executive at the time, says there were even long discussions about how big the phone would be. “I was actually pushing to do two sizes — to have a regular iPhone and an iPhone mini like we had with the iPod. I thought one could be a smartphone and one could be a dumber phone. But we never got any traction on the small one, and in order to do one of these projects, you really need to put all your wood behind one arrow.”

The iPhone project was so complex that it occasionally threatened to derail the entire corporation. Many top engineers in the company were being sucked into the project, forcing slowdowns in the timetables of other work. Had the iPhone been a dud or not gotten off the ground at all, Apple would have had no other big products ready to announce for a long time. And worse, according to a top executive on the project, the company’s leading engineers, frustrated by failure, would have left Apple. …

 

… When Jobs started talking about the iPhone on Jan. 9, 2007, he said, “This is a day I have been looking forward to for two and a half years.” Then he regaled the audience with myriad tales about why consumers hated their cellphones. Then he solved all their problems — definitively.

As Grignon and others from Apple sat nervously in the audience, Jobs had the iPhone play some music and a movie clip to show off the phone’s beautiful screen. He made a phone call to show off the phone’s reinvented address book and voice mail. He sent a text and an e-mail, showing how easy it was to type on the phone’s touch-screen keyboard. He scrolled through a bunch of photos, showing how simple pinches and spreads of two fingers could make the pictures smaller or bigger. He navigated The New York Times’s and Amazon’s Web sites to show that the iPhone’s Internet browser was as good as the one on his computer. He found a Starbucks with Google Maps — and called the number from the stage — to show how it was impossible to get lost with an iPhone.

By the end, Grignon wasn’t just relieved; he was drunk. He’d brought a flask of Scotch to calm his nerves. “And so there we were in the fifth row or something — engineers, managers, all of us — doing shots of Scotch after every segment of the demo. There were about five or six of us, and after each piece of the demo, the person who was responsible for that portion did a shot. When the finale came — and it worked along with everything before it, we all just drained the flask. It was the best demo any of us had ever seen. And the rest of the day turned out to be just a [expletive] for the entire iPhone team. We just spent the entire rest of the day drinking in the city. It was just a mess, but it was great.”

Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.

Leno: The National Zoo is closed due to the government shutdown. Only the pandas there are working because technically they work for China.

Fallon: After Congress failed to reach an agreement on a new spending bill, the federal government has officially shut down. So, roads won’t get fixed, public employees won’t be able to help you, and getting a federal loan for a house will be very difficult. But there will also be a lot of differences.

Leno: Obama has canceled his Asia trip, said he didn’t want to be in Indonesia not doing anything to solve the shutdown crisis when he could be at home not doing anything to solve the shutdown crisis.

Fallon: Michael Jordan says he could have beaten LeBron James one-on-one during his prime. James replied, ‘No kidding. I was nine then.’

Leno: How many are worried about the government shutdown? How many are more worried about the government starting back up?

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Time to look in on the IRS once again. The big news now is that obama’s chicago style IRS thugs went after Dr. Ben Carson after he had the temerity to criticize the one. Washington Times with the story.

Tea party groups, Franklin Graham, Christine O’Donnell, a pro-marriage group. And now Dr. Ben Carson.

The list of conservatives targeted by the Internal Revenue Service for audits, tax-exempt reviews or tax privacy breaches keeps growing, raising fresh questions in Washington about whether a scandal the Obama administration has blamed on bureaucratic incompetence and coincidence may in fact involve something more nefarious.

The latest revelation came Thursday from Dr. Carson, the renowned neurosurgeon who told The Washington Times that he was targeted for an audit just months after he gave a speech in front of President Obama that challenged America’s leadership. The agency requested to review his real estate holdings and then conducted a full audit.

In the end, the IRS found no wrongdoing, Dr. Carson said, but it raised his suspicions about being singled out for his speech.

“I guess it could be a coincidence, but I never had been audited before and never really had any encounters with the IRS,” Dr. Carson said in an interview. “But it certainly would make one suspicious because we know now the IRS has been used for political purposes and therefore actions like this come under suspicion.” …

IBD Editors say there’s no chance the Ben Carson audit was an accident.

… This is not a coincidence, any more than awakening with a severed horse’s head in your bed after being made “an offer you can’t refuse” is.

Someone — either within the IRS bureaucracy or above it — saw what Carson did, didn’t like it, and decided to make him pay. The American people must know who it was.

And there are two other crucial points to the victimization of this man who personifies the American Dream.

First, when a government is as big as ours has become, outrageous abuse from the soldiers of its financing machinery is inevitable, especially within a governmental climate that encourages it.

Second, there is no excuse for a president who’s been in office for more than four years failing to ensure that such outrages couldn’t happen.

Whether or not Obama instigated IRS abuse for political objectives, he is responsible for a culture within the bureaucracy that tolerated and even encouraged it.

Lois Lerner, recently fired from the IRS, can expect a pension with a lifetime value of $3,960,000. CNS News has this story.

Even before she retired last week, scandalized IRS official Lois Lerner’s compensation was already attracting attention.  While on administrative leave, federal rules allowed her to keep collecting a salary, one that reportedly totaled $177,000. So it was no surprise when speculation arose over how much Lerner could collect in federal pension benefits.

Unfortunately, that speculation, which initially projected a benefit of over $50,000, might be off by about half … and in the wrong direction.

National Taxpayers Union calculations show that Lerner could qualify for a starting pension at the annual equivalent of as much as $102,600, and up to $3.96 million over her lifetime.

The individual retirement choices of federal employees are not a matter of public record. However, precisely because NTU has been denied this information in the past (specifically pertaining to Members of Congress), we’ve developed the most accurate method available to provide solid estimates of how much federal employees can collect. …

CNS News also reports the IRS has only produced 10% of the documents demanded by congressional committees. 

 - The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee–which is probing the Internal Revenue Service’s discriminatory treatment of Tea Party and conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status–says the IRS has thus far handed over to the committee only about 10 percent of the documents the IRS itself has said are responsive to the committee’s demands for documents.

The committee subpoenaed the Treasury Department for relevant documents from the department and the IRS more than seven weeks ago at the beginning of August.

“To date, the IRS has produced to the committee only about 10 percent of all responsive materials that it has identified,” the committee’s majority staff said in a memo to committee members last Tuesday.

Committee staff confirmed to CNSNews.com today that the IRS has not produced a significant number of additional documents since that memo was circulated on Sept. 17, and that as of the afternoon of Monday, Sept. 23, the IRS’s total production of documents to the committee remained only about 10 percent of those the IRS has said are responsive

“In his letter of August 2, 2013, Acting Commissioner Werfel represented to the committee that the IRS has identified 660,000 responsive documents,” said the Oversight Committee majority staff memo. “The committee has received only 63,000 pages.” …

According to a WSJ OpEd, all of the IRS news has vanished from the three networks.

ABC, CBS and NBC have so far refused to report the latest bombshell in the IRS scandal – a newly released list from the agency that showed it flagged political groups for “anti-Obama rhetoric.” On September 18 USA Today, in a front page story, reported the following: “Newly uncovered IRS documents show the agency flagged political groups based on the content of their literature, raising concerns specifically about ‘anti-Obama rhetoric,’ inflammatory language and ‘emotional’ statements made by non-profits seeking tax-exempt status.”

Not only have ABC, CBS and NBC not reported this story they’ve flat out stopped covering the IRS scandal on their evening and morning shows. It’s been 85 days since ABC last touched the story on June 26. NBC hasn’t done a report for 84 days and CBS last mentioned the IRS scandal 56 days ago on July 24. …

Leonard Downie, former WaPo executive editor, details how reporters are learning to fight back against administration sleuths.

In the Watergate era, the Nixon administration’s telephone wiretaps were the biggest concern for journalists and sources worried about government surveillance. That was one of the reasons why Bob Woodward met with FBI official Mark Felt (a.k.a. “Deep Throat”) in an underground parking garage in Arlington, and why he and Carl Bernstein did much of their reporting by knocking on the front doors of their sources’ homes. Except for the aborted prosecution of Daniel Ellsberg for the leak of the Pentagon Papers, criminal culpability or pervasive surveillance were not major concerns, especially after Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in 1974.

Not so now. With the passage of the Patriot Act after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a vast expansion of intelligence agencies and their powers, the aggressive exploitation of intrusive digital surveillance capabilities, the excessive classification of public documents and officials’ sophisticated control of the news media’s access to the workings of government, journalists who cover national security are facing vast and unprecedented challenges in their efforts to hold the government accountable to its citizens. They find that government officials are increasingly fearful of talking to them, and they worry that their communications with sources can be monitored at any time.

So what are they doing? Many reporters covering national security and government policy in Washington these days are taking precautions to keep their sources from becoming casualties in the Obama administration’s war on leaks. They and their remaining government sources often avoid telephone conversations and e-mail exchanges, arranging furtive one-on-one meetings instead. A few news organizations have even set up separate computer networks and safe rooms for journalists trained in encryption and other ways to thwart surveillance.

“I worry now about calling somebody because the contact can be found out through a check of phone records or e-mails,” said veteran national security journalist R. Jeffrey Smith of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit accountability news organization. “It leaves a digital trail that makes it easier for government to monitor those contacts.”

“We have to think more about when we use cellphones, when we use e-mail and when we need to meet sources in person,” said Michael Oreskes, senior managing editor of the Associated Press. “We need to be more and more aware that government can track our work without talking to our reporters, without letting us know.” …

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Mark Steyn has wonderful words for the people who shut down the World War Two memorial in DC. Steyn is always making up new words and his tour de force today is his word for the barriers set up by the park service all over our country. Mark calls them Barrycades.

… Nevertheless, just because it’s a phony crisis doesn’t mean it can’t be made even phonier. The perfect symbol of the shutdown-simulacrum so far has been the World War II Memorial. This is an open-air facility on the National Mall — that’s to say, an area of grass with a monument at the center. By comparison with, say, the IRS, the National Parks Service is not usually one of the more controversial government agencies. But, come “shutdown,” they’re reborn as the shock troops of the punitive bureaucracy. Thus, they decided to close down an unfenced open-air site — which oddly enough requires more personnel to shut than it would to keep it open.

So the Parks Service dispatched their own vast army to the World War II Memorial to ring it with barricades and yellow “Police Line — Do Not Cross” tape strung out like the world’s longest “We Support Our Troops” ribbon. For good measure, they issued a warning that anybody crossing the yellow line would be liable to arrest — or presumably, in extreme circumstances, the same multi-bullet ventilation that that mentally ill woman from Connecticut wound up getting from the coppers. In a heartening sign that the American spirit is not entirely dead, at least among a small percentage of nonagenarians, a visiting party of veterans pushed through the barricades and went to honor their fallen comrades, mordantly noting for reporters that, after all, when they’d shown up on the beach at Normandy it too had not been officially open.

One would not be altogether surprised to find the feds stringing yellow police tape along the Rio Grande, the 49th Parallel, and the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, if only to keep Americans in rather than anybody else out. Still, I would like to have been privy to the high-level discussions at which the government took the decision to install its Barrycades on open parkland. For anyone with a modicum of self-respect, it’s difficult to imagine how even the twerpiest of twerp bureaucrats would consent to stand at a crowd barrier and tell a group of elderly soldiers who’ve flown in from across the country that they’re forbidden to walk across a piece of grass and pay their respects. Yet, if any National Parks Service employee retained enough sense of his own humanity to balk at these instructions or other spiteful, petty closures of semi-wilderness fishing holes and the like, we’ve yet to hear about it.

The World War II Memorial exists thanks to some $200 million in private donations — plus $15 million or so from Washington: In other words, the feds paid for the grass. But the thug usurpers of the bureaucracy want to send a message: In today’s America, everything is the gift of the government, and exists only at the government’s pleasure, whether it’s your health insurance, your religious liberty, or the monument to your fallen comrades. The Barrycades are such a perfect embodiment of what James Piereson calls “punitive liberalism” they should be tied round Obama’s neck forever, in the way that “ketchup is a vegetable” got hung around Reagan-era Republicans. Alas, the court eunuchs of the Obama media cannot rouse themselves even on behalf of the nation’s elderly warriors. …

Wesley Pruden found a park service ranger with some sense of decency.

… The Park Service appears to be closing streets on mere whim and caprice. The rangers even closed the parking lot at Mount Vernon, where the plantation home of George Washington is a favorite tourist destination. That was after they barred the new World War II Memorial on the Mall to veterans of World War II. But the government does not own Mount Vernon; it is privately owned by the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association. The ladies bought it years ago to preserve it as a national memorial. The feds closed access to the parking lots this week, even though the lots are jointly owned with the Mount Vernon ladies. The rangers are from the government, and they’re only here to help.

“It’s a cheap way to deal with the situation,” an angry Park Service ranger in Washington says of the harassment. “We’ve been told to make life as difficult for people as we can. It’s disgusting.” …

Charles Krauthammer explains how he thinks we got to this.

… The most ubiquitous conventional wisdom is that the ultimate cause of these troubles is out-of-control tea party anarchists.

But is this really where the causal chain ends? The tea party was created by Obama’s first-term overreach, most specifically Obama­care. Today’s frantic fight against it is the echoing result of the way it was originally enacted.

From Social Security to civil rights to Medicaid to Medicare, never in the modern history of the country has major social legislation been enacted on a straight party-line vote. Never. In every case, there was significant reaching across the aisle, enhancing the law’s legitimacy and endurance. Yet Obama­care — which revolutionizes one-sixth of the economy, regulates every aspect of medical practice and intimately affects just about every citizen — passed without a single GOP vote.

The Democrats insist they welcomed contributing ideas from Republicans. Rubbish. Republicans proposed that insurance be purchasable across state lines. They got nothing. They sought serious tort reform. They got nothing. Why? Because, admitted Howard Dean, Democrats didn’t want to offend the trial lawyers.

Moreover, the administration was clearly warned. Republican Scott Brown ran in the most inhospitable of states, Massachusetts, on the explicit promise to cast the deciding vote blocking Obamacare. It was January 2010, the height of the debate. He won. Reid ignored this unmistakable message of popular opposition and conjured a parliamentary maneuver — reconciliation — to get around Brown.

Nothing illegal about that. Nothing illegal about ramming it through without a single opposition vote. Just totally contrary to the modern American tradition — and the constitutional decency — of undertaking major social revolutions with only bipartisan majorities. Having stuffed Obamacare down the throats of the GOP and the country, Democrats are now paying the price. …

John Steele Gordon posts on Alice in Wonderland comments.

Politicians fudge the truth all the time. And sometimes they flat-out lie. Bill Clinton’s infamous, “I did not have sex with that woman,” is the modern exemplar of presidential mendacity. At least it was until yesterday, when Barack Obama gave John Harwood of CNBC an interview. One response to a question makes President Clinton’s finger-wagging whopper sound like the Gettysburg Address:

‘PRESIDENT OBAMA: John, I think it’s fair to say that—during the course of my presidency—I have bent over backwards to work with—the Republican party. And have purposely kept my rhetoric down. I think I’m pretty well known for being a calm guy. Sometimes people think I’m too calm.” ‘

The mind boggles. This is a president who did not meet with the Republican minority leader in the Senate until a year and a half into his presidency; who excluded Republicans from any part in the shaping of the ObamaCare legislation, and forced it through on a strictly party-line vote; who excluded Republicans from any input on the stimulus bill; who invited Paul Ryan to a conference on health care and then insulted him to his face when Ryan could not reply; who accused Republicans of wanting only to deny health care to 30 million Americans; who called them “bitter clingers,” and told his supporters to get in their faces.

The only thing President Obama, the most divisive, partisan president in the history of the republic, has ever bent over backwards to do was to get out of a sand trap. He has kept his rhetoric down only to the extent of not advocating violence against Republicans.

I’m not a psychiatrist, so I don’t know whether this is just an utterly cynical remark, made in the knowledge that the lap-dog media will not call him on it, or whether it is an artifact of deep problems in telling reality from fantasy.

History will not treat this man kindly.

David French says the closing of the WW Two memorial is a perfect symbol of government malice.

The mainstream media is in the midst of one of its regular exercises in completely missing a wave of groundswell conservative anger — this time over the closing of the World War II Memorial. It’s as if the entire conservative case against the Obama administration’s incompetence, malice, and inefficiency was boiled down into one incident. …

Jonah Goldberg says we’re getting a good view of the president’s vindictive streak. We call it government by valerie jarrett.

… What’s unusual is the way Obama sees the government as a tool for his ideological agenda. During the fight over the sequester, Obama ordered the government to make the 2 percent budget cut as painful and scary as possible.

“It’s going to be very painful for the flying public,” Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood warned Americans.

“The FAA’s all-hands furloughs managed to convert a less than 4 percent FAA budget cut into a 10 percent air-traffic control cut that would delay 40 percent of flights,” the Wall Street Journal noted at the time. 

The Department of Homeland Security announced it might not be able to protect the nation’s borders, and in an effort to prove the point summarily released a couple thousand of immigrant detainees, many of them with criminal records.

Obama, the avowed problem solver, set out to create problems for the American people, just to prove how great government is and how crazy Republicans were for wanting to cut spending — much of the money borrowed from China — a little. But don’t you dare call him an ideologue!

Now, with the government shutdown and the looming fight over the debt ceiling, Obama’s doubling down on this ideologically perverse strategy.

The National Park Service, which has somehow become the unofficial goon squad of American liberalism, reversed course and let American World War II vets visit the WWII memorial in Washington, D.C. This is obviously good news. (I was waiting to see if Steven Spielberg would come out with a new Obama-friendly director’s cut of Saving Private Ryan in which the old guy at the end is dragged off in cuffs before he can reach Tom Hanks’s grave.)

Still, it cost the government more money to try to keep WWII vets out of an open-air memorial than it would have to just leave it be. In Virginia, the NPS ordered the Claude Moore Colonial Farm to shut down, even though it’s privately funded.

Far worse, Obama told CNBC’s John Harwood that Wall Street should be far more panicky about Republican efforts to use the debt ceiling to win concessions from the White House. I don’t blame Obama for being annoyed with Republicans for trying to use the debt ceiling the exact same way he did when he was a senator. But normally a sitting president doesn’t try to talk down the economy just to win a political point. …

Bloomberg News reports on the strange juxtapositions of what’s closed and what’s open. For example, grocery stores on Army bases are closed while the golf course used by the president on Andrews Air Force Base is open.

Grocery stores on Army bases in the U.S. are closed. The golf course at Andrews Air Force base is open.

All 128 employees of the Saint Lawrence Seaway Development Corp. are working, while 3,000 safety inspectors employed by the Federal Aviation Administration are off the job.

The Food and Drug Administration is reviewing new pharmaceuticals. The National Institutes of Health is turning away new patients for clinical trials.

The seeming randomness of the U.S. government’s first shutdown in 17 years can be explained in part by anomalies in the spending Congress does and doesn’t control. Activities funded by fees from drug, financial-services and other companies are insulated from year-to-year budget dysfunction. The ones that get a budget from Congress get hit. …

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Today’s special Shutdown edition of Pickings starts with Craig Pirrong at Streetwise Professor.

… Look.  I think that Obamacare is a disaster, but that the Republicans played this like idiots: they aren’t known as the Stupid Party for nothing.  Ted Cruz was a debating star at Princeton who thought that studying with alums of “lower Ivies” (like Penn) at Harvard Law was beneath him, but he strategized this like the holder of a diploma from a penitentiary correspondence school. If anything, this strategy has cemented Obamacare, rather than undermined it.

But the most important cause of the current impasse is that a hardcore partisan president is partisan out of near religious conviction in his righteousness, and the near religious conviction that his opponents are evil.  He is willing to compromise on things he doesn’t really care about-and Syria and Iran fall into that category-but it’s a zero sum game to him on domestic matters. He doesn’t want to win: he wants to extirpate his enemies. Beginning to understand this, the Republicans have every incentive to double down.  Meaning that the conflict and crisis will only metastasize.

Every day I pray more fervently that Adam Smith (“much ruin in a country”) and Bismarck (“a special providence for  . . . the United States of America”) are right. We’re testing both.

John Fund corrects some of the misconceptions about the 1995 shutdown.

… Deeply ingrained in the psyche of every congressional Republican is the government shutdown of 1995, for which Republicans were blamed. While many Republicans now believe the shutdown was a mistake, more think the problem was that the party lost its nerve.

Former Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos, now host of ABC’s This Week, has validated that view. In his memoir, he wrote that Democrats, until then holding out against the Republicans’ budget-limiting efforts, were close to blinking. “Clinton was grumpy, the rest of us were grim,” until suddenly news came that Senate majority leader Bob Dole and House speaker Newt Gingrich were blinking first. “Whether the cause was hubris, naïveté, or a failure of nerve,” Stephanopoulos explained, “the Republicans had blown their best chance to splinter our party; from that point on, everything started breaking our way.”

Dick Morris, then a top Clinton strategist, agrees with Stephanopoulos’s analysis. In his book Behind the Oval Office: Getting Reelected Against All Odds he writes, “We were greatly surprised when the Republicans surrendered by offering to reopen the government without getting a budget deal and without any commitments from us other than to balance the budget in seven years based on [Congressional Budget Office] numbers. We all knew this was GOP surrender.”

“What was frustrating about it is, is that we were this close,” Ed Gillespie, a top aide to then-House majority leader Dick Armey, told Fox News years later. Republicans were on the verge of “winning the government shutdown fight. In my estimation, if we’d have hung in there 48 hours more, the worm was about to turn. . . . If we’d had the strength to hang in there another two days, we would have done it on our terms. But we didn’t.”

President Obama and Senate majority leader Harry Reid have read that history and are determined to wait until the markets, or angry constituents or poll numbers, drive the Republicans into another surrender. But Obama knows the longer the shutdown continues, the more he stands to lose. …

WSJ OpEd also corrects some bad history.

As the government shutdown continues, the nation gets closer and closer to the day—probably Oct. 17—when Washington hits the debt limit, and with it the specter of default. President Obama may be getting nervous about what will happen to his negotiating position as that day approaches.

He keeps asserting that the debt limit has never been used “to extort a president or a government party.” Treasury Secretary Jack Lew is selling the same story, saying “until very recently, Congress typically raised the debt ceiling on a routine basis . . . the threat of default was not a bargaining chip in the negotiations.”

This is simply untrue. Consider the shenanigans of congressional Democrats in 1989 over Medicare’s catastrophic health coverage provision. …

And a WaPo OpEd with the same.

One party controls the White House and the Senate by less than the margin needed to end a filibuster, and the other party controls the House by a wide margin. A fundamental conflict over government spending is at the heart of an impasse that leads to a shutdown of the federal government.

The year is not 2013 but 1981 . . . and 1982, 1984, 1986 and 1987. That’s right, the Reagan years, when President Ronald Reagan and House Speaker Tip O’Neill would work things out and avoid having to close the Washington Monument. With all due respect to Chris Matthews and other purveyors of this narrative popular in today’s Washington, the reality was quite different.

I joined the staff of the Office of Personnel Management in 1981. Soon after, several decisive actions by the president demonstrated his determination to show that lines had been crossed. One came in August with the firing of striking air traffic controllers. Another came Nov. 20, when Reagan vetoed an appropriations bill that did not achieve at least half of his proposed reduction of $8.4 billion in domestic spending. In the absence of appropriations, the administration shut down the government for four days. …

Yuval Levin on what the end might look like. 

NR’s Bob Costa, whose reporting on Congress has been second to none, has been reporting all week that John Boehner thinks the CR and debt-ceiling mess could end in a meaningful budget deal. Others have now confirmed his reporting, and apparently Boehner has been making the case to members and brought it up at yesterday’s White House meeting. 

Could it work? Stranger things have happened, though I can’t think of very many right now. But I think the term “grand bargain,” which Bob and others have been using, isn’t right to describe what Boehner and some other House Republicans seem to have in mind. From what has been reported so far, it seems like they’re talking about a fairly modest deal to move some of the sequester caps upward and replace the savings (which come from discretionary cuts) with equal savings that come from entitlement cuts. What might that look like? …

… The Democrats, meanwhile, have locked themselves into a position of total intransigence on the debt ceiling and say they will only negotiate on the budget if Republicans send them a clean one (in other words, one that involves no negotiation). They’ve been confident that they can sustain the argument that Republicans won’t compromise even as Democrats refuse to compromise. They know they can count on a friendly media narrative, and it has mostly succeeded so far, but they also know they are vulnerable on the Vitter amendment, that the House’s small-bill strategy is cracking their wall a little, and that at the end of the day there really has to be an increase in the debt ceiling. They have been very poorly served by their leadership, especially Harry Reid’s bizarre repressed rage; they began their negotiations at the Republicans’ budget numbers and so have never had anything substantive to win in this process; and they risk losing any symbolic victory if they can’t back down from their total obstinacy.    

The way out of this jam (which is a much bigger jam for Republicans than Democrats, let’s be clear) would therefore need to be an agreement that Republicans can honestly present as a debt-ceiling deal that involves a budget compromise and Democrats can honestly present as a budget deal that involves a debt-ceiling increase. That’s what the outcome Boehner seems to envision would offer. In the process, some portion of the sequester caps would be lifted without increasing overall spending and some modest entitlement reforms would be enacted without fundamental changes the Democrats detest. 

Could it work? Maybe. But the political system that could pull it off would probably not have gotten into the situation that requires it.

Very good cartoons today.

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Andrew Malcolm posts on the shutdown.

… Here’s all you need know about Obama’s style of power politics: When his party controlled both houses of Congress, it took him 542 days to have the opposition’s Senate leader over for coffee and a chat.

With his party also controlling both houses, George W. Bush waited all of 96 hours to have Ted Kennedy and others of his brand into the Oval Office when there was no agenda but to talk about how they would talk. Bush aides were also not empowered to call Democrats terrorists and hostage-takers.

Yes, you say, but Bush had been a governor, a chief executive leader who had to develop a strategy and build teams and cooperation with opposition politicians in a legislature.

And Obama was, well, an opposition legislator, who never lead anything larger than a college protest and is so void of core beliefs he still requires a teleprompter to feed him the best poll-tested words to be seen saying.

If this president was a leader and had the country’s best interests in mind, he would have skipped golf last Saturday and invited legislative leaders in to see what little something they might agree on at that last minute of the expiring fiscal year. To get a deal working.

Instead, Obama called those legislators over two days into the partial government shutdown. And before they even arrived, he had his spokesman, Jay Carney, utter this long sound-bite:

“The President is not going to negotiate about how we can come to an agreement on our budget challenges, how we can come to an agreement about funding necessary priorities to ensure that we grow our economy and ensure that the middle class is protected and expanding, ensure that our kids are getting the best education possible, and then ensure that we reduce our deficit in a responsible way.”

So, no negotiations on anything of substance. Just coffee? A pointless meeting to create positive optics so critics can no longer say, “Obama won’t even meet with Congress.”

Last year Obama told the Russians he’d have more flexibility after his final election. Apparently, such flexibility does not apply to domestic affairs. …

Seth Mandel thinks Harry Reid has lost it.

“My staff has always said ‘don’t say this,’ but…” is a frightening disclaimer for the communications staffers of any member of Congress to hear. But it can be especially cringe inducing when the person reciting the line has a terrible habit of not only saying things over the warnings of his staff but also saying things he shouldn’t even have to be told not to say. Joe Biden falls into this category. And so does the author of the above line, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

The full version of that quote, from 2008, is: “My staff has always said ‘don’t say this,’ but I’m going to say it again, because it’s so descriptive because it’s true. Leader Boehner mentioned the tourists lined up in summer, winter–long lines coming into the Capitol. In the summertime, because the high humidity and how hot it gets here, you could literally smell the tourists coming into the Capitol. And that may be descriptive, but it’s true.”

Reid may have been channeling Biden with that “literally,” but it’s the sort of quote that Democrats like Reid and Biden give because they know they’ll get a pass from the media in the way a Republican never could and they seem to be engaged in a decades-long competition over who can be the first to make conservative bloggers’ heads literally explode. Today, Reid offered yet another example of this tendency. …

John Hinderaker from Power Line posts on the closing of the World War II memorial.

That’s right: the Obama administration dispatched more security guards to prevent World War II veterans from visiting the wide-open WWII memorial on the Mall than it stationed in Benghazi, notwithstanding the American Ambassador’s pleas for better security. Paul Bedard has the story:

“The National Park Service is sending so many officials out to shut down federal parks that it might have to suspend furloughs if the government closure continues.

Two examples:

– At the World War II Memorial on The Mall in Washington, where veterans have been staging protests to keep it open, Washington Examiner’s Charlie Spiering reports that at least seven officials were dispatched Wednesday morning to set up a ring of barricades to block tourists from the memorial. That is two more than the State Department had in Benghazi a year ago on the night of the terrorist attack that killed four, including the U.S. ambassador.”

Ouch. One might think that President Obama’s priorities are all screwed up.

“– National Park Officials closed down the educational Claude Moore Colonial Farm near the CIA in McLean, Va., even though the federal government doesn’t fund or staff the park popular with children and schools. Just because the privately-operated park is on Park Service land, making the federal government simply its landlord, the agency decided to close it.”

This is another instance where the Obama administration went out of its way, not to save money, but to inconvenience taxpayers by creating the illusion that the government “shutdown” is causing problems.

More from Power Line.

President Obama’s barricading of the World War II memorial on the Mall, to keep out veterans who had long planned visits to the memorial, was one of the dumbest PR moves of all time. …

And more.

… You can’t make this stuff up: World War II veterans come to Washington to see their monument, and the Obama administration tries to block them by putting up barricades. When that blunder starts getting media attention, the administration doubles down by paying union members $15 to march around, waving signs and protesting–as though that were a sure-fire way to generate sympathy for the nonessential federal employees who are getting the day off. Is it possible that the Democrats could be snatching defeat from the jaws of victory? …

Spengler says the US plays checkers while Russia plays chess.

Americans see individual pieces of geopolitical real estate in isolation, like hotels on the Monopoly board, while the Russians look at the interaction of all their spheres of interest around the globe.

Syria is of no real strategic interest to Russia, nor to anyone else for that matter. It is a broken wreck of a country, with an irreparably damaged economy, without the energy, water, or food to maintain long-term economic viability. The multiethnic melange left in place by British and French cartographers after the First World War has broken down irreparably into a war of mutual extermination, whose only result can be depopulation or partition on the Yugoslav model.

Syria only has importance in so far as its crisis threatens to spill over into surrounding territories which have more strategic importance. As a Petri dish for jihadist movements, it threatens to become the training ground for a new generation of terrorists, serving the same role that Afghanistan did during the 1990s and 2000s. 

As a testing ground for the use of weapons of mass destruction, it provides a diplomatic laboratory to gauge the response of world powers to atrocious actions with comparatively little risk to the participants. It is an incubator of national movements, in which, for example, the newfound freedom of action for the country’s 2 million Kurds constitutes a means of destabilizing Turkey and other countries with substantial Kurdish minorities. Most important, as the cockpit of confessional war between Sunnis and Shi’ite, Syria may become the springboard for a larger conflict engulfing Iraq and possibly other states in the region.

I do not know what Putin wants in Syria. I do not believe that at this point Russia’s president knows what he wants in Syria, either. A strong chess player engaging an inferior opponent will create complications without an immediate strategic objective, in order to provoke blunders from the other side and take opportunistic advantage. There are many things that Putin wants. But he wants one big thing above all, namely, the restoration of Russia’s great power status. Russia’s leading diplomatic role in Syria opens several options to further this goal. …

Reason reviews a book about the Wisconsin union fight written by two reporters from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

It’s not clear who first introduced the chant “this is what democracy looks like” to the epic early-2011 showdown in Wisconsin between angry public-sector union workers and newly elected Republican Gov. Scott Walker. The protesters shouting the phrase surely meant to insist that they were the true voice of the people. But despite the sheer size and raucous noise of the crowds that packed the Wisconsin State Capitol for weeks protesting Walker’s proposed legislation to roll back union benefits and prerogatives, the demonstrators ultimately lost every fight that mattered. They lost because the voting public in Wisconsin approved of Walker’s plan, albeit narrowly. 

The people had already spoken when they elected a Republican governor and legislative majority in 2010. Democracy then re-affirmed Walker’s controversial decisions even under the glare of a nationwide spotlight and a hostile press. Nevertheless, the sloganeers were correct, just not in the way they intended.

As Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reporters Jason Stein and Patrick Marley note in their book More Than They Bargained For: Scott Walker, Unions, and the Fight for Wisconsin, “The citizens of Wisconsin and indeed the country as a whole, sometimes derided as apathetic and out of touch, showed that they were eager to engage on both sides, to defend the rights of workers and to safeguard the state’s financial future.” The engaged activists “marched, they sent hundreds of thousands of emails and tweets, and they overwhelmingly held themselves to a peaceful, democratic purpose, which asserted itself even in the face of the many exceptions to that general rule. Likewise, the police and authorities also managed to handle the protests without serious injury or loss of life on either side. When it came time to vote, citizens set turnout records.”

Engaged citizenry, vigorous debate, productive legislatures: This is everything that good-government types usually pine for. Yet most national media outlets viewed the Walker/union battle as something distasteful and unfortunate. “How did Wisconsin become the most divisive place in America?” clucked a New York Times headline. 

One of the greatest motivators for political participation, it turns out, is bitter division. As Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald (R-Beaver Dam) put it in February 2011, “Democracy isn’t pretty all the time.”

In their admirably evenhanded account, Stein and Marley leave readers to their own conclusions. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

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Jonathan Tobin suggests the shutdown may last longer than we think.

…He (obama) has been courting a shutdown since 2011 and clearly appears to believe that he can turn his sagging second term around by facing down the GOP and winning. Since he thinks the worse things get the better it will be for Democrats, he has no incentive to compromise even on the most reasonable of Republican demands about not exempting federal employees from the joys of ObamaCare.

But what the president may be about to discover is that he has backed the Republicans into a spot they also have no great incentive to abandon. The assumption that the Republicans will quail in the face of media opprobrium and sob stories about furloughed federal employees doesn’t take into account the fact that having stuck their necks out this far, a quick retreat may do them more harm than good. Not only would their base not forgive Boehner for cracking, but independents prepared to blame the Democrats or both parties equally for the problem might think worse of them for acting as if the whole thing was a charade.

If so, we may be in for a longer confrontation than anyone thought with consequences for both sides that are equally unpredictable. Fasten your seat belts; it’s going to be a bumpy shutdown.

Appearing on Morning Joe, Bob Woodward says if the economy suffers from the shutdown it is on the president’s head. Free Beacon with the story.

BOB WOODWARD: Can I enter in here just for a moment because I think it’s a good question. And there is something the president could be doing. He said he will not negotiate on the debt ceiling. A reasonable position. “I will not be blackmailed” he said. But he should be talking. They should be meeting, discussing this, because as I think Steve Ratner showed earlier, the American economy is at stake and the president, if there is a downturn or a collapse or whatever could happen here that’s bad, it’s going to be on his head. The history books are going to say, we had an economic calamity in the Presidency of Barack Obama. Speaker Boehner, indeed, is playing a role on this. Go back to the Great Depression in the 1930s. I’ll bet no one can name who was the speaker of the House at the time. Henry Thomas Rainey. He’s not in the history book it’s on the president’s head. He’s got to lead. He’s got to talk. And the absence of discussion here, I think, is baffling element.

Sean Trende of Real Clear Politics posts on the possible effects of the shutdown.

… 4. What happens to red state Senate Democrats? Of course, the real action for 2014 is not the House, where the GOP will continue to control the agenda except in the unlikely event that it loses 17 seats. The real fight is for control of the Senate, which in turn revolves around races in eight states: West Virginia, Arkansas, Kentucky, South Dakota, Louisiana, Alaska, Montana and North Carolina. Obama lost those states by, respectively, 27, 24, 23, 18, 17, 14, 14 and two points, respectively.

The politics of a shutdown in these states are very different than in the nation as a whole. We can try to estimate the popularity of a shutdown by taking as a national baseline CNN’s recent finding that 46 percent of voters would blame Republicans for a shutdown vs. the 36 percent that would blame Obama. If we adjust these numbers according to the results of the presidential election in 2012, we would estimate that the president would shoulder the blame for a shutdown in each of those states save for North Carolina, and that outright majorities would blame the president in West Virginia, Arkansas and Kentucky.

The last thing Democratic candidates in these states want is a public spat over a piece of legislation that is highly controversial, that might have a problematic rollout in the coming weeks and months, and that places them on the side of an unpopular president. If there’s an upside for the GOP, this is probably it. Even after the 1995-96 shutdowns, the GOP managed to gain Senate seats, largely by making gains in reddish states.

Of course, none of this should be read as advocating the shutdown, or predicting that it could not possibly have any negative consequences for the GOP. For starters, a government shutdown is essentially lighting a fuse without knowing exactly where it will go. This is something that could easily get out of control if the shutdown stretches out for weeks and bleeds into the debt ceiling battle, which could be potentially catastrophic for the county. …

Dan Pfeiffer, senior white house advisor, says the administration is “not for negotiating with people who have a bomb strapped to their chest.” The GOP as terrorists has become a left meme. Just for grins, let’s take a look at real terrorists. Brendan O’Neill of Telegraph, UK thinks it is time to talk about the barbarism of modern islamist terrorism.

In Western news-making and opinion-forming circles, there’s a palpable reluctance to talk about the most noteworthy thing about modern Islamist violence: its barbarism, its graphic lack of moral restraint. This goes beyond the BBC’s yellow reluctance to deploy the T-word – terrorism – in relation to the bloody assault on the Westgate shopping mall in Kenya at the weekend. Across the commentating board, people are sheepish about pointing out the historically unique lunacy of Islamist violence and its utter detachment from any recognisable moral universe or human values. We have to talk about this barbarism; we have to appreciate how new and unusual it is, how different it is even from the terrorism of the 1970s or of the early twentieth century. We owe it to the victims of these assaults, and to the principle of honest and frank political debate, to face up to the unhinged, morally unanchored nature of Islamist violence in the 21st century.

Maybe it’s because we have become so inured to Islamist terrorism in the 12 years since 9/11 that even something like the blowing-up of 85 Christians outside a church in Pakistan no longer shocks us or even makes it on to many newspaper front pages. But consider what happened: two men strapped with explosives walked into a group of men, women and children who were queuing for food and blew up themselves and the innocents gathered around them. Who does that? How far must a person have drifted from any basic system of moral values to behave in such an unrestrained and wicked fashion? …

… My penny’s worth is that this terrorism speaks to a profound crisis of politics and of morality. Where earlier terrorist groups were restrained both by their desire to appear as rational political actors with a clear goal in mind and by basic moral rules of human behaviour – meaning their violence was often bloody, yes, but rarely focused narrowly on committing mass murder – today’s Islamist terrorists appear to float free of normal political rules and moral compunctions. This is what is so infuriating about the BBC’s refusal to call these groups terrorists – because if anything, and historically speaking, even the term terrorist might be too good for them.

Furthermore, these people are engaged in a slaughter of Christians. Kirsten Powers posts in the Daily Beast.

Christians in the Middle East and Africa are being slaughtered, tortured, raped, kidnapped, beheaded, and forced to flee the birthplace of Christianity. One would think this horror might be consuming the pulpits and pews of American churches. Not so. The silence has been nearly deafening.

As Egypt’s Copts have battled the worst attacks on the Christian minority since the 14th century, the bad news for Christians in the region keeps coming. On Sunday, Taliban suicide bombers killed at least 85 worshippers at All Saints’ church, which has stood since 1883 in the city of Peshawar, Pakistan. Christians were also the target of Islamic fanatics in the attack on a shopping center in Nairobi, Kenya, this week that killed more than 70 people. The Associated Press reported that the Somali Islamic militant group al-Shabab “confirmed witness accounts that gunmen separated Muslims from other people and let the Muslims go free.” The captives were asked questions about Islam. If they couldn’t answer, they were shot.

In Syria, Christians are under attack by Islamist rebels and fear extinction if Bashar al-Assad falls. This month, rebels overran the historic Christian town of Maalula, where many of its inhabitants speak Aramaic, the language of Jesus. The AFP reported that a resident of Maalula called her fiancé’s cell and was told by member of the Free Syrian Army that they gave him a chance to convert to Islam and he refused. So they slit his throat. …

The Express, UK calls the perps “mindless youths,” but we know who is attacking planes in Great Britain with lasers.

THOUSANDS of planes coming in to land at Britain’s busiest airports are in danger of crashing because pilots are being ‘blinded’ by laser pen attackers.

Britain’s largest pilots’ union is so concerned by a recent spate of incidents it has issued an emergency bulletin to members advising them how to avoid being blinded and losing control of their planes.

The British Airline Pilots’ Association (Balpa) now wants the law changed so anyone caught in possession of the higher powered lasers without a “legitimate reason” to be jailed.

“Slaps on wrists and £150 fines are not enough – custodial sentences should be the norm,” a spokesman said yesterday.

Most of the attacks are on large commercial jets, but even military planes carrying injured troops home from Afghanistan to hospitals in the Midlands have been targeted.

Police helicopters chasing criminals over densely populated areas are also regularly hit.

In most cases the beams are being shone by mindless youths, but pilots and security experts worry terrorists could also use them.

The incidents are all contained in official reports logged with the Civil Aviation Authority and obtained by the Sunday Express.

Planes are being struck at the rate of five times a day by beams from high intensity laser pens that can be bought online from as little as £12.

The more powerful products emit bright green beams and cost about £400, with a range of up to 200 miles. ….