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According to Breitbart, Bob Woodward thinks it is absurd to pass an immigration bill no one has read.

Legendary Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward criticized the “Gang of Eight” immigration bill process, and the new rush to pass the repackaged bill with the amendment from Sens. Bob Corker (R-TN) and John Hoeven (R-ND), on Fox News Sunday.

“You can’t have a Congress that is kind of going around picking this and picking that and that fails and that fails and this fails,” Woodward said in the online post-show panel of Fox News Sunday this weekend.

Woodward added that “when you pass complicated legislation and no one has really read the bill” then “the outcome is absurd.”

Woodward is the veteran journalist who, with Carl Bernstein, broke the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon, and has remained a force at the Post over the past several decades.

Steve Hayward takes a look at the bill.

I’m pretty sure it was my first Washington mentor, the great M. Stanton Evans, who told me—and perhaps originated—the famous story of a senior Senate aide explaining American democracy to a Russian visitor shortly after the Soviet Union broke apart in 1991.  The story is probably apocryphal, but like Xenophon’s re-telling of Cyrus the Great, or Machiavelli’s subtle mis-tellings of so many stories, it contains the “effectual truth” of the matter:

‘It’s true, we have a two-party system in America: The Evil Party, and the Stupid Party.  And every once and a while the Evil Party and the Stupid Party get together to pass something really evil and stupid.  That’s called “bipartisanship.” ‘

It would seem the perfect description of the Gang of Eight and immigration reform.  Please save us from bipartisan gangs.

Stan also taught me that whenever you hear about a bad piece of legislation under development in Congress, when you actually read the bill you invariably find out that it’s even worse than you imagined.  So Stan’s column a few days ago (I don’t have a link) notes:

“On first appraisal, the amnesty/immigration bill before the Senate looks pretty bad.  On a more careful comb-through, clause by clause, it looks much worse – like a complete disaster.  It also looks like a massive venture in deception. …”

Mickey Kaus has his metaphor for the bill.

I’ve been trying to think of the right metaphor for the giant Corker-Hoeven amendment, the one that is reportedly giving the Gang of 8′s immigration bill enough votes to pass the Senate. Sure, it’s a fig leaf–but a fig leaf is usually something insignificant-yet-real. This is something grandiose that’s a fraud.

The best I can come up with is this: A man comes into your restaurant. You recognize him–he’s a guy who ate a $100 meal last year and said he’d pay later, but he stiffed you. Now he’s back and wants another meal on credit. He senses you are wary and makes a new offer. “This time I’ll pay you … $2 million! How can you refuse? It’s 2 million dollars!”

You get the idea.  Just try and collect.

Similarly,  Schumer, Durbin & Co. have offered a deal to Corker, Hoeven, and conservatives. In essence, it’s this: You’ll immediately legalize 11 M immigrants who are unlawfully in the country. They’ll get work permits renewable ad infinitum–we call it “provisional,” but basically they’re in. Yes, we know that in 1986 we passed an amnesty and promised enforcement that never happened, but this time we promise to … militarize the Southern border! Hire 20,000 new agents! That’s the ticket. Double the Border Patrol! Spend $20 billion. Quadruple the budget.  Drones in the sky–triple the number of drones. Drones! Sensors on the ground!  700 miles of fence! 100% use of E-Verify! ”I don’t know what more to do, short of just shooting people,” says Gang of 8-er Lindsey Graham.

Just try and collect. …

The Atlantic posts on the increasing prison population. Another result of the foolish drug war.

The U.S. incarceration rate has more than quadrupled since 1980. It’s now the highest in the world, just ahead of Russia and Rwanda. …

… Why have U.S. incarceration rates skyrocketed? The answer is not rising crime rates. In fact, crime rates have actually dropped by more than a quarter over the past 40 years. Some look at these statistics and find confirmation of their view that expanding prison populations reduces crime rates. In fact, however, these same decreases have occurred even in places where incarceration rates have remained unchanged.

New sentencing guidelines have been a key factor. They have reduced judges’ discretion in determining who goes to jail and increased the amount of time convicts sentenced to jail spend there. A notable example is the so-called “three-strikes” law, which mandates sentences ranging from 25 years to life for many repeat offenders. Though championed as protecting the public, such sentences have resulted in long confinements for many non-violent offenders, who constitute half of all inmates.

Perhaps the single greatest contributor has been the so-called “war on drugs,” which has precipitated a 12-fold increase in the number of incarcerated drug offenders. About 1.5 million Americans are arrested each year for drug offenses, one-third of whom end up in prison. Many are repeat offenders caught with small quantities of relatively innocuous drugs, such as marijuana, a type of criminal activity often referred to as “victimless.”

Some sentencing laws seem little less than perverse. For example, in the 1980s, crack cocaine received a great deal of public attention. In response, the U.S. Congress passed legislation imposing a 100 to 1 sentencing ratio for possession of crack cocaine, as compared to its powdered form. That is, someone carrying 5 grams of crack cocaine would get the same sentence as someone carrying 500 grams of powdered cocaine. From a medical point of view, this makes little sense. …

WSJ has the lowdown on America’s Cup spying.

The America’s Cup, which begins in San Francisco July 4, isn’t just sailing’s most prestigious competition. It is also a showcase for the most shamelessly conspicuous spy operation in professional sports.

From San Francisco’s waterfront, it’s impossible to miss the teams practicing on their 13-story-tall yachts—and the fleet of enemy spy vessels trailing them. Onboard the powerboats, which sport their teams’ logos, are photographers with $10,000 Nikon lenses trying to shoot pictures of something the other guys don’t want them to see: a shorter sail, a lighter foil, a modified rudder.

Reconnaissance in the Cup is about as old as the 162-year-old competition itself, and it’s especially crucial this year because the four teams are racing largely untested, state-of-the-art yachts. The squads spy on each other to avoid missing technological breakthroughs and to learn their opponents’ racing strategy.

“Sometimes you get caught up in your own processes and you want to think outside the box,” said Cameron, the New Zealand team photographer. “Those guys”—the competition—”are thinking completely outside the box.”

Espionage has already permeated this Cup. New Zealand coach Rod Davis said that in November, his team needed to test a new foil, which elevates a boat’s hull above water so the boat goes faster. The problem: An Oracle spy boat was lurking outside their Auckland dock.

The solution was to prepare two yachts. One had the new foil. The other didn’t. Both left dock, but the sailors on the new-foil boat pretended to suffer a breakdown. The decoy sailed off and Oracle took the bait, Davis said, leaving the first yacht to test the foil. …

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Mark Steyn on the trip to Europe.

Descending from the heavens for the G-8 summit at beautiful Lough Erne this week, President Obama caused some amusement to his British hosts. The chancellor of the Exchequer had been invited to give a presentation to the assembled heads of government on the matter of tax avoidance (one of the big items on the agenda, for those of you who think what the IRS could really use right now is even more enforcement powers). The president evidently enjoyed it. Thrice, he piped up to say how much he agreed with Jeffrey, eventually concluding the presentation with the words, “Thank you, Jeffrey.”

Unfortunately, the chancellor of the Exchequer is a bloke called George Osborne, not Jeffrey Osborne.

Obama subsequently apologized for confusing George with Jeffrey, who was a popular vocal artiste back in the ’80s when Obama was dating his composite girlfriend and making composite whoopee to the composite remix of Jeffrey Osborne’s 1982 smoocheroo, “On the Wings of Love.”

I suppose it might have been worse. When Angela Merkel proposed a toast to a strong West, he could have assumed that was the name of Kim and Kanye’s new baby. …

While the president is busy being a citizen of the world, his economy is proving a disaster for those he claims to want to help. NY Times OpEd has some examples.

In a working-class neighborhood in Lowell, Mass., in early 2009, I sat across the table from Diana, then 24, in the kitchen of her mother’s house. Diana had planned to graduate from college, marry, buy a home in the suburbs and have kids, a dog and a cat by the time she was 30. But she had recently dropped out of a nearby private university after two years of study and with nearly $80,000 in student loans. Now she worked at Dunkin’ Donuts.

“With college,” she explained, “I would have had to wait five years to get a degree, and once I get that, who knows if I will be working and if I would find something I wanted to do. I don’t want to be a cop or anything. I don’t know what to do with it. My manager says some people are born to make coffee, and I guess I was born to make coffee.”

Young working-class men and women like Diana are trying to figure out what it means to be an adult in a world of disappearing jobs, soaring education costs and shrinking social support networks. Today, only 20 percent of men and women between 18 and 29 are married. They live at home longer, spend more years in college, change jobs more frequently and start families later.

For more affluent young adults, this may look a lot like freedom. But for the hundred-some working-class 20- and 30-somethings I interviewed between 2008 and 2010 in Lowell and Richmond, Va., at gas stations, fast-food chains, community colleges and temp agencies, the view is very different. …

Mark Helprin writes about the degradation of our armed forces. 

In the rush to paper over its delinquencies in the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, the Obama administration seems unaware that its failures are fundamental rather than merely anomalous. They are, unfortunately, a portent of the future.

On March 26, this newspaper reported that “In the wake of the attack, the military has examined how to improve its rapid response forces,” specifically by “adding special operations teams of roughly 10 troops to ships carrying larger Marine Expeditionary Units.” MEUs shipborne in amphibious ready groups usually number 2,200 Marines in special forces, reconnaissance, armored reconnaissance, armor, amphibious assault, infantry, artillery, engineer and aviation battalions, companies and platoons. They can get over the beach fast, and they fight like hell.

On March 21, 2011, during Operation Odyssey Dawn, an American F-15 went down in Libya. Immediately after the Mayday, the 26th MEU started rescue operations from the USS Kearsarge, and a short time later two of its Harrier fighter jets, two CH 53 helicopters, and two MV 22 Ospreys were at the scene, with more than a hundred Marines. Hundreds more might easily have arrived if required. Forces like this could have shattered the assault in Benghazi in minutes. Adding 10 men to such echelons rich in special forces would have little relevance. Fine in itself, the proposal is an obfuscation. The issue is not the composition of already capable MEUs but rather that one was not available when the attack took place. …

And while the government’s ability to protect us has diminished, the government’s ability to protect itself has exploded. HuffPo has the story.

Want to make money on the drug war? Start a company that builds military equipment, then sell that gear to local police departments. Thanks to the generation-long trend toward more militarized police forces, there’s now massive and growing market for private companies to outfit your neighborhood cops with gear that’s more appropriate for a battlefield.

Some of this is decades-old news. For over 25 years, the Pentagon has been supplying surplus military equipment to police agencies across the country, largely in the name of fighting the drug war. In fact, in as early as 1968 Congress passed a law authorizing the military to share gear with domestic police agencies. But it was in 1987 that Washington really formalized the practice, with a law instructing the Secretary of Defense and the U.S. Attorney General to notify local law enforcement agencies each year about what surplus gear was available. The law established an office in the Pentagon specifically to facilitate such transfers, and Congress even set up an 800 number that sheriffs and police chiefs could call to inquire about the stuff they could get. The bill also instructed the General Services Administration to produce a catalog from which police agencies could make their Christmas lists. …

… By 1989, fully-armed Guard troops were stationed in front of suspected drug houses in a series of drug raids in Portland. In Kentucky, local residents grew so enraged at Guard sweeps in low-flying helicopters, they blew up a Kentucky police radio tower. In Oklahoma, Guard troops dressed in battle garb rappelled down from helicopters and fanned out into rural areas in search of pot plants to uproot. Guard troops would later tell USA Today Some would later tell media outlets they were told to exaggerate their haul in order to boost federal funding for future efforts. …

Cool pictures from Amusing Planet of grass covered tram tracks in Europe.

Tram tracks on many European cities are lined with grass, a practice that probably started in the 1980’s to bring greenery back to city space and at the same time, provide habitable zone for numerous insects and invertebrates. These swaths of green provide a host of benefits to any urban area, like reduce urban heat island effect, provide a permeable surface for storm water to infiltrate, reduce pollution and absorb noise generated by the grinding of metal wheels on metal tracks. Not to mention, they look incredibly good in comparison to concrete or asphalt.

Green tracks have become increasingly popular in Europe and can be seen in pretty much every major European cities from Barcelona to Frankfurt, Milan, St-Etienne and Strasbourg.

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Our national embarrassment went to Berlin last week. Jennifer Rubin starts our look at the speech he gave.

One hardly knows where to begin when it comes to President Obama’s speech at the Brandenburg Gate, but I will start with an overarching point. There is no reason — with Iran edging closer to nuclear weapons capability; jihadism on the march in the Middle East; China engaging in cyberterrorism; and Bashar al-Assad continuing his mass murder with Iran’s and Russia’s assistance — for the president to be talking about nuclear arms reduction. This is the triumph of ego and cluelessness over common sense. His speech has nothing to do with the multiple threats and challenges we face. It seems he has nothing useful to offer on our real problems so he’ll go back to an oldie-but-really-bad-idea from his college days — a nuclear freeze. (This is what comes from the White House running national security policy rather than anyone with a modicum of appreciation for the world as it is.)

That said, I’ll be more specific about the speech’s faults. There are more, but I will focus on 10 of them:

1. “Today, 60 years after they rose up against oppression, we remember the East German heroes of June 17th. When the wall finally came down, it was their dreams that were fulfilled. Their strength and their passion, their enduring example remind us that for all the power of militaries, for all the authority of governments, it is citizens who choose whether to be defined by a wall, or whether to tear it down.“ The president frequently leaves out what brought down that wall — the West’s determination over decades not to relent against the Soviets. I know it’s incompatible with his agenda, but to leave the Soviets, the Americans and the Cold War out of the equation is absurd. …

Andrew Malcolm has his thoughts.

This was not the moment he was looking for.

Barack Obama returned to Berlin Wednesday to give a speech where he originally wanted to appear back in 2008, the Brandenburg Gate. He was a mere candidate then and German Chancellor Angela Merkel vetoed the event as too political for the historic site.

So, the 2008 Obama campaign took its $800,000 and staged his speech elsewhere before about 200,000 Berliners, none of whom could vote in the U.S. election. But it looked great on TV back home.

No doubt every American remembers where they were and what they were doing that July day when they first realized that Barack Hussein Obama was a messiah. Or thought he was. He gave a speech that melted his adoring media, what became known among several people as his “moment” speech. Obama said that word 16 times.

“People of Berlin, people of the world,” the ex-state senator intoned on that long-ago day, “This is our moment. This is our time.”

Well, what a difference 1,791 days makes. American presidents often travel abroad to change the subject from troubles at home. In Obama’s case, things like serial scandals involving the IRS, the FBI, the State Department, the Justice Department and still unexplained lack of security and emergency response that got four Americans killed in Benghazi.

And presidents go to Berlin to say famous things. Ronald Reagan: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” John Kennedy: “Ich bin ein Berliner!” (I am a Berliner.)

But there Obama was Wednesday before a foreign invitation-only audience 1/50th the size of 2008. To the distant crowd watching him behind a thick bullet-proof glass barrier, Obama was a diminished stick figure. …

Scott Johnson at Power Line notes George Will’s take.

Reading Obama’s speeches is a little like reading New York Times editorials. They don’t withstand close scrutiny, but that’s the least of it. They should be accompanied by a warning that they may be hazardous to your health. They kill brain cells.

George Will suffers through Obama’s speech at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin so that we don’t have to. Will takes up the arms control thread in Obama’s speech.

Arms control is only one theme in a desultory speech full of bromides that act as a general anesthetic on the conscious mind. Virtually everything in the speech is off. If Obama praised apple pie, he would do so in a way that would make you think there must be a strong case against it if you could only concentrate on what he is saying. …

Here’s George Will.

The question of whether Barack Obama’s second term will be a failure was answered in the affirmative before his Berlin debacle, which has recast the question, which now is: Will this term be silly, even scary in its detachment from reality? …

… In Northern Ireland before going to Berlin, Obama sat next to Putin, whose demeanor and body language when he is in Obama’s presence radiate disdain. There Obama said: “With respect to Syria, we do have differing perspectives on the problem, but we share an interest in reducing the violence.” Differing perspectives?

Obama wants to reduce the violence by coaxing Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, who is winning the war, to attend a conference at which he negotiates the surrender of his power. Putin wants to reduce the violence by helping — with lavish materiel assistance and by preventing diplomacy that interferes — Assad complete the destruction of his enemies.

Napoleon said: “If you start to take Vienna — take Vienna.” Douglas MacArthur said that all military disasters can be explained by two words: “Too late.” Regarding Syria, Obama is tentative and, if he insists on the folly of intervening, tardy. He is giving Putin a golden opportunity to humiliate the nation responsible for the “catastrophe.” In a contest between a dilettante and a dictator, bet on the latter.

Obama’s vanity is a wonder of the world that never loses its power to astonish, but really: Is everyone in his orbit too lost in raptures of admiration to warn him against delivering a speech soggy with banalities and bromides in a city that remembers John Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” and Ronald Reagan’s “Tear down this wall”? With German Chancellor Angela Merkel sitting nearby, Obama began his Berlin speech: “As I’ve said, Angela and I don’t exactly look like previous German and American leaders.” He has indeed said that, too, before, at least about himself. It was mildly amusing in Berlin in 2008, but hardly a Noel Coward-like witticism worth recycling.

His look is just not that interesting. And after being pointless in Berlin, neither is he, other than for the surrealism of his second term.

Bill Kristol’s turn.

… Half a century ago, President Kennedy declared, “All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words ‘Ich bin ein Berliner!’ ” A quarter-century ago, President Reagan challenged the general secretary of the Soviet Union: “Come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev​—​Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” President Obama, by contrast, declared nothing notable and challenged no one powerful. With the Berlin Wall down and the Cold War won, the president of
the United States talked at length and had nothing to say.

It would be too harsh, perhaps, to say that Obama’s remarks served only to ratify the judgment rendered the week before by Bill Clinton: that President Obama is pretty much “a total wuss.” It wouldn’t be too harsh to say of Obama’s foreign policy what Winston Churchill said in 1936 about the Stanley Baldwin government: He is “decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.” …

We close today with Power Line’s post on “Our Dimwitted President.”

President Obama seems incapable of going abroad without embarrassing himself. Via InstaPundit, we learn that when he was in the U.K., Obama couldn’t keep Chancellor George Osborne’s name straight. Obama repeatedly called him “Jeffrey.” The repeated gaffe became so obvious that Obama apologized:

According to the Sun and the Financial Times, Mr Obama apologised to the chancellor for calling him Jeffrey three times during the meeting – saying: “I’m sorry, man. I must have confused you with my favourite R&B singer”.

That would be this Jeffrey Osborne. The real Jeffrey Osborne was excited to hear about the mishap, and George Osborne was gracious about it. But good grief: the first obligation of a diplomat is to keep track of whom he is speaking to. One can imagine the hilarity if George W. Bush had referred to Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and Prime Minister during his administration, as “James Brown,” confusing the Prime Minister with his favorite R&B singer. Or perhaps, given Bush’s musical tastes, Sawyer Brown, or Zac Brown. Would such a gaffe have been laughed off? I doubt it.

Speaking of embarrassments, Telegraph, UK with Hagel’s latest.

Chuck Hagel, the US defence secretary, has apologised to a professor of Indian descent after jokingly asking if he was a member of the Taliban.

Mr Hagel’s spokesman insisted the offhand remark, which came after a speech at the University of Nebraska on Wednesday, was not meant to refer to anyone in the audience or to the professor’s Indian heritage.

At Wednesday’s event, after discussing prospects for talks with the Taliban insurgency, Hagel waited for another question and pointed to the back of the hall, saying:

“OK, so who has a – way up in the back there. You’re not a member of the Taliban are you?”

His attempt at humour appeared to fall flat, judging by the long pause that followed, according to a video of the event broadcast by the Pentagon channel. …

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Jennifer Rubin posts on the president’s disappearing act.

There are certainly different styles of leadership. But President Obama is suffering the results of poor choices (passing a huge new entitlement on a party-line vote) and of what can only be described as a lack of courage.

Brit Hume says it as well as anyone: “When the issues are difficult and the options unappetizing he tends simply to go away.”

Obama practically disappeared from the scene (no calls to Cabinet officials, no convening in the Situation Room) on the night of the Benghazi, Libya, attack. He seems more concerned on the NSA flap with distancing himself from conservatives whom he loathes (“I am not Dick Cheney”) and in Syria on protecting his self-image (he ends wars, doesn’t start them) than in taking the heat from Democrats. When coverage is not glowing, he becomes cranky with the media (as does his spokesman). He is most at ease campaigning before a crowd (whether it is an election or not) when he can accuse opponents of ill-will and flail away at straw men with no interruption. …

Turns out Israel has green weenie frauds too. Caroline Glick tells us about an electric car company with the hubris to call itself – Better Place. Then she writes about oil discovered in Israel.

… To summarize, the government gave Better Place a massive tax break. Investors poured $840 million into the company. The media showered the company in fabulous free PR.

And in four years, it only managed to sell 900 cars.

That tells you something about economics.

The iron rule of supply and demand is foolproof.

If the price is too high, people won’t buy your product. And if the ticket price of being the pioneers in a risky market, of having to go out of your way to get to the battery swap stations, and of swapping your battery three to four times more often than you have to fill up your gas tank is the same as the price of a normal car, then no one will want to be a pioneer. And no one did.

Indeed, according to Channel 2, more than a hundred of the 900 owners of Better Place cars worked for the company. And the majority of the other owners purchased the electric car as a second or third car. …

USA Today with an OpEd providing another example of why you don’t want to start a business in this country. 

As a mother of three who has struggled to stick to a family budget, I know the frustration parents feel as they watch children grow out of brand new clothes seemingly overnight. That’s why in 1997, I started a kids’ clothing consignment business, a little like the ones that are everywhere now but also a little different.

What started as a small family business operating out of our home has grown to 22 states. Now, though, it might all turn out to be illegal, thanks to the bureaucratic thinking of the Department of Labor.

Help a mother out

The business model that parents thought was an innovation, but that Labor sees as a menace, is simple but effective. You might have heard of it: cooperation.

We rent a large space for a few days, say an unused department store. Parents with clothes and children’s items to sell sign up online, enter their items into a computerized tracking system and choose their sale price. Then they bring the clothes and other items to the sale location, label them with preprinted price tags and display the clothes. Parents keep 70%; we keep 30%. It is easier than a garage sale, makes more money for parents, and shoppers efficiently find good deals.

A big part of our success are the hundreds of parents — both consignors and shoppers — who voluntarily work brief shifts to help set up before the sale starts. In exchange, these parents get to shop first with more choices and better merchandise.

In January, though, the Department of Labor noticed all this cooperation going on. Months later, investigators concluded that volunteers are “employees” under the Fair Labor Standards Act.

This means paying the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, filling out IRS paperwork and complying with who-knows-what other rules. And all for a pop-up business that lasts days. …

City Journal article notes the changes to women’s magazines.

Some of the most venerable brands in your grocery store sit not on the shelf but on the checkout line, where magazines like Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Redbook have been reflecting women’s lives for decades. From one month to the next, little seems to vary; the celebrity interviews and fashion spreads blend into one another, creating the impression of a seamless, unchanging world.

Yet if you compare the women’s magazines of today with their counterparts of 50 years ago, you’ll find it impossible to miss how dramatically different they are—and how daily life has transformed along with them. For example, in 1963, Good Housekeeping could report that 40 percent of its readers were in the workforce; by 2010, roughly 75 percent of women aged 25 to 54 were. In 1963, the average age of first marriage for women hovered around 20.5; by 2012, it had risen to 26.6. Clearly, women’s lives have changed enormously. But a historical journey through the checkout racks suggests that they haven’t always changed in the ways you’d think.

Start with something that hasn’t changed: American women’s obsession with their figures. The January 1963 Redbook featured a cover line on a 10-DAY DIET TO HELP YOU RECOVER FROM THE HOLIDAYS; the February 2013 issue cajoles readers to “get to your best weight ever” and promises “the plan and the push you need.” The April 1963 Ladies’ Home Journal pledged ideas on how to “dine well on 300 calories”; the February 2013 issue offers a more cheerful take on weight control: “Yay! Retire your fat pants forever.” One shudders to think of the pounds lost and gained over five decades of readership.

Given current obesity rates, the readers of women’s magazines were probably thinner in 1963. But their magazines weren’t. Flip through the weighty 50-year-old issues, and you’ll soon feel, literally, a massive cultural shift in what women expect from their periodicals. In 1963, consuming a magazine could take days. Early that year, Good Housekeeping serialized Daphne du Maurier’s novel of the French Revolution, The Glass-Blowers, cramming much of it into a mere three issues. In May, GH ran a large portion of Edmund Fuller’s novel The Corridor, a feat that required stretching the magazine to 274 text-heavy pages. Redbook’s March 1963 issue featured Hortense Calisher’s novel Textures of Life and five short stories, a level of fiction ambition that even The New Yorker rarely attempts now. There is verse, too. At one point, a dense page of du Maurier’s text makes room for Catherine MacChesney’s “From the Window,” letting Good Housekeeping readers experience poetry and prose at the same time. Marion Lineaweaver’s ode to the coming spring in LHJ (“The wind is milk / So perfectly fresh, cool / Smooth on the tongue”) was one of six poems in the March 1963 issue alone. …

MS Magazine writer, and anti-gun activist, decides to carry a gun for a month.

My hands are shaking; my adrenaline is surging.

No, it’s not from the latte I just inhaled or because this is the first time in two years I’ve been in a Starbucks since declaring a boycott on its open-carry gun policy.

What’s got me jittery this morning is the 9mm Glock that’s holstered on my hip. Me, lead gun policy protester at the 2010 Starbuck’s shareholder meeting. Me, a board member of the Brady Campaign. Me, the author of a book about the impact of gun violence, Beyond the Bullet.

Yes, I bought a handgun and will carry it everywhere I go over the next 30 days. I have four rules: Carry it with me at all times, follow the laws of my state, only do what is minimally required for permits, licensing, purchasing and carrying, and finally be prepared to use it for protecting myself at home or in public.

Why? Following the Newtown massacre in December, the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre, told the country, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”  I wondered what would it be like to be that good guy with a gun? What would it be like to get that gun, live with that gun, be out and about with that gun. Finally, what happens when you don’t want that gun any more?

I decided to find out. …

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Niall Ferguson on the Regulated States of America.

In “Democracy in America,” published in 1833, Alexis de Tocqueville marveled at the way Americans preferred voluntary association to government regulation. “The inhabitant of the United States,” he wrote, “has only a defiant and restive regard for social authority and he appeals to it . . . only when he cannot do without it.”

Unlike Frenchmen, he continued, who instinctively looked to the state to provide economic and social order, Americans relied on their own efforts. “In the United States, they associate for the goals of public security, of commerce and industry, of morality and religion. There is nothing the human will despairs of attaining by the free action of the collective power of individuals.”

What especially amazed Tocqueville was the sheer range of nongovernmental organizations Americans formed: “Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations . . . but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small; Americans use associations to give fetes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools.”

Tocqueville would not recognize America today. Indeed, so completely has associational life collapsed, and so enormously has the state grown, that he would be forced to conclude that, at some point between 1833 and 2013, France must have conquered the United States. …

Voting present yet again, the administration is now in a Keystone fix according to Kim Strassel. 

If President Obama once thought it politically savvy to kick the Keystone XL pipeline decision down the road, he’s surely ruing that strategy today. The delay has allowed the environmental community to elevate the project into a litmus test of his environmental fealty—so much so that some of Mr. Obama’s biggest supporters are now vowing to turn his base against him if he moves ahead with a win-win project that will boost the economy.

The ultimatum was expressed clearly in an open letter to Mr. Obama on June 3 from Thomas Steyer, the billionaire climate activist. Mr. Steyer has been a loyal Obama ally, speaking at the Democratic National Convention in 2012 and donating generously to the president and his party.

In his letter, Mr. Steyer nonetheless made clear that he and his NextGen political action committee will turn their force on the president if he approves Keystone. …

According to the Weekly Standard and the NY Times, President Present laid an egg in Berlin today.

The White House pool report reveals that only 6,000 will be in attendance for Obama’s Berlin speech today:

The stage for the president’s speech is set up on the East side of the Brandenburg Gate, in the old East Berlin. The sun is pounding down and there are around 6,000 invited guests according to German authorities. There are bleachers set up either side of the square, with a big two storey riser facing the stage which has a row of bullet proof glass and 12 US, German and EU flags and the grand backdrop of the Gate. There is a large standing crowd between the bleachers.

Last time around, when Obama delivered a speech in Berlin in the 2008 presidential campaign, when he was still a senator, 200,000 folks came out to see him.

UPDATE: The pool reporter says only 4,500 were present for Obama’s speech:

Crowd count at the Brandenburg Gate speech was 4,500 according to Elmar Jakobs. …

Bloomberg News reveals how college sports are subsidized by students.

As parents and students struggle to keep up with rising college tuition and take on greater burdens of debt, universities are being challenged to justify the ballooning athletic fees they tack on to the bill.

In the 2010-11 academic year, the 227 public institutions in Division 1 of the National Collegiate Athletic Association collected more than $2 billion in athletic fees from their students — or an average of more than $500 per enrollee — according to research by Jeff Smith at the University of South Carolina Upstate.

These fees, which can exceed $1,000 a year, are often itemized as a “student activity” or “general” expense. That may explain why separate research, by David Ridpath of Ohio University, found that students were only dimly aware of the extent of the fees, and weren’t pleased once they found out how much they were paying.

Worse yet, institutions with high proportions of poorer students carrying substantial education debt appeared to be charging the highest fees. While all students must pay the costs of maintaining athletic programs, few actually benefit from the services they subsidize. In this sense, the fees are comparable to a regressive tax — and one that is more onerous for lower-income students than for the more affluent, who are able to attend schools where athletic fees are lower.

For the six public schools in the Big South conference, Smith shows that the average athletic fee was $1,512, about 25 times more than the average $61 paid by students at the Big Ten conference schools. … 

And the Gothamist reveals how NYU profs have their housing subsidized by students.

NYU students pay at least $40,000 in tuition (and over $10,000 for on-campus housing-PDF) for the academic year—an insane amount. But it makes sense when you consider that NYU not only forgives mortgages for star professors but also helps buy vacation houses for star professors and other esteemed administrators.

The NY Times has the depressing details today. For instance, NYU President John Sexton has a place on Fire Island—”an elegant modern beach house that extends across three lots… bought with a $600,000 loan from an N.Y.U. foundation that eventually grew to be $1 million, according to Suffolk County land records.” …

Late night humor from Andrew Malcolm.

Fallon: Last week Obama asked China’s president to stop spying on Americans. And the Chinese leader responded, “You first.”

Conan: Everyone please turn off your phones. I’ve got some jokes I don’t want the government to hear.

Leno: Eliot Spitzer and John Edwards both have birthdays the other day. Which explains why no strippers were available for other parties.

NBC News Cosmic Log with an ode to duct tape.

Over the past half a century, duct tape has been keeping NASA’s astronauts alive, putting airplanes back together, making race cars speedier and patching up millions of fix-it projects. It’s even been used to remove warts. But the makers of duct tape aren’t resting on their sticky, gray laurels: On the contrary, engineers and designers are adding some new twists to the decades-old standby.

“Ten years ago, I used to hear kids say, ‘Oh, my dad uses that to fix everything,’” Scott Sommers, director of marketing for ShurTech Brands, told NBC News. “Now I hear the dads say, ‘Oh, my kids make everything out of that stuff.’”

ShurTech makes one of the best-known brands of duct tape, known as Duck Tape, and is the motive force behind this weekend’s Duct Tape Festival in Avon, Ohio, the company’s corporate headquarters. The annual event is scheduled to coincide with Father’s Day — which is apt, considering how many dads have gotten out of a tough fix thanks to those silvery rolls of adhesive.

“I hope that women never find out about duct tape,” humorist Dave Barry joked, “because once they do, men will no longer serve any useful purpose.” …

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Mark Steyn says the digital superstate is useless when it matters.

Every time I go on his show, my radio pal Hugh Hewitt asks me why congressional Republicans aren’t doing more to insist that the GOP suicide note known as “the immigration deal” include a requirement for a border fence. I don’t like to tell Hugh that, if they ever get around to building the fence, it won’t be to keep the foreigners out but to keep you guys in.

I jest, but only very slightly and only because the government doesn’t build much of anything these days – except for that vast complex five times the size of the Capitol the NSA is throwing up in Utah to house everybody’s data on everything everyone’s ever done with anyone ever.

A few weeks after 9/11, when government was hastily retooling its 1970s hijacking procedures for the new century, I wrote a column for The National Post of Canada and various other publications that, if you’re so interested, is preserved in my anthology “The Face Of The Tiger.” It began by noting the observation of President Bush’s Transportation Secretary, Norman Mineta, that if “a 70-year-old white woman from Vero Beach, Florida” and “a Muslim young man” were in line to board a flight, he hoped there would be no difference in the scrutiny to which each would be subjected.

The TSA was then barely a twinkle in Norm’s eye, and in that long ago primitive era it would have seemed absurd to people that one day in America it would be entirely routine for wheelchair-bound nonagenarians to remove leg braces before boarding a plane or for kindergartners to stand patiently as three middle-age latex-gloved officials poke around their genitals. Back then, the idea that everybody is a suspect still seemed slightly crazy. As I wrote in my column, “I’d love to see Norm get his own cop show:

“‘Capt. Mineta, the witness says the serial rapist’s about 5’10″ with a thin mustache and a scar down his right cheek.’

“‘Okay, Sergeant, I want you to pull everyone in.’

“‘Pardon me?’

“‘Everyone. Men, women, children. We’ll start in the Bronx and work our way through to Staten Island. What matters here is that we not appear to be looking for people who appear to look like the appearance of the people we’re looking for. …

J. Christian Adams explains why the Arizona voting rights decision was a big win for the right.

Something perverse happened after the Supreme Court’s decision today invalidating citizenship-verification requirements in Arizona for registrants who use the federal voter registration form. The Left knows they lost most of the battle, but are still claiming victory. That’s what they do. Election-integrity proponents and the states are saying they lost, but don’t realize they really won.

The Left wins even when they lose, and conservatives are often bewildered and outfoxed in the election-process game.

Earlier today, I called the decision a nothingburger. After re-reading the case and reflecting a bit more, it’s clear that the decision was a disaster for the Left and their victory cackles are hollow — and they know it.

Worse, conservatives dooms-dayers who have never litigated a single National Voter Registration Act case have taken to the airwaves, describing the case as a disaster which invites illegal-alien voting.

In the last year, I’ve litigated five NVRA cases and worked on the preemption issues for years, and there is more to cheer in today’s opinion than there is to bemoan. Those complaining about the opinion don’t understand what the Left’s goal was in this case: total federal preemption. On that score, Justice Scalia foiled them; indeed, the decision today was a huge war won, even if the small Arizona battle was lost.

From my time in the Justice Department Voting Section, I can remember intimately the wars over some of the preemption issues decided today. …

Streetwise Professor caught a Putin rant.

At a reception on the occasion of Russia Day, Putin held court, and talked about . . . the United States. After awarding the State Prize to Sergei Nikulin, head of the bureau that designed a new nuclear missile designed specifically to defeat US missile defenses, Putin launched into a disquisition on American history:

Pooling together traditional Soviet-time propaganda clichés, Putin recalled the US “genocide” of Native Americans, slavery and racial segregation that is still, according to Putin, very much evident in the United States today. Putin deplored the US nuclear bombing of Japanese cities in 1945 and expressed doubt that Soviet dictator Josef Stalin would have dropped an atom bomb on Nazi Germany if the USSR obtained nuclear weapons in 1945, when an overall victory was already assured. After expressing his “personal opinion” that Americans and their leaders are worse than Stalin, Putin acknowledged that the US is basically a democratic country, built on the principle of individual rights and freedoms, whereas Russian society is built on “collectivism,” which makes it fundamentally different. The Russian national soul, according to Putin, is eternal and directly connected to God, unlike, apparently, the pragmatic American one—“so it is very hard for us to understand each other, but it is possible sometimes”.

Russian soul, blah blah blah.  Interesting, that, during a week when a survey was released showing that Russians were among the least religiously observant people in the world. And as Felgenhauer notes, rather than being a narod united in collective solidarity, Russian society is atomized: the Russian social capital account is heavily overdrawn.  In other words, Putin’s characterization of Russia is a crock.

We are so in Putin’s head.  He is obsessed with the US.  Can you imagine any US president discussing, say, Russian conquests in the Caucasus, or Central Asia?

There is one part of Putin’s remarks that is particularly outrageous:  ”Putin deplored the US nuclear bombing of Japanese cities in 1945 and expressed doubt that Soviet dictator Josef Stalin would have dropped an atom bomb on Nazi Germany if the USSR obtained nuclear weapons in 1945, when an overall victory was already assured.”

That is more than a crock: it is an ahistorical outrage. …

Streetwise Professor also posts on Putin’s theft of Bob Kraft’s Super Bowl ring.

Vladimir Putin has done some outlandish things, but I think this takes the trophy.  Or the ring.  The Super Bowl Ring.

You might recall that Kraft in 2005 joined a cadre of businessmen to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg. The Patriots owner walked into that meeting with a jewel-laced Super Bowl XXXIX ring on his finger, but left empty-handed.

“I showed the president my most recent Super Bowl ring,” Kraft said at the time, per The Boston Globe. Putin “was clearly taken with its uniqueness … at that point, I decided to give him the ring as a symbol of the respect and admiration that I have for the Russian people and the leadership of President Putin.”

Not so fast. Kraft now admits Putin nabbed the ring — worth upwards of $25,000 — without his consent.

“I took out the ring and showed it to (Putin),” Kraft said this week, per the New York Post. “And he put it on and he goes, ‘I can kill someone with this ring,’ I put my hand out and he put it in his pocket, and three KGB guys got around him and walked out.”

That’s the head of the Party (and State) of Crooks and Thieves: leading by example!

The only thing that is worse than Putin’s in-your-face thievery is the Bush administration’s craven response:

Kraft kept his wits about him and complied with a call from the White House, in which a George W. Bush handler told him: “ ’It would really be in the best interest of U.S.-Soviet relations if you meant to give the ring as a present.’ “

FFS. No wonder Putin thinks he can get away with about anything when dealing with the US.  Because he can. I think he tries this stuff to see what he can get away with.  He gets away with it . . . so he pushes it even more.  He’ll keep pushing until someone pushes back.

Here’s my idea.  Have Ray Lewis let Putin hold his Super Bowl ring, and pray that Putin tries to pocket it. And we can make money off this by putting it all on pay-per-view.

Marc Perry celebrates the internal combustion engine.

The automobile stands as an enduring symbol of mobility and opportunity in America — and of innovation that’s at the core of our nation’s economic strength and prosperity.

Yet the conventional gasoline-powered engine is sometimes disparaged and treated as if it’s yesterday’s technology. Listening to politicians, environmentalists and media pundits, you might think that the gas engine is inefficient and old-fashioned, a relic of the past that ought to be replaced by alternative automotive technologies like electric cars and plug-in hybrids.

But a good look at the latest advances in the gasoline-powered engine — and those on the horizon — jars this opinion, and the surge in U.S. oil production from shale drilling further refutes the idea that conventional engines are old technology.

Already powering more than 230 million cars in the United States, internal combustion engines have the potential to become substantially more efficient, while providing economic and environmental benefits that extend well beyond the money consumers save at the pump.

Imagine if your car uses advanced computing to control fuel injection far more precisely than before, improving the fuel efficiency of big cars by more than 15 percent. Or what if your car is able to knock another 30 percent off fuel consumption — and corresponding greenhouse-gas emissions — by partly cooling hot exhaust gas before it is pumped into the engine?

Diesel engines, which are more efficient than gasoline engines, might also take off in the U.S. …

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Big treat today. Readers will learn what an algorithm is. No, it is not a dismaying vision of Al Gore dancing the Macarena.  An algorithm is a way to use data to spot correlations and then organize and initiate responses. Today they are made more capable and important because massive computing power has become inexpensive and plentiful. Intelligent Life a subsidiary publication of The Economist endeavors to explain;

… An algorithm, at its most basic, is not a mysterious sciencey bit at all; it is simply a decision-making process. It is a flow chart, a computer program that can stretch to pages of code or is as simple as “If x is greater than y, then choose z”.

What has changed is what algorithms are doing. The first algorithm was created in the ninth century by the Arabic scholar Al Khwarizami—from whose name the word is a corruption. Ever since, they have been mechanistic, rational procedures that interact with mechanistic, rational systems. Today, though, they are beginning to interact with humans. The advantage is obvious. Drawing in more data than any human ever could, they spot correlations that no human would. The drawbacks are only slowly becoming apparent. …

… Last year Target, a marketing company, yet again proved the power of algorithms, in a startling way. Its software tracks purchases to predict habits. Using this, it chooses which coupons to send customers. It seemed to have gone wrong when it began sending a teenage girl coupons for nappies (diapers), much to the anger of her father, who made an official complaint. A little later, the New York Times reported that the father had phoned the company to apologise. “It turns out,” he said, “there have been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of.” He was going to be a grandfather—and an algorithm knew before he did. …

NY Post tells us how NYU kowtows to Chinese communists.

NYU isn’t letting a pesky thing like human rights stand in the way of its expansion in China.

The university has booted a blind Chinese political dissident from its campus under pressure from the Communist government as it builds a coveted branch in Shanghai, sources told The Post.

Chen Guangcheng has been at NYU since May 2012, when he made a dramatic escape from his oppressive homeland with the help of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

But school brass has told him to get out by the end of this month, the sources said.

Chen’s presence at the school didn’t sit well with the Chinese bureaucrats who signed off on the permits for NYU’s expansion there, the sources said.

“The big problem is that NYU is very compromised by the fact they are working very closely with the Chinese to establish a university,” according to one New York-based professor familiar with Chen’s situation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. …

Michael Barone catches MSNBC being ignorant. OK, you ask, what else is new?

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, who seems like a nice person, got caught making a huge historical mistake; he said George Wallace, the Alabama Governor who defied a desegregation order 50 years ago, was a Republican. Nope. He was a Democrat and ran in the Democratic presidential primaries in 1964, 1972 and 1976; he also ran for president as a third party candidate in 1968. Hayes either didn’t know that–surprisingly for a political commentator–or temporarily and perhaps conveniently forgot it. Or maybe he just figures that all political villains are Republicans. In any case he apologized for what he, appropriately, called a “stupid, inexcusable, historically illiterate mistake.”

Here’s another fact he and others may want to keep in mind as we remember the climactic events of the civil rights movement 50 years ago: Bull Connor, the Birmingham police commissioner who turned fire hoses and police dogs on peaceful civil rights demonstrators, was a Democrat too. In fact, he was Democratic National Committeeman from Alabama, at a time when each state and territory had just one male and one female member on the Democratic National Committee.

One more reminder: President John Kennedy’s endorsement 50 years ago this month of what became the Civil Rights Act of 1964 came in the third year of his presidency, in response to events in Birmingham and elsewhere; previously he had been reluctant to raise the issue for fear he would antagonize Southern Democratic officeholders and voters. Some on the left evidently want to depict the civil rights battle as a struggle between benificent Democrats and evil Republicans. It was no such thing.

Another fool from MSNBC gets a look from Roger Simon.

A few days ago, MSNBC commentator Martin Bashir, in high dudgeon, accused critics of the IRS scandal of racism toward Barack Obama. I’m not going to rehearse the number of black conservatives — including intellects of the stature of Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele — who would then be racists, or even go into my own personal story as a white civil rights worker in the South in the sixties (I’m older than Bashir) and how insulting it would be to people like me to be lumped in as racists because we object to the president’s policies.

Never mind the massive declines in racism in our (and other Anglo-Saxon) societies documented in a recent Pew Poll and never mind the late Andrew Breitbart’s offer of one hundred thousand dollars for evidence of the use of the n-word by even one of tens of thousands of Tea Party demonstrators for which not a single bid came forward.

What interests me is why people like Bashir maintain this need to brand anyone even vaguely to the right as racist. It’s almost a disorder worthy of classification in the DSM-5 — PRDS: Projective Racist Derangement Syndrome.

Actually, I don’t think it’s quite that sick, although it does have definite pathological aspects. A more obvious motivation is old-fashioned fear. …

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Peter Wehner on the administration that gives answers that are the “least untruthful.” 

Talk about collapsing standards. When Barack Obama ran for office, his promise wasn’t that he’d simply improve our politics; he would transform them. He would appoint men and women of unblemished integrity who would serve the public interest. Mr. Obama would hold people accountable. He boasted in 2010 that he had put in place the toughest ethics rules in history. His administration would be the most transparent in history. And all of this would restore faith and trust in government. 

That was then. Let me tell you about now. 

James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, clearly mislead Congress when in March of this year Clapper was asked by Senator Ron Wyden, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”

“No, sir,” Clapper responded.

“It does not?” Wyden asked again.

“Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly.”

That statement was false, since we know that the NSA has collected phone records of millions of Americans. 

And so what is Mr. Clapper’s excuse? Try this one on for size. The New York Times reports that in an interview on Sunday with NBC News, Mr. Clapper acknowledged that his answer had been problematic, calling it “the least untruthful” answer he could give. 

That phrase–what Clapper said is “the least untruthful” answer he could give–should live on in scandal lore. …

Daniel Henninger on the same theme. 

Here is Barack Obama commenting last Friday on the National Security Agency’s antiterrorist surveillance programs: “We’ve got congressional oversight and judicial oversight. And if people can’t trust not only the executive branch but also don’t trust Congress and don’t trust federal judges to make sure that we’re abiding by the Constitution, due process and rule of law, then we’re going to have some problems here.”

Uh-huh.

Herewith a partial list of political groups that said they were subjected to over-the-top audits by the Internal Revenue Service:

Greenwich Tea Party Patriots, Greater Phoenix Tea PartyPatriots, Laurens County Tea Party, Northeast Tarrant Tea Party, Myrtle Beach Tea Party, Albuquerque Tea Party, San Antonio Tea Party, Richmond Tea Party, Manassas Tea Party, Honolulu Tea Party, Waco Tea Party, Chattanooga Tea Party and American Patriots Against Government Excess.

What that target list shows is there was never one “tea party.” It was collections of citizens spontaneously gathering all over the country under one easy-to-remember name. Their purpose was to do politics. For that, their government hit them hard.

In January the pollsters at the PewResearchCenter reported that for the first time a majority of Americans—53%—now agree that “the federal government threatens your own personal rights and freedoms.”

This is far beyond concerns about the size of government. A majority of people now see the government of Madison, Jefferson and Franklin as a direct, personal threat.

So yes, we have “some problems” here. …

Mark Steyn with a Corner post.

When the IRS is accused of “targeting,” don’t assume they’re speaking metaphorically. From Politico:

As chairman of the House Homeland Security oversight subcommittee, [Jeff] Duncan (R-S.C.) toured a federal law enforcement facility in late May and noticed agents training with the semi-automatic weapons at a firing range. They identified themselves as IRS, he said.

“When I left there, it’s been bugging me for weeks now, why IRS agents are training with a semi-automatic rifle AR-15, which has stand-off capability,” Duncan told POLITICO. “Are Americans that much of a target that you need that kind of capability..?

“I think Americans raise eyebrows when you tell them that IRS agents are training with a type of weapon that has stand-off capability. It’s not like they’re carrying a sidearm and they knock on someone’s door and say, ‘You’re evading your taxes,’” Duncan said.

A bureaucracy is bad. A politicized bureaucracy is worse. A paramilitary politicized bureaucracy is nuts. And, in fact, evil. There is no reason in a civilized society why the Deputy Assistant Commissioner of Paperwork should have his own SEAL Team Six. …

George Will says Lois Lerner is the “scowling face of the state.”

As soon as the Constitution permitted him to run for Congress, Al Salvi did. In 1986, just 26 and fresh from the University of Illinois law school, he sank $1,000 of his own money, which was most of his money, into his campaign to unseat an incumbent Democratic congressman. Salvi studied for the bar exam during meals at campaign dinners.

He lost his campaign. Today, however, he should be invited to Congress to testify about what happened 10 years later, when he was a prosperous lawyer and won the Republican Senate nomination to run against a Democratic congressman named Dick Durbin.

In the fall of 1996, at the campaign’s climax, Democrats filed with the Federal Election Commission charges against Salvi’s campaign alleging campaign finance violations. These charges dominated the campaign’s closing days. Salvi spoke by telephone with the head of the FEC’s Enforcement Division, who he remembers saying: “Promise me you will never run for office again, and we’ll drop this case.” He was speaking to Lois Lerner.

After losing to Durbin, Salvi spent four years and $100,000 fighting the FEC, on whose behalf FBI agents visited his elderly mother demanding to know, concerning her $2,000 contribution to her son’s campaign, where she got “that kind of money.” When the second of two federal courts held that the charges against Salvi were spurious, the lawyer arguing for the FEC was Lois Lerner.

More recently, she has been head of the IRS Exempt Organizations Division, which has used its powers of delay, harassment and extortion to suppress political participation. For example, it has told an Iowa right-to-life group that it would get tax-exempt status if it would promise not to picket Planned Parenthood clinics. …

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit wrote a WSJ column about IRS abuse in May 2009. 

Barack Obama owes his presidency in no small part to the power of rhetoric. It’s too bad he doesn’t appreciate the damage that loose talk can do to America’s tax system, even as exploding federal deficits make revenues more important than ever.

At his Arizona State University commencement speech last Wednesday, Mr. Obama noted that ASU had refused to grant him an honorary degree, citing his lack of experience, and the controversy this had caused. He then demonstrated ASU’s point by remarking, “I really thought this was much ado about nothing, but I do think we all learned an important lesson. I learned never again to pick another team over the Sun Devils in my NCAA brackets. . . . President [Michael] Crowe and the Board of Regents will soon learn all about being audited by the IRS.”

Just a joke about the power of the presidency. Made by Jay Leno it might have been funny. But as told by Mr. Obama, the actual president of the United States, it’s hard to see the humor. Surely he’s aware that other presidents, most notably Richard Nixon, have abused the power of the Internal Revenue Service to harass their political opponents. But that abuse generated a powerful backlash and with good reason. Should the IRS come to be seen as just a bunch of enforcers for whoever is in political power, the result would be an enormous loss of legitimacy for the tax system. …

The Economist reports on a carbon fiber cable invented in Finland for elevator shafts. It will allow more sky to be scraped because at 100 or so floors, the weight of the steel cable began to be a height limiting factor. Economics will still be in play though as there are limits to the amount of each floor’s space that can be dedicated to elevator shafts. One solution was the sky lobbies used in the World Trade Center which saw three cars in one shaft.

WHEN Elisha Otis stood on a platform at the 1854 World Fair in New York and ordered an axeman to cut the rope used to hoist him aloft, he changed cityscapes for ever. To the amazement of the crowd his new safety lift dropped only a few inches before being held by an automatic braking system. This gave people the confidence to use what Americans insist on calling elevators. That confidence allowed buildings to rise higher and higher.

They could soon go higher still, as a result of another breakthrough in lift technology. This week Kone, a Finnish liftmaker, announced that after a decade of development at its laboratory in Lohja, which sits above a 333-metre-deep mineshaft which the firm uses as a test bed, it has devised a system that should be able to raise an elevator a kilometre (3,300 feet) or more. This is twice as far as the things can go at present. Since the effectiveness of lifts is one of the main constraints on the height of buildings, Kone’s technology—which replaces the steel cables from which lift cars are currently suspended with ones made of carbon fibres—could result in buildings truly worthy of the name “skyscraper”. …

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Eliana Johnson of National Review says it is time to stop blaming the IRS scandals on “rogue” agents.

We can officially dispense with the notion that the targeting of tea-party groups began when a couple of rogue agents in the Internal Revenue Service’s Cincinnati office set out to streamline their work.

The heart of the effort to target tea-party and other conservative groups, we are learning, occurred in Washington, and that is likely why five D.C.-based IRS officials who are connected to the targeting have retired, resigned, been replaced, or been put on administrative leave, since news of the scandal broke in mid May. They include Holly Paz, who last week, according to an IRS source, was replaced as director of Rulings and Agreements, the division that oversaw the targeting of conservative groups; Washington lawyer Carter Hull, who is accused of micromanaging the processing of tea-party cases, and who, according to IRS sources, requested his retirement package on March 12; the commissioner of the agency’s Tax Exempt and Government Entities division, Joseph Grant, who retired on June 3; former IRS commissioner Steven Miller, who resigned days after news of the scandal broke; and the director of the IRS’s Exempt Organizations division, Lois Lerner, who was placed on administrative leave only after refusing to tender her resignation, according to Iowa’s Chuck Grassley. All five are or were based in the IRS’s headquarters on Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C.

The testimony of Cincinnati-based IRS employees released last week by the House Oversight Committee helps explain why so many employees in D.C. who are associated with the current scandal are quietly departing the scene. We have learned that the controversial and inappropriate “lookout” list created in the Cincinnati office was probably compiled as a response to requests from Washington for tea-party files. One Cincinnati employee, Gary Muthert, told the committee that he began singling out tea-party applications at the request of a supervisor who told him that “Washington, D.C., wanted some cases.” Muthert, sources say, was a member of the group that screened all applications for tax exemptions and passed those identified as tea-party applications along to specialists for extra scrutiny. He sent seven tea-party applications to Washington in May 2010, according to interview transcripts, because his manager told him that “Washington, D.C., wanted seven.”

Thus, it was IRS employees in Washington, according to Muthert, who ordered agents in the Cincinnati office to focus their attention on the applications of tea-party groups. …

Johnson’s IRS contacts want us to know Lois Lerner is still logging on to the IRS computer system.

Lois Lerner, the Internal Revenue Service’s director of Exempt Organizations currently on paid leave, has not had any of her computer access restricted since she abdicated her responsibilities, according to an IRS source with knowledge of the situation. 

Lerner was placed on administrative leave on May 21 after refusing to tender her resignation, and logged into the IRS’s computer system using her agency computer as recently as June 4, the source tells me. She has the ability to access the same information that was available to her before she was placed on leave. …

Ann Coulter provides tips on following the IRS probe.

Instead of showing endless loops of IRS employees wasting taxpayer dollars line-dancing — Breaking news: Government employees waste millions of your dollars every single day! — I think it would be more useful for the public to hear a few crucial facts about the exploding scandal at the Internal Revenue Service.

At Tuesday’s congressional hearings on the IRS, witnesses provided shocking details about the agency’s abuse of conservative groups.

The IRS leaked the donor list of The National Organization for Marriage to their political opponents, the pro-gay-marriage Human Rights Campaign. This is not idle speculation: The documents had an internal IRS stamp on them. The list of names was then published on a number of liberal websites and NOW’s donors were harassed.

The IRS demanded that all members of the Coalition for Life of Iowa swear under penalty of perjury that they wouldn’t pray, picket or protest outside of Planned Parenthood. They were also asked to provide details of their prayer meetings. …

Slate contributor says the real NSA scandal is how the randomly educated, poorly qualified, Snowden was given top-secret access.

Edward Snowden sounds like a thoughtful, patriotic young man, and I’m sure glad he blew the whistle on the NSA’s surveillance programs. But the more I learned about him this afternoon, the angrier I became. Wait, him? The NSA trusted its most sensitive documents to this guy? And now, after it has just proven itself so inept at handling its own information, the agency still wants us to believe that it can securely hold on to all of our data? Oy vey!

According to the Guardian, Snowden is a 29-year-old high school dropout who trained for the Army Special Forces before an injury forced him to leave the military. His IT credentials are apparently limited to a few “computer” classes he took at a community college in order to get his high school equivalency degree—courses that he did not complete. His first job at the NSA was as a security guard. Then, amazingly, he moved up the ranks of the United States’ national security infrastructure: …

Just to remind us how corrupt our elected representatives are, George Will writes on sugar subsidies.

The steamboat conveying Andrew Jackson up the Ohio River toward his tumultuous 1829 inauguration had brooms lashed to its bow, symbolizing Old Hickory’s vow to clean up Washington. But sweeping out Washington’s Augean stables, like painting the Golden GateBridge, is steady work, so steady it never ends. Neither do the policies that cosset sugar producers.

These immortal measures just received the Senate’s benediction because they illustrate the only law Washington can be counted on to respect. It is the law of dispersed costs but concentrated benefits.

The provisions by which Washington transfers wealth from 316 million American consumers to a few thousand sugar producers are part of a “temporary” commodity support program created during the Great Depression. Not even the New Deal could prolong the Depression forever. It ended. But sugar protectionism is forever. The Senate recently voted 54 to 45 against even mild reforms of the baroque architecture of protections for producers of sugar cane and sugar beets. …

It is not a big thing, but Volokh Conspiracy has a post illustrating the same thing.

I noticed two anecdotes about the late Sen. Frank Lautenberg, both of which were meant to be complimentary but in fact speak volumes about the petty corruption of our political class and how inured to it we’ve become. The first was told by a friend of his who was at a conference of Jewish philanthropists in Israel with Lautenberg on 9/11. Lautenberg “used his pull as a former senator” to get everyone an early flight back to the U.S. so they could rejoin their families. The second, told by Vice-President Biden at Lautenberg’s funeral, related how Biden was once hustling to make an Amtrak train to Delaware, but was told by Amtrak staff, “don’t worry we’re holding the train for Sen. Lautenberg” (who was a big political supporter of Amtrak).

Now, as corruption goes, this is minor stuff. But I’m more disturbed that rather than the rich and powerful (Lautenberg’s friends in Israel and Biden) being embarrassed that Lautenberg (mis)used his influence to inconvenience others on behalf of himself and his friends, they tout these stories in eulogizing them, as if we should all be glad that a (former!) Senator has the “clout” to help his friends at the expense of those less connected. Bleh!

UPDATE: How much more I would have admired Lautenberg if his friends could relate that “we begged him to use his clout as a former Senator to get us back to our families, but Frank was adamant that his friends and acquaintances were no more important than anyone else trying to get back home, and that he wouldn’t abuse his status as former senator on our behalf.”

There is some good news around. Money writes on the increase of known reserves of gas and oil. Or course, our governments will find a way to create problems there.

The Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration has upgraded its estimates of global oil reserves by 11% after scouring 41 countries and finding a lot more “technically recoverable” shale oil and shale gas than it did the last time it filed a similar report, in 2011.

Since then, the EIA’s shale gas estimates alone have jumped by 10% and its estimate of gas reserves has soared by 47%. The U.S., China and Argentina are all largely responsible for the upticks in shale oil and gas numbers, while Russia’s shale oil stockpile and Algeria’s shale gas resources also place them among the EIA’s top four potential producers in each category. …

A change of pace with a report in the NY Times about the expanded range of mountain lions.

The great migration began perhaps 40 years ago. From strongholds in the Rocky Mountains and Texas, young males headed east, seeking female companionship and new places to settle.

The emigrants were about seven feet long, nose to tail, and weighed up to 160 pounds. Given a dietary choice, they preferred deer, but would eat almost anything that moved: elk, bighorn sheep, wild horses, beaver, even porcupines. Left free for an evening, they were capable of killing a dozen domestic sheep before dawn, eating their fill and leaving the rest for the buzzards. They were also known to attack humans on occasion.

Long ago the Inca called them puma, but today — though they belong to only one species — they have many names. In Arizona they are known as mountain lions; in Florida they are panthers, and elsewhere in the South they are called painters. When they roamed New England, they were called catamounts. In much of the Midwest they are known as cougars, and that is the name everyone understands.

Until relatively recently, they were mainly a memory. All but exterminated east of the Rockies by 1900, they were treated as “varmints” in most Western states until the late ’60s and could be shot on sight. In Maine, the last catamount was killed in 1938.

But today Puma concolor is back on the prowl. That is one of the great success stories in wildlife conservation, but also a source of concern among biologists and other advocates, for their increasing numbers make them harder to manage — and harder for people to tolerate. No reliable estimate exists for the cougar population at its lowest point, before the 1970s, but there are now believed to be more than 30,000 in North America. They have recolonized the Black Hills of South Dakota, the North Dakota Badlands and the Pine Ridge country of northwestern Nebraska. …

Andrew Malcolm tops off our week with his recap of late night humor.

Fallon: Celebrity chef Paula Deen just released her own line of butter. When asked what you should put it on, Deen said, “Who said you have to put it on anything?”

Leno: Russian President Putin and his wife are divorcing. He gets the house in Moscow. She gets to live in Siberia.

Fallon: That Florida Powerball winner is 84 years old. Other people in Florida were like, “Figures it would go to some kid.”

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Glenn Reynolds notes the common thread to the DC scandals. 

“How ironic is that? We wanted a president that listens to all Americans — now we have one.” That was Jay Leno’s take on the Obama administration’s expanding NSA spying scandal, which has gone beyond Verizon phone records to include Google, Facebook, Yahoo and just about all the other major tech companies except, apparently, for Twitter.

The NSA spying scandal goes deep, and the Obama administration’s only upside is that the furor over its poking into Americans’ private business on a wholesale basis will distract people from the furor over the use of the IRS and other federal agencies to target political enemies — and even donors to Republican causes — and the furor over the Benghazi screwup and subsequent lies (scapegoated filmmaker Nakoula is still in jail), the furor over the “Fast And Furious” gunrunning scandal that left literally scores of Mexicans dead, the scandal over the DOJ’s poking into phone records of journalists (and their parents), HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ shakedown of companies she regulates for “donations” to pay for ObamaCare implementation that Congress has refused to fund, the Pigford scandal where the Treasury Department’s “Judgment Fund” appears to have been raided for political purposes — well, it’s getting to where you need a scorecard to keep up.

But, in fact, there’s a common theme in all of these scandals: Abuse of power. …

David Brooks reviews an interesting book. Interesting in that it reveals and displays the unhappiness of the American left at a point in time before we learned about the massive data-mining undertaken by the government. Interesting also in that it is written in the narrative style of the “USA Trilogy” by John Dos Passos.

… Packer rarely comes out and says what he thinks. This is a book of nearly pure narrative, and his meanings are embedded in the way he portrays people, those he likes (outsiders) and those he doesn’t (bankers, the political class). There are some passages of outright analysis in this book to show that America is “unwinding,” that the structures of everyday life are crumbling, that the nation’s leaders have “abandoned their posts,” that the void has been filled with “the default force in American life, organized money.” But I doubt the analytic passages together would fill more than a few ­pages of this 434-page book.

The stories that do fill its ­pages are beautifully reported. There are a few dominating figures who pop in and out, like Jeff Connaughton, the perfect political No. 2, who in the early 1980s hitched his wagon to Joe Biden and became an aide, a fund-raiser, a lobbyist and a Washington insider. But during the financial crisis Connaughton grew disillusioned with politics, and he gives Packer an absolutely brutal portrait of Biden as a coldblooded operator, a staff-abuser and a people-user, who cares about nothing but his own presidential ambitions. (This portrait is cartoonishly overdrawn.)

There is Dean Price, a young go-getter who opened a chain of truck stops and then fell for some crackpot suggestions that the world was about to run out of oil and moved off into ­biodiesel. After being the political flavor of the month for a while with his ­speeches on energy, he was charged with not paying his taxes, his company tanked and things ended badly.

There is Tammy Thomas, a woman from Youngstown, Ohio, who worked hard in the city’s auto parts plants and took an early retirement buyout as the local economy crumbled around her. She lost a large chunk of her savings in a Ponzi scheme. Outraged at the changes around her, she has become an activist and community organizer.

To repeat, Packer does an outstanding job with these stories. “The Unwinding” offers vivid snapshots of people who have experienced a loss of faith. As a way of understanding contemporary America, these examples are tantalizing. But they are also frustrating. The book is supposed to have social, economic and political implications, but there is no actual sociology, economics or political analysis in it.

By “the unwinding,” Packer is really referring to three large transformations, which have each been the subject of an enormous amount of research and analysis. The first is the stagnation of middle-class wages and widening inequality. Depending on which analyst you read, this has to do with the changing nature of the information-age labor market, changing family structures, rising health care costs, the decline of unions or the failure of education levels to keep up with technology.

The second is the crushing recession that began in 2008. Depending on which analyst you read, this was caused by global capital imbalances, bad Federal Reserve policy, greed on Wall Street, faulty risk-assessment models or the insane belief that housing prices would go on rising forever.

The third transformation is the unraveling of the national fabric. Depending on which analyst you read, this is either a gigantic problem (marriage rates are collapsing; some measures of social connection are on the decline) or not a gigantic problem (crime rates are plummeting, some measures of social connection are improving).

Packer wants us to understand these transformations, but ultimately, narrative and anecdotes are not enough. They need to be complemented with evidence from these long-running debates and embedded in a theoretical framework and worldview. …

The above by David Brooks reviewing a book by the New Yorker’s George Packer is a good illustration of why the American left cannot understand the damage done by the current administration. To see how things might be different, and we could once again have an economy that could generate as many as one million jobs in a month as it did during the recovery of the Reagan Presidency we have Forbes contributor, Carl Schramm, who makes the moral case for policies that foster growth.

… The moral implications of non-recovery causes Washington to look culpable for human costs that politicians would just as soon not consider.  In every recession or slow-growth situation, every one of them, the poor pay a higher price. Just the same, in most recoveries the poor do better than the rich.  Think about it.  Right now well off people hardly know that recession-like conditions persist.  In fact, the incomes of the top one percent have climbed steadily through the last few years.

Poorer Americans, including black people, have had to deal with the problem of chronic unemployment and retreat entirely from the labor force. How is it that advocates for the poor don’t really seem to understand that when our economy doesn’t grow there is no possible way that poverty will ever be reduced?  Perhaps it’s because the poor are now permanently attended to by the profession of community advocates.

In America, even as the world uses the American model of entrepreneurial capitalism to push back poverty, we have institutionalized poverty as an intractable social condition!  The ideological solution is to take from the rich despite the tautological reality that their invested capital creates all the new jobs.  If you don’t think the poor can or want to work, that they should be permanent wards of the state, and you wrap yourself in the feel-good pop-morality of “social justice,” what other solution can you reach?  Tragically, America’s cadre of public policy professionals seems to believe the poor will always be with us, at pretty much the same percent of population, no matter what.  Thank goodness China, India and, now, countries in Africa don’t buy this assumption!

Where in the rhetoric of those who advocate for the poor does one ever hear of the eradication of poverty outright through the expansion of minority entrepreneurship and the growing up of scale businesses?  The notion that somehow entrepreneurial capitalism is not what the poor could use to their benefit is bolstered by a set of memes that serve to make growth itself somehow morally questionable.  Experts in community activism and social work, as well as some philanthropic supporters and growing numbers of college students, appear to believe that it is better that people live in an eco-friendly static state of near-poverty than be cogs in the destruction of the environment that is the inevitable (but not really true) cost of economic growth.

In a confused world of economic policy there is only one true north – growth!  Growth means the expansion of human welfare at home.  Public policy that is not first and foremost focused on economic expansion of our own economy imposes unnecessary and horrific costs on individuals, most importantly the poor, right here in America.

Here’s how old Pickerhead is. When traveling from Rhode Island to Valley Forge for the 1957 Boy Scout Jamboree, he can remember the train stopping periodically for ice for the air conditioning system. CNN has a story on the man who helped create the ice business in America.

Frederic Tudor not only introduced the world to cold glasses of water on hot summer days, he created a thirst people never realized they had.

In 1805, two wealthy brothers from Boston, Massachusetts, were at a family picnic, enjoying the rare luxuries of cold beverages and ice cream.

They joked about how their chilled refreshments would be the envy of all the colonists sweating in the West Indies.

It was a passing remark, but it stuck with one of the brothers. His name was Frederic Tudor, and 30 years later, he would ship nearly 200 tons of ice halfway around the globe to become the “Ice King.”

 

Ice man cometh

Nothing in Tudor’s early years indicated that he would invent an industry.

He had the pedigree to attend Harvard but dropped out of school at the age of 13.

After loafing for a few years, he retired to his family’s country estate to hunt, fish, and play at farming.

When his brother, William, quipped that they should harvest ice from the estate’s pond and sell it in the West Indies, Frederic took the notion seriously. After all, he had little else to do. …