JustOneMinute

James Comey To The FBI

The NY Times tells us that James B. Comey, a "former Bush official", will be nominated to lead the FBI:

By choosing Mr. Comey, a Republican, Mr. Obama made a strong statement about bipartisanship at a time when he faces renewed criticism from Republicans in Congress and has had difficulty winning confirmation of some important nominees.

They include this bit of near-history:

At the same time, Mr. Comey’s role in one of the most dramatic episodes of the Bush administration — in which he refused to acquiesce to White House aides and reauthorize a program for eavesdropping without warrants when he was serving as acting attorney general — should make him an acceptable choice to Democrats.

...

In the 2004 episode that defined Mr. Comey’s time in the Bush administration, the White House counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales, and Mr. Bush’s chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., sought to persuade Attorney General John Ashcroft — who was hospitalized and disoriented — to reauthorize the administration’s controversial eavesdropping program.

Mr. Comey, who was serving as the acting attorney general and had been tipped off that Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Card were trying to go around him, rushed to Mr. Ashcroft’s hospital room to thwart them. With Mr. Comey as well as Mr. Mueller in the room, Mr. Ashcroft refused to reauthorize the program. Mr. Bush later agreed to make changes in the program, and Mr. Comey was widely praised for putting the law over politics.

He surely was so praised. The WaPo skates a bit closer to what I think is the truth:

Comey was famously involved in a 2004 hospital-room confrontation with White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and the president’s chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr. The two White House officials were attempting to persuade Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, who was recovering from emergency surgery to remove his gallbladder, to reauthorize a controversial warrantless domestic eavesdropping program.

...

Comey’s objection to the warrantless wiretapping — he told Congress that he would have resigned had the technique continued — was not his only brush with Bush-era policies. He also opposed the approval of enhanced interrogation techniques by the CIA. He said at the time that the Justice Department would eventually be ashamed of its legal backing when the world learned about the methods, which included waterboarding.

"Bush-era"? Many would describe that as "Cheney-era". One more dot to connect:

Comey later came under criticism from some Bush administration officials for his role in selecting Patrick Fitzgerald to lead the special investigation into the leaking of the name of CIA officer Valerie Plame, a probe that led to the conviction of Vice President Dick Cheney’s adviser Scooter Libby.

Which leads to my perspective - a Republican group was pushing back on a number of fronts against Dick Cheney's aggressive view of Executive power and the best way to fight the war on terror. Warrantless surveillance and enhanced interrogation were two disputed areas. The Plame "investigation" was never a serious attempt to find out who may have leaked information about Valerie Plame (hence the cursory non-investigation of Armitage and Powell at State and the utter pass given to NBC's Russert, Mitchell and Gregory) - the focus was on bringing down Scooter Libby and Dick Cheney.

Just to review the timing - Jack Goldsmith took over the Office of Legal Counsel in October 2003 and promptly raised questions about enhanced interrogation and warrantless wiretapping. He tried without success during the fall of 2003 to get James Comey, then a Deputy AG, read into the surveillance program. On Dec 30, 2003 Ashcroft recuses himself from,the Plame investigation and Comey appoints Special Counsel Fitzgerald. A month later, Comey was read into the surveillance program, and by March we had the famous hospital showdown.

Cheney had made a lot of enemies, not all of whom were on Team Blue.

 

Harvard 1, Strawman 0

To the delight of NY Times headline writers, some politicized Harvard scholars (from the Warren School?) provide an answer to a question nobody is asking:

For Medicare, Immigrants Offer Surplus, Study Finds

Medicare? I thought the controversy was about whether illegal immigrants were net "takers" of government services directed to the young and poor, such as public education, food stamps, emergency room services and so on. Does anyone really think elderly Hispanics are coming to this country to retire, collecting Social Security and Medicare benefits for which they are not eligible?

But not so fast! Did I say "illegal imigrants"? My bad:

Researchers included the contributions of legal residents who were not citizens, a group that is eligible for Medicare if certain requirements are met; unauthorized immigrants; and citizens who were born abroad.

It was not clear how much of the surplus was made up of earnings by immigrants in the country illegally, who are ineligible for most government programs.

So this study is not even looking at just illegal immigrants? Then why bother?

The Times eventually notes that immigrants (legal and illegal) tend to be young; their current net contribution to Social Security (and presumably Medicare) has been a commonplace of the debate.

The Times also includes some appropriately dismissive comments. My fave:

Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, who was an author of the institute’s report this month [2013, 2007], said that looking at Medicare alone was not very useful, as it was just one slice of the entire entitlement pie. And the large immigrant youth population, which the study spends most of its time on, is familiar, he said.

“It’s a yawner of a study,” he said. “Young people don’t get Medicare. We don’t need several Ph.D.’s to tell us that.”

But some cheerleading is also included:

The finding “pokes a hole in the widespread assumption that immigrants drain U.S. health care spending dollars,” said Leah Zallman, an instructor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and the lead author of the study.

Pokes a hole? Despite not looking at Medicaid and emergency room spending, where critics claim the real spending is ocurring? Despite not separating illegal immigrants from high tech H1-B visa holders working for Apple?

More hilarity (my emphasis):

“There’s this strong belief that immigrants are takers,” said Leighton Ku, the director of the Center for Health Policy Research at George Washington University. “This shows they are contributing hugely. Without immigrants, the Medicare trust fund would be in trouble sooner.” The belief prevails, for example, among some opponents of immigration reform.

The Times does not cite anyone expressing the belief that immigrants, legal and illegal, are a current net drain on Medicare. Such a person may exist, but let's look at the 2013 Heritage study (of controversial authorship) mentioned by the Times.

The focus is on illegal immigrants and all government services, not only Medicare. However, we are offered clues that current Medicare expenditures are not an issue by passages such as this:

As noted, there currently are few unlawful immigrants over age 50. This may be because unlawful immigrants, arriving as young adults over the past 15 to 20 years, have simply not yet reached age 50. It may also be that unlawful immigrants, being unable to access the U.S. welfare and retirement systems under current law, simply go back to their country of origin as they get older. If one assumes that under current law, most unlawful immigrants will return to their country of origin around age 55, the lifetime fiscal costs of unlawful immigrants under current law are comparatively low: only around $1 trillion.

Per Heritage, bringing illegals onto the books will also boost tax receipts in the short term:

The present analysis assumes that at the current time, some 55 percent of unlawful immigrant workers work on the books and 45 percent work off the books. The analysis assumes that if amnesty were enacted, 95 percent of future employment of the former unlawful immigrants would occur on the books. This would increase payments of federal and state income taxes, FICA taxes, and other labor taxes (such unemployment and work compensation fees) by nearly $14 billion per year.

However, the short term boost is more than offset by the long term consequences:

It is often argued that unlawful immigrants have a positive impact on U.S. taxpayers because they pay taxes into the Social Security trust fund. Unlawful immigrant workers do pay Social Security or FICA taxes; the median unlawful immigrant worker currently pays about $2,070 per year in FICA taxes.[49]

If amnesty encouraged all former unlawful immigrant workers to work on the books, that number would rise to around $3,770. A worker who paid this amount into Social Security for 35 years would contribute $132,000. Upon retiring, this individual would receive $14,650 per year in Social Security benefits and $10,074 per year in Medicare benefits.[50] Over an average span of 18 years of retirement, the total Social Security and Medicare benefits received by this individual would come to $445,000. Thus, the retirement benefits received would be more than three times the taxes paid into the system.[51]

Moreover, taxes and benefits must be viewed holistically. It is a mistake to look at the Social Security trust fund in isolation. Unlawful immigrants draw benefits from many other government programs besides Social Security. If an individual pays $3,700 per year into the Social Security trust fund but simultaneously draws a net $25,000 per year (benefits minus taxes) out of general government revenue, the solvency of government has not improved. In reality, other taxpayers, including many Social Security recipients, will face higher taxes in order to subsidize unlawful immigrant households.

Lest you wonder whether Heritage was breaking new ground here, let's flash back to 2004 and a CIS study estimating the tax impact of illegal immigrants on the Federal coffers:

Social Security and Medicare. Although we find that the net effect of illegal households is negative at the federal level, the same is not true for Social Security and Medicare. We estimate that illegal households create a combined net benefit for these two programs in excess of $7 billion a year, accounting for about 4 percent of the total annual surplus in these two programs. However, they create a net deficit of $17.4 billion in the rest of the budget, for a total net loss of $10.4 billion. Nonetheless, their impact on Social Security and Medicare is unambiguously positive. Of course, if the Social Security totalization agreement with Mexico signed in June goes into effect, allowing illegals to collect Social Security, these calculations would change.

That may all be obvious to you, but I bet you don't have a Harvard PhD. Or write Times headlines.

SINCE YOU ASKED: The Times includes a dismissive quote from Gordon Hanson:

Gordon Hanson, a professor of economics at the University of California, San Diego, who has worked on migration issues for 20 years, said there was still no comprehensive nonpartisan analysis of the fiscal consequences of putting illegal immigrants on the books.

Federal coffers tend to benefit from immigrants in the country illegally, he said, with contributions to programs like Social Security and Medicare that those immigrants cannot draw on later. State and local governments, on the other hand, have to absorb more of the costs, like education for their children and emergency room visits.

This summarizes a paper presented by Prof. Hanson circa 2006.

EVEN TIMES READERS... The reader revolt in the Times comments section is shocking. One wonders if the Times editors are capable of noticing, or of embarrassment.

Just Say "Yes" to MoveOn

How many MoveOn petitions have you signed? This could be the first!

Tell Guantanamo Hunger Strikers: Stop Torturing President Obama

Dear Hunger Strikers,

We understand that indefinite detention is not a picnic and that many of you are probably homesick. But the hunger strike is doing nothing to hurt the Congressional Republicans, who are actually the ones responsible for your imprisonment. Meanwhile, the man who has pledged repeatedly to free you is said to be suffering from deep anguish. Obama has your back, but do you have his? Please call off this ill-advised hunger strike.

P.S. We’re serious and if you continue to push Obama, we will call you terrorists and urge the president to throw the book at you.

And if we get really angry, we will threaten to have them turned loose so we can hunt  them down with drones.

Just Say 'No' To Special Prosecutors

The WSJ argues that a special prosecutor will just become Obama's Special Protector in the IRS debacle:

The case for a special counsel is that Attorney General Eric Holder can't be trusted to investigate his Administration, and that the Administration will stonewall Congress. We don't trust Mr. Holder either, but letting him pass the buck to a special prosecutor is doing him a favor. This scandal is best handled in Congressional hearings that educate the public in the next year rather than wait two or three years for potential indictments.

With a special prosecutor, the probe would immediately move to the shadows, and the Administration and the IRS would use it as an excuse to limit its cooperation with Congress. Special prosecutors aren't famous for their speed, and a decision on indictments would extend well past the 2014 election. If there were no indictments, whatever the prosecutor has discovered would stay secret. And even if specific criminal charges were filed, the facts of an indictment couldn't stray far from the four corners of the violated statute.

So with a special prosecutor we will only find out bits of what happened, years from now. What is Obama waiting for?

FWIW: I made the same point back in the Plame days and a few weeks back on this.

Winter Is Coming

We are back to global cooling in Forbes. Do keep in mind - for the statists who seized on global warming as an excuse to tax and regulate everything, global cooling will work just as well. After a few years of grinding the intellectual gears, of course. We eagerly await Al Gore's sequel, A REALLY Inconvenient Truth.

RANDOMLY WALKING, OR STAGGERING: The gist here by Doug Keenan is that a random walk model of annual temperature change over the last few centuries fits the data better than the trend models, which implies that the temperature changes we have seen over the last 150 years are not statistically meaningful. Folks who see an upward temperature trend are subject to the same illusion as those who see meaningful patterns in charts of the movement of stock prices. More on the climate issues here.

I won't name any names but a couple of the quant jocks here will find this follow-up to be hilarious (I got the punchline after far too many minutes of reflection. You say 'ARIMA', I say... 'Huh? Where are my old notebooks...')

Anyway, the author was pushing back against the random-walker. Her claim, after extending the data back to 1800:

BEST data: Trend looks statistically significant so far.

And her Big Finish:

That is: using the preliminary BEST data going back to 1800, the IPCC AR(1) blows the model favored by Doug Keenan in his Wall Street Journal out of the water. The model that says "Statistically significant warming" wins.

Yeah, take that, global warming deniers!

Except that her UPDATE is truly mortifying given the seeming snark of the original post:

Update(May 25): If I use annual averaged best data, the model that wins reverses. As already promised below, I'll be discussing other models.

I haven't looked for that discussion yet. But what went wrong? Well, Doug Keenan tested a random walk model against annual data. The extended data for the rebuttal was originally left on a monthly basis. A moment's reflection (or several) will suggest that a trend-based model will outperform a random walk model over an annual weather cycle. Basically, the random walker will say that information about whether last month was warmer than two months ago is not helpful in predicting whether the next month will be warmer yet. By way of contrast, the trend model will say that if this month was warmer than the previous one then the next month will be even warmer than this one.

And in a normal year in the Northern Hemisphere, February is warmer than January, March is warmer than February, and so on until there is an inflection in August; July is warmer than June, so the model will mindlesslly predict August to be warmer than July. With the normal progression of the seasons this won't pan out. However, since August is cooler than July, the model will then predict September to be cooler than August, and it is back to making predictions that will probably look pretty good. Until January/February, when we reverse direction again and repeat the annual warming cycle.

So over a twelve month period a simple mindless trend model should make ten good predictions and two bad ones. The Random Walk model will not look good by comparison. But once the data are averaged over a year, apparently the Random Walk re-emerges triumphant even back to 1800.

A more nuanced response (although dismissed by Doug Keenan) is presented here by Doug McNeall.

Not That I Am The Target Audience, But...

Breaking (actually, side-splitting) news on the Hillary hagiography planned for the summer of 2016:

Scarlett Johansson and Reese Witherspoon are among actresses being considered to portray the former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Rodham - about the younger years of the former First Lady and senator - is due out some time around the 2016 presidential election, in which Clinton might be a canditate. It will focus on 1974, when she was a Washington lawyer.

And since Hillary was the most beautiful woman in Washington Scarlett would be a logical choice. I understand Hollwood can't suck up to her fast enough, but please. Common sense prevailed in this headline, after a fashion:

Scarlett Johansson 'too sexy' for role

Oddly, the role in question was not "Rodham", but Lisbeth Salander from "The Girl With The Dragon Tatoo". The director explains:

Director David Fincher decided against giving the role of main character Lisbeth Salander - who is played by Rooney Mara [pics]- to the 26-year-old beauty, despite her "great" audition, because people "can't wait for her to take her clothes off".

Hmm, if she is playing Rodham we can wait.

ObamaCare - Is Obama Lying, Or Ignorant?

Last month our President was talking up his legacy achievement:

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, I think that any time you’re implementing something big, there’s going to be people who are nervous and anxious about is it going to get done, until it’s actually done.

 

But let’s just step back for a second and make sure the American people understand what it is that we’re doing.  The Affordable Care Act -- Obamacare -- has now been with us for three years.  It’s gone through Supreme Court tests.  It’s gone through efforts to repeal.  A huge chunk of it has already been implemented.  And for the 85 to 90 percent of Americans who already have health insurance, they’re already experiencing most of the benefits of the Affordable Care Act even if they don’t know it.  Their insurance is more secure.  Insurance companies can’t drop them for bad reasons.  Their kids are able to stay on their health insurance until they’re 26 years old.  They’re getting free preventive care.  

 

So there are a whole host of benefits that, for the average American out there, for the 85 to 90 percent of Americans who already have health insurance, this thing has already happened.  And their only impact is that their insurance is stronger, better, more secure than it was before.  Full stop.  That’s it.  They don’t have to worry about anything else.

Today the NY Times reports on the impact of the "Cadillac tax" on generous health care plans:

While most of the attention on the Obama administration’s health care law has been on providing coverage to tens of millions of uninsured Americans by 2014, workers with employer-paid health insurance are also beginning to feel the effects. Companies hoping to avoid the tax are beginning to scale back the more generous health benefits they have traditionally offered and to look harder for ways to bring down the overall cost of care.

In a way, the changes are right in line with the administration’s plan: To encourage employers to move away from plans that insulate workers from the cost of care and often lead to excessive procedures and tests, and galvanize employers to try to control ever-increasing medical costs. But the tax remains one of the law’s most controversial provisions.

Bradley Herring, a health economist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, suggested the result would be more widely felt than many people realize. “The reality is it is going to hit more and more people over time, at least as currently written in law, ” he said. Mr. Herring estimated that as many as 75 percent of plans could be affected by the tax over the next decade — unless employers manage to significantly rein in their costs.

75% of plans could be affected? Maybe Obama still believes "The Truth" his Administration was promoting back in 2009:

Second, the excise tax levied on insurance companies for high-premium plans, the so-called "Cadillac tax," will affect only a small portion of the very highest cost health plans – a total of 3% of premiums in 2013. The vast majority of health plans fall below the thresholds set in the Senate plan and would be completely unaffected by the provision. And those that are above the threshold would only face an excise tax on the generally small portion of the plan that exceeds the threshold.

The "Cadillac Tax" was sold as basically targeting Mitt Romney and his sons. However, the left leaning Economic Policy Institute recently blew the whistle on that; this is from the Huffington Post:

One Obamacare provision targeting employers that offer overly generous insurance could wind up costing Americans with pretty ordinary health plans, a new report finds.

The Affordable Care Act includes a tax on high-cost insurance plans that’s both a funding mechanism for the law and meant to encourage patients with a menu of generous health benefits to choose only necessary services. But the tax could wind up hurting workers who pay premium dollars for not-so-premium health plans, according to a new report from the left-leaning think tank the Economic Policy Institute.

Let's cut back to the Times story where they ilustrate their point with a human example:

The changes can be significant for employees. The hospital where Abbey Bruce, a nursing assistant in Olympia, Wash., worked, for example, stopped offering the traditional plan that she and her husband, Casey, who has cystic fibrosis, had chosen.

Starting this year, they have a combined deductible of $2,300, compared with just $500 before. And while she was eligible for a $1,400 hospital contribution to a savings account linked to the plan, the couple is now responsible for $6,600 a year in medical expenses, in contrast to a $3,000 limit on medical bills and $2,000 limit on pharmacy costs last year. She has had to drop out of school and take on additional jobs to pay for her husband’s medicine.

“My husband didn’t choose to be born this way,” Ms. Bruce said. The union representing her, a chapter of the Service Employees International Union, has objected to the changes. Her employer, Providence Health & Services, says it designed the plans to avoid having employees shoulder too much in medical bills and has reduced how much workers pay in premiums.

A nursing assistant who is a member of the SEIU? Hey, that doesn't sound like Mitt Romney or any other fat cat deplored by the left.

I guess Obama is too busy not knowing about Benghazi and not knowing about the IRS to know about this.

SINCE IGNORANCE IS BLISS: Let's cut to the blissful Paul Krugman, with today's cheerleading for ObamaCare:

Before I can explain what the news means, I need to make a crucial point: Obamacare is a deeply conservative reform, not in a political sense (although it was originally a Republican proposal) but in terms of leaving most people’s health care unaffected. Americans who receive health insurance from their employers, Medicare or Medicaid — which is to say, the vast majority of those who have any kind of health insurance at all — will see almost no changes when the law goes into effect.

The NY Times - two papers in one.

Rioting In Sweden - Help Is On the Way!

Rioting spread in Sweden:

Rioting spread to several Swedish towns on Friday night as police stepped up arrests during a sixth night of unrest and far-right vigilantes chased non-whites in southern Stockholm.

In Linköping, central southern Sweden, police responded to 120 incidents as cars, caravans and two schools were set alight. At one point a blazing truck was rolled into a building, which caught fire.

...

In Stockholm, police made 18 arrests - the largest number since the disturbances broke out last Sunday night in the northern suburb of Husby a week after an elderly immigrant was shot dead by police. The violence appears to have been sparked by young, second-generation immigrants from north Africa and the Middle East angered by racism and social exclusion.

This problem has been brewing in Sweden for many years, as long time readers of this blog will recall. From a 2002 post which dealt with income inequality in Sweden and the US:

However, immigrant labor rates [in Sweden] started decreasing in the mid-70s, and the gap between the indigenous population and immigrants continued to increase considerably in the past decade, partly due to the recession that began in 1990. During the first half of 1998, the unemployment rate for non-Nordic citizens was 28.3% and a relatively mild 5.7% for the "Nordic" population (the Nordic countries are Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Norway).

But help, after a fashion, is on the way. Although it is too controversial to report, the immigrants in question tend to be Muslim. This year Ramadan begins in early July. During Ramadan observant Muslims are meant to fast from sunrise to sunset. That is a manageable hardship in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, which is near the equator: this July, the days there will be about 13 1/2 hours long, which leaves 11 1/2 hours during which food and drink can be consumed.

But Stockholm in the summertime? That is getting close to the land of the midnight sun - the days will be over 18 hours long at the start of Ramadan. Observant Muslims will have less than six hours to manage a breakfast and a dinner. Good luck, and Godspeed!

Leaks Investigations, LOL

The NY Times provides context for Obama by reviewing the recent history of leak investigations. Without, of course, any mention of the Plame debacle, since that was a sincere effort to invent a scandal and bring down the Administration, with reporters jailed as collateral damage.

Further comedy gold is provided with the news that Obama Is Irritated:

On Thursday, President Obama ordered a review of Justice Department procedures for leak investigations, saying he was concerned that such inquiries chilled journalists’ ability to hold the government accountable. But he made no apology for the scrutiny of the many officials whose records were searched or who had been questioned by the F.B.I.

“He makes the case that we have 18-year-olds out fighting wars and acting like adults, and we have senior administration officials quoted in stories acting like children,” said Tommy Vietor, a former National Security Council spokesman. Mr. Obama and top administration officials say some leaks put Americans at risk, disrupted intelligence operations and strained alliances.

Oh, please - Administration officials were leaking like schoolgirls in the summer of 2012 in order to boost Obama's reelection chances. What is Obama's complaint, that his aides are so blindly devoted that they are risking national security to keep him in office? I remain confident he could have stifled them if he had wanted to. Instead, he is trying to stifle the press.

AND SPEAKING OF VALERIE PLAME... Lest we forget, once the criminal referral was publicized Richard Armitage of the State Dept. put himself forward privately but promptly as the leaker (OK, he forgot about his leak to Bob Woodward, but still...). Yet in the AP case of the Yemen leak we have been told that the FBI has interviewed over 500 officials without finding the leaker. What, the person won't step forward? Why not?

The China Syndrome

China may finally be tugging on North Korea's leash:

China Bluntly Tells North Korea to Enter Nuclear Talks

By JANE PERLEZ

BEIJING — The Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, bluntly told a North Korean envoy on Friday that his country should return to diplomatic talks intended to rid it of its nuclear weapons, according to a state-run Chinese news agency.

Via Josh Rogin at the FP, this freight train has been gathering steam for a while.

Salute This!

Matt Drudge and The Weekly Standard highlight CBS News' Mark Knoller noting that Obama failed to return the salute of a Marine while boarding the Marine One helicopter.

Without looking it up I will assert that, based on my recollections of related coverage from the Clinton era, Presidents, as civilians, are not supposed to be saluting anyone. Of course, there is military protocol and there is Presidential custom - my further recollection is that Presidents do in fact routinely return salutes, and some Presidents manage it better than others. 

So are we thumping Barry for inadvertently getting it right? For being a literalist instead of following tradition? Or is my memory utterly askew? Or has the protocol been changed since Clinton (yet another 9/11 effect?). So many questions.

Over to Google...

REASSURING: My steel trap is not fully rusted out yet:

Longstanding tradition requires members of the military to salute the president. The practice of presidents returning that salute is more recent — Ronald Reagan started it in 1981.
 
Reagan’s decision raised eyebrows at the time. Dwight Eisenhower, a former five-star general, did not return military salutes while president. Nor had other presidents.

Reagan reportedly discussed this with the commandant of the Marine Corps, who said that Reagan was the boss and a gesture of respect was fine. Clinton was mocked for his early efforts and naturally Bush 43 was criticized:

The debate over saluting has persisted, with some arguing against it for protocol reasons, others saying it represents an increasing militarization of the civilian presidency.

“The gesture is of course quite wrong: Such a salute has always required the wearing of a uniform,” author and historian John Lukacs wrote in The New York Times in 2003.

“But there is more to this than a decline in military manners,” he added. “There is something puerile in the Reagan (and now Bush) salute. It is the joyful gesture of someone who likes playing soldier. It also represents an exaggeration of the president’s military role.”

Garry Wills, the author and Northwestern University professor, echoed those remarks in the Times in 2007.
 
“The glorification of the president as a war leader is registered in numerous and substantial executive aggrandizements; but it is symbolized in other ways that, while small in themselves, dispose the citizenry to accept those aggrandizements,” he wrote.

Very interesting. Since this incident comes the day after Obama's drone speech and his expression of hope that the war on terror will not be endless, maybe we are seeing an attempt by Obama to de-militarize the Presidency. That would actually be newsworthy, rather than thump-worthy.

Obama did return to shake the Marine's hand. If he wants to substitute some other gesture of respect for the salute, that might fly with people. However, I would not advise any President, but especially one with a reputation for cool aloofness, to adopt a new practice of striding past servicemen and women without acknowledging them.

Legalizing Pot

The NY Times has a round table on legalizing marijuana.

Mark Kleiman is one of the contributors. If I may steal a point he makes in his book "Drugs And Drug Policy", folks who think we should simply regulate marijuana as we do alcohol are sliding by the fact that (based on CDC numbers) our approach to alcohol could probably use some work:

There are approximately 80,000 deaths attributable to excessive alcohol use each year in the United States.¹ This makes excessive alcohol use the 3r d leading lifestyle-related cause of death for the nation.² Excessive alcohol use is responsible for 2.3 million years of potential life lost (YPLL) annually, or an average of about 30 years of potential life lost for each death.¹ In 2006, there were more than 1.2 million emergency room visits and 2.7 million physician office visits due to excessive drinking.³ The economic costs of excessive alcohol consumption in 2006 were estimated at $223.5 billion.³

So alcohol abuse is not just killing people, it is (somewhat unlike cancer or heart disease) killing a lot of younger people.

Nixon's The One, But Obama Is Coming On

Yesterday, in anticipation of Obama's drone speech, the NY Times ran a guest piece blasting him. The author, James C. Goodale, represented The New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case:

The search warrant filed to investigate the Fox News reporter James Rosen proved as many had suspected: President Obama wants to make it a crime for a reporter to talk to a leaker. It is a further example of how President Obama will surely pass President Richard Nixon as the worst president ever on issues of national security and press freedom.

Not a fan.

Obama has now made his inevitable left turn against his own drone war:

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Thursday announced new restraints on targeted killings and narrowed the scope of the long struggle with terrorists as part of a transition to a day he envisions when the nation will no longer be on the war footing it has been on since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

In a widely anticipated speech at the National Defense University, Mr. Obama offered his most expansive defense of the drone war he has waged since taking office, but he signaled that he planned to wind down the strikes, which have stirred controversy at home and abroad. He referred obliquely to a new secret order imposing a higher standard on authorizing such attacks and shifting responsibility more from the C.I.A. to the military.

Beyond that, Mr. Obama proposed the creation of a secret court or some other independent body that would have to sign off on strikes in the future.

Stop me before I kill again!

Mark Mazetti, a Times reporter with a book on the drone war, provides his perspective on the speech. This is poignant:

In his speech, President Obama spoke of a “strong preference” for capturing militants rather than killing them. During his presidency, a far greater number of militant suspects have been killed than captured.

Mysteriously these darn terrorists haven't been walking into US Embassies and surrendering.

Only In Florida (Ongoing)

The latest legal hijinks to come out of the Sunshine State involves a classic Juliet and Juliet love story with a bit of an age twist:

(CBS) SEBASTIAN, Fla. - A Florida state attorney says the charges against Kaitlyn Hunt, an 18-year-old high school student who engaged in a same-sex relationship with a 15-year-old classmate, will not be dropped, despite petitions from the public, CBS affiliate WTSP reports.

...

The Indian River County Sheriff's Office held a press conference Monday in response to the public's uproar.

"If this was an 18-year-old male and that was a 14-year-old girl, it would have been prosecuted the same way," Indian River County Sheriff Deryl Loar said.

According to the station, Florida's law says any person who engages in sexual activity with a minor between the ages of 12 and 16 commits the crime of lewd and lascivious battery.

...

According to an arrest affidavit obtained by WTSP, Kaitlyn and her girlfriend began dating in November 2012. The victim reportedly told police they began a sexual relationship and according to the report, the victim was 14 and Kaitlyn was 18.

It would be interesting to know whether it would be significant if the relationship started when Kaitlin was 17. My guess is not, but it is wild to think that the relationship could have been legal at the outset but became illegal at the older girl's 18th birthday. This tidbit hangs over the proposed plea deal:

If she is found guilty, it's also possible that Hunt could apply to not have to register as a sex offender under a "Romeo and Juliet" law [more] because the girls were no more than four years apart in age, Colton said.

It would also be interesting to know the history of this law. I can't escape the suspicion that once upon a time the point of the law was to protect underage girls from predatory guys with pregnancy as the feared outcome (I didn't grow up hearing anyone refer to me as "jailbait" in my youth, although my mom assures all and sundry I was a handsome lad. Well, moms... Still, I never heard any other guys referred to as jailbait either. Hmm, Justin Bieber? Not any more!

Friday will be a big day for this case apparently. Hey, why not a pardon from thre Governor?

The IRS Hearings

Fox News in Cinncinnati delves into the IRS chain of command.

Now Apple Is The Enemy?

Democrats are going to demonize Apple as a non-taxpayer when there are so many US corporations from which to choose? What, did Obama's last fundraising swing through Silicon Valley disappoint?

The Times had an amusing and comprehensible example of a legal tasx minimization ploy:

Atop Apple’s offshore network is a subsidiary named Apple Operations International, which is incorporated in Ireland — where Apple had negotiated a special corporate tax rate of 2 percent or less in recent years — but keeps its bank accounts and records in the United States and holds board meetings in California.

Because the United States bases residency on where companies are incorporated, while Ireland focuses on where they are managed and controlled, Apple Operations International was able to fall neatly between the cracks of the two countries’ jurisdictions.

So for tax purposes Apple was nowhere. That is assuming the Times has this right, and in my experience they have a hard time on issues of tax and finance.

They also allude to a dumb but widely offered argument, to wit, that corparations that leave cash overseas to avoid taxes are inevitably under-investing in their US operations. That could make sense in the case of small businesses that lack ready access to our capital markets. However, the notion that Apple is constrained in its investments by a lack of internally generated cash is absurd. To their credit, the Times presents the research making that point:

As companies’ earnings have accumulated offshore, many executives have been pushing more aggressively for a tax holiday that would allow them to bring back funds at lower tax rates. Apple has recently announced that it will return $100 billion to shareholders over three years through a combination of dividends and purchases of its own shares. Though Apple has enough cash on hand to pay for those initiatives, the company recently announced it would take on $17 billion in debt, rather than bring overseas money back to the United States to avoid paying repatriation taxes on those returning funds.

“If Apple had used its overseas cash to fund this return of capital, the funds would have been diminished by the very high corporate U.S. tax rate of 35 percent,” Mr. Cook is planning to testify, according to the prepared text. Apple “believes the current system, which applies industrial era concepts to a digital economy, actually undermines U.S. competitiveness.”

Critics, however, say these so-called repatriation holidays, which bring back funds at lower tax rates, do virtually nothing to stimulate the economy and benefit only corporations, their executives and shareholders. Congress enacted a repatriation holiday in 2004, allowing corporations to bring back about $300 billion from overseas and pay just 5.25 percent rather than the regular 35 percent corporate rate.

But a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that 92 percent of the repatriated cash was used to pay for dividends, share buybacks or executive bonuses.

“Repatriations did not lead to an increase in domestic investment, employment or R.&D., even for the firms that lobbied for the tax holiday stating these intentions,” concluded the study, which was conducted by a team of three economists that included a former Bush administration official. Tuesday’s hearing on Capitol Hill, along with the disclosures about Apple’s tax policies, are likely to make lowering repatriation taxes a more difficult proposition for lawmakers to stomach, Congressional staff members said.

 BIG FINISH: The most creative minds in Silicon Valley study and create computer code, the most creative minds in Wall Street study, and lobby for changes in, the tax code, and the result is Apple.

 

 

Scandals

 

A new ABC News/WaPo poll is out with some reaction to the various scandals.

A majority think the Administration is trying to cover up the facts on Benghazi.

A majority think the IRS deliberately targeted conservative groups; a [plurality think the Administration is covering up the facts.

But there is little love for the press - a majority think the federal prosecutors were justified in going after the phone records of the AP. That said, 69% are very or somewhat concerned that the feds will overstep in trying to protect classified information.

Here we go:

Q: Do you think the Obama administration (is honestly disclosing what it knows about what occurred in Benghazi) or (is trying to cover up the facts)?

33% say disclosing honestly: 55% say covering up.

But the Republicans are not unambiguously the good guys here:

Q: Republicans in Congress have criticized the way the Obama administration handled the attack in Benghazi, Libya. Do you think Republicans in Congress are (raising legitimate concerns), or are they (just political posturing)?

44% say they are raising legimate concerns; 45% say posturing.

On the IRS:

Q: As you may know it's been disclosed that the IRS singled out some conservative political groups for extra questions about their tax status. Do you think it was appropriate or inappropriate for the IRS to do this?

20% appropriate; 74% inappropriate.

Q: Do you think this extra focus on conservative political groups by the IRS was (a deliberate effort to harass these groups) or (an administrative mistake that was not intended to treat these groups unfairly)?

Deliberate - 56%; Administrative mistake - 31%

Q: In dealing with this situation with the IRS, do you think the Obama administration (is honestly disclosing what it knows about what occurred) or (is trying to cover up the facts)?

Disclosing - 42%; Concealing - 45%.

And on the AP:

Q: The AP reported classified information about U.S. anti-terrorism efforts and prosecutors have obtained AP's phone records through a court order. Do you think this action by federal prosecutors is or is not justified?

Justified - 52%; Not justified - 33%.

Nothing on the James Rosen, the Fox News reporter mentioned as a possible co-conspirator in a leak investigation because he wanted to interview a State Department source. And nothing on Secretary Sebelius' arm-twisting fund-raising from companies she regulates.

Don't Tell The President!

The latest revelation in the IRS debacle is stunning. From Politico:

The White House on Monday once again added to the list of people who knew about the IRS investigation into its targeting of conservative groups — saying White House chief of staff Denis McDonough had been informed about a month ago.

Press secretary Jay Carney said again that no one had told President Barack Obama ahead of the first news reports: not his top aide McDonough, nor his chief counsel Kathy Ruemmler, nor anyone from the Treasury Department.

I understand their desire to avoid even the appearance of interfering with an ongoing internal investigation, so not alerting the President before hand is a justifiable strategy. What is inexplicable is that the President was sent out after the story appeared in the press to express his disappointment and anger without any staffer mentioning to him that, by the way, we knew about that. So now, a week later, we find out that his chief of staff was keeping him out of the loop.

Of course, maybe Obama was just playing dumb and had been told immediately that his staff had been shelterering him for several weeks. At the press conference with Turkey PM Erdogan last Thursday Obama was queried specifically on the timing and ducked it:

Q    Unfortunately, we all forgot umbrellas.  Mr. President, I want to ask you about the IRS.  Can you assure the American people that nobody in the White House knew about the agency’s actions before your Counsel’s Office found out on April 22nd?  And when they did find out, do you think that you should have learned about it before you learned about it from news reports as you said last Friday?  And also, are you opposed to there being a special council appointed to lead the Justice Department investigation? 

And also, Mr. Prime Minister, what is the status on efforts to normalize relations with Israel?  And do you still plan to go to Gaza in the coming weeks?  Thanks.

PRESIDENT OBAMA:  Well, with respect to the IRS, I spoke to this yesterday.  My main concern is fixing a problem, and we began that process yesterday by asking and accepting the resignation of the Acting Director there.  We will be putting in new leadership that will be able to make sure that -- following up on the IG audit -- that we gather up all the facts, that we hold accountable those who have taken these outrageous actions.  As I said last night, it is just simply unacceptable for there to even be a hint of partisanship or ideology when it comes to the application of our tax laws.

I am going to go ahead and ask folks -- why don't we get a couple of Marines, they're going to look good next to us -- (laughter) -- just because I've got a change of suits -- (laughter) -- but I don't know about our Prime Minister.  There we go.  That's good.  You guys I'm sorry about.  (Laughter.)   

But let me make sure that I answer your specific question.  I can assure you that I certainly did not know anything about the IG report before the IG report had been leaked through the press. Typically, the IG reports are not supposed to be widely distributed or shared.  They tend to be a process that everybody is trying to protect the integrity of.  But what I'm absolutely certain of is that the actions that were described in that IG report are unacceptable. 

So in addition to making sure that we've got a new acting director there, we're also going to make sure that we gather up the facts, and hold accountable and responsible anybody who was involved in this.  We're going to make sure that we identify any structural or management issues to prevent something like this from happening again.  We're going to make sure that we are accepting all of the recommendations that the IG has in the report. 

And I'm looking forward to working with Congress to fully investigate what happened, make sure that it doesn’t happen again, and also look at some of the laws that create a bunch of ambiguity in which the IRS may not have enough guidance and not be clear about what exactly they need to be doing and doing it right, so that the American people have confidence that the tax laws are being applied fairly and evenly. 

So in terms of the White House and reporting, I think that you've gotten that information from Mr. Carney and others.  I promise you this -- that the minute I found out about it, then my main focus is making sure we get the thing fixed.  I think that it's going to be sufficient for us to be working with Congress.  They've got a whole bunch of committees.  We've got IGs already there. 

The IG has done an audit; it's now my understanding they're going to be recommending an investigation.  And Attorney General Holder also announced a criminal investigation of what happened. Between those investigations, I think we’re going to be able to figure out exactly what happened, who was involved, what went wrong, and we’re going to be able to implement steps to fix it. 

And that, ultimately, is the main priority that I have, but also I think the American people have.  They understand that we’ve got an agency that has enormous potential power and is involved in everybody’s lives.  And that’s part of the reason why it’s been treated as a quasi-independent institution.  But that’s also why we’ve got to make sure that it is doing its job scrupulously and without even a hint of bias, or a hint that somehow they’re favoring one group over another. 

And, as I said yesterday, I’m outraged by this in part because, look, I’m a public figure -- if a future administration is starting to use the tax laws to favor one party over another or one political view over another, obviously we’re all vulnerable.  And that’s why, as I’ve said, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican, you should be equally outraged at even the prospect that the IRS might not be acting with the kind of complete neutrality that we expect. 

And I think we’re going to be able to fix it.  We’re going to be able to get it done, and we’ve already begun that progress and we’re going to keep on going until it’s finished.

More grist for John Stewart's mill.

Oklahoma

CNN has ongoing coverage of the disaster there.

The Fourth Scandal

The Times updates us on the fourth scandal of Hell Week:

Potential Donors to Enroll America Grow Skittish

By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration’s efforts to raise private money to carry out the president’s health care law have provoked such a strong partisan uproar that potential donors have become skittish about contributing, according to several people involved in the fund-raising program.

White House officials said they did not sign off on the fund-raising calls made by Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, but were generally aware that she would be seeking support from outside groups.

Two House committees have begun investigating the solicitations. Five senior Republicans from the Senate and the House have asked the comptroller general of the United States, Gene L. Dodaro, to investigate the actions of Ms. Sebelius to determine if she was improperly circumventing spending limits imposed by Congress.

Having Ms. Sebelius raise money from the companies she regulates never sounded like a great idea. Let's flash back to the WaPo's seemingly straight-faced explanation of how she could it within the letter of the law:

Federal regulations do not allow department officials to fundraise in their professional capacity. They do, however, allow Cabinet members to solicit donations as private citizens “if you do not solicit funds from a subordinate or from someone who has or seeks business with the Department, and you do not use your official title,” according to Justice Department regulations.

No use of her job title? She's just another private citizen! Jeffrey Andersen of The Weekly Standard expounds:

When possibly the second-most powerful person in Washington comes and suggests that perhaps you should make a donation to her administration’s favorite cause, it’s hard to say no — especially when she holds almost unchecked power over the business sector in which you compete.

That seems obvious to me, but evidently not to Barry (who is no doubt planning to emulate Bill Clinton and raise money for his future library from the Oval Office as a "private citizen").

UPDATE: And then there were five: Fox News reporter James Rosen is described as a co-conspirator for a warrant in a leak investigation? Kidding?

Light It Up

Bill Keller of the Times on how to legalize pot. he includes an interesting aspiration for the market structure by way of drug policy sage Mark Kleiman:

One practical challenge facing the legalization pioneers is how to keep the marijuana market from being swallowed by a few big profiteers — the pot equivalent of Big Tobacco, or even the actual tobacco industry — a powerful oligopoly with every incentive to turn us into a nation of stoners. There is nothing inherently evil about the profit motive, but there is evidence that pot dealers, like purveyors of alcohol, get the bulk of their profit from those who use the product to excess. “When you get a for-profit producer or distributor industry going, their incentives are to increase sales,” said Jonathan Caulkins of Carnegie Mellon, another member of the Washington consulting team. “And the vast majority of sales go to people who are daily or near-daily consumers.”

What Kleiman and his colleagues (speaking for themselves, not Washington State) imagine as the likely best model is something resembling the wine industry — a fragmented market, many producers, none dominant. This could be done by limiting the size of licensed purveyors. It would help, too, to let individuals grow a few plants at home — something Colorado’s new law permits but Washington’s does not, because polling showed Washingtonians didn’t want that.

I suppose with a fragmented market the producers could promote the product by way of a trade association - the Got Milk campaign springs to mind - but there is still a good point here. One does wonder about the history of the beer industry in the US, which was highly fragmented but (I suspect) locally concentrated a century ago. Presumably that was driven by high transportation costs which are not relevant to the current marijuana question.

Another Beautiful Sunday

Rain again? When does the global warming Al Gore promised us kick in?

On The Path (Again)

The White House Press Office delivers some light Saturday morning comedy:

President Seeks Path Forward Beyond Troubles

Their gist - the White House won't be distracted by these distractions and neither will the Times. Instead they will focus on the President's agenda, as soon as they develop one.

I can't wait for the musical: Somewhere, over the rainbow, states are Blue...

Obama's Outrage On IRS - Hey, I Might Get Audited Someday!

It's all about Obama in ObamaWorld. Here is the First Fixer explaining why he is outraged by the IRS debacle (my emphasis):

And that, ultimately, is the main priority that I have, but also I think the American people have.  They understand that we’ve got an agency that has enormous potential power and is involved in everybody’s lives.  And that’s part of the reason why it’s been treated as a quasi-independent institution.  But that’s also why we’ve got to make sure that it is doing its job scrupulously and without even a hint of bias, or a hint that somehow they’re favoring one group over another. 

And, as I said yesterday, I’m outraged by this in part because, look, I’m a public figure -- if a future administration is starting to use the tax laws to favor one party over another or one political view over another, obviously we’re all vulnerable.  And that’s why, as I’ve said, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican, you should be equally outraged at even the prospect that the IRS might not be acting with the kind of complete neutrality that we expect.

Obviously, Obama realized he couldn't quite complete the thought that follows from "Look, I'm a public figure" so he broadended his horizons to include the rest of the residents of ObamaWorld.

The good news is that he will be unemployed in another three years so perhaps he will start focusing on the grim job market in, let's guess, late 2015.

WHERE IS THE TRUST? Ann Althouse wants a special prosecutor becasue she doesn't trust the partisan hacks under Holder to investigate the partisan hacks in the IRS. Fair enough, but I don't want a special prosecutor - that becomes an excuse to hide all evidence and witnesses from Congress so as to avoid interfering with an ongoing, never-ending investigation.

That said, I would favor a special counsel for the AP leak investigation since (a) a criminal investigation is already underway for the underlying leaks,  (b)  the underlying leaks probably came from Admin officials hoping to boost Obama's re-election chances and (c) Team Holder is never going to prosecute anyone anyway. Even after his Double Secret Recusal.

Obama's Presser

I wonder what else Obama is angry about. I guess we'll find out...

The Incredible Disappearing Deficit

CBO revises downward its deficit estimate:

CBO Slashes 2013 Deficit Projection to $642 Billion

The budget deficit for the current year is projected to come in well below what was estimated just a few months ago, according to a government study released Tuesday.

The Congressional Budget Office cites higher tax revenues and better-than-expected bailout repayments by mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as the key reasons for the improved outlook. The budget office now predicts a 2013 budget deficit of $642 billion, more than $200 billion below its February estimate. This year's shortfall would register at 4.0 percent of the economy, far less than the 10.1 percent experienced in 2009 when the government ran a record $1.4 trillion deficit.

The deficit picture is expected to continue to improve next year and beyond, with the 2015 deficit now projected at $378 billion, just 2.1 percent of the economy. All told, the budget office predicts deficits over the coming decade of $6.3 trillion, down $522 billion from earlier projections.

The projected deficits then resume an upward trajectory.

Presumably this affects the urgency of any Grand Bargain. It may also alter the timing of the debt ceiling scuffle.

I infer from this that capital gains realizations were high in 2012:

One of the reasons for the burst of additional income tax revenues, the budget office says, is that upper-income taxpayers claimed more income late last year in order to avoid paying the higher tax rates enacted in January.

 The CBO report can be found here. Ezra Klein engages in some cheerleading; I especially love this:

3) Sequestration is a dumb idea.

If this report clarifies anything it’s that our debt problem, insofar as we have one, is a long-term problem, not a short-term problem. But sequestration disappears in 10 years. The policies in a deficit deal, by contrast, continue to grow. If you care about the long-term debt you should see a world in which sequestration replaces a debt deal to be a disaster. The calm of the Republican Party on this point either bespeaks a disinterest in debt or a misunderstanding about sequestration.

Dumb compared to what - negotiating more tax hikes with Obama? The search for a long term solution may have to be deferred until the next President.

 

I Buried Paul

Audio forensics reports are available for the upcoming Zimmerman trial. Whether the two reports (FCA, Reich)are actually admissible as evidence is yet to be determined, but the Reich report really needs to be turned into a comedy sketch. A highlight:

"An evangelical preacher or carnival barker". Please.

The evidentiary status of these reports is roughly as firm as their scientific foundation, which is shaky:

Zimmerman’s lead defense attorney Mark O’Mara said the only thing the audio analysis shows is that the recording is not long enough, or good enough quality, to prove anything. “There are two of them, and they seem to be internally inconsistent, because they seem to be saying different things. One witness says he thinks he hears certain things, and another witness says he doesn’t hear that. And none of them can come up with something that is precise … or that is something they can testify with.”

O’Mara said since the analysis came out just a month away from the beginning of the trial, he may ask for a delay in the trial so his defense team can have enough time to look at the science that was used to analyze the call.  He also said he plans on challenging those methods used at an evidentiary hearing he has asked for later this month.

The defense motion is discussed by the Orlando Sentinel. Jeralyn Merritt is doubtful that that the voice analysis can meet the 'Frye' standard applied by Florida courts. When this was topical last year she was pretty sure that the analysis would not pass muster in Federal court under the Daubert standard.

And even if the reprts were admitted, it is not clear what we are learning:

Two new reports from state audio experts give different conclusions about the voice screaming for help just before 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot: One said it was Trayvon. The other said some cries more likely came from his shooter.

It remains to be seen whether jurors will hear about the new evidence at George Zimmerman's trial, set to begin June 10 in Sanford. Zimmerman's lawyer said he may ask to delay the trial in light of the new analysis.

...

Another report, by Harry Hollien and James Harnsberger of Forensic Communication Associates, said the audio quality was insufficient for a definitive voice match. But they found some of the cries came close to matching Trayvon's voice, while others came close to matching Zimmerman's.

The FCA report was interesting and had a good point. They explain that they can't make a definite voice match to anybody in particular but if they assume that the screaming was coming from either Martin or Zimmerman then they can make a sensible guess as to the more likely screamer.

Which is all very well for investigative purposes (or cocktail party chit-chat) but should this go to a jury? What is the level of accuracy, or the track record of this technique? Will the jury get any baseline at all as to what these reports actually might mean?

Different researchers using different techniques come to different answers and the jury is supposed to decide the scientific validity? I don't think so. But I'm not feeling bold enough to predict a Florida court.

HOWEVER! I was bold enough to pooh-pooh voice analysis as a definitive tool in this case.

Apparently Erroneous Reporting About Allegedly Erroneous Reporting

Jake Tapper, now of CNN but a bulldog for truth while at ABC News, is getting lots of love from the left for debunking a bit of the Benghazi talking points story. His gist - the summaries of the emails put forward by ABCNews and the Weekly Standard exaggerate (to the point of invention) the mention of State Department concerns by the White House as a topic needing to be addressed.

However, there is trouble in their Blue Heaven: Tapper's summary of the Weekly Standard is wrong and somewhat misleading. Here is Tapper:

The Weekly Standard reported that Rhodes "responded to the group, explaining that Nuland had raised valid concerns and advising that the issues would be resolved at a meeting of the National Security Council’s Deputies Committee the following morning." Nuland refers to then-State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland.

But that is not what Stephen Hayes reported in the article linked by CNN; instead, he wrote that as a follow-up the the ABC news reports. The relevant passage from the original Hayes reporting is here (p. 2), with my emphasis:

But in a follow-up email at 9:24 p.m., Nuland wrote that the problem remained and that her superiors—she did not say which ones—were unhappy. The changes, she wrote, did not “resolve all my issues or those of my building leadership,” and State Department leadership was contacting National Security Council officials directly. Moments later, according to the House report, “White House officials responded by stating that the State Department’s concerns would have to be taken into account.” One official—Ben Rhodes, The Weekly Standard is told, a top adviser to President Obama on national security and foreign policy—further advised the group that the issues would be resolved in a meeting of top administration officials the following morning at the White House.

So per Hayes, his info is coming from a House report (Republican side). Other White House officials said that the State Department concerns would be addressed. And Ben Rhodes, who wrote his now-controversial email at 9:34 PM, just after the Nuland email, is alleged by Hayes to have said what CNN is now reporting: 

"...further advised the group that the issues would be resolved in a meeting of top administration officials the following morning at the White House."

Baffling. To compound the mystery, CNN presents what looks like a direct quote from the Hayes piece, but the passage does not appear in the linked Weekly Standard article. However, the phrase does appear in a different Hayes piece which was written as a follow-up to the ABC scoop.

If Hayes was right (or at least, unsure) the first time in describing what Rhodes wrote and wrong following ABC News then we should look to ABC for the problem. Here is how Karl described their sourcing for the emails:

Summaries of White House and State Department emails — some of which were first published by Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard — show that the State Department had extensive input into the editing of the talking points.

So ABC implies they had access to more emails than were reported by Stephen Hayes. Eventually, Karl writes this:

After the talking points were edited slightly to address Nuland’s concerns, she responded that changes did not go far enough.

“These changes don’t resolve all of my issues or those of my buildings leadership,” Nuland wrote.

In an email dated 9/14/12 at 9:34 p.m. — three days after the attack and two days before Ambassador Rice appeared on the Sunday shows – Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes wrote an email saying the State Department’s concerns needed to be addressed.

“We must make sure that the talking points reflect all agency equities, including those of the State Department, and we don’t want to undermine the FBI investigation.  We thus will work through the talking points tomorrow morning at the Deputies Committee meeting.”

Karl's quote includes a specific mention of the State Department; the new, selectively released email from CNN does not. What gives?

In a follow-up today, Karl tries to explain:

This is how I reported the contents of that e-mail, quoting verbatim a source who reviewed the original documents and shared detailed notes...

The source was not permitted to make copies of the original e-mails. The White House has refused multiple requests – from journalists, including myself, and from Republican leaders in Congress – to release the full e-mail exchanges.

...

I asked my original source today to explain the different wording on the Ben Rhodes e-mail, and the fact that the words “State Department” were not included in the e-mail provided to CNN’s Tapper.

This was my source’s response, via e-mail: “WH reply was after a long chain of email about State Dept concerns. So when WH emailer says, take into account all equities, he is talking about the State equities, since that is what the email chain was about.”

The White House could still clear up this confusion by releasing the full e-mail transcripts that were provided for brief review by a select number of members of Congress earlier this year. If there’s “no ‘there’ there,” as President Obama himself claimed yesterday, a full release should help his case.

Jake Tapper has a good reputation for being tough on the White House, so there was a certain craftiness in selectively releasing one out-of-context email to him to make the White House case. However, I doubt he will play the patsy here - if context counts then Tapper will join the cry for a more complete release of the emails.

And for my money, if Nuland of State is complaining at 9:24 and Rhodes is responding ten minutes later, it is hardly a stretch to think he was responding to Nuland.

MORE: Ace pounds the table about "doctored" emails, forcefully reminding people who shouldn't need reminding that ABC News and Stepehn Hayes were working off of summaries of the emails, not source documents. J Karl of ABC News is crystal clear in his follow-up; his original story opened the door to confusion with this:

White House emails reviewed by ABC News suggest the edits were made with extensive input from the State Department.

What? ABC News reviewed them? A few paragraphs later we get this:

Summaries of White House and State Department emails — some of which were first published by Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard — show that the State Department had extensive input into the editing of the talking points.

Well, was it summaries, source documents, or both? Karl was blurry in round one.

Salt It Up

Let me be the first to misrepresent this new panel finding:

Panel Finds No Benefit in Sharply Restricting Sodium

They are not saying "Salt It Up"; they are saying that there are reasons to doubt that lower levels of sodium consumption extolled by some are in fact beneficial (which is Not News). But my guess is this will be widely misinterpreted.

Well, misinterpet away, I say! Going after both salt and sugar is like going after the Joker and a jaywalker. Our national dietary discussion would benefit from a focus on the real baddies. Do keep in mind - like zombies, sugar eats your brain!

 

Waiting For Dr. Barry

The NY Times reports on Obama's presser and includes this bit of oblivion about the IRS scandal:

Mr. Obama’s comments about the I.R.S. left the agency and its leadership alone in answering charges that its employees had put added demands on Tea Party and other conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status from 2010 to 2012, even though none appeared to have been denied the classification.

They aren't worried about a chilling effect? Perhaps they were too excited about Barry's medical metaphor:

A few hours later, at a Democratic fund-raiser in New York City, Mr. Obama bemoaned “hyper-partisanship in Washington” and said he had hoped that Republicans might have been more willing to cooperate after his re-election last year.

“My thinking was when we beat them in 2012 that might break the fever, and it’s not quite broken yet,” Mr. Obama told supporters at the five-story West Village home of the film mogul Harvey Weinstein. “But I am persistent. And I am staying at it.”

You'd have to be sick to criticize Obama? I'll just guess that between Benghazi, the IRS, the AP subpoenas and Iran-Contra ObamaCare, the fever may persist a bit longer.

THIS WOULDN'T BE HAPPENING IF OABAMA WERE IN CHARGE: Team Obama has explained that the IRS is an independent agency and the Justice Department controls the scope of its investigations. So if hyper-partisan Democratic operatives are running amuck, what is a poor President to do?

A Troubling Victory Lap And Its Aftermath

Back in May 2012 the CIA, in conjunction with the British MI6 and Saudi intelligence, pulled off a coup - some double agents provided intel about the latest Al Qaeda in Yemen underwear bomb and volunteered to deliver the bomb itself; in the course of bringing that together, the Saudis also gleaned drone targeting information for some Al Qaeda-Yemen leaders.

Kudos! And this was all too good to keep quiet during a Presidential campaign, so the Administration leaked like a sieve. Unsurprisingly, this annoyed our allies, so the FBI felt obliged to investigate. And good luck to them, since the sources (as with the leaks about the raid on Osama or the cyberattacks on Iran) were clearly coming from Presidential image-polishers.

So a year has gone by and now we learn that rather than vex various White House operatives with tiresome questions about how much they spilled to the press about Obama's awesomeness the FBI managed to obtain a broad subpoena covering a number of Associated Press reporters. That flips the script! Back in the Plame days, the point of a leak investigation was to tie the Administration up in knots (actually, a bipartisan effort to tie Cheney up in knots); now the Administration is using leak investigations as a weapon to throw a (wet) blanket over the press.

Immediately Meta

The NY Times front pages a story on the IRS tax-exempt scandal and is not distracted by tedious questions such as, what happened:

I.R.S. Focus on Conservatives Gives G.O.P. an Issue to Seize On

Its a scoring opportunity for the Red Team! Why, or whether, Senate Democrats might want to lead their own investigation is not even considered.

The Nanny Mayor Is Watching You

Trouble in Bloomberg's Paradise:

Privacy Breach on Bloomberg’s Data Terminals

By AMY CHOZICK and BEN PROTESS

A shudder went through Wall Street on Friday after the revelation that Bloomberg News reporters had extracted subscribers’ private information through the company’s ubiquitous data terminals to break news.

The company confirmed that reporters at Bloomberg News, the journalism arm of Bloomberg L.P., had for years used the company’s terminals to monitor when subscribers had logged onto the service and to find out what types of functions, like the news wire, corporate bond trades or an equities index, they had looked at. Bloomberg terminals, which cost an average of more than $20,000 a year, are found in nearly every banking and trading company.

...

Bloomberg reporters used the “Z function” — a command using the letter Z and a company’s name — to view a list of subscribers at a firm. Then, a Bloomberg user could click on a subscriber’s name, which would take the user to a function called UUID. The UUID function then provided background on an individual subscriber, including contact information, when the subscriber had last logged on, chat information between subscribers and customer service representatives, and weekly statistics on how often they used a particular function. A company spokesman said both of those functions had been disabled in the newsroom.

So for example:

Similar problems, which became public on Friday, started at JPMorgan Chase last summer, when the bank suffered a multibillion-dollar trading loss. Some Bloomberg reporters called the bank, people briefed on the call said, to question whether the traders responsible for the loss had been fired. They cited the fact that the traders had gone silent on the terminal. The bank, the people said, objected to the reporting technique, but did not formally reach out to Bloomberg executives to complain. Yet bank officials soon discovered that other Bloomberg reporters were using the approach on other stories unrelated to the trading loss.

OK, that is fairly enterprising journalism. But crazy, in terms of brand management.

Well - who wants to put Mayor Bloomberg in charge of tracking gun sales nationally?

Al Sharpton - The New Godfather Of Rap?

The NY Times spends some time on the perils of hip, edgy ads aimed at a young audience. The recent Pepsi debacle featuring rappers, goats and Emmet Till is featured prominently.

Trying to Be Hip and Edgy, Ads Become Offensive

By STUART ELLIOTT and TANZINA VEGA

Madison Avenue is learning a painful lesson: cutting edge advertising can slice both ways.

Some of the biggest names in marketing, including Ford Motor, General Motors, Hyundai Motor, Reebok and PepsiCo, have been forced recently to apologize to consumers who mounted loud public outcries against ads that hinged on subjects like race, rape and suicide.

PepsiCo found itself meeting this week with the Rev. Al Sharpton and the family of Emmet Till — the teenager whose death in Mississippi in 1955 helped energize the civil rights movement — to try to quell multiple controversies involving its Mountain Dew brand.

The article closes with the news (OK, "news") that Al Sharpton wants to find yet more real estate for himself on Shakedown Street:

Mr. Sharpton said he intended to lead a broader conversation with the executives of PepsiCo, other major corporations and the music industry, civil rights groups and the families of Mr. Till and Trayvon Martin. He said he would contact executives at Coca-Cola, Walmart, the record label Cash Money and the rap mogul Russell Simmons, among others, and expected to hold a meeting within the next 30 days.

“I don’t want to shut down black artists, but how do we protect ourselves against depravation and misogyny?” Mr. Sharpton said. “The artists do not understand that you may have a younger following, but you’re dealing with corporate responsibility from older stockholders who are just not going to tolerate that.”

A company that has hired Big Al for his consulting services may avoid some high risk ads but will surely avoid any Sharpton-led protests. And to be fair, the Reverend planted his flag in opposition to misogynistic rap years ago.

FWIW, the niche Sharpton is targeting is already populated by folks such as Paul Porter of Rap Rehab, who was invoilved with the Pepsi imbroglio. But did Porter ever run for President? He did not.

They're From The IRS And They're Here To Apologize

Fortunately, this happened under Obama. If something similar happened under Bush, the sidewalks would be unsafe due to leaping Libs descending from above:

IRS apologizes for targeting conservative groups

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Internal Revenue Service inappropriately flagged conservative political groups for additional reviews during the 2012 election to see if they were violating their tax-exempt status, a top IRS official said Friday.

Organizations were singled out because they included the words "tea party" or "patriot" in their applications for tax-exempt status, said Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt groups.

In some cases, groups were asked for their list of donors, which violates IRS policy in most cases, she said.

"That was wrong. That was absolutely incorrect, it was insensitive and it was inappropriate. That's not how we go about selecting cases for further review," Lerner said at a conference sponsored by the American Bar Association.

"The IRS would like to apologize for that," she added.

Lerner said the practice was initiated by low-level workers in Cincinnati and was not motivated by political bias. After her talk, she told The AP that no high level IRS officials knew about the practice. She did not say when they found out.

Many conservative groups complained during the election that they were being harassed by the IRS. They accused the agency of frustrating their attempts to become tax exempt by sending them lengthy, intrusive questionnaires.

The IRS Commissioner at the time was a Bush holdover.

As to why it won't happen again, well, nobody at the top knew anything the first time, so waddya gonna do?

IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman told Congress in March 2012 that the IRS was not targeting groups based on their political views.

"There's absolutely no targeting. This is the kind of back and forth that happens to people" who apply for tax-exempt status, Shulman told a House Ways and Means subcommittee.

Shulman was appointed by President George W. Bush. His 6-year term ended in November. President Barack Obama has yet to nominate a successor. The agency is now being run by acting Commissioner Steven Miller.

Left unanswered - are these "low-level" IRS workers in a union (presumably the NTEU)?

MORE: As Prof. Jacobson notes, the IRS is the enforcer for ObamaCare as well. No politicization to worry about there, either. Giving more power to unsupervised partisans - wonderful.

A Dog's Second Best Friend

The NY Times shows us that newspaper editors are dog's second best friend:

Owning a Dog Is Linked to Reduced Heart Risk

The nation’s largest cardiovascular health organization has a new message for Americans: Owning a dog may protect you from heart disease.

Yeah, yeah. No where does the reporter note that a dog in the home will knock over the grandparents, chew on the grandkids, deliver more and stranger diseases than a crazed Japanese terrorist and escalate the cost of homeowner's insurance. Get a dog and die!

I'm troubled by the media's lack of moral clarity.

Death Knell For The Obama Bull Market?

As the Dow and S&P race to new record highs, a cloud no larger than a man's beard has emerged on the horizon - Paul Krugman is not worried about a stock market bubble:

And there’s a lot of bubble talk out there right now. Much of it is about an alleged bond bubble that is supposedly keeping bond prices unrealistically high and interest rates — which move in the opposite direction from bond prices — unrealistically low. But the rising Dow has raised fears of a stock bubble, too.

So do we have a major bond and/or stock bubble? On bonds, I’d say definitely not. On stocks, probably not, although I’m not as certain.

Yike! Or happy anniversary - back in June of 2003 Krugman was convinced (for reasons that were undoubtedly based on Deep Thinking and had nothing to do with his partisan posturing) that the Bush bull market was a bubble:

In short, the current surge in stocks looks like another bubble, one that will eventually burst.

The S&P 500 (currently 1628) was at 995 when he wrote that, and it has surely been higher and lower since. Yes, we had our fun. , just as we had our fun with Krugman's Bold Interest Rate Forecast of March 2003:

With war looming, it's time to be prepared. So last week I switched to a fixed-rate mortgage. It means higher monthly payments, but I'm terrified about what will happen to interest rates once financial markets wake up to the implications of skyrocketing budget deficits.

Eventually Krugman woke up to the implications of mindless partisanship and recognized that he had made a bit of a whoopsie with that one.

However, his fans (and critics) will hear a related dog whistle in the current column:

So when people talk about bubbles, you should listen carefully and evaluate their claims — not scornfully dismiss them, which was the way many self-proclaimed experts reacted to warnings about housing.

The petulant whinging is unmistakably Our Paulie - if only the haters had listened to Krugman, all this could have been avoided. After all, he had seen the housing bubble, or so he says. My favorite Krug-prediction on housing is still this:

Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, contends that what's happening in the housing market is "a very orderly and moderate kind of cooling." Maybe he's right. But if he isn't, the stock market drop of the last two days will be remembered as the start of a serious economic slowdown.

It will all end badly, unless it doesn't - how could anyone have been deaf to such a clarion call?

To be fair, Krugman has not always pretended to have been a genius on housing. After all, plenty of folks thought hosuing was over-valued; what most of us, certainly including Krugman, got wrong was the severity opf the adjustment process. This is from October 2008, post AIG and Lehman:

LISA MILLAR: ...He's been relentless in his criticism over the latest financial crisis, but admits even he didn't see it coming.

PAUL KRUGMAN: I should have, I mean I saw parts of it, I saw the housing bubble but I berate myself for not understanding the extent to which we've had these sort of financial domino effects. I saw that there would be a burst bubble and there would be a lot of pain but didn't realise how big the pain would be. Lots of people should have seen it, Alan Greenspan, if there's a villain it's Allan Greenspan who was warned about parts of it and brushed aside the warnings. But in general, in retrospect how could we have been so blind? We had created a financial system that basically outgrew the defences that we created back in the 1930s to protect against banking crisis. We should have understood because the system had outgrown those defences, there was the possibility of another one, but very few people saw it coming.

Well, yeah. FWIW, I took a rare turn defending Krugman against the charge that he had advocated in favor of a housing bubble. As an offset, I had a long column debunking a "Flatland" column that Krugman described as "one of the best pure-economic pieces I’ve done in my tenure at the Times." Of course, I can't debunk the notion that it was his best, but it wasn't so very good.

Still In Benghazi

ABC News reports on the drafting process for the Benghazi talking points:

Exclusive: Benghazi Talking Points Underwent 12 Revisions, Scrubbed of Terror Reference

That said, the first paragraph of the first draft does focus on the Muhammed video protests in Cairo; terrorists and extremists are only introduced in the second paragraph. Admin apologists can argue that Team Obama buried the nuance and emphasized the lead until reality overtook them.

 

Big Benghazi Day

Hot Air and The Hill have some Benghazi coverage.

Count Every Talking Point

Megan McArdle documents the point that Al Gore only adopted "Count every vote" in Florida after his original stragetgy - Recount every Democratic vote - failed in court.

Lest you doubt, here is contemporaneous NY Times post mortem of the Florida debacle:

CONTESTING THE VOTE: STRATEGY

Gore's Failure to Ask for Manual Statewide Recount May Have Been Critical Mistake

By DAVID BARSTOW and ADAM NAGOURNEY
Published: December 13, 2000

 In the inevitable second-guessing that followed today's defeat at the hands of the United States Supreme Court, Vice President Al Gore's failure to ask the Florida courts for a manual statewide recount has emerged as one in a series of pivotal legal miscalculations that may have doomed his 35-day battle to wrest Florida's 25 electors from George W. Bush, legal experts said today.

...

''He has nobody to blame but himself,'' said Thomas W. Merrill, a professor of law at Northwestern University, who criticized the Gore campaign for elevating hardball tactics -- seeking immediate hand recounts in Democratic strongholds -- over a strategy of demanding that all votes be counted regardless of the political consequences.

''It had the appearance of being manipulative,'' Mr. Merrill said. ''It had the appearance of making it look as if he didn't want a level playing field. I think it seeped into the way the judicial system perceived things.''

No kidding.

Lawyers who followed the court case said today that they were most struck by Mr. Gore's decision not to formally petition the Florida courts for a manual statewide recount. Instead, Mr. Gore had only made the offer to Mr. Bush in televised address nearly a month ago. Mr. Bush rejected the offer, and Mr. Gore's lawyers never once pursued it in court even though they were invited to do just that during oral arguments before the Florida Supreme Court. Mr. Boies said the vice president would ''accept'' a statewide recount, but added, ''We are not urging that upon the court.''

Presumably Al Gore is not a complete idiot so he must have had his reasons (my emphasis):

Mr. Gore's lawyers, explaining what happened, said that in the first chaotic days after the election there was a palpable political nervousness about appearing too indiscriminate in seeking manual recounts, and there was also a practical need, given logistical difficulties, to concentrate legal firepower on those counties where the chances of getting manual recounts offered the highest likelihood of success.

Later, as today's deadline approached for naming Florida's electors, Mr. Gore's lawyers were reluctant to push hard in any court for a statewide recount, they said. To propose so huge an undertaking, they feared, would only provide Mr. Bush's lawyers with unlimited possibilities for delaying tactics. ''We were reluctant to get involved in anything that could slow us down,'' Dexter Douglass, one of Mr. Gore's lawyers, said. ''Our focus was on moving our winnable case.''

Still, in defending their overall strategy, Mr. Gore's lawyers noted that any number of crucial decisions were made on the fly, often with incomplete information, often at the edge of exhaustion, and always under the pressure of crushing deadlines. Under such conditions, they said, miscalculations were inevitable, and entirely human. None of the Gore lawyers, for example, anticipated the extent to which judges at every level would dwell on their failure to formally seek a manual statewide recount.

If the lawyers failed to gauge how cynical their strategy looked, well, they are lawyers rather than political strategists (although they were being paid to estimate and influence the reaction of the judges). Better guidance from the top would have been helpful.

 

Gun Madness (Ongoing)

It's not just the bullets that do damage - guns have led to an epidemic of mental illness across America. The latest example:

Boy who held pencil like gun suspended

School has "zero tolerance" weapons policy

Anne McNamara

SUFFOLK, Va. (WAVY) - A Suffolk school suspended a second grader for pointing a pencil at another student and making gun noises.

Seven-year-old Christopher Marshall says he was playing with another student in class Friday, when the teacher at Driver Elementary asked them to stop pointing pencils at each other.

"When I asked him about it, he said, 'Well I was being a Marine and the other guy was being a bad guy,'" said Paul Marshall, the boy's father. "It's as simple as that."

Cops and robbers? Boys will be boys? C'mon, get with 2013!

The Suffolk school system has a "zero tolerance policy" when it comes to weapons.

And the weapon was?

"A pencil is a weapon when it is pointed at someone in a threatening way and gun noises are made," said Bethanne Bradshaw, a spokesperson for Suffolk Public Schools.

Wait'll they hear that the pen is mightier than the sword.

Abraham Lincoln had a classic quip asking how many legs a dogs has if you call the tail a leg. The answer (and brace yourself, school administrators) - four, because calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg. Similarly, making gun noises does not transform... oh, for heaven's sake, it's not that complicated.

Back In Benghazi

Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News reports on the ongoing cover-up.

Fifty Shades Of Red

The NY Times frontpages the angst of senior Administration advisors who fret that our President wandered off script when he spoke of Syria, chemical weapons and "red lines" last summer:

Off-the-Cuff Obama Line Put U.S. in Bind on Syria

This is Obama's 'smart diplomacy in action:

WASHINGTON — Confronted with evidence that chemical weapons have been used in Syria, President Obama now finds himself in a geopolitical box, his credibility at stake with frustratingly few good options.

The origins of this dilemma can be traced in large part to a weekend last August, when alarming intelligence reports suggested the besieged Syrian government might be preparing to use chemical weapons. After months of keeping a distance from the conflict, Mr. Obama felt he had to become more directly engaged.

In a frenetic series of meetings, the White House devised a 48-hour plan to deter President Bashar al-Assad of Syria by using intermediaries like Russia and Iran to send a message that one official summarized as, “Are you crazy?” But when Mr. Obama emerged to issue the public version of the warning, he went further than many aides realized he would.

Moving or using large quantities of chemical weapons would cross a “red line” and “change my calculus,” the president declared in response to a question at a news conference, to the surprise of some of the advisers who had attended the weekend meetings and wondered where the “red line” came from. With such an evocative phrase, the president had defined his policy in a way some advisers wish they could take back.

“The idea was to put a chill into the Assad regime without actually trapping the president into any predetermined action,” said one senior official, who, like others, discussed the internal debate on the condition of anonymity. But “what the president said in August was unscripted,” another official said. Mr. Obama was thinking of a chemical attack that would cause mass fatalities, not relatively small-scale episodes like those now being investigated, except the “nuance got completely dropped.”

Obama lost the nuance? The deepest thinker and shiniest star on the Presidential Christmas tree? C'mon, he knows more than his advisors. They should be listening to him, and clearly they have missed the nuance.

It's interesting, not to say unnerving, that today (if not back when he said it) the Times can find senior officials distancing themselves from the president. Who wants to board a ship the rats are abandoning?

And how the mighty have fallen - my goodness, back in the day Matt Yglesias wrote an article praising Obama's bold, creative Foreign Policy by Gaffe:

The Accidental Foreign Policy

How an early gaffe and an excruciatingly long primary season helped Barack Obama find a distinctive voice on foreign affairs

...

Barack Obama has always been an independent thinker. He of course opposed the war in Iraq, and he’s built a team of national-security advisers who disproportionately took the same, then-unpopular antiwar view. But as a presidential candidate articulating what he might do in office, his real break with convention may have begun with a gaffe.

Matt was not writing for the Onion or even the Daily Currant at the time. Any day now!

In any case, Obama's distinctive voice, coupled with his self-infatuation with it, has led to other bold foreign policy strokes. Late last summer (just a few weeks after his Syrian belly flop) Obama decided that, law and practice notwithstanding, Egypt was no longer an ally. And in 2008 did Candidate Obama really  favor an undivided Jerusalem. Move on.

Soon enough the world's foreign ministers will ask with one voice - Is that the President of the United States speaking, or did someone switch to the Comedy Channel?

THE BUCK STOPS WHERE? Blaming TOTUS. Hmm, any chance Barack will explain that Sasha and Malia misplaced his briefing book?

APPROACHING THE LIMIT: I love this from Obama's improv skit last August:

...a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.  That would change my calculus.  That would change my equation.

Hands up if you think Obama actually took calculus in high school or college. I don't see any hands...

But yes, it sounds so much tonier than "calculations", so Big Props to the First Wordsmith.

THE 'NAYS' HAVE IT: Obama said this at Hudson Valley Community College:

I was just talking to the Mayor of Troy, who was -- we were in a room, and he was saying how he had studied calculus in the room where we were taking a picture.  And I had to inform him I didn’t take calculus.  (Laughter.)  But he was testimony, he was an example of what you can do because of an institution like this. 

I guess the Syrians have figured that out.

SUNDAY REVIEW: The Times gives guest space to Daniel Byman, "a professor in the security studies program at Georgetown and the research director at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Mideast Policy". He says this about red lines:

The administration’s ultimatum now seems like cheap talk, and it illustrates the risks of carelessly drawing red lines and issuing highly public threats that won’t be enforced.

So far, at least, the Obama administration has put off both consequences and accountability and simply pushed for further investigation. Meanwhile, Mr. Assad has not blinked, and the president’s political opponents, like Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan, argue that Iran and North Korea will draw the wrong lessons if the president lets Mr. Assad call his bluff.

Don't call his bluff.

Don't Know Much About History (Ongoing...)

The NY Times reminds us that for many, history began on January 20, 2009. This is from a profile of an immigration activist turned Obama official (#FoxHenhouse):

Now, as Mr. Obama is in Latin America this week as the first president in decades with a chance to get an overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws through Congress...

What, Bush and McCain never had a chance with their push for comprehensive reform? Now they tell us.

To be fair, the Times does note that Obama's contribution has been to threaten to bring his polarizing touch to the process. Her list of accomplishments includes this:

[Ms. Muñoz] has helped draft a bill that the president threatened to introduce if talks on Capitol Hill faltered.

Don't call his bluff!

 

Maybe "Onions" Instead Of Pepperoni

I wanted to believe that a pizza owner imposed a one-slice limit on Mayor Bloomberg, but I smelled onions.

The Most Racist Commercial Ever?

Dr. Boyce Watkins tells us how Mountain Dew gets its buzz:

Mountain Dew Releases Arguably the Most Racist Commercial in History

If you’ve never heard of Felicia the Goat, you’ll know about her soon.  Felicia the Goat is the main character in a recent Mountain Dew commercial, created in part by Tyler the Creator.  The video shows Felicia in a line up of criminal suspects, all of whom may be charged with a crime.

Of course, in the world of Mountain Dew, every single suspect is black.  Not just regular black people, but the kinds of ratchety negroes you might find in the middle of any hip-hop minstrel show:  Gold teeth, “mean mugging,” sun glasses wearing, white-t sportin, hard core n*ggaz ready to “get into some ol gangsta sh*t.”  Apparently, this is the kind of ad you put out if you want to appeal to the black male demographic.

Well, the spot was created by a black rapper/comic and his ensemble, so there is a certain "Go Figure" puzzle as to whether "racist" is exactly the right label. Yes, negative sterotyopes are being depicted, but Ed Krayewski of Reason argues that this might be in the service of art:

The ad was created by the leader of Odd Future, a hip-hop group that’s also behind the sketch comedy show Loiter Squad on Comedy Central (and whose most famous member is probably Frank Ocean, who appears in neither the ad nor the sketch show). All the members are black.

...

The Mountain Dew ad consists of a line up of several members of Odd Future as well as a goat that assaulted a woman (because she wouldn’t give him more Mountain Dew; the goat is a recurring character). If the woman described a goat and the cops brought in a line up full of black men, that seems to me more a commentary on the stereotypes by which cops operate (“oh it’s a goat? Surely you must mean it’s a black man”) than any kind of racist messaging. But that’s how art works; the interpretation is up to the viewer.

Well, OK, but the goat also has the voice of a thug rapper. But why wouldn't it? The goat is the fantasy rap alter-ego of Tyler the Creator:

It all started with a song lyric. On his new LP, Wolf Odd Future ringleader Tyler, the Creator raps "Might fuck around and be a goat named Felicia" on the track "Trashwang." That lyric has come to life thanks to Mountain Dew's comical "Felicia, the Goat" series.

So a black thug rapper envisions himself as a thug goat. Ingenious! But back to Dr. Watkins of Your Black World:

As the woman is shaking, crying and trying to decide what to do, the goat says, “Snitches get stitches fool.”   After that, he says, “Keep ya mouth shut.  When I get outta here, I’m gonna do you up (translation:  Probably beat and s-xually assault you again).”  Shaking in fear, the woman runs screaming out of the room, worried that testifying is going to get her killed by this demonic negro goat and his thugged-out sidekicks.

Mountain Dew has set a new low for corporate racism.  Their decision to lean on well-known racial stereotypes is beyond disgusting.  This doesn’t even include the fact that the company has put black men on par with animals.   The holocaust of mass incarceration and the glorification of violent prison culture has taken a tremendous toll on the black community.  Corporations are making it cool for black men to murder one another, while gun manufacturers ensure that the streets are flooded with the weapons necessary for us to complete our own genocide.

The family of Emmett Till is seeking to boycott the company due to Lil Wayne’s decision to not apologize for a song (Karate Chop) in which he compares Emmett Till’s face to a woman’s v@gina after he’s had s*x with her (Mountain Dew is sponsoring Lil Wayne’s tour).   It appears that Mountain Dew is right on board with the degradation and disrespect for the entire African American community being pursued by the worst in the hip-hop community.  This ad has to be one of the most irresponsible pieces of trash in the history of corporate advertising.

Even worse is that Mountain Dew probably thinks this ad is acceptable because they got the OK from a black man.  In their thorough corporate oversight, Mountain Dew may not have realized that Tyler the Creator is also the man who made a song called “Tron Cat,” with a verse stating that he would “r@pe a pregnant b*tch and tell my friends I had a threesome.”   As a Business school professor myself, I am stunned that Mountain Dew would allow their brand to be connected to a man who celebrates the s-xual assaults of pregnant women.

Black leaders have denounced hip-hop before and will (we hope) continue to do so. More backstory is here, however, and I think we can exponerate the goat for the sexual assault.

The video was the third in a series created by Tyler for Mountain Dew, all focused on the goat (dubbed “Felicia”) encountering trouble with the law in its quest to get more Mountain Dew. The first installment showed the goat attacking the woman – a waitress trying to serve him some of the soda – because he wants the whole bottle (and more). The second showed the goat being pulled over while driving by an (African-American) cop, who discovers the trunk of the goat’s car is filled with empty plastic bottles of Mountain Dew. (Cop: “Looks like we have ourselves a clear-cut case of Dew U I.”) These spots also ended with the goat declaring, “You’re never gonna catch me.”

Tyler the Creator's statement is here; the first episode seems to have been pulled by Pepsi.

In an Update Dr. Watkins tells us that reader Paul Porter (surely the founder of Rap Rehab) succeeded in getting pepsi to pull the ads.

So, was Pepsi racist for running the ads delivered by the edgy black comic they hired? Or are they now racist for silencing this authentic voice of black rage? When Quentin Tarantino drops ten thousand N-bombs and has a sympathetic black guy shoot up half the South he gets an Academy Award Best Picture nomination, so the boundaries of artistic expression are murky.

SINCE YOU ASK: I can't imagine ever approving these ads if I were at Pepsi but I also can't imagine Pepsi seeking the approval of a boring middle-aged white guy for these ads, which are clearly targeting a different demographic. Their bad.

"Glitches And Bumps"

Obama tells the press that there won't be any need to report on ObamaCare horror stories:

The president acknowledged that some people might encounter problems trying to obtain insurance.

“Even if we do everything perfectly, there will still be, you know, glitches and bumps, and there will be stories that can be written that say, ‘Oh, look, this thing is, you know, not working the way it’s supposed to, and this happened and that happened,’ ” Mr. Obama said. “And that’s pretty much true of every government program that’s ever been set up.”

Daniel Kessler of Stanford and the Hopover Institution  thinks there may be as many as thirty million glitches and bumps:

The Coming ObamaCare Shock

Millions of Americans will pay more for health insurance, lose their coverage, or have their hours of work cut back.

...

The allure of the David-versus-Goliath narrative is likely to prove irresistible to the media, raising the pressure on Washington to repeal or dramatically modify the law. With the implementation of ObamaCare beginning to take full force at the end of the year, there will be plenty of time before the 2014 midterm elections for Congress to consider its options.

We'll see whether the press follows their marching orders.