Read it.

Complex legislation and regulatory schemes inevitably spawn a whole ‘industry’ of people who will be happy to help you navigate the law — for a fee. This, in turn, establishes a fervent (and well-funded, which they are willing to share with legislators of the right attitude) lobby to keep, and even to increase, the complexity upon which their business model is built. And don’t think legislators don’t know it — and exploit it.

Read it.

Good luck with that.

Read it.

Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, is an institution of good reputation and high quality, where I have some friends. It offers a liberal arts education typical of the best available in America today. It troubles me that Bowdoin, rather than, say, Harvard—a bigger and richer place where I work—should be made an example of. Nonetheless, Peter Wood and Michael Toscano have done just that in a comprehensive new study, “What Does Bowdoin Teach?” the first of its kind and probably destined to be the best, which shows in the practices and principles of one college what political correctness in our time has done to higher education in our country.

Mark Steyn looks at the IRS scandal.

    The Vast Majority of IRS Employees Aren’t Corrupt

Great. So, if the vast majority aren’t, what proportion is corrupt? Thirty-eight per cent? Thirty-three? Twenty-seven? And that’s the good news?

Read it.

Occupy Roanoke is on record opposing “fat cats” and lobbyists. Terry McAuliffe made his fortune on his connections to the Clinton administration as one of the most prominent lobbyists and crony capitalists in the country.

The Occupy movement was always about supporting the Democrat party. Their partnership with McAuliffe, who pioneered bundling political donations and famously auctioned off stays in the Lincoln bedroom, is a welcome admission of that fact.

Let’s call them the “Obama Youth”. Or OY for short.

Read it

Hint: Yes.

It wouldn’t be surprising if there were more cases like this we’ve never heard about. Here’s why: The Justice Department’s rules only say the media must be informed about “subpoenas” for “telephone toll records.” The FBI’s operations guidelines interprets those rules quite literally, making clear the requirement “concerns only grand jury subpoenas.” That is, these rules don’t apply to National Security Letters, which are secret demands for information used by the FBI that don’t require judicial approval. The narrow FBI interpretation also doesn’t cover administrative subpoenas, which are issued by federal agencies without prior judicial review. Last year, the FBI issued NSLs for the communications and financial records of more than 6,000 Americans—and the number has been far higher in previous years. The procedures that do apply to those tools have been redacted from publicly available versions of the FBI guidelines. Thus, it’s no shocker the AP seizure would seem like an “unprecedented intrusion” if the government doesn’t think it has to tell us about the precedents. And there’s no telling if the Justice Department rules (and the FBI’s interpretation) allow the feds to seize without warning other types of electronic communications records that could reveal a journalist’s e-mail, chat, or Web browsing activity.

Hey, Mother Jones: These are the guys you guys have voted for ever since the sixties. Enjoy.

Read it.

President Barack Obama has an important new ally as emboldened Republicans work to derail his agenda: John McCain.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Mark Steyn peeks behind the curtain.

In April last year, the Obama campaign identified by name eight Romney donors as “a group of wealthy individuals with less than reputable records. Quite a few have been on the wrong side of the law, others have made profits at the expense of so many Americans, and still others are donating to help ensure Romney puts beneficial policies in place for them.” That week, Kimberley Strassel began her Wall Street Journal column thus:

    Try this thought experiment: You decide to donate money to Mitt Romney. You want change in the Oval Office, so you engage in your democratic right to send a check.

    Several days later, President Barack Obama, the most powerful man on the planet, singles you out by name. . . . The message from the man who controls the Justice Department (which can indict you), the SEC (which can fine you), and the IRS (which can audit you), is clear: You made a mistake donating that money.

Miss Strassel wrote that on April 26, 2012. Five weeks later, one of the named individuals, Frank VanderSloot, was informed by the IRS that he and his wife were being audited. In July, he was told by the Department of Labor of an additional audit over the guest workers on his cattle ranch in Idaho. In September, he was notified that one of his other businesses was to be audited. Mr. VanderSloot, who had never previously been audited, attracted three in the four months after being publicly named by el Presidente. More to the point he attracted that triple audit even though Miss Strassel explicitly predicted in America’s biggest-selling newspaper that this was exactly what the Obama enforcers were going to do. The “separate, sinister entity” of the government of the United States went ahead anyway. What do they care? If some lippy broad in the papers won’t quit her yapping about it, they can always audit her, too — as they did to Miss Strassel’s sometime colleague Anne Hendershott, a sociology professor who got rather too interested in Obamacare and wrote about it in the Journal and various small Catholic publications. The IRS summoned Professor Hendershott to account for herself, and forbade her husband from accompanying her, even though they filed jointly. She ceased her political writing.

‘He who has ears to hear, let him hear.’

Read it.

Middle income families are about to encounter some real surprises as a result of the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare). For example, many workers will soon discover that when they earn more money, they end up with less take-home pay. Others will discover that they are worse off if their employer offers them “affordable coverage” than if there is no health insurance offer.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Here are some sample calculations for a wage earner couple with two children living in a state that offers Medicaid to households with incomes at or below 133 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL). Because the law allows 5 percent of income to be “set aside,” this is functionally equivalent to offering Medicaid to families with incomes under 138 percent of the federal poverty level. The federal poverty level for a family of four is currently $23,550. Allowing for the income set-asides and multiplying by 1.38, this family would be eligible for Medicaid as long as it doesn’t earn more than $32,499.

Now, suppose that the family earns an additional $501. It will now be ineligible for Medicaid. If the employer does not offer affordable coverage, the family will have to turn to a health insurance exchange.

According to the Kaiser Health Reform Subsidy Calculator, the premium cost for family coverage purchased through an exchange will be $1,143 per year (3.46 percent of annual income). Yet, after paying this premium and paying the additional federal income taxes it owes, this family is actually worse off as a result of its higher earnings. (See the table).

Not really a surprise. Half of the tax code sets up disincentives to get off dependency on the government (well, maybe I exaggerate … a third, maybe), and the Crust prefers it that way.

Read it.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

As Otter said to Flounder: ‘You fucked up! You trusted us!’ The resemblance between our government and Delta House is becoming stronger and stronger every day; Joe Biden already has the Bluto part nailed.

Read it.

And of course ‘Big Pharma’ is merely the corporate whipping boy designed to distract attention from the fact that it’s the academicians of the Crust, with their ‘progressive’ allies in Big Media and Big Politics, that are driving the whole affair. Anybody who departs from the Crustian consensus — gun owners, Republicans — are obviously mentally unbalanced and oughtn’t to be allowed to own a gun, vote, or live outside of a government-controlled mental hospital. (The Soviet Union was a pioneer in this approach, as in so many others.)

Read it.

Any Brit who dared suggest that the importation of so many immigrants into a tiny, crowded island — into a country whose constitution and stability are ultimately reposed in the liberal traditions of the parent culture — would inexorably change things was, during the Blair years at least, dismissed as a “racist.” Any Brit who argued that a multi-ethnic society is all fine and dandy but that a multi-cultural society is a recipe for segregation and collapse was flatly ignored. Anybody who suggested that immigration from areas of the world spectacularly different to Britain should be limited was accused of intolerance. Indeed at times, merely mentioning the word “immigration” was enough to invite a stern look and the attendant suggestion that it was somehow beyond the pale for the people of a nation to assert that they might control who joins their society. To suggest that they might as a matter of general policy privilege those areas of the world full of people who are more like the natives was “profiling.”

Read it.

The Obama administration has gotten itself into a fix between its contradictory stories about the Benghazi incident, reports of the IRS targeting conservative groups, and the Justice Department’s grabbing of phone records from AP reporters. There are few things more fun to watch than arrogant political leaders — folks who spend their lives bossing everyone around — getting a comeuppance.

Not that the dimwitted among the electorate will pay any attention. They’re too busy signing up for their free Obama Money.

My favorite take wasn’t from any serious commentator but from comedian Jon Stewart, who noticed that the president routinely claims ignorance about embarrassing events by saying that he learned of them while watching the news: “I wouldn’t be surprised if President Obama learned Osama bin Laden had been killed when he saw himself announcing it on television.”

Wouldn’t surprise me.

I visited DC last week and was astounded at the booming economy, the endless new construction, the astronomical prices, and garish displays of wealth everywhere — not to mention the haughty attitudes of every pissant assistant to the whatever. That’s what Other People’s Money buys you. When Ronald Reagan talked about the Shining City on the Hill he was speaking metaphorically about America, but the new shining city is DC — funded on the backs of all those Americans who blithely vote for people who promise to solve their problems.

Your tax dollars at work.

Read it.

An Oscar Meyer wiener, serving as proxy for a finger, was pushed into the spinning blade of a table saw. The demonstration, at the International Woodworkers Fair in Atlanta, mimicked the way gruesome table saw injuries often occur. But this saw was equipped with a safety device called SawStop that allowed the blade to distinguish between wood and flesh, and to stop fast enough to prevent serious harm. Sure enough, the blade came to a dead stop in about three one-thousandths of a second, leaving the dog with only a minor nick.

We have the technology.

Wheeler thought: If only this had come along sooner. He took out his Visa card to order two of the saws, but was told none were available. As the SawStop guys explained, they had been seeking licensing deals with the big power tool makers, but had found no takers.

But apparently nobody is using it.

Faced with the prospect of never getting the invention to market, the little company, also known as SawStop, eventually started making its own saws. Since the first went on sale in 2004, SawStop says it has recorded 2,000 “finger saves”—customer reports of  accidents likely to have caused disfiguring injuries with conventional saws, but that resulted in minor cuts or a few stitches at most (SawStop also acknowledges two reports of amputations.).

That’s America for you.

The SawStop story is about an industry’s ability to resist a major safety advance that could, by now, have prevented countless disfiguring injuries, but might have been bad for business. It highlights the endless due process that makes it virtually impossible for regulators to enact safety measures over the unified objections of industry.

Unfortunately, that’s America too.

Read it.

The jailed doctor who helped the U.S. track down Usama bin Laden was convicted by a tribal court on bogus charges, according to a classified Pakistani government report.

Shameful. They ought to have given him free transportation for himself and his family, a green card, and a wheelbarrow full of money.

Read it.

Of course. Who would dare poke fun at The Magic Negro.

It’s been obvious ever since Barack Obama appeared on the political scene that comedians rarely go beyond lame jokes about him. As far back as 2009, the Los Angeles Times noted that “TV’s leading political humorists have largely backed away from their ritual comic hazing of the president.”

He could change his name to Bush.

Read it.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

 The week after Republicans’ historic 2010 midterm election landslide, President Barack Obama appointed the union president that represents “tens of thousands in the IRS,” Colleen Kelley, to a key Administration post. Two years later, that union, the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), contributed $580,412 to federal candidates—94% of which were Democrats.

The position Obama appointed Kelley to: the Federal Salary Council, an advisory group charged with recommending federal employee raises.

Representing 150,000 members from 31 federal agencies and departments including the Internal Revenue Service, the NTEU bills itself as the nation’s largest independent federal union. Kelley, herself a former IRS Agent, commands her union brigade with partisan ferocity.

I’d be more inclined to credit hand-wringing on the part of union employees if it weren’t for the fact that most of them look to be sub-clinically obese. Have you ever seen the women in charge of the NEA? Pigs in space, every one of them.

Read it.

As the scandal involving the IRS’ targeting of Conservatives and Tea Party groups consumes the news cycle for the moment and Barack Obama (who, so far, has claimed ignorance of the targeting) has thrown a sacrificial lamb out to appease journalists, that IRS agents targeted certain small-government, anti-tax groups should really not come as a surprise.

What, you didn’t know the IRS had a union? Silly mortal….

Read it.

A national labor board which has long been accused of making union-friendly decisions was dealt another blow Thursday, after a second federal appeals court found President Obama exceeded his power when he bypassed the Senate to appoint its members.

The ruling by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia once again threatened to upend the National Labor Relations Board’s decisions. And it has the potential to stall the board entirely, as well as challenge other federal agencies that have similar appointees.

Read it.

The IRS official who led the tax-exempt organizations unit when Tea Party groups were targeted is now in charge of the IRS office responsible for ObamaCare, two Capitol Hill sources told Fox News.
…
The ObamaCare official in question, Sarah Hall Ingram, had been serving as commissioner of the office responsible for tax-exempt organizations from 2009 to 2012 — the division included the group that targeted Tea Partiers — and has since left to serve as director of the IRS’ Affordable Care Act division. That unit is responsible for enforcing parts of the health care law, including the fines associated with the so-called individual mandate — the requirement to buy health insurance.

Seems appropriate, somehow.

Read it.

As a Chicago parent discovered, city officials can’t hand over records if they’ve already destroyed them.

Read it.

Cook is expected to appear in front of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to explain why Apple has failed to repatriate up to $100bn in cash stashed in foreign countries.

Uh, so that they don’t lose 35% of it to the IRS? That’s just a guess, you understand….

Had Cupertino returned its money to the US, it would have been hit with a punitive 35 per cent tax rate, meaning it was cheaper in the long run to issue bonds and pay interest at market rates.

The technical financial term for that is ‘DUH’.

The investigations committee has also grilled other companies that use slick methods to keep their tax bills down, including Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard.

‘Slick methods’ meaning ‘perfectly legal methods that the all-your-money-is-ours crowd don’t like and so have made up a derogatory term for’. (Unfortunately, they can’t be called ‘tax cheats’, legitimately, because they aren’t cheating; they’re following the law. Although that doesn’t prevent some of the all-for-the-state crowd doing it anyway. You know how they are.)

An Apple spokesman insisted the firm paid all its taxes. “We’ve been working with the subcommittee to answer their questions about Apple, and we welcome any further questions they might have,” Apple said in a statement. “Apple is one of the largest taxpayers in the United States, having paid $6 billion in federal corporate income tax in fiscal 2012.”

It’s not enough, of course; it’s never enough. As long as you have money left after the taxman gets done with you, you are somehow a ‘dodger’.

Read it.

Surveying the crimes that were eagerly devoured by the public in papers such as News of the World, Orwell said the elegant middle-class criminals of the past, often involving sex triangles or desperate murderous attempts to stop sliding down the class ladder, had gone forever.

Well, if he were alive today Orwell would look around him and conclude that whatever else you can say about modern Britain, the art of murder is in vigorous good health.

And we have our diverse new immigrant population to thank for its modern-day flowering.

Whether it’s the polonium poisoning of a Russian dissident, the honor killings of errant Muslim daughters, or the voodoo dismemberment of “possessed” African children at the urging of unhinged witch doctors, murder has never been so varied.

Read it.

The parents of Gurkiren Kaur Loyal, 8, say their daughter was being treated for dehydration during a trip to India when staff reportedly gave her a mystery injection.

“I asked what was the injection for, but he gave me a blank look and injected the liquid into her,” Gurkiren’s mother Amrit Kaur Loyal told the Birmingham Mail. “Within a split second, Gurkiren’s head flipped back, her eyes rolled in her head, and the color completely drained from her. I knew they had killed her on the spot.”

The family guarded Gurkiren’s body after her death so her organs could not be harvested right away, but when her body was flown home to the UK, the family discovered all of Gurkiren’s organs had been removed and only her eyes remained, the Birmingham Mail reports.

Read it.

Internal cost estimates from 17 of the nation’s largest insurance companies indicate that health insurance premiums will grow an average of 100 percent under Obamacare, and that some will soar more than 400 percent, crushing the administration’s goal of affordability.

New regulations, policies, taxes, fees and mandates are the reason for the unexpected “rate shock,” according to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which released a report Monday based on internal documents provided by the insurance companies. The 17 companies include Aetna, Blue Cross Blue Shield and Kaiser Foundation.

And this is the Affordable Health Care Act. I’d hate to see what the Unaffordable Health Care Act is like….

Read it.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Progressive nonprofit Great Education Colorado claims to be the most effective education advocacy group in the state, but less than 30 percent of Great Education’s funding actually finds its way to education campaigns and issues. The small amount spent on education has supported initiatives that would drastically raise taxes on Coloradans.

A prime Job of the Crust is as a well-paid employee of a ‘non-profit’ that rakes in lots of cash from the politically-correct but dimwitted public and then never does anything useful, even by their own warped standards.

Read it.

The Chronicle of Higher Education tells us the median salary of public university presidents rose 4.7 percent in 2011-12 to more than $440,000 a year. This increase vastly outpaced the rate of inflation, as well as the earnings of the typical worker in the U.S. economy. Perhaps, most relevant for this community, it also surpassed the compensation growth for university professors.

Some members of the Crust are more equal than others, apparently.

Read it.

The ‘Affordable Health Care Act’ must mean affordable to Warren Buffet and George Soros.

Read it.

Good question.

Read it.

But not, you’ll note, Hillary Clinton. ‘Look! Over there!’

I’m shocked–shocked, I tell you–to find the IRS targeting conservatives….

Read it.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

 In an era when everything is customizable, why not customize your child’s education?

Hint: Because it threatens the rice bowl of a lot of government employees (unionized government employees, the Ruling Class’s natural prey).

“What about home schooling? You know, it’s not just for scary religious people any more.” That’s a line from Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and it should strike fear into the hearts, not of vampires, but of public-school administrators everywhere.

But it doesn’t, because they provide the votes that make the whole machine run, and the governing bureaucracy is very well aware of it.

“That first year, chatting with other homeschooling parents at soccer games, picnics, and after-church coffee hours, I found that our decision was far from unusual. Homeschooling has long been a philosophical choice for religious traditionalists and off-the-grid homesteaders, but for the parents we met — among them several actors, a jazz composer, a restaurateur, a TV chef, a Columbia University physical-plant supervisor, and a handful of college professors — it was a practical alternative to New York’s notoriously inadequate education system.”

An education totally created by people for whom these hip & trendy urbanites religiously (if I may use so incongruous a term) vote. Savor the irony.

Victor Davis Hanson puts his finger on it.

America has always been a country of self-invention. Yet there used to be some correlation between the life that one lived and the life that one professed. It was hard to be a phony in the grimy reality of the coal mine, the steel mill, the south 40 acres, or atop a girder over Manhattan.

No longer in our post-modern, post-industrial, metrosexual fantasyland. The nexus of big government, big money, and globalization has created a new creed of squaring the circle of being both liberal and yet elitist, egalitarian-talking but rich-acting, talking like a 99 percenter and living like a 1 percenter. And the rub is not that the two poles are contradictory, but that they are, in fact, necessary for each other: talking about the people means it is OK to live unlike the people.

We are degenerating into a society like that of the quondam Soviet Union, where apparatchiks and their privileged scions live very high on the hog while proclaiming their solidarity with the workers and peasants of the proletariat; meanwhile, the real proletariat formed long lines for crude bread and ill-fitting shoes, hoping to find something they could sell on the ‘black market’ to make ends meet.

Hipness is a tool designed to justify enjoying the riches and leisure produced by the American brand of Western market capitalism by poking fun at it, teasing it some, dressing it up a bit to suggest ambivalence over its benefits without ever seriously either understanding their source or, much less, losing them. We feel hip at Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods, but not so much in the organic section of Safeway.

It’s all about fitting in with all the other ‘nonconformists’. ‘Edgy’ means falling in line with all of the other self-proclaimed ‘edgy’ people, patting each other on the back about how courageous they are in staying with what’s hip and trendy.

Hip also plays out as professed caring — worrying in the abstract about all sorts of endangered species, starving peoples, or degraded environments. It is being loudly angry at retrograde forces — white males, the rich, gun owners, Christians, family types, and suburbanites, the sorts who ostensibly crafted the toxicity of Western civilization that you are forced to use and enjoy. Yet embrace hip, and all things become possible. A Martian would see the modern university as an elitist enclave, where life-long tenured professors make lots of money overseen by hordes of even better-paid administrators, that together cause tuition for cash-strapped and indebted students to rise faster than the rate of inflation without any promises that their eventual certifications will result in commensurate good jobs. A non-Martian would instead appreciate the hip nexus of diversity, eco-caring, and gender-neutral inclusivity.

It doesn’t matter what you do, much less the effects of your doing — what matters is that you care, and care about the right things. ‘Raising consciousness’ is more valued than actually raising the barn; spending an hour doling out Thanksgiving dinner to the homeless is more valued than doing something that will encourage them to be able to afford their own.

Read it.

What happens when a liberal scholar unearths an inconvenient truth?

Hint: It gets ignored.

IT HAS BECOME increasingly popular to speak of racial and ethnic diversity as a civic strength. From multicultural festivals to pronouncements from political leaders, the message is the same: our differences make us stronger.

But a massive new study, based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America, has concluded just the opposite. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam — famous for “Bowling Alone,” his 2000 book on declining civic engagement — has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.

“The extent of the effect is shocking,” says Scott Page, a University of Michigan political scientist.

Not to those of us who live in the real world, as university political scientists increasingly do not.

Read it.

But my experience — both on the way up and the way down — is a good window into one of the central questions facing President Obama as he prepares to take the oath of office for a second time on Jan. 21: What role, if any, should the government play in nurturing entrepreneurs and, by extension, jobs, in America? In our case, we really had no expectation that government would play any role whatsoever. Unfortunately, though, we were wrong. Dead wrong. It did play a role and, for the most part, it was not a good one. It doesn’t have to be that way; there are fixes that can be made.

You may not be interested in the fucking government, but the government is interested in fucking you.

The mere debate, however, prompted tremulous bureaucrats at the U.S. Commerce Dept. — congenitally allergic to even the slightest whiff of controversy — to tell the registries (who are regulated by Commerce) to knock it off. We thought the complaints were nonsense. After all, how bad could it be to get rid of errors and replace them with relevant search results? But it didn’t matter. The government had, effectively, dealt us a death blow.

Your tax dollars at work … or not, as the case may be.

Despite repeated efforts at reform, almost always stymied by political gridlock in Washington, federal rules make it a snap, and potentially quite lucrative, for people to file civil lawsuits, no matter how ludicrous.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

Uh-oh. When even the tame New England RINOs start chewing on the hand that feeds them, things are getting serious.

Mark Steyn is on the case.

In Massachusetts, where last year the Governor vetoed efforts to prohibit food stamps being used for pornography, piercings, tattoos, guns, manicures, etc, they’re now trying to discover whether the Tsarnaev brothers used them to pay for the Boston Marathon bombing….

I began my book America Alone with an Arnold Toynbee quote: “Civilizations die from suicide, not murder.” Paying Islamic terrorists to blow you up is more like assisted suicide. Cheaper than going to a Swiss clinic, although somewhat bloodier.

Heather MacDonald documents the degeneration.

The public is told that the university needs more state money to stay competitive in the sciences but not that the greatest threat to scientific excellence comes from the university’s obsession with “diversity” hiring. The public knows about tuition increases but not about the unstoppable growth in the university’s bureaucracy. Taxpayers may have heard about larger class sizes but not about the sacrosanct status of faculty teaching loads. Before the public decides how much more money to pour into the system, it needs a far better understanding of how UC spends the $22 billion it already commands.

The modern university is less a center of scholarship than it is a playground for ideological drones.

At Berkeley, as federal research money flooded into the campus, the faculty were losing interest in undergraduate teaching, observed Clark Kerr, UC’s president and a former Berkeley chancellor. (Kerr once famously quipped that a chancellor’s job was to provide “parking for the faculty, sex for the students, and athletics for the alumni.”) Back in the 1930s, responsibility for introductory freshman courses had been the highest honor that a Berkeley professor could receive, Kerr wrote in his memoirs; 30 years later, the faculty shunted off such obligations whenever possible to teaching assistants, who, by 1964, made up nearly half the Berkeley teaching corps.

And it’s all about the funding.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is alarmed today at a letter from the Departments of Justice and Education to the University of Montana.

Read it.

The IC certainly has not covered itself in glory during this wretched episode, at least in the heroic Battle of the Beltway Desk Jockeys. In the field, of course, it’s a different story; the things I’m hearing about the firefight at the consulate and the CIA annex are stunning. We couldn’t ask for braver men standing watch on that wall, and for this administration to besmirch their memory — as Hillary Clinton did by continuing to stick to the ludicrous video meme even after the bodies were brought home — is the very pinnacle of moral disgrace.

William Safire knew Hillary Clinton way back when:

Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our First Lady — a woman of undoubted talents who was a role model for many in her generation — is a congenital liar.

Drip by drip, like Whitewater torture, the case is being made that she is compelled to mislead, and to ensnare her subordinates and friends in a web of deceit. . . .

Therefore, ask not “Why didn’t she just come clean at the beginning?” She had good reasons to lie; she is in the longtime habit of lying; and she has never been called to account for lying herself or in suborning lying in her aides and friends.

Read it.

We often focus on the ideological biases of the university, where the more lunatic examples of political correctness get the most attention. But in education as in economics, there is a trickle-down effect. The grandees at the elite universities train the PhD’s who go on to second and third tier institutions, where they in turn train the students who get high school and grade school teaching credentials. They also write most of the textbooks that end up in K-12 classrooms. Thus the progressive ideology metastasizes throughout the educational system, determining the curriculum, the textbooks, and the point of view of the teachers. At that level the ideas may be garbled, half-baked, incoherent, and a collection of clichés and slogans. But they are still toxic and effective at transmitting a world-view to impressionable minds.

Read it.

Beneath the radar, drowned out by Benghazi, a splashy murder trial, and an even splashier kidnapping, there was one of those inconsequential “inside baseball” career stories that is normally of interest only to a select few inside the nation’s ruling class.

In this case, however, there are teachable moments well above and beyond the people involved. It was a tiny event, and yet, it explains so much about how and why Mitt Romney lost the 2012 presidential election, as well as how and why the GOP establishment so often does.

A key Romney aide and spokesperson, who committed one of the biggest blunders of the entire 2012 Presidential Campaign, was recently hired by a big Obama supporter to handle communications for a liberal propaganda group.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised. The Crust take care of their own.

Read it.

Union bosses think that veterans deserve the best, i.e. union membership.

Read it.

The United States remains fully committed to helping Syrian rebels topple the embattled regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said Thursday evening.

Although how this is any business of the U.S. government is conveniently left unexplained.

“Using the full range of tools, the United States will continue to work toward achieving our goal of ending the violence and helping the Syrian people transition to a post-Assad authority,” Hagel said during the Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s Soref Symposium, an annual Washington, D.C., gathering that focuses on tracking unrest in the Middle East.

Are the troops going in? No? Well, then, I guess the ‘full range of tools’ is a lot more limited than the casual observer might imagine. The idiotic assumption that removing Assad will lead to ‘ending the violence’ is particularly amusing, and underscores the common perception that, when it comes to government service, it is the scum, not the cream, that rises to the top.

Read it.

Because, you know, ‘diversity’ is more important than a good education for your kids.

Just thought you’d like to know.

Nigel Farage explains it all to you.

Read it.

Yeah, we can laugh, but modern life has place educrats between a rock and a spiky hard place. If they don’t want to get sued, they can take a chance on exercising ‘discretion’. In order to avoid exercising ‘discretion’, they put in place ‘mandatory’ policies. ‘Hey, it’s not my fault, the policy left me no option. Go complain to that guy over there.’ And mandatory policies, when pursued in a it’s-not-my-fault mode, lead to absurd results. But they’d rather look stupid (or at least dull followers of stupid policies) than be sued. Nobody ever got fired for following policy, no matter how stupid the policy might be, and bureaucrats are all about not getting fired. (If they can teach some kids along the way, that’s gravy, but that’s not what they’re there for.)

It’s just that simple.

Read it.

Well, they couldn’t do any worse than the ones who are voting there right now.

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Whiskey Row in the Arizona mountain town of Prescott has seen its share of bar fights, biker gangs and rowdies.

But the bar fights aren’t supposed to involve a biker gang made up of police officers carrying brass knuckles and knives. The fallout from such a brawl in December has led to the retirements of a police chief and two senior sheriff’s officials and recommendations of felony charges against the former chief for his alleged role in trying to cover it up.

Hey, it’s Arizona — what else is there to do? It’s not as if they’re allowed to arrest illegal immigrants, after all.

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Americans are ditching their U.S. passports in record numbers, a sign of growing frustration with a system that taxes U.S. citizens on their global wealth whether they live in Montana or Mongolia.

The latest bold-faced names to relinquish their U.S. citizenship include Mahmood Karzai, a brother of Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, according to federal data released Wednesday. Also on the list, published quarterly by the Internal Revenue Service, is Isabel Getty, the daughter of jet-setting socialite Pia Getty and Getty oil heir Christopher Getty.

In total, more than 670 U.S. passport holders gave up their citizenship — and with it, their U.S. tax bills — in the first three months of this year. That is the most in any quarter since the I.R.S. began publishing figures in 1998. And it is nearly three-quarters of the total number for all of 2012, a year in which the wealthy songwriter-socialite Denise Rich (christened “Lady Gatsby” by Yachting magazine) and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin joined more than 932 other Americans in tossing their passports.

If the recent quarter’s pace continues, 2013 will become a landmark year for saying goodbye to America, tax-wise.

Hey, somebody’s got to pay for the Obama vacations. It sure ain’t them.