James Taranto explores “Why the Obama IRS scandal may be worse than ‘a cancer on the presidency:’”

No one can deny that Barack Obama is a highly skilled politician, at least by the measure of election outcomes. His record is undefeated, save for an ill-advised 2000 primary challenge to an entrenched incumbent congressman. His 2008 presidential victory, after a fraction of a term in the U.S. Senate, was especially dazzling. It disproved those who said that Hillary Clinton was invincible, that a left-wing Democrat couldn’t win, and that America wasn’t ready for a black president.

No one can deny that Lance Armstrong and Mark McGwire were highly skilled athletes. But their accomplishments are forever tainted by their use of banned performance-enhancing drugs. The use of the Internal Revenue Service’s coercive power to suppress dissent against Obama is the political equivalent of steroids. The history books should record Obama’s re-election with an asterisk to indicate that it was achieved with the help of illicit means.

Read the whole thing. And then check out Rick Moran at the PJ Tatler, who writes that the “Timeline of Obama Foreknowledge of IRS Scandal Continues to Slip.”  Rick notes that “The list of people who knew months ago of the IRS targeting program and yet somehow forgot to tell their boss, the president of the United States, about it is growing longer. And so is the witness list for House hearings on the matter.”

Of course, you could argue that the time begins in 2009, when Obama first “joked” about siccing the IRS on his enemies. Once Obama flashes the Barack Signal, the underlings know how to take it from there, As Mickey Kaus writes:

We now know, of course, that you don’t need direct White House involvement to politicize the IRS, at least for Democrats.** The underlings know what to do! The idea that they are apolitical professionals was always a myth.*** It’s even more of a myth now, in the era of Daily Kos and Greg Sargent. I wonder if McCurry, now safely through the revolving door, would like to revisit his statement. …

Read the whole thing, and follow the “****” for more on All the President Asterisk’s Men.

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Back in 2011 we had lots of fun with Rachel Maddow of MSNBC cheerfully using one of the biggest pariahs of today’s “Progressive” environmentally-correct — the Hoover Dam — to promote the environmentally-correct “Progressive” channel that employs her. Here’s an amusing following up, found at Jim Geraghty’s Campaign Spot daily email:

Why Kevin Williamson Rocks, Vol. LMXVIII

You probably don’t need any more reasons to purchase Kevin Williamson’s The End Is Near and It’s Going to Be Awesome: How Going Broke Will Leave America Richer, Happier, and More Secure,but I just had to share this section yesterday, dismantling Rachel Maddow’s “Lean Forward” ad featuring the Hoover Dam as a symbol of future national infrastructure projects that absolutely must be funded.

Conventional political theory holds that only the state can provide public goods such as parks, sidewalks, roads, and the like. Television commentator Rachel Maddow offered a typically exaggerated expression of this view when she visited the Hoover Dam and remarked, “When you are this close to Hoover Dam, it makes you realize how small a human is in relation to this as a human project. You can’t be the guy who builds this. You can’t even be the state that builds this. You have to be the country that builds this.” (Never mind that Hoover Dam was in fact built by a consortium of private firms headed by Bechtel-Kaiser, under precisely the sort of outsourcing/private contractor arrangement that Maddow has no time for in most other contexts — in fact, she includes a chapter in one of her books denouncing this practice.) In a sense, Maddow is correct — the Hoover Dam is an economically nonviable project from the time of its conception, and the mighty installation, visually impressive as it is, produces significantly less electricity than does a typical small nuclear power plant. Which is to say, it is a majestic boondoggle. Only politics can do that — and stay in business. And, needless to say, a “guy” attempting a project with the environmental impact of Hoover Dam would never get permission from environmental regulators, given that its construction entailed wiping out an entire local ecosystem.

So the only parts Maddow got right were the points she didn’t intend to make.

The concept that Hoover Dam was not actually built by the federal government, but was ultimately built by private companies, seemed so contrary to our usual narratives that I went and looked it up:

The Hoover Dam project was too big for any one company. So W. A. Bechtel helped form a consortium calling itself Six Companies, Inc. W. A. knew the heads of the consortium companies as friends and business associates, having been in partnerships with most of them. There was tall, lean Harry Morrison, head of Morrison-Knudsen of Boise, Idaho, and the man most directly responsible for bringing the group together; and the white-haired Wattis brothers of Utah Construction Co., the region’s foremost railroad builders. They were joined by the wry Felix Kahn of MacDonald & Kahn, a premier builder of office buildings, industrial plants, and hotels, including the Mark Hopkins in San Francisco. Phil Hart ran Pacific Bridge Co., one of the oldest construction firms on the West Coast, and was justly famous for his underwater work — a critical component in dam construction. Charlie Shea, the pugnacious, acid-tongued boss of J. F. Shea Co., was the best tunnel and sewer man west of the Rockies. And finally there was the legendary Henry Kaiser, whom W. A. had long valued for his enthusiasm and vision. W. A. Bechtel served as the second president of Six Companies; his son Steve was a member of the executive committee; and sons Warren and Ken served on the board.

Kevin is also taking no prisoners a critic, helping his local theater enforce their no cell phone rules — in appropriately dramatic style.

For my recent interview with him, click here to listen.

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“Be prepared to love the Eagles’ Evan Mathis, even if you hate the Eagles,” Mary Katharine Ham writes.

I love Mashable.com’s self-lobotomized description of Mathis’ stunt:

Just what precisely Mathis is so pissed off about — other than just like, taxes in general, man — isn’t quite clear.

Yes, what on earth would cause him to do that?

Mashable adds, “But one thing is obvious: He’s not exactly having guilt pangs over the stunt.”

Presumably, the Eagles’ Obama-supporting owner will remind him of the futility of individual expression in a corporatist world.

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“So much scandal is swirling around President Obama that it was hard to spot what must be the biggest strategic error of the week,” the New York Sun opines, “his warning to Prime Minister Cameron that if Britain leaves the European Union it could lose clout in Washington. The story ran in few, if any, places other than the London Financial Times, which featured on page one a picture of Messrs. Cameron and Obama in the Oval Office:

The headline read, “Obama warns Cameron that Britain would lose influence in the US if it pulls out of EU.”

Who in the world came up with that brainstorm? The idea seems to be, as the FT quotes Mr. Obama as articulating it for Mr. Cameron, that Britain’s membership in the EU is “an expression of its influence and its role in the world.” The president advised Mr. Cameron, in public statements yesterday, to try to “fix what’s broken” in the European Union rather than pull out. In context that’s an intervention by Mr. Obama into Britain’s domestic political situation, where a fast-growing political party is challenging Mr. Cameron’s government over the issue of Europe.

The challenger is the United Kingdom Independence Party. It was founded in 1993 in the wake of the Maastricht Treaty, which led to the creation of the European Union and the Euro. For years a marginal group, with a libertarian streak, UKIP has been surging lately. It has helped box Mr. Cameron in to promising a referendum on whether Britain should stay in the European Union, and if recent polls are an indication, there’s a fair chance that Britons would decide to exit the socialist satrapy that has been set up in the years since Maastricht.

So when did it become American policy to set itself against the British voters? A British exit — known as “Brexit” in British shorthand — ought to be seen as an opportunity for America. These columns have been making this point for some years, urging the idea that an exit of Britain from the EU would present a chance to forge something substantive out of the “special relationship” that Britain and America are supposed to enjoy. It’s a situation that calls for creative thinking in the White House and the State Department.

As James C. Bennett and Iain Murray noted in the Wall Street Journal in 2o11, a savvier president would have offered England a membership in NAFTA, if it departed from the EU.

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“Not Too Sharp,” quips James Taranto today:

Morgan Whitaker, a producer for NBC newsman Al Sharpton’s show, doesn’t seem to think either the murder of four Americans in Benghazi or the Obama administration’s use of the IRS to target political opponents is any big deal. She weighed in with a blog post yesterday titled “The 7 Other ‘Scandals’ That Didn’t Turn Out to Be Obama’s Watergate”: Solyndra, Fast and Furious, the alleged offer of an administration position to a 2010 Senate candidate, national-security leaks, Obama’s birth certificate, the White House’s links to MediaMutters and Janet Napolitano’s order giving work permits to some illegal aliens.

This was posted at 4:30 p.m. ET yesterday. The AP broke the story of the Justice Department’s surveillance some 20 minutes later. It’s the worst timing since the New York Times’s puff piece on unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers, which ran on Sept. 11, 2001.

MSNBC President Phil Griffin told NPR in 2011 that Al Sharpton is “smart. He’s entertaining. He’s experienced. He’s thoughtful. He’s provocative, all the things I think that MSNBC is.” (And how.)

I’m sure Griffin feels that goes double for Sharpton’s producer.

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“It’s a bad rerun of a show that was awful the first time, and yet ran far too long.” Rand Simberg writes today at PJM:

Enemies lists, IRS audits of same, cover-ups at high levels of government, an aloof president who has others do his (unspoken?) bidding — after the events of the past week, many have been comparing the Obama administration to another one that ended almost forty years ago. And while many of the comparisons of Barack Obama to Richard Nixon are indeed apt, one doesn’t have to go that far back in history to find an even better parallel.

For those of us politically aware in the 1990s, the Obama administration has come to seem like a bad rerun of the corrupt Clinton era, complete with witness intimidation and character attacks on their political opponents, stonewalling and obfuscating while claiming that their crimes are being “politicized,” false claims of “exoneration” by official reports, and, yes, even IRS audits of their political enemies. All with a sycophantic media complicit, and even incestuous and inbred, with the White House.

For example, several days ago, when the Benghazi scandal started to climb out of the grave to which the administration and its enablers in the press thought they had consigned it last fall, the first response from the president’s spokesman was that it was something that happened a long time ago, seemingly back in the Cambrian era of late 2012. As opposed, of course, to the Bush administration, which apparently remains evergreen four and a half years after its departure, at least when it comes to assigning blame for otherwise unexplainable and “unexpected” mishappenings during this one. Of course, as PJ Media’s Ed Driscoll points out, Jay Carney’s own corruption is not exactly new-fallen snow.

This was a standard tactic of the Clinton administration and its defenders, in every scandal from Whitewater and Castle Grande, to the illegal campaign donations from James Riady (who, in another case of what was old is new again, has somehow recently turned up in the new series as well). And then there was  John Huang and the Chinese donations (and others too numerous to recount in this brief piece), to L’Affaire Grand — the Lewinsky scandal.

In each and every case, the tactic would be to prevaricate, stonewall, and withhold requested documents for weeks, months or years. Then, when some evidence managed to evade the combined media/administration cover-up and come to light (such as Hillary Clinton’s law-firm billing records), it would suddenly become “old news.”

We’re seeing a repeat of other tactics as well.

Read the whole thing.

And then check out Jim Treacher, who notes that “The only difference between this week and every other week for the last 4 years is that for once we’re not the only ones paying attention.”

Speaking of which, as Moe Lane writes, guess who wrote this six years ago:

In Washington, scandals metastasize, growing and changing until we can’t remember what they were about in the beginning. A bungled burglary became a cancer on the presidency, forcing Richard Nixon to resign in disgrace. A money-losing Arkansas real estate deal led to Monica, a blue dress and Bill Clinton’s impeachment. Already, the furor over the dismissal of eight U.S. Attorneys has shifted focus from the crass but essentially routine exercise of political patronage to the essential project of George W. Bush’s presidency: its deliberate and aggressive efforts to expand and protect Executive power.

If you haven’t already figured it out, click over to Moe’s blog for schadenfreude, super-sized style.

Update: “News Anchor: IRS Targeted Me After Obama Interview.” Love the photo juxtaposition at the top of the page.

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“Could Detroit Be the Next City to Go Bankrupt?“, Veronique de Rugy asks at the Corner:

Why is the city in such a terrible financial situation? Because it spends too much and it suffers from rampant corruption:

Orr, a Washington-based turnaround expert and bankruptcy attorney, was selected by Gov. Rick Snyder to oversee Detroit’s finances. In his report, Orr described the city’s operations as “dysfunctional and wasteful after years of budgetary restrictions, mismanagement, crippling operational practices and, in some cases, indifference or corruption.”

“Outdated policies, work practices, procedures and systems must be improved consistent with best practices of 21st century government,” Orr wrote. “A well-run city will promote cost savings and better customer service and will encourage private investment and a return of residents.”

As such, we shouldn’t be surprised that Detroit has lost almost 26 percent of its population between 2000 and 2011. But don’t despair Detroit, the Light Rail is coming to you:

In January, US Department of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced a federal commitment of $25 million to the M-1 Rail project, thus tentatively setting construction to begin in the summer for the 3 mile stretch of rail between downtown and New Center. Gone will be the days when Detroit’s only rail transit is a glorified amusement park ride!

Ahh, the desire named streetcar; it’s particularly desirable, even in broke cities such as Detroit, because the potential to spread the graft around is so much more than simply buying new busses:

A transit agency that expands its bus fleet gets the support of the transit operators union. But an agency that builds a rail line gets the support of construction companies, construction unions, banks and bond dealers, railcar manufacturers, electric power companies (if the railcars are electric powered), downtown property owners, and other real estate interests. Rail may be a negative-sum game for the region as a whole, but those concentrated interests stand to gain a lot at a relatively small expense to everyone else.

It looks like Detroit could also be getting a statue of Robocop, in much the same way that similarly exhausted Philadelphia has an iconic-slash-cheesy statue of Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky character. But what’s fascinating is that judging by these headlines on today’s Drudge Report, real-life Detroit actually appears in far worse shape than the dystopian projections that 1987′s Robocop depicted for the city’s 21st century future:

• Too late to save Detroit?
• ‘Dysfunctional, wasteful’…
• 27% of Detroit Homes Vacant…

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“Looks as though Joe Klein is back on the Narrative Plantation,” John Nolte writes at Big Journalism. “After blistering the Obama Administration over revelations that the IRS was targeting conservative groups, today Klein took his marching orders from Ezra Klein and publicly walked it all way back:”

I may have swung a bit too hard, putting Barack Obama’s Administration in the same league as Franklin Roosevelt’s and Richard Nixon’s when it comes to the Internal Revenue Service. The situation remains a major embarrassment, though.

The most important difference is that the Roosevelt and Nixon IRS depredations came from the White House. This mess seems to have percolated from the middle–the IRS’s Cincinnati office (a major facility, by the way)–up to the upper-middle. It was an overreaction, to be sure–but, as Ezra Klein explains, it was a response to a very real problem[.]

“So now Joe Klein is back in the club — back on the Narrative Plantation as a member of Ezra Klein’s JournOlist in good standing,” Nolte adds. “Now that everyone is in line and knows their place, the media can proceed to circle the wagons.”

I’d love to know how Joe was instructed to dial it back. Did anything need to be spoken, or was it simply understood? “Joe, you’re 66 years old, only a few years younger than Bob Woodward. You saw what me and the rest of the boys in the Juicebox Mafia did to him a couple of month ago, right? Shame if something like that were to happen to you…”

Update: And again (times two): “The New JournoList spin on the IRS,” as spotted by Meryl Yourish:

That’s funny. Two different articles, one in Mother Jones, one in the WaPo, yet they’re running the exact same explanation as to why the IRS targeted conservative groups filing for tax exemptions.

“I found two,”  Yourish adds. “How many more New JournoList IRS apologists can you find?” Add Klein to the list, which could keep on growing.

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NBC, November 4th, 2007: the network, owned by GE, which makes its money selling lightbulbs, goes dark to hector viewers into going “green:”

The Atlantic today on NBC’s dismal upcoming primetime schedule: “This Is the Not-So-Bright Future of NBC:”

I just sat through NBC’s upfront presentation, which teases the new season lineup for advertisers and other assorted looky-loos, and boy, does the future not look bright for the struggling Peacock network. After clearing whole swaths of its schedule through cancellations, this could have been NBC’s chance to revitalize itself with sharp, interesting fare. But I suppose the economic realities of running a major network are such that it seemed wiser to roll out a slate of boring, predictable, almost parodic shows, none of which seem likely to do the network any good.

And speaking of National Broadcasting Karma, this also seems appropriate:

From Newsbusters, yesterday: “Chris Hayes’ ‘Easy’ Solution To Poverty: Give People Money!”

Chris Hayes is what passes at MSNBC for a progressive intellectual.

Which makes his simple-minded and manifestly mistaken proposal that much more maddening. Making a peek-a-boo video-clip appearance on today’s Melissa Harris-Perry’s show, which focused on finding solutions to poverty in America, Hayes was seen holding up a hand-written sign with his solution, reading “Giving people money: It’s actually that easy.” View the video after the jump.

Presumably then Hayes and the rest of the on-air “talent” at MSNBC are OK with this Reuters story, on advertisers giving less money to NBC, and the other TV networks:

“Advertisers have many more places to go to, so broadcasters are probably a little reticent of trying to push stronger (rates), even with this stronger economy,” Fratrik added.

Viewers’ biggest distraction is cable TV, which is churning out more hits that lure eyeballs from the Big Four. AMC’s zombie thriller “The Walking Dead” and the A&E reality show “Duck Dynasty” haul in broadcast-sized audiences. “Walking Dead” averaged 10.7 million viewers this season, more than all but the top 12 shows on broadcast TV.

Online video players such as Hulu and Google Inc’s YouTube are jockeying for ad dollars, and viewing hours are growing on Netflix, the streaming service that is making a big push into original programming with shows like political thriller “House of Cards.”

Plus, networks don’t yet get full credit in Nielsen ratings for the viewers who catch their favorite shows online.

So far this season, combined prime-time ratings on the four broadcasters declined 7.5 percent, the biggest year-over-year decline in six years, according to Nielsen data provided by Horizon Media and based on live viewing and those who record and watch the show the same day.

Hey, CNN also advised Americans to spend less in 2010; a year after NBC’s Tom Brokaw personally begged Mr. Obama to take money out of consumers’ pockets in the form of higher gasoline taxes. If they’re consuming less television, that’s all good news, right?

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“Whoa: Did the IRS also target Jewish groups for ‘extra-special attention’?,” Twitchy asks:

The IRS admits to targeting conservative groups for additional review and laughably claims the witch hunt wasn’t “motivated by political bias.” What will its math-challenged spokeswoman Lois Lerner say about allegations that the IRS gave “extra-special attention to the tax-exempt status of some Jewish groups for political reason”?

* * * * *

The pro-Israel group Z STREET filed a lawsuit against the IRS in 2010, claiming an IRS agent said the organization would come under extra scrutiny because it’s “connected to Israel.”

In addition, the IRS agent told a Z STREET representative that the applications of some of those Israel-related organizations have been assigned to “a special unit in the D.C. office to determine whether the organization’s activities contradict the Administration’s public policies.”

* * * * * *

The Jewish Press reports:

The IRS even took the position that because Israel is a country “where terrorism happens,” the service was justified in taking additional time to determine whether Z STREET was involved with funding terrorism.

The first hearing in Z STREET v IRS is reportedly scheduled for July.

And that’s in addition to John Podhoretz’s post at Commentary yesterday, in which he wrote:

As it happens, I know something about the chilling effect of an IRS investigation into a non-profit’s 501 (c)-3 status because in 2009, COMMENTARY (a non-profit) received a letter from the Internal Revenue Service threatening the revocation of the institution’s standing as a non-profit due to a claim that on our website we had crossed the line in the 2008 election from analysis to explicit advocacy of the candidacy of John McCain for president. (Non-profits are not permitted to endorse candidates.) The charge was false—all we had done was reprint a speech delivered at a COMMENTARY event by then-Sen. Joseph Lieberman in which he had endorsed McCain.

Taking away a non-profit’s ability to receive tax-exempt charitable contributions is equivalent to a death sentence.

We were told by counsel that, should the IRS rule against us, we would have almost no recourse. You might think free speech rights would trump any such effort, but of course no one is challenging your speech rights, merely finding that what you say runs afoul of laws dealing with non-profits. You have no constitutional right to non-profit status, after all.

Disproving the false charge, which we did eventually in part by literally printing out the 2 million words that had appeared on this site in 2008 and sending them in many boxes to the IRS to show that the words in which Lieberman said he was supporting McCain were essentially a part per million, cost us tens of thousands of dollars and dozens upon dozens of hours of lost work time. The inquiry, which never should have been brought, was closed. But talking to lawyers and strategizing and the like in such a circumstance make the experience an ordeal that leaves you a bit shell-shocked—which is, of course, the point.

Now, I had assumed that a hostile reader or hostile liberal group was responsible for the IRS inquiry into COMMENTARY, but there is a salient detail in today’s story that makes me think something else might have been at work. IRS official Lerner said the effort against the conservative groups in 2012 came from “low-level” officials in the Cincinnati office. The investigation into COMMENTARY came out of the Columbus office. Is there something going on inside the IRS offices in Ohio?

Who will find out?

“Well whaddataknow,” Iowahawk tweets today. “Turns out ‘low level IRS employees in Cincinnati’ was IRS Chief Counsel in 2011.” (Another Iowahawk tweet today was the basis for our headline above.)

More after the pagebreak.

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November 24, 2008. Curiously, Time meant their headline to be a compliment.

You can’t say you weren’t warned:

● “FDR’s policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate.”

— Press release, UCLA Newsroom, August 10, 2004.

● “RECOVERY SUMMER #4: Obama: Our economy is ‘poised for progress.’ Or is it #5 now?”

— Blog post, Instapundit.com, today.

Or as a recent video at Prager University asked:

Oh, and speaking of Time, when I searched Google for the above cover, I came across three stories which chart the annual progress of how Time viewed BHO in relation to FDR:

● November 24, 2008: Time magazine publishes above cover with BHO as FDR, complete with Roosevelt’s jaunty cigarette holder, which is probably the most miraculous portion of the illustration, considering the leftwing MSM’s obsession with political correctness.

●  July 6, 2009: Time’s cover headline sagely cautions, “What Barack Obama Can Learn From FDR,” which seems more than a little odd, considering that a year ago, Time thought Obama was FDR.

● February 22nd, 2010: The metatag on a Time article, in other words, the headline that comes up when searching on Google  warns,  “Why Obama is not FDR.”

Given the moribund nature of the American economy, perhaps Time’s first assessment was more correct than they realized.

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From those wonderful folks who brought you Walter Cronkite politicizing the Tet Offensive, Dan Rather and RatherGate, and Katie Couric writing Christmas poems in praise of ObamaCare comes this gem from CBS anchor Scott Pelley, speaking to Quinnipiac University:

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James Taranto on “The New Nixon,” only this time around, “the press cheered as the IRS investigated the president’s opponents,” he adds:

Last year, the Post notes, “Tea Party groups complained . . . that they were receiving dozens of questionnaires from the IRS with regard to their applications for nonprofit tax status, probing their political leanings and activities.”

That prompted an editorial from the New York Times cheering on the IRS: “Taxpayers should be encouraged by complaints from Tea Party chapters applying for nonprofit tax status at being asked by the Internal Revenue Service to prove they are ‘social welfare’ organizations and not the political activists they so obviously are.” The Times did say the rules “should be applied across the board,” and the list of groups it wanted investigated included Priorities USA, a pro-Obama group, as well as a couple of conservative groups and Americans Elect, the failed third-party effort.

But the IRS now acknowledges that Tea Party people were right: The agency was investigating them because of their political profile. Viewpoint-based selective enforcement of IRS regulations would be a First Amendment violation even if the regulations themselves are constitutional. It is difficult to credit Lois Lerner’s claim that this was merely an error and not politically motivated. Imagine if the NAACP and the United Negro College Fund got hit with this sort of treatment and the IRS denied a racial motive while acknowledging it had deliberately chosen groups whose names contained synonyms for “black.”

Read the whole thing.

Regarding the Watergate flashbacks caused by Benghazi, in a guest post at Power Line, David Gelernter writes:

It is the Democratic Party that’s on trial today; and to a lesser extent, America’s mainstream media.  For Democrats (and especially Democratic senators) it is put-up-or-shut-up time: are they Democrats or Americans first?  Obviously their first instinct was to defend the Democratic administration.  Republicans would have done the same.  But starting with the Hayes story on the Rice propaganda points (and the neo-Soviet process that turned them from truth to lies), and then the Issa hearing Wednesday (and a recent ABC news piece focusing again on the phonied-up talking points), no honest observer can fail to suspect this administration of doing unspeakable things.  It is Congress’s duty to find out the truth.

How would Republicans act if a GOP administration were under this sort of cloud?  We know exactly how.  It was the radically partisan Edward Kennedy who proposed that a senate select committee investigate Watergate—but in February 1973, the Senate voted unanimously to create that committee.  Republican Senator Howard Baker was vice chairman, and asked the key question: ”What did the president know and when did he know it?”  Which Democratic senator will ask that question today, now that the issue isn’t breaking-and-entering but lying about four murders, including the murder of an American ambassador?  Which cabinet member will be Eliot Richardson and resign rather than continuing to be part of a coverup?  Will John Kerry rise to the challenge?

To ask the question is to answer it.

But speaking of All the President’s Men…

Update: Also at Power Line, John Hinderaker adds, “Come to think of it, this may be one more reason why Obama is so single-mindedly devoted to winning back the House in 2014: the way his administration’s scandals are multiplying, an all-Democrat Congress provides insurance against having to leave office via helicopter.”

And via the comments section:

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“Talk about a nanny state,” the New York Post quips. “Goldman Sachs employees concerned Bloomberg news reporters are using terminals to snoop:”

Irked Goldman Sachs brass recently confronted Bloomberg LP over concerns reporters at the business news service have been using the company’s ubiquitous terminals to keep tabs on some employees of the Wall Street bank, The Post has learned.

The ability to spy on Bloomberg terminal users came to light recently when Goldman officials learned that at least one reporter at the news service had access to a wide array of information about customer usage, sources said.

In one instance, a Bloomberg reporter asked a Goldman executive if a partner at the bank had recently left the firm — noting casually that he hadn’t logged into his Bloomberg terminal in some time, sources added.

Goldman later learned that Bloomberg staffers could determine not only which of its employees had logged into Bloomberg’s proprietary terminals but also how many times they had used particular functions, insiders said.

The matter raised serious concerns for the firm about how secure information exchanged through the terminals within the firm actually was — and if the privacy of their business strategy had been compromised.

“You can basically see how many times someone has looked up news stories or if they used their messaging functions,” said one Goldman insider.

“It made us think, ‘Well, what else does [Bloomberg] have access to?’”

“Mayor Bloomberg, who is worth about $25 billion, no longer oversees the day-to-day running of Bloomberg LP but controls the privately held company,” the Post adds.

Just to review the players involved, we have Goldman Sachs, the farm team for the White House’s economic advisors, being spied on by the information/publishing house of the Ultimate Nanny Stater, Mike Bloomberg. Whose news service is so in the tank for Obama, that seemingly every piece of bad economic news it reports is labeled “unexpectedly.”

Back in 2009, Kevin D. Williamson of National Review explored how the GOP lost Gordon Gekko, who apparently gave up the idea of corporate raiding for getting in bed with an administration whose dream was building a corporatist top-down command and control economy, and whose house organ declared in early 2009, “We Are All Socialists Now.”

The Zero Hedge econoblog adds, “to some there is nothing more informative than knowing if the object of their stalking ambitions is currently sitting next to a PC. As it turns out, it is not just clients of Bloomberg that found this functionality useful, but Bloomberg journalists too…”

As I said when the Washington Post’s JournoList scandal broke, you wanted it, you got it: Welcome to East Germany, boys. But, to mix socialist metaphors, didn’t you know that only the highest ranking Inner Party members have the ability to switch off their two-way telescreens?

Update: “This is different from the News International phone hacking scandal, how?”

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“Team Obama calls global warming doubters ‘crazy,’” Paul Bedard writes at the Washington Examiner:

The president’s recently formed grass-roots campaign operation revealed Thursday that it plans to attack Republicans who question radical global warming hype, dubbing them “crazy” purveyors of “far-fetched conspiracy theories.”

In a fundraising memo from President Obama’s re-election campaign manager, Organizing for Action slammed “climate deniers” and their doubts, which Jim Messina compared to the nutty things a crazy uncle would say at Thanksgiving dinner.

You mean crazy stuff like this: “Can Humans Survive?” Newsweek, aka the Daily Beast asks:

Nonetheless, if the planet starts heating up rapidly, and droughts are causing mass death, it’s very possible that we’ll become desperate enough to try solar management. The planet would rapidly cool a few degrees and give crops a chance to thrive again. What would it be like to live through a geoengineering project like that? “People say we’ll have white skies—blue skies will be a thing of the past,” Cascio said. Plus, solar management is only “a tourniquet,” he warned. The greater injury would still need treating. We might cut the heat, but we’d still be coping with elevated levels of carbon in our atmosphere, interacting with sunlight to raise temperatures. When the reflective particles precipitated out of the stratosphere, the planet would once again undergo rapid, intense heating. “You could make things significantly worse if you’re not pulling carbon down at the same time,” Cascio said.

While this scheme received favorable lip-service in 2009 by John Holdren, Obama’s Dr. Strangelove-esque “Science” “Czar,” even Al Gore says it’s crazy. And Al and crazy are on exceedingly good terms:

XXXX

While the Daily Beastweek is donning its sandwich board and alternately either waiting the sky to fall or waiting to shoot sun-reflecting pollutants into it, “Despite global warming hype, wildfires at 10-year low,” the Daily Caller notes:

Wildfires are burning up thousands of acres in the western U.S., a fact the Obama administration points to as evidence that Washington needs to get serious about addressing global warming.

However, government data show that wildfires are at a 10-year low.

According to the National Interagency Fire Center, there were 13,115 fires between January 1st and May 3rd of this year, which burnt a total of 153,277 acres — about half as much as burned last year. This is lowest spring for wildfires since 2004, according to NIFC.

“Wildfire activity remains light throughout the US. Two new large fires were reported this week and one was contained,” according to the latest update from NFIC.

“People who claim that the climate is getting more severe simply have not studied the history of climate,” said Steven Goddard, a climate skeptic blogger who pointed out the data, in an email. “This year has been very cold, with record amounts of spring snow.”

And even USA Today is forced to note, “Tornado activity hits 60-year low.”

But the sky could still fall! Former Newsweek editor Jonathan Alter tells MSNBC today that the “Sequestration Could Kill People:”

Let’s just broaden the conversation out from Head Start a little bit because these cuts go all the way across everything that the federal government does. So people can have a particular problem maybe with Head Start. Maybe it doesn’t have the results they want. Anybody can find various problems with various government programs. But to take a machete to the federal budget this way is mindless.

Pretty much all of these agencies could close some programs, consolidate programs, save some money. Obama’s for that. Democrats are for that. But to just kind of say that arbitrarily everything has to be cut, what ends up happening is, look at these people on dialysis. They get rides to their kidney dialysis programs. If they don’t get there for their dialysis treatment, they can die. These rides have been dramatically cut back in some areas because of these cuts.

Multiply that by thousands of programs and different things the federal government is involved with – whether it’s small business, Head Start, or anything else – the only people spared are those who serve the powerful like airlines because Congressmen have to fly home. They don’t want the delays at the airport. So they fixed that and they left the poor and the sick to fend for themselves. And that’s immoral in the United States.

So why does Obama hate the old and infirm so much?

Click to enlarge.

Incidentally, Hot Air links to the apocalyptic Newsweek/Daily Beast article above under the headline, “What will the next mass extinction look like?” For those who published it, I’d say it looked like this:

You know what else risks extinction? “Heh: ‘Reporter’ On List Of ’5 Dying Careers To Avoid’”

Dying Career #2: Reporter

They say a species must adapt or die, and with the trend of the Internet replacing print journalism (you are reading this on the computer, after all), media folks who don’t adjust might not survive too much longer. In short, many reporters could be going the way of their typewriters soon.

Projected Decline: Reporter and correspondent positions are expected to decline by 8 percent from 51,900 jobs in 2010 to 48,000 in 2020, for a total of nearly 4,000 jobs lost, says the U.S. Department of Labor

Why It’s Dying: The Department of Labor says that because of the trend of consolidation of media companies and the decline in readership of newspapers, reporters will find there are fewer available jobs.

So, if you have a hankering for writing, you might look into…

Alternative Career: Public Relations Specialist

As Stephen Kruiser quips at the Tatler:

What amused me while reading this is that the real reason reporters are a dying breed is that they’ve already turned into public relations specialists, especially the current MSM types regarding this president. They long ago abandoned the inquisitive nature that real reporters need and now write nothing but fawning high school girl journal entries about how wonderful The Idiot King is.

When this job goes the way of the village blacksmith they’ll have no place but the mirror to look when it’s time to dole out the blame.

Just a reminder — 20 years ago, it was a Newsweek journalist who bragged on C-Span about the “Yeah, I’m In The Media, Screw You!” button she was wearing:

“My reaction to that button [`Rather Biased'] and others, in part, is a button I bought yesterday that says `Yeah, I’m In The Media, Screw You!’….I do understand why a lot of people are upset with us, why we rank somewhere between terrorists and bank robbers on the approval scale. We do criticize. That’s part of our role. Our role is not just to parrot what people say, it’s to make people think. I think that sometimes I want to say to the electorate `Grow up!’”

Now who’s being naive, Kay?

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News travels slow, I guess:

● “Beck TV: Hiroshima vs. Detroit – Which City Really Embraced the ‘American Dream’?”

– Headline at Glenn Beck’s The Blaze Website, February 28, 2011.

● “Kevyn Orr [Detroit's emergency manager]: Detroit Is In Worse Shape Than I Thought.”

– Headline, CBS-Detroit, yesterday.

Related: “Backlash? Public Now Trusts the GOP Over Obama to Make the Right Decisions on Gun Laws,” Ace notes. “Well, we’ve had five years of horrific failures from Obama, Reid, and Pelosi. It’s nice that the slow boats have begun joining us on the right side of the river.”

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“All of the structures that we use to run the world today— our civics, our politics, our legal systems, healthcare, education— are all structured for a world 100 or 200 years ago, not for the world of today. So we think we’re in for a lot of disruption,” says Salim Ismail, founding director of Singularity University.

– From Reason TV’s video interview: “Singularity University’s Salim Ismail on the Age of Technological Disruption”

Though given that Ismail mentions Moore’s Law, it’s worth quoting Kevin Williamson’s thoughts on that topic:

“We treat technological progress as though it were a natural process, and we speak of Moore’s law — computers’ processing power doubles every two years — as though it were one of the laws of thermodynamics. But it is not an inevitable, natural process. It is the outcome of a particular social order.”

A social order the current administration is deeply antithetical towards, hence our current string of bad economic “luck:”

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as “bad luck.”

Or to put it another way, “You didn’t build that.”

(For my recent interview with Williamson, click here.)

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Hilarious comment posted to  Charles C. W. Cooke’s post on 3D-printable guns:

Just now, I noted that 100,000 people have already downloaded the digital blueprints to Defense Distributed’s 3D-printable gun. This gem was among the comments on my post:

The answer is we have to ban 3D. No one really needs a third dimension. If it will save just one life, it will be well worth it. Living in a two-dimensional world is just a sensible limitation on our depth perception.

This is pretty funny but, as with most things that are pretty funny, it strikes at a real point – that being that the Second Amendment implications of limiting the printing of guns are the least of America’s worries. If previous panicked attempts to prohibit items of which the state disapproves are anything to go by, the whole Bill of Rights will eventually find its way into the crosshairs of the censors, liberty interests being subjugated as usual by ostensible “necessity.” There is simply no way of making a serious effort to prevent — not prosecute after the fact, but prevent — people from making, carrying, and transporting 3D-printed guns without going after Americans’ First Amendment right to distribute whatever blueprints they wish and without undermining in some way their Fourth Amendment right to privacy.

Which seems to dovetail well with Phil Bowermaster’s post at Transparency Revolution on “Catastrophic Success:”

I’m reading K. Eric Drexler’s new book Radical Abundance, which explores the impact of atomically precise manufacturing (APM). Drexler predicts that APM will be with us soon and that it will transform the global economy in ways that can be compared to the industrial revolution of the 18th century or the advent of agriculture some 10,000 years ago. That is to say, he predicts it will be among the biggest shifts that have ever occurred.

Drexler compares the introduction of APM with the digital revolution of the past few decades, asserting that APM will essentially turn the production of physical goods into a form on information technology. Just as digital technologies made it possible to produce unlimited copies of information products (books, recorded movies, music) at essentially zero cost, APM will enable the production of physical goods at a tiny fraction of the cost of producing them today — enabling a world of radical abundance per the book’s title. This transition will not come without problems, however. Imagine the kind of disruption which has occurred in the music business over the past decade and a half applied to manufacturing, agriculture, and energy production. The elimination of infrastructure, businesses, and employment will be staggering. Drexler warns that with the introduction of APM we may face a period of “catastrophic success.”

Found via Glenn Reynolds, who would likely add, “Well, it is the 21st century, you know.”

Of course, getting old media into the 21st century may be a bit more problematic, though ABC seems to have back-ended into a rather libertarian stance regarding gun-grabbing totalitarian monsters of the past: Hitler, Lenin, what’s the difference?

(Last item via Kathy Shaidle, who links to some excellent advice here: “Don’t apologise, explain that this what a joke looks like – and then enjoy the writhings of the old order as they seem themselves so brutally wrong-footed.”)

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Hey, remember the late 1980s and early 1990s, when all the smart guys were predicting Japan was going to be the economic powerhouse of the 21st century? So much for that idea, as the Daily Finance Website noted in 2011:

In 1986, Gore Vidal wrote that in the face of Japan’s climb to economic dominance, “There is only one way out. The time has come for the United States to make common cause with the Soviet Union.” His advice on the Soviets was provocative, but the idea that Japan owned the future was nearly ubiquitous.

In 1991, former MIT dean Lester Thurow, wrote that, “If one looks at the last 20 years, Japan would have to be considered the betting favorite to win the economy honors of owning the 21st century.”

In 1988, former Reagan official Clyde Prestowitz said, “The American century is over. The big development in the latter part of the century is the emergence of Japan as a major superpower.”

In his book Trading Places, Prestowitz elaborated: “The power behind the Japanese juggernaut is much greater than most Americans suspect, and the juggernaut cannot stop of its own volition, for Japan has created a kind of automatic wealth machine, perhaps the first since King Midas.”

Michael Crichton — not exactly an economic analyst, but widely read nonetheless — wrote in 1992 that “Sooner or later, Americans must come to grips with the fact that Japan has become the leading industrial nation in the world. The Japanese have the longest lifespan. They have the highest employment, the highest literacy, the smallest gap between rich and poor. Their manufactured goods have the highest quality. They have the best food. The fact is that a country the size of Montana, with half our population, will soon have an economy equal to ours.”

It never did. These predictions weren’t just wrong. They were the sheer opposite of what happened. Japan’s stock market and real estate market collapsed in the 1990s. Its economy has been in an unmitigated slump ever since, spending the better part of two decades fighting deflation. It is now the most indebted industrialized nation in the world.

What went wrong? In the most simplistic terms, bulls focused obsessively on Japanese managerial techniques. The nation did have some great managers, particularly in comparison to American businesses like General Motors (NYS: GM) , which were failing hand over fist. But what went mostly ignored was that Japan’s boom was based on debt and overinvestment, not productivity. That created a bubble of epic proportions. When that bubble burst, the chickens came home to roost. Twenty years later, they’re still roosting.

Hey, remember the mid-to-late-naughts, when all the smart guys were predicting China will be the economic powerhouse of the 21st century? So much for that idea — “China may not overtake America this century after all,” Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes in the London Telegraph:

The National Bureau of Statistics has since revealed that data collected by the regions overstates GDP by 10pc, though they have not acted on the insight. It is well-known why this goes on. The reward system of the Communist hierarchy has been geared to talking up growth, and officials gain kudos by lowering the stated “energy intensity” of their zone.

China’s Development Research Council (DRC) expects growth to drop to 6pc by 2020. It could be much lower. The US Conference Board says it will average 3.7pc from 2019-2025 as the ageing crisis hits. Michael Pettis from Beijing University thinks it is likely to slow to 3pc to 4pc over the next decade, deeming this entirely desirable if it comes from taming the runaway state enterprises.

If so, China’s growth may not be much higher than the new consensus estimate of 3pc for a reborn America, powered by its energy boom and the revival of the chemical, steel, glass, and paper industries.

All those charts showing China’s economy surging past the US by 2030, or 2025, or even 2017, will look very credulous. China may not surpass the US this century.

Stop by the Internet cafe in your local Chinese ghost town and read the whole thing.

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Now is the time when we juxtapose, Small Dead Animals-style:

“‘No such thing as ethical oil,’ Al Gore tells Toronto audience.”

— The Toronto Globe and Mail, yesterday.

“Al Gore is now richer than Mitt Romney – and it’s all thanks to big oil.”

— The London Telegraph, January 12th, 2013.

(Via Colby Cosh.)

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