The NYT is still hoping for a redemptive outcome, but Dana Milbank of the WaPo seems to have jumped to the other side. He quotes Rosen and gives his verdict:

“I want to report authoritatively, and ahead of my competitors, on new initiatives or shifts in U.S. policy, events on the ground in [North Korea], what intelligence is picking up, etc…I’d love to see some internal State Department analyses…In short: Let’s break some news, and expose muddle-headed policy when we see it, or force the administration’s hand to go in the right direction, if possible.” That is indeed compelling evidence — of good journalism.

At the end of the piece Milbank pulls his punches of course. Like his colleagues, Milbank was once a true believers in the One. Attkisson, Rosen, the AP: can he become a true believer agina? We’ll see.

Sharyl Attkisson via Politico:

“I can confirm that an intrusion of my computers has been under some investigation on my end for some months but I’m not prepared to make an allegation against a specific entity today as I’ve been patient and methodical about this matter…I need to check with my attorney and CBS to get their recommendations on info we make public…there could be some relationship between these types of things and what’s happened to me.”

The “types of things” she referred to are these. HT: PL

Jeffrey Lord:

According to the White House Visitors Log…the president of the anti-Tea Party National Treasury Employees Union, Colleen Kelley, visited the White House at 12:30pm that Wednesday noon time of March 31st…The very next day after her White House meeting with the President, according to the Treasury Department’s Inspector General’s Report, IRS employees — the same employees who belong to the NTEU — set to work in earnest targeting the Tea Party and conservative groups around America. The IG report wrote it up this way: April 1-2, 2010: The new Acting Manager, Technical Unit, suggested the need for a Sensitive Case Report on the Tea Party cases. The Determinations Unit Program Manager Agreed.

Mark Steyn notes the case of one person who was not only targeted as described above, but also got “visits from the FBI, OSHA and the ATF.” Lots of coordination, but how? Companies with unions have two management structures, and even non-union organizations have a percentage of their employees who want to organize. A clever and subtle way to help manage the Tea Party thing, until it unravels of course.

Telegraph:

The small glass jugs filled with green or gold coloured extra virgin olive oil are familiar and traditional for restaurant goers across Europe but they will be banned from 1 January 2014…The use of classic, refillable glass jugs or glazed terracotta dipping bowls and the choice of a restaurateur to buy olive oil from a small artisan producer or family business will be outlawed…The European Commissions justification for the ban, under special Common Agriculture Policy regulations, is “hygiene” and to protect the “image of olive oil”…”It will seem bonkers that olive oil jugs must go while vinegar bottles or refillable wine jugs can stay.”

At least they’re fiddling with olive oil. It could be a lot worse.

We’re flagging this one for future reference. Taranto rounds up quite a number of commentators who are sure that the three or four current scandals generating some heat but little light so far are no big deal. Maybe they’re right but we doubt it. You can’t have behavior this creepy and lying this pathetic without dominos falling one after another. There are too many officials involved from multiple agencies harassing too many citizens for this to settle down. Those harassed are coming forward, and they will be followed by others. And what’s up with stealing medical records? In our opinion this will continue to metastasize and no one knows where it will end, since it’s been going on silently for years.

This is a strange piece in the NYT, with White House aides spinning furiously. What’s really odd about the piece is all the references to fictional presidents in the movies and on TV. That’s very strange. We don’t see CEO’s imagining themselves as characters in obscure films about business, for example. This is a most peculiar crowd, but maybe not so much since they seem to live in a world of fantasy and fiction.

In case you’re unfamiliar with Law & Order, whether the original, SVU or CI, there are a couple of rules when approached for a friendly conversation with investigators: lawyer up and shut up being notable among them. Even a smart lawyer like Scooter Libby ignored this advice. Both Michael Ledeen and Hugh Hewitt give advice to those who may be implicated in our current or coming scandals (don’t you think there will be others?), namely to move quickly in lawyering up or they’ll get worse counsel at a worse price.

Also, Thomas Lifson has an interesting piece on how the scandal avalanche may be affecting the MSM. It will be interesting if it turns out to be true.

Robert Samuelson discusses health care in Oregon:

the uninsured annually had 5.5 office visits, used 1.8 prescription drugs and visited an emergency room once. Almost half (46 percent) said that they “had a usual place of care,” and 61 percent said that they had “received all needed care” in the past year. About three-quarters (78 percent) who received care judged it “of high quality.” Health spending for them averaged $3,257…

when people were covered by Medicaid, many of these figures rose. The annual number of office visits went to 8.2; the number of drugs, to 2.5; the share of patients with a usual place of care, to 70 percent; the proportion receiving all needed care, to 72 percent. Preventive care also increased. The share of patients receiving screening for cholesterol moved from 27 percent for the uninsured to 42 percent; the share of women older than 50 having mammograms jumped from 29 percent to 59 percent; the share of men older than 50 getting PSA tests for prostate cancer doubled, from 21 percent to 41 percent. Spending rose to $4,429.

Unfortunately, the added care and cost didn’t much improve physical health. The study screened for high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes and the risk of heart attack or stroke. No major differences were detected between the uninsured and Medicaid recipients.

So: 2700 very expensive pages not only creates chaos and unemployment, but is pretty much a total waste of time.

And there’s this from the WaPo: “Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has gone, hat in hand, to health industry officials, asking them to make large financial donations.” Knowing what we know now about the administration, what happens to those who say no to her?

Sometimes it’s the Tonight Show that’s watching you, sometimes it’s Bloomberg. NYT:

There are now more than 315,000 Bloomberg terminal subscribers worldwide who rely on the desktop computer for research, trading, communication and a constant stream of financial information and news. But as it turned out, what the subscribers were doing was not always confidential. 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 preliminary analysis at Bloomberg revealed that “several hundred” reporters had used the technique…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.

And the things the watchers can’t see directly they’ll ask you about in some detail.

There’s an amusing and hysterical article at Salon about giving up burgers to save the earth or some such. And now the NYT also reports on CO2 reaching 400PPM somewhere. You know how we take this news. Yawn. We wouldn’t mind it if earth was a little warmer, not that there’s any recent evidence of that. Anyhow, here’s a thought: why not build a Kandor on earth, an enclosed environment given its own atmosphere, this one with, say, 2000PPM CO2. Let’s see what the results are. Maybe this has already been done, but we haven’t read about it. Probably pretty expensive, but surely less expensive than the things proposed by the catastrophic AGW crowd (which India, China, etc. will never implement anyhow). And you can charge admission to defray the costs.

(At BOTW, Taranto points out that non-CO2 particles are also at an alarmingly high number: 996,600PPM.)

NRO:

The superiority of market processes to political processes is not in origin moral but technical. The useful knowledge in any modern society is distributed rather than centralized…Markets work for the same reason that the Internet works: They are not organizations, but disorganizations. More precisely, they are composed of countless (literally countless, blinking into and out of existence like subatomic particles) pockets of organization, their internal structures and relationships to one another in a constant state of flux. Market propositions are experimental propositions. Some, such as the iPhone and the No. 2 pencil, are wildly successful; others, such as New Coke or Clairol’s Touch of Yogurt Shampoo, are not. Products come and go, executives come and go, firms come and go…

Politics creates the immortal corporation. Amtrak and the U.S. Postal Service are two institutions that would have failed long ago if not for government support — subsidies for Amtrak, the government-chartered monopoly on letter delivery for the postal service. The cost of their corporate immortality is not only the waste associated with maintaining them, but also the fact that their existence prevents the emergence of superior alternatives. No sane person would invest 12.5 percent of his income in Social Security in 2013, but we are compelled to do so, and so the bankrupt enterprise continues as though it were not tens of trillions of dollars underwater. A political establishment is a near-deathless thing: Even after the bitter campaign of 2012, voters returned essentially the same cast of characters to Washington, virtually ensuring the continuation of the policies with which some 90 percent of voters pronounced themselves dissatisfied. No death, no evolution…

Washington is packed to the gills with people who believe that they have the ability to design an intelligent national health-care system, but there is not one who does — no Democrat, no Republican, no independent. The information burden is just too vast. Washington is not only full of people who do not know what they are talking about, it is full of people who do not know that they do not know what they are talking about.

Just so.

We’re talking about the media of course. Afghanistan, who cares? Benghazi, no big deal! First Amendment, fuggedaboutit! Guys in Boston, who even remembers that? Look over here quick: some girl stabbed her boyfriend and some other girls were trapped in a cellar by some guys! Now that’s the important stuff. Each day we’re amazed that things have sunk so low, and each day there’s a new decline.

Perhaps the thing that we find most offensive about the Senate immigration bill is that it does not appear to take itself seriously as a law that intends to be implemented in its details. There is precious little in the bill that addresses in a serious way how the massive enterprise it envisions is to be put into practice. And where there is implementation language, it is often ludicrous.

Here’s a bit from the section labeled Interior Enforcement, Sec 201, Additional Immigration. It is unclear from the language if relatives of those who have Z Visas residing in foreign lands would be covered by this subsection. If so, those cases alone could number potentially in the tens or hundreds of thousands. Note that only 50 immigration lawyers, if even that many, are being added to the Department of Justice to litigate the cases covered in this section:

(b) Department of Justice.-
(1) JUDICIAL CLERKS-The Attorney General shall, subject to the
availability of appropriations for such purpose, appoint necessary
law clerks for immigration judges and Board of Immigration
Appeals members of no less than one per judge and member. A
law clerk appointed under this section shall be exempt from the
provisions of subchapter I of chapter 63 of title 5 [5 USCS §§
6301 et seq.]
(2) LITIGATION ATTORNEYS.-In each of the fiscal years 2008
through 2012, the
Attorney General, subject to the availability of appropriations for
such purpose, shall increase the number of positions for
attorneys in the Office of Immigration Litigation by not less than 50…

50 litigators, budgetary conditions permitting. That’s some serious enforcement. At two lawyers per case and a case resolved every three months, this group could resolve as many as 100 cases a year. Maybe more.

It’s hard to conceive of 12 million people as a line of men, women, and children who need to be processed in some manner or other, many with particular needs and oddities of their cases, many with so-called “routine” cases, whatever they are. Imagine it as 120 Super Bowls, all being played at once. Crowds of 100,000 line up at 120 equivalents of the Rose Bowl around the country. Assume that each one of the newly legal wants to pay the cashier and be admitted to the game of being able to work legally in America. (For a moment we’ll leave aside the requirement that the applicant has to leave the country before applying.) But the cashier can’t just sell tickets.

The cashier has to inspect the papers of each of the 100,000 people standing in line to buy a ticket. The cashier has to run a background check on the ticket buyer, which is supposed to be done within 24 hours. The background check may involve the cashier in communications with towns and villages in foreign countries. The cashier has to do further investigations if something on the background check comes up spotty or incomplete. The cashier then has to ask the ticket buyer to get out of line and stand to one side. The cashier has to consider what will be done with the ticket buyer’s younger brother who is next in line, and with the ticket buyer’s 8 year old daughter, who also wants to go to the game and who was born in Pasadena. Can she be admitted without adult supervision while her father is waiting off to one side? And all this is repeated 100,000 times at the Rose Bowl, and there are 120 Rose Bowls around the country. How long do you think that would take before all could be admitted, given these procedures? 3 years, 5 years, 10 years?

And that’s if there were cashiers available today and they and their superivsors knew what to do. Here’s our point: there are no cashiers today, no supervisors. The bill puts in place zero cashiers on day one, and there is no Employment Manual for any that get hired on how to do the newly created tasks outlined in the bill. And yet, the moment the bill is signed, 12 million people, or 100,000 people lined up at 120 Rose Bowls around the country, have been told to expect that they can buy a ticket. What are the chances that they will be admitted without even buying a ticket, given the ridiculous situation the Senate bill sets up?

Forget the mockery of border law enforcement that is today’s sad story, and will continue to be so under this new law. The Senate immigration bill mocks itself, because it does not even take its own enforcement seriously.

Michelle Malkin has compiled an excellent list of the paperwork backlogs that already exist under the current system. Adding another 12 minllion to a paperwork backlog already numbering in the millions is an indication of how seriously Congress takes itsel in the matter of law enforcement versus the appearance of good intentions.

(This is a belated April Fool in a sense. This is what we wrote about how bad the 2007 bill was. Question: is enforcement likely to be any better under this new bill?)

NY Post:

The more you know about government finances, the harder it is to take the budget theater in Washington seriously. The president boasts that non-defense discretionary spending is at “its lowest level as a share of the economy since the Eisenhower administration,” but that measure ignores about 81 cents out of every dollar Washington spends. The tiny reductions in spending growth imposed by the sequester have been for the most part shrugged off by the people, though they have produced a great deal of angst and wailing in Washington — not only from the politicians, but also from such private-sector beneficiaries as defense contractors. This is an almost entirely meaningless debate. The total fiscal overhang of our federal, state, and local governments — their combined debt and unfunded liabilities — is around $140 trillion, and growing. That is about twice the annual economic output of human civilization, and nearly the value of all the financial assets in the world. It is something close to a mathematical certainty that those debts and obligations will not be made good on at their present value. The real debate for the next 30 years is not how we go about paying our bills, but how we go about not paying them.

Of course the deficits are unfinanceable. If the professoriat and the media could give up believing in utter nonsense, we could make things a lot better by fully exploiting our oil and gas resources and privatizing everything in government that business does better. Oh well, dream on!

RCM:

Total employment rose by 293,000 during April, but part-time jobs increased by 441,000. As a result, full-time jobs declined by 148,000. The number of “full-time-equivalent” (FTE) jobs only increased by 73,000. This was not enough to keep pace with the growth of our working-age population, so the “FTE jobs ratio” (the number of FTE jobs per 100 working-age Americans), fell…The April jobs numbers describe a mass replacement of full-time workers with part-time employees, coupled with a fall in the length of the average workweek. This happens to be precisely what you would expect, given the perverse incentives baked into Obamacare, which took effect on January 1…During April, the FTE jobs ratio fell for the fifth month in a row, to 53.09. The earliest warning signal for every recession since 1955 (the first year for which the data is available) has been a significant, sustained decline in this ratio…

It is now 76 months since our latest employment recession started. America’s FTE jobs ratio is still down by 5.10 from its peak, and is only 0.56 above its low point of the cycle. In contrast, at the same point during the Reagan recovery, the FTE jobs ratio was 2.01 above its prior high, having risen by 4.80 from its nadir. The numbers show that Reaganomics were vastly more effective than progressive economics during the first 76 months after the onset of their respective employment recessions.

Roger Simon remembers when the Washington Post became famous:

We are in a fascinating period of unraveling. Whistleblowers in the defense community are appearing. I’m sure at State, some are looking over their shoulders, waiting for the “Night of the Long Knives” to begin. It probably has already. How far will it go? We will soon, no doubt, be in the period of “limited hangouts.” (The attempt by Jay Carney, Obama’s press secretary, to play the “Benghazi happened a long time ago” dodge on Wednesday arguably fits this definition.) Who will be the John Dean, the Erlichman, and Haldeman? Is “Deep Benghazi Throat” talking at this moment? While we are making Watergate analogies, it’s worth noting this is far worse than that noxious moment in American history or the other recent impeachment episode — Clinton. In the former, some dumb zealots broke into the campaign headquarters of the opposition party in an election that wasn’t remotely close. Nevertheless, the paranoid Nixon destroyed himself by trying to cover up the idiocy. Clinton wagged his finger at us and lied about sex under oath, while his wife — an important figure in Benghazi where she has already been caught dissimulating — similarly lied by publicly blaming her husband’s philandering on the “great right-wing conspiracy.” (What power!) Creepy behavior all around and certainly nothing remotely presidential, but, compared to Benghazi, no one died or was even injured. As far as I know, no one even stubbed a toe. Benghazi, on the contrary, was an important battle in the Global War on Terror, which has now reached our shores more than once. It will undoubtedly do so again. Those who take this casually in the slightest are conscious or unconscious traitors or fools — or so self-interested as to be beneath contempt.

Meanwhile, the deputy chief of mission in Libya and two others will testify before Congress this week:

Hicks was in Tripoli at 9:40 p.m. local time when he received one of Stevens’ earliest phone calls amid the crisis. “We’re under attack! We’re under attack!” the ambassador reportedly shouted into his cellphone at Hicks. Chaffetz, who subsequently debriefed Hicks, also said the deputy “immediately called into Washington to trigger all the mechanisms” for an inter-agency response. “The real-life trauma that he went through…I mean, I really felt it in his voice. It was hard to listen to. He’s gone through a lot, but he did a great job.”

It was obvious what had happened at Benghazi from the very beginning. The cover-up was pathetic, and only worked because the media actively assisted in it. Because the cover-up is so inept, it requires that enormous pressure now be put on both the whistleblowers and the media, and the Chicago Way certainly knows how to do that. The most interesting thing will be to see if anyone in the media choir defects.

CBS seems to be doing a little of that.

Business Insider:

Obama won “Young voters” (18-29) by 24 points (60% to 36%). These folks were 19% of total voters. Obama won “Young middle aged voters” (30-44) by 7 points (52% to 45%). These folks were 26% of total voters.

Romney won “Middle-aged voters” (45-59) by 5 points (52% to 47%). These were 29% of voters. Romney won “Older voters” (60+) by 9 points (54% to 45%). These were 25% of voters.

So as you age you become more conservative. No news there. But the question is whether there has been a fundamental and irreversible shift among the young that will not undo itself as these people age. The 18-29 cohort is a lot more liberal than the 60+ group is conservative.

The Boomers were raised on the sturdy American values of the 1950′s, values largely in sync with many earlier generations. Vietnam created great incentives for the anti-war crowd to get graduate degrees and become professors, which many did. They’re the department heads for the more youthful voters. Meanwhile, illegitimacy has soared among the young, from negligible levels in the Boomers’ youth to 40-70% today. These are reasons to be pessimistic about the country’s future.

Some trends are self-limiting, however, and when the government runs out of other people’s money, we’ll see how many those trends are, and how radical the changes are. Radical changes do happen. A century ago the country enacted and then repealed Prohibition. In our time, we note that things seem to be coming to a head. There’s the crazy denial of what’s at the heart of terrorism. There’s a newly hysterical tone about those who even blandly take issue with today’s PC outlook. The denial and the hysteria are signs of weakness, not of strength. Brittle.

Add to the mix that the young have had it pretty easy by earth’s standards and haven’t so far been challenged like some generations by great wars, famines, plagues or depressions. It wasn’t that long ago that the Dow fell by almost 90% and life expectancy was half of what it is today. Things don’t look good if present trends among the young continue. But there are many reasons to think that some of the current excess is self-correcting. HT: Neo

Keynes:

We repudiated entirely customary morals, conventions and traditional wisdom. We were, that is to say, in the strict sense of the term, immoralists. The consequences of being found out had, of course, to be considered for what they were worth. But we recognised no moral obligation on us, or inner sanction, to conform or to obey. Before heaven we claimed to be our own judge in our own case…we repudiated all versions of the doctrine of original sin, of there being insane and irrational springs of wickedness in most men.

We may live in a post-Judeo-Christian world but we don’t live in a post-hysteria world.

Steyn:

the U.S. was little different from most other countries. In 1970, its foreign-born population was 4.7 percent. And, while most of the West has embraced mass immigration in the last half-century, America differs significantly from those developed countries, like Canada and Australia, that favor skilled migrants…the majority of U.S. foreign-born residents now come from Latin America, and more than a quarter of them – 12 million – from Mexico. A policy of “family reunification” will by definition lead to low-skilled immigrants…

any rational immigration reform that respected the interests of the American people would attempt to reorient present policy. Instead, the Gang of Eight’s bill will cement it, and accelerate it. According to Numbers USA, if the immigration bill passed, it would increase the legal population of the U.S. by 33 million in its first decade. That figure includes 11.7 million amnestied illegals and their children, plus 17 million family members imported through chain migration, with a few software designers on business visas to round out the numbers.

Thirty three million is like importing the entire population of Canada…if you’re black, look at it this way: the demographic clout it took you guys four centuries to amass can now be accomplished overnight at a stroke of Chuck Schumer’s and Lindsay Graham’s pens. And, if you belong to the 40 percent of Americans who will be encountering many of these “chain migrants” in the application line for low-skilled service jobs, isn’t it great to know that in this gangbusters economy you’re going to have to pedal even faster just to go nowhere?

Speaking of demographic clout, the main reason for not importing 33 million Canadians is that they’re supposedly a bunch of liberal pantywaists and the Republican Party would never be elected to anything ever again. But fortunately 33 million Latin Americans are, as we’ve been assured time and again by columnist Charles Krauthammer and other eminent voices, “a natural conservative constituency”

Meanwhile: Sen. Mike Gravel (D-Alaska) says the White House has helped keep the truth about the “extraterrestrial influence that is investigating our planet” from the public…“The smoking gun of the whole issue, which is when they saw hovering space craft in Wyoming and South Dakota over the ICBM missile silos that the missiles couldn’t work,” Gravel says.

Via BOTW:

There was a recent survey of the top airports in the country — in the world, and there was not a single U.S. airport that came in the top 25. Not one. Not one U.S. airport was considered by the experts and consumers who use these airports to be in the top 25 in the world. I think Cincinnati Airport came in around 30th. What does that say about our long-term competitiveness and future? And so when folks say, well, there was some money in the FAA to deal with these furloughs — well, yeah, the money is this pool of funds that are supposed to try to upgrade our airports so we don’t rank in the bottom of industrialized countries when it comes to our infrastructure. And that’s what we’re doing — we’re using our seed corn short term.

Actually the head of the FAA sounds like a fool. The sequester resulted in ATC’s having one furlough day every two weeks. He’s apparently claiming that that tiny amount of money is material to “upgrading our airports.” How ridiculous is that? But he inadvertently making a compelling case to privatize everything the government does that the private sector can do better — get all that out of government spending. Oh wait, that wasn’t the head of the FAA.