“This suspicious activity has been going on for quite some time – both on my CBS computer and my personal computer,” Attkisson said. “CBS then hired its own independent cyber security firm, which has been conducting a thorough forensic exam … they were able to rule out malware, phishing programs, that sort of thing…There were just signs of unusual happenings for many months, odd behavior like the computers just turning themselves on at night and then turning themselves back off again.”

How do you get a computer to switch on remotely? Oh well, let’s leave that. It is nice to see that the left and right agree on some things, like this appalling snooping. And we’ve heard voices usually highly supportive of Democrat proposals opposing some of the most ludicrous bills in recent times.

Well, some things never change, however. Celebrities, is there anything they don’t know?

Fox News has notably changed its tone since the election…McCain told me, “Rupert Murdoch is a strong supporter of immigration reform, and Roger Ailes is, too’…McCain said that he, Graham, Rubio, and others also have talked privately to top hosts at Fox, including Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Neil Cavuto, who are now relatively sympathetic to the Gang’s proposed bill…The unity of the Gang fractured at one point when Rubio, who often tried to find ways to set himself apart from the seven other senators, announced his support for an amendment requiring biometric tracking for visa holders which the Gang had agreed to oppose…

Rubio sided with the Chamber against the construction workers. ‘There are American workers who, for lack of a better term, can’t cut it,’ a Rubio aide told me. ‘There shouldn’t be a presumption that every American worker is a star performer. There are people who just can’t get it, can’t do it, don’t want to do it. And so you can’t obviously discuss that publicly.’ In the end, the wage issue was settled to the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s satisfaction, and the Building and Construction Trades union won a cap on the number of visas for foreign construction workers…

The senators’ immigration-policy staffers also attended the Gang’s meetings, and, over time, two stood out: Leon Fresco, a Schumer aide, and Enrique Gonzalez, a Rubio aide. Both are Cuban-American lawyers from Miami who know the intricacies of immigration law. On one occasion, Fresco interrupted Schumer and corrected him on a technical point. According to McCain, Schumer, who is known for being colloquial with his staff, retorted, ‘Shut up, Leon!’ McCain remarked that Schumer and Fresco seemed to have a relationship akin to the characters played by John Goodman and Steve Buscemi in the cult movie ‘The Big Lebowski’

VDH:

employers want a continuing influx of young workers who will undercut the wages of American citizens. That the bargaining power of other minorities, Latino- and African-American citizens especially, is undercut by illegal labor matters little. How odd that elite Republicans pander to Latino grandees to win perhaps 35 percent of the Latino vote; that the party garners no more than 5 percent of the much larger African-American vote is never discussed. In the bizarre logic of the Republican elite, you must cater to the Hispanic elite in order to siphon votes from the liberal Latino bloc, while the much more important black demographic is simply written off. Is there one Republican politician who is more worried about the plight of unemployed African-American citizens than he is about granting amnesty to foreign nationals who broke U.S. laws to come here?

As usual, Mickey Kaus is all over the insanity playing out before our eyes. Appalling creatures, these politicians, no? HT: IP

Telegraph:

total credit in Chinese financial system may have reached 221pc of GDP, jumping almost eightfold over the last decade. Companies will have to fork out $1 trillion in interest payments alone this year…“Liquidity conditions have tightened severely due to the crackdown on shadow banking activities,” said Zhiwei Zhang from Nomura. “We believe the series of policy tightening measures in the past three months have reached critical mass, such that deleveraging in the banking sector is happening. Liquidity tightening can be very damaging to a highly leveraged economy,” he said

Morgan Stanley: “Through 2007, creating a dollar of economic growth in China required just over a dollar of debt. Since then it has taken three dollars of debt to generate a dollar of growth. This is what you normally see in the late stages of a credit binge.” So is the spiking of interest rates in Shanghai.

In Syria, it was Russia which wrote the screenplay of the war, this time in order to serve its own strategy and to maintain a foothold for its naval fleet in the Mediterranean, specifically in the Tartus seaport. Tartus is the sole harbor in the Mediterranean for the Russian naval fleet to receive logistic supplies and maintenance. It receives Russian military ships coming from the Black Sea. The seaport, however, is small and can only receive four medium-size ships at a time. President Putin has clearly said that Tartus is vital for Russian security strategy

The NYT says that the US is now going to start sending weapons to the rebels. The US position has changed from two years ago when Assad was a reformer.

CBS News spokeswoman Sonya McNair: “A cyber security firm hired by CBS News has determined through forensic analysis that Sharyl Attkisson’s computer was accessed by an unauthorized, external, unknown party on multiple occasions late in 2012. Evidence suggests this party performed all access remotely using Attkisson’s accounts. While no malicious code was found, forensic analysis revealed an intruder had executed commands that appeared to involve search and exfiltration of data. This party also used sophisticated methods to remove all possible indications of unauthorized activity, and alter system times to cause further confusion.

This was earlier in 2012. This was later in 2012. Probably that Snowden fellow hacking her computer, right?

DOJ: “To our knowledge, the Justice Department has never compromised Ms. Attkisson’s computers, or otherwise sought any information from or concerning any telephone, computer, or other media device she may own or use.” Well that’s reassuring.

The CIA’s deputy director plans to resign and will be replaced by White House lawyer and agency outsider Avril D. Haines, Director John O. Brennan said Wednesday. Haines, who will succeed career officer Michael Morell on Aug. 9, has served for three years as President Obama’s deputy counsel in charge of national security issues and as legal adviser to the National Security Council. Although she has never worked inside the intelligence agency, “she knows more about covert action than anyone in the U.S. government outside of the CIA,” Brennan said

Given all we’ve learned about covert action over the last few weeks, that’s quite a mouthful.

HONG KONG, Aug. 6 — Pro-Beijing lawmakers approved legislation here today giving broad authority to the police to conduct covert surveillance, including wiretapping phones, bugging homes and offices and monitoring e-mail. The bill passed the 60-member Legislative Council on a vote of 32 to 0 soon after pro-democracy lawmakers walked out…the heads of security agencies are allowed to order less intrusive surveillance, like monitoring e-mail and phone calls through servers and telecommunications switches…The bill was particularly controversial because it does not prohibit covert surveillance of journalists and because it imposes only a few restrictions on covert surveillance of lawyers…Chinese agencies have tended to operate with considerable independence from the Hong Kong government and its institutions.

The Guardian on Snowden: On May 20, he boarded a flight to Hong Kong, where he has remained ever since. He chose the city because “they have a spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent”. Huh? HT: LGF

The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency for the last four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen and Dell…He has had “a very comfortable life” that included a salary of roughly $200,000, a girlfriend with whom he shared a home in Hawaii, a stable career, and a family he loves. “I’m willing to sacrifice all of that because I can’t in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building.” Three weeks ago, Snowden made final preparations that resulted in last week’s series of blockbuster news stories. At the NSA office in Hawaii where he was working, he copied the last set of documents he intended to disclose. He then advised his NSA supervisor that he needed to be away from work for “a couple of weeks” in order to receive treatment for epilepsy

He also said: “My predisposition is to seek asylum in a country with shared values. The nation that most encompasses this is Iceland.” Weird. Very weird.

The sweeping collection of data on private behavior is every bit as indiscriminate and flawed as the airport-screening system. In both, everybody is guilty until proven innocent. Because one terrorist hid a bomb in his shoe, we all must remove our shoes before flying. Because one terrorist hid a bomb in his underwear, we all are subject to X-ray- like screenings. The little old Lutheran lady from Peoria is as suspect as the Saudi Arabian student seeking a pilot’s license. Justice is supposed to be blind, not stupid. Meanwhile, the FBI had been warned about the jihadist turn by one of the brothers who bombed the Boston Marathon, but took its eye off him, perhaps out of an excessive concern for his rights. The Army psychiatrist charged with killing 13 soldiers at Ft. Hood had identified himself as a “Soldier of Allah,” but the brass didn’t bounce him because they were afraid of the diversity cops. The balance of rights and security is out of balance. On one hand, security officials let terrorists slip through the cracks because they fear charges of anti-Muslim bias. On the other, they secretly vacuum up the personal data and habits of 300 million people. The snooping is an outgrowth of 9/11, but “growth” is the operative word. An emergency response has been expanded and institutionalized, secretly and repeatedly. The warrantless wiretapping program the Bush administration started focused on catching terror suspects from abroad communicating with Americans. But, like mushrooms after the rain, the program spread exponentially to where all phone calls in America are subject. Another program extends the snooping to the Internet and credit-card use, though the details are sketchy. It is of little comfort that the seizure of this electronic trail is defended by both Republicans and Democrats

Noonan:

There is no way a government in the age of metadata, with the growing capacity to listen, trace, tap, track and read, will not eventually, and even in time systematically, use that power wrongly, maliciously, illegally and in areas for which the intelligence gathering was never intended. People are right to fear that the government’s surveillance power will be abused. It will be. There are many reasons for this, but the primary one is that humans are and will be in charge of it, and humans have shown throughout history a bit of a tendency to play every trick and bend and break laws. “If men were angels,” as James Madison wrote, limits, checks, balances and specifically protected rights would not be necessary. But they aren’t angels. Add to all this simple human mistakes, innocent and not, and misjudgments. And add to that sheer human craziness, partisan lust, political mischief of all sorts. In the Clinton White House there was a guy named Craig Livingstone who amused himself reading aloud the confidential FBI files of prominent Republicans. The files—hundreds of them—were improperly secured and disseminated. Imagine Craig Livingstone at the National Security Agency. Imagine Lois Lerner. So if we have and develop a massive surveillance state, it will be abused.

The failure to do sensible profiling has created a wholly unnecessary Leviathan with powers that surely are abused today. Digging up dirt on your opponents is the Chicago Way, after all. So who would have the means and motive to orchestrate the impressive roll-out of spy scandal after scandal? Could it be the former senior military and intelligence officers who were burnt by people they loathe? Or perhaps their former associates?

More food for thought. Imagine if you could dig up all the dirt, not just on your Republicans opponents, but also on the Democrats who would like to run in 2016. Add to that all the dirt you have on reporters and editors who will shape the coverage of candidates. The power to be a kingmaker and kingbreaker. Unprecedented.

(Mickey Kaus seems to think it’s an inside job on the part of the administration, with which we disagree, but we do appreciate his handy guide to that Rubio silliness.)

An elementary school will hold a toy gun exchange Saturday, offering students a book and a chance to win a bicycle if they turn in their play weapons. Strobridge Elementary Principal Charles Hill maintains that children who play with toy guns may not take real guns seriously. “Playing with toys guns, saying ‘I’m going to shoot you,’ desensitizes them, so as they get older, it’s easier for them to use a real gun,” Hill said. At Saturday’s event, called Strobridge Elementary Safety Day, a Hayward police officer will demonstrate bicycle and gun safety, and the Alameda County Fire Department is sending a rig and crew to talk about fire safety. Fingerprinting and photographing of children will be offered

We wonder if the principal was one of Zombie’s Keystone Kops.

“Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” committee member Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked Clapper during the March 12 hearing. In response, Clapper replied quickly: “No, sir.”

Move along now. Nothing to see here.

fracking has made U.S. oil production skyrocket 20% in just the last year, according to the Energy Department. That’s the biggest increase in 21 years, and it is expected to soar another 21% in the next five years. The growth has curbed the U.S. need for energy imports. America is expected to end its dependence on imported liquid fuels by 2025…

Venezuelan exports to the U.S. have fallen 11% in the first two months of 2013 compared to 2012…African nations sounded the sharpest warnings because they have been the first to see the impact of our fracking revolution on their exports, which fell 41% in 2012 from 2011. There are comparable figures elsewhere in OPEC

It was a mere two years ago that we first mentioned fracking, and look how great the progress has been in such a short time.

WaPo:

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time….

An internal presentation on the Silicon Valley operation, intended for senior analysts in the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate, described the new tool as the most prolific contributor to the President’s Daily Brief, which cited PRISM data in 1,477 articles last year. According to the briefing slides, obtained by The Washington Post, “NSA reporting increasingly relies on PRISM” as its leading source of raw material, accounting for nearly 1 in 7 intelligence reports.

That is a remarkable figure in an agency that measures annual intake in the trillions of communications. It is all the more striking because the NSA, whose lawful mission is foreign intelligence, is reaching deep inside the machinery of American companies that host hundreds of millions of American-held accounts on American soil.

The technology companies, which participate knowingly in PRISM operations, include most of the dominant global players of Silicon Valley. They are listed on a roster that bears their logos in order of entry into the program: “Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.” PalTalk, although much smaller, has hosted significant traffic during the Arab Spring and in the ongoing Syrian civil war. Dropbox , the cloud storage and synchronization service, is described as “coming soon.”

The Examiner notes some testimony before congress: “Eric Holder refused to answer when asked if the Justice Department is spying on members of Congress, citing the need for a classified conversation.” Wouldn’t a better answer be “no”? This is getting really weird, the speed with which a shoe drops nearly every day. We wouldn’t be surprised if some very senior and recently departed people from the military and intelligence worlds are actively orchestrating these disclosures, and not simply as payback for what was done to them.

The administration has now lost all credibility.

Quite a sentence for the NYT to write. (We note in passing that those unconcerned about these surveillance measures are making the crucial assumption that the information is being used for vital national security purposes and is not being used for domestic political purposes; why would anyone assume such a thing, given this crew’s track record?) HT: TW

HA! The NYT walked it back.

When I was a child in the 1960s, names like Corregidor and Iwo Jima were still sacred, and pronounced everywhere with respect. Writing in the 1960s about the battle of Midway, Samuel Eliot Morison stepped out of character to plead with his readers: “Threescore young aviators…met flaming death that day in reversing the verdict of battle. Think of them, reader, every Fourth of June. They and their comrades who survived changed the whole course of the Pacific War.” Today the Battle of Midway has become niche-market nostalgia material, and most children (and many adults) have never heard of it. Thus we honor “the greatest generation.” (And if I hear that phrase one more time I will surely puke.)…

The Japanese army saw captive soldiers as cowards, lower than lice. If we forget this we dishonor the thousands who were tortured and murdered, and put ourselves in danger of believing the soul-corroding lie that all cultures are equally bad or good. Some Americans nowadays seem to think America’s behavior during the war was worse than Japan’s — we did intern many loyal Americans of Japanese descent. That was unforgivable — and unspeakably trivial compared to Japan’s unique achievement, mass murder one atrocity at a time.

In “The Other Nuremberg,” Arnold Brackman cites (for instance) “the case of Lucas Doctolero, crucified, nails driven through hands, feet and skull”; “the case of a blind woman who was dragged from her home November 17, 1943, stripped naked, and hanged”; “five Filipinos thrown into a latrine and buried alive.” In the Japanese-occupied Philippines alone, at least 131,028 civilians and Allied prisoners of war were murdered. The Japanese committed crimes against Allied POWs and Asians that would be hard still, today, for a respectable newspaper even to describe. Mr. Brackman’s 1987 book must be read by everyone who cares about World War II and its veterans, or the human race.

The attitude of American intellectuals: Before Pearl Harbor but long after the character of Hitlerism was clear — after the Nuremberg laws, the Kristallnacht pogrom, the establishment of Dachau and the Gestapo — American intellectuals tended to be dead against the U.S. joining Britain’s war on Hitler.

Today’s students learn (sometimes) about right-wing isolationists like Charles Lindbergh and the America Firsters. They are less likely to read documents like this, which appeared in Partisan Review (the U.S. intelligentsia’s No. 1 favorite mag) in fall 1939, signed by John Dewey, William Carlos Williams, Meyer Schapiro and many more of the era’s leading lights. “The last war showed only too clearly that we can have no faith in imperialist crusades to bring freedom to any people. Our entry into the war, under the slogan of ‘Stop Hitler!’ would actually result in the immediate introduction of totalitarianism over here….The American masses can best help [the German people] by fighting at home to keep their own liberties.” The intelligentsia acted on its convictions. “By one means or another,” Diana Trilling later wrote of this period, “most of the intellectuals of our acquaintance evaded the draft.”

We link to SLA Marshall’s account of D-Day here. For more on the anti-war left in WWII there’s this. HT: PL

Q: Let me give you a thought experiment here, and it is the following: without addressing the Palestine-Israel problem, let’s say you were an advisor to the President of the United States, how would you respond to current events there? Would you advise him to put a structure in place to monitor that situation, lest if one party or another begins looking like they might be moving toward genocide?…

A: What we don’t need is some kind of early warning mechanism there, what we need is a willingness to put something on the line in helping the situation. Putting something on the line might mean alienating a domestic constituency of [chuckle] tremendous political and financial import; it may more crucially mean sacrificing — or investing, I think, more than sacrificing — billions of dollars, not in servicing Israel’s military, but actually investing in the new state of Palestine, in investing the billions of dollars it would probably take, also, to support what will have to be a mammoth protection force, not of the old…Rwanda kind, but a meaningful military presence. Because it seems to me at this stage (and this is true of actual genocides as well, and not just major human rights abuses, which were seen there), you have to go in as if you’re serious, you have to put something on the line.

Unfortunately, imposition of a solution on unwilling parties is dreadful. It’s a terrible thing to do, it’s fundamentally undemocratic. But, sadly, we don’t just have a democracy here either, we have a liberal democracy. There are certain sets of principles that guide our policy, or that are meant to, anyway. It’s essential that some set of principles becomes the benchmark, rather than a deference to people who are fundamentally politically destined to destroy the lives of their own people. And by that I mean what Tom Friedman has called “Sharafat”. I do think in that sense, both political leaders have been dreadfully irresponsible. And, unfortunately, it does require external intervention…. Any intervention is going to come under fierce criticism. But we have to think about lesser evils, especially when the human stakes are becoming ever more pronounced.

No doubt her views have evolved since her Hagelian episode.

“Wang Huning still believes in Marxism, and he still believes that the party makes the correct choices. He doesn’t believe China should become a multiparty system or have division of powers.” Mr. Wang’s influence derives in part from having daily access to the Chinese leader. He has accompanied three successive presidents on almost every domestic and foreign trip of the past decade…

As head of the Research Office for the past 11 years, Mr. Wang has overseen the “brain trust” for the top leadership, giving policy advice, commissioning research and writing speeches and official reports. “Wang Huning is the biggest internal brains of the CPC,” or Communist Party of China, said Zhu Xufeng, a professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing who has studied the role of think tanks in the Chinese system. As a speechwriter, Mr. Wang would be evaluated based on how much his speech drafts had to be revised, Mr. Zhu said. “If it’s rarely revised by leaders, it’s good — you’re familiar with the leader’s thoughts”…

Mr. Wang’s political break came in 1995, when he was summoned to join the Research Office by then President Jiang, who had gotten to know him as Shanghai party chief in the 1980s and embraced his neoconservative views after the Tiananmen crackdown. Since then, Mr. Wang has played a role in almost every major political initiative…Friends and analysts described Mr. Wang as a workaholic and insomniac who is discreet and almost obsessively low-profile. Several friends said he had largely cut off communication with them since taking charge of the Research Office

China bear Jim Chanos: “The entire Chinese political system is tilted to the current model. Truly changing it will bring on a serious economic contraction. It remains to be seen if Xi/Li have the political will to risk that outcome as a by-product of reform.” Bank loans to GDP are 134% which is unsustainable. We wonder what Mr. Wang is advising.

As has been said, market processes are superior to centralized processes because the amount of information needed for effective centralization is too vast, and too fast changing, for bureaucracies to keep up (assuming they even wanted to). The OrCam is but one of many experiments. Some will succeed and some will fail and some will morph into things unimagined right now. The logic of progress in the internet age dramatically disfavors centralization and regulation. Transparency, crowd-feedback and the like are the way to improve products and services. Pity they don’t seem to get that in Washington. HT: WRM

The president of Bowdoin played golf with the head of the Claremont Institute and therein lies a tale. There’s a video featuring the head of the NAS recounting what happened. You can read the Bowdoin project here. The Life of Julia is the rule, not the exception, on campus and if you grew up in the ethos of the 1950′s, it is not only gone, it is verboten.

Shale gas, only 2% of total U.S. natural gas production a decade ago, is now nearly 40%…1.7 million jobs are currently supported by this unconventional revolution in oil and gas…such drilling even in gas-rich Texas uses only 1% of the total water consumed in the state…a few weeks ago, the Potential Gas Committee, a nonprofit affiliated with the Colorado School of Mines and the authoritative source on the nation’s gas resources, raised its projection for technically recoverable natural gas supplies in the U.S. by 26%.

We asked why not an Apollo Program for developing shale gas, but it seems to be doing nicely, and the less government involvement the better of course. This is a very interesting time for American business, and would be more so if the clown carnival in Washington would shut down and leave town.

For example, it’s much easier for many small companies to become world class manufacturers than it was decades ago. It’s all happened very recently. Advanced CNC technology enables the production of complex monolithic structures without welding, etc., which lowers cost, increases reliability, and removes labor cost as a factor. New management techniques, such as implementing LEAN not only on the shop floor but in the back office, repeatedly and dramatically lowers costs and improves both efficiency and job satisfaction. Finally, advanced ERP technologies produce real-time, online visibility of the production process both for the producer and the customer. This reduces inventory and other costs, improves visibility across the entire supply chain, and solves problems like bottlenecks before they occur. Only large companies could do this 20 years ago, and they solved the problems with big SG&A. Today for the first time a small company can have the same world class capabilities as a large legacy manufacturer with a sustainably lower cost structure.

29 times more regulations were issued by agencies than there were laws passed by Congress.

Dodd-Frank is 2300 pages of mostly rubbish, and we wouldn’t be surprised if there are 29 regulations for each page of the law. It’s no accident that it takes 10x more time to build some skyscrapers today than it did a century ago.

NJ:

more than 75 countries have remote piloted aircraft. More than 50 nations are building a total of nearly a thousand types. At its last display at a trade show in Beijing, China showed off 25 different unmanned aerial vehicles.

The MQ-9, pictured above, is a serious aircraft. New versions will have 1K thrust engines, 88 foot wings, 12,000 pounds GTOW, and up to 42 hours of non-stop ISR flying. They can carry 14 Hellfire missiles or 4 of those plus two 500LB laser guided bombs. The technology is advancing very quickly in this arena, and soon there will be thousands of them flying globally. The current US order book is less than 500, but that will no doubt increase substantially. Oddly enough, we don’t recall ever hearing of the company that makes these aircraft before now. From the Google car to this, a brave new world.

Although acting commissioner Steven Miller apologized for the “horrible customer service” conservative taxpayers had gotten, a gentleman by the name of Malik Obama received impeccable, express service when he took the precaution of mailing in his nonprofit application from N’giya, Kenya, rather than notoriously slower mail processing centers such as Phoenix and Dallas. Malik, the brother of President Obama, runs the Barack H. Obama Foundation, named for the president’s father. On May 30, 2011, they applied for tax-exempt status, and had their approval signed less than a month later by Lois Lerner herself, and conveniently backdated by Lois to cover the two-and-a-half years the enterprising Malik had already been raking in “tax-deductible” donations from Americans. The Washington address of the Barack H. Obama Foundation appears to be bogus, and it’s not clear whether the funds are being used back in Kenya for anything other than supporting the famously lavish lifestyle of Malik and his 12 wives. Given that the IRS is not shy about asking American conservatives for Facebook posts and lists of who attends their meetings, Ms. Lerner surely would have been within her rights to ask Malik Obama about the “exclusive” photographs currently displayed on the Barack H. Obama Foundation website of a recent meeting in Sudan, one of only four countries the U.S. government designates as a “terrorist state,” and the foundation’s apparently extensive association with the Sudanese president and blood-soaked genocidal war criminal Omar al-Bashir. Given that the IRS likes to ask conservative taxpayers whether their friends and relatives are planning on running for office, Ms. Lerner might like to ask Malik Obama when his friend President Bashir is planning on leaving office. After another quarter-million corpses? Whatever. Let’s accept that, when U.S. taxpayers wind up giving tax breaks to an entity linked to the butchers of Darfur, it’s pure coincidence that the racket turns out to be run by the president’s brother. Let’s accept that Malik Obama just got lucky that his letter landed on the desk of Lois Lerner, and that, when she backdated his application for two-and-a-half years, she’d momentarily forgotten that it’s illegal for her to backdate it more than two-and-a-quarter years. Indeed, let’s take the president at his word, that the existence of this shadowy IRS entity working deep within the even shadowier U.S. Treasury planted in deep cover within the shadowiest conspiracy of them all, this murky hitherto unknown organization called “the Executive Branch,” that all this was news to him.

It’s bad for Mr. Steyn to be writing such nasty things. He’d better watch out.

A kindergartner who brought a cowboy-style cap gun onto his Calvert County school bus was suspended for 10 days after showing a friend the orange-tipped toy, which he had tucked inside his backpack on his way to school, according to his family and a lawyer. The child was questioned for more than two hours before his mother was called, she said, adding that he uncharacteristically wet his pants during the episode. The boy is 5 — “all bugs and frogs and cowboys,” his mother said…the boy’s friend had brought a water gun on the bus a day earlier. On Wednesday, unbeknown to his parents, the boy stowed his cap gun — from Frontier Town near Ocean City — inside his backpack as he left for school…

children in first and second grade have been disciplined for pointing their fingers like guns and for chewing a Pop-Tart-like pastry into the shape of a gun. In Pennsylvania, a 5-year-old was suspended for talking about shooting a Hello Kitty bubble gun…Kim Roof, executive director of administration for Calvert schools, said she could not comment on the case but pointed out that such incidents are fully reviewed at disciplinary conferences to determine the most appropriate outcome.

The country is sick. The highest officials in the land lie like rugs and the media (mostly) don’t care. Meanwhile, 5 year olds are persecuted for living the way we all lived half a century ago. Pathetic.

And here we are again today. The media and the police in England have joined forces to suppress free speech in the wake of the horrific slaughter of that soldier the other day. We suppose they’re afraid of the soccer hooligans acting up, though evidence for that is scarce. So they’re going after tweets of all things. This can’t end well.

Why stop with free speech? The logic of this appeasement ends in burning books and shuttering museums. Time to get a head start.

Mieke Crane is the mother of the six-year-old kindergarten student who brought the gun on the bus…The school sent home a letter to parents of students who take the bus explaining what happened. It stressed no gun was on the bus and there was never any danger. The letter also has photo of the toy showing it’s actual size, which is slightly larger than a quarter.

California:

Former Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa P. Jackson will become Apple’s top environmental officer…After coming under fire from environmental groups such Greenpeace for powering its data centers with fossil fuel energy, the company vowed to switch over to renewable sources. In March it announced that all of its data centers now run on solar, wind or geothermal energy.

More: “A North Carolina couple traveled to Hawaii in order to bring their baby into the world in a dolphin-assisted birth.” More: “With regard to potential prosecution of the press for the disclosure of material, that is not something I’ve ever been involved in, heard of, or would think would be wise policy.” More. Sigh.

“China is pulling ahead on the environment,” was the title of a 2009 column in Forbes. “China is pushing ahead on renewable technologies with the fervor of a new space race,” Peter Ford reported in the Christian Science Monitor the same year. “Green Giant” was the title of a 7,000-word thumb-sucker by Evan Osnos in the New Yorker, which spelled out the scale of the Chinese government’s investment in green tech. And there was this: “Being in China right now,” wrote Tom Friedman of the New York Times in January 2010, “I am more convinced than ever that when historians look back at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, they will say that the most important thing to happen was not the Great Recession, but China’s Green Leap Forward. The Beijing leadership understands that the E.T. — Energy Technology — revolution is both a necessity and an opportunity, and they do not intend to miss it”…

The heady optimism of four years ago has now given way to more sober views, thanks to the accretion of facts. Facts like 16,000 dead pigs floating down Shanghai’s Whampoa river in March. Or the worst air pollution on record in Beijing in January, with levels of tiny particulate matter reaching levels 25 times higher than the standard in the U.S. Or 80% of the East China Sea lost to fishing because of the pollution, according to Elizabeth Economy of the Council on Foreign Relations. Or 1.2 million premature deaths due to air pollution

That Friedman bit is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? Try finding some safe drinking water in the countryside in China. Finally, in a nasty bit of irony, the wind turbines in the West are killing people in China.

We, the faculty of the Dept. of Atmospheric Sciences of Texas A&M, agree with the recent reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that: It is virtually certain that the climate is warming, and that it has warmed by about 0.7 deg. C over the last 100 years. It is very likely that humans are responsible for most of the recent warming. If we do nothing to reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases, future warming will likely be at least two degrees Celsius over the next century. Such a climate change brings with it a risk of serious adverse impacts on our environment and society.

AT has a nice piece on this subject. Air is 7800 parts nitrogen, 2000 parts oxygen, 900 parts argon and 4 teeny-weeny parts CO2, up from 3 teeny-weeny parts some years ago. Another hare brained religion that shows no sign of dying soon.

while the Stockholm riots keep spreading and intensifying, Swedish police have adopted a tactic of non-interference. ”Our ambition is really to do as little as possible,” Stockholm Chief of Police Mats Löfving explained to the Swedish newspaper Expressen on Tuesday. “We go to the crime scenes, but when we get there we stand and wait,” elaborated Lars Byström, the media relations officer of the Stockholm Police Department. ”If we see a burning car, we let it burn if there is no risk of the fire spreading to other cars or buildings nearby. By doing so we minimize the risk of having rocks thrown at us.” Swedish parking laws, however, continue to be rigidly enforced

It’s all senseless violence, don’t you know? Steyn has some additional observations on how very strange the West has become — not that any of this is new; the “youths” have been rioting for years and no one seems to know why

Caution in reporting leaks as facts is warranted. Discrediting certain high profile “leaks” and leakers would be an outstanding strategy for those under siege in order to spread the idea that “leaks” equal falsehoods. We’ll see.

“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.

the administration has gone overboard in its zeal to find and muzzle insiders. The Associated Press revealed last week that the government had secretly seized two months’ worth of records for telephones used by the agency’s staff, partly to determine the source of a leak about a report involving a foiled terrorist plot in Yemen…

administration officials often talk about the balance between protecting secrets and protecting the constitutional rights of a free press. Accusing a reporter of being a “co-conspirator,” on top of other zealous and secretive investigations, shows a heavy tilt toward secrecy and insufficient concern about a free press.

“Muzzle” is a strong word, but the tone is moderate particularly in the concluding paragraph. Perhaps the wayward will return to the fold. We guess they’ve gotten past the schoolyard crush so evident on 1/20/09 when they went all gooey over things like “transparency” and how these new guys were so different and so much better than what came before.

Still, they can’t seem to confront the real story yet (at least publicly), that as the Sharyl Attkisson story appears to indicate, all this spying is not so much about national security as about getting dirt on reporters.

“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

Burke violated Department policy when he provided the Dodson memorandum to Fox News reporter Levine without Department approval, and that his explanations for why he did not believe his actions were improper were not credible. We believe this misconduct to be particularly egregious because of Burke’s apparent effort to undermine the credibility of Dodson’s significant public disclosures about the failures in Operation Fast and Furious. We further believe that the seriousness of Burke’s actions are aggravated by the fact that they were taken within days after he told Deputy Attorney General Cole that he took responsibility for his office’s earlier unauthorized disclosure of a document to The New York Times, and after Cole put him on notice that such disclosures should not occur. Burke also knew at the time of his disclosure of the Dodson memorandum that he was under investigation by OPR for his conduct in connection with the earlier disclosure to The New York Times. As a high-level Department official, Burke knew his obligations to abide by Department policies and his duty to follow the instructions of the Deputy Attorney General, who was Burke’s immediate supervisor. We found Burke’s conduct in disclosing the Dodson memorandum to be inappropriate for a Department employee and wholly unbefitting a U.S. Attorney. We are referring to OPR our finding that Burke violated Department policy in disclosing the Dodson memorandum to a member of the media for a determination of whether Burke’s conduct violated the Rules of Professional Conduct for the state bars in which Burke is a member.

Burke was acting as a fixer, and he had many qualifications for that role. Sharyl Attkisson provides the appalling context. HT: BB

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.

When the Justice Department began investigating possible leaks of classified information about North Korea in 2009, investigators did more than obtain telephone records of a working journalist suspected of receiving the secret material. They used security badge access records to track the reporter’s comings and goings from the State Department, according to a newly obtained court affidavit. They traced the timing of his calls with a State Department security adviser suspected of sharing the classified report. They obtained a search warrant for the reporter’s personal e-mails.

The case of Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, the government adviser, and James Rosen, the chief Washington correspondent for Fox News, bears striking similarities to a sweeping leaks investigation disclosed last week in which federal investigators obtained records over two months of more than 20 telephone lines assigned to the Associated Press. At a time when President Obama’s administration is under renewed scrutiny for an unprecedented number of leak investigations, the Kim case provides a rare glimpse into the inner workings of one such probe. Court documents in the Kim case reveal how deeply investigators explored the private communications of a working journalist — and raise the question of how often journalists have been investigated as closely as Rosen was in 2010.

The interesting point about this piece is that it’s in the Washington Post. Perhaps there are parties at the Post who wondered: if you can investigate scores of reporters secretly given a plausible national security argument, how many times has this gone on, and was it ever done to us? Having dirt on people is how this crowd got to the top. How naive of reporters to think they were exempt. HT: AT

We also note that the Post is paying close attention to the Lois Lerner / Celia Roady matter. Hmmm…

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.

Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet.

Andrew McCarthy describes a phone call that took place at 10pm. It wasn’t a bad plan for the two top dogs to lump Benghazi in with Egypt even though they knew it wan’t true. The faithful immediately bought the story and it worked.

“they have a saying in Chicago: ‘Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action’.”

Chicago, eh?

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.

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?

A couple of other points. The AP story is fishy from a variety of perspectives, including that it focuses on phone calls but makes no mention of other electronic communications. What about all the text messages and emails, which is the way that much if not most of journalistic communication is done today? Surely if the government wanted blanket information it would have gotten all that traffic as well. Details dribble out, in scandal after scandal, from Fast and Furious to Benghazi and this. And the final point: what are the scandals that we still don’t know about?

One shocking thing we learned in reading the Politico piece is that Rhodes is or was the senior speechwriter. The other speechwriter, Jon Favreau, is four years younger and started writing for the Chicago team when he was 24 or so. So when the administration gets its history wrong on everything from D-Day to the Berlin Airlift, there’s a reason. The facts are coming from young ignoramuses who don’t know much American history.

The American people ought to be ashamed of themselves for allowing themselves to be fooled by two dolts in dunce caps. Far worse than that, however, is that the media celebrate their work by deifying the fellow who delivers the rubbish they peddle. Imagine: a country of 300 million taken in by two young fools and a guy with a mellifluous voice.

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.

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

The New Yorker:

the mere existence of the edits — whatever the motivation for them — seriously undermines the White House’s credibility on this issue. This past November (after Election Day), White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters that “The White House and the State Department have made clear that the single adjustment that was made to those talking points by either of those two institutions were changing the word ‘consulate’ to ‘diplomatic facility’ because ‘consulate’ was inaccurate.”

Remarkably, Carney is sticking with that line even now. In his regular press briefing on Friday afternoon (a briefing that was delayed several times, presumably in part so the White House could get its spin in order, but also so that it could hold a secretive pre-briefing briefing with select members of the White House press corps), he said:

The only edit made by the White House or the State Department to those talking points generated by the C.I.A. was a change from referring to the facility that was attacked in Benghazi from “consulate,” because it was not a consulate, to “diplomatic post”… it was a matter of non-substantive factual correction. But there was a process leading up to that that involved inputs from a lot of agencies, as is always the case in a situation like this and is always appropriate.

This is an incredible thing for Carney to be saying. He’s playing semantic games, telling a roomful of journalists that the definition of editing we’ve all been using is wrong

There are a number of takeaways from this. First, the MSM apparently really believed their guy when he spoke rubbish and grandiosity lo these many years. They believed their guy even though most every word that came out of his mouth was to be measured in terms of its political usefulness, not by its truth. That accounts for the tone of surprise and incredulity in the New Yorker piece.

Second, the White House is equally unprepared and surprised. As we know from the days of Richard Nixon and Ron Ziegler, the press secretary’s orders come straight from the top. So when Carney looks like a buffoon telling lies that are long past their sell-by date, it’s because there’s confusion, disorganization and maybe even a little panic at the top. And why wouldn’t there be? Here was this Chicago Way politician with a nice voice getting treated as a god. Heaven on earth.

The MSM is now coming to grips with the fact that, despite it was Republicans saying so, there actually was a cover-up and they ignored it because they wrote it off as partisan politics. Oops! Whether the media get to the central issue is another matter. Contrary to the received wisdom in these matters, the cover-up is not always worse than the crime. In Ron Ziegler’s “third-rate burglary” that was true. In Benghazi, the opposite is the case. The crime in Benghazi was not taking whatever diplomatic and specifically military actions that might have saved four lives. Whether or not the efforts would have been successful is not the issue; orders to “stand down” are the issue. We know where the order came from. Whether the media are willing to go there is another thing entirely.

Obama and Hillary Clinton are on trial — not yet before a court, but in the minds of thoughtful people everywhere. It appears (given the limited evidence we have so far) that they were grossly negligent before Benghazi, criminally incompetent that night of the attack, and then that they aided and abetted a conspiracy to lie about the murders—all for the obvious political reasons and because Obama and Clinton (and nearly all their leftist friends) believe that Americans are stone-stupid. But the real trial deals with other suspects.

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?

Bonus fun: the administration is doing other things to copy Nixon’s paranoid and perhaps criminal behavior. And finally, one of the worst aspects of this sordid affair is that it undid the US’s relationship with the moderate President Magariaf of Libya. We threw it all away, and for what?