Or, as George Will put it, how stupid do they think we are? It’s not just some functionary in Cincinnati. But then, President Obama has been cracking jokes about the IRS targeting his opponents for a long time.
Oh – I suppose I should say that I’m opposed to the IRS targeting ANY group on political grounds. Is that a Rightist position? Or do we all agree on that one? That is to say, all of us outside the bureaucracy?
And if not. Oh, dear.
Even better – with an MFA! You can become Deputy National Security Advisor - and help write the fiction about what happened in Benghazi.
What’s wrong about what the IRS has been doing? Here’s Professor Ann Althouse, in answer to an attempt to mitigate the scandal:
The unequal, politically skewed enforcement of a law is a far more serious problem than the level of harshness of a neutrally enforced law. We can disagree about what the tax laws should be and how strictly or harshly they should be enforced, but everyone knows it is fundamentally wrong to vary the degree of enforcement, selecting victims by their politics. If government cannot be trusted to avoid that fundamental wrong, it cannot be trusted with any power at all. It would be better to wipe the tax code clean and rebuild it without any complicated corners where government officials — great or small — have a place to do their dirty work.
The president undermines that chance when he struggles through a news conference with no apparent theme or overarching purpose other than to catalog his grievances and complain about the lack of cooperation from the other side.
This may well have been the opposite impression from what the president and his people hoped to convey this week. But it happened anyway. Well into his fifth year in the White House, this president still seems ill at ease in the news conference format. He is driven by the energy and conflict of the encounter, rather than the other way around.
This lack of mastery stands in striking contrast to his renown for holding throngs in thrall, at home and abroad. Even in the informality of a Washington dinner (such as the White House Correspondents’ Association gala last weekend), Obama is a gifted presenter, holding forth with the timing and wit of a professional comedian and then turning reflective and serious. Addressing an audience, he is nearly always on.
But in the unscripted free fall of an on-camera news conference, that mastery is notably missing. Early in his first term, the president gave long, professorial answers to every question. When he and his inner circle were dismayed by the distractions and tangential stories that came from these sessions, they came to rely more on one-on-one interviews. Those were more productive from the president’s point of view, but they did not address the underlying fault.
via Instapundit.
I don’t care what the issue is – every time an idiot says something like “Senators representing 75% of the population voted in favor of Bill X, but the senators representing 25% of the population blocked it,” I want to reach for an 8th grade civics textbook and belabor the commentator about the head and shoulders. Repeat after me – the House is Representative – the Senate is the brake on mob rule. All praise to the Founders!
Law should be slow and deliberate – exactly the opposite, say, of Andrew Cuomo’s recent gun extravaganza, passed in the first quarter hour of a new session of the New York State Assembly and already suspended even before the New York courts get a chance to strike it down.
Some history for the Cyprus kind of bank levy, mainly links, from Prof. Cowen.
A commenter at Prof Althouse’s in re:
Back in 2008, David Barron and Martin Lederman had published — in the Harvard Law Review — a “definitive denunciation” of President Bush’s approach to war powers. Now, they were writing a secret memo in support of Obama’s power….
They weren’t anti-war, they were anti-Republican.
The generation of unintended consequences strikes again – they’re going to want to sell off their McMansions – but who wants to buy them?
According to data from theAmerican Housing Survey, from 1989 and 2009, 80 percent of new homes built in that era were detached single-family homes. A third of them were larger than 2,500 square feet. And most startling – “I checked my numbers over and over again,” a bemused Nelson says – 40 percent were built on lots of half an acre to 10 acres in size. Now, he says, 74 percent of new housing demand will come from the people who bought these homes, now empty-nesters, wanting to downsize.
A vast majority of today’s households with children still want such houses, Nelson says. But about a quarter of them want something else, like condos and urban townhouses. That demand “used to be almost zero percent, and if it’s now 25 percent,” Nelson says, “that’s a small share of the market but a huge shift in the market.” And this is half of the reason why many baby boomers may not find buyers for their homes. “Even if the numbers matched,” Nelson says, “the preferences don’t.”
via Prof Reynolds.
Remember when one of the marketing points for Obama was that he was an adjunct professor of constitutional law?
That was then. This is now. I’d wish I was a more rude person so I could ask some colleagues to explain their position now.
Luckily, I’m on leave.
I guess that’s worth the Nobel Peace Prize.
The Department of Justice has developed a white paper outlining the specific circumstances under which the United States can conduct a lethal drone strike against an American citizen, a copy of which was obtained Monday by NBC News.
The paper provides the first detailed look at the criteria the Obama administration uses to judge if it can legally kill American citizens traveling abroad without the benefit of due process.
Further: Here’s a long version from the left (Glen Greenwald). Throwaway line: ‘The NYT quoted a Bush intelligence official as saying “he did not know of any American who was approved for targeted killing under the former president”.’ Greenwald, who sure hated W, doesn’t challenge the assertion. Maybe killing Americans abroad isn’t any worse than killing foreigners – but inside the legal context it sure looks pretty bad.
What always gets me when I read these stories is reading about Awlaki’s 16 year old (American citizen) son. Not collateral damage with his father – he got a drone of his own.
Do we have politicians like this any more? Watch the whole interview! 20 minutes or so, but well worth-while.
You know, in a funny way Chuck Hagel teaching at Georgetown for 3 years (and from the link it’s not clear whether he’s been full time, distinguished professorship or not) qualifies him to be Secretary of Education about the same way being a sergeant in Vietnam qualifies him for Secretary of Defense. From what one reads today, he’d better not be relying on his confirmation hearing performance.
There are fewer blank spots on the world map now. Not that they’ve filled everything in . . . but they’re getting there!
One of the few areas where U.S. foreign relations have not deteriorated seems to be North Korea, whose U.S. relations remain as terrible as they were in the Bush and Clinton eras.
Last June, a Pew Research Center study of global attitudes toward the U.S. found that they have worsened in pretty much every country except Japan. Approval of the Obama administration’s polices have dropped by double-digit margins everywhere in the world since 2009.
It’s all well and good for chummy senators to congratulate Secretary Clinton, their former colleague, on her accomplishments. It’s a lot harder to name any of them, let alone enough good ones to outweigh the bad.
Another visitor reports - Sophie Schmidt, daughter of Google’s Eric Schmidt. Great photos, though none posted of my favorite building in Pyongyang, the 105 story Ryugyong Hotel.