How bad have the past several days been for the Obama Administration? This bad (NB: some of the language in this clip is not CoC compliant, although most of it is bleeped out):

Below, a statement just posted on the Facebook page of Rev. Charles Chaput, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Philadelphia:

The trial of Kermit Gosnell is over. His convictions will surprise very few. But nothing can bring back the innocent children he killed, or make up for the vulnerable women he exploited. We should keep the repugnance of his clinic conditions sharp in our memories, and we should remember the media's inadequacy in covering his case, because Kermit Gosnell is not an exception. Others just like him run abortion mills throughout our country. 
We need to stop cloaking the ugliness of abortion with misnomers like "proper medical coverage" or "choice." It's violence of the most intimate sort, and it needs to end.

To those of us who have grown all but inured to hearing Catholic bishops produce sententious lectures on political and economic matters about which they know, basically, nothing--a bigger welfare state, please, and, while you're at it, raise that minimum wage again, and again--having a bishop take an unambiguous stand on a matter that truly falls within his purview as a bishop--that is, to address matter of fundamental matter of morality, no matter how unstylish it might prove in the news rooms of the mainstream media or in the faculty lounges of major universities--is more than bracing.  

Here is another guy that you should know. Gabe Schoenfeld is a journalist. He worked for Commentary for a good long time, writing excellent pieces, and in recent years he has been doing other things -- among them working as a senior adviser for the Romney campaign.

Not so long ago, in a farewell visit to CPAC, Governor Romney suggested that Republicans study his campaign with an eye to sorting out the mistakes he made. It typifies the man's decency and humility that he would issue such a call.

The people who ran that losing campaign are less happy at the prospect that their "dirty laundry" might be aired in public -- which is precisely what Gabe has done, to their chagrin, in his new book  A Bad Day on the Romney Campaign: An Insider’s Account. At NRO Online, he has recently defended his endeavor against the attacks being leveled at him in public and private by those who managed the campaign.  You ought to take a look at the article and the book.

Even though I technically live inside the beltway, I like to keep an outside-the-beltway perspective. This week has made that a tad difficult. Scandals are breaking so quickly and so big that it's hard to make sense of everything. The entire town seems to be imploding.

A local journalist tweeted today:

pissing off the tea party, natsec hawks, the press AND russia in a week's time is a Gob Bluth level of difficulty feat.

So many scandals here. For instance, not only is the IRS targeting groups for political reasons a big deal, but so is the fact that the media ignored or dismissed the story when conservative groups told them about it over the past few years. So is the fact that one media outfit actually took documents from the IRS and thought the big story wasn't that the IRS was wrongly sharing confidential information but, instead, the information that was in the documents! And so is the fact that the IRS targeted Jewish groups! And so is the fact that the IRS leaked confidential information of pro-marriage groups to liberal media outlets. And that's just what we know now.

On the journalist surveillance scandal, it would actually be a big deal if one reporter was spied on by the government. But 100? Who thought that was OK? Is it true that Eric Holder himself had to sign off on the action?

Never mind that HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was caught pressuring the groups she regulates for money or that, as I read this morning, the EPA decided to get in on the action of disparate treatment for disparate political views.

And don't mention that the CIA and the State Department and the White House are all spinning wildly different stories about the 9/11/2012 terrorist attack in Libya. (Make sure you check out the Washington Post getting around to saying Obama didn't say it was a terrorist attack despite his claims to have done so. Let's make sure Candy Crowley and her cheering press corps colleagues read it, too.)

Is there anything new you could learn this week that would surprise you?

But my real question is how you're processing all this information. Do people outside the beltway care about any of these scandals? Which ones? And what do you think are the key questions to have answered in the days, weeks and months to come? Are you ranking the scandals in order of importance? What's your ranking?

Angelina Jolie -- it seems silly to identify her as "the actress and director" since she's probably one of the most well-known women on the planet -- has undergone a double mastectomy as a preventive measure to avoid breast cancer. Her mother died of the disease at age 56. Jolie, 38, inherited a genetic predisposition -- a faulty gene called BRCA1 -- that gave her an 87% chance of contracting breast cancer herself. Now that Jolie has had the procedure, the odds of her developing breast cancer have dropped to almost nothing. She is still at risk of developing ovarian cancer, but elected to deal with the higher-risk and more complex breast cancer threat first.

In an effort to publicize the possibility of genetic testing and preventive treatment, the mother of six has written about her choice on the op-ed page of today's New York Times:

Cancer is still a word that strikes fear into people’s hearts, producing a deep sense of powerlessness. But today it is possible to find out through a blood test whether you are highly susceptible to breast and ovarian cancer, and then take action...

I wanted to write this to tell other women that the decision to have a mastectomy was not easy. But it is one I am very happy that I made. My chances of developing breast cancer have dropped from 87 percent to under 5 percent. I can tell my children that they don’t need to fear they will lose me to breast cancer.

It is reassuring that they see nothing that makes them uncomfortable. They can see my small scars and that’s it. Everything else is just Mommy, the same as she always was. And they know that I love them and will do anything to be with them as long as I can...

For any woman reading this, I hope it helps you to know you have options. I want to encourage every woman, especially if you have a family history of breast or ovarian cancer, to seek out the information and medical experts who can help you through this aspect of your life, and to make your own informed choices.

...I choose not to keep my story private because there are many women who do not know that they might be living under the shadow of cancer. It is my hope that they, too, will be able to get gene tested, and that if they have a high risk they, too, will know that they have strong options.

Life comes with many challenges. The ones that should not scare us are the ones we can take on and take control of.

Jolie is careful to make the procedure seem as non-threatening as possible, but this can't have been easy to contemplate, let alone to experience. She's done a commendable thing by going public about it (and parenthetically, I'm astounded that no news of it leaked out during the three months that she was going through surgeries). I hope she has a long and happy life.

Ricochetti, have you had genetic testing? In a case like this one, where the information can be acted upon to maintain health and lengthen life, it seems a no-brainer. But a genetic profile can reveal fates that cannot be avoided. Would you want to know what your genes have in store?

So the American Civil Liberties Union, concerned about the US government's alleged propensity to surveil the email of American citizens without a warrant, filed a request with the Justice Department under the Freedom of Information Act for more information. 

This is what it got: a memorandum entitled “Guidance for the Minimization of Text Messages over Dual-Function Cellular Telephones” that is completely blacked out. All fifteen pages of it.

Mr. President, I don't think "transparent" means what you think it means.

Let's take a breath and take stock, shall we? We have the IRS acting like the KGB, singling out groups and people for harassment on the basis of political philosophy. We have efforts to learn about the deaths of four Americans under attack overseas, and the subsequent lies that our government told us about that attack, labeled as a "sideshow" and a political circus by the Commander-in-Chief. We have the federal government secretly gathering months of phone records of Associated Press editors and reporters in what AP's management has termed a, "massive and unprecedented intrusion." Oh yes, and abortionist Kermit Gosnell has just been convicted on three counts of murder for practices that the President couldn't bring himself to condemn. As David Burge observed on Twitter, "MSNBC must be having a hard time deciding which story to ignore first."

But here, let me help. Let's start by reporting on the guy at the top, shall we? After all, in almost any organization, large or small, it is the character of the person at the top that informs and shapes the character of the organization itself. Tonight, the President who only a week ago advised us to reject those who, "…incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some sinister entity that's at the root of all our problems," has taken Air Force One out for yet another spin at your expense.

While the media feels like a battered spouse, abused by the one they love; as Americans try to understand how the same administration that warns them against profiling terrorists can itself profile American citizens on the basis of words like "patriot," or "tea party" and then uses the instrumentalities of government to harass them; while we all try to resolve a whopping encroachment on the press with the serene assurances from people on both sides of the aisle that a registry of firearm owners would surely never be abused; the man whose ideology endorsed and informed these outrages is attending fund raisers in New York City. Sorry, but you missed the first one where, for somewhere between $16,500 to $20,000 per ticket, you could have basked languidly in the home of Harvey and Georgina Weinstein, along with Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel, in the company of Barack Obama, champion of the little guy -- unless of course that little guy happens to be serving at a foreign outpost under attack, or works for the Associated Press, or runs afoul of the IRS by endorsing decidedly un-faddish concepts of limited government. But there were several fundraisers tonight, so if you hurry ...

"They'll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner," the President said in Ohio last week, admonishing the audience that, "You should reject those voices." Leave aside for the moment that those voices include George Washington (who used to be called the Father of Our Country, but who in today's enlightened morass of speech codes, would be called the Parent 1 of Our Country), who famously said, "Government is not reason, it is not eloquence. It is force, and like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master." For that matter, put aside James Madison's warning that, "The people of the U.S. owe their independence and liberty, to the wisdom of descrying in the minute tax of 3 pence on tea, the magnitude of the evil comprised in the precedent. Let them exert the same wisdom, in watching against every evil lurking under plausible disguises, and growing up from small beginnings."  

Leave aside the accumulated wisdom of human experience, like all the good little liberals do, and in the name of hope and change, pretend history began with you and then read the headlines. It would seem that not enough of us watched for the mischief that resided in the small beginnings. And those who did were derided by the Piers Morgans of the world as fanatics who, inexplicably, didn't trust their government. We've now gone from "small beginnings" to huge scandals that pour forth from the beltway as if from a national sewer, and yet we are expected to accept as a given that the same IRS that harassed Americans for disagreeing with their government will, with over 16,000 additional agents, even-handedly administer and enforce the clumsy and lumbering monstrosity of national healthcare. On what grounds are we to accept this? On the word of Barack Obama, who lectures us to disregard the wisdom of the Founders in favor of the dishonest and heavy-handed machinations of his administration?

It's time for the cheerleaders of the Obama presidency to take stock. Your government is not your friend. It is not your partner, except insofar as it has its hands in your pocket. It's time to take the blinders off. Another voice the President would prefer us to reject would be that of Adam Smith, who warned that:

The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, would ... assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.

The Justice Department's seizure of the AP's phone records shows that this administration cares far more about power than political and civil liberty.  It has intruded on the freedom of the press in ways that the allegedly power-hungry Bush Administration would never have dreamed.

When the Bush administration was wracked with the leaks of classified information about its counter-terrorism policies, most notably its interrogation and electronic surveillance programs, Democrats in Congress happily took advantage of the information. Nary a peep was heard about protecting national security and preventing the media from publishing classified information.

But now President Obama has to live in the leak-happy world that he and his colleagues created to undermine the last administration. And they don't like it. Unlike the Bush administration, however, they are willing to go to lengths that threaten the freedom of the press to stop it -- this administration has conducted far more investigations and prosecutions for leaking than its predecessors. And, for the most part, this administration has gotten away with it from the press, which has given them a pass on civil liberties compared to how they treated Republicans.

I deplore the Obama administration's assault on freedom of the press. But I have no sympathy for the AP or the mainstream media, because this is how you get treated when you are in a politician's pocket. If the AP's editors and reporters and their colleagues at other newspapers had been more adversarial toward this President, as they were with President Bush, they would been treated with far more respect. The AP should wish for a return of the days of a Republican administration, which considered the press a worthy adversary, rather than a servant to be mistreated at will.

Until last week's testimony on Capitol Hill, the press gave President Obama a pretty wide berth on the Benghazi story. Like the Gosnell trial, the recent uptick in coverage has been driven more by shame than alacrity.

The story about the IRS harassing conservative 501(c)(4)s? That seems to have bothered them a little bit more. Do something explicitly Nixonian and you'll activate that vestigial instinct in journalists that reminds them that they're actually supposed to hold power accountable.

Want to push the press corps right over the edge? This might do it. From the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative's top executive called a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into how news organizations gather the news.

The records obtained by the Justice Department listed incoming and outgoing calls, and the duration of each call, for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and the main number for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP.

In all, the government seized those records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown but more than 100 journalists work in the offices whose phone records were targeted on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.

In a letter of protest sent to Attorney General Eric Holder on Monday, AP President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt said the government sought and obtained information far beyond anything that could be justified by any specific investigation. He demanded the return of the phone records and destruction of all copies.

The DOJ is being tight-lipped, but it looks as if this is part of an investigation into the leaking of classified information. And it looks like the line of authority would have to go straight back to the Attorney General:

... The government would not say why it sought the records. U.S. officials have previously said in public testimony that the U.S. attorney in Washington is conducting a criminal investigation into who may have leaked information contained in a May 7, 2012, AP story about a foiled terror plot. The story disclosed details of a CIA operation in Yemen that stopped an al-Qaida plot in the spring of 2012 to detonate a bomb on an airplane bound for the United States.

... Justice Department published rules require that subpoenas of records from news organizations must be personally approved by the attorney general but it was not known if that happened in this case. The letter notifying AP that its phone records had been obtained though subpoenas was sent Friday by Ronald Machen, the U.S. attorney in Washington.

... The Justice Department lays out strict rules for efforts to get phone records from news organizations. A subpoena can only be considered after "all reasonable attempts" have been made to get the same information from other sources, the rules say. It was unclear what other steps, in total, the Justice Department has taken to get information in the case.

A subpoena to the media must be "as narrowly drawn as possible" and "should be directed at relevant information regarding a limited subject matter and should cover a reasonably limited time period," according to the rules.

I'll withhold judgment on this for now, as I've long been of the opinion that the Feds need to be more aggressive about prosecuting the leaking of classified information (though they also probably need to classify a lot less material -- though not in cases like this one). If the underlying rationale here was for the U.S. Attorney to get to the bottom of a leak of a covert CIA operation, that strikes me as utterly legitimate.

That, however, is a matter of ends and not means. There are still open questions as to what efforts the DOJ made prior to issuing the subpoenas and why they were so seemingly broad.

Regardless, this is not the way that an Obama Administration that spent the weekend trying to defend itself on Benghazi and the IRS wants to get its week started.

Earlier this afternoon, the jury in Philadelphia announced that they had found Dr. Kermit Gosnell guilty on three out of four counts of first-degree murder.

UPDATE: Here's the audacious statement released by Planned Parenthood in the aftermath of the verdict:

The jury has punished Kermit Gosnell for his appalling crimes. This verdict will ensure that no woman is victimized by Kermit Gosnell ever again. 

This case has made clear that we must have and enforce laws that protect access to safe and legal abortion, and we must reject misguided laws that would limit women's options and force them to seek treatment from criminals like Kermit Gosnell.

Apparently, teaching the Constitution, being “worried about government spending, debt or taxes,” and wanting to “make America a better place to live” was sufficient to get one targeted by the IRS.

Consider the following recent comment from President Obama:

Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems. Some of these same voices also do their best to gum up the works. They’ll warn that tyranny always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave, and creative, and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can’t be trusted.

In the context of the IRS scandal, how naïve does it seem to not maintain some form of healthy skepticism about the government? I don’t view government as “some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems.” But I don’t view it as a nest of angels and demigods either.

It’s a long-running joke that men turn off their brains when they think about sex. Well, it turns out that when it comes to sex and cognitive impairment, women are the ones who seem to suffer the most.

While reading through the APA Task Force Report on the Sexualization of Girls, I ran across something I’ve been pondering since the 2012 campaign, when the War on Women strategy proved effective. While it is well known that we live in a highly sexualized society, with much literature having been published attesting to this fact and to the damaging effects it has on women, not much is discussed about self-objectification specifically.

Self-objectification is when women internalize the sexualized messages of the culture and, as a result, begin to see themselves as sexual objects. This phenomenon has been on the rise for years, as sexualized messaging has been pushed from every corner of society, from schools, to the media, to politics (it was a large part of the Obama campaign, with its Girls "voting for Obama is like having sex for the first time" ad and the Vote Like Your Lady Parts Depend On It messaging).

According to the APA Task Force, an insidious consequence of self-objectification is impaired cognitive functioning due to a fragmented consciousness.

Chronic attention to physical appearance leaves fewer cognitive resources available for other mental and physical activities. While alone in a dressing room, college students were asked to try on and evaluate either a swimsuit or a sweater. While they waited for 10 minutes wearing the garment, they completed a math test. The results revealed that young women in swimsuits performed significantly worse on the math problems than did those wearing sweaters. No differences were found for young men. In other words, thinking about the body and comparing it to sexualized cultural ideals disrupted mental capacity.

These findings are also reflected in a report published a few years ago titled, “My Body or My Mind” in the European Journal of Social Psychology. In that study, the researchers tested their theory that women who internalize objectified messaging and begin to think of themselves as “a sexual object to be scrutinized” develop impaired cognitive abilities.

A total of 25 women were videotaped for two minutes, from the front and from behind, while they walked up and down a hall. Half of the participants were filmed by a man, and the other half were filmed by a woman. After the filming, each woman watched her video to reinforce the experience in her mind. Their cognitive skills were then tested with a series of questions that increased in difficulty.

The results showed that the women who were filmed by men scored lower on the tests. They did just as well as the other women on the easy parts of the test, but when the difficulty level increased, they made more mistakes.

A follow-up study found that anxiety and self-esteem levels were not a factor, and the researchers concluded that the cognitive difficulties “might be due to a split in perspective regarding the self,” which is similar to conclusions drawn in the APA Task Force report.

The researchers also concluded that “it stands to reason that the cumulative effects of objectification on the female body over a lifetime may severely disrupt cognitive processes.”

The APA Task Force reports that the cognitive decrements associated with self-objectification suggests that “sexualization practices may function to keep girls ‘in their place’ as objects of sexual attraction and beauty, significantly limiting their free thinking and movement in the world.”

No wonder sexualization was such a big part of the Obama campaign and the messaging of progressives in general.

Do you agree with the reports? If they’re right, what can we do about it? Who’s at fault here? Only men who objectify women? Hollywood? Or is there another cultural dynamic at work—brought about by the sexual freedom movement of radical feminism? Do women (not girls) themselves bear any responsibility?

Reading up on the Bolshevik Revolution over the last couple of days--my Cold War project may be moving slowly, but it's moving--I kept feeling that Vladimir Lenin reminded me of someone, but I couldn't quite think who. This morning, it struck me: Charles Manson.

A serious question--well, at least it's semi-serious: Am I making too much of what may be merely a coincidental likeness, or is there a certain look, a certain affect, that characterizes the psychopath?

1) When Tea Party groups complained about IRS targeting in 2012, you could read a defense of that behavior in an editorial aptly headlined "The I.R.S. Does Its Job."

2) When it turned out that even the IRS conceded it had done wrong, you might be able to find that story on page A10 of a Saturday paper.

3) And a few days later, when the IRS scandal stubbornly grew despite the Times' best attempts, the news would make it to the front page, but with the soothing headline "I.R.S. Focus on Conservatives Gives G.O.P. an Issue to Seize On."

Robert J. Cottrol is a name that you should know. He teaches at George Washington University, where he holds a chair in the law school and is professor of history and sociology as well. He is a fine historian, one of our leading legal scholars, and he has a new book out that is well worthy of attention. Entitled The Long Lingering Shadow: Slavery, Race, and Law in the American Hemisphere, it examines, in comparative perspective, the role of law in creating a systematized racial hierarchy in the United States, Brazil, and the Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America. The squib on the book is accurate:

Ranging across such topics as slavery, emancipation, scientific racism, immigration policies, racial classifications, and legal processes, Cottrol unravels a complex odyssey. By the eve of the Civil War, the U.S. slave system was rooted in a legal and cultural foundation of racial exclusion unmatched in the Western Hemisphere. That system’s legacy was later echoed in Jim Crow, the practice of legally mandated segregation. Jim Crow in turn caused leading Latin Americans to regard their nations as models of racial equality because their laws did not mandate racial discrimination— a belief that masked very real patterns of racism throughout the Americas. And yet, Cottrol says, if the United States has had a history of more-rigid racial exclusion, since the Second World War it has also had a more thorough civil rights revolution, with significant legal victories over racial discrimination. Cottrol explores this remarkable transformation and shows how it is now inspiring civil rights activists throughout the Americas.

 It was, Bob claims, the rigidity of our system of racial classification that made overturning that system so profound an event in our history. In Brazil and the rest of Latin American, where the requisite racial categories were more fluid, discrimination persists in a fashion no longer tolerated here.

Bob is an Afro-Yankee -- a descendant of free men and women of color from the North. He grew up in New York, where his father was editor of The Amsterdam News. I first met him at Yale in 1971, when we were both seniors. Although he was, if I remember correctly, in those days an adherent of the Young People's Socialist League and I was by then a conservative of sorts, we had this in common: We had not been amused the previous year by Yale's collaboration with the radicals attempting to make it impossible for a jury to convict Black Panther Bobby Seale of ordering the torture and murder of Alex Rackley, a member of the Black Panther Party who was suspected of being a police informer.

I returned to Yale to do a Ph.D. in 1974, and there I found Bob again. In the summer of 1977, when I was maniacally writing my dissertation in preparation for taking up a job at Cornell in the fall, Bob was doing the same. I would work until I could not focus at all. Then I would read a Raymond Chandler novel until I could sleep. When I ran out of reading, I would visit a bookstore on Chapel Street in New Haven that was open all night. There, with some frequency, even if it was 3 a.m., I would find Bob on a similar errand.

As we finished chapters of our respective dissertations, we exchanged and read one another's work, and we kept in touch thereafter. While I was at Cornell, I remember getting a call shortly after midnight one night. It was Bob, and he wanted to talk. As a Yankee, he was not entirely happy in Atlanta, where he had landed a job in the American Studies department at Emory. I remember him saying that he was not sure which worried him more -- not getting tenure, or getting it. Not long thereafter, he quit Emory, took a job in Washington as an assistant dean at Georgetown, and began attending Georgetown University Law School at night.

The rest is history. After law school, Bob taught for some years at Boston College Law School, shifted to Rutgers School of Law in Camden, and then made his was to GW. The dissertation I read became The Afro-Yankees: Providence's Black Community in the Antebellum Era and was selected by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Book for 1983. Fifteen years later, he would publish From African to Yankee: Narratives of Slavery and Freedom in Antebellum England, and he was the lead author in Brown v. Board of Education: Caste, Culture and the Constitution, which was a Book of the Month Selection for the History Book Club and won the 2003 Prize of the Langum Project for Historical Literature as "Best Book in Legal History Accessible to the General Educated Public."

Bob also emerged as a leading defender of the Second Amendment, exploring in his writing and research the connection between the failure of the Supreme Court to incorporate the Second Amendment and Jim Crow. It has long  been his view that, if African-Americans had been able to own arms, it would have been impossible to deprive them of the other rights associated with citizenship.

In this connection, he edited a four-volume study entitled Gun Control and the Constitution: Sources and Explorations on the Second Amendment, which appeared in 1993. When reissued a year later -- abridged in a single volume, under the title Gun Control: The Courts, Congress and the Second Amendment -- it was made a Book of the Month Selection by the History Book Club. He is now collaborating with Raymond T. Diamond on a book tentatively entitled Insurgent Victory: Heller, McDonald and the Restoration of the Second Amendment. That, too, will surely find a ready audience. You might enjoy the interview that he did with Glenn Reynolds.

Bob and I see one another episodically -- at academic meetings and in DC. A few years ago after a meeting of the Historical Society, I remember our going out to a Brazilian restaurant in DC that he knew and discussing his progress on the book recently published. Last summer, he spent the better part of a day with me when I was in the hospital at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. I remember our discussing at length on this occasion The Long Lingering Shadow, which he had by then finished. It is nice to see the book finally out.

Nineteen people were shot in New Orleans on Sunday during a Mother's Day parade, a local crime story that somehow slipped through the rigorous editorial filters at the Washington Post.  Baffling.

The beat goes on for John Kerry.

He and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov spent last Tuesday in "marathon meetings" in Moscow to discuss what to do about the problem of Syria. They subsequently announced that their countries would hold an international conference at which Syrian government officials and the rebels would have an opportunity to get together and name an interim government.

Then, after seeing Kerry off, the Russians announced that they're going ahead with an arms transfer of ground-to-air missile systems to Syria (i.e., to Assad), which the Wall Street Journal says "could significantly strengthen Damascus's ability to ward off an attack." The systems are believed to be sophisticated S-300 missile batteries, which would severely compromise the ability of the West to impose a no-fly zone.

Walter Russell Mead points out that this maneuver amounts essentially to Russia kicking dirt in John Kerry's face:  

Putin has no interest in helping the Obama administration look powerful or successful. On the contrary, the Kremlin believes that undermining American prestige and credibility worldwide is a vital Russian interest.

That does not preclude carefully negotiated bargains on areas of common interest, but that “carefully negotiated” part is a lot harder than it looks — and more desperate you seem to get a deal, the uglier the deal you will get.

Even if Russia and the US can ultimately agree on a course in Syria—and that’s a very big if—Russia will still be strongly inclined to do everything in its power to trip up the US and hand it a diplomatic defeat.

It’s a big mistake to underestimate the anti-American paranoia and deep-seated resentment that animates the Kremlin. Meanwhile, the Obama administration is hungry to avoid the humiliating impasse resulting from a succession of policy mistakes that have gotten it so entangled in Syria, which may make the administration less skeptical than it should be about Russia’s intentions here.

At this point in its history Russia has been reduced to an opportunistic power looking for ways to insert itself into world politics; it would be unrealistic to expect the Kremlin to do anything but try to make the most of what it must see as a rare, heaven-sent chance to gain the upper hand over the US on a high profile issue.

This was a costly blunder, and Kerry walked into it for the sake of a doomed-to-fail conference that will probably never even take place. The conference idea is predicated on two flawed assumptions: 1) that "the rebels" are a cohesive group (and a group the Americans want dictating the future direction of Syria, a questionable premise in view of the ever-increasing proportion of jihadists in the mix); and 2) that the Russians can deliver Assad. But there is no reason to assume the Russians can do any such thing.

The Atlantic quotes Sergei Strokan, a columnist for the liberal Moscow daily Kommersant, as saying that the Americans' faith in the Russians' ability on this point is pure folly. "All of this is wishful thinking," he said. "Moscow has quite limited influence on the Syrian regime."

Frankly, it matters little to the Russians whether or not the conference will illustrate their inability to deliver Assad. What's beyond dispute is that the Syrian conflict has already boosted Russian prestige in direct proportion to the decline of American influence:

Decades from now, President Barack Obama's decision to not arm Syria's rebels may be condemned or praised by historians. But a visit to Moscow this week showed that it has come at an immediate price. Washington's failure to act created a vacuum that Putin and Lavrov used to boost Russia's global standing.

"For the last two years, Lavrov has dramatically elevated his profile on the world stage," Susan Glasser recently wrote in Foreign Affairs. "He has done so by almost single-handedly defying Western attempts to force some united action to stop Syria's deadly civil war."

...

On the international stage...Russia is ascendant. For Putin, Kerry's request for help marked the achievement of a decade-old goal. From the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's 1999 bombing of Kosovo, to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, to the 2011 U.N.-backed toppling of Muammar Gaddafi, Moscow has been largely irrelevant.

By protecting Assad, Putin has forced those in search of peace in Syria to come to Moscow, according to Maria Lipman, a scholar-in-residence at the Carnegie Moscow Center and a leading political analyst. Putin's logic is simple.

"You may denounce us," she explained, "But when it comes to the most important international issue today, you come to Moscow."

So, with all this, why is the Obama administration turning to Putin for help? The answer is simple: The White House's desperate desire not to get its own hands dirty in Syria.

So what happens next? It's another opportunity for President Obama to do nothing and hope for the best. Mead:

Moscow is likely to read the US response to this provocation very carefully; if the administration swallows the missile sale without response, Russia won’t see this as demonstrating US “friendship” and “sincerity,” it will see this as a clear sign of weakness and desperation and will push harder. Iran will see this too and the mullahs will draw their conclusions. It’s likely that the Gulf Arabs and the Turks have already significantly downgraded their assessments of American focus and will based on this news. In Jerusalem, too, where the missile story first surfaced, they are assessing the reliability of their American ally.

Is alienating our regional allies worth a dubious deal with the Kremlin? We are likely to find out in the not too distant future. But Russia’s goal is not to help us get out of our diplomatic predicament; it is to make us pay the highest possible price for our blunders.

TO: Stephen Hawking

FROM: Pejman Yousefzadeh

RE: Hypocrisy

Dear Professor Hawking:

So, when are your principles going to lead you to get rid of that Intel Core i7 chip?

The whole world wonders.

Yours truly,

Pejman Yousefzadeh

Just because it's cool: A revised version of David Bowie's Space Oddity, recorded by Commander Chris Hadfield on board the International Space Station.  

During these dwindling hours of Mother's Day 2013, one of the most famous songs about motherhood in all of American popular culture, "Mammy," performed by the man who made the song famous, Al Jolson.

Famous on Broadway since the turn of the last century, Jolson became responsible for one hit sone after another, doing more than perhaps any other performer of his era to move jazz, blues and ragtime into the cultural mainstream.  In 1927 Jolson appeared in "The Jazz Singer," the first "talkie."  Out of favor today--in part because he often performed in blackface, a convention dating back to the nineteenth century that we would find shocking today--Jolson represented a major talent.  Brash, loud, and overtly sentimental, he was nevertheless a master of rhythm and diction.

Here Jolson performs at Soldiers' Field in Chicago in 1949, just a year before his death.  (Jolson's reference to selling programs during the Dempsey-Tunney fight is a joke.  In 1927, the year of that fight--the famous "long count" fight--Jolson was already a major star.)

The season of Commencement addresses is upon us, and we all know just what that means, don't we?  An ocean of self-indulgent liberal blather.  Against this sea of nonsense, I offer Congressman Paul Ryan.  

Yesterday at Benedictine College, the superb Catholic school in Atchison, Kansas, Ryan did something important.  He insisted that the free markets matter not simply because the prove so successful at producing goods but because they're moral.

To wit:

[W]hy is there such resistance to free enterprise? It’s the old problem of greed. The critics say nothing good comes from commerce....Sure, free enterprise makes more stuff, they argue. But it relies on “greed”—on people pursuing their self-interest. And isn’t the love of money the root of all evil…or something to that effect...?

At some level, we all ask ourselves, “How can I make ends meet?” But the successful ask a better question: “What’s something people need?” Voluntary exchange is an act of good faith. It gives the buyer a good in exchange for something of equal value. It creates a culture of personal responsibility and good will. To attract customers, you must be trustworthy. To attract workers, you must treat them with dignity.

Free enterprise helps the workers themselves—because work gives people more than a paycheck. It gives them a sense of pride—a sense of purpose. It makes them a part of their communities. And when we share our gifts with other people, we show solidarity with each other. If farmers didn’t harvest, people would go hungry. If doctors and nurses didn’t practice, the sick would go untreated. We don’t think of ourselves as greedy—even though we take part in the economy. And we shouldn’t—because we’re working to help our families. We’re helping to put food on the table, to pay for our education, to save for retirement....

Free enterprise doesn’t reward greed. It rewards value—because competition checks greed. And there’s no greater opportunity for greed than government cronyism. Greed knows how to exploit the pages of regulations. It knows how to navigate the halls of power. So if we’re concerned about greed, we shouldn’t give it more opportunities to grow.

Greed knows how to exploit the pages of regulations and navigate the halls of power.

Beautiful.

Just imagine what the media response would have been if liberal groups got targeted like this during the Bush administration:

The Internal Revenue Service on Friday apologized for targeting groups with “tea party” or “patriot” in their names, confirming long-standing accusations by some conservatives that their applications for tax-exempt status were being improperly delayed and scrutinized.

Lois G. Lerner, the IRS official who oversees tax-exempt groups, said the “absolutely inappropriate” actions by “front-line people” were not driven by partisan motives.

Rather, Lerner said, they were a misguided effort to come up with an efficient means of dealing with a flood of applications from organizations seeking ­tax-exempt status between 2010 and 2012.

During that period, about 75 groups were selected for extra inquiry — including burdensome questionnaires and, in some cases, improper requests for the names of their donors — simply because of the words in their names, she said in a conference call with reporters.

They constituted about one-quarter of the 300 groups who were flagged for additional analysis by employees of the IRS tax-exempt unit’s main office in Cincinnati.

When mere words that carry a certain partisan/philosophical meaning trigger IRS harassment, we can dispense with the nonsensical assertion that the harassment was “not driven by partisan motives.” The IRS tried to explain its actions to curtail any public relations damage to its reputation. The effort turned into a catastrophe:

About a half-hour into a conference call with reporters Friday afternoon, senior Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner said something she will regret.

“I’m not good at math,” she confessed as she tried to summon a statistic.

Lerner clarified that she is a lawyer and not an accountant (a fair defense) but the remark instantly blew up on Twitter — an IRS official being bad at math!? — and wound up punctuating what was a torturous response to the IRS’ admission that it inappropriately targeted tea party groups.

A skeptical press corps peppered Lerner with questions, many of which she and her staff were unable or unwilling to answer.

Read the whole thing, which is utterly damning in discussing the IRS’s attempts to evade serious and justified questions regarding its harassment of conservative groups. Incidentally, I don’t find the words “tea party” or “patriot” in Commentary’s name, but that didn’t stop the IRS from targeting it in 2008:

This morning, an IRS official named Lois Lerner apologized for inappropriately targeting non-profit groups for scrutiny in 2012 based on the fact that they had the words “Tea Party” or “Patriot” in their names. There are many things that need to be said about this. First, and simplest, is to ask how seriously the Obama administration is going to take this outrageous effort at political suppression by an agency under its charge. Has the IRS inspector general gotten involved? Has a U.S. attorney been apprised of this matter, which can only be considered an act of political intimidation and therefore would fall under the aegis of various federal criminal statutes? If not, why not?

Second, this is a test for the mainstream media. If the fact that the targeted groups are conservative means that the story is soft-pedaled and not subject to major investigative scrutiny, any argument against liberal bias evaporates now and forever. Will this be brought up at today’s press briefing at the White House with Jay Carney? You can bet that had any such thing happened in reverse during the Bush administration, Tony Snow would have been bombarded with questions for weeks if not months.

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

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

Again, imagine the media response if it were a liberal magazine that was targeted by the IRS during the Bush administration.

It’s worth remembering that a year ago, the New York Times heartily approved of the harassment the IRS is now forced to apologize for (to be fair, the Times also argued that the pro-Obama Priorities USA also ought to be harassed). One wonders when the Times will issue its own apology. Speaking of apologies, when will the IRS apologize for its continuous violations of the Fourth Amendment?

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has claimed that agents do not need warrants to read people’s emails, text messages and other private electronic communications, according to internal agency documents.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which obtained the documents through a Freedom of Information Act request, released the information on Wednesday.

In a 2009 handbook, the IRS said the Fourth Amendment does not protect emails because Internet users “do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in such communications.” A 2010 presentation by the IRS Office of General Counsel reiterated the policy.

Under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986, government officials only need a subpoena, issued without a judge’s approval, to read emails that have been opened or that are more than 180 days old.

Privacy groups such as the ACLU argue that the Fourth Amendment provides greater privacy protections than the ECPA, and that officials should need a warrant to access all emails and other private messages.

Traditionally, the courts have ruled that people have limited privacy rights over information they share with third parties. Some law enforcement groups have argued that this means they only need a subpoena to compel email providers, Internet service companies and others to turn over their customers’ sensitive content. 

But in 2010, a federal appeals court ruled that police violated a man’s constitutional rights when they read his emails without a warrant.

I await the outrage of those who thought that the Bush administration’s advocacy of the Patriot Act meant the end of the Constitution.

And speaking of the Bush administration, as might be expected, it got the blame for this mess from Jay Carney. Never let it be said that the Obama administration has forgotten how to shirk responsibility.

Vexed political issue of the day: should scantily-clad Cambridge undergraduettes be permitted to wrestle in Jell-o for money at student garden parties?

I think the answer to that one has to be a resounding Duh!

If you believe in women's liberation - and I do - then surely that liberation ought to include the freedom to decide whether or not they wish to smear their nubile bodies in slimy gloop and tussle erotically for the benefit of an admiring audience of baying males.

But a typically puritanical leftist kill-joy at Cambridge University disagrees. She has successfully launched an online petition to have this traditional event banned and - to its eternal shame - the drinking club which hosted the event, the Wyverns, has caved.

As I argue over at the Telegraph, this kind of ban represents the thin end of the wedge.

First they came for the Jell-o wrestlers....

It's time we on the right started fighting back against these Alinskyite tactics. The counter-revolution starts here....

Note: It was a little over five years ago that my maternal grandmother passed away. A remarkable lady, she always reminded me of Katharine Hepburn with her grace and quick wit, and of Margaret Thatcher with her impeccable demeanor, steadfast conviction, and mastery of the language.  She helped raise me, and her death hurt harder than anything has in a very long time.   On this Mother's Day, in light of the friendships I've been fortunate enough to form on Ricochet, I'd like to simultaneously beg your indulgence and then take it for granted by introducing my grandmother to you through something I wrote only a few days after she passed away in 2008. It's a story of her, of family, of my own mom who cared for her mother, and it is heavy on faith as well,  for to separate Granny from her faith would be like trying to separate warmth from the sun, or the smile from Mona Lisa. Happy Mother's Day. 

My earliest memories of her are of being carried in her arms as she would sing "I love you a bushel and a peck." I was too young to be really good at walking yet, I was too short for her to press her cheek against mine unless she were carrying me, and I couldn’t move as fast across the floor as she did (neither could anyone else for that matter). I knew that she was "Granny Bob," and though I didn’t know exactly what a bushel or peck was, I knew my Granny loved me and I got the impression that she thought I was incredibly special and just about the best thing to hit town. As the first of four grandchildren and many great grandchildren, I was not the last person to have that impression.

Marguerite Beeson Young was the oldest of two children born to Myra and Ben Beeson. My great grandparents were both strong willed people, but I think even they must have been surprised at the little firecracker they brought into the world. Marguerite’s younger brother, B.F. Beeson says that as a youngster, his big sister’s name was difficult for him to pronounce and came out sounding something like "Bob-eese." This was eventually shortened to "Bob," and became her calling card throughout the family. It was entirely appropriate that she would have a masculine nickname, for though she was surely a lady with far more class than most, I’ve seen my Granny address a room full of deacons and seem like the only man in the room. She had no equals with one exception. Her little brother grew to be not so little after all. A tall man with an equally sharp wit and powerful mind, my Uncle BF was the only person I saw who could debate Granny to a draw, if not actually get the better of her. My cousins and I used to sit in the next room and listen in on the debates. This, sports fans, was the true clash of the titans. That they loved each other dearly was obvious, but a debate amongst this bunch was not for the faint of heart.

My second oldest memory is of sitting next to Granny Bob on what seemed like a very tall bed, watching television. When my family and I would visit Granny and Grandaddy, the beginning of Johnny Carson’s television show would signal the start of bed time. I would climb the bed and perch next to Granny to discuss things. You see, Granny didn’t engage in "child speak" with me. It wasn’t Mr. Rogers saying, "Can you say Tonight Show?" No, Granny spoke to me as an equal, and I did my best to reply in kind. I’m sure my sentences were mangled beyond comprehension, but I reasoned that if she was going to talk to me like I was smart, then I would have to sound smart. That’s how Granny taught; by example. She taught me the proper and effective use of the language.

As Johnny Carson got into his monologue, Grandaddy would bring Granny and me a plate full of seedless grapes. Now, this was living! Granny and I discussed the monologue, or any subject we pleased. Whether it was politics, cars, music, or why I shouldn’t have climbed to the top of the outside television antenna that was attached to the house, we munched on grapes and had a grand time. Granny Bob was the first person I remember talking to me on an adult level.

I also have distinct memories of going to a department store downtown with Granny. A trip with Granny was an adventure, but one needed to be rested in advance. Granny shopped the way she drove her car, and she drove her car the way she lived; in high gear. When Granny was behind the wheel, I would find something to hold on to and say that we were going to "ride the horsey." For someone raised on the Lone Ranger, riding the horsey signified something very nearly like high speed pursuit. So Granny and I would take off in a cloud of dust for Mullers, the big department store in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Granny approached shopping as if it were a surgical strike by a Navy SEAL team: get in, get it done, and get out. Of course, with her "Little David" in tow, she took time to take me to the second floor where there was a soda counter for refreshments. Here, Granny introduced me to the wonders of a Cherry Coke. It was like grapes during Johnny Carson all over again, we would enjoy a simple snack and chat.

Part of visiting my grandparents was going to church with them. As a little fellow, I would lean over to my parents or to Granny when the preacher would get really worked up over something and ask, "Why is he yelling at us?" The guy was red faced, sputtering, hollering in our general direction, and I had never met the man and so couldn’t figure out what I had done to tick him off so much. Granny would tell me he wasn’t mad, he was just very serious. As long as I wasn’t in trouble with the guy, it was okay with me, and I’d fall asleep in someone’s lap.

As years passed by, I learned more of Granny Bob’s faith. Church was a central point of her life, but it wasn’t an end to itself. It was a means. A means to bring her closer to God. It’s a distinction lost on many churchgoers … the goal is not the church … the goal is to serve and love the Lord and in turn to bask and grow in God’s love for us. Granny didn’t just teach it, though she taught and served in the church for her entire adult life.  Like everything else, she lived the example.

I remember around 1977, after my mom and my Sister and I had moved back to Lake Charles and were living with Granny Bob and Grandaddy. The church had lost its pastor and was searching for another. The search committee had located a promising minister and he came to preach one Sunday and spend a little time with the congregation.

Well, he must have impressed everyone because the church voted to invite this minister to be their pastor. This was a large church, a prestigious position for any minister to occupy, so it never occurred to anyone that the minister would turn down the church’s offer, but that’s exactly what he did. What followed was an exercise in self-loathing by the congregation. One person after another, usually men, stood to make the case that the minister’s refusal to be their pastor meant that they had fallen short in some fashion. Surely, if this good man didn’t want to be the pastor of this church, something must be wrong with them.

I was sitting next to Granny and could see that she was not going quietly into this wilderness of guilt with the rest of the speakers, whether they were deacons or not. So my grandmother stood and, with eloquence and grace yet with conviction and a command of the language, she completely rejected and destroyed the very premise of the other speakers’ arguments.

Did we not, she asked, routinely pray to the Lord asking that His will be done? When the church prayed about extending an invitation to this minister, did we not say, "If it be Thy will?" Could it be, she asked, that the Lord heard our prayer and took those words more seriously than did we? "Has it occurred to anyone that just maybe it wasn’t the Lord’s will that this man be our pastor?" Granny asked. Granny asked if anyone had considered the possibility that the Lord had another minister in mind for this church, and that rather than kicking itself, the church should give thanks that His will had been revealed? You see, while the other speakers were focused on what was happening to their church, Granny’s eyes were focused on her Lord, and she knew that if she was faithful in that, God would take care of the details.

That’s how Granny lived her life. Through the good times and the bad, when we were all together and happy, or when a divorce or death in the family would break hearts, Granny stayed focused on God and his will. In this and many other respects, she was a giant in our family.

As the years went by, Granny and Uncle BF buried their grandparents and then their parents. Though the grief was strong, Granny and her brother were stronger. Granny knew that one day she would see them all again. Eleven years ago, Granny buried her husband of over 50 years. When her beloved Woodrow went to heaven, we think Granny’s heart went with him. From that point forward, she wore his wedding band on an elegant little gold chain around her neck. Growing up, I noticed that while others cried profusely by a coffin at funerals, Granny recognized the body as an empty shell, and looked forward to the day that she would be reunited with her loved ones. On Tuesday, March 11, 2008, Granny finally made it to the reunion.

Cancer had taken Granny’s strength, but not her spirit. As I wrote at the time to my cousin, "Gran is awake for an hour or two at most before going back to sleep. When she is awake, it takes every ounce of energy she can muster to try and communicate, and at times her speech is indecipherable. It’s tough for her to keep her eyes open for any amount of time. I was taken aback by how frail she looks. She still musters the energy to get off a witty remark now and then, to let everyone know she’s not down for the count. But it was heartbreaking to see her in this condition. As you know, she’s always been a woman of indomitable will, impeccable manners, consummate dignity, and a razor sharp mind. Her spark is still there, but the light burns dimly."

The knowledge that cancer was running its course gave Granny some time to spend with family. Christmas was magical as always. With Granny there was laughter and a certain ease that made everyone around her know that they were home, and that in this home there was love and happiness enough for everyone. On February 24th, my own Mother retired from 30 years of church work (another strong and remarkable example of Granny’s influence). Granny attended the retirement banquet, though her body was weakening. Afterward, the family gathered back at her house. My sister told me that Granny was in the bedroom resting, but that she had not wanted to go back there for fear that her "Little David," wouldn’t come visit with her. As my mind went back 40 years, time was erased, and a few minutes later I was sitting on that bed next to my Granny eating grapes and talking. What a special time. What a special lady.

In a eulogy delivered many years ago, William F. Buckley Jr., struggled to find the words that focus on the special spirit of one of his loved ones. Unable to articulate that special quality, he finally asked, "How does one illuminate a sunburst?" How indeed. How does one put into words that special feeling that Granny gave everyone in her home, that they belonged and that they were loved. How can one articulate that look of complete joy and elation she would get when one of her grandkids or great-grandkids entered the room? At her funeral, Granny’s pastor said that for those that knew her, no words were needed; while for those who didn’t know her, no words were adequate.

Toward the end of her life, Granny lived daily with my Mother always at her side, gently and lovingly tending to her. With typical grace and eloquence, Granny told my Mom, "You gave up part of your life to help me live mine. Thank you." Granny departed this life with her eyes still focused on her Savior. As her example and her words linger in our minds and in our hearts, we say, "Granny Bob, you lived your life in a way that showed us how to live ours. Thank you. We love you dearly."