Man, are we getting old. Earlier this morning, our good friend and former "Young Gun" Keith Urbahn and his wife welcomed their first child, the fantastically named Benjamin Burke Urbahn, into the world. Keith reports that both mother and child are doing well.

Our congratulations go out to the entire Urbahn platoon. The prospects for the next generation just got a little bit brighter.

Sometimes I think we conservatives are too harsh on communism. Come on, it's not all bad. A case in point: the above North Korean, all-girl rock band. Okay, maybe they're not quite Zepparella. But one has to admit, they're not bad.

According to a new study, charismatic professors aren't necessarily the best teachers.

Now watch the short clip below and ask yourself: Could this be the greatest pedagogical minute in human history?

A Quinnipiac poll finds Americans want a special prosecutor to probe IRS targeting of Tea Party groups by 76 to 17 percent. I've heard from a very wise former administration official who said the IRS scandal is a textbook case for special prosecution. Even two-thirds of Democrats want this. Heck, Bill Keller of the New York Times thinks it's a good idea.

Which is why I'm suspicious. Is it a good idea? The Wall Street Journal argues emphatically against it. Indictments are far less important than political accountability, they argue:

The case for a special counsel is that Attorney General Eric Holder can't be trusted to investigate his Administration, and that the Administration will stonewall Congress. We don't trust Mr. Holder either, but letting him pass the buck to a special prosecutor is doing him a favor. This scandal is best handled in Congressional hearings that educate the public in the next year rather than wait two or three years for potential indictments.

While it's possible some T-men or White House officials broke the law, the heart of the matter so far is the extent of the selective tax enforcement against conservatives and why auditors thought that was kosher. Perhaps they were taking orders from their IRS bosses, or maybe they were responding to Democratic Senators, but whatever the case the public deserves to know.

No fewer than three Congressional committees are digging into the facts, and they have the power to issue subpoenas, compel depositions and demand emails and documents. All of this can then make its way into the public record. If the White House chooses not to turn over relevant information, it will have to assert executive privilege. Such resistance carries its own political price.

With a special prosecutor, the probe would immediately move to the shadows, and the Administration and the IRS would use it as an excuse to limit its cooperation with Congress. Special prosecutors aren't famous for their speed, and a decision on indictments would extend well past the 2014 election. If there were no indictments, whatever the prosecutor has discovered would stay secret. And even if specific criminal charges were filed, the facts of an indictment couldn't stray far from the four corners of the violated statute.

There's definitely an argument that public accountability is key here, particularly given how devastating this incident has been to the public trust.

I'm convinced. No special prosecutor. What do you think?

Last week, Fed chair Ben Bernanke hinted during testimony to the Joint Economic Committee of Congress that the policy of quantitative easing that has kept the economy afloat for the past three years might have an endpoint, and a rather near one at that. He started out toeing the expected line -- that "a premature tightening of monetary policy could lead interest rates to rise temporarily, but would also carry a substantial risk of slowing or ending the economic recovery and causing inflation to fall further" -- but then surprised both the Committee and the markets by saying the Fed could slow the pace of asset purchases "in the next few meetings," leaving the Fed's real intentions as clear as mud. The phrase "the next few meetings" could mean an end to QE3 by Christmas. Some Fed officials are said to be open to tapering off large-scale asset purchases as soon as the next meeting, which is on June 18-19.

The markets shuddered at the obscurity of Bernanke's testimony, but what would an end to QE really look like?

Financial journalist Matthew Lynn has an intriguingly counterintuitive piece up on the Journal's MarketWatch page that puts forward four possible scenarios.

1. Gold rises. But that doesn't make any sense, you say. Gold is a hedge against all the evils quantitative easing has the potential to unleash: hyperinflation, economic collapse, social unrest. Pull back on QE and the value of the hedge diminishes. Right?

Wrong, according to Lynn:

To a few hard-core gold-bugs, the metal is an alternative currency, and a better one as well. But to most people it is a decent hedge against inflation, and a minor industrial commodity. Central bankers are only going to withdraw QE when they are convinced they have seen off the threat of deflation, and created the modest, persistent inflation that is part of a growing economy.

By definition, then, when QE is ended we have inflation to worry about, and in those circumstances you want to own some gold. At the same time, if the economy is growing again, commodity prices will be rising, and gold is a commodity.

Either way, it will benefit, and the price will go up.

2. Banks gain value. But, but...isn't it QE that's artificially sustaining a bankrupt banking system? What will happen to the banks' balance sheets when the easy money is withdrawn? They'll crash, that's what.

Except they won't:

In fact, by the time QE is withdrawn, the banks will be in good enough shape again; they will have had enough cheap money to repair their balance sheets. Even better, housing markets will be ticking up again, and a healthy property market translates into healthy banking industry very quickly. So bank shares will be a good bet.

3. Bond yields stay steady. Dude. Now you're just yanking my chain.

Bond yields are at their lowest levels in 50 years because the central banks are printing money. Turn off the tap and yields will shoot up. Where will the buyers be? And won't bonds saturate the market when the banks "unload the hundreds of billions they have accumulated on their own balance sheets during the last three years"?

Nope:

Central bankers know that the quickest way to trash the economy is to allow bond yields to rise sharply. They are only going to end QE once government and corporate debts are under control, and they certainly are not going to hike interest rates at the same time as they are ending QE. True, bond yields are not going to fall any further — it is hard to get lower than just about zero. But they will hold steady for a long time after QE ends.

4. Equities go up. Okay, I give up. Why are the equities that have only been rallying because of QE going to go up when QE ends?

The story we keep getting told is that it is only QE that is keeping the equity markets alive. End it, and we will see a crash that will make 1929 seem like a mere wobble on the charts.

Again, not true.

QE will only come to an end when you get a growing economy, with rising employment, and a healthy property market. All that is by definition good for company profits and good for equities. At the same time, if bond yields stay very low, then with a more confident economy investors will be attracted by the higher yields offered by equities. So equity markets will rise as well.

The crux of Lynn's argument is that the end of QE is inevitable, but the central bankers are not so dumb as to end it prematurely:

Most of the debate around QE assumes it is going to be withdrawn while the economy is in dire straits.

But why would that happen? Nobody stops the medicine before the disease has been bought under control.

You can certainly argue about whether printing money is the right solution. But whether it is or not, it is the one that central bankers have fixed upon — and they are not likely to stop until they have finished the job.

QE will only end when the economic outlook is definitely improving, and while it may involve some shocks along the way, it will be good for most markets rather than bad.

What do you think of his analysis?

So, let's review the latest:

• Concerning the IRS scandal, we learn that Lois Lerner was "directly involved" in the targeting of conservative groups. This included signing letters that contained "a list of detailed questions of the kind that a Treasury inspector general’s audit found to be inappropriate."
• Organizing for Action is a 501(c)(4), which means that it is supposed to act in a non-partisan capacity when engaging in advocacy. So naturally, the President of the United States--who is anything but non-partisan--has signed a fundraising letter on behalf of Organizing for Action, which includes a request to register at this site, which as you will note, contains the name of the non-non-partisan president of the United States in its URL. As of two weeks ago, Organizing for Action has not yet applied for tax-exempt status from the IRS, but I am willing to bet dollars to donuts that when they do, they will encounter no problems whatsoever with their application. To be sure, the IRS won't want to cause yet another scandal by giving yet another prominent 501(c)(4) applicant a hard time, but the point is that plenty of equivalent conservative groups have had to resistance from the IRS, while liberal groups have gotten nothing but the kindest cooperation.
• I am pleased to note that Jonathan Turley has decided to continue to eat his Wheaties:

Recently, Attorney General Eric Holder appeared before the House Judiciary Committee to answer questions about the administration's sweeping surveillance of journalists with the Associated Press. In the greatest attack on the free press in decades, the Justice Department seized phone records for reporters and editors in at least three AP offices as well as its office in the House of Representatives. Holder, however, proceeded to claim absolute and blissful ignorance of the investigation, even failing to recall when or how he recused himself.Yet, this was only the latest attack on the news media under Holder's leadership. Despite his record, he expressed surprise at the hearing that the head of the Republican National Committee had called for his resignation. After all, Holder pointed out, he did nothing. That is, of course, precisely the point. Unlike the head of the RNC, I am neither a Republican nor conservative, and I believe Holder should be fired.

• Also eating their Wheaties: The Wall Street Journal editorial board:

Like dumber follows dumb, the scandal of politicized IRS tax enforcement has been followed by calls for a "special prosecutor." Republicans are predictably leading this call against a Democratic Administration, but this is one case in which the GOP should hope it doesn't get its way.

The case for a special counsel is that Attorney General Eric Holder can't be trusted to investigate his Administration, and that the Administration will stonewall Congress. We don't trust Mr. Holder either, but letting him pass the buck to a special prosecutor is doing him a favor. This scandal is best handled in Congressional hearings that educate the public in the next year rather than wait two or three years for potential indictments.

• And finally, let us take note of the fact that Stuart Stevens is in danger of depleting the world's Wheaties supply:

In Dan Brown’s new novel, Inferno, the lead character is struck with amnesia, unable to remember critical events even as he’s trying to save the world. Let’s borrow that useful plot device and imagine if American journalists woke up and couldn’t remember who was president. It would be interesting to ask them a few questions:

What would you think of a president under whom the IRS targeted his harshest political opponents, during his reelection campaign?

What would you think of a president whose obsession with leaks and secrecy was so great that he used the Justice Department to obtain phone records of reporters, in violation of Justice’s established procedure?

What would you think of a president whose head of the Department of Justice signed a criminal warrant against a leading journalist working for the news organization most critical of the president—and monitored the movements of the journalist and even went after his mother’s phone records?

What would you think of an administration that directed the president’s press secretary repeatedly to deliver false information concerning the death of an American ambassador?

These are not hypothetical questions—and yet there is an entire class of journalist so invested in a certain moral and ethical image of the president its members are unable to entertain facts that might tarnish that image. They are the pro-Obama equivalent of Birthers, never letting emerging facts cloud the conclusion they’ve already committed to hold.

The same journalists who did not hesitate to assume the worst of previous Republican administrations—E.J. Dionne, Walter Pincus, Jack Shafer, to name a few—are now tying themselves in knots trying to explain that there is nothing to see when the IRS probes Obama’s enemies or that the Justice Department secretly seizing the phone records of one of their peers and his mother was really a good thing. One has to wonder if it were their mother and her records, how that mother-son conversation would play out.

“Well, Mom, you know, the president has to do these things, and I’ve told you time and again not to email Aunt Sally about my sources. Is that any way to keep hope alive?”

Stevens was Mitt Romney's chief strategist in the 2012 presidential election. If he strategized as tough as he wrote this column, we might now have a new president.

Glenn Reynolds' latest column in USA Today rests on a clever insight:

Government officials are happy making and executing plans that affect the lives of millions, but when things go wrong, well ... they're willing to accept the responsibility, but they're not willing to take the blame. What's the difference? People who are to blame lose their jobs. People who are "responsible," do not. The blame, such as it is, winds up deflected on to The System, or something else suitably abstract.

But when you cut the linkage between outcomes and experience, you make learning much more difficult. When you were a toddler learning to walk, you fell down a lot. This was unpleasant: shocking, at least, and often painful. Thus, you learned to fall down a lot less often.

His proposed remedy:

I'd favor some changes that put accountability back in. First, I'd get rid of judicially created immunities. The Constitution itself creates only one kind of immunity, for members of Congress in speech and debate. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, courts have interpreted this grant of immunity, explicitly in the Constitution, more narrowly than the judicially created ones).

I'd also cut all payments to members of Congress whenever they haven't passed a budget. If they can't take care of that basic responsibility, why should they get paid? Likewise, I'd ban presidential travel when there's not a budget. He can do his job from the White House.

I'm willing to consider other changes: Term limits that kick in whenever there's a deficit for more than two years in a row. Limitations on civil-service protections to allow wronged citizens to get offending bureaucrats fired. Pay cuts for elected officials whenever inflation or unemployment are above a threshold.

I couldn't get behind all of Reynolds' proposals, but it's an interesting thought experiment. What changes would you like to see implemented to hold public officials more accountable?

Anthony Weiner is on the rise. He’s only four points behind in the race for mayor, and New Yorkers are showing their love to the disgraced congressman. At a Laurelton Memorial Day Parade in Queens, spectators shouted words of support and vied to get a picture with him. One devotee yelled from her porch, “Welcome back! We need you!”

Do we?

Some say yes, arguing that if Governor Mark Sanford can get reelected to his old House seat, why not Weiner to the mayor’s office. But can we even equate the two?

Karen Tumulty of the Washington Post says no. While the comparisons between Sanford and Weiner are inevitable, “the differences are more significant than the similarities.” Here’s a summary of her points:

1. Sanford has a long history with his voters, having had his name on the general election ballot five times, three of them for the same office. Weiner is running for an office he has never held, and he’s seeking support from voters he has never represented.
2. The scandals took “different arcs.” Once Sanford’s affair with Maria Belen Chapur was exposed, he owned up to it (and eventually married her). “Weiner continued to deny that the crotch photos sent through his Twitter account were in fact of his own crotch.”
3. After the scandals broke, Sanford remained in office, enjoying a 55 percent approval rating when he left, while Weiner was forced to resign.
4. The two offices are different. Sanford, a staunch conservative, ran in a Republican district, but when people vote for local office, they look beyond partisanship to find someone who offers concrete solutions to their immediate problems. “Weiner made his reputation not with his legislative achievements, but by doing partisan battle on cable news channels.”
5. The circumstances in which the two decided to run are very different. Sanford responded to the unique opportunity of a special election, which meant a short campaign and weak rivals. Weiner faces a long campaign with few allies and a field of seasoned opponents.

While all these points are good and valid, it seems that Tumulty is missing one point—the nature of the scandals themselves.

Here’s the difference: Sanford committed adultery—a violation of the marriage contract, complete with cover-ups, lies, and manipulations. While this is bad, it is something we can all relate to. We’ve either had an affair ourselves, had a parent who cheated, known a friend who committed adultery, or had a spouse who left us for someone else.

We know what adultery looks like. That doesn’t mean we approve of it. We don’t. But we know the twists and turns of it, its complexity, its cruelty, its rationalities, its pain. We both hate it and understand it. It’s a tale as old as David and Bathsheba, a sad, infuriating story that plays out on the stage of everyday life.

Texting lewd photos to young women (which was also a violation of the marriage contract) does not. Does this make what Weiner did fundamentally “worse”? No. But it does make it less relatable—which matters in elections.

All of us can, on some level, understand what happened with Sanford. When we see him on the television screen, we react by shaking our heads with disappointment, maybe even anger. With Weiner, we cringe. Most of us simply can’t relate to Weiner taking naked pictures of himself and sending them to young women he had never even met. It reeks of perversion. The undertones are predatory, addictive, and narcissistic. In a word, creepy.

Some have accused conservatives of being inconsistent in their support for Sanford and their condemnation of Weiner, but that’s because they’re equating the scandals. People reelected Sanford not just because he admitted his sin—as Weiner eventually did as well—but because they aren’t creeped out by what he did. They are angry, shocked, and many are responding from their own painful experiences with adultery and divorce. But with Weiner, it’s a whole different animal.

We tolerate sin and fallenness in our leaders. If they learn from it, they can even be stronger. We look at them and say, by the grace of God there go I. But that’s harder to do that when we enter the world of the perverse, the lewd, the predatory, and the creepy. 

While many of us can admit that we could easily, given the right (or should I say wrong) circumstances, stumble down the same trail as Sanford, most of don’t see ourselves, as mature adults, falling for the temptation of taking a photo of our genitalia and sending it to strangers.

Like it or not, in reality, normal sin trumps creepy every time. We can forgive that which we understand, but when it comes to aberrant behavior we don’t understand, forgiveness isn’t even the issue. Being eerily uncomfortable is. When we understand something, we can face it, deal with it, come to terms with it. But when we don’t, we just want to get away from it. And we certainly don’t trust it.

Mostly that's because of  single moms. But there's also a growing trend of wives earning more than husbands. From Pew:

A record 40% of all households with children under the age of 18 include mothers who are either the sole or primary source of income for the family, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of data from the U.S. Census Bureau. The share was just 11% in 1960.

These “breadwinner moms” are made up of two very different groups: 5.1 million (37%) are married mothers who have a higher income than their husbands, and 8.6 million (63%) are single mothers.

The median family income of the former group is nearly $80,000, much higher than the national median income of $57,100 for all families with kids, and nearly four times the $23,000 median for families led by a single mom.

So we're really talking about two completely different arrangements.

I know quite a few families with either single mothers or wives who work full-time and husbands who don't. I've even met a few of them at Ricochet meet-ups, so I know we have them here, too. Hey, guys!

Even with my highly traditional views about men being the heads of households, I see no inherent problem with wives earning more than their husbands.

But what really annoyed me about this story was how a local reporter sought to interview subjects for her story on this report. She works for the Washington Post and her last attempt at story sources was to find out if parents were banning toy guns from their house in response to Newtown. She wasn't interested in the variety of responses to Newtown but she had already determined that this would be her story. She kept asking for weeks, apparently to no avail.

This week she announced that this Pew report was coming out and said she wanted to talk to these "Breadwinner Moms." Then she wrote:

While close to 80 percent say women should NOT return to the 1950s homemaker role, they are uncomfortable about the toll breadwinning moms may take on children and marriages - while they don't have that same feeling about breadwinner dads. Interesting and weird. Thoughts?

Emphasis mine. I wrote up a response that I didn't bother finishing or sending. It began:

Wait, why is it "weird" to think it's good for men to be breadwinners?

Particularly considering that major new research on marriages where wives make more shows they're unhappier and more likely to divorce.

In general it makes sense for men and women to make different types of sacrifices (largely owing to biological reality and the social norms that flow from that) for their families. That women sacrifice by, say, gestating little humans and nursing them and looking after them and so on and so forth, and men sacrifice by being expected to work without any break whatsoever for their entire lives is not the rule for everyone. But there's nothing wrong with comprehending the social norms and benefits that come with acknowledging the reality of men and women not being completely interchangeable, biologically or otherwise.

What do you think about the growing trend of Breadwinning Mamas? Cause for alarm? All cool?

Tomorrow, I'll be taking my daughter to the pediatrician for her annual check-up. Pediatricians these days, on the advice or requirement of the American Academy of Pediatrics, ask parents about guns in their house.

The AAP is rabidly anti-gun, as Forbes' Paul Hsieh notes:

[T]he American Academy of Pediatrics is not politically neutral in the gun debate. The AAP supports standard Left positions, including “federal firearms legislation that bans assault weapon sales and the sales of high capacity magazines” and “the strongest possible regulations of handguns for civilian use.” The AAP also recommends that parents “NEVER have a gun in the home” (“NEVER” capitalized in their statement).

Despite the fact that a child is 100 times more likely to die in a swimming accident than a gun accident, our pediatrician doesn't suggest we "NEVER" live near a pool.

Anyway, in recent years, I've been surprised by the question (amazing what sleep deprivation can do to parents of young children!) and have mumbled through responses. This time, I'd like to be prepared.

What would you say to a pediatrician who asked you whether you keep any guns in your house?

I have a new piece up at PJ Media today in which I present a counterfactual scenario wherein the Tsarnaev brothers are prevented from carrying out the Boston Marathon bombings through proven means of police profiling. The scenario also includes the likely backlash from  CAIR and other members of the grievance lobby. An excerpt:

But none of this matters, of course, to those responsible for making security policy in America. Better to inconvenience every last passenger going through an airport, better to hoist paraplegics out of their wheelchairs so as to search them than focus attention on those who history teaches are most likely to blow up an airplane or fly it into a skyscraper. And better to let a few people get blown to bits and a few dozen others get maimed every so often than employ techniques that will prevent such horrors, albeit with the side effect of having members of the racial grievance industry get their backs up on television.

Regardless of what President Obama says, the threat of Muslim terror has not lessened.  Shouldn't our so-called leaders start taking it seriously?

As you are no doubt aware, about two dozen suburbs of Stockholm, Sweden were on fire for a week starting May 19. Young Muslim men, encoded in most news reports as "youths" or "hooligans", rioted nonstop, torching cars and setting buildings alight, including stores, offices, apartment buildings, schools, and even a police station. The riots erupted in the suburb of Husby after police shot and killed an old man waving a machete. 

The suburbs in question house predominantly immigrant populations with large contingents from Somalia, Eritrea, Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq. The Sunday Telegraph visited Husby and discovered that the "police were hardly to be seen, and when they did arrive, it was purely to protect the firefighters dealing with the car blaze rather than make arrests." The lack of a police response has resulted in few injuries, most all of them to policemen stoned by rioters.

The authorities did not, however, shirk their responsibility to issue parking tickets to the torched cars:

A Fria Tider reporter noticed this meter maid hard at work in the suburb of Alby and asked her what she was doing:

When questioned, the officer explained that the ticket was issued because the vehicle lacked a tag showing its time of arrival. The fact that the vehicle had been effectively destroyed – its windshield smashed and the interior heavily damaged by fire – was irrelevant according to the meter maid, who asked Fria Tider’s photographer to destroy the photos he had taken.

As to the riots, Stockholm Chief of Police Mats Lofving was quoted in the Swedish newspaper Expressen as saying, "Our ambition is really to do as little as possible." Lest that policy be in any way unclear, Lars Byström, media relations officer of the Stockholm Police Department, elaborated:

We go to the crime scenes, but when we get there we stand and wait. 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.

The police did ultimately call in reinforcements to quell the rioting. Apology expected shortly.

There has been some celebrating on the port side ever since stories like this one came out, indicating that premium costs associated with the Affordable Care Act --Obamacare-- are, well, affordable. We are to believe that 

[b]ased on the premiums that insurers have submitted for final regulatory approval, the majority of Californians buying coverage on the state's new insurance exchange will be paying less—in many cases, far less—than they would pay for equivalent coverage today. And while a minority will still end up writing bigger premium checks than they do now, even they won't be paying outrageous amounts. Meanwhile, all of these consumers will have access to the kind of comprehensive benefits that are frequently unavailable today, at any price, because of the way insurers try to avoid the old and the sick.

Paul Krugman is positively gleeful as he contemplates the political consequences that he expects to ensue should these findings hold up:

. . . think about the political dynamics. Because the Supreme Court decided to let states opt out of the Medicaid expansion, some states — notably Texas — will have a pretty dysfunctional version of Obamacare in 2014, although even those systems will provide significant benefits to many people. Still, the whole political calculus was supposed to be that Republicans in red states could point to the horrors of Obamacare and ride them to political victory. Instead, it looks as if we’re going to see blue-state residents reaping the benefits of a functional health care system, while red-state residents are denied many of those benefits, for what looks like no better reason than mean-spirited spite — because what’s going on is, indeed, mean-spirited spite.

Predictions that Obamacare will be a big political issue are probably right — but not in the way gleeful conservatives imagined.

Unfortunately for Krugman et al., these claims of triumph do not give us some very important details about the California findings. For those details, one must consult Walter Russell Mead:

On Wonkblog, a pro-ACA outlet that cheered loudly when the California numbers came out, Sarah Kliff argues that success in the Golden State might not be replicable elsewhere. According to Kliff, California is one a few states to take an “active purchaser” approach to the ACA. This means that a state board has the power to select which plans will be available in the exchange, and can reject any plan whose rates are too high. Most other states, however, do it differently:

The vast majority of states…operate under a “clearinghouse model.” In that scenario, any health plan that meets a set of criteria gets approval to sell on the health insurance exchange. All 33 state exchanges that the federal government will run operate under this  clearinghouse model. So do 10 of the 18 state-run health exchanges (this includes the District of Columbia). Two states, Kentucky and New Mexico have not, according to Kaiser Family Foundation, addressed the issue yet.

In the final count, only six states are currently “active purchaser” states, so nationwide might not be as low as California’s projections suggest.

If that’s not enough to temper any lingering optimism, consider that the state had to make some significant tradeoffs to keep rates so low, as an LA Times piece reveals. Under the plans offered on the exchange, consumers will have access to far fewer doctors and hospitals. Blue Shield of California, for example, will give its exchange customers access to only 36 percent of its regular physician network . . .

Mead ends his piece with the following words: "With Obamacare, even the good news is often bad." Quite so.

In case you've missed it, two of Ricochet's finest minds, Ben Domenech and Jim Pethokoukis, have been engaged in an ongoing (and characteristically civil and good-natured) debate about the future of the Republican Party for the past week or so (The first entries are here and here).

Today, they continued the cyber-jousting. Here's Ben at RealClearPolitics:

... The whole point of starting with the argument for a flat tax is to end up with a tax structure that looks more like Simpson-Bowles and less like the mess we have today. The implication that Republicans can’t be pro-jobs/economy if they are pro-balanced budget strikes me as wrongheaded. And I hardly think Republican tax proposals beyond a flat tax consist only of “slashing top marginal rates” – it is certainly not one of my own priorities, nor has it been part of the GOP platform since 2003, with more energy focused on preventing rates from going up or on wholesale tax reform.

Of course Republicans need to become more sophisticated in how they connect tax reform policy to the challenges Americans face in their daily lives. Better analytics is not a strategy. But this does not demand that they ditch the populist goal. You make the case for a flat tax not as a purist aim, but because it makes logical sense to the people, even if you just end up getting to a flatter tax because of it.

And here's Jim, from part of his response at AEI:

I am not arguing that we don’t need to do anything about spending, only that we should be realistic. As I point out in a National Review column today, keeping spending only a couple of percentage points above its historical average will be hard work. Keeping budget deficits low, much less running surpluses, will also likely require revenue above historical levels. I think balanced budget amendments and superlow rate tax reform (or flat taxes) of the sort GOPers have been proposing make the math impossible.

It's a sophisticated, insightful discussion. Have a gander at the whole thing and tell us how you feel about the points being argued. Is a flat tax worth pursuing? How important is balancing the budget? Are the standard conservative talking points on the economy open to the criticism of being insufficiently appealing to the middle class? Let us know what you think in the comments.

The Associated Press runs a story today about Cody Keenan, successor to Jon Favreau as Barack Obama's chief speechwriter. The new scribe has an interesting take on his boss's communication challenges:

The White House declined to make Keenan available for an interview. But in a recent Kennedy School interview, Keenan said the 24-hour media environment of cable TV, Twitter, blogs and other competing information sources have made the White House speechwriter's job more challenging.

"With rare exceptions, the bully pulpit doesn't reach as many people as it used to," he said. "Our job is to keep the president's message fresh and arguments compelling even as they've been the same for the past six years."

First of all: mission failed. Not that I'm going to get all high and mighty on the guy. I was a speechwriter in the later days of the Bush Administration. "Fresh" and "compelling" were not words that were often applied to our prose stylings. Most of the words that were used can't be repeated here.

Given his natural talents, however, one of the things that's been surprising about Obama's rhetorical maturation over the course of his presidency is how excruciatingly, four-month-old-magazine-in-your-dentist's-waiting-room boring the man has become. He had a good run during his "take up thy bed and walk" days. Now, however, he seems about as invested in the material as a guy doing two shows a night in Branson.

If Keenan's theory of the case is representative of the thinking in the White House, then Team Obama has this backwards. Presidents don't have to compete for market share. The proliferation of media doesn't mean that presidential messaging gets drowned out; It means that the velocity of the message is dramatically increased. In a media environment where every word out of the president's mouth is going to be repeated a thousand times over, the last thing you want to do is make the president ubiquitous -- exactly what the Obama Administration has done.

It cuts against every instinct in an activist administration like this one -- and against the President's seemingly deathless conviction that his rhetoric is a lever with which he will move the whole world -- but tactical silence may actually be the best option available. Value is at least partially a function of scarcity. If a president wants to increase the impact of his words, reducing the supply isn't a bad place to start. A little less verbal promiscuity -- you can be taken seriously about a Kanye West-Taylor Swift tiff or the national debt, but not both -- could go a long way. But self-appointed lightgivers have a notorious inability to understand the virtues of reticence.

It is hard to feel sorry for the Obama Administration over their claims that Republicans have created excessive delays for judicial confirmations, particularly in regard to the D.C. Circuit.

It may be true that the Senate has been slow in confirming President Obama's picks to the federal bench. And it may even be true that the Senate has failed to confirm some qualified nominees. But this is simply liberal chickens coming home to roost. 

Democrats opened the floodgates to partisan fighting over judicial nominees when they used outrageous tactics to stop Robert Bork from being appointed to the Supreme Court in 1987. Bork was one of the most qualified nominees to the Court in our lifetimes -- he was a judge on the D.C. Circuit, a former solicitor general, and a distinguished legal scholar. His contributions to legal thinking in the fields of both antitrust law and constitutional interpretation were profound. Democrats, led by Senator Ted Kennedy, opposed him purely on ideological grounds, because they rejected Bork's theory of interpreting the Constitution according to the original intent of the Framers.

By stopping Bork, liberals turned the judicial confirmation process away from qualifications and toward politics. Liberals have continued to oppose Republican nominees for both the Supreme Court (remember the Roberts and Alito hearings) and the lower courts (recall the meritless opposition to Miguel Estrada for the D.C. Circuit) solely on the grounds of ideology ever since. They thus have no standing to complain about the treatment of Obama's picks until they "confess error," as they say at the Supreme Court, and concede that their opposition to Bork was a mistake. When they begin to consider Republican nominees solely on their merits, we can start returning the favor.

$156,000 a year for eating my fill and napping for two hours in the office before I go home? A $1,400/month food allowance? Where do I sign up?

Some labor supporters think that the decline of the labor movement is due to evil conservatives and their evil ways. But perhaps they should contemplate the possibility that labor's decline is due to the fact that the talent pool in the labor movement is not what it used to be.

While the official US unemployment rate continues its steady decline, many other labor-market metrics are far less encouraging. The economy still has nearly 3 million fewer jobs than when the Great Recession began — and 10 million to 12 million fewer than if it were back to the pre-downturn trend. Labor force participation rates have collapsed, with most of the decline due to weak labor demand rather than long-term demographic changes.

The job climate for young workers and the long-term unemployed is particularly toxic. For instance: The long-term unemployed account for 37% of the total unemployed population, three times what’s typical during an expansion. [See above chart.] The risk here is that the long-term unemployed turn into the permanently unemployed as their skills degrade. As it is, there’s a bias against hiring these folks.

In National Review, AEI’s Michael Strain highlights a number of possible policy options. Among them:

1. In many states, companies that need to cut labor costs have the option of giving employees a shortened work week. Unemployment benefits partially compensate for lost wages, and workers get to keep their jobs and benefits. “A limited but active program to keep Americans working might include expanding, supporting, and publicizing work-sharing UI programs.”

2. Temporarily lowering the minimum wage for young and inexperienced workers. ”This would give them the opportunity to begin a résumé, learn occupational skills (including the soft skills of professionalism, punctuality, and dealing with a boss), and build a professional network, all of which could lead to better jobs.”

3. Lowering the minimum wage for the long-term unemployed, while also permanently expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit for all working families.

4. Relocation subsidy to help the long-term unemployed move from high-unemployment areas to low-unemployment areas. Strain: “A program like this already exists under the Trade Adjustment Assistance program. Certain workers who have secured employment in a new city can receive a relocation allowance of up to 90 percent of the ‘reasonable and necessary expenses’ of moving, plus an additional lump-sum payment of up to $1,250. The unemployment-insurance system could create a similar program for the long-term unemployed, possibly financed by letting them take an advance on their UI benefits.”

5. Unemployment insurance-funded lump-sum bonuses to unemployed workers when they get a job “as an incentive for them to search harder and more efficiently.”

6. Assistance to those long-term-unemployed workers who want to start businesses.

7. More high-skill immigration, since “research suggests that skilled immigrants are 30 percent more likely to start a business than U.S. natives — and new businesses create jobs.”

8. Delaying the health care reform requirement that firms with 50 or more full-time workers provide their employees with health insurance.

Strain offers several other ideas, and then gives this important conclusion:

None of these policies are incompatible with the reasonable and correct conservative opposition to massive government programs and to inefficient, poorly designed, and cronyist stimulus packages. But if the GOP wants to enact them, it will have to embrace — or at least acknowledge — the power of active but limited government to do good for society.

Republicans need to be more than the party of the heroic entrepreneur, more than the party of ever-lower marginal income-tax rates, more than the party of balancing budgets and maximizing economic liberty by minimizing government. They need to show that they care about the poor, the struggling, the vulnerable — and that they are willing to pitch in and help. A great place to start would be tackling the most serious economic problem facing the country today, by championing creative, genuinely conservative public policies to decrease unemployment.

Because the federal government's sequester is bouncing along swimmingly. From the Washington Times:

...since sequestration kicked in March 4, the government has posted openings for 4,300 federal job titles to hire some 10,300 people. The median position has a salary topping out at $76,000, and one-fourth of positions pay $113,000 or more, according to an analysis by The Washington Times of federal job listings.

Altogether, the jobs will pay up to $792 million per year. Including job postings that have been open since before sequestration, the government is in the market for 27,000 employees who will make up to $1.8 billion a year.

The jobs posted since sequestration include 10,195 positions at the Department of Agriculture, 2,800 positions at the Department of Veterans Affairs and 1,611 positions at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Which wasn't supposed to happen, was it? Weren't planes supposed to drop out of the sky? Weren't old people supposed to be left by the side of the road?

At the Transportation Security Administration, which said sequestration would result in widespread flight delays, 436 positions, almost all for security officers, have been posted since March 4.

Right. I remember when they said that. They promised all sorts of disasters. Seems like a contradiction, no? If you're broke, you shouldn't be hiring. Well, here's an email which describes how the Department of Agriculture is handling what folks in the political business call an "optics problem:"

“We have gone on record with a notification to Congress and whoever else that ‘[the Agriculture Department’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service] would eliminate assistance to producers in 24 states in managing wildlife damage to the aquaculture industry, unless they provide funding to cover the costs.’ So it is our opinion that however you manage that reduction, you need to make sure you are not contradicting what we said the impact would be,” leaders said.

In other words: whatever you do, as you roll back your budgets to the levels they enjoyed a few years ago, make sure it hurts the customer.  

Hurts the customer. That's you and me.  

How is this any different from the arrogance and entitlement we've seen from the rest of the federal government these past weeks -- wiretaps, politically-motivated audits, etc.?  It's not.  

It's easy to focus all of this on Obama -- he is, after all, a perfect embodiment of the arrogant federal bureaucrat, utterly certain of his abilities, utterly ignorant of his incompetence -- but he's like a fat old union boss -- he's as much a product of the system as a manager of it.

Put it this way: in three years, Obama will be gone. But whoever wrote that Dept. of Agriculture memo, whoever conducted those IRS audits, whoever wrote the memo to authorize the AP/James Rosen wiretaps -- they'll still be there.

They're not going anywhere.

Kevin Kookogey, president and founder of Linchpins of Liberty, describes what IRS targeting has been like for him over at USA Today:

In order to raise money, I filed an application with the IRS in January 2011, seeking to obtain 501(c)(3) status as an educational organization. The IRS processes more than 60,000 non-profit applications annually and it typically takes two or three months for an organization such as mine to be granted status as a public charity.

I have been waiting for 27 months.

In the interim, I lost a $30,000 grant, multiple thousands of my own money and had to cease any further activity for fear the IRS would target me for harassment.

With an economy of words, Kookogey explains that, if the government can threaten our rights based upon what we think, what we speak or what we write, then we no longer have a government of the people, by the people or for the people.

We're still trying to figure out how this happened. Tim Carney points out that, given the IRS employees' known political views, no particular conspiracy was needed to create the culture that resulted.

But there's also this at, Commentary, where we learn that George W. Bush's Commissioner of Internal Revenue visited the White House a grand total of once. Douglas Shulman, Commissioner from 2008 to 2012, visited the White House 118 times in 2010 and 2011 alone. His successor, Steven Miller, has apparently kept that pace up as well.

So much remains to be learned about this, no? Shulman testified, you'll recall, that one of the 118 visits was for the Easter Egg Roll. I guess we have to wait to find out about the other 117 times.

Yesterday's post "Are Women Funny?" generated a lively conversation through which I discovered a host of new comedians. Thank you, everyone, for joining in.

One very funny person who curiously was not mentioned on the comments thread is Phil Hartman. He exemplified smart-funny, rather than slob-funny or crude-funny; his hallmark was a magnificently assured rapid-fire delivery of whole paragraphs of well-written material. He also had a hilarious stillness, a Madeline Kahn-esque ability to be funny just by standing there. This is a recording of Hartman's audition tape for the 1985-86 season of Saturday Night Live:

It doesn't get much better than an impression of a German impressionist doing impressions. Enjoy.