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.

So to the indifferent inquirer who asks why Memorial Day is still kept up we may answer, it celebrates and solemnly reaffirms from year to year a national act of enthusiasm and faith. It embodies in the most impressive form our belief that to act with enthusiasm and faith is the condition of acting greatly. To fight out a war, you must believe something and want something with all your might. So must you do to carry anything else to an end worth reaching. More than that, you must be willing to commit yourself to a course, perhaps a long and hard one, without being able to foresee exactly where you will come out. All that is required of you is that you should go somewhither as hard as ever you can. The rest belongs to fate. One may fall-at the beginning of the charge or at the top of the earthworks; but in no other way can he reach the rewards of victory.

When it was felt so deeply as it was on both sides that a man ought to take part in the war unless some conscientious scruple or strong practical reason made it impossible, was that feeling simply the requirement of a local majority that their neighbors should agree with them? I think not: I think the feeling was right-in the South as in the North. I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.

If this be so, the use of this day is obvious. It is true that I cannot argue a man into a desire. If he says to me, Why should I seek to know the secrets of philosophy? Why seek to decipher the hidden laws of creation that are graven upon the tablets of the rocks, or to unravel the history of civilization that is woven in the tissue of our jurisprudence, or to do any great work, either of speculation or of practical affairs? I cannot answer him; or at least my answer is as little worth making for any effect it will have upon his wishes if he asked why I should eat this, or drink that. You must begin by wanting to. But although desire cannot be imparted by argument, it can be by contagion. Feeling begets feeling, and great feeling begets great feeling. We can hardly share the emotions that make this day to us the most sacred day of the year, and embody them in ceremonial pomp, without in some degree imparting them to those who come after us. I believe from the bottom of my heart that our memorial halls and statues and tablets, the tattered flags of our regiments gathered in the Statehouses, are worth more to our young men by way of chastening and inspiration than the monuments of another hundred years of peaceful life could be.

--Oliver Wendell Holmes. (Via Paul Rosenzweig.)

Busy with end-of-school events--child number three, Nico, graduated from high school this weekend--I've fallen a few days behind in my reading, so I only just now came across the memorandum that Roger Ailes, CEO of Fox News, sent to Fox employees four days ago.  

You'd expect the leader of a news organization to create a flap when one of his reporters gets shoved around by the feds, and Ailes certainly sticks up for Fox reporter James Rosen. But only Roger Ailes could have written a note of such angry defiance--and such insistent patriotism.  

You could close out Memorial Day in worse ways than by reading this:

Dear colleagues,

The recent news about the FBI’s seizure of the phone and email records of Fox News employees, including James Rosen, calls into question whether the federal government is meeting its constitutional obligation to preserve and protect a free press in the United States. We reject the government's efforts to criminalize the pursuit of investigative journalism and falsely characterize a Fox News reporter to a Federal judge as a "co-conspirator" in a crime. I know how concerned you are because so many of you have asked me: why should the government make me afraid to use a work phone or email account to gather news or even call a friend or family member? Well, they shouldn’t have done it. The administration’s attempt to intimidate Fox News and its employees will not succeed and their excuses will stand neither the test of law, the test of decency, nor the test of time. We will not allow a climate of press intimidation, unseen since the McCarthy era, to frighten any of us away from the truth.

I am proud of your tireless effort to report the news over the last 17 years. I stand with you, I support you and I thank you for your reporting with courageous optimism. Too many Americans fought and died to protect our unique American right of press freedom. We can’t and we won’t forget that. To be an American journalist is not only a great responsibility, but also a great honor. To be a Fox journalist is a high honor, not a high crime. Even this memo of support will cause some to demonize us and try to find irrelevant things to cause us to waver. We will not waver.

As Fox News employees, we sometimes are forced to stand alone, but even then when we know we are reporting what is true and what is right, we stand proud and fearless.  Thank you for your hard work and all your efforts.

Sincerely,

Roger Ailes

You may or may not have heard of the Judson Welliver Society.  It was the creation of William Safire, the now-departed columnist for The New York Times and before that a speechwriter for President Richard Nixon.  Periodically it brings together former presidential speechwriters from all prior administrations with living speechwriters.  Peter has asked me to report on this year's meeting, which he could not attend and which was on Tuesday a week ago.

Actually, "society" is too grand a term. A "once every year or two depending on nothing in particular assemblage for drinking, eating and (what else?) speechifying" would be more like it.  

Last Tuesday members gathered at the home of Chris Matthews. Before his leg tingled at McNBC, Chris was a speechwriter for Jimmy Carter and then an aide to Tip O'Neill.  Politics aside, he is a very good guy and, with his wife, Kathleen, was an impeccable host.

Safire convened the first of these dinners mid-way through the Reagan Administration.  He made a point, which has been continued ever since, of inviting the current presidential writers.  I was in the White House at the time.  I believe my inaugural dinner (we former presidential speechwriters like to use terms like "inaugural"in reference to ourselves, a subtle hint at past glories) was the second convocation, or perhaps the third.  

Of that first dinner I remember in particular Clark Clifford's talk.  Clifford had been the principal political aide as well as speechwriter for Harry S Truman (Truman aficionados please note that, in Truman's own style, I deployed no period or other punctuation after the president's middle initial; Turman had no middle name, only that single letter).  Tall, lean, as elegant in manner and dress as any human being I have ever laid eyes on, Clifford told the most amazing stories.  He had everyone on the floor laughing.  At the next dinner two years later, Clifford spoke again, and told the same stories word for word again, as he did at the next one I attended, which was his last.  Thing is, each time he rehearsed his repertoire, it was with such energy and such a sense of fun that everyone died laughing all over.  He was a spectacular story teller.

This year a film crew was present.  Robert Schlesinger -- son of Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (JFK speechwriter and historian) -- is producing a documentary follow-on to White House Ghosts, his excellent book on presidential speechwriting and speechwriters from FDR to George W. Bush (http://www.amazon.com/White-House-Ghosts-Presidents-Speechwriters/dp/B003H4RDCO).  The crew set up right behind me, and judging from the camera's height and the occasional, "Oh sorry," the top of my head may be in for a starring role.

This year at least one veteran of each administration represented spoke, including John Podhoretz (Reagan, now editor of Commentary magazine), Mary Kate Cary (Bush 41, now a columnist for U.S. News), Jeffrey Shesol (Clinton, now partner in West Wing Writers), Michael Waldman (Clinton, now president of NYU Law School's Brennan Center), and  John McConnell (Bush 43, now a much-in-demand writer and speaker).  The Carter administration was particularly heavily spoken for and about by Carter writers Hendrik Hertzberg (now political commentator at The New Yorker), James Fallows (The Atlantic), and Gordon Stewart (chairman of the Society and MC of the evening).  In addition to Schlesinger, family  represented several of the departed members including Ted Sorensen and Bill Safire. 

I haven't mentioned all the writers  or all who spoke, but everyone who got up was witty or moving or both.  Particularly good, for different reasons, were Dana Rohrabacher (Reagan, now a member of Congress) and Matthews.

Rohrabacher told a story of Reagan's 1984 trip to Ireland and a presidential speech scheduled for delivery while there.  The speech included a Gaelic phrase that some staffer's friends at a Washington-area Irish bar had suggested as appropriate.  It seems the speech flew through the clearance process and only at the last minute did anyone think to check what the phrase meant.  Let's just say, it turned out to have been a practical joke that the president would not have found funny had the phrase's meaning been discovered AFTER delivery.

By the way, had Reagan delivered it, he would not have been the first president to have stumbled so.  Other than Reagan's "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," the best-known presidential address in Cold War Berlin was JFK's when he said in German, "I am a Berliner."  Except that the key word was not quite right.  It turned out he actually said, "I am a jelly donut."  The crowd cheered anyway.

Rohrabacher closed with a heartfelt affirmation of the common goal of serving the nation and all it stands for. 

Matthews spoke about working on a book about Reagan and Tip O'Neill.  Reagan and O'Neill were very different men, he said, coming from very different places in the political world.  They fought each other hard, but they also worked hard and maturely  to produced deals for the good of the country.  He talked about what made the relationship work.

Maybe I am wrong, but in listening I felt Matthews was contrasting the current president unfavorably with Reagan, much less if at all the current speaker with O'Neill.  If so, it would not be new.  Despite the tingling leg, Matthews has ripped into Obama publicly on several occasions for not listening to Congress, not dealing with them, not undertaking the hard, essentially door to door labor (except that instead of working precincts, presidents work senators and congress members) a president has to do to be effective.  In public in the past he has seemed dismayed and even at times seems disgusted with the Obama operation. 

Except this evening, courtesy kept him from being so direct.  The current writers were there.  He left his audience to draw their own conclusions.

Remember, Lord, the fallen

Who died in fields of war,

In flaming clouds, in screaming crowds

On streets that are no more,

That we today might waken

And greet this day in peace

With grateful prayer for those who bear

The storms that never cease.

Remember friends and strangers,

And those forgotten now,

Whose names are known to you alone,

Before whose love we bow

And ask that you surround them

With mercy’s endless light

That they may live, and we forgive

The foe they went to fight.

 

Remember, Lord, the living,

Who bear the pain of loss—

A death she died who stood beside

Her Son upon the cross.

Remember all your children,

The dead and those who weep,

And make us one beneath the sun

Where love will never sleep.

—Genevieve Glen, O.S.B.

Edit of 9:15PM Pacific:  In his comment, notmarx wished that I'd posted all three stanzas of this marvelous hymn instead of stopping with the first.  So?  So I added the final two.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
  That mark our place; and in the sky
  The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
  Loved and were loved, and now we lie
        In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
  The torch; be yours to hold it high.
  If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
        In Flanders fields.

Every Memorial Day, I read this poem and remember the charge given us by the fallen. To assist our Pinterest-ready, Buzzfeeding world, I highlighted my favorite bit in the adjacent graphic.

Enjoy your day to the fullest. But above all,  remember.

A few Harvard Law School students have endured university censorship to protest the inanity of their Class Day speakers.  The pugnacious group (called "HLS is Bogus") should be applauded for demanding more from the school.  But while HLS insists on a self-delusional "HLS Thinks Big" event this week, law schools actually think smaller than small --- and it's a problem graver than hypocritical leftist graduation addresses.

Here's a recurring scene in legal studies . . . You're learning about, for example, the needless overcomplexity of the tax code.  When someone asks why it has to be this way, why deductions and credits appear so arbitrary and so difficult to discern, the class enjoys a hearty chuckle at his obvious naiveté.  Usually the mystified professor will act the cop ("I don't make the laws . . .") and move on, but if he's bold enough to be honest, he'll say that it's because the tax code is also a lawyer employment act.  The class laughs again, this time, content that the code's complexity will help them pay off law school debts and pleased that they'll soon know something that the rest of America can't figure out.  (Now that's a "valuable" education!)

If a student hazards to wield a normative thought about how a law is enforced or why certain regulation is senseless, he has to subordinate those reflections to, at best, an exam's "policy" section (which professors never read).  Elite law schools aren't fostering original thinking or "big ideas," they're creating waves of followers who excel at "issue spotting" (applying a fixed body of law to a prefabricated body of facts under time pressure).  This may be a lawyerly skill, but its inherent lowness partly explains why we continue to be frustrated with the absurdity of our legislation process and justice system.

Speaking of justice, law schools dare not tackle sticky subjects like what "justice" or "equality" ought to mean.  Too subjective or theoretical, perhaps --- as if the Supreme Court's wild interpretations of the Equal Protection Clause are not similarly subjective.  Instead of inculcating an awe for the majesty of the Law, law schools churn out graduates who view the law as an instrument to manipulate for their own pecuniary or ideological gain.  Others simply abhor the law as meaningless minutiae and decide to tack on business school tuition to their debt pile.

It's been big news that law school is a poor investment, and observers often lament the lack of practical training to prepare alumni for plying their trade.  These are valid criticisms, and I would prefer an apprenticeship system with three years of clinical work than the current farce of a curriculum.  If law schools are going to neglect practical considerations anyway, they should at least try to energize students when they question the status quo of our broken body of laws and enliven original thinking.  Instead, as HLS has done, they squelch dissension, reward rote minds, and pretend that an annual panel "thinks big."  It's not just the graduation speaker, it's the audience, too.  Law schools, like our colleges, breed "moral midgets."

A healthy warning about information gathering on the internet is coming from an unlikely source—Eli Pariser of MoveOn.org. He helped develop phone-banking tools and precinct programs in 2004 and 2006 that laid the groundwork for Obama’s web-powered presidential campaign. Pariser is also a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and author of “The Filter Bubble,” which exposes how personalized search might be skewing our worldview.

I recently listened to a TED talk Pariser did a couple of years ago about online filter bubbles, and it put the “low-information voter” in a new context for me—it’s not just that voters aren’t interested in finding out what’s going on in the country—they’re not getting access to the information in the first place, because it’s being edited out by algorithms based on personalized interests.

Pariser explains that the internet is supposed to be a tool to bring people together, that it can be great for democracy as new voices are heard and different ideas shared. But he says there’s been a shift in how information is flowing online, and that “it’s invisible.” He also warns that “if we don’t pay attention to it, it could be a real problem.”

So I first noticed this in a place I spend a lot of time —my Facebook page. I'm progressive, politically—big surprise—but I've always gone out of my way to meet conservatives. I like hearing what they're thinking about; I like seeing what they link to; I like learning a thing or two. And so I was surprised when I noticed one day that the conservatives had disappeared from my Facebook feed. And what it turned out was going on was that Facebook was looking at which links I clicked on, and it was noticing that, actually, I was clicking more on my liberal friends' links than on my conservative friends' links. And without consulting me about it, it had edited them out. They disappeared.

Facebook isn’t the only place doing algorithmic editing of the web. Google’s doing it too. So is Yahoo. So is Netflix. So are a lot of companies and organizations. Results are based on personal interests and habits. If we all search for the same thing, all of us will get different results (and you won’t have the opportunity to see my results just as I won’t see yours).

Pariser explains that even when we’re logged out, there are “57 signals that Google looks at—everything from what kind of computer you’re on to what kind of browser you’re using to where you’re located.” All of it designed to personally tailor our search results. Pariser tells of how he asked some friends to google Egypt and to send him the results; he was shocked by how different they were. One friend didn’t get any results about protests in Egypt while another’s was full of them—and it was the big story of the day.

This kind of personalization of searches “moves us very quickly toward a world in which the internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see.” Pariser calls this the “filter bubble.”

And your filter bubble is your own personal, unique universe of information that you live in online. And what’s in your filter bubble depends on who you are, and it depends on what you do. But the thing is that you don’t decide what gets in. And more importantly, you don’t actually see what gets edited out.

Pariser says this reveals that we we’ve gotten the story about the internet wrong. In the past, before the internet, we were subject to information gatekeepers in the form of Walter Cronkite and Peter Jennings, of the editors at the New York Times and the Washington Post. With the rise of the internet, the information floodgates opened and swept away the traditional gatekeepers.

But, according to Pariser, that flood of information isn’t flowing like we think it is. “What we're seeing is more of a passing of the torch from human gatekeepers to algorithmic ones. And the thing is that the algorithms don't yet have the kind of embedded ethics that the editors did.”

While Pariser recognizes the wonders of the web, he calls for individuals to exercise more control over their search results. He also calls for programmers to encode algorithms with a sense of public life, a sense of civic responsibility. They need to be “transparent enough” to allow us to “see what the rules are that determine what gets through our filters.”

I think we really need the internet to be that thing that we all dreamed of it being. We need it to connect us all together. We need it to introduce us to new ideas and new people and different perspectives. And it’s not going to do that if it leaves us all isolated in a Web of one.

Do you search out different views and perspectives on the internet, or do you live in a filter bubble? If you've broken out of your bubble, what advice can you offer others to break out of theirs?