My dad owned a bar. It was an Irish bar, in so much as my dad is Irish-American and likes to surround himself with signed photos of Paul Hornung, hurleys, and framed copies of the Easter Proclamation of 1916. (You could look those things up, or just close your eyes and imagine you are sitting in a standard-issue Irish pub on the East Coast of the United States.)

There weren't too many genuine Paddys around to lend their sweet lilting brogues to the proceedings, but when there were, my father would generally leap at the chance to hire one. It was good business to have a bit of the auld sod about the place. It lent an authenticity that went beyond a jukebox stocked with the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. It set my dad's place apart. Without it, Hennessey's was just another gin joint with a sticky floor.

As an adult, I worked in more than a few Irish bars in New York City. Although I was born and bred in the green fields of northern New Jersey, in the heat of battle I would occasionally affect a bit of an accent if I thought it might make me money. This game had to be played carefully as it could easily lead to the question no impostor ever wants to hear: Where are you from?

I never lied. I always fessed up. But if pressed, I would firmly deny that I was trying to pass myself off as an Irishman. 

"It's just an occupational hazard," I'd say, noting that everybody else in the place was Irish. "Hard not to pick it up, you know what I mean? It just seeps in." Slink. Slink. Slink. 

To me, speaking in an Irish accent was worth the embarrassment of occasionally getting caught because it made business sense. People go to an Irish bar to get the Irish thing. The pasta tastes better in an Italian restaurant when you think the guys in the back are all from Naples or Calabria. You go up to Harlem to get soul food made by people who embody that culture and know how to present it. 

So what do we make of this?

A Welsh pub in New York is facing a fine after advertising for staff with knowledge of Welsh culture.

Michael Colbert, originally from Wrexham, and his American wife Jennifer have been accused of discrimination.

They say they face a fine of $7,500 (£4,800) if they lose their case over the LongBow pub in Brooklyn.

They claim the advert wanted someone with a "specific skill set" but the New York City Commission of Human Rights said it believed it was discrimination.

Yes, New York City has a Commission of Human Rights. Yes, they are spending scarce resources on this nonsense. Yes, it is absurd. Yes. Yes. Yes. Bloomberg. Bloomberg. Bloomberg.

But ... is there something here? Isn't this really a question about where to draw the line? We don't want businesses refusing to hire people because of their gender, or the color of their skin, or their sexual orientation. We get that and  appreciate it. But a business can refuse to hire you if you don't have the right training or the right education, can't they? When does that process of discrimination verge into something sinister. Someone has to set a standard, right? 

I suppose, but when you set up a Human Rights Commission to find and eliminate discrimination in your city, that commission is going to keep searching for a problem until it finds one. And if it can't find one, it will define discrimination down until it does.

My dad's place had a sign behind the bar claiming that management had the right to refuse service to ANYONE for ANY REASON. A great many people were denied service simply because they were drunk. That's about as clear a violation of human rights as I can think of, yet no one ever complained to the authorities. Probably because when their heads cleared, they realized how silly they had been.

Maybe the same thing will happen here. 

Rod Dreher (author of the new and critically acclaimed Little Way of Ruthie Leming) links to this Atlantic piece headlined "Why Do NPR Reporters Have Such Great Names?"

It's a fun article that points out that every workplace has interesting names, but that you just don't usually hear full names spoken out loud daily. (Although, no offense to the fine folks here at Ricochet, but the known commodities have some seriously boring names.) You'd never make it on public radio, Rob Long! Oh wait.

And there's hope for the rest of us. From the article:

But what if your parents didn't bless you with an NPR name? You could, of course, make up your own -- novelist Liana Maeby suggests sticking your middle initial in your first name, and adding it to the smallest foreign place you've ever visited. (Her NPR name is Liarna Kassel.) But can you still make it in the radio business with a plain name? Robert Smith of Planet Money told me by email that the only reason to change his name "would be so that I could be more famous. You would remember it better if I ended by reports with, 'I'm Mobius Tutti.'" But at the same time, he says, "I'm in this business to tell other people's stories, and not to promote myself or my own name. Being a Robert Smith is always a good reminder that you aren't that different than the people you cover."

I like Mollzie Hřbitovní. What's yours? And tell us about the smallest foreign locale you've visited. Anyone else visited the ossuary in Sedlec? A bone church really stays with you, you know? I'm cheating, perhaps, by using a portion of Sedlec's "Hřbitovní kostel Všech Svatých" for NPR purposes.

(The headline is a reference to Ophabia Quist-Arcten, current NPR reporter who always signs off saying "in Daaaa-kaaaaaah!" Gets me every time.)

Maybe the end times really are nigh.

Slate has come out swinging in defense of polygamy:

While the Supreme Court and the rest of us are all focused on the human right of marriage equality, let’s not forget that the fight doesn’t end with same-sex marriage. We need to legalize polygamy, too. Legalized polygamy in the United States is the constitutional, feminist, and sex-positive choice. More importantly, it would actually help protect, empower, and strengthen women, children, and families.

Argument 1: American families already come in all shapes and sizes. If one-man/one-woman is legal, one-man/multiple women should be legal too: 

Many people argue that there is no such thing as a “healthy, responsible” polygamous family, particularly for the children born into one...The earnestness of these arguments is touching but idealistic...Two-parent families are not the reality for millions of American children. Divorce, remarriage, surrogate parents, extended relatives, and other diverse family arrangements mean families already come in all sizes—why not recognize that legally?

Argument 2: The Constitution upholds freedom of religious expression, and most polygamists are exercising their religious beliefs:

Most polygamous families are motivated by religious faith, such as fundamentalist Mormonism or Islam, and as long as all parties involved are adults, legally able to sign marriage contracts, there is no constitutional reason why they shouldn’t be able to express that faith in their marriages. Legalized polygamous marriage would also be good for immigrant families, some of whom have legally polygamous marriages in their home countries that get ripped apart during the immigration process.

Argument 3: Polygamy is pro-feminist:

The case for polygamy is, in fact, a feminist one and shows women the respect we deserve. Here’s the thing: As women, we really can make our own choices. We just might choose things people don’t like. If a woman wants to marry a man, that’s great. If she wants to marry another woman, that’s great too. If she wants to marry a hipster, well—I suppose that’s the price of freedom.

And if she wants to marry a man with three other wives, that’s her damn choice.

...As a feminist, it’s easy and intuitive to support women who choose education, independence, and careers. It’s not as intuitive to support women who choose values and lifestyles that seem outdated or even sexist, but those women deserve our respect just as much as any others. It’s condescending, not supportive, to minimize them as mere “victims” without considering the possibility that some of them have simply made a different choice.

The feminist line, as delivered here, would seem to support polyandry (one wife, multiple husbands) as well as polygamy, a point curiously neglected by the author of the Slate piece. Well, no worries. That's next.

There has been much anxiety of late over the future of the legal services industry -- a term that covers both the private practice of law and legal education, but also extends beyond that to cover lawyers who work in government or in private business. In the Wall Street Journal today, I reviewed a particularly gloomy take on the future of the industry: Steven J. Harper's new book, The Lawyer Bubble: A Profession in Crisis.

The review that I wrote was meant to call attention to the overwrought nature of his conclusion. While Harper's book focuses on the collapse of a few poorly managed megafirms, I note that he:

... [I]gnores the more salient fact that the vast majority of big firms have avoided this grisly fate. Mr. Harper never looks into how these savvy firms survive in a tough environment. They do so, in part, by avoiding overstaffing, by cutting bad clients and by paying premium wages to young associates—many of whom, debts paid, happily bail out for less stressful work as in-house counsel for companies or in the government and nonprofit sectors. Over all, the model proves stable: With Congress passing monstrosities like Dodd-Frank and the Affordable Care Act, top-flight legal talent is needed more than ever to guide well-heeled clients through the growing regulatory maze.

Ironically, Mr. Harper misses the most significant recent dislocation in the practice of law, which is at the consumer end of the market: the rise of low-cost online law firms like LegalZoom and RocketLawyer that aid clients in drafting standard partnerships, wills, leases and the like. These firms pose a mortal threat to sole practitioners, not to Big Law.

In some e-mail correspondence after the publication, I received many comments by individuals whose observations do not quite jibe with my own. One point in particular that is worth some mention is the observation that the stability that I see in the practice of law conceals the huge amount of churning and adaptation that goes on inside the field, so that it is a mistake to think of the profession as though it were stable. 

I agree with that general observation, and only meant to say that the adaptations thus far taken by many firms have staved off a far worse fate. But in any dynamic market, even in prosperous times, no one should ever sit on his or her laurels. It is always necessary to innovate and to respond.  

It is also clear that no one person has a full knowledge of how the profession works. I have been active in a number of different contexts -- from writing amicus briefs to giving client advice to working as an expert witness.  All of these experiences revolve around a common core, but it would be foolhardy to make any claim to having all the answers.

For those Ricochet members in the legal community, what trends and shifts in the legal profession have you witnessed during your careers?

I will be blogging for the Louis D. Brandeis Center three times this week. Check out my first post that outlining the themes of my book, Unlearning Liberty.

...thirty years of politically correct censorship on campus is promoting bad intellectual habits by encouraging students to talk only to those with whom they already agree, join ideological groups that only reinforce their existing beliefs, and avoid engaging with professors for fear of lower grades (or even, potentially, punishment). This process supercharges group polarization and allows for the cheap dodges to debate and discussion that permeate our larger society. If higher education was really effective at making us deeper, more nuanced, more sophisticated thinkers and arguers, then we should be living in a golden age of American discourse. But I don’t think anyone would suggest that is the case.

And check out the video:

President Barack Obama made the following statement yesterday to the graduating class of Ohio State University:

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

We have never been a people who place all our faith in government to solve our problems. We shouldn’t want to. But we don’t think the government is the source of all our problems, either. Because we understand that this democracy is ours. And as citizens, we understand that it’s not about what America can do for us, it’s about what can be done by us, together, through the hard and frustrating but absolutely necessary work of self-government. And class of 2013, you have to be involved in that process.

Obama seems to think that warnings about tyranny are new. Quite the contrary—they began not with the Tea Party but with the founding fathers:

Alexander Hamilton warned, “If the federal government should overpass the just bounds of its authority and make a tyrannical use of its powers, the people, whose creature it is, must appeal to the standard they have formed, and take such measures to redress the injury done to the Constitution as the exigency may suggest and prudence justify.”

George Washington warned Americans to be on guard against tyranny because “government is not reason; it is not eloquence. It is force. And force, like fire, is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”

Advising college students to reject such warnings is a call for them to reject our nation’s founding principles and the wisdom of those who knew how to preserve liberty.

Obama said that our nation is an experiment in self-rule and that anyone who criticizes the government is criticizing the very nature of democratic self-government. This is not true, of course, because critics of the government today are not critical of our democratic way of life or our republican form of government but of the erosion of it over time.

However, Obama’s comment does bring to light an important point (though not the collectivist one he intended). Government is, indeed, “by the people.” The bedrock of a self-ruling nation is the individual exercising self-government. It is the first foundation, a foundation built on the unchanging, objective morality of nature and nature’s God, and a foundation supported by the family, by religious institutions, and finally by the state.

When self-government erodes, everything else eventually crumbles. This is a point the founders made repeatedly:

Washington in his First Inaugural address in 1789 stated, “The foundation of our national policy will be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality; ...the propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained.” 

Thomas Jefferson (who was no Christian moralist) said, “Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God” and “Freedom is lost gradually from an uninterested, uninformed, and uninvolved people.”

James Madison stated, “We base all our experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government.”

And, finally, John Adams said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people, and is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.”

Obama told the students of Ohio State that those who warn of tyranny suggest “that our brave, and creative, and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can’t be trusted.” Conservatives don’t think self-rule (democracy) is a sham or that it can’t be trusted. The founders certainly believed Americans had the capacity to exercise self-rule free from the imposing power of a king; they had every confidence in the success of the American experiment.

However, they understood that it can only succeed if self-government is exercised according to moral, rational principles. The warnings the founders issued about tyranny were based on the knowledge that liberty will inevitably be lost if individuals abandon self-government to anarchy of the soul.

Obama was wrong to tell college students to ignore warnings of tyranny—warnings such as these are part of our American heritage. But wouldn’t conservatives also be wrong to tell students that the only threat to their liberty is the increasing power of the government at the hands of tyrannically minded officials?

If we have learned anything from the founders, shouldn’t we also be telling students that one of the greatest threats to their personal liberty is their personal immorality?

Just as we cite Madison and Montiesquieu about the dangers of unlimited government, shouldn’t we also quote the words of Benjamin Franklin, that “only a virtuous people are capable of freedom; as nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters”?

If we don’t, if we’re too afraid because we don’t want to seem intolerant or judgmental, shouldn’t we accept some of the blame for our nation’s decline?

Even if US budgets were deep in the black, it would be perfectly legitimate to examine the fiscal costs of legalizing millions of currently undocumented workers. But such analysis should provide as full an economic picture as possible for policymakers. A new Heritage foundation study, while providing some useful data points, is frustratingly incomplete.

Certainly pundits and activists with axes to grind will run hard with Heritage’s claim that “former unlawful immigrants together …  would generate a lifetime fiscal deficit (total benefits minus total taxes) of $6.3 trillion.” Quite a talking point — one researchers arrive at via a fairly straightforward calculation. They simply determine the difference between their forecast of futures taxes paid and benefits received. Fair enough and good to know.

The study, however, fails to capture indirect but important economic impacts of immigration such as increasing economic activity or positively affecting American employment. Both of those would lead to higher tax revenues and reduced transfer payments. Surely every effort should be given to factoring in such dynamic impacts of immigration reform. The Heritage study says, for instance, that “taxes and benefits must be viewed holistically.” So, too, immigration overall. Big policy changes don’t exist in a vacuum, isolated from the rest of the economy.

Not making these added calculations raises red flags as to the study’s completeness. What about studies of US states that find economic contributions of low-skill immigrants “dwarf their fiscal costs?” Another example: Heritage claims “that unlawful immigration appears to depress the wages of low-skill U.S.-born and lawful immigrant workers by 10 percent, or $2,300, per year.” Yet other highly regarded research finds wage gains at all education levels for US-born workers.

Is immigration reform that potentially expands the population of less-skilled individuals a smart economic policy or not? It’s impossible to draw a reasonable conclusion based only on the Heritage study.

Last week, I posted about the revelation that the State Department Inspector General's office was launching an investigation into Foggy Bottom's official report on what happened in Benghazi, as well as the fact that the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee was going to be holding hearings on the attack this week featuring new witnesses who got skipped over during the official review.

At the time, I wrapped up the post this way:

It's good to see we're digging deeper into this -- sunshine being the best disinfectant and all that. But one has to wonder: what, if anything, could come out of those hearings to shake the general public from their relative indifference to this story?

Well, if it's going to happen, it just might be this. Here's what CBS News is reporting today:

The deputy of slain U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens has told congressional investigators that a team of Special Forces prepared to fly from Tripoli to Benghazi during the Sept. 11, 2012 attacks was forbidden from doing so by U.S. Special Operations Command South Africa.

The account from Gregory Hicks is in stark contrast to assertions from the Obama administration, which insisted that nobody was ever told to stand down and that all available resources were utilized. Hicks gave private testimony to congressional investigators last month in advance of his upcoming appearance at a congressional hearing Wednesday.

According to excerpts released Monday, Hicks told investigators that SOCAFRICA commander Lt. Col. Gibson and his team were on their way to board a C-130 from Tripoli for Benghazi prior to an attack on a second U.S. compound "when [Col. Gibson] got a phone call from SOCAFRICA which said, 'you can't go now, you don't have the authority to go now.' And so they missed the flight ... They were told not to board the flight, so they missed it."

No assistance arrived from the U.S. military outside of Libya during the hours that Americans were under attack or trapped inside compounds by hostile forces armed with rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and AK-47 rifles.

Hold on, everybody. It's about to get real.

What’s a “messenger ballot?”  Excuse me if my answer is a bit sketchy, but I’m just learning about it from a group of bad guys who appear to be illegally exploiting it.

I don’t know if other states are doing this, the history of it, the need for it, etc., but here in New Jersey we are learning the perils of not having people show up to vote in person and present identification.

Apparently a “messenger ballot” is allowed when one person acts as a “messenger” for a voter, picks up forms for the voter to be allowed to vote by messenger, then votes for the voter by absentee ballot.

Gee, what could possibly go wrong?

Does the phrase “penchant for fraud” even cross the minds of legislatures when passing such a statute? Or, in a Democrat-controlled legislature like New Jersey, is fraud the goal?

Goal or not, it certainly seems to be the result in Asbury Park, a city poorer than most and more liberal than San Francisco (with a fraction of the feigned sophistication).

Residents of Asbury Park vote for their entire governing body (5 people) all at once, in an off year and in May -- when no one is paying attention.

There are 22 people running this year - four “tickets” of 5 people and 2 independents.

With apologies to George Peppard and Mr. T, one of these tickets refers to itself as the “A-Team.” I refrain from calling them a Motley Crew for fear of having to apologize to other Motley Crews for the insult. 

One A-Team candidate, Duanne Small, sports a resume with more incarcerations for gang-like offenses than the lead character in a 1970s “black-sploitation” movie. 

Another A-Team candidate, Remond Palmer, was removed from the Board of Education by the State because of a prior cocaine conviction.

Worse than those two, Jim Keady abandoned his previous position on the Asbury Park City Council mid-term after impregnating a woman who wasn’t his wife and abruptly leaving town with her (then subsequently leaving her and coming back -- but not to his wife).

With that many sinister characters in one place, if the prosecutor’s office wants to find impropriety involving messenger ballots, all they have to do is raid the campaign office of the “A-Team.”

Which they did Saturday.         

According to an online report of The Asbury Park Sun:

“In the 2009 municipal election, no messenger ballots were requested whereas for this election, 336 messenger ballots have been requested, according to records from the election offices of the Monmouth County Clerk.”

Turns out that all the other candidates in Asbury Park have stated they are not involved in messenger ballots, but this A-Team has campaign staffers acting as messengers. Good grief.

Right now there are unconfirmed reports, not yet connected to any campaign, that someone has used the names of displaced Hurricane Sandy victims and registered them in addresses in Asbury Park that don’t actually exist. Double good grief.

This brings me to the need for voter ID laws. You know the problem.  The moment you try to have someone show ID to vote, like they have to show ID to catch a fish, the Democrats scream, “Racist! The evil Republican is trying to stop black people from voting!”

In 2013, the moment anyone hears the shout of the word “racist!” the media amplifies it, white people cower from it, black people believe it, and the heavy hammer of political correctness destroys any chance of a discussion on the merits of a proposal.

Truth is, Voter ID laws will protect the votes of all people, black and white, from being stolen by the likes of Asbury Park’s notorious “A-Team” and the other ACORN-like groups they emulate.

Here is an opportunity for those who favor fair elections to bring the issue of Voter ID to the forefront and discuss it with America using this “messenger vote” fraud in Asbury Park as the conversation starter.

If this were an issue liberals favored, the mainstream media would spread the story of the Asbury Park incident and the need for voter ID laws for us. They would frame it as a civil rights problem (white man Jim Keady exploiting poor black voters in Asbury Park).

We can’t rely on a fair shake from media, so we’ll have to do it ourselves. Try to get everyone talking about the need for voter ID laws to protect all voters of every color, with this unfortunate event in Asbury Park as the exemplar of what will happen to fair elections if we fail to do so.

Niall Ferguson is scrambling to save his career/life/reputation after he suggested that because John Maynard Keynes was gay and childless, he lacked concern for posterity.

How did I receive a degree in economics from the University of Colorado without knowing Keynes was gay? I'm sure, by now, you can't graduate without two semesters of Integrative Queer Keynesiology and Social Thought.

Anyway, the comments are being met with such thoughtful responses as that Ferguson took "gay bashing to new heights." And here's Ferguson's apology.

Jonah Goldberg has some thoughts:

I don’t endorse the theory and completely understand why it offends people. But it’s hardly as if it’s unheard of in academia to speculate that ones sexual orientation (or race, or gender etc) can influence a person’s views on public policy. Is it really nuts now to think that having kids changes a person’s time horizons? 

More relevant,  this theory about Keynes is hardly new. Joseph Schumpeter, I thought famously, suggested that Keynes’ childlessness was a key issue. In his obituary of Keynes Schumpeter wrote: “He was childless and his philosophy of life was essentially a short-run philosophy. 

Goldberg points to a passage from a 1986 Harvard Business Review article by George Sim Johnston, reviewing a book by Henry Kaufman:

As I say, Dr. Kaufman counsels bond investors to forget the past. Early in the book, however, he tells us that his most strongly held views, particularly with regard to inflation, probably derive from his past, which began in the Weimar Republic. He was born just after the hyperinflation and was weaned on family stories about the overnight disappearance of life savings. Ever since, he has been wary of the state’s ability to print money.

It would be useful if more economists prefaced their works with such biographical material. As William James pointed out, analytical thinking always begins with some personal bias; scratch a mathematical model and you’ll find that its creator prefers blueberry jam to marmalade. John Maynard Keynes would have done a great service if he had begun The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money with the disclosure that he was a Bloomsbury aesthete and a practicing homosexual. He could have explained how he and friends did not believe in self-denial or consider that they had any obligation to posterity. (An historian has pointed out that Keynes’s famous remark, “In the long run we are all dead,” is easy to make if you have no children and don’t want any.) Perhaps as a result we might have lower federal deficits.

He provides examples of other authors, such as William Grieder and William Rees Mogg, talking about how Keynes' economic doctrines were the result of his rejection of certain social mores. The latter argued that Keynes rejected the gold standard, for instance, because he rejected all standards.

There's much more but Goldberg ends:

So Keynes believed that Puritan values inclined people to embrace an economic theory (capitalism),  but the Ferguson episode teaches us that is now beyond outrageous to suggest that Keynes’ rejection of puritan values inclined him to embrace a slightly different economic theory (Keynesianism)? Got it.

What I find interesting about the Ferguson controversy is how disconnected it is to the past. Even academics I respect reacted to Ferguson’s comments as if they bordered on unimaginable, unheard of madness. I understand that we live in a moment where any negative comment connected to homosexuality is not only wrong but “gay bashing.” But Ferguson was trafficking in an old theory that was perfectly within the bounds of intellectual discourse not very long ago. Now, because of a combination of indifference to intellectual history and politically correct piety he must don the dunce cap. Good to know.

Whatever other freedoms this era encourages, freedom of discussion is not one of them. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Seriously:

After an unseemly brawl broke out in Venezuela’s national assembly this week, one of the bloodied opposition parliamentarians recounted how Diosdado Cabello, the assembly’s pro-government head, had looked down on the rowdy scene with a gleeful smile.

The punch-up, which followed Mr Cabello’s refusal to allow opposition deputies the floor unless they recognised Nicolás Maduro as Venezuela’s president, has highlighted the stark political tensions that have wracked the Opec country since the disputed April 14 election.

Following Mr Maduro’s narrow victory, many observers had expected the former union leader to become more radical politically, in order to keep the disparate ranks of “chavismo” together, while becoming necessarily more pragmatic in economics. So far, though, the 50-year-old socialist is only showing real signs of political radicalisation.

[…]

Prison minister Iris Varela has already threatened Henrique Capriles, the opposition leader, saying that she had prepared a jail cell for him and that he is responsible for the nine deaths that took place in street protests following the presidential elections.

The government has also arrested Timothy Tracy, a US documentary film-maker, for allegedly attempting to foment a “civil war”, and a retired general, Antonio Rivero, for inciting post-election violence. The opposition describes General Rivero as Mr Maduro’s first political prisoner.

And there’s also this:

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on Friday said Colombian ex-president Alvaro Uribe was plotting to kill him, adding to a deluge of accusations by the former bus driver in recent months.

“Uribe is behind a plot to kill me,” Maduro said in a televised speech. “Uribe is a killer. I have enough evidence of who is conspiring, and there are sectors of the Venezuelan right that are involved.”

He did not provide details.

The Venezuelan president, who was elected in April by a narrow margin, earlier this year accused the United States of seeking to kill opposition leader Henrique Capriles to stir chaos and spark a coup.

He later said he himself was the target of an assassination plot by mercenaries from El Salvador who had entered Venezuela.

The leftist, former President Hugo Chavez frequently clashed with Uribe while the two were both in office over issues ranging from border security to free trade agreements and military cooperation with the United States.

Chavez died in March after a two-year battle with cancer

Just hours before his death, Maduro alleged “imperialist” conspirators had infected the former president with the disease.

It should be noted, of course, that Chavez/Maduro supporters are strangely silent about the fact that their political idols are showing classic signs of insanity, and dragging an entire country down with them.

It's hard to imagine this ending well.

Oskar Lafontaine, finance minister of Germany and the launcher of the euro, is now calling for the currency to be broken up to avoid "disaster":

"The economic situation is worsening from month to month, and unemployment has reached a level that puts democratic structures ever more in doubt...Hopes that the creation of the euro would force rational economic behaviour on all sides were in vain," he said, adding that the policy of forcing Spain, Portugal, and Greece to carry out internal devaluations was a "catastrophe".

Lafontaine cautioned that "southern Europe, including France, will be forced by their current misery to fight back against German hegemony sooner or later." They already are. Yesterday, French finance minister Pierre Moscovici -- following a deal brokered with Brussels to allow France and Spain an extra two years to meet a deficit target of 3% of GDP -- announced, "Austerity is finished. This is a decisive turn in the history of the EU project since the euro. We're seeing the end of austerity dogma." Lest anyone miss it, he added, "It's a victory of the French point of view."

The Telegraph reports: 

The triumphalist tone may enrage hard-liners in Berlin and confirm fears that concessions will lead to a slippery slope towards fiscal chaos.

German Vice-Chancellor Philipp Rösler lashed out at the European Commission over the weekend, calling it "irresponsible" for undermining the belt-tightening agenda.

The Franco-German alliance that has driven EU politics for half a century is in ruins after France's Socialist Party hit out at the "selfish intransigence" of Mrs Merkel, accusing her thinking only of the "German savers, her trade balance, and her electoral future".

Italy, too, is getting restive. Premier Enrico Letta has decided that Italy will not submit to "death by austerity":

“Italy is dying from fiscal consolidation. Growth policies cannot wait any longer,” [Letta] told Italy’s parliament. He said the country is in “very serious” crisis after a decade of stagnation and warned of violent protest if the social malaise deepens.

The grand coalition of Left and Right - the first since the late 1940s - will abolish the hated IMU tax on primary residences, a wealth levy imposed by ex-premier Mario Monti, and push for tax cuts for business and young people to pull the country out of perma-slump. A rise in VAT to 22pc in July may be delayed.

Vice-premier Angelo Alfano - the appointee of ex-premier Silvio Berlusconi - said he agreed with every word from “beginning to end”, as the Berlusconi camp claimed “total victory” over the policy agenda.

Mr Letta said Italy would abide by EU budget pledges, but in reality he seems to have broken with the core demands of the EU fiscal compact.

The Bundesbank, meanwhile, has issued a report that completely undermines the European Central Bank's policy of backstopping bonds in the eurozone:

[The report is] a point by point assault on every claim made by ECB chief Mario Draghi to justify emergency rescue policies - or Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) - unveiled last summer to stop Spain’s debt crisis spiraling out of control.

The Draghi plan mobilized the ECB as lender of last resort and led to a spectacular fall in borrowing costs across the EMU periphery, buying nine months of financial calm. The credibility of the pledge rests entirely on German consent. Analysts say the crisis could erupt again at any moment if that is called into question.

“The report borders on economic warfare,” said Harvinder Sian from RBS. “We think there is going to be fear and dread in the market that the court will reject OMT.”

The document said OMT entails the purchase of “bad bonds”, violates ECB independence and entails a high risk of heavy losses in the “not unlikely” event that debtor states are forced out of EMU.

It said the Greek debacle had shown that conditions cannot be enforced, and, in any case, it is “very questionable” whether it is desirable to drive down the borrowing costs of profligate states.

To cap it all, the Bundesbank said the ECB has no mandate to uphold the “current composition of monetary union”. Its task is to uphold price stability and let the chips fall where they may.

The German high court is set to rule on the legality of the bond rescue plan on June 12, although there are doubts that a ruling will be handed down prior to Germany's elections in September. “They might refer the case to the European Court but that would leave the Sword of Damocles hanging over the market for another two years,” said David Marsh, author of books on the Bundesbank and EMU. Sovereign bond strategist Nicholas Spiro said markets are “sick and tired” of the eurozone debt crisis. “If the court sides with the Bundesbank in any way the whole house of cards could come crashing down,” he said.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan had something to say to Syrian President Bashar Assad today:

“If God permits, we will see this criminal, this murderer, receive his judgment in this world, and we will be grateful to [God] for it,” Turkish daily Hurriyet quoted Erdogan as saying.
"Hear me, Bashar Assad. You will give an account for this. You will pay a very, very heavy price for [only] showing the courage you cannot show others to the babies in the cradle with soothers in their mouths. God willing, the lamentations of these children will fall upon you as blessed revenge,” he added.
“For our Syrian brothers who are asking when God’s help will come, I want to say: God’s help is near,” Erdogan stated, according to Hurriyet.

This may be the most elegant threat since Inigo Montoya. Could anything inspire Obama to summon such operatic menace? 

We’ve all seen it hundreds of times. Athletes pointing to the sky in gratitude to God when they’ve won (and sometimes even when they’ve lost). Whether it’s Nick Swisher from the Cleveland Indians, Olympic athletes like Tervel Dlagnev after freestyle wrestling and Hunter Kemper at the end of a triathlon, or most notably Tim Tebow, it’s as American as apple pie. Until now.

As Texas high school sprinter Derrick Hayes crossed the finish line in the 4X100 relay with the team’s fastest time ever, he pointed to the sky. It was a natural impulse. It’s also what got the Columbus High School Mighty Cardinals team disqualified and out of the state championship.

“It was a reaction,” Derrick’s father, KC Hayes, said. “I mean you’re brought up your whole life that God gives you good things, you’re blessed.”

But the Texas school district has a zero tolerance for “excessive celebration” at sports events. Superintendent Robert O’Connor said that includes raising hands.

“I don’t think that the situation was technically a terrible scenario as far as his action, but the action did violate the context of the rule,” O’Connor said.

Like Shylock demanding his pound of flesh, O’Connor and the state have refused to budge.

Those coming to the team’s defense, including Derrick’s father, consider the disqualification a violation of religious freedom.

“You cross a finish line and you’ve accomplished a goal and within seconds it’s gone,” KC Hayes said. “To see four kids, you know, what does that tell them about the rest of their lives? You’re going to do what’s right, work extra hard, and have it ripped away from you?”

So now an act that was once commonplace (and still is in professional sports), has been deemed “excessive celebration” by the government powers that be. How ironic because it is not that at all. Quite the opposite. It’s an act of humility, a kind of sports version of non nobis, “Not to us, Lord, but to your name give glory.”

In a day of rampant narcissism among teens, this seems like the perfect message to encourage. Evidently not. Conformity to government regulations is the absolute, unwavering priority—no matter who suffers.

Israel has said that she will not tolerate arms being transported from Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon. She is serious.

On Friday, Israel conducted an airstrike against a shipment of advanced ground-to-ground long range missiles, manufactured by Iran, headed from Syria toward Lebanon. The arms, which were described by a senior Israeli official as "game-changing," are suspected to have been Scud-D missiles. If this is true, then game-changing is certainly the word. A Scud-D launched from Lebanon has the range to hit Eilat, which is the southernmost city in Israel.

You might recall that Israel conducted a similar strike in January, when it struck a convoy heading from Syria to Lebanon. The Syrian regime, which had vowed back then to respond if Israel did such a thing again, has not taken any direct retaliatory action this time, but has taken to state television to accuse Israel of striking Damascus itself.

As Amos Harel points out in Haaretz, Assad's inability to engage Israel in a direct military confrontation at the moment does not preclude his taking action of another kind, "which could be anything from shots fired along the Syrian border, to an attack on Israelis abroad − similar to the suicide bombing in Bulgaria last July. That attack was apparently a response from Hezbollah and Iran to what they called a series of Israeli assassinations on Iranian nuclear scientists." We'll see. In the meantime, Israel is sticking to its red lines: no hardware or chemical weaponry will be allowed to pass from Syria into the hands of Hezbollah.

President Obama, asked about the airstrike during a TV interview on Telemundo, expressed his support for Israel's action: "What I have said in the past and I continue to believe is that the Israelis justifiably have to guard against the transfer of advanced weaponry to terrorist organizations like Hezbollah. We coordinate closely with the Israelis recognizing they are very close to Syria, they are very close to Lebanon." 

For as long as I can remember Brooks Brothers has listed in its catalogue this sport coat. It is a quadrivium of intrigue, comprising, unlike most coats which are of but one nature, four distinct panels. Brooks Brothers refers to this coat formally as the "Milano Fit Harris Tweed Fun Sport Coat," which is alright if you are a stickler for precise cognomens. When Aristotle wrote his Categories and De Interpretatione the coat went by the name Mediolanum Tunica Stricta Lana Fun Ludo, of which the English given above is a more or less precise translation. But while the name we apply today to this fun sport coat is obedient to history, it is important to recognize that the garment itself is not.

The fun sport coat, appearing recently on page 3 of the Brooks Brothers catalogue, surrounded by dreer navy sweaters and gray suits and brown shoes, is a thrilling indictment of the Saxxon wool shackles whose surly bonds have for centuries enwrapped the American businessman. One look at the fun sport coat jars the senses: its statements are a multitude. What can it mean to have a blue windowpane lapel on one's right and a dark gray lapel upon one's left? A blue pocket flap on the left and a jaunty summer gray one on the right? These questions perplex the beholder. They perplex all the more because to no man is this beast a stranger. It hangs in every Brooks Brothers in the country, and every man--I mean every real man--hangs in Brooks Brothers. A real man has arrived to purchase a replacement navy suit, or a white shirt and a cardinal tie. Or some Royall Lyme. But this jacket.

He can't leave the store without seeing and rejecting, as always he does, the fun sport coat. The American man of middle working age has decided that he is not fun enough to wear this coat at least two dozen times in his life. The horror of the permanent bleakness of his situation has become a received truth. The ambit of his whole life has been hemmed in by the fun sport coat, so many times has he said: No, I am not fun. I won't have fun. This coat is not the coat for me.

Which is why seeing one attached to a person, out in the world, is such a beguiling experience. The fellow underneath the coat usually wears an expression like this well-chosen guy on the Brooks Brothers website. He isn't sure of what is going on. Everything is very uncertain; the world balances on a knife-edge between chaos and great azure pools of fun.

Perhaps he has come into great wealth. Perhaps he has recently had a stroke. Perhaps his sheer force of will empowered him to cast off centuries of fusty tradition and to be, finally, fun. But something about the funness of his Brooks Brothers fun sportscoat has not been completely effective. The smile is forced; the eyes darken. There is something faintly murderous about the fun of the fun sport coat. As though a great swell of tradition were ready to rise up and destroy its subverter. It is a dangerous jacket. Three stars; snug across the chest.

I was unable to attend Donald Kagan's farewell address a week ago Thursday, but there were compensations. We were together for an hour and a half the preceding Monday -- discussing the book I recently finished (tentatively entitled The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta: The Persian Challenge), which, in manuscript, he had just read; and chatting about old times.

Don Kagan was, you see, my Doktorvater: he directed my dissertation. And he was much more. He arranged my transfer from Cornell to Yale, when the former fell apart back in 1969 and I found myself, as associate editor of The Cornell Daily Sun, more deeply involved in politics than I imagined possible and further from being able to attend to my studies than I thought tolerable.

Don is now 80; I have known him for 45 years -- first as a freshman in a discussion section in his Roman history course, which he taught himself; later, as a young friend; then, as a graduate student; and finally, again, as a friend and protege. He has always been there when I needed a helping hand.

Don Kagan is a remarkable man. He is a first-rate scholar. Read his four-volume New History of the Peloponnesian War; work your way through The Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace. You will see what I mean. He was also a fabulous teacher. Ask generations of Yalies. His introductory course in Greek history was one of a handful of courses that everyone knew one must take.

Don is also fearless. I watched him take on Kingman Brewster at Yale in defense of freedom of speech. Later, as Dean of Yale College, in the days when multiculturalism was the rage, he stood up for academic integrity and defended the intellectual foundations of liberal education.

He is also a man of great generosity. Of this I can speak with authority. As you can probably imagine, I am not all that easy to deal with. I think what I think, and I do not suffer fools gladly. There were times when Don and I were at odds on some point regarding ancient Greek history. I never gave way, and, in the face of my obstinacy, he would merely shake his head when we clashed and move on.

Occasionally, I would persuade him of something. In my dissertation and in a later article, I argued that the Spartan ephors cannot have been directly elected -- that the evidence suggested that chance somehow played a role in their selection, and I suggested that they may have been chosen by lot from an elected pool (as the Athenian archons later were). Initially Don thought this mad. A year or so after I finished the dissertation, however, one evening I got a call. "You are right," a familiar voice said. "Right? Of course, I am right," I replied "But about what?" "About the Spartan ephors, you ninny," he retorted; and I responded, "Of course, I am right. I have known that for some time." To which he replied, "No, no. You are right!" What had happened, of course, was that, as he worked on one of the volumes of his New History of the Peloponnesian War, Don had had to confront the question. And once he wrestled with the evidence in a situation where narrative considerations forced him to choose one way or another, he changed his mind.

I still have not persuaded Don that his account of the origins of the Peloponnesian War is wrong, but I still hope to do so -- in the book I intend to write while on sabbatical over the next twelve months. What I know, however, is this. He will judge my argument on its merits, and he will not let his prior commitments get in the way. What made him a great teacher and scholar was just that.

If you read The Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace, you will find that he is very hard on John F. Kennedy. That was not always the case. In 1973, when I was his teaching assistant in a course entitled Historical Studies in the Origins of War, he treated Kennedy as a hero. When additional evidence came out, he realized that the man was a weakling and an opportunist and that he had been irresponsible throughout.

Don started out as a liberal. I did as well. At one point, in fact, I was well to the left of him. In the mid-1960s, when William F. Buckley came through Cornell, Don debated him, and he gave the noted conservative no quarter. But Don was what you might call a Harry Truman liberal -- sympathetic to the programs of the New Deal and even to their extension, but tough-minded in foreign affairs.

Over time, however, Don became what you might call a neo-conservative. Like many another Truman Democrat, he got mugged by reality, and, in time, he came to recognize the unfolding logic of progressivism. I have long thought of him as a Reagan Democrat. My guess, however, is that he is no longer affiliated with the Democratic Party. He knows that its members offer no hope. The fact that his farewell address was delivered under the auspices of the William F. Buckley Program at Yale tells you a lot about his trajectory. There is not much difference these days between Truman Democrats and Buckley Conservatives.

When I saw Don last week, his office was nearly empty. When he turns in his grades, that will be the end. He will abandon his perch in the Hall of Graduate Studies and retreat to his home. It will be a terrible loss for Yale.

There are two further compensations for my having missed Don's swan song. I can now watch it (and so can you, in the embeds at the bottom of this post). But, more to the point, on the 29th of May a group of his former students and others will attend a dinner being held by Yale in his honor. I will be there, and I look forward to seeing a multitude of old friends.

It is a sad business. It marks the end of an era. But what a joy it was to be around for that era! All good things pass, alas.

With his menacing behind-closed-doors mystique, Cass Sunstein might just be the Karl Rove of the New Left.  But for all of Rove's political talents, perhaps it's a testament to the Left's ascendancy that Sunstein is less an operative than an "intellectual."

Sunstein's ideas could be the key to the Left's grip on a listless America.

His earlier book, Nudge, promoted a kind of subtle coercion that Sunstein brands as "libertarian paternalism."  Now, Sunstein writes Simpler, which appears to be more of the same, coupled with an account of his time at OIRA ("Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs") in the White House Office of Management and Budget.  

You can read Sunstein's excerpt in the New Republic: "Why Paternalism is Your Friend." Would we notice Sunstein's "small" government?  Make the default 401(k) contribution 6% instead of 0% and people will save; install fattening mirrors in 7-Elevens instead of banning Big Gulps.  These are the mild proposals of a new liberalism grounded in behavioral economics.

Sunstein's ideas are alarming for the obvious reason that they erode our freedoms.  But they pose a particular problem for the Right because they can (and I believe will) slice right through libertarian "principles."  

Individual responsibility?  You can have that, says Sunstein, within a range of manicured choices, the boundaries of which you won't even notice.  Self-interest as good?  Sunstein totally agrees, insofar as his "architecture of options" directs your self-interest toward optimal outcomes as defined by social scientists.  Worst of all, a soft paternalism strives to embarrass libertarians as dogmatic crazies, pigeonholing them as a "state of nature" party eager for the right to harm themselves.  

To win the day against Papa Cass, libertarians will have to argue that freedom for freedom's sake --- even if "proven" harmful --- is to be preferred.  Would today's well-dieted, over-cautious Americans embrace this?

Libertarians also will find it especially difficult to counter Sunstein because he really has a similar "end" in mind.  Sunstein opposes an "ends paternalism" but supports a "means paternalism " This distinction does not hold up, however, because the content of the "means" envisions a particular "end."  In Sunstein's case, the end is rather boring if not, with irony, lifeless --- to live as long as your genetics make possible. 

Hence, there is common ground between Sunstein and libertarians like Peter Thiel. Sure, there's a contrast between an existence "free from" coercion, and an existence "nudged" by coercion toward health and jobs.  But both are degrading in the lowness of their ends --- they're but two sides of the same ignoble coin.

Sunstein might call it: government giving people the freedom to live (longer).  And Thiel would vehemently counter by arguing for the freedom merely to live and keep living, a freedom from government.  Because we tend to view everything from the perspective of "government," we have the instinct to contrast these "freedoms" ad nauseam.  But both are amoral, and both shrink the soul.

Ultimately, the fundamental threat is an over-reliance on social science, which liberals like Sunstein will use to cabin our choices and which libertarians have (mistakenly) depended upon as "proof" of their principles.  We almost always take the advice of a quantitative model before the advice of a priest or rabbi.  Is this fully human?  Is is good?  Does it acknowledge the soul?

Over at The Atlantic, David Graham notes that, a) Ted Cruz was born in Canada, but that, b) he could become president anyway.  The money graf:

Helpfully, the Congressional Research Service gathered all of the information relevant to Cruz's case a few years ago, at the height (nadir?) of Obama birtherism. In short, the Constitution says that the president must be a natural-born citizen. "The weight of scholarly legal and historical opinion appears to support the notion that 'natural born Citizen' means one who is entitled under the Constitution or laws of the United States to U.S. citizenship 'at birth' or 'by birth,' including any child born 'in' the United States, the children of United States citizens born abroad, and those born abroad of one citizen parents who has met U.S. residency requirements," the CRS's Jack Maskell wrote. So in short: Cruz is a citizen; Cruz is not naturalized; therefore Cruz is a natural-born citizen, and in any case his mother is a citizen. You can read the CRS memo at bottom; here's a much longer and more detailed 2011 version.

The need to raise huge sums, a press that already loathes him, even his own Republican colleagues in the Senate, many of whose noses he seems already to have put badly out of joint--all that might stand between Ted Cruz and the White House.  But the Constitution won't.

Somehow, I like knowing that.

In my column for Hoover's Defining Ideas this week, I looked at the discomfort that is emerging in Massachusetts over proposals that drones and other forms of surveillance be used at next year's Boston Marathon. As I note there:

... [T]he last thing needed in these difficult circumstances is a squeamishness about aggressive government action. It is wholly unwise to think that we can turn surveillance devices on and off with the flip of a switch ... and still get the information we need. The correct approach is to ... collect troves of information about the conduct of people in public places, which can then be stored for future use.

The key protection of civil liberties lies in the restricted access and use of that information. Unauthorized use is subject to severe penalties and should be invoked to allow for the full collection of the relevant information. Indeed, similar activities have to take place in monitoring the Internet use of suspected terrorists—and similar constraints must apply. The information can be collected and reviewed for limited law enforcement purposes, so long as its unauthorized release or use is subject to heavy criminal sanctions.

This has occasioned some discomfort amongst my libertarian friends, including Jim Harper at the Cato Institute, whose critical response is here. I've responded at Cato. An excerpt from my rejoinder:

... It was painfully clear from the pattern of events in Boston that the private surveillance cameras that were trained on the Boston Marathon provided indispensable information toward identifying and apprehending the Tsarnaev brothers. What makes their use unreasonable, when there is not the slightest evidence that the information so acquired was used for improper purposes unrelated to the search?

It may be “worth discussing,” as Harper suggests, whether the use of surveillance will help deter some crimes and stop others. But, if so, the only useful discussion is one that asks the means-ends question of how, in light of cost and privacy concerns, one can construct the best cost-effective surveillance system available, which can then be coordinated with the activities of police officers and volunteers on the ground, especially at any public event that presents a soft target.

But to dismiss these efforts on the unsupported speculation that “the possibility of apprehension seems not have occurred to the Tsarnaev brothers” can only be described as blinding error, especially in light of their frantic efforts to escape capture so they could strike again... 

This division in libertarian thought is an important one. The efficacy of our security efforts depends on getting it right.

US job growth in April beat economist expectations, as nonfarm payrolls rose 165,000 and the jobless rate fell to a four-year low of 7.5%. But the report contained worrisome signs that President Obama’s health care reform law is hurting full-time, high-wage employment.

While the American economy added 293,000 jobs last month, according to the separate household survey, the number of persons employed part time for economic reasons — “involuntary part-time workers” as the Labor Department calls them – increased by almost as much, by 278,000 to 7.9 million. These folks were working part time because a) their hours had been cut back or b) they were unable to find a full-time job. At the same time, the U-6 unemployment rate — a broader measure of joblessness that includes discouraged workers and part-timers who want a full-time gig – rose from 13.8% to 13.9%.

What’s more, there was a 0.2 hour decline in the length of the average workweek. This led to a 0.4 percentage point drop in the index of average weekly hours, “equaling the largest declines since the recovery began,” notes economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Let’s see, more part timers and fewer hours worked. Economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin says what we’re all thinking: “This is not good news as it reflects the reliance on part-time work. … the decline in hours and rise of part-time work is troubling in light of anecdotal reports of the impact of the Affordable Care Act.”

Anecdotal reports like this one from the Los Angeles Times: “Consider the city of Long Beach. It is limiting most of its 1,600 part-time employees to fewer than 27 hours a week, on average. City officials say that without cutting payroll hours, new health benefits would cost up to $2 million more next year, and that extra expense would trigger layoffs and cutbacks in city services.”

Now, there is the possibility that government furloughs are affecting the length of the workweek. (Though at the same time, steady if unspectacular private-sector job growth shows the Fed may be continuing to effectively offset any negative sequestration impact.) Here is JPMorgan on the subject:

Government shed a trend-like 11,000 jobs last month, a number which bore little evidence of a meaningful sequestration impact. Similarly, it is hard to directly link the decline in the average workweek to furloughed government workers, as the workweek only measures private industry hours. It’s conceivable the decline in the workweek may be related to the Affordable Care Act, but a simpler explanation is that it had jumped two ticks in the prior two months, and through the month-to-month noise is just settling into a stable trend.

We’ll see. But the combo of data and anecdotes should at least raise red flags about how health care reform could be permanently altering the structure of the American labor market.

A few other points:

1. The labor force participation rate was dead in the water. If it were back to January 2009 levels, the U-3 unemployment rate would be 10.9%. Demographics are playing a role here. But even taking that into account may put the real unemployment rate in the 9% to 10% range.

2. Only 53.9% of private industries added jobs last month, the second lowest of the labor market recovery, according to JPM.

3. Even with the unemployment rate at a misleadingly low 7.5%, it is way above where the Obama White House predicted it would be if Congress passed the 2009 stimulus, as the above chart shows. Back then, Team Obama thought 5% was the economy’s full-employment rate but recently has upped that number to 5.4%.

4. If the economy continues to add jobs at the 2013 pace of 196,000 a month, the labor market would return to pre-recession employment levels in seven years and ten months, according to the Hamilton Project’s “jobs gap” calculator.