by Burt Prelutsky

The other day, my wife and I were in the car listening to a radio talk show. The host, while referring to Barack Obama, insisted that in spite of his many faults and deficiencies as a president and commander in chief, one had to acknowledge that he was a very good father. To which Yvonne said, “How does he know what sort of father he is?”

It struck me as an excellent question. I think there is a widespread belief that Obama is a good family man, but we have no grounds for coming to that conclusion. The only time we see the family together is when they’re taking off for a taxpayer-funded vacation or posing for campaign photos. Other than that, we never see Obama with his daughters. Surely Malia, who’s 14, is certainly old enough to play golf with her father, but I never see her out on the course with him. Instead, it’s those same three guys whose full time job seems to be to make up a foursome for the president, whether it’s Eisenhower, Ford, Clinton or Obama.

I’m not suggesting that Obama is as bad a father as he is a president, but it does seem to me that if he took the role as seriously as he should, he’d use his bully pulpit to admonish black men to start shouldering their responsibilities and to be ashamed of their part in dooming the 71% of black babies being born to unwed mothers to a life of ignorance, poverty and crime. You would think that in four years, he could have taken a few minutes off from deriding Republicans and Tea Party members to deliver a few well-chosen words to those sperm donors who have turned every inner city in America into an urban cesspool.

It also wouldn’t be out of line for Mrs. Obama to quit yakking about cookies and calories long enough to expend some of her political capital on young black women who don’t seem to think twice about condemning themselves, their offspring and future generations, to lives of quiet degradation.

Recently, I heard from a woman in Florida who referred to the man she lives with, a man named Charley, as her partner. In replying to a question I posed in my response, she explained that there were a great many older people in Florida who are divorced or widowed, but refrain from getting married again because one of them would have to surrender his or her Social Security checks.

I was shocked. I always thought that the federal government did everything in its power to encourage marriage. When Congress finally stops wasting its time trying to outlaw guns, they should get around to changing the law so that these old folks can afford to stop living in sin.

The more I thought about it, the sillier it seemed to me that people of any age who are cohabiting or canoodling have decided to refer to the other party as a partner. I couldn’t help picturing a guy named Hank at a social gathering making introductions: “This is my partner, Susan, and this is my other partner, Charley,” while people gasped, and whispers of “ménage a trois” swept through the lodge hall, unaware of the fact that Charley is the other half of Hank & Charley’s Plumbing Supplies.

Later that same day, a different radio host was devoting an hour to the topic of divorce. He insisted that it was essential that for the good of the child, no divorced parent should ever speak ill of his or her ex.

It is something we have all heard so often that we generally accept it as folk wisdom, along the lines of never running in a house while holding scissors or regularly consuming large amounts of fruits and vegetables. But this time it triggered something in me, and I found myself thinking, “Why not? What’s to be gained by lying?”

When I got home, I sent the following email to the fellow on the radio: “I found today’s discussion about divorce fascinating, but I must take exception to your rule about not speaking ill of one’s ex-mate to the children.

“As you know, many, if not most, kids assume they have played a major role in causing the divorce. So on top of the unavoidable trauma, if people took your advice, it would force the children to deal with unnecessary guilt.

“It seems to me that when parents split, you would like them to say insipid things such as, “Mommy and Daddy still care for each other and we both love you very much, but we no longer love each other” or “Your Mommy (or Daddy) is a wonderful person, but we both just feel it was better if we lived apart.” I can’t imagine any child whose response to the first bit of malarkey wouldn’t be ‘So what?’ or to the second, ‘Better for who?’ Or ‘Better for whom,’ if one of the parents happened to be an English teacher.

“Even to my 73-year-old ears, those are going to sound like very shallow, selfish reasons for breaking up the family unit and leaving the child, in most cases, fatherless.

“I’m not suggesting that anyone should wash the other parent’s dirty laundry in front of the kid, but I think that trying to whitewash the other party is going to leave the child with a great deal more anger and confusion than if you at least indicate the truth of the matter.

“Some parents, after all, are simply wicked and evil, and there’s no compelling reason to add hypocrisy to the mix, thus making a bad situation even worse.

“It goes without saying that the explanation for the split be age-appropriate. But in most cases, between the raised voices, the sulks, the sighs, the occasional slaps and the slammed doors, kids of any age are going to be aware of friction in the home, even if the deluded parents are convinced they possess the acting chops of Meryl Streep and Michael Caine. Regards, Burt Prelutsky”

Walter Williams explains why the minimum wage hurts those it is meant to help. No matter how many times you explain this to liberals, they will never get it.

Obama simply doesn’t care: it makes him seem generous and the GOP mean.

…President Barack Obama proposed raising the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $9 an hour. That would be almost a 25 percent increase. Let’s look at the president’s proposal, but before doing so, let’s ask some other economic questions.

Are people responsive to changes in price? For example, if the price of cars rose by 25 percent, would people purchase as many cars? Supposing housing prices rose by 25 percent, what would happen to sales? Those are big-ticket items, but what about smaller-priced items? If a supermarket raised its prices by 25 percent, would people purchase as much? It’s not rocket science to conclude that when prices rise, people adjust their behavior by purchasing less.

It’s almost childish to do so, but I’m going to ask questions about 25 percent price changes in the other way. What responses would people have if the price of cars or housing fell by 25 percent? What would happen to supermarket sales if prices fell by 25 percent? Again, it doesn’t require deep thinking to guess that people would purchase more.

This behavior in economics is known as the first fundamental law of demand. It holds that the higher the price of something the less people will take and that the lower the price the more people will take. There are no known exceptions to the law of demand. Any economist who could prove a real-world exception would probably be a candidate for the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and other honors.

Dr. Alan Krueger, an economist, is chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers. I wonder whether he advised the president that though people surely would be responsive to 25 (more…)

Donna Brazile, longtime Democrat activist, tweeted:

What’s on your menu? Just got off the phone with my health care provider asking them to explain why my premium jumped up. No good answer!

Yes there is, it’s the ironically named “Affordable Care Act.”

I wish saying “I told you so” afforded some pleasure, but the joke is on all of us.

Senator Chuck Grassley’s floor speech

The problem we face with Mr. Lew’s nomination is that the Senate does not have answers to basic factual questions about Mr. Lew. How can we make an informed choice on his nomination? For example, when Mr. Lew worked at tax-exempt New York University, he was given a subsidized $1.4 million mortgage. Now, Mr. Lew claims that he cannot remember the interest rate he paid on his $1.4 million mortgage that tax-exempt New York University gave him. Does this pass the laugh test? . . .

When Mr. Lew was executive vice president of NYU, the school received kickbacks on student loans from Citigroup C -0.38% . Then, Mr. Lew went to work for Citigroup. When I asked Mr. Lew if he had any conversations with Citigroup about these kickbacks while he was at NYU, he once again “could not recall.” . . .

In the past, the President has railed against the “fat cats” on Wall Street. Today, the President nominates a man who took a bonus from a bailed-out financially insolvent bank. The President has constantly complained about the high cost of college tuition. While Mr. Lew was at NYU, the University increased tuition nearly 40 percent while he was getting paid more than NYU’s President.

In the not so distant past, President Obama called the Ugland House “the biggest tax scam in the world.” Today he nominates a man who invested there. In fact, the President has repeatedly railed against the Cayman Islands and Cayman Islands investments. Mr. Lew is a serial Cayman Islands investor. On his watch, Citigroup invested money there, NYU invested money there, and he invested his own money there.

The WSJ wryly noted Lew’s confirmation as good news:

…there is a silver lining. His support from every Democrat (save Vermont Independent Bernie Sanders) sets a new standard that renders irrelevant a decade of Democratic political campaigns. Such as:

• Investment accounts in the Cayman Islands are no longer evil tax havens. Now they are a form of prudent investor diversification. Tax lawyers everywhere want to thank Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus for his new forbearance.

• Poorly disclosed executive compensation is no longer a plague on profit-making businesses. It’s now “not uncommon for large organizations,” as New York University explained Mr. Lew’s $685,000 severance payment for leaving the school to join the paupers on Wall Street.

The New York Times reported Tuesday that this severance “payment was not disclosed in the university’s publicly available tax records.” This is true, but it’s odd because NYU told us last week that Mr. Lew’s compensation was reported in the school’s IRS filings. The school’s policy, clearly stated on its website under the headline “No Severance Pay,” says no one who resigns voluntarily receives such a payment. But Mr. Lew did.

• Corporate jet rides? They’re now a necessary perk that former Democratic Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin is allowed to bestow on his political protégés.

• And private lending in the student-loan market—featuring what liberals used to call “kickbacks” to colleges—is now officially acceptable in President Obama’s Washington. Mr. Lew was at NYU when the school made Citigroup, C -0.31% his future employer, its preferred lender in return for a 0.25% share of each loan.

• Perhaps those who still have jobs on Wall Street can also take heart that Mr. Lew’s ascension might mark the end of Washington’s banker-bashing. Having been present at the meltdown of Citigroup’s mortgage investment arm, Mr. Lew will no doubt understand that failure happens in finance and it’s not usually a crime.

Shouldn’t public safety be a top priority of state government? Not in progressive, ultra-blue California.

LA Times

State trying to count parolees who have ditched GPS trackers

California corrections officials, expressing concern over a rise in paroled sex offenders disabling their GPS tracking devices, said Monday that the problem may be larger than they believed.

On Sunday, The Times reported a 28% rise in warrants issued for GPS tampering since October 2011, when the state reduced penalties for parole violators and made counties responsible for them.

Officials in the Department of Corrections had stated for months that such cases numbered in the hundreds. Then, earlier this month, they said they knew of 3,200 cases from October 2011 through December 2012.

On Monday, department spokeswoman Deborah Hoffman said that because that tally included only cases in which parole revocation hearings were held, the actual number of incidents may be larger.

The state’s figures “also may not include those [GPS violators] still on the loose,” she added.

This is of a piece with this story, which we noted

California unable to disarm 19,700 felons and mentally ill people

California authorities are empowered to seize weapons owned by convicted felons and people with mental illness, but staff shortages and funding cuts have left a backlog of more than 19,700 people to disarm, a law enforcement official said Tuesday.

How delicious. Our prez thinks he owns the right to write his own coverage. Brett LoGiurato at Business Insider

Bob Woodward said this evening on CNN that a “very senior person” at the White House warned him in an email that he would “regret doing this,” the same day he has continued to slam President Barack Obama over the looming forced cuts known as the sequester.

CNN host Wolf Blitzer said that the network invited a White House official to debate Woodward on-air, but the White House declined.

“I think they’re confused,” Woodward said of the White House’s pushback on his reporting.

Earlier today on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Woodward ripped into Obama in what has become an ongoing feud between the veteran Washington Post journalist and the White House. Woodward said Obama was showing a ”kind of madness I haven’t seen in a long time” for a decision not to deploy an aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf because of budget concerns.

The Defense Department said in early February that it would not deploy the U.S.S. Harry Truman to the Persian Gulf, citing budget concerns relating to the looming cuts known as the sequester.

“Can you imagine Ronald Reagan sitting there and saying, ‘Oh, by the way, I can’t do this because of some budget document?’” Woodward said on MSNBC.

“Or George W. Bush saying, ‘You know, I’m not going to invade Iraq because I can’t get the aircraft carriers I need?’” Or even Bill Clinton saying, ‘You know, I’m not going to attack Saddam Hussein’s intelligence headquarters,’ … because of some budget document?”

Woodward began stirring controversy last weekend, when he called out Obama for what he said was “moving the goal posts” on the sequester by requesting that revenue be part of a deal to avert it.

Make work for lawyers, throttle economic growth — just another day for the Obama administration.

This demonstrates how an administration “interprets” a law can effectively create law well outside the legislative process.

Roger Clegg

The Obama administration this month issued regulations formally adopting the “disparate impact” approach to its enforcement of the Fair Housing Act, the 1968 law designed to protect buyers and renters from discrimination (racial and otherwise). This approach is increasingly becoming standard in housing and every area of the law.

Landlords, businesses, local governments and others can be held liable for policies that have disproportionate racial effects—even if those policies make no racial distinctions, are adopted with no discriminatory intent, and are applied in nondiscriminatory ways.

Yet if the numbers come out wrong, then none of the rest matters, unless a defendant can prove to the satisfaction of a judge or jury that there is some high degree of “necessity” for the policy or practice in question. Even then, defendants can lose if a judge or jury is persuaded that some other procedure would have been as good and wouldn’t have resulted in those numbers.

The disparate-impact standard for anti-discrimination law pushes people to do one or both of two things: Get rid of legitimate selection criteria, or use a racial double standard to ensure that the numbers come out right. This approach first became infamous in a 1971 Supreme Court opinion as a way to strike down hiring and promotion tests in employment. For example, the federal government and civil-rights groups have challenged police and firefighter written exams for having disparate racial impact, and physical exams for having a disparate impact on women.

The Obama administration is still doing plenty of that, but also much more. In 2010, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued Kaplan Higher Learning Corp. for running credit checks on job applicants. Kaplan did so to cut down on employee theft of student payments. The Obama administration objected because the checks had a supposedly disparate impact on black applicants. I say “supposedly” because Kaplan kept no racial data on its personnel. The government hired “experts” to look at DMV photos and apply a “race rating.” Mercifully, a judge threw out the lawsuit last month.

The magic of disparate impact can also mean that if a recipient of federal funding doesn’t provide a service—say, a driver’s license exam—in a foreign language, it can be held liable for national-origin discrimination.

The Obama administration is challenging school-discipline policies (more…)

Jim Geraghty:

Hardball producer Michael LaRossa tweeted, “Only in America can a President propose a law, get it passed, and then actively campaign against implementing it.”

Yes, instead of spending time in Washington, with all of the members of Congress who could pass something to replace the sequester, Obama went to Newport News to hold a campaign-style event shouting about the need to pass something to replace the sequester.

…

How did Obama try to pass his stimulus? Campaign-style events. How did Obama try to pass Obamacare? Campaign-style events. How is Obama pushing for amnesty legislation? Campaign-style events. Gun control? Campaign-style events. Fiscal cliff? Campaign-style events. This is all besides his actual presidential campaign.

But mind you, his campaign-style rallies didn’t move the poll numbers on Obamacare, and Democrats to this day never use the word “stimulus” when discussing new spending. Obama is very good at getting people to like him and believe in him — more so than his agenda. We see this phenomenon when his overall job-approval rating is five to ten points higher than his handling of most major issues such as the economy.

Friesian horses, via Susan Gertson

Alix Spiegel at NPR

Why do some children who grow up in poverty do well, while others struggle?

To understand more about this, a group of psychologists recently did a study.

It began in a small spare room where a series of very poor mothers and their 5-month-old babies came to watch a soothing video. Soothing the baby was the point, says Elisabeth Conradt, a postdoctoral researcher at Brown University’s Brown Center for the Study of Children at Risk. The researchers needed to take measurements of the babies when they were calm.

On the screen, circles of gently colored shapes flickered and music softly played while a sensor taped to the baby’s chest recorded how much the baby’s heart beat when the baby breathed in, and how much the baby’s heart beat when it breathed out.

This simple measure has a complicated scientific name that sounds vaguely like a disease — baseline respiratory sinus arrhythmia — but the researchers were interested in it because it can tell you something about how a baby responds to the world around it.

You see, while there’s always a difference between how much the heart beats when a person inhales and when he or she exhales, everyone has a different set point. Sometimes there’s a big difference, and sometimes it’s small. And in very young babies, researchers have noticed that there are different temperaments associated with these different set points.

When there’s a big difference and the set point is high, babies tend to have great attention and can focus for long periods of time on the things in their environment. “When you’re presenting them with a new toy, they’re going to really look at it and inspect it,” says Conradt. “But they also may be more irritable and fussy when parts of their environment are changing.”

In contrast, babies with a low set point “might lose interest after a couple minutes, but they’re also not going to be as fussy or irritable,” she says.

Babies with a high set point seem to have a more sensitive nervous system, which makes them more sensitive to their environment, in both good and bad ways. Babies with a low set point seem to have a less sensitive nervous system, which makes them less sensitive to their environment.

Conradt and her colleagues wondered if this simple measure could be used to predict how children in poverty would fare as they aged…

Read on, the conclusions might surprise you.

Via Jonah Goldberg

A missing boy who sparked a police search involving a helicopter and sniffer dogs was found two hours later – sleeping under a bean bag at home.

The parents of five-year-old Jenson Lorey called the police after they could not find him at home in Swansea.

A dozen officers joined the search for him – even looking in the family’s attic – while the police helicopter and sniffer dogs were called in.

But Jenson’s sister finally found him asleep under a giant bean bag.

Samantha and Andrew Lorey reported their son missing at around 20:15 GMT on Monday.

As well as the police search, members of the community also joined in the hunt for Jenson.

“Everyone who knew me was out looking but even people who didn’t know me were looking too.

“The bus drivers were using their radios, and the taxi drivers were all looking…

I bet they’ll want to search the Jenson’s home first before joining any such things in the future.

by Burt Prelutsky

You have to wonder just how many times Obama is going to announce that, thanks entirely to Republicans in Congress, this nation is on the verge of going over the cliff or ending up in a ditch. I also wonder how many people still give a darn if Operation Head Start simply disappears or how it is that cops and firefighters, who all collect a city or county paycheck, will suddenly be unemployed if the federal government has to cut two cents from every dollar it currently squanders.

And why is it that instead of ever coming up with a plan to avoid emergency measures, Obama always pretends that he has no choice in such matters but to fire food inspectors and air traffic control agents, people who actually perform vital services, but never mentions his own batalion of butt-kissing aides and Mrs. Obama’s ladies-in-waiting?

Apparently Chuck Hagel will be the next Secretary of Defense. Not only can he count on all 55 Senate Democrats voting for him, but a large number of Republicans. In spite of the fact that he is an anti-Semite and the best friend Iran has in America, the feeling, as expressed by Sen. Saxby Chambliss, is that the president should be allowed to pick his own cabinet members. Why any Republican senator should feel that way is a mystery to me. Not only is Hagel not the best man for the job, he may very well be the worst.

But I also could never figure out why the Republicans allowed Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who had been the chief counsel of the ACLU and an outspoken feminist, to sail through her confirmation hearings in 1993 even though she refused to answer questions from those who wondered how she planned to make the transition from left-wing advocate to being a justice on the Supreme Court. And over the past 20 years, we’ve all come to realize that she never had the slightest intention of transitioning. The final vote, by the way, was 96-3.

And yet it had only been a scant six years earlier, in 1987, that the Democrats prevented Ronald Reagan from appointing Robert Bork to the Supreme Court.

And, again, in 2004, the Democrats prevented George W. Bush from appointing either Charles Pickering and, later, Michael B. Wallace, to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, often a stepping stone to the Supreme Court.

Clearly, it’s Democrats who know how to play hardball. Republicans don’t even know how to put on their jockstraps.

I am guessing that the Democrats will get the massive immigration reform bill passed just the way they want it. That means, as happened with Reagan, who signed the first amnesty bill, they will promise to build an enormous fence with barbed wire and electricity running through it, and then renege once they have all the illegals registered as Democrats. And by “all,” I am not referring to the 11 million they keep yakking about. That is the exact same number that was being tossed around over a decade ago. So unless Mexicans stopped sneaking in since then, stopped having babies or have taken Romney’s suggestion to heart and started self-deporting, I think it is safe to assume the number is much closer to 20 million.

Wouldn’t it make for a nice change if the next time Obama started in about needing higher taxes in order to finance work on our infrastructure, he quit yakking about bridges, roads and those damn trains that nobody wants, and instead started making plans to build that fence?

I always found it odd that Reagan, who made the line “Trust but verify” so famous when talking about the Soviet Union, was so easily flimflammed by the Democrats.

I am quickly losing patience with those conservative pundits who don’t believe that Obama is out to destroy our economy in order to re-create it in the image of the failed socialistic economies of Europe. But, some of these pundits argue, even he can see that those countries are all on life support. Of course he can. But what they fail to recognize is the size of the man’s ego. None of those countries, after all, has had his masterful hand at the helm.

What further confounds me is that, in spite of a corrupt media that never tires of singing Obama’s praises, you would think that people would recognize in their own lives and those of their friends and relatives what a disaster he has been. And what a hypocrite! He rails against the rich and privileged — you know those millionaires and billionaires with their private jets — as if he were a member of the proletariat. But not only is he worth several million dollars, and will be worth hundreds of millions once he’s out of office and able to cash in on books to which he’ll lend his name and speeches for which he’ll be paid a king’s ransom, but look at who he hangs out with. If he’s not breaking bread with the likes of Paul McCartney, Tom Hanks, George Clooney and Sarah Jessica Parker, he’s giving campaign speeches at gatherings where tickets go for $35,000 apiece or playing golf with Tiger Woods or footsies with Warren Buffet and Jeffrey Immelt.

The only poor people he ever even lays eyes on are the Marines who have to salute him when he prances off Air Force One and those silly buggers who provide a background curtain for him every time he delivers a speech.

Finally, have you ever noticed how many left-wingers, especially those who accuse conservatives of being fascists, relish the company of real life dictators? For openers, there’s Oliver Stone and Michael Moore, who can’t get enough of guys like Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez. Steven Spielberg said that the seven hours he spent with Castro were the highlight of his life. Sean Penn, who’s not only enamored of Castro and Chavez, but also had very warm feelings for Saddam Hussein.

Woody Allen wished that Obama didn’t have to answer to Congress or the Supreme Court, and Harry Belafonte wants Obama to toss his Republican critics in jail. Even that’s not enough for Bill Maher, Will Ferrell and Chris Matthews, who wanted George Bush dead and would like to see the rest of us in the terminal ward.

But that’s nothing new. George Bernard Shaw, an avowed socialist, had nice things to say about Hitler and Mussolini. Charlie Chaplin, Lillian Hellman, Paul Robeson, and half the self-labeled intellectuals in Hollywood and New York, thought that Joseph Stalin was the cat’s pajamas.

Although, nobody seems certain whether it was Marx, Lenin or Stalin, who first dubbed those radical zealots who blindly promoted communism as “useful idiots,” the fact is he was only half right.

Which fits within a budget that doesn’t exist.

If you want a thorough agency-by-agency rundown of the budget cuts sequestration would deliver, the Office of Management and Budget has you covered. In compliance with The Sequestration Transparency Act of 2012, the OMB sent a detailed report to Congress in September 2012. But there’s a small problem with the report: One of the cuts it warns against would affect an agency that no longer exists–and didn’t exist when the OMB sent its report to congress.

The first line item on page 121 of the OMB’s September 2012 report says that under sequestration the National Drug Intelligence Center would lose $2 million of its $20 million budget. While that’s slightly more than 8.2 percent (rounding error or scare tactic?), the bigger problem is that the National Drug Intelligence Center shuttered its doors on June 15, 2012–three months before the OMB issued its report to Congress.

“Why were military personnel used as props for an entertainment industry awards show?”

And isn’t it interesting that Obama, who let people die in an Islamist takeover in Benghazi, had his wife present an award for a movie about rescuing people from an Islamist takeover in Iran.

This gives new meaning to “she’s a firecracker.”

Colin Dickey in Lapham’s Quarterly

In 1725, a tavern owner in Rheims, France named Jean Millet was accused of the murder of his wife. Millet’s wife was overweight, past her prime, and Millet, an otherwise upstanding member of the community, was reputed to be interested in a young servant girl from Lorraine. When Mme Millet’s remains were found smoldering in the kitchen one night—with only her legs, part of her head, a few large bones and some vertebrae identifiable—suspicion quickly fell to her husband, who was quickly tried, convicted, and sentenced to death.

Luckily for the tavern owner, he was saved at the last minute by one of his lodgers, a young and promising surgeon named Nicholas Le Cat, who argued that because Mme Millet was a known alcoholic, the likely cause of her death was not murder, but spontaneous human combustion. Millet was ultimately acquitted, though the ordeal left him destroyed, and he lived out the remainder of his life in a mental institution—haunted, perhaps, either by the fact that he had gotten away with murder, or that his wife really had, suddenly and without warning, burst into flames from too much drinking…

Steven Malanga in the LA Times how public service unions have financially raped Californians.

When California’s government employee pension system was established in 1932, it was a model of restraint. Private-sector pensions were still rare then, but California lawmakers had a particular reason for wanting a public-sector pension system: Without one, unproductive older workers had an incentive to stay on the job and just “go through the motions” to get a paycheck, as a 1929 state commission put it. Pensions would encourage those workers to retire. The commission cautioned, however, against setting a retirement age so low that it would “encourage or permit the granting of any retirement allowance to an able-bodied person in middle life.”

Accordingly, California set its initial retirement age for state workers (and, beginning in 1939, for local government employees) at 65, at a time when the average 20-year-old entering the workforce could expect to live for another 46 years, until age 66. The system’s first pensions were modest, though far from miserly. An employee’s pension equaled 1.43% of his average salary over his last five years on the job, multiplied by the total number of years he had worked. That formula typically provided longtime workers with pensions equal to half or more of their final salaries.

The pensions were funded by three sources: contributions from employers (that is, state and local governments); contributions from employees (though some governments opted to cover that expense); and money that the pension fund would gain by investing those contributions. With the 1929 stock market crash in mind, California opted for a cautious investment approach.

“An unsound system,” the 1929 commission warned, would be “worse than none.” The employees’ contributions were fixed, so if investment returns weren’t sufficient to fund the promised pensions, the employers’ contributions would have to increase to make up the difference.

In the decades since, that cautious approach has been virtually abandoned as public employee unions have taken control of the system. The retirement age has been lowered, benefits have been increased and investments have become far riskier.

The major changes began in the late ’60s, during a time of rapidly growing public-sector union power. In 1968, the Legislature added one of the most expensive of all retirement perks — annual cost-of-living adjustments — to CalPERS pensions. Other enhancements followed, including, in 1970, a far more generous pension formula that would allow an employee who worked for 40 years to retire at (more…)

UK Telegraph

In an embarrassing slip of the tongue, Mr Kerry last week praised US diplomats working to secure “democratic institutions” in the Central Asian country, which does not exist.
The newly minted diplomat was referring to Kyrgyzstan, a poor, landlocked nation of 5.5 million, which he appeared to confuse with its resource-rich neighbour to the north, Kazakhstan.

We didn’t watch the Oscar show until the very end, when our DVD ended and ABC was the channel the cable box was tuned to.

Suddenly, there’s Michelle Obama inserting herself into things.

Jennifer Rubin at the WaPo

…She declared of the Best Picture nominees, “They reminded us that we can overcome any obstacle if we dig deep enough and fight hard enough and find the courage within ourselves.”

And stab enough people in the back to get your movie made. Or suck…

Alas, none of the films nor her aides reminded her to mention the military, not those personnel behind her nor those serving overseas, an odd omission for the White House that nevertheless was pleased to have them arrayed behind her like, well, set decoration.

She did have time to give a crumb to the gay community, applauding the movies that inspire us ”no matter who we are or what we look like or who we love,” adding that “they are especially important for our young people.” (Except when they contain gruesome violence, traffic in stereotypes or use gratuitous profanity, I guess.) Real heroes, such as our servicemen and servicewomen, inspire us, too, I would think.

It is not enough that President Obama pops up at every sporting event in the nation. Now the first lady feels entitled, with military personnel as props, to intrude on other forms of entertaining (this time for the benefit of the Hollywood glitterati who so lavishly paid for her husband’s election). I’m sure the left will holler that once again conservatives are being grouchy and have it in for the Obamas. Seriously, if they really had their president’s interests at heart, they’d steer away from encouraging these celebrity appearances. It makes both the president and the first lady seem small and grasping. In this case, it was just downright weird.

Weird, but still small and grasping.

No one, it seems, gets within a mile of the White House with any sense of restraint. No one there would dare suggest nearly half the country didn’t vote for him and doesn’t much like him and might want to be left to their small daily pleasures. (Greta Garbo said it best.) And no one there is apt to explain that the White House, the military and the first lady (not this one in particular) are institutions bigger than the Obamas and their e-mail list.

by Burt Prelutsky

I actually watched Obama’s entire State of the Union address. I would like to think I was merely doing my duty as a citizen and as a political observer, but I’m beginning to worry that there is simply a streak of masochism that runs through me. After all, that’s an hour of my life I’ll never get back, and God knows I’m not getting any younger. If anything, just listening to and looking at His Arrogance has aged me considerably over the past five years.

I can’t even boast that I have cracked his code. A child of six could have figured out a long time ago that when he says “fees” and “revenue,” he means “taxes;” when he says “investing,” he means “spending;” and when he says “folks,” he means “suckers.” Furthermore, when he says “Let me make this perfectly clear,” he means “Abracadabra, now you see it, now you don’t.” And, finally, when he refers to “God,” he means himself.

If it weren’t for those masochistic tendencies, I would have long ago adopted Antonin Scalia’s approach to these annual telethons. For the past 16 years, he has avoided them, dismissing them as “childish spectacles.” Actually, the way that Joe Biden and Obama’s other puppets and stooges bounce up and down, applauding every platitude, cheering every cliché, I think Justice Scalia does a disservice to childish spectacles.

Frankly, I suspect the audience spends more time rehearsing their responses than Obama devotes to rehearsing his speech. After all, he not only has the use of a Teleprompter, but it’s only a slightly longer version of every other speech he gives. But it’s those senators and congressmen who have to know when the proper response is a furrowed brow, conveying their shared concern about rich people not paying their fair share; or polite applause, indicating they’re still awake; or whether it’s time to jump up and deliver the sort of ovation generally reserved for winners on “American Idol.”

One thing I know is that I wouldn’t want to be in Joe Biden’s shoes. That’s because, being on camera right behind Obama, he not only can’t afford to yawn or twitch around in his chair, but, like a musical conductor, he is expected to cue the other stiffs in the audience. If you’re Charles Schumer or Nancy Pelosi, you don’t want the TV camera catching you seated when Biden is up on his hind legs, waving his pom-poms.

Predictably, Obama went on at length about guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens, but nary a word about those in the hands of inner-city punks. On the other hand, I have to give him credit for at least suggesting that being a father entails more than knocking up a teenager. But, naturally, he gave less time to that all-important topic than he did to sending kudos to his wife and Mrs. Biden for something or other. Perhaps for putting up with the likes of him and Joe.

Some people actually take exception to my calling Obama arrogant. But what else would you call it when he decides that a $16.5 trillion dollar debt is of less concern than his golf score; when he ignored all the sensible recommendations of the Simpson-Bowles Commission, a commission, by the way, that he commissioned; and when — thus completing the trifecta — he apparently decided to override the counsel of his secretary of state, his secretary of defense, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Martin Dempsey, who all urged him to arm the Syrian insurgents. It wasn’t simply their intention to put an end to al-Assad’s carnage, but to diminish Iran’s and Russia’s influence in the Middle East.

This fool is not only a one-man band, but he’s tone-deaf.

Actually, the way that Obama and his merry gang of fiscal idiots are going, it’s quite possible that by 2016, we’ll look back on a $16.5 trillion national debt as the good old days.

Apparently the only person who has any influence on him is Valerie Jarrett, who, rumor has it, is up for the lead in “Rasputin, the Mad Monk! The Musical!”

Because for liberals, the indoctrination of young minds can never start early enough, Obama pleaded for more money with which to fund pre-school for four-year-olds. What makes this particularly cynical is that his own Department of Health and Human Resources determined in 2010 that by the time kids are in kindergarten, there’s no discernible difference between the tots who have been attending nursery school and those who haven’t. For liberals, it’s not about the kids learning their ABCs; it’s all about teaching them to chant “Mmm-mmm, Obama” in unison.

No liberal speech would be complete without tossing a bone to women. What amazes me about women, especially single left-wing women, is that they’re always talking about being empowered and independent. But they invariably vote for Big Government in the hope that Big Brother will take care of them, providing them with free birth control pills and free abortions, while at the same time pretending they’re fit for frontline warfare. The other big lie that liberals foster is that being a social worker is the equivalent of being a brain surgeon and should therefore entitle them to the exact same paycheck.

I am always bemused when Obama brings up the need to renew our infrastructure. Inasmuch as he claimed that was the main reason he needed the trillion-dollar Stimulus passed as soon as he took office, he either lied in 2009 or all those roads and bridges had a shorter shelf life than cottage cheese.

This brings us to Marco Rubio’s rebuttal. The mainstream media made a big deal out of the fact the senator had to pause to drink some water. Some people, it is said, can’t see the forest for the trees. Liberals, on the other hand, can’t see the forest or the trees. In Rubio’s case, they apparently decided he might be okay as a senator, but would never hack it as a camel.

The truth is Rubio gave a fine speech. The reason that a rebuttal invariably falls short has less to do with the person giving it than with the venue. The president gets to make his way slowly through throngs of kiss-ups before arriving at his beloved Teleprompter. He then stands before hundreds of partisans and a balcony filled with his wife, his friends and a bunch of carefully selected guests. He is then interrupted, on average, every 30 seconds by thunderous applause.

The fellow doing the rebutting, on the other hand, is alone in a sweat box. Now if I were head of the GOP, God forbid, I would place the guy in an auditorium and have him address a packed house. There’s no trick to a politician getting an ovation, but it can’t happen if there’s nobody around to clap.

Next, provide him with a podium so he can pause to drink some water, preferably during a huge round of applause and laughter. And while we’re at it, turn on the damn air conditioner so it doesn’t look like the poor guy is being grilled by the cops.

Speaking of being grilled by the cops, I was delighted to see cop-killer Christopher Dorner meet his maker in that blazing cabin. For one thing, I figure it served to prepare him for his final destination. For another, what the world doesn’t need is another multi-million dollar, multi-year, murder trial, which would only encourage a bunch of mugs to argue endlessly over insanity pleas and the pros and cons of capital punishment.

If I was entrusted with his burial rites, I would say that Chris Dorner lived a despicable life. But in the end, Crispy Dorner went out like a champ.

Opening act was Otis Taylor. Great blues, rock and “trance blues.” Here’s his version of Hey Joe. Ann Harris, on fiddle is a gifted musician and performer.

They set up Robert Randolph Presents the Slide Brothers. Randolph is a virtuoso on the pedal steel guitar, coming from a musical tradition in black Pentecostal churches called “sacred steel.” The concert featured Randolph and three older virtuosos, men who he looked up to.

The clip below is from 2002. There are clips on Youtube of last night’s performance shot with iPhones, but this clip best captures the joy of his performances.

Bob Woodward

Misunderstanding, misstatements and all the classic contortions of partisan message management surround the sequester, the term for the $85 billion in ugly and largely irrational federal spending cuts set by law to begin Friday.

What is the non-budget wonk to make of this? Who is responsible? What really happened?

The finger-pointing began during the third presidential debate last fall, on Oct. 22, when President Obama blamed Congress. “The sequester is not something that I’ve proposed,” Obama said. “It is something that Congress has proposed.”

The White House chief of staff at the time, Jack Lew, who had been budget director during the negotiations that set up the sequester in 2011, backed up the president two days later.

“There was an insistence on the part of Republicans in Congress for there to be some automatic trigger,” Lew said while campaigning in Florida. It “was very much rooted in the Republican congressional insistence that there be an automatic measure.”

The president and Lew had this wrong. My extensive reporting for my book “The Price of Politics” shows that the automatic spending cuts were initiated by the White House and were the brainchild of Lew and White House congressional relations chief Rob Nabors — probably the foremost experts on budget issues in the senior ranks of the federal government.

Obama personally approved of the plan for Lew and Nabors to propose the (more…)

by Burt Prelutsky

It is once again that time of year when we are told that a billion people around the world will be tuned in to see which of the over-hyped movies and actors get to take home Academy Awards. My wife will be tuned in because she likes to see what everyone is wearing and I’ll be watching because I enjoy seeing the winners trying to act humble and I get a kick out of watching the losers pretend to be good sports.

The fact of the matter is that as with most elections, the winners have to spend a king’s ransom advertising. For months, the same people who will go on stage and pretend they are unworthy have been waging war in the Hollywood trade papers.

This year, there’s been a lot of static over the fact that Kathryn Bigelow, who directed “Zero Dark Thirty,” wasn’t nominated for an Academy Award, even though the movie was. As a result, as happens whenever a woman appears to have been slighted, we have been hearing from the usual suspects that sexism reigns in Hollywood.

The dopes ignore a few salient points. For one thing, although they are now nominating 10 movies for Best Picture, they continue to only nominate five directors. Therefore, if one were to say that if it was an injustice in her case, it was equally so for Ben Affleck, whose “Argo” was nominated, while he wasn’t. For another thing, how is it that if the Academy is now riddled with sexists, it wasn’t two short years ago when they actually gave Bigelow the Oscar for the mediocre “Hurt Locker.” Is it possible that the Academy been over-run with right-wingers? And if so, why wasn’t I invited to join the coup?

We had the same scenario when Barbra Streisand wasn’t nominated as Best Director for “The Prince of Tides,” and outraged feminists –there being no other kind! – ignored the fact that she had been given an Oscar for the very forgettable song, “Evergreen.”

Back in 1958, David Niven won the Best Actor Oscar, Wendy Hiller won as Best Supporting Actress and Deborah Kerr was nominated as Best Actress. What’s more, the movie they all appeared in, “Separate Tables,” was nominated as one of the five Best Pictures. In spite of all that, its director, my friend, Delbert Mann, was not nominated. To his credit, he didn’t whine about it. He was disappointed, but he didn’t complain that the Academy members had it in for guys born in Kansas.

It seems to be a constant complaint that when women don’t win any award they might have a shot at, it’s because of blatant sexism. And when they do win, it’s based on recognition of their sheer genius, even when there might be more women than men casting ballots on both occasions.

It reminds me of the black college basketball coach who, after several losing seasons, was let go a few years back, and accused the university of racism, ignoring the obvious fact that it was the very same institution that had hired him in the first place.

Only the folks who hand out the Nobel Peace Prize make as many bad decisions as the members of the Motion Picture Academy. These are the folks, let us never forget, who decided that “Sweet Leilani” was a better song than “They Can’t Take That Away From Me” and that “Three Coins in the Fountain” was better than “The Man That Got Away.”

They gave Oscars to the likes of “The Greatest Show on Earth,” “The English Patient,” “The Deer Hunter,” “Driving Miss Daisy” and “Platoon,” but never even nominated “Roxanne,” “My Cousin Vinny,” “Hail the Conquering Hero,” “Singin’ in the Rain” or “Groundhog Day.”

These are the very same goofballs who have given not one, but two Oscars, to Sean Penn, Tom Hanks and Jane Fonda, but none to Irene Dunne, Jean Arthur, Claude Rains, William Powell, Montgomery Clift, Thelma Ritter or Preston Sturges, and never even got around to nominating Joseph Cotton, Steve Martin or Edward G. Robinson.

This year, the biggest blemish on the Oscars had nothing to do with Kathryn Bigelow. It’s the fact that they, who saw fit to bestow Oscars on Michael Moore and Al Gore, for such left-wing crapola as “Bowling for Columbine” and “An Inconvenient Truth,” respectively, never even had “2016” on their short list of 15 documentaries worthy of consideration.

One thing for certain is that on Oscar night, when one recipient after another rushes on stage, and with the sort of cloying humility that made Charles Dickens’ Uriah Heep so singularly obnoxious, insists that they are undeserving of such an honor, I’ll be sitting home, echoing their sentiments.

The post office decides to focus on its non-core mission.

First the end of Saturday mail, now a new clothing line. The U.S. Postal Service is taking unprecedented steps to make itself relevant and profitable these days.

The cash-strapped agency announced plans on Tuesday to launch a new line of all-weather apparel and accessories sometime next year.

Move over, upscale North Face. Or should it be the grittier Carhartt brand that worries?

The Postal Service chose “Rain Heat & Snow” as its own brand name, alluding to its unofficial motto: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stay these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”

Only men’s apparel and accessories will be available initially, but the agency plans to add a women’s line in the future, it said Tuesday.

The Postal Service inked a licensing agreement with Cleveland-based Wahconah Group, Inc. to produce the new line, which will include jackets, headgear, footwear and clothing that allows integration of modern technology devices such as iPods, according to agency spokesman Roy Betts.

“This agreement will put the Postal Service on the cutting edge of functional fashion,” agency licensing manager Steven Mills said in a statement. “The main focus will be to produce Rain Heat & Snow apparel and accessories using technology to create ‘smart apparel’ — also known as wearable electronics.”

Maybe they should get Colt to issue a line of handguns for going postal.

Just think, you can annoy people with your opinions from the grave. But can your views “evolve” when you’re six feet under?

A new application will soon allow users to keep posting Twitter updates from beyond the grave, independently using intricate knowledge of your online character to create a virtual continuation of your personality after you die.

­“When your heart stops beating, you’ll keep tweeting,” says the new application’s tagline.

‘LivesOn’ will let users pursue ‘life after death’ on their social media profiles, letting the deceased communicate with loved ones. LivesOn will keep posting after you kick the bucket, following the example of the DeadSocial platform.

Due to be launched in March, the LivesOn application will keep tweeting after you pass on. The service will utilize advanced analysis of your main Twitter feed, to carefully select appropriate subjects, likes, or articles that would have been likely to interest you, posting them on your behalf for your friends to read.

Pre-existing applications so far have only allowed users to schedule prepared updates…

Barack Obama met with Al Sharpton and other “African American leaders” to discuss the president’s “plan to strengthen the economy for the middle class and continue to build ladders of opportunity for those striving to get there,” according to the White House.

Whoa! Listening to Al “Kingfish” Sharpton about economic issues?

Watch this clip from the 2004 Democrat Presidential Debates. The last 30 seconds are priceless.

For those too young to understand the Kingfish reference, watch a bit of this:

Steven Brill in Time, with a long article about the medical profession.

When Sean Recchi, a 42-year-old from Lancaster, Ohio, was told last March that he had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, his wife Stephanie knew she had to get him to MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Stephanie’s father had been treated there 10 years earlier, and she and her family credited the doctors and nurses at MD Anderson with extending his life by at least eight years.

Because Stephanie and her husband had recently started their own small technology business, they were unable to buy comprehensive health insurance. For $469 a month, or about 20% of their income, they had been able to get only a policy that covered just $2,000 per day of any hospital costs. “We don’t take that kind of discount insurance,” said the woman at MD Anderson when Stephanie called to make an appointment for Sean.

Stephanie was then told by a billing clerk that the estimated cost of Sean’s visit — just to be examined for six days so a treatment plan could be devised — would be $48,900, due in advance. Stephanie got her mother to write her a check. “You do anything you can in a situation like that,” she says. The Recchis flew to Houston, leaving Stephanie’s mother to care for their two teenage children…

Secretary of State John Kerry gave his first major foreign policy speech today. In his address, delivered at the University of Virginia, he discussed tackling climate change.

“We as a nation must have the foresight and courage to make the investments necessary to safeguard the most sacred trust we keep for our children and grandchildren: an environment not ravaged by rising seas, deadly superstorms, devastating droughts, and the other hallmarks of a dramatically changing climate,” said Kerry, according to prepared remarks.

Yes, we want to leave our kids with healthy environment. But what will it matter if we leave them broke? Consider:

• ridiculous college debt
• high real estate prices
• fewer job opportunities that pay less
• the burden of paying for Baby Boomers in retirement
• trillions in nation debt accrued now that they will be forced to pay off

Yeah, what about that?

Do you remember how George W. Bush had soiled our national reputation. Why Frenchmen on the street had bad things to say about America. Imagine that.

But Obama was going to restore the world’s love for us, starting with Muslims. He took that showy trip to Egypt to prove how much the new boss was different from the old boss.

Well…

After four years of Barack Obama’s diplomatic ‘leadership’ and billions of dollars in attempted friendship aid, a new public opinion poll reveals that 92% of Pakistanis now disapprove of the United States.

The results could have been worse. Not much. But a little. Fully four Pakistanis out of 100 do approve of the United States, President Obama and his policies. They, however, seem to keep kind of quiet about their views in that rowdy land. That’s the lowest favorable rating Pakistan’s citizens have ever given their ostensible North American ally.

A tweet:

I hope to one day open a Nicolas Cage themed bar called The Cage. Every drink order must be either shouted or whispered.

Has any other actor appeared in so many bad movies?