Readers of this and other conservative blogs know about the corrupt money giveaway known as Pigford. Breitbart was all over it. So was National Review.

Now, two years later, the New York Times discovers the story is fit to print.

In a nutshell: the racialists in the Obama administration have given away $1.33 billion to black and Hispanic. The tab will likely get much bigger.

Sequester that, honky!

SHARON LaFRANIERE

In the winter of 2010, after a decade of defending the government against bias claims by Hispanic and female farmers, Justice Department lawyers seemed to have victory within their grasp.

Ever since the Clinton administration agreed in 1999 to make $50,000 payments to thousands of black farmers, the Hispanics and women had been clamoring in courtrooms and in Congress for the same deal. They argued, as the African-Americans had, that biased federal loan officers had systematically thwarted their attempts to borrow money to farm.

But a succession of courts — and finally the Supreme Court — had rebuffed their pleas. Instead of an army of potential claimants, the government faced just 91 plaintiffs. Those cases, the government lawyers figured, could be dispatched at limited cost.

They were wrong.

On the heels of the Supreme Court’s ruling, interviews and records show, the Obama administration’s political appointees at the Justice and Agriculture Departments engineered a stunning turnabout: they committed $1.33 billion to compensate not just the 91 plaintiffs but thousands of Hispanic and female farmers who had never claimed bias in court.

The deal, several current and former government officials said, was fashioned in White House meetings despite the vehement objections — until now undisclosed — of career lawyers and agency officials who had argued that there was no credible evidence of widespread discrimination. What is more, some protested, the template for the deal — the $50,000 payouts to black farmers — had proved a magnet for fraud.

“I think a lot of people were disappointed,” said J. Michael Kelly, who retired last year as the Agriculture Department’s associate general counsel. “You can’t spend a lot of years trying to defend those cases honestly, then have the tables turned on you and not question the wisdom of settling them in a broad sweep.”

The compensation effort sprang from a desire to redress what the government and a federal judge agreed was a painful legacy of bias against African-Americans by the Agriculture Department. But an examination by The New York Times shows that it became a runaway train, driven by racial politics, pressure from influential members of Congress and law firms that stand to gain more than $130 million in fees. In the past five years, it has grown to encompass a second group of African-Americans as well as Hispanic, female and Native American farmers. In all, more than 90,000 people have filed claims. The total cost could top $4.4 billion.

The top bosses should be fired immediately.

…Though the FAA says it is strapped for cash, the air traffic control agency managed to find the dollars to update its interactive “command center” tool on its website so passengers can check if their airports are behind schedule due to what it calls sequester-related “staffing” problems. Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn noticed this rare case of FAA technological entrepreneurship and fired off a letter Wednesday protesting what he called the agency’s “full blown media rollout” to hype the flight delays.

That had zero impact on FAA bosses, who were on Capitol Hill rationalizing their dereliction. But after Mr. Coburn published his letter on his website, FAA regional employees wrote to blow the whistle on their bosses. As one email put it, “the FAA management has stated in meetings that they need to make the furloughs as hard as possible for the public so that they understand how serious it is.”

Strategies include encouraging union workers to take the same furlough day to increase congestion. “I am disgusted with everything that I see since the sequester took place,” another FAA employee wrote. “Whether in HQ or at the field level it is clear that our management has no intention of managing anything. The only effort that I see is geared towards generating fear and demonstrating failure.”

Walter Russell Mead on “gentry liberals”:

If Maureen Dowd’s evisceration manqué of President Obama’s gun control strategy in the New York Times is any indication, Ms. Dowd is in the wrong line of work. She doesn’t understand American politics. She doesn’t know how votes are gained and lost, she doesn’t know what presidents do or understand what powers they have, and above all she doesn’t understand how politicians think.

Column writing is dangerous work and long success in the game can lead to the stifling of that Editor Within who keeps you from looking too stupid in print. A rich self esteem, fortifed by decades of op-ed tenure and dinner party table talk dominance, has apparently given Ms. Dowd the confidence to believe that she is a maestro of political infighting, a Clausewitz of strategic insight and a Machiavelli of political cunning rolled up into one stylish and elegant piece of work. From the heights of insight on which she dwells, it is easy to see what that poor schmuck Barry Obama can’t: those 60 votes on gun control were his for the taking, if he was only as shrewd a politician as Maureen Dowd.

The President needs to get his hands dirty, our genteel and accomplished op-ed writer advises the ex-community organizer and Chicago pol. He needs to get real, get down in the dirt, muck around with the senators and exercise raw power. Don’t make empty gestures and don’t give up, she advises him: fight! fight! fight!

Perhaps because she fears that the President is too stupid to understand what she means, or simply out of her benevolent desire to show her readers just what brilliant political insight looks like, she vouchsafes us some examples. Here’s how she sees the President twisting the arm of North Dakota Democrat Heidi Heitkamp:

Sometimes you must leave the high road and fetch your brass knuckles. Obama should have called Senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota over to the Oval Office and put on the squeeze: “Heidi, you’re brand new and you’re going to have a long career. You work with us, we’ll work with you. Public opinion is moving fast on this issue. The reason you get a six-year term is so you can have the guts to make tough votes. This is a totally defensible bill back home. It’s about background checks, nothing to do with access to guns. Heidi, you’re a mother. Think of those little kids dying in schoolrooms.”

If only Lyndon Johnson had understood the art of political pressure as well as Maureen Dowd. “You work with us, we’ll work with you.” It’s… brilliant! Reminding her about her six year term… if that doesn’t swing her around, nothing will. “You’re a mother…” This is a set of brass knuckles no one could resist. The NRA must be thanking its lucky stars that a bumbling amateur like Barack Obama is in the White House instead of the arch-politician Maureen Dowd; Heidi Heitkamp would have been putty in her elegantly manicured hands.

This is a politician getting down to what the New York Times editorial page seems to think is a particularly fetching set of brass knuckles: reciting liberal talking points one after another in rapid fire sequence. That’s hardball, that’s brass tacks at least in the mind of Maureen Dowd, a woman who on the evidence of this column could and would teach her own grandmother to suck eggs.

But lest anyone miss the full range of her strategic insight, Dowd gives us another example. This is how she tells us that Obama could have won over one Republican Senator:

Tom Coburn, the Republican senator from Oklahoma, is one of the few people on the Hill that the president actually considers a friend. Obama wrote a paean to Coburn in the new Time 100 issue, which came out just as Coburn sabotaged his own initial effort to help the bill.

Obama should have pressed his buddy: “Hey, Tom, just this once, why don’t you do more than just talk about making an agreement with the Democrats? You’re not running again. Do something big.”

Don Corleone should put it this well. This is how minds are changed, votes are swayed and history is made. Use your male bonding skills for the power of good: “Press your buddies,” liberals, a bright new future awaits.

Dowd still has one Big Idea to share with us: the masterstroke that would have turned it all around and snatched victory from the jaws of defeat:

Couldn’t the president have given his Rose Garden speech about the “shameful” actions in Washington before the vote rather than after?

Yes! Presidential eloquence, better timed.  That would have done the trick. Those mangy Republicans and cowardly blue dog Democrats could never have resisted that nuclear weapon of American politics, a well timed Rose Garden speech. (Ms. Dowd also suggested that the President make some gun control speeches in blue states represented by GOP senators; a somewhat more practical suggestion but one unlikely to sway any votes.)

The Times apparently thinks it has readers who find columns like this either useful or diverting, so we say nothing about whether this is the caliber of political thought that ought to appear at the Newspaper of Record. But the paper may want to recalibrate its intellectual void detectors just a bit; it is hard to read anything this vapid without questioning the judgment of everyone involved.

One interesting thing about Ms. Dowd’s description of “hardball” political tactics is just how dainty and genteel her brass knuckle suggestions actually are. A speech, an appeal to reason: there is nothing here about lucrative contracts for political supporters, promises of sinecure jobs for politicians who lose their seats, a “blank check” for administrative backing on some obscure tax loophole that a particular politician could award to a favored client; there’s not even a delicate hint about grand jury investigations that can be stopped in their tracks or compromising photographs or wiretaps that need never see the light of day. Far be it from Ms Dowd to speak of or even hint at the kind of strategy that actual politicians think about when words like ‘hardball’ come to mind. Ms Dowd speaks of brass knuckles and then shows us a doily; at some level it speaks well of Ms. Dowd as a human being that even when she tries she seems unable to come up with an offer someone can’t refuse…

Megan McArdle explains to the likes of MoDo that politics isn’t like TV.

…The American President and The West Wing are not searing portrayals of effective political management.  They’re drama.  The first question a dramatist asks is not “Is this how it really works?” but “Is it entertaining?”  And the second is “Can the audience understand this in less than thirty seconds?”  Veracity is way, way down the list.  If you want a clue to how realistic it all is, consider that Aaron Sorkin awarded Jed Bartlett the Nobel Prize in Economics.  Then go interview some Nobel Prizewinning Economists and ask yourself whether a single one of them would have the desire, or the ability, to run for president.  

Jed Bartlett doesn’t win policy debates because of his amazing tactical skills, his overpowering arguments, or the sheer persuasiveness of his granite-faced brand of urbane folksomeness.  He wins them because Aaron Sorkin is a liberal and he wants Republicans to lose on the major issues.  Unfortunately for liberals, Tom Coburn and John Boehner don’t have their lines faxed over from Hollywood every morning.

If we had a responsible rather than spiteful president, he’d reform this bloated and inept agency. Read it all and burn.

WSJ

The 4% FAA spending cut that somehow delays 40% of flights.

As travellers nationwide are learning, the White House has decided to express its dislike of the sequester—otherwise known as modestly smaller government—by choosing to cut basic air traffic control services. We wrote about this human- rights violation on Tuesday in “Flight Delays as Political Strategy,” but the story gets worse the closer we look.Start with the Federal Aviation Administration, better known as the Postal Service without the modern technology. Flyers directly fund two-thirds of the FAA’s budget through 17 airline taxes and fees—about 20% of the cost of a $300 domestic ticket, up from 7% in the 1970s. Yet now the White House wants to make this agency that can’t deliver what passengers are supposedly paying for even more dysfunctional.

Ponder this logic, if that’s the right word: The sequester cuts about $637 million from the FAA, which is less than 4% of its $15.9 billion 2012 budget, and it limits the agency to what it spent in 2010. The White House decided to translate this 4% cut that it has the legal discretion to avoid into a 10% cut for air traffic controllers. Though controllers will be furloughed for one of every 10 working days, four of every 10 flights won’t arrive on time.

The FAA projects the delays will rob one out of every three travellers of up to four hours of their lives waiting at the major hubs. Congress passed a law in 2009 that makes such delays illegal, at least if they are the responsibility of an airline. Under President Obama’s “passenger bill of rights,” the carriers are fined millions of dollars per plane that sits on the tarmac for more than three hours. But sauce for the goose is apparently an open bar for the FAA gander.

The White House claims the sequester applies to the budget category known as “projects, programs and activities” and thus it lacks flexibility. Not so: This is a political pose to make the sequester more disruptive. Legally speaking, the sequester applies at a more general level known as “accounts.” The air traffic account includes 15,000 controllers out of 31,000 employees. The White House could keep the controllers on duty simply by allocating more furlough days to these other non-essential workers.

Instead, the FAA is even imposing the controller furlough on every airport equally, not prioritizing among the largest and busiest airports. San Francisco’s Napa Valley airport with no commercial service will absorb the same proportion of the cuts as the central New York radar terminal, which covers La Guardia, JFK and Newark International, as well as MacArthur, Teterboro, New Haven, Republic and other regional fields.

Anyone who has flown in or out of those terminals knows that they are hardly (more…)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Despite vast differences with President George W. Bush on ideology, style and temperament, President Barack Obama has stuck with Bush policies or aspirations on a number of fronts, from counterterrorism to immigration, from war strategy to the global fight against AIDS.

Even on tax policy, where Bush advocated lower tax rates for all and Obama pushed for higher rates on the rich, Bush’s tax cuts for the middle class not only have survived under Obama, they have become permanent.

Obama inherited from his predecessor two military conflicts, a war on terror and a financial crisis. He also inherited, and in time embraced, the means with which to confront them.

On Thursday, Obama will attend the dedication of Bush’s presidential library in Texas, a tableau that will draw attention to two distinct men — a Republican and a Democrat from different ends of the political spectrum, political foils with polarized constituencies.

Indeed, Obama ran for president in 2008 as the anti-Bush, critical of the war against Iraq and of the economic policies of the preceding eight years.

But in his more than four years of governing, Obama has also adopted or let stand a series of Bush initiatives, illustrating how the policies of one administration can take hold and how the realities of governing often limit solutions…

Bush had every mistake exaggerated by a Democrat-leaning news media.

Obama has most mistakes ignored by same.

Maureen Dowd

…President Obama has watched the blood-dimmed tide drowning the ceremony of innocence, as Yeats wrote, and he has learned how to emotionally connect with Americans in searing moments, as he did from the White House late Friday night after the second bombing suspect was apprehended in Boston.

He didn’t connect with me. I don’t need consolation nor comforting from politicians, especially the likes of Obama. I changed the channel.

Unfortunately, he still has not learned how to govern.

Well, what a shock!

How is it that the president won the argument on gun safety with the public and lost the vote in the Senate? It’s because he doesn’t know how to work the system. And it’s clear now that he doesn’t want to learn, or to even hire some clever people who can tell him how to do it or do it for him.

Why should he? He regards himself as brilliant. And Maureen, you’re one of his ego’s enablers.

It’s unbelievable that with 90 percent of Americans on his side, he could get only 54 votes in the Senate. It was a glaring example of his weakness in using leverage to get what he wants. No one on Capitol Hill is scared of him.

Obama is a natural bully. But bullies eventually get found out.

Obama and Reid were afraid of open debate and thus cooked their own goose.

WSJ

…Majority Leader Harry Reid was free to bring the deal struck by West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin and Pennsylvania Republican Pat Toomey to the floor for an up-or-down vote, and this background-checks amendment might have passed. It did convince 54 Senators, including four Republicans.

But under Senate rules, a simple majority vote would have opened the measure to up to 30 hours of debate, which would have meant inspecting the details. The White House demanded, and Mr. Reid agreed, that Congress should try to pass the amendment without such a debate.

Majority rules would have also opened the bill to pro-gun amendments that were likely to pass. That would have boxed Mr. Reid into the embarrassing spectacle of having to later scotch a final bill because it also contained provisions that the White House loathes. So Mr. Reid moved under “unanimous consent” to allow nine amendments, each with a 60-vote threshold.

The White House was right to worry. An amendment from John Cornyn of Texas that would have required all states to recognize every other state’s concealed-carry permits earned 57 votes, 13 Democrats among them. The nearby table has the list. On Thursday, Wyoming’s John Barrasso offered an amendment to protect gun ownership privacy that passed 67-30.

The media are attributing the demise of Manchin-Toomey to the clout of rural states, as if those voters don’t count; or claiming it would have passed under a secret ballot, as if democratic accountability is bad. Our guess is the amendment would have received fewer votes in a secret ballot. Many red-state Democrats wanted to avoid handing Mr. Obama a larger defeat on a bill that was about to fail anyway, but more might have parted company once the specifics were scrutinized.

Manchin-Toomey was rushed together on a political timetable, and a thorough scrub would have revealed that its finer legal points aren’t as modest as liberals claim. Tellingly, the White House blew up earlier negotiations with Tom Coburn on background checks. The Oklahoma Republican favored more and better checks across secondary firearms markets like gun shows and online, but liberals insisted that federally licensed dealers had to keep records.

In other words, keeping guns away from dangerous or unstable people was less important than defeating the NRA. The Senate GOP offered an alternative background-checks amendment that failed 52-48. Nine Democrats were in favor, but their colleagues voted en masse to block it from moving forward. How’s that for incoherent?

Mr. Obama is technically right that Manchin-Toomey would not create a federal firearms registry. Then again, its most clamorous supporters are also contemptuous of the Second Amendment, and they are explicitly hoping for a fifth Justice to overturn the Supreme Court’s landmark gun-rights rulings. Manchin-Toomey opponents can be forgiven for worrying that gun controllers will attempt to build a registry from whatever records they get.

***

Meanwhile, political reporters are ignoring the disintegration of Mr. Obama’s overall gun agenda. Restricting large capacity magazines went down 46-54, with 10 Democrats breaking with the President. Banning certain types of semiautomatic rifles failed 40-60 with 15 Democrats opposed. Those 15 or so Democrats, along with numerous Republicans, are the true mainstream on guns in America: open to reasonable compromises as long as they safeguard individual rights.

People who cling to their guns, or merely to the Constitution, aren’t part of the coalition that Mr. Obama believes re-elected him, and his mistake was thinking they would simply dissolve into history’s rearview mirror in his new progressive era. Mr. Obama was routed this week because he tried to govern from the left and thus played into the hands of the NRA. If the Newtown families want someone to blame, they can start with the President.

Jacob Sullum at Reason

“There are good people on both sides of this thing,” President Obama said in a gun control speech a couple of weeks ago, “but we have to be able to put ourselves in the other person’s shoes.” He worried that “both sides of the debate sometimes don’t listen to each other” and wondered, “How do you build trust?” Not this way:

There were no coherent arguments as to why we wouldn’t do this. It came down to politics—the worry that that vocal minority of gun owners would come after them in future elections….They caved to pressure, and they started looking for an excuse—any excuse—to vote no….This was a pretty shameful day for Washington.

That is how Obama explained the Senate’s refusal to approve the gun control measures he supports. According to the president, no one honestly questioned the merits of his proposals; the opposition all “came down to politics,” meaning a desperate desire to retain power. His opponents not only failed to make a convincing case, he says; they offered “no coherent arguments” at all. Since Obama’s case for gun control consisted mainly ofinvoking dead children and grieving parents, that charge displays an astonishing lack of self-awareness. Here is how Obama responds to critics, such as Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who fault him for using victims of gun violence as props:

Are they serious? Do we really think that thousands of families whose lives have been shattered by gun violence don’t have a right to weigh in on this issue? Do we think their emotions, their loss, is not relevant to this debate?

Of course they have a right to speak their minds. But no, their emotions are not relevant when it comes to empirical questions such as the impact of background checks, “assault weapon” bans, and limits on magazines. Their pain tells us nothing about the effectiveness or constitutionality of such measures. To the contrary, it obscures those issues with an impenetrable emotional fog.

Obama does a fine job of empathizing with the parents of Adam Lanza’s victims. But that is something any decent human being should be able to manage. Where he has trouble, despite his lip service to the idea of putting himself in the other guy’s shoes, is in empathizing with his opponents. He not only says they are wrong, which is to be expected. He refuses to concede that people who disagree with him about gun control are acting in good faith, based on what they believe to be sound reasons—that they, like him, are doing what they think is right. His self-righteous solipsism is striking even for a politician.

Buzzfeed

The head of a group accused of illegally taping private meetings of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s campaign visited the White House days before the group’s Twitter account began actively attacking the Kentucky Republican, according to White House visitors logs.

White House logs and the Twitter feed of Shawn Reilly, one of two men at the heart of the McConnell wiretapping scandal, show he met with White House officials on Dec. 5, just days before his organization Progress Kentucky began a messaging blitzkrieg against the Republican leader.

Reilly and Curtis Morrison are currently under investigation by the FBI for illicitly taping a campaign conversation between McConnell and a handful of his advisors. During the conversation McConnell and his aides discussed the potential candidacy of actress Ashley Judd — including using her mental health problems against her…

This should be front page news. When Rush Limbaugh attacked Sandra Fluke, there was non-stop media hysteria. The venerable NBC Nightly News’ Brian Williams intoned, “A firestorm of outrage from women after a crude tirade from Rush Limbaugh,” as he teased a segment on the brouhaha. Yet, accusations of babies having their heads severed — a major human rights story if there ever was one — doesn’t make the cut.

Kirsten Powers on the story that wasn’t told.

FYI, Obama, as an Illinois state senator, voted against a Born Alive Infants Protection Act. Perhaps he should have, ahem, “made it a little harder for our kids to get decapitated at birth.”

Infant beheadings. Severed baby feet in jars. A child screaming after it was delivered alive during an abortion procedure. Haven’t heard about these sickening accusations?

It’s not your fault. Since the murder trial of Pennsylvania abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell began March 18, there has been precious little coverage of the case that should be on every news show and front page. The revolting revelations of Gosnell’s former staff, who have been testifying to what they witnessed and did during late-term abortions, should shock anyone with a heart.

NBC-10 Philadelphia reported that, Stephen Massof, a former Gosnell worker, “described how he snipped the spinal cords of babies, calling it, ‘literally a beheading. It is separating the brain from the body.” One former worker, Adrienne Moton, testified that Gosnell taught her his “snipping” technique to use on infants born alive.

Massof, who, like other witnesses, has himself pleaded guilty to serious crimes, testified “It would rain fetuses. Fetuses and blood all over the place.” Here is the headline the Associated Press put on a story about his testimony that he saw 100 babies born and then snipped: “Staffer describes chaos at PA abortion clinic.”

“Chaos” isn’t really the story here. Butchering babies that were already born and were older than the state’s 24-week limit for abortions is the story. There is a reason the late Democratic senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan called this procedure infanticide.

Planned Parenthood recently claimed that the possibility of infants surviving late-term abortions was “highly unusual.” The Gosnell case suggests otherwise.

Regardless of such quibbles, about whether Gosnell was killing the infants one second after they left the womb instead of partially inside or completely inside the womb — as in a routine late-term abortion — is merely a matter of geography. That one is murder and the other is a legal procedure is morally irreconcilable.

A Lexis-Nexis search shows none of the news shows on the three major national television networks has mentioned the Gosnell trial in the last three months. The exception is when Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan hijacked a segment on Meet the Press meant to foment outrage over an anti-abortion rights law in some backward red state…

“Let’s make it a little harder for our kids to get gunned down.”
– President Obama, April 8 2013

James Taranto on Obama’s gun speech.

Obama’s speech, at once demagogic and pathetic, reminded us of Mayor Michael Nutter’s efforts to censor a different kind of magazine, which we noted last month. Like Nutter, Obama is seeking to restrain law-abiding individuals from exercising their constitutional rights in ways the liberal left disapproves. And like Nutter’s effort, Obama’s is unlikely to succeed.

Here’s an example of the president’s demagogy:

Ninety percent of Americans support universal background checks. Think about that. How often do 90% of Americans agree on anything? And yet, 90% agree on this–Republicans, Democrats, folks who own guns, folks who don’t own guns; 80% of Republicans, more than 80% of gun owners, more than 70% of NRA households. It is common sense.

And yet, there is only one thing that can stand in the way of change that just about everybody agrees on, and that’s politics in Washington. You would think that with those numbers Congress would rush to make this happen. That’s what you would think. If our democracy is working the way it’s supposed to, and 90% of the American people agree on something, in the wake of a tragedy you’d think this would not be a heavy lift.

And yet, some folks back in Washington are already floating the idea that they may use political stunts to prevent votes on any of these reforms. Think about that. They’re not just saying they’ll vote “no” on ideas that almost all Americans support. They’re saying they’ll do everything they can to even prevent any votes on these provisions. They’re saying your opinion doesn’t matter. And that’s not right.

At this point, the audience boos, and Obama leads them in a chant of “We want a vote!” So let’s see if we have this straight: 90% of the public agrees with Obama’s position, yet it can’t get a vote because opponents are playing politics? One or the other of these statements may be true, or both may be false, but they can’t both be true.

Now, this column strongly opposes all Obama’s gun-control proposals, but we’re with our colleague Kim Strassel in thinking Senate Republicans are foolish to try to prevent votes on them. Why not put red-state Democrats like Mark Pryor, Mary Landrieu, Mark Begich and Joe Manchin on the spot by making them vote on each and every antigun proposal? As Strassel notes, the GOP can always filibuster later, if there’s a danger of an actual bill going to the floor–or, if the Senate approves something, they can kill it in the House.

Obama uttered one of the worst lines in the history of presidential oratory yesterday: “This is about these families and families all across the country who are saying let’s make it a little harder for our kids to get gunned down.”

Scare stories abound. Jim Geraghty in the Morning Jolt:

President Obama is off to Connecticut today, doing an event at “the University of Hartford where he will continue asking the American people to join him in calling on Congress to pass common-sense measures to reduce gun violence.”

At one hour flight and back, Obama will rack up $359,500 in costs of operating Air Force One. You’ll recall that last week, Obama held a similar event in Denver. The flights to and from Denver, you’ll recall, cost $1 million.

Keep that in mind when you read stories that begin, “Williamson-Burnet County Opportunities, Inc. (WBCO) is being forced to cut back almost $400,000 from its senior Meals on Wheels and Head Start programs due to federal spending decreases caused by sequestration.”

The president and his defenders will argue, “But, you see, we couldn’t do anything about that. The money comes from separate accounts. One goes to the Air Force to operate Air Force One, and the other is for Meals on Wheels.” But to everyone outside the government, this makes no sense. You’re the federal government. Sort out your own budget. Figure out what the priorities are. You keep saying your hands are tied, but you’re the ones who tied them. Spend less on pep rallies and photo ops outside of Washington and use that money to plug holes in the programs you deem a genuine priority.

By the way, here’s one of the big stories in the Washington Post’s sequester coverage last week . . .

Cancer clinics across the country have begun turning away thousands of Medicare patients, blaming the sequester budget cuts.

Oncologists say the reduced funding, which took effect for Medicare on April 1, makes it impossible to administer expensive chemotherapy drugs while staying afloat financially . . .

Doctors at the Charleston Cancer Center in South Carolina began informing patients weeks ago that, due to the sequester cuts, they would soon need to seek treatment elsewhere.

Now, check out this account of the same issue from CBS News. (Jeff Vacirca, chief executive of North Shore Hematology Oncology Associates in New York, is quoted in both stories. )

“We couldn’t last for more than three to six months if we were to be in the red on all those drugs that now the reimbursement has gone down on,” said Dr. Jeff Vacirca, CEO of Northshore Hematology Oncology.

A one-month course of chemo for one patient could cost $10,000. Medicare reimbursement will now fall about $200 short.

“It’s going to be a hardship to patients, their caregivers and really such an increased cost to society and to Medicare in the long run that it makes no sense to me,” Vacirca said.

Wait, Medicare is now $200 short in covering a $10,000 treatment, and there’s no solution that can be found? There’s no way the patients can cover that amount, or the provider can’t delay a portion of the billing, or some charitable foundation can make up the difference? The only solution is to stop treatment? Doesn’t make any sense, does it?

It doesn’t make sense, and at least one angle of this story doesn’t check out. Check out this local coverage in Charleston, contradicting the Post’s account:

Contrary to a media report, the Charleston Cancer Center is not turning away patients as a result of federal sequestration cuts, an administrator at the practice confirmed Friday afternoon.

Kirk Daniel, chief operations officer at the center, said the practice will continue to treat its patients, including those with Medicare plans. He said The Washington Post inaccurately reported that the Charleston Cancer Center informed some patients that they will need to seek treatment for their cancer elsewhere.

Kind of fascinating that when Medicare implements a 2 percent reduction, the very first place these Cancer Centers implement cuts is in treatment for the most vulnerable, isn’t it?

Many of us saw this coming. Joe Klein in Time

Let me try to understand this: The key incentive for small businesses to support Obamacare was that they would be able to shop for the best deals in health care super-stores—called exchanges. The Administration has had 3 years to set up these exchanges. It has failed to do so.

This is a really bad sign. There will be those who argue that it’s not the Administration’s fault. It’s the fault of the 33 states that have refused to set up their own exchanges. Nonsense. Where was the contingency planning? There certainly are models, after all—the federal government’s own health benefits plan (FEHBP) operates markets that exist in all 50 states. So does Medicare Advantage. But now, the Obama Administration has announced that it won’t have the exchanges ready in time, that small businesses will be offered one choice for the time being—for a year, at least. No doubt, small business owners will be skeptical of the Obama Administration’s belief in the efficacy of the market system to produce lower prices through competition. That was supposed to be the point of this plan.

Certainly, the Republicans who have stood in the way of these exchanges—their own idea, by the way, born in the conservative Heritage Foundation—deserve a great deal of the “credit” for the debacle. But we are now seeing weekly examples of this Administration’s inability to govern. Just a few weeks ago, I reported on the failure of the Department of Defense and the Veterans Administration to come up with a unified electronic health care records system. There has also been the studied inattention to the myriad of ineffective job training programs scattered through the bureaucracy. There have been the oblique and belated efforts to reform Head Start, a $7 billion program that a study conducted by its own bureaucracy—the Department of Health and Human Services—has found nearly worthless. The list is endless.

Yes, the President has faced a terrible economic crisis—and he has done well to limit the damage. He has also succeeded in avoiding disasters overseas. But, as a Democrat—as someone who believes in activist government—he has a vested interest in seeing that federal programs actually work efficiently. I don’t see much evidence that this is anywhere near the top of his priorities.

One thing is clear: Obamacare will fail if he doesn’t start paying more attention to the details of implementation, if he doesn’t start demanding action. And, in a larger sense, the notion of activist government will be in peril—despite the demographics flowing the Democrats’ way—if institutions like the VA and Obamacare don’t deliver the goods. Sooner or later, the Republican party may come to understand that its best argument isn’t about tearing down the government we have, but making it run more efficiently.

Sooner or later, the Democrats may come to understand that making it run efficiently is the prerequisite for maintaining power.

“Why wouldn’t we want to close the loophole that allows as many as 40 percent of all gun purchases to take place without a background check?”

— President Obama, remarks on gun safety, March 28, 2013

Notice the “as many as” in that statement? It’s like “save up to 80%” in advertising. “Up to.” Sure.

The Washington Post doesn’t let Obama get away with this.

We were away last week and have been catching up on the recent rhetoric. A number of readers asked us about this comment last week by President Obama, and his Twitter account (managed by his campaign spin-off Organizing for Action), given that we had looked closely at this statistic back in January, in two columns, and found it wanting. It ultimately earned a rating of Two Pinocchios. PolitiFact in January also concluded there were serious problems with this particular statistic, giving it a rating of “half true.”

Normally we would expect some adjustment of the language in response to a fact-checker consensus. Alas, it appears to be time for a refresher course — and a new rating.

The Facts

There are two key problems with the president’s use of this statistic: The numbers are about two decades old, yet he acts as if they are fresh, and he refers to “purchases” or “sales” when in fact the original report concerned “gun acquisitions” and “transactions.”  Those are much broader categories of data.

As we noted before, the White House said the figure comes from a 1997 Institute of Justice report, written by Philip Cook of Duke University and Jens Ludwig of the University of Chicago.

This study was based on data collected from a survey in 1994, the same year that the Brady Act requirements for background checks came into effect. In fact, the questions concerned purchases in 1993 and 1994, and the Brady Act went into effect in early 1994 — meaning that some, if not many, of the guns were bought in a pre-Brady environment.

Digging deeper, we found that the survey sample was just 251 people. (The survey was done by telephone, using a random-digit-dial method, with a response rate of 50 percent.) With this sample size, the 95 percent confidence interval will be plus or minus six percentage points.

Moreover, when asked whether the respondent bought from a licensed firearms dealer, the possible answers included “probably was/think so” and “probably not,” leaving open the possibility the purchaser was mistaken. (The “probably not” answers were counted as “no.”)

When all of the “yes” and “probably was” answers were added together, that left 35.7 percent of respondents indicating they did not receive the gun from a licensed firearms dealer. Rounding up gets you to 40 percent, although as we noted before, the survey sample is so small it could also be rounded down to 30 percent.

Moreover, when gifts, inheritances and prizes are added in, then the number shrinks to 26.4 percent. (The survey showed that nearly 23.8 percent of the people surveyed obtained their gun either as a gift or inherited it, and about half of them believed a licensed firearms dealer was the source.)

How amusing that “progressives” are so attached to 19th century technology. Could it be that, as incorrigible meddlers and know-it-alls, they just hate the idea of people going where they feel like it, when they feel like it?

So much better to jam them on trains.

Two stories sum it up:

Ten years after Iraq war began, Iran reaps the gains

The influence of Tehran on its neighbor is growing, while the U.S., Iraqi officials and analysts say, pursues a policy of near-total disengagement.

Ten years after the U.S.-led invasion to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, the geopolitical winner of the war appears to be their common enemy: Iran.

American military forces are long gone, and Iraqi officials say Washington’s political influence in Baghdad is now virtually nonexistent. Hussein is dead. But Iran has become an indispensable broker among Baghdad’s new Shiite elite, and its influence continues to grow.

The signs are evident in the prominence of pro-Iran militias on the streets, at public celebrations and in the faces of some of those now in the halls of power, men such as Abu Mehdi Mohandis, an Iraqi with a long history of anti-American activity and deep ties to Iran.

Obama claimed credit for ending the war (Bush did), then pissed away our investment in blood and treasure to prove a point. Jerk.

Healthcare law could raise premiums 30% for some Californians

About 5 million Californians got a first glimpse at what they might pay next year under the federal healthcare law. For many, that coverage will come with a hefty price tag.

Compared with what individual policies cost now, premiums are expected to rise an average of 30% for many middle-income residents who don’t get their insurance through their employers.

Alternatively, lower-income consumers will reap the biggest savings and are projected to save as much as 84% off their coverage thanks to federal subsidies.

The figures were released Thursday by Covered California, the state agency charged with implementing the federalAffordable Care Act. They underscore the harsh reality that costs for some consumers will have to rise in order to carry out the biggest healthcare expansion in half a century…

Half a century? ObamaCare is a massive boondoggle, a wealth transfer scheme, that will set America back.

Washington Examiner

President Obama praised the growth of the U.S. energy sector during a visit to Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Il., on Friday, crediting his administration’s “all of the above” energy policy for increased oil and gas production.

“We produce more oil than we have in 15 years.  We import less oil than we have in 20 years,” he said. “We’re producing more natural gas than we ever have before — with hundreds of thousands of good jobs to show for it.”

Those numbers are true. Between fiscal years 2010 and 2012, total U.S. oil production rose by about 1.1 million barrels per day over fiscal year 2007, and natural gas production rose 20 percent from 2007 to 2012.

What the president failed to mention is that the growth he is so proud of has taken place in spite of his administration’s energy policy, not because of it.

A recent study by the Congressional Research Service found that all of the increased production from fiscal years 2007 to 2012 took place on non-federal lands.

We’ve all known his type.

Victor Davis Hanson:

It is not easy to ruin the American economy; doing nothing[1] usually means it repairs itself[2] and soon is healthier than before a recession.

But don’t despair: there are plenty of ways to slow down even an inherently strong economy. History offers plenty of examples. But as more contemporary models, take your pick of successfully ruined economies — the Venezuelan, the Cuban, the North Korean, the Greek, the Italian, the Portuguese, or pretty much any from Mediterranean Africa to the Cape of Good Hope. There are certain commonalities about why and how they fail. Let’s review some of them.

Government

The state can never be too big. Ensure that it is unaccountable and intrusive, in constant need of more money and more targets to regulate. The more government, the more people are shielded from the capital-creating, free-market system. Think the DMV or TSA, not Apple. The point is for an employee to spend each labor hour with less oversight, while regulating or hampering profit-making, rather than competing with like kind to create material wealth. Regulatory bodies are a two-fer: the more federal, union employees, the more regulations to hamper the private sector. The more federal mandates, like new healthcare requirements and financial reporting, the less employers profit and the fewer employees they can hire. Washington should be a growth city, absolutely immune from the downturn elsewhere, a sort of huge and growing octopus head with decaying tentacles. State jobs should be redefined as something partisan — whose expansion is noble and helps the helpless, and whose contraction is evil and the design of a bitter and aging white private-sector class.

On the other end of the equation, ensuring 50 million on food stamps, putting over 80,000 a month on Social Security disability insurance, and extending unemployment insurance to tens of millions all remind the jobless that life is not too bad (thanks to the government), and certainly a lot better than working at a “low-paid” job that equates to giving up federal support. To paraphrase Paul Krugman, the more and the longer the jobless receive, the less likely they are to take chances looking for a job. That too might be again a good thing if you wish to slow down the economy. In general, even Arnold Toynbee, a man of the Left, acknowledged that the greedy drive of the scrambling private sector was not as pernicious to civilizations as the collective ennui produced by vast cadres of lethargic and unaccountable public “servants” doing supposedly noble work.

The Law

To ensure capriciousness and unpredictability for both suspect employers and investors, make the law malleable, even unpredictable from day to day, in the style of an Argentina or Venezuela. Redefine the law as what is deemed socially useful. For federally subsidized bankrupt auto companies, creditors should be paid back on the basis not of contractual law, but of nobility — why borrow to give a rich man a return on his superfluous investment, when a retired auto worker might have to pay a higher healthcare premium? Boeing wants to open a non-union plant in South Carolina? Have the NLRB try to stop it (and illegally staff the NLRB with recess appointments[3]). Illegal aliens? They are neither illegal nor aliens, as federal immigration law is itself a capricious construct. Does the Senate really have to present a budget? Do presidents need to meet budget deadlines? Who said there is a Defense of Marriage Act?

What law says that gays cannot serve overtly in the military or women (more…)

A few days ago, I sent a link of a recent Thomas Sowell column to a liberal friend (some of my best friends are liberal).

He called it nutty, and seized upon an arguable historical detail, ignoring Sowell’s point that ethnic groups often determine their outcomes via their cultural values.

These are obviously broad measures, but so are the methods the DOJ is applying when punishing companies for “disparate racial outcomes.”

So, anyway, I saw these photos in today’s LA Times. First, the winners of yesterday’s LA Marathon:

The winners in the California Academic Decathlon

President Obama’s relationship with the truth gets much less truthier.

President Obama urged House and Senate leaders to bring the assault weapons ban and other measures introduced in response to the Newtown, Conn., school shooting up for a vote.

“These weapons of war, when combined with high-capacity magazines, have one purpose: to inflict maximum damage as quickly as possible,” Obama said in a statement. “They are designed for the battlefield, and they have no place on our streets, in our schools, or threatening our law enforcement officers.”

Weapons of war? Does he believe that members of the Marine Corpse (his pronunciation) go to war with AR-15 rifles?

Does he know the difference between an automatic and semi-automatic weapon? Sure, but he knows many dumbo voters do not.

By now, anyone who cares saw Senator Diane Feinstein get pissy when Senator Ted Cruz pestered her about the 2nd Amendment.

She insisted she wasn’t a sixth grader and didn’t need this newcomer lecturing her because she’s been there a long time. Did she learn about the logical fallacy of “appeal to authority” which boils down to, “Don’t argue with me, I know more than you.”

Guess not.

Then:

“I’ve looked at bodies that have been shot with these weapons,” the bill’s chief sponsor, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, told Senate Judiciary Committee colleagues. “How many times does this have to happen?”

How many foolish laws must be passed that accomplish nothing, Diane? Like your last “assault weapons” ban that did zilch.

Besides, who cares if she’s seen dead bodies? That doesn’t constitute a good reason for passing a law. Furthermore, if she means the two dead San Francisco politicians–Moscone and Milk–they were not killed with rifles.

And, in today’s USA, very few are: per the FBI in 2010, there were 358 people murdered with rifles versus 6,009 with handguns.

Washington Post

At a news conference last Friday, President Obama claimed that, “starting tomorrow,” the “folks cleaning the floors at the Capitol” had “just got a pay cut” because of the automatic federal spending cuts known as the sequester.

The president very quickly earned Four Pinocchios for that statement, especially after senior officials at the Architect of the Capitol (AOC), the federal agency that employ janitors on the House side, and the office of the Sergeant at Arms (SAA), which employs janitors on the Senate side, issued statements saying the president’s comments were not true.

Then his aides piled on more whoppers trying to justify his blatant lie.

U.S. investigation of Benghazi attacks ‘going painfully slowly’

Nearly six months after an ambassador and three other Americans were killed in Libya, officials still don’t fully know who was behind the assaults.

That’s the web version. Here is the print version.

U.S. investigation of Benghazi attacks ‘going painfully slowly’

Nearly six months after an ambassador and three other Americans were killed in Libya, officials still don’t fully know who planned the assaults.

Planned? As for the gist of the story, it’s non news.

Nearly six months after President Obama vowed to “bring to justice” the militants who killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans in Benghazi, Libya, the joint CIA and FBI effort to catch the ringleaders has made little apparent progress.

Officials say U.S. authorities do not yet have a full understanding of who planned and carried out the two brief but intense assaults, nearly eight hours apart, on a lightly guarded diplomatic compound and a nearby CIA base late on Sept. 11 and early the next day.

Investigators have identified several people who were present during the terrorist attacks, but none has been definitively linked to the deaths.

“It is going painfully slowly,” said Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), a member of the House Intelligence Committee who has been briefed on the investigation. “We don’t have access to all the people we’d like to have access to.”

Yeah, yeah yeah.

Wes Pruden

Bubba was a piker. The Clinton White House sold sleepovers in the Lincoln Bedroom that were cheap at the price. Barack Obama is auctioning off access to His Grandiosity for really big bucks. Unlike Hillary, Michelle doesn’t even have to straighten up the room and make up the bed when the guests leave.

The White House reacted with considerable heat Monday to editorials in the New York Times and the Washington Post scolding the president for putting “major campaign donors” on an “advisory board” and giving them frequent “access” to the president. This little perk was said to be going for a half-million dollars.

“Any notion that there is a set price for a meeting with the president of the United States is just wrong,” Jay Carney, the president’s mouthpiece, told reporters at the White House.

The wording of Mr. Carney’s remarks, which are usually carefully measured to make sure the spokesman’s brain is engaged before his mouth moves, raises speculation that the price of the access is set on a sliding scale. This could pose problems for the president and his men. If the CEO of Ajax Widgets LLC pays $500,000 for a cup of coffee and a breakfast bagel with the president, he won’t be pleased to learn that the CEO of Acme Anvils, Inc., got the president’s ear for $475,000, and maybe got two bagels and a strawberry shmear on the side.

The Washington Post, in its editorial, decried the sale of access as “behavior that has become all too common in this town and carries more than a whiff of influence-peddling.” The New York Times detected more than a whiff, of something like genuine stink. An advisory board, the newspaper said, “is nothing more than a fancy way of setting a price for access to Mr. Obama.”

This contretemps, so far the cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, is (more…)

Sequester tweets, collected by Jim Geraghty:

Shortly after midnight, this is what happened, according to Twitter:

Stephen Gutowski: “Just tried driving but since sequestration went into effect the roads have all crumbled into dust.”

Brendan Loy: “OH MY GOD THERE ARE GOVERNMENT WORKERS SPONTANEOUSLY COMBUSTING ALL OVER THE PLACE, THIS IS HORRIBLE, PLEASE MAKE IT STOP” He added, “BREAKING: CALIFORNIA DECLARES WAR ON OREGON; KENTUCKY LAUNCHES SNEAK ATTACK ON TENNESSEE. MASS CHAOS.”

Jonah: “It wasn’t until I ate my neighbor’s pancreas that I realized president Obama was right about the sequester.”

Iowahawk: “The corpses are piling up outside my window like cordwood, oh my God the humanity.”

Sebastian: “Nothing to worry about! I grabbed my double barrel shotgun & blasted #sequester through the door, just like the VP said.”

Ari Fleischer: “President Obama is right. Undo the sequester! I can’t stand it already.”

Becket Adams: “I don’t think my neighbors are taking sequestration seriously. They’re giving me weird looks and making fun of my war paint and loincloth.”

Exurban Jon: “So this is what anarchy feels like . . . From now on, I shall be known as ;ExJon, Warlord of the Western Deserts.’”

Buck Sexton: “Did America lose 170,000,000 jobs in the last 10 minutes? Keep me informed, everyone.”

Brandon Morse: “The #sequester may now join the Mayan Calendar and the Y2K bug in the “[Stuff] Everyone Survived” Hall of Fame.”

By morning, it was even worse:

Rick Wilson: “A few hours of fitful sleep, the sound of sirens and screams of the victims of the Barackolypse rending the night air . . . I saw their fires in the dark, savagery swiftly tearing away the thin veneer of civilization only government diversity programs provided.”

John Podhoretz: “Just looked out the window. Five hedge fund guys fighting over a piece of raw meat.”

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.

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.