Current Events - March 8, 2013

Fox News anchor offers to save White House tours, with his wallet

As long as we’re shark-jumping, President Obama, let’s pole vault these suckers, shall we?

The White House’s transparently petty decision to inflict sequester’s pain on America’s middle-schoolers (as if those years aren’t tough enough) revealed its sequestration doomsaying as silly and its post-doomsaying behavior as spiteful. In a rare good PR turn for Republicans, what was meant to make them look like heartless meanies has held the White House up for ridicule for its utter unwillingness to prioritize. Upon hearing the estimates that the White House’s cancellation of tours might save the administration $18,000-$72,000 a week, Fox News anchor Eric Bolling— I’m sure they’re fans at the White House— decided to come to the aid of The Children.

In a Facebook post on Thursday, anchor Eric Bolling announced that he will offer to personally pay the costs to keep the tours at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue open for a week.

During Thursday evening’s episode of “The Five,” Bolling elaborated. “I will absolutely write the check if they open the doors next week.

“I’ll make you a deal Mr. President…Let these families take their White House tours next week and I’ll cover the added expenses. Word is it will cost around $74,000.”

Referencing White House press secretary Jay Carney, the Fox host added: “Mr Carney, you know this an offer you can’t refuse. Give me a call.”

Grab your popcorn, everyone, and the kids of St. Paul’s Lutheran School, grab your bags:

Meanwhile, the sequester saga is ongoing, as Carney assures us today that while White House tours are out, the White House Easter Egg Roll is safe:

“I would refer both to the East Wing and the Secret Service, but it’s my understanding that as of now, the decision has been made that the Easter Egg Roll will go forward,” Carney said.
On Tuesday, the Obama administration announced it was canceling tours of the White House indefinitely due to “staffing reductions resulting from sequestration.”

Asked why the Easter Egg Roll would continue when tours had been canceled, Carney characterized the decision as similar to “choices you make all the time” about budget issues.

“This is about trade-offs. Because when you have the kind of severe cuts that the sequester represents, you have to reduce your budget accordingly. And then you have to make choices about what you do and what you don’t,” Carney said.

Earlier in his briefing with reporters, Carney defended the decision to cancel the tours, saying it was emblematic of the tough decisions forced by the sequester.

Yes, it is about trade-offs. The Easter Egg Roll is a one-time event, so is no doubt cheaper than weekly tours. It’s also a small event, with a lottery system for commoners, and a bunch of appearances by the progeny of government staffers, political appointees, lobbyists, and visiting Hollywood stars. I’m sure the Reese Witherspoon photo-ops (and she did look fab!) have nothing to do with its being spared while the tours for the hoi polloi are jettisoned.

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/03/07/fox-news-anchor-offers-to-save-white-house-tours-with-his-wallet/

Rotten to the Core: The Feds' Invasive Student Tracking Database

By Michelle Malkin
(This is the fourth installment of a continuing series on nationalized academic standards known as the "Common Core.")

While many Americans worry about government drones in the sky spying on our private lives, Washington meddlers are already on the ground and in our schools gathering intimate data on children and families.
Say goodbye to your children's privacy. Say hello to an unprecedented nationwide student tracking system, whose data will apparently be sold by government officials to the highest bidders. It's yet another encroachment of centralized education bureaucrats on local control and parental rights under the banner of "Common Core."

As the American Principles Project, a conservative education think tank, reported last year, Common Core's technological project is "merely one part of a much broader plan by the federal government to track individuals from birth through their participation in the workforce." The 2009 porkulus package included a "State Fiscal Stabilization Fund" to bribe states into constructing "longitudinal data systems (LDS) to collect data on public-school students."

These systems will aggregate massive amounts of personal data -- health-care histories, income information, religious affiliations, voting status and even blood types and homework completion. The data will be available to a wide variety of public agencies. And despite federal student-privacy protections guaranteed by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, the Obama administration is paving the way for private entities to buy their way into the data boondoggle. Even more alarming, the U.S. Department of Education is encouraging a radical push from aggregate-level data-gathering to invasive individual student-level data collection.

At the South by Southwest education conference in Austin, Texas, this week, education technology gurus were salivating at the prospects of information plunder. "This is going to be a huge win for us," Jeffrey Olen, a product manager at education software company CompassLearning, told Reuters. Cha-ching-ching-ching.
The company is already aggressively marketing curricular material "aligned" to fuzzy, dumbed-down Common Core math and reading guidelines (which more than a dozen states are now revolting against). 

Along with two dozen other tech firms, CompassLearning sees even greater financial opportunities to mine Common Core student tracking systems. The centralized database is a strange-bedfellows alliance between the liberal Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (which largely underwrote and promoted the Common Core curricular scheme) and a division of conservative Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. (which built the database infrastructure).

Another nonprofit startup, "inBloom, Inc.," has evolved out of that partnership to operate the database. The Gates Foundation and other partners provided $100 million in seed money. Reuters reports that inBloom, Inc. will "likely start to charge fees in 2015" to states and school districts participating in the system. "So far, seven states -- Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, North Carolina and Massachusetts -- have committed to enter data from select school districts. Louisiana and New York will be entering nearly all student records statewide."

The National Education Data Model, available online at http://nces.sifinfo.org/datamodel/eiebrowser/techview.aspx?instance=studentElementarySecondary, lists hundreds of data points considered indispensable to the nationalized student tracking racket. These include:

--"Bus Stop Arrival Time" and "Bus Stop Description."
--"Dwelling arrangement."
--"Diseases, Illnesses and Other Health Conditions."
--"Religious Affiliation."
--"Telephone Number Type" and "Telephone Status."

Home-schoolers and religious families that reject traditional government education would be tracked. Original NEDM data points included hair color, eye color, weight, blood types and even dental status.
How exactly does amassing and selling such personal data improve educational outcomes? It doesn't. This, at its core, is the central fraud of Washington's top-down nationalized curricular scheme. The Bill Gates-endorsed Common Core "standards" are a phony pretext for big-government expansion. The dazzling allure of "21st-century technology" masks the privacy-undermining agenda of nosy bureaucratic drones allergic to transparency, accountability and parental autonomy. Individual student privacy is sacrificed at the collective "For the Children" altar. 

Fed Ed is not about excellence or academic achievement. It's about control, control and more control.

http://townhall.com/columnists/michellemalkin/2013/03/08/rotten-to-the-core-the-feds-invasive-student-tracking-database-n1528581/page/full/

CSCOPE: Exposing the Nation’s Most Controversial Public School Curriculum System

In February, Texas announced that the state, along with the Texas Education Service Center Curriculum (TESCCC,) would enact major changes to the controversial curriculum management system dubbed CSCOPE. The system received a litany of complaints from faculty members and parents alike concerning its lack of transparency (parents were allegedly not permitted to review lesson-plans), lack of oversight from the State Board of Education, and for allegedly imposing oppressive working conditions for faculty members.

CSCOPE was created so that teachers could frame their year around teaching points required by the state. 

Lessons, which are written by CSCOPE staff and current and former teachers, can be updated and delivered online, making it more cost-effective than standard textbooks.

To note just how off-color some of the CSCOPE curriculum is, consider that the Texas CSCOPE Review, an independent watchdog group, uncovered an out-of-date, optional CSCOPE lesson-plan on terrorism — “World History Unit 12 Lesson 07″ — which allegedly likens the Boston Tea Party to “an act of terrorism.”

The system also recently asked students to design a flag for a new socialist nation.

To glean greater insight, Glenn Beck invited special guests David Barton and Pat Gray, along with teachers Mary Bowen, Stan Hartzler and Texas State Sen. Dan Patrick to discuss what is truly going on within their state’s education system.

Barton explained that CSCOPE is referred to as “instructional material” and not “curriculum,” therefore is not subject to regulation by the State Board of Education. The historian also brought in artifacts of Texas public school curriculum to showcase just how different it is today and to mark, year-by-year, the increasing application of political correctness in lesson plans.

Using a chart, Barton documented and mapped out core CSCOPE material, which eliminates national values, Americanism or rather, American exceptionalism, the study of federalism and majority rule (the core of our constitution) along with patriotic symbols like the Liberty Bell. Christopher Columbus, Rosh Hashanah and Christmas are all relegated to the dustbin along with American military history. Equality and a belief in justice is replaced by “fairness” and instruction on American propaganda and imperialism.

Disturbingly, Beck and Barton noted that the worst is yet to come. Showcasing a lesson plan for grades 1-3, Barton revealed CSCOPE’s list of “heroes,” which comprises a dozen secular progressives and only three conservatives or political moderates.

According to a previous report from TheBlaze, teachers complained that they were expected to deliver the curriculum verbatim and only on days allotted by the CSCOPE lesson plan. Even if students were unable to absorb the lesson, teachers were allegedly directed to progress to the next lesson regardless. TheBlaze also reported that teachers were “asked to sign a contract that would prevent them from revealing what was in the CSCOPE lessons or face civil and criminal penalties.”

The controversial program’s website states that CSCOPE is a comprehensive online curriculum management system developed and owned by the Texas Education Service Center Curriculum Collaborative (TESCCC), a consortium composed of the 20 ESCs in the state.” It goes on to explain that the CSCOPE system provides curriculum framework for grades kindergarten through 12 across a broad range of subject areas.

The online description might raise red flags for some when it states that the CSCOPE content is regularly updated based on, among other criteria, “feedback collected through various stakeholder groups in the collaborative, including individual teacher submissions through the CSCOPE website and the School District Advisory Committee, comprised of district representatives from all participating regions of the state.”

What, or rather who, comprises CSCOPE’s collaborative and stakeholder groups? That question and a myriad others are what critics hope to get to the bottom of.

But while the groups to which CSCOPE appears relatively beholden may sound alarms for critics, the actual researchers CSCOPE credits with providing the basis for its curriculum seem to be formidable industry veterans by and large. Those educators include Robert Marzano, Fenwick English, John Crain, Heidi Hayes Jacobs, Grant Wiggins, Jay McTighe, H. Lynn Erickson, and James Barufaldi.

CSCOPE has been adopted by some 75 percent of Texas schools and the aim was to implement a national adoption of the management system. However, CSCOPE reportedly refused when Common Core Standards sought to purchase the system as the national curriculum standard. It is by far and away, one of the more hotly contested topics in the current education debate and much mystery still remains as to CSCOPE’s core tenets.

Beck noted that secular progressivism, further, the notion of communal life and collectivism, is at the system’s core. Other points of contention concerning CSCOPE curriculum include lesson-plans positing that Christopher Columbus was an “eco-warrior” and, when referring to the famed explorer’s journal, all references to God and Christendom were removed.

Students are also posed with hypothetical scenarios concerning historical figures and have allegedly been asked to take a position on population growth. Students were even subject to a lesson framed around the idea that “Christianity was a cult,” Beck noted.

CSCOPE’s director, Wade Labay has defended his curriculum and maintained that controversy has stemmed from misconceptions.” For instance, he said that framing the Boston Tea Party as an act of terrorism was merely one teacher’s way to engage students in the day’s lesson.

State Sen. Patrick, who chairs the Senate Education Committee, has led the CSCOPE hearings, bringing the controversial system to public light. He pushed CSCOPE to allow parents to view curriculum and to lift  gag-orders on teachers. Patrick explained his experience bringing CSCOPE to task and revealed what he believes is in store for his state.

Hartzler, who taught math for nearly four decades, retired early because of CSCOPE. He said that he was written nearly a dozen times for not following the system’s lesson plan and maintains that CSCOPE is dumbing-down American students. He said he tried his best to follow the lesson plans, but simply could not.

Bowen, who is currently forced to use CSCOPE in her school district, feels that schools are now more like factories that send children out into the real world from an assembly-line that has not even given them the basics. She spoke to Beck despite the fact that CSCOPE had set up disciplinary consequences for doing so.

Bowen said that the lessons were mediocre at best, often “riddled with errors” and that “tests were invalid.”

“There’s tremendous coercion. It’s an incredibly oppressive environment.” She added that there have been teachers who were fired for speaking out to the school board.

Bowen also explained that teachers spend “one out of every five” days testing students, and that those tests provide data for the government’s use.

When asked what they tell parents who are inquisitive about their child’s lesson-plans, Hartzler said he violated his gag-order “right away.” He said he showed the parents why the students were struggling and where they should go from that point on.

Beck said that President Obama will look to move forward with implementing CSCOPE or such systems within a short time-frame. The panel said concerned Americans should send letters to the Attorney General and that emergency legislation should be enacted to help teachers push back.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/03/07/cscope-exposing-the-nations-most-controversial-public-school-curriculum-system/

Law Professor Forces Students to Lobby for Government Ban on Soda

The ban on large sugary drinks may not be restricted to the New York City area any more. A law professor at George Washington University is now requiring his students lobby for a government ban on sugary beverages, or else they won’t pass.

John Banzhaf, the professor, will require his pupils to lobby state and local governments to ban these sodas. In a press release put out by the professor himself, he stated the objective as “Undergrads Required to Lobby for Obama Policy”. The press released continued by stating, “some 200 undergrads will be asked to contact legislators in their home cities, counties, or states asking them to adopt legislation similar to that already adopted in New York City…banning restaurants, delis, movie theaters and many other businesses from selling high-sugar drinks in cups or containers larger than 16 ounces”.

In case some students didn’t want to lobby for the exact policy that is in place in New York City, Professor Banzhaf has given these alternatives for substitute activities: 

1. Ban the sale of sugary soft drinks entirely.
2. Ban the sale of sugary soft drinks to children.
3. Put a special tax on sugary soft drinks; e.g., to reduce consumption and/or to fund counterads.
4. Don’t exempt sugary soft drinks from the ordinary sales tax.
5. Prohibit the sale of sugary soft drinks in vending machines.
6. Mandate per-oz. pricing of sugary soft drinks in venues like fast food restaurants and movie theaters (i.e., a 32 oz. serving must cost at least twice as much as a 16 oz. serving)
7. Limit the maximum size for sugary soft drinks in venues like fast food restaurants and movie theaters (e.g., a single serving can be no more than 16 oz.).

But as you can see, even these “alternative” options do not accommodate for students who do not agree with the professor’s agenda. Basically anyone who does not believe it is the government’s duty to get involved in this area should either drop the class or will most likely fail. This professor; however, is known for being one who loves the attention of the media. He has repeatedly sued fast food companies for making people fat. He even sued the Catholic University of America over the university’s policy to implement single-sex dormitories. 

Is this just another publicity stunt for the professor? How is this type of class allowed to exist without some sort of balance? 

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/heatherginsberg/2013/03/08/law-professor-forces-students-to-lobby-for-government-ban-on-soda-n1529094

Why the Death of Hugo Chavez Matters

Tears streamed down the face of Venezuelan Vice President Nicolas Maduro yesterday as he announced that longtime Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez was dead. The news likely came as a surprise to no one—Chavez had been battling cancer for years and was long thought to be on his deathbed. In fact, the Venezuelan leader had not been seen in public since December.

Though not unexpected, Chavez’s death has far-reaching—and potentially dangerous—implications for the U.S. and the world.

Addressing the nation, Maduro called on the Venezuelan people to rally together in the spirit of “love, peace, and discipline,” proclaiming, “Let there be no weakness, no violence. Let there be no hate.” Interestingly, this came from the same man who just three hours earlier made irresponsible and dangerous claims that Chavez’s poor health was caused by deliberate acts of the regime’s enemies. 

Further implicating the U.S., Maduro also expelled American military attaché David Delmonaco from the country, charging him with engaging in “destabilizing projects” against the regime.

Because they are outlandish to our ears, these claims may seem inconsequential. Yet in Venezuela, these ridiculous assertions threaten to take a dangerous situation from bad to worse.

It may be hard for many Americans to understand, but despite the sometimes brutal and authoritarian nature of the Chavez regime, the Venezuelan leader’s passing will be a difficult moment for the nation. Ruling Venezuela for 14 years, Chavez’s unique combination of populism, authoritarianism, socialism, and combativeness allowed him to build nothing less than a cult of personality. Bolstered undoubtedly by a system of socialist subsidies and political patronage, Chavez enjoyed the adoration of the masses.

With the nation already in mourning, the outrageous and provocative statements of Vice President Maduro have the potential to spark strong anti-American violence in Venezuela like that seen throughout the Middle East late last year.

As Heritage Latin America expert Ray Walser wrote yesterday:

The Obama Administration needs to act swiftly and sternly to rebut this outlandish claim, rally international support, and prepare to protect American lives and property, as well as that of innocent Venezuelans.

Factor in the country’s known ties to major U.S. enemies—namely Hezbollah and Iran—and the situation may develop into the first major foreign policy crisis for newly confirmed Secretary of State John Kerry.

Indeed, the threat of Iranian influence in Latin America is nothing new. In October 2011, two Iranian nationals were indicted in an attempt to bomb a D.C.-area restaurant and assassinate the Saudi ambassador on U.S. soil. The men were caught trying to hire a Mexican drug cartel member to carry out the assassination. While Venezuela has never been directly implicated in the plot, with daily flight between Tehran and Caracas, Venezuela remains Iran’s critical entry point into the Americas.

While Chavez declared Maduro his successor before his death, the Venezuelan constitution requires that an election be held within 30 days. Former presidential candidate and democratic opposition leader Henrique Capriles is likely to run against Maduro. The Obama Administration should signal to Venezuela that anything other than free and fair elections for the nation’s new president will open the door to possible diplomatic and economic sanctions.

Regardless of who wins, the road ahead will be difficult. The nation’s new leader will inherit a nation plagued by over-dependence on oil revenues and stagnant industry, not to mention high inflation, currency devaluation, and extremely high levels of homicide and criminal violence.

Chavez may be dead, but his anti-American spirit and the damage caused by his sweeping socialist policies are not. In the days and weeks to come, both newly confirmed Secretary of State Kerry and the next president of Venezuela will have many challenges on their hands.

http://blog.heritage.org/2013/03/06/why-the-death-of-hugo-chavez-matters/?roi=echo3-14781014766-11704470-7f4b1486a8a9f4adba75224bc46de0ef&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning%2BBell

 Message: I Care

It’s hard not to laugh just a little at President Obama’s wonderfully transparent attempts to counteract his image of aloofness and detachment by inviting members of Congress to dinner and lunch and going over to talk to them at the Capitol. The most remarkable thing about this charm offensive is, of course, that it is news that the president would call a senator from the opposite party or have lunch with the chairman of the House Budget Committee. It’s really a mark of the astonishing incompetence of this administration’s approach to Congress (and not just to congressional Republicans) that this should be a big story. It’s Obama’s fifth year in office, and he seems only now to have realized that—since he seems incapable of actually liking people who are not literally in the act of praising him—at least pretending to like them might get him somewhere.

 

The interesting question is just where he hopes it will get him, though. Much of the coverage of the president’s newly social mood has suggested rather vaguely that he hopes to communicate to Republicans that he wants a big budget deal and is willing to bargain. The White House seems to have persuaded itself (or been persuaded by some liberal opinion journalists making this case) that Republicans just simply don’t know that the president has offered to impose even tighter price controls in Medicare and to accept a change in how the CPI is calculated in return for another round of tax increases. But I think this Politico story about the president inviting Paul Ryan to lunch gets closer to the truth, noting:

By speaking directly with Ryan, Obama is hoping to enlist a powerful ally in convincing leadership to abandon its insistence on subjecting all future measures on the debt, deficit, taxes and entitlement reform to “regular order,” the tortuous committee process dominated by party conservatives, according to a person close to the process.

In other words, the president is worried that Congress is getting back to doing its job, rather than just pointlessly tangling with him all the time, and that this might leave him both less relevant and less powerful. I think he’s right, and right to be worried. It has been difficult to see through all the dust thrown up by the various ridiculous deadline-driven budget bouts, but the first few months of Obama’s second term have not gone very well for him. The Bush tax rates are now “permanent” for about 98 percent of the country and the automatic 2013 tax increase was kept about as small as it could have been, the growth of discretionary spending is being modestly restrained by the 2011 budget agreement and sequester and major new spending is almost unthinkable, there’s a continuing resolution coming soon that looks likely to ease the burdens placed on the Pentagon (at least) by the form of the sequester without increasing spending levels, and that CR will likely put off further 2013 budget fights at least well into the summer (when the debt ceiling will be reached again) and perhaps through the fiscal year to clear the deck for the 2014 budget fight—in which House Republicans will offer a budget that balances in ten years without raising taxes and Senate Democrats (proposing their first budget since 2009) seem likely to offer one that doesn’t balance yet does raise taxes. And all the while, the president has gotten nothing else accomplished and his approval ratings have dropped.

 

Now, obviously none of this amounts to much to be proud of for Republicans, except in light of the president’s absurdly hubristic attitude of the past few months. All the fights they’ve had have been about a small portion of only discretionary spending, the prospect of serious entitlement reform is not much nearer than it was, the party has not taken up an aggressive new policy agenda with middle-class appeal, and while keeping the other side from achieving its goals is an important aim of any minority party it is not a sufficient one. 

 

But if the past few months have not been hugely successful for Republicans, they have been a disaster for the president, whose power naturally diminishes with every passing day in this second term. And he seems to understand why: Republicans have decided to stop focusing on him and start using the leverage they have as the party in charge of one house of Congress—working with Senate Democrats to seek common ground where they can and forcing them to take uncomfortable votes where they can, while taking it for granted that the president will sign anything Congress sends him. That’s the promise of “regular order” for them, and it has some appeal for Senate Democrats too, since the president has offered no agenda for them to rally around and seems to have very little interest in their reelection prospects. 

 

All this seems like a recipe for presidential irrelevance, and Obama seems to be responding to that danger by putting himself back in the middle of the story. Being nice to people is always a good idea, but I think he’s going to find that the trouble he’s in is not the result of a shortage of lunch invitations.

 http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/342464/message-i-care-yuval-levin

 Living Large in the Obama White House

The hoi polloi aren’t welcome, but Marie Antoinette would be at home.

We are now firmly ensconced in the brutal Age of the Sequester, and things in America are grave. The federal government, we learned on Wednesday, is so strapped for cash that the president has been forced to cut off the People’s access to the home he’s borrowing from them. He didn’t want to have to do this, naturally — “particularly during the popular spring touring season.” But then Congress just had to go and acquiesce with measures that the president himself suggested and signed into law. How beastly! We axed 2.6 percent from a $44.8 trillion budget, and now the president can’t even afford the $18,000 per week necessary to retain the seven staff members who facilitate citizens’ enjoying self-guided tours around the White House.

The executive mansion is not in that much trouble, of course. It’s certainly not in sufficiently dire straits for Air Force One ($181,757 per hour) to be grounded, or to see the executive chef ($100,000 per year) furloughed, or to cut back on the hours of the three full-time White House calligraphers ($277,050 per year for the trio), or to limit the invaluable work of the chief of staff to the president’s dog ($102,000 per year), or to trim his ridiculous motorcade ($2.2 million). If Ellen DeGeneres wants another dancercize session or Spain holds another clothing sale, the first family will be there before you can say “citizen executive.” Fear ye not, serfs: Austerity may be word of the week, but the president is by no means in any danger of being forced to live like the president of a republic instead of like a king.

When Calvin Coolidge was president in the glitzy 1920s, he took the republican ideal so seriously that he ended up in a series of tiffs with the White House housekeeper, Elizabeth Jaffray, over the cost of state dinners, and took to admonishing the executive branch for using too many pencils. Such behavior now serves only as a punchline to a joke that is not funny. The current annual cost of the White House — just in household expenses, not the policy operations for which it exists — is $1.4 billion: Annually, presidential vacations cost $20 million (the low estimate for one presidential vacation to Hawaii is $4 million, but the true cost is probably five times that); the first family’s yearly health-care costs are $7 million; more than $6 million is spent on the White House grounds each year. Transporting the president cost $346 million last year. But as Michelle Obama might say, America is basically a downright mean sort of place, so the tours will just have to go. One hopes at least that the calligraphers were recruited to sign the docents’ pink slips.

It’s not just the cost that stuns — it’s the pomp, too. The expense is often justified on the grounds of security. But for someone who wishes to remain inconspicuous, the president isn’t exactly subtle about things. In the 1930s, Eleanor Roosevelt tried to refuse Secret Service protection but was overruled. Nonetheless, for fear that “their presence made her look more like a Queen flanked by an Imperial Guard,” she refused to let the agents that tailed her make themselves known to the public, notes Philip H. Melanson. I was in Washington, D.C., once when George W. Bush’s presidential motorcade came past. It was like watching a Michael Bay movie about traffic, but with more special effects. “Imperial Guard” doesn’t do it justice. One can imagine Noel Coward: “Dear boy, I simply loved you in Pennsylvania Avenue!”

Like many of his predecessors, President Coolidge recognized that Americans looked up to the president as the only nationally elected politician, and he sought to behave accordingly. His example has been forgotten. John F. Groom, who has written a book about the growth of the White House, contrasts the expectation that presidents “should run their lives as examples to the nation, with frugality and simplicity,” with the conduct of President Obama, who, despite constant harping about “income inequality,” has displayed “the very height of unbridled personal excess in his own lifestyle.” It has been a long while since an incumbent lived frugally or simply. For all his virtues, Ronald Reagan positively encouraged a renaissance of Kennedy’s Camelot — bringing Hollywood into the mix for good measure. Fondly as many might remember his years in office, it was not a good look. And by all measures, George W. Bush was as bad as Obama — if not worse. America, “let’s not go to Camelot,” as Monty Python said. “’Tis a silly place.”

There was a reason that the Founding Fathers rejected titles and honorifics in favor of simplicity. Thankfully, the straightforward address, “Mr. President,” won out over the pretentious names that John Adams suggested, which included “His Majesty the President,” “His Mighty Benign Highness,” and “His High Mightiness.” (The Senate rather cruelly mocked Adams by suggesting it refer to him as “His Rotundity.”) Too many in our government have forgotten which way around this is supposed to work. Here in America, it’s supposed to be small government, Big People. This is the New World not the Old. And yet, if you could sew Marie Antoinette’s head back on and bring her back to life, she would look around at today’s White House and nod approvingly. As for the people queuing outside? Sorry, darling, we simply can’t afford to invite them in.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/342494/living-large-obama-white-house-charles-c-w-cooke

 Where Rand’s Stand Stands

Rand Paul’s 12-hour, 56-minute filibuster captured a news cycle and prompted a bit of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington nostalgia, but what else can we take away from it? Here are five things, to start.

1. Rand Paul is good at transactional politics.

Contrary to Senator McCain’s grumbles, Senator Paul’s stand proved more than the fact that he’s good at rousing a rabble of “libertarian kids.” It showed Paul is good at being a Republican — better than his father was, for sure. Consider that Rand’s coalition of supporters includes not just traditional Republicans and tea-partiers but the full bouquet of libertarians, including the sort who beatified his father. Some in the latter camp were upset when the Kentuckian hewed to the GOP party line on its fleeting delay of Chuck Hagel’s confirmation, so convinced were they that Hagel’s benignity outweighed his bewilderment.

Paul struck a mildly defensive posture at the time, assuring the Israel skeptics and defense retrenchers in his base that he’d ultimately support Hagel and that he was keeping his powder dry for what he saw as the bigger fight: using the confirmation of John Brennan to the post of director of the Central Intelligence Agency to put the Obama administration’s feet to the fire on drones. Paul, of course, kept his word. He had been a good soldier in the losing effort on Hagel, and he used the maneuverability he thus acquired to take a stand on an issue that was important to him. Do you think any of the paleos and libertarians who shook their heads at Paul’s Hagel vote are still mad? As a political transaction, this was as smart as it gets.

2. He’s as much a strategist as an ideologue.

The rap on Paul the Younger when he came into office was that he was a kook, especially by the standards of the old-guard Senate gentility, which often operates at such a low ideological frequency that you could transmit its proceedings under water. Paul didn’t help his cause with his early cable-news stumble on the constitutional wisdom of civil-rights-era federal intervention — foolishly choosing to martyr himself to the exception instead of trying to make a case that it proves the rule. But since then Rand has picked his spots much better, and the filibuster was a case in point.

Paul is explicitly and implicitly skeptical, not just about this administration’s conduct of the War on Terror but about the very structure of that war. But there is not now a workable coalition in Washington that shares his skepticism. So Paul shrewdly narrowed his focus. Not to the War on Terror broadly. Not drone strikes. Not drone strikes against U.S. citizens abroad. Not drone strikes against U.S. citizens on U.S. soil who are in the active process of carrying out terrorist attacks. No, Paul asked a narrow — and, as it turns out, brutal — question. Does the president think he has the constitutional authority to assassinate a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil, without due process, if he deems that citizen a threat? By focusing on the archest case, Paul made the White House’s prior refusal to rule out such an authority look as extreme as it actually is. It spontaneously brought rank-and-file Republicans to the floor to help him, and it caused half of the progressives on Twitter to defend him and the other half to succumb to madness as Rand %&$*ing Paul established himself as the only reasonable man in the room.

3. There is (maybe) a market for civil libertarians.

The transition from the Bush to the Obama administration established most elected Democrats as pure opportunists on civil liberties, as they went largely radio silent as Their Man amplified Bush-era war powers, expanded the scope and the intensity of covert “kinetic action,” and failed to shut down Gitmo. Let’s yield that there is a kind of cockeyed principle involved in the selective silence — that Democrats aren’t purebred hypocrites but actually do trust Obama more than they trusted Bush not to abuse his authority. Something like the mirror of that might be happening with Republicans. That is, they might be realizing — in part opportunistically, but in part sincerely — that even though the president is commander-in-chief, the prosecution of the War on Terror ought to be governed by the rule of law and not that of man. This is certainly the vibe you got from civil-libertarian and anti-war pundits on Twitter last night, who spoke hopefully of Paul’s filibuster as “changing the physics” of Washington or “expanding the scope of the possible” when it comes to foreign policy.

4. Paul has allies in the class of 2010 — and beyond.

Of course, even if it’s true that Republicans are interested in occupying a space dove-ward of the president and serving these traditionally underserved elements on the right, it will be a halting, messy process, translating the vibe of the Paul filibuster into either a policy program or a coalition that can win elections. But the roster of early supporters Paul drew to the Senate floor is telling. Not just Mike Lee and Ted Cruz — the Senate Republicans’ Federalist Society brain trust — but lunch-pail tea-partiers such as Pat Toomey and Ron Johnson and Mr. 2016 himself, Marco Rubio. The New Guys, and the antithesis of Senator McCain’s get-off-my-lawn hawkishness. The star power of these early adopters combined with the organic energy Paul brought to his filibuster (probably the longest such speech to stay on topic and not resort to phone-book-reading and the like) to goad others to the floor, including the Senate Republicans’ Nos. 1 and 2, Mitch McConnell and John Cornyn. Again, it’s not yet clear that they were one and all standing with Rand, but they were standing in his general vicinity.

5. Washington is still capable of (real) drama.

In an era of “manufactured crises” in which battles over governance and over spin take place in two distinct and causally isolated universes (see the remoteness of perception from reality on the sequester, for just the latest example), Rand Paul’s filibuster presented the greatest of rarities in Washington — the salutary political spectacle. It was a show, to be sure. But it was spontaneous (when Paul arrived at the Capitol on Wednesday, he didn’t even know the Brennan vote was on the docket) and self-sustaining. It drew even the marginally politically minded to watch C-SPAN in prime time. And it was effective.

When Rand Paul relieved himself to, well, relieve himself, we lived in a world in which the president refused to acknowledge a key limit on his war power. When Rand Paul arrived at the Capitol today, he did so with a letter from the attorney general that answered his question in terms as unequivocal as you’re likely to get from a government lawyer. Indeed, whether Rand’s stand changes the tenor of the foreign-policy debate or reverberates through the Republican party, it is perhaps most interesting because it worked.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/342477/where-rand-s-stand-stands-daniel-foster 

Record 89,304,000 Americans 'Not in Labor Force' -- 296,000 Fewer Employed Since January

 The number of Americans designated as "not in the labor force" in February was 89,304,000, a record high, up from 89,008,000 in January, according to the Department of Labor. This means that the number of Americans not in the labor force increased 296,000 between January and February. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) labels people who are unemployed and no longer looking for work as “not in the labor force,” including people who have retired on schedule, taken early retirement, or simply given up looking for work. 


The increase marks the second month in a row, after rising in January from 88.8 million in December.  Those not in the labor force had declined in December from 88.9 million in November. 
The nation's unemployment rate decreased to 7.7 percent in February, down from 7.9 percent in January.  Overall unemployment “has shown little movement, on net, since September 2012,” the Labor Department said.
Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 236,000 in February, according to the report.

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/record-89304000-americans-not-labor-force-296000-fewer-employed-january

This Dreadful Chart Really Puts Today’s Jobs Numbers Into Perspective

U.S. unemployment has fallen to its lowest levels since President Obama was elected in 2008, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday.

And although this is a welcome piece of news, let’s not get too ahead of ourselves. Indeed, as Alan Krueger, Chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, reminds us on the White House blog, “more work remains to be done.”

Okay, that’s a bit of an understatement. As the following charts from Bill McBride of Calculated Risk show, we have a long, long way to go before we can get back to pre-recession employment levels.

First, here’s a graph showing where labor force participation rate stands:

Calculated Risk

“The participation rate is well below the 66% to 67% rate that was normal over the last 20 years, although a significant portion of the recent decline is due to demographics,” McBride notes.

But if you think the LFP rate is bad, check out the following chart comparing job losses (in percentage terms) from the start of the “employment recession” to other post-World War II recessions:

Calculated Risk

Yikes.

“This shows the depth of the recent employment recession – worse than any other post-war recession – and the relatively slow recovery due to the lingering effects of the housing bust and financial crisis,” McBride notes.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/03/08/this-dreadful-jobs-losses-charts-really-puts-things-into-perspective/