THE NEW JOHN KERRY QUESTION: “How do you ask a man to be the [first] man to die for a mistake?” “I mean, I am just generally wondering, where are all the war protests?”
UPDATE: From the comments: “When Bush was bombing Iraq Springsteen was all ‘Last to Die.’ And now that Obama is about to bomb Syria he’s all ’57 Channels and nothing On’.”
“SMART DIPLOMACY:” Obama’s First Big Mideast Blunder: Abandoning Iraq.
AT 1:15, Obama Will Talk About Syria from the Rose Garden.
IN THE MAIL: Clever Fox: A Dani Fox Novel.
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 114.
BAD REVIEWS: Obama, Holder, Journalists, And Their Sources.
Initially, a federal district judge, Leonie Brinkema, issued an opinion that was favorable to Risen’s position. The Administration appealed. In 2012, despite pleas for restraint from major news organizations—including both the Times and Fox News—Holder approved an appellate brief that marked a low point in recent First Amendment litigation. It rejected any notion of a reporter’s constitutional privilege to protect sources in criminal proceedings. It dismissed the idea that reporting like Risen’s might be justified because it serves the public interest. And it described a working reporter who hears classified information during an interview with a government official as a witness to a crime, under the Espionage Act of 1917—no different under criminal law from a witness to a murder.
The brief was a plank in a wider Administration campaign to deter leakers in national-security cases by punishing them harshly and by acting aggressively to identify journalists’ sources. Holder has approved more media-leak prosecutions than all previous Attorneys General combined. This spring, however, after it was revealed that the Justice Department had secretly seized phone records of Associated Press reporters and editors, as well as those of the Fox reporter James Rosen, the Administration backed down, and, on July 12th, Holder vowed to change how Justice would treat journalists in criminal cases.
The rest of this piece is basically special pleading on the part of journalists — hey, you wouldn’t treat us like Assange or Snowden or Manning, we’re your buddies! — that misses that the campaign to intimidate whistleblowers is all of a piece, by an Administration that has a lot to hide.
THE SYRIA DEBACLE: Questions For Hillary Clinton.
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CLAUDIA ROSETT: So Much For The UN Charade In Syria.
AN UNFORTUNATE TONE: President Obama riles with reference to ‘my military.’ All through the day, I me mine I me mine I me mine. Hey, Prez: You didn’t build that.
IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: IRS Draws New Complaint.
The Internal Revenue Service is facing new criticism from Congress after one of the country’s biggest veterans’ organizations said the IRS has recently been too tough in its reviews of the tax-exempt status of individual American Legion posts.
The House Committee on Veterans Affairs this week requested the IRS respond to complaints its inspectors are asking posts to provide discharge papers or service records during reviews of their tax-exempt status, a policy the committee says is “completely unwarranted.” The American Legion said Post 447 in Round Rock, Texas, was fined $12,000 for lack of compliance before finding documents to satisfy inspectors.
Zero out their travel and conference budget.
A FOLLOWUP ON THAT WEIRD STORY ABOUT FOREIGN MUSLIMS LURKING ABOUT BOSTON’S QUABBIN RESERVOIR: “The seven individuals apprehended for trespassing at the Quabbin Water Reserve in Belchertown, Massachusetts, just after midnight May 14, 2013 are part of an ‘on-going criminal matter,’ according to the Massachusetts State Police.”
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN ONE MAN TAKES ON THE FEDS: The Feds get vindictive.
JAMES TARANTO: Show of Farce: Obama’s Syria approach defies satire.
“I’ve not made a decision.” That was President Obama’s very first answer in a Wednesday interview with “PBS NewsHour.”
A day earlier, the Onion anticipated that comment in a story titled “Obama Weighing His Syria Option.” It included this pretend quote from Denis McDonough, the White House chief of staff: “The president recognizes that the situation in Syria is extremely delicate and that the U.S. faces complex consequences regardless of what he chooses; that’s why he’s giving the one option in front of him so much thought. He will not act until he’s confident in the inexorable decision he’s making.”
In the PBS interview, Obama also stressed that the option before him was a minimal one. America will act, he said, “if, in fact, we can take limited, tailored approaches, not getting drawn into a long conflict, not a repetition of, you know, Iraq, which I know a lot of people are worried about.” Politico summed that up with the headline “Obama: Syria Won’t Be Iraq.”
Andy Borowitz, resident satirist at The New Yorker, summed it up with the headline “Obama Promises Syria Strike Will Have No Objective.” Here’s his pretend Obama quote: “Let me be clear. Our goal will not be to effect régime change, or alter the balance of power in Syria, or bring the civil war there to an end. We will simply do something random there for one or two days and then leave.”
Read the whole thing.
MOST TRANSPARENT ADMINISTRATION IN HISTORY: Appeals court says White House visitor logs can be kept from public.
CHANGE: ObamaCare Turns A Liberal To The Right.
Christensen once supported Obamacare — also called the Affordable Care Act — because he likes to help people.
“I’m a left-leaning social activist,” he said Wednesday at a Chattanooga chapter meeting of the National Federation of Independent Businesses, which counted U.S. Rep. Chuck Fleischmann, R-Tenn., and State Sen. Bo Watson, R-Chattanooga, in attendance. “It sounded like a good idea to offer insurance to all the people in the country.”
Christensen was originally concerned with patients who go to the emergency room for minor ailments instead of seeking a primary care physician and felt that Obamacare would allow people to stay healthier and remove perverse incentives that clog up hospitals across the U.S.
The only problem? He didn’t realize how much it would cost him, and he’s horrified by how much it’s going to cost his employees.
“Some of those regulations about what the costs of my employees are going to be are horrendous, and I can’t understand the math,” he said. “Listening to the insurance providors and people providing webinars on how to figure out what our costs are going to be in this program, it’s gigantically troublesome to me.”
Not only does the math make his accountant shudder, Christensen is fairly certain that his employees are going to totally lose all coverage, he said.
How’s that hopey-changey stuff workin’ out for ya?
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Elite Liberal Arts Colleges Face Credit Ratings Downgrade. “Over the past several months, the credit ratings of several prestigious liberal arts colleges have been downgraded or assigned a negative outlook by Moody’s Investors Service.”
ADVICE TO YOUNGER EMPLOYEES: Get Off Email And Pick Up The Phone.
Advertising sales were down and Ms. Baxter identified a reason: Her sales staff, all under age 35, were emailing clients with their pitches, not calling them on the phone.
Younger workers may have mastered technologies that some of their older colleagues have barely heard of, such as photo and video sharing apps Instagram and Vine, but some bosses wish they’d learn a more traditional skill: picking up the phone.
While Millennials—usually defined as people born between 1981 and the early 2000s—are rarely far from their smartphones, they grew up with a wider array of communication tools, such as texting and online chatting, and have different expectations for how and when they’d like to be reached. In the workplace, some managers say avoiding the phone in favor of email can hurt business, hinder creativity and delay projects.
Read the whole thing.
IT’S HARD OUT THERE, for a gender studies major.
THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR MITT ROMNEY, WE’D HAVE A PRESIDENT BRIT-PUNDITS WOULD MOCK FOR CLUMSY INEPTITUDE. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Barack Obama is proving an embarrassing amateur on the world stage compared to George W. Bush. “As it stands, President Obama’s proposed military coalition on Syria has a grand total of two members – the US and France. And the French, as we know from Iraq, simply can’t be relied on, and have very limited military capability. It is a truly embarrassing state of affairs when Paris, at best a fair weather friend, is your only partner. . . . In marked contrast to Obama, President Bush invested a great deal of time and effort in cultivating ties with key US allies, especially Britain.”
This must be more of that “smart diplomacy” we were promised.
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