HE’S RIGHT, BUT NO ONE WANTS TO HEAR IT: Former President George W. Bush on ISIS: “You need boots on the ground.”

THE STATE DEPARTMENT’S HACK:  His name is Patrick Kennedy, the State Department’s Undersecretary for Management.

A State Department official at the center of the Benghazi controversy may also have called off a controversial inspector general probe.

Patrick Kennedy, the State Department’s undersecretary for management, allegedly blocked diplomatic security investigations that may have cast the bureau in a negative light.

According to an internal memo prepared by the inspector general in October 2013 and obtained by the Washington Examiner, Kennedy personally called off an investigation into the ambassador to Belgium after allegations surfaced that the ambassador had solicited “sexual favors from both prostitutes and minor children.”

A former official with the State Department’s office of inspector general said the obstruction of oversight went even further, noting that Kennedy was “good friends” with the acting inspector general, Harold Geisel. The former official requested anonymity to speak candidly about Kennedy’s potential interference with inspector general probes. . . .

Kennedy has been linked to the security failures that led to the 2011 terror attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, the controversy involving Hillary Clinton’s private emails and State Department projects that involved Clinton Foundation donors. . . .

The undersecretary continues to play a role in the State Department’s stonewalling of Freedom of Information Act requests.

Is there anything this guy can’t do? A National Review story on Kennedy in 2013 highlighted his odd career at the Department:

He’s not a political appointee or a longtime Obama backer; he has worked in diplomatic and government positions his entire adult life. . . . But congressional Republicans increasingly see Kennedy as a key figure in what they characterize as the State Department’s culture of unaccountability, secrecy, and rear-covering.

Sounds like the State Department’s resident ass-coverer. I would call for his resignation but then again, there would be a thousand other career civil servants willing to take his place (paid for with our tax dollars, of course).

HE’S PROVING TO BE USEFUL: Bernie Sanders tries to shame Clinton into voicing her opinion on free trade, other key issues.

Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton spent Thursday ducking questions about a trade bill before Congress, as her chief rival for the nomination said it was embarrassing to see the party’s leading candidate hide from the biggest issues of the day.

The former secretary of state has avoided the trade issue for months, keeping mum rather than choosing sides in a debate that has split the Democratic Party. But the pressure on her to speak out peaked as the legislation headed to a House vote Friday.

“SecretaryClinton, if she is against this, we need her to speak out right now — right now,” declared Democratic presidential contender Sen. Bernard Sanders, who has spearheaded opposition to the free trade measure.

“You can be for it or against it. But I don’t understand how on an issue of such huge consequences you don’t have an opinion,” he said Thursday at a breakfast meeting with reporters in Washington hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. . . .

He said Mrs. Clintonalso owes it to voters to answer questions about climate change, domestic spying by the National Security Agency, the Keystone XL oil pipeline and the political dominance of America’s billionaire class, which also are issues where Mr. Sanders has lead the charge and areas where liberal activists mistrustMrs. Clinton.

“Those are issues. I respect the secretary. But I would like to see a civil, intelligent debate,” he said.

Yeah, “a civil, intelligent debate” isn’t exactly Clinton’s forte. But it’s fun to watch Sanders call out Clinton’s pusillanimity.

DESTROYING IT WOULD BE BETTER: Carly Fiorina says it’s time to redefine feminism.

“A feminist is a woman who lives the life she chooses,”Mrs. Fiorinatold a free-market interest group dinner in Washington in speech that was billed as her first major policy address since declaring her candidacy May 5. “A woman may choose to have five children and home-school them. She may choose to become a CEO or run for president.”

Mrs. Fiorina also delved into abortion and birth control, suggesting liberals have a double-standard on women’s health issues.

“The left fights to protect late-term abortions and sues the Little Sisters of the Poor, but they oppose over-the-counter birth control,” she told the crowd.

She’s right, but to be fair to Fiorina, I don’t think she’s trying to “redefine” feminism so much as offer a healthy alternative to its dependent, whiny version of women demanding various entitlements, repeatedly articulated by progressives such as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Feminism has been hijacked by progressives, and it’s no longer about equality for women as much as demeaning and punishing men–often wrapped in poorly disguised hatred of “ironic misandry.”

Fiorina’s vision is one of equality of opportunity and individual liberty–quintessential American values–rather than the one-size-fits-all progressive vision exemplified by the recent liberal anthropologist Wendy Martin’s NY Times expose on Upper East Side women, whom she demeans for choosing to be stay-at-home, involved moms. Haters gonna hate, I suppose. Fiorina’s message is a welcome contrast.

AS MUCH RESPECT FOR THE CONSTITUTION AS OBAMA: In my latest oped with David Rivkin, we explain why Hillary Clinton’s voter reform proposals–automatic voter registration at age 18, a 20-day early voting period, allowing felons to vote, etc.–are all likely to be unconstitutional:

A federal takeover of election laws—and rolling back state voter-ID laws intended to discourage election fraud—is a high priority for progressives. The billionaire financier George Soros reportedly has pledged $5 million to bankroll legal challenges to laws like those that Mrs. Clinton decries. Part of the effort is intended simply to galvanize the Democratic base by stoking a sense of grievance, but the strategy should be taken seriously—and rebutted as unconstitutional. . . .

Congress can use its Elections Clause power to pre-empt state laws, but its pre-emptive authority should be restrained by the anti-commandeering principle. Congress cannot conscript state officials to execute federal congressional-election reforms, but instead must use federal officials to do so. . . .

Republicans have been muted in their response to Mrs. Clinton and the attempt to expand federal power over elections and undermine states’ anti-fraud election laws. Such reticence is a mistake. They would have the Constitution and legal precedent on their side in rebutting her proposals—as they would if they launched a fresh legal challenge to the Motor Voter law. 

Mrs. Clinton is making it clear that, if elected, we can expect her to continue President Obama’s disdain for the Constitution. Clinton’s fury over the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision—which allowed the airing of Hillary: The Movie, as an exercise of free speech—has led her to propose scaling back the First Amendment. Her zeal to expand amnesty for illegal immigrants has caused her to declare that she will “go even further” than President Obama’s actions, which a federal judge has enjoined due to separation of powers concerns. Her eagerness to win the presidency now leads her to disregard yet another fundamental constitutional concept—federalism.

IT’S A BAD HABIT SHE HAS: Hans Von Spakovsky: Clinton Gets Everything Wrong on Voting:

She insists that state legislative initiatives to improve the integrity of our election process are a “sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color.” Wrong. Instead, as Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity aptly puts it, states are engaged in “the usual effort to strike the right balance between facilitating voting by eligible voters and preventing voting by ineligible voters.”

Clinton’s assertion is hard to reconcile with the U.S. Census Bureau’s finding that blacks voted at a higher level than whites by two percentage points in the 2012 election. Moreover, the Justice Department didn’t file a single case in 2014 (or, thus far, in 2015) under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act alleging the disenfranchisement of people of color.

Clinton also claimed that students and grandmothers are being turned away from the polls in Texas because of its voter-ID law. But there is no evidence that this is occurring. In state elections in 2013, turnout almost doubled in comparison with the 2011 state election (when the ID law was not in place) — including in heavily minority areas, some of which had even greater increases in turnout. And the few people who don’t have an ID are provided with one free of charge by Texas authorities.

Voter anti-fraud laws aren’t about “disenfranchising” anyone. They’re about ensuring the integrity of our constitutional republic, by implementing commonsense measures to restrict voting to those who are eligible to vote. Democrats like Clinton, by contrast, have every incentive to loosen anti-fraud measures, so that ineligible voters–mostly convicted felons, students (who want to vote outside their state of legal residency) and illegal immigrants–can vote, as Democrats know that these ineligibles are highly likely to vote for Democrats.

Plus, invoking the “disenfranchisement” rhetoric–with an added dose of “Jim Crow” references for good measure–are designed to gin up black and other minority turnout in a 2016 presidential election that will not have the same minority pull as when Obama was on the ballot.

OBAMA’S “BULLY” PULPIT:  Obama took a cheap shot at the Supreme Court for even agreeing to hear the Obamacare subsidy case, King v. Burwell, telling reporters at a press conference in Germany “This should be an easy case” and “Frankly, it probably shouldn’t even have been taken up.” Joel Gehrke over at NRO notes:

Jonathan Gruber, one of Obamacare’s architects, famously contradicted that assertion in 2012, flatly admitting that the law had been designed to withhold subsidies from those who purchased coverage through the federal exchange in an attempt to prod states to set up their own marketplaces.

“What’s important to remember politically about this is if you’re a state and you don’t set up an exchange, that means your citizens don’t get their tax credits — but your citizens still pay the taxes that support this bill,” Gruber said. Yet when asked today to say how states should prepare for the prospect of the court adopting that reading, Obama was dismissive of his opponents legal reasoning, and the idea that any well-informed jurist could be swayed by it. “I think it’s important for us to go ahead and assume that the Supreme Court is going to do what most legal scholars who have looked at this would expect them to do,” he said. “I’m optimistic that the Supreme Court will play it straight when it comes to the interpretation.”

It’s typical Obama bullying of the Court, suggesting that it would not be “play[ing] it straight” if it rules in favor of the plaintiffs and gives effect to the plain language of a law that limits subsidies to “an Exchange established by the State.” Obama similarly took to his “bully” pulpit after the Supreme Court’s oral arguments in the first big Obamacare case, NFIB v. Sebelius (2012). It’s almost like he thinks the Supreme Court is the King’s Bench or something.

THE NEXT ASSAULT ON FREE SPEECH: The WSJ editors perspicaciously predict the “Return of the Speech Police” in the 2016 presidential election:

[A] behind-the-scenes effort is under way to lobby the Federal Election Commission and Justice Department to stifle free political speech the way the Internal Revenue Service did in 2012. Don’t be surprised if the subpoenas hit Republican candidates at crucial political moments.

In late May the Campaign Legal Center and Democracy 21 asked the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel to investigate former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and his Right to Rise Super PAC for violating campaign-finance law. According to the letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch, “If Bush is raising and spending money as a candidate, he is a candidate under the law, whether or not he declares himself to be one.”

The theory behind this accusation is campaign “coordination,” the new favorite tool of the anti-speech political left. Earlier this year the Justice Department invited such complaints with a public statement that it would “aggressively pursue coordination offenses at every appropriate opportunity.” . . .

Democracy 21 President Fred Wertheimer says Mr. Bush should be considered a candidate who is illegally coordinating because if you asked “100 ordinary Americans” if he is a candidate, they will say yes. What a bracing legal standard. What would the same 100 Americans have said about Hillary Clinton in 2013, or Ted Cruz in high school? Where is the limiting principle?

There is no limiting principle–just ask conservatives in Wisconsin who supported Scott Walker’s efforts to reform public sector unions.  The point isn’t so much that liberals/progressives think they will ultimately win when these efforts are inevitably challenged in court. The point is that merely investigating conservatives on shadowy “coordination” allegations is sufficient to chill conservatives’ speech, sending supporters (and their funds) elsewhere.

THE STENCH OF WEAKNESS CONFIRMED: Russian bomber flights near US airspace doubled last year.

Russian bombers intruded into the U.S. Air Defense Identification Zone — a transition area around U.S. airspace where the U.S. does not claim sovereignty but keeps close watch — at least 10 times in 2014, double the average of five incursions a year dating to 2006, according to the North American Aerospace Defense Command, known as NORAD. . . .

“We saw last year both an increase in their frequency as well an expansion of the areas where they flew. While these flights are ostensibly for training, they are also clearly intended to message to us,” Adm. William Gortney, the commander of NORAD, told The Washington Times.

Rep. Michael K. Conaway, a Texas Republican who serves on the House Armed Services Committee, said he believes the Kremlin’s message is crystal-clear and that it ultimately could trigger a dangerous response.

“On a tactical level, this is a pattern that shows they’re testing our responses to see what we’re doing and how we do it,” he said. “They’re very provocative, they’re subject to miscommunication, and some event could happen that no one wants.

“So why do the Russians continue to do it? I think they’re rattling sabers in a sense. I think this is definitely coming from [Russian President Vladimir] Putin. They’re flexing their muscles, they’re trying to reclaim the superpower status that Putin has always wanted to. It’s a great concern, it’s dangerous and it’s provocative. There’s no good that can come from it, and it needs to stop,” Rep. Conaway said.

Because a beta male/mom jeans President who tells Russia that he’ll have “more flexibility” after the 2012 election invites Putin’s belligerence. Russia’s annexation of Crimea is only the beginning. It’s almost as though Russia and China are now itching for a fight with a weakened U.S.

FEDERALIZING VOTING: NYC Mayor Bill DeBlasio says the U.S. has a “democracy problem” because States generally define the terms of voting. This is essentially an echo of Hillary Clinton’s recent proposal to pass a federal law requiring automatic voter registration upon reaching age 18, restoring felons’ voting rights, and a mandatory 20-day early voting period.

“Our elections are governed by state law and for a long time I’ve believed we need to make a fundamental series of reforms,” de Blasio told CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “Let’s face it, a lot of the people in the political class have tried to discourage voter involvement and a lot of incumbents prefer a very small electorate.”

The mayor referred to several Republican governors who have signed laws requiring photo identification by voters, arguing the provision is a modest step to prevent fraud. Democrats like de Blasio counter that Republicans’ interests are more partisan: They want to discourage some people from voting altogether.

Congress has some authority, under the Elections Clause, to regulate the time, place and manner of congressional (not state) elections. But presumably the present GOP-controlled Congress would not sanction federalizing election law in the way proposed by DeBlasio and Clinton. For the moment, at least, the battle will remain in the federal courts, as liberals/progressives resort to their typical lawfare tactics in an attempt to block state laws designed to stop voting fraud.

Indeed, this is shaping up to be a big theme of the Democrats in 2016: Republicans are trying to keep minorities from voting by implementing anti-fraud reforms like voter ID and periodic purging of voter rolls for dead, illegal and other ineligible individuals. Unfortunately for the Democrats, there is no evidence whatsoever that such anti-fraud laws prevent minorities from voting. Indeed, voter turnout rates for blacks exceeded that for whites in 2008 and 2012, and the turnout of other minority groups has consistently increased, despite enactment of anti-fraud laws.

But according to the liberals/progressives, restricting voting by convicted felons and requiring photo ID are little more than modern-day Jim Crow laws, secretly aimed at blacks. It’s all about ginning up minority turnout in the presidential election, which is why Hillary’s top campaign lawyer, Marc Elias, has filed lawsuits challenging these ant-fraud laws ahead of the 2016 election in key battleground States such as North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin.

Ironically, the litigation activities in which Mr. Elias is engaging is undoubtedly being “coordinated” by his chief employer, the 2016 Clinton campaign.  And it is now clear that the Elias lawfare is being bankrolled by George Soros. One might surmise from this that Soros is trying to “buy” a Clinton presidency by funding this litigation, and that it’s all being done with the knowledge, blessing and at least implicit coordination with the Clinton campaign. Ironically, this sort of “coordination” is the deadly sin of which the political left has been trying to convict Scott Walker for several years. It’s just another case of the progressive motto: forbidden for thee, but not for me.

CALLING “CAITLYN” JENNER A “HE” IS A MICROAGGRESSION: A member of the Hitler Youth student at Ithaca College writes a letter to the editors of the Pittsburgh-Gazette to complain about a column by Jennifer Graham,who had the audacity to refer to “her” as “Mr. Jenner” since he/she does, after all, still have the full array of male, er, parts (not to mention chromosomes).  In the eyes of the delicate snowflake student:

Repeatedly, Ms. Graham refers to Caitlyn Jenner as “him,” and the subheadline “he/​she” not only is a microaggression but also likens the former Olympian’s personal struggle with becoming herself as an interchangeable joke, instead of courageous.

Every time someone misappropriates the gender of a transgender person, it’s a microaggression. Every time a media source refers to Caitlyn as “Bruce,” it’s a microaggression.

By publishing this column, the Post-Gazette is responsible for propagating transphobia as socially acceptable. . . .

Fifty percent of transgender teens will attempt suicide, and 40 percent of all homeless youth identify on the LGBTQ+ spectrum. That’s not some liberal-media exaggeration, that’s the truth. We never hear about this because the LGBTQ+ community has yet to be given a voice — we’re drowned out by people like Ms. Graham, demonizing us for our sexuality.

So it is inexcusable for newspapers, like the Post-Gazette, to give a voice to a bully to further propagate the hate crimes perpetrated against our community. We did not make an active choice to be LGBTQ+, but Ms. Graham made an active choice to be offensive. As journalists, you must do better.

Oh dear. Where to begin? The poor little flower apparently cannot handle anyone disagreeing with him/her (he/she signed his/her name “Christopher Kelly,” but who am I to assign a gender–that would be so aggressive of me). Such disagreements are likely not tolerated in the progressive/liberal “safe space” of Ithaca College, where this larval stage human has been brainwashed instructed.

And if Mr./Ms. Kelly is truly concerned about the high suicide rates of transgendered individuals, he/she should consider the opinion of psychiatrists such as Paul McHugh (former chief psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins Hospital), who wrote an oped explaining that the available data suggests that undergoing transgender surgery does not improve psychiatric outcome, and that those undergoing the surgery actually have suicide rates 20 times higher than the non-transgendered population. Psychiatric treatment for body dysmorphic disorder can be beneficial for such individuals.

Mr./Ms. Kelly, I don’t know if you are making an “active choice” to be LGBTQ+ (whatever the “+” means). But I do know that if an individual wishes to refer to an individual with XY chromosomes and male genitalia as “he,” it is not an “offensive” “microagression” against you. It is scientific fact, unlike global warming climate change, which I rather suspect you defend as “scientific fact” on a regular basis. Grow up.

ANOTHER ISRAEL AND AMERICA-HATING PRESIDENT: Former President Jimmy Carter spoke recently to an AARP group, telling them, “Americans still have racist tendencies or feelings of superiority to people of color.”  Nice to hear such pro-American words from a former President.

Carter’s other recent gems include an oped last August in which Carter accused Israel of committing war crimes against Palestinians.  He also defended Obama’s decision to miss the unity rally in Paris after the Charlie Hebdo shootings, saying, “President Obama’s just come back from vacation, and I know how it is when you’ve been gone for a week or two.”

The similarities between Carter and Obama are growing day by day– although a poll last summer had Obama beating Carter for the title of “worst President since World War II” by five percentage points.  I suspect Obama’s lead in that poll would be much higher today. 

DISPARATE IMPACT STRIKES AGAIN: A federal judge in New York, Kimba Wood (a Reagan appointee), has thrown out New York’s teacher exam as racially discriminatory under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. The reason? Black and Hispanic applicants had passage rates only 54 to 75 percent that of white applicants. The exam, called LAST-2, was administered from 2004 to 2012. According to the New York Times:

“Instead of beginning with ascertaining the job tasks of New York teachers, the two LAST examinations began with the premise that all New York teachers should be required to demonstrate an understanding of the liberal arts.”

Joshua Sohn, a partner at the firm Mishcon de Reya, who represents the prospective teachers in the case, echoed the that sentiment.

“They started with the conclusion, without any support, that this is what you actually needed to know to be an effective teacher,” Mr. Sohn said.

With this ruling, the LAST-2 meets the same fate of the LAST-1, an earlier version of the test, given from 1993 to 2004, that was also found to be discriminatory. . . .

Neither version of the exams is still in use in New York. Instead the state administers a new test called the Academic Literacy Skills Test, or the ALST, along with a slate of other assessments. The fate of the ALST, however, was recently called into question as well. This spring, Judge Wood began questioning whether that test, too, was racially discriminatory. A hearing is scheduled on the issue for later this month.

So having a well-rounded understanding of liberal arts is no longer  a reasonable indicia of a qualified teacher any longer.  But if  a well-rounded education isn’t an appropriate assessment of teacher qualification, what is? Breathing? Holding a (worthless) degree? Counting to 100? How far we have come–which just goes to show that the progressive motto “forward” isn’t always a positive thing for society. No wonder public schools generally are such cesspits of ennui and incompetence.

The outcome of this case illustrates the problem inherent in disparate impact theory, in which a plaintiff alleging discrimination is allowed to win under the statute without any proof of intentional discrimination.  So long as the action taken–in this case, an employment test–has a disparate statistical impact on a protected class (such as race), the burden will shift to the defendant. At that point, of course, the incentive to settle is strong, and shifting the burden of proof is often the death knell of the challenged practice.

The bottom line is that disparate impact theory allows many, many innocuous practices to be labeled as “discriminatory” merely because they “impact” races at a different rate. As I’ve pointed out before, this is a horrible way to run a diverse society, as the races do not participate in the same activities at the same rate, nor do they generally perform the same on standardized tests, as the recent racial discrimination lawsuit by Asian-Americans against Harvard University shows.

ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST: Hawaii’s state Obamacare exchange has failed, after over $200 million in federal taxpayer funding and many millions more of state funding.

The once-highly praised Hawaii Health Connector has been “unable to generate sufficient revenues to sustain operations,” Gov. David Ige’s office said in a statement. The federal Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) informed the exchange last week that federal funds were no longer available to support long-term operations. . . .

While many of the state’s Democrats praised the ObamaCare exchange when it launched in October 2013, it was riddled with trouble from the start. The web portal never worked properly despite the state spending $74 million on a contract with CGI to build and maintain it. . . .

Enrollment never reached the 300,000 number then-Gov. Neil Abercrombie, a Democrat, enthusiastically predicted at the opening press conference launching the Connector. The enrollment number also never hit 70,000, the minimum needed to stay financially solvent. At its peak, enrollment reached 37,000, a fraction of the state’s 1.4 million people. Hawaii’s uninsured population, at 8 percent when the exchange opened, dropped just 2 percent.

Yep–another rousing Obamacare success story–all the more reason for the Supreme Court to give effect to the law as written by the Democrats and rule that individuals in federal-run exchanges don’t qualify for subsidies. Doing so will put the Obamacare monstrosity out of its misery sooner. 

WHEN ISIS GOES NUCLEAR: Investors’ Business Daily has a disturbing editorial, “Apocalypse Now: ISIS Establishing Nuclear Caliphate,” which claims that the radical Islamist group is close to acquiring sufficient funds for a nuclear weapon.

In the latest edition of its propaganda rag, the Islamic State says it has enough cash to buy a nuclear weapon from Pakistan and smuggle it into the U.S. through Mexico. This is the sum of all fears, and it’s not overblown. . . .

A Rand Corp. study says IS has more than $2 billion in assets from seized oil fields and refineries, kidnap ransoms and taxation. The think tank figures the terror group now controls fields with a production capacity of more than 150,000 barrels a day. It smuggles this oil out in tanker trucks and sells it at steeply discounted rates to buyers in Syria, Turkey, Kurdistan and elsewhere.

Despite falling world oil prices that have slowed IS’ energy revenues to about $2 million a week, the terror group is still raking in more than $1 million a day in extortion and taxes alone. IS has also stolen some $500 million from state-owned banks in Iraq.

This is far more cash than al-Qaida had access to before 9/11. And IS is more ambitious — and fanatical enough to actually detonate a nuke inside a U.S. city. . . . Indeed, IS’ magazine boasts that IS is “looking to do something big, something that would make any past operation look like a squirrel shoot.”

Another reason to seal the Mexican border as much as possible. But hey, ISIS is just the JV; nothing to worry about. This growing threat makes me glad I don’t live in a major U.S. city.

HE’D RATHER BLAME REPUBLICANS THAN FIX IT: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says President Obama will veto any Obamacare backup plan Congress passes.  This makes sense, as Obama is clearly more interested in scoring political points, by blaming Republicans, rather than fixing his signature legislation. As with all things Obama, it’s his way or the highway, and Congress’s desires are irrelevant.

The Supreme Court is expected to rule on the Obamacare subsidy case, King v. Burwell, at the end of June. If the Court rules that individuals in States without state-established health insurance exchanges cannot obtain Obamacare subsidies, some believe the GOP needs to have a legislative “fix” available.  The Hill has reported that GOP leaders are hinting at extending the subsidies, at least temporarily, combined with repeal of the individual and employer mandates:, an idea originally floated by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI):

While working on their own ideas, Freedom Caucus members are also open to something like Sen. Ron Johnson’s (R-Wis.) idea to temporarily extend subsidies.

Johnson’s plan would extend ObamaCare subsidies through August 2017, when he hopes there will be a Republican president, while also repealing the law’s individual and employer mandates.

His bill has 31 Republican co-sponsors in the Senate, including Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). It has not received the same welcome in the House, though; Ryan’s working group is still publicly undecided on the question, and House Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price (R-Ga.) came out in opposition to the idea last month. . . .

Republicans acknowledge they will face pressure to do something if the court rules for the challengers. Figures from the Obama administration released Tuesday show 6.4 million people would lose subsidies that help them afford insurance.

Of course, why Republicans would be to blame for the Supreme Court upholding Obamacare as written by Congress is inexplicable, other than by the fact that the mainstream media has repeatedly said so.  No Republicans–none–voted for Obamacare, and then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi admitted that the bill was not read carefully, because Congress had to pass it so we could find out what’s in it.  As David Harsanyi observes:

The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that the 37 states that have declined to set up exchanges would see an average spike of 287 percent should the King v. Burwell decision not go the Obama administration’s way. It would be 650 percent in Mississippi — an amount that only proves that exchanges have not made insurance markets more competitive or more affordable as promised. Actually, the cost of insurance in federally run exchanges is already 287 percent higher. The difference is picked up by taxpayers. . . .

So you can imagine the overwhelming appeal to emotion that Democrats and the media would roll out if millions were to lose their subsidies. The fight would be over whom the public blames for whatever chaos would ensue. The culpability for that chaos would belong in one place.

Yep, intelligent individuals know who is to blame for Obamacare and all its warts. But the problems is that low information voters have swallowed the progressive/liberal mainstream media’s storyline, which of course blames the Republicans for the harsh, natural consequences of an ill-considered bill they never supported in the first place.

DIET COKE GIRL A FAKE?: Gateway Pundit reports that Tahera Ahmad, the Muslim activist who recently cried religious discrimination against United Airlines has been called a “liar” by a commenter at FlyerTalk who says she was a witness to the ordeal:

She [Ahmad] ordered a coke zero and a hot green tea with a Splenda. The flight attendant handed her a full diet coke with a cup on top and then told her that the green tea would take a few minutes and she would get it to her ASAP. The lady said very rudely and condescending to the FA that she ordered a coke zero and basically pushed the soda back to the flight attendant. The FA said she was sorry and attempted to find a coke zero for her (which she did not have many of) and told her that she could only give her a portion of the can not the full can. This is when the lady in question started to freak out and told the FA “What do you think I will use this as a weapon?! Why can’t I have the whole can? I think you are discriminating against me. I need your name….” The lady just kept yelling to her “I need your name… I am being discriminated against.” This is when a few passengers told her to calm down and one guy told her to “shut her mouth and she is being ridiculous over a can of coke”. No one ever said anything anti-Muslim to her at all. . . . This person is a liar plain and simple and is just pulling the discrimination card.

The commenter was anonymous, so there’s no way (yet) to confirm whether he/she was actually a witness to the event. But it does raise questions that should be explored as to whether this was all just a publicity stunt. The question is: With Muslim activists being so aggressive, will any of the witnesses be willing to publicly come forward and tell their story, or will they be intimidated into silence?

United has fired the flight attendant. I hope she sues them.

BECAUSE “SOCIAL” SCIENCE IS OXYMORONIC:  Scientific Fraud and Politics:

Last year UCLA political science grad student and maybe soon-to-be Princeton professorMichael LaCour released stunning findings from a field trial on gay marriage called “When Contact Changes Minds.” He found that a 20-minute conservation with a house-to-house canvasser could convert huge numbers of opponents into supporters, at least if the canvassers explained they were gay and told personal stories.

The study quickly became a media sensation, the most talked-about poli-sci paper in years, and it led gay-rights activists including some working on the Ireland referendum to retool their voter outreach.

The problem is that Mr. LaCour stands accused of faking everything from start to finish. Ph.D. candidates at Berkeley David Broockman andJosh Kalla tried but failed to replicate Mr. LaCour’s results. They then noticed unusual statistical irregularities in Mr. LaCour’s survey panel. He now says he pulled a Hillary Clintonand deleted his raw data. But the canvassing firm he claimed to have employed has never heard of the project—and there is no proof anyone was ever contacted, much less changed their minds. . . .

The larger question is why anyone invested Mr. LaCour’s paper with the authority of “science.” Experience and common sense suggest that persuading people to reconsider their opinions is difficult. An uninvited nag carrying on about politics on the front porch sounds like one of the less successful approaches.

Then again, the study flattered the ideological sensibilities of liberals, who tend to believe that resistance to gay marriage can only be the artifact of ignorance or prejudice, not moral or religious conviction. Mr. LaCour’s purported findings let them claim that science had proved them right.

Similar bias contaminates inquiries across the social sciences, which often seem to exist so liberals can claim that “studies show” some political assertion to be empirical. Thus they can recast stubborn political debates about philosophy and values as disputes over facts that can be resolved by science. President Obama is a particular aficionado of this bait and switch.

Calling social science a “science” is, frankly, laughable. And these days, even the “hard” sciences have become so politicized that one often cannot trust the “peer review” process to weed out errors, as is so often the case with global warming climate change data.

DIVERSITY COMEUPPANCE:  Kate Bachelder at WSJ has a great column on “Harvard’s Chinese Exclusion Act“:

Getting into Harvard is tough enough: Every year come the stories about applicants who built toilets in developing countries, performed groundbreaking lunar research, or won national fencing competitions, whatever it takes to edge out the competition. So you can imagine that the 52-year-old Florida businessman and author Yukong Zhao is incensed that gaining admission may be even harder for his children—because of their race.

“It’s not a political issue,” he says. “It’s a civil-rights issue.”

Mr. Zhao helped organize 64 groups that last month asked the Education Department to investigate Harvard University for discriminating against Asian-Americans in admissions. The allegation is that Harvard is holding Asian-Americans to higher standards to keep them from growing as a percentage of the student body. The complaint, filed also with the Justice Department, follows a lawsuit against the university last fall by the nonprofit Students for Fair Admissions. . . .

This spring, 21% of the students admitted to Harvard were Asian-American; in 1993 it was about 20%. Harvard selects students based on criteria it calls “holistic,” taking into consideration subjective qualities such as, according to the university’s website, “interests,” “character” and “growth.”

Yet look how Harvard stacks up against schools that explicitly don’t consider ethnicity in admissions. At the California Institute of Technology, the share of Asian-American students hit 42.5% in 2013—double Harvard’s and a big jump from Caltech’s 26% in 1993. At the University of California-Berkeley it is more than 30%; the state’s voters banned the state schools from using racial preferences in a 1996 referendum. The trend is also observable at elite high schools with race-neutral admissions: New York City’s Hunter College High School was 49% Asian-American in 2013.

This disparity suggests “a de facto quota system” at Harvard, Mr. Zhao tells me over dinner at a restaurant near his home in Orlando, where he works for a large energy company. Racial quotas aren’t allowed thanks to a 1978 Supreme Court ruling, but in 2003 the court confirmed that colleges could use race as a “plus” factor.

That “plus” factor decision, Grutter v. Bollinger, allowed the University of Michigan law school’s race-conscious, “holistic” admission program but warned:

“When using race as a ‘plus’ factor in university admissions, a university’s admissions program must remain flexible enough to ensure that each applicant is evaluated as an individual and not in a way that makes an applicant’s race or ethnicity the defining feature of his or her application. The importance of this individualized consideration in the context of a race-conscious admissions program is paramount.”

What Harvard and other “diversity”-driven admissions programs are doing isn’t giving Asian students a “plus” factor (as it is with “underrepresented” black or Hispanic students). Instead, being Asian with impeccable credentials is actually a “negative” factor that prevents such Asian students from being evaluated as an individual, which illustrates how perverse the quest for “diversity” has become.  The same can be said for white students who lose admissions seats to minority students with less impressive objective credentials.  But the incredibly high credentials of Asian students helps bolster the case that “diversity” is just progressive code for “discrimination” based on race rather than increasing educational opportunities for minority students.

SHOCKER: FRACKING IS SAFE: The EPA Fracking Miracle.

So even the Environmental Protection Agency now concedes that fracking is safe, which won’t surprise anyone familiar with the reality of unconventional oil and natural gas drilling in the U.S. But if no less than the EPA is saying this, then the political opposition doesn’t have much of a case left. . . .

EPA’s conclusion really is remarkable. The agency has yearned for an excuse to take over fracking regulation from the states, which do the job well. So if there was so much as a sliver of evidence that fracking was dangerous, the EPA would have found it. Think of this as the Obama Administration’s equivalent of the Bush Administration failing to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Heh. Let’s watch the contortions of the progressive science deniers now.

AUTOMATIC VOTER FRAUD: Hillary Clinton calls for automatic voter registration. I’m sure this wouldn’t lead to any problems.

“Today Republicans are systematically and deliberately trying to stop millions of citizens from voting,” she said during a speech at Texas Southern University in Houston.

“I call on Republicans at all levels of government, with all manner of ambition to stop fear-mongering about a phantom epidemic of election fraud and start explaining why they are so scared of letting citizens have their say.”

Clinton went after former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush by name, accusing the Republican presidential hopefuls of taking part in “a sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise” minorities, young people and the poor.

Automatic voter registration is just another ploy by Democrats to swell their base’s turnout at the polls, including those who lack legal ability to vote, including illegal aliens and convicted felons.  This shouldn’t be surprising, as a recent poll revealed that 60% of Democrats agreed that illegal immigrants should be able to vote, and another revealed that illegal Hispanic immigrants favor Democrats by 54 to 19 percent over Republicans. Democrats in Congress have introduced legislation to restore voting rights for convicted felons.

Keep talking, Hillary. A recent Rasmussen poll showed 76% of likely voters support voter ID, including 58% of Democrats. In recently upholding Indiana’s voter ID law in 2008, liberal Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens (now retired and replaced by Elena Kagan) observed in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board:

[F]lagrant examples of such fraud in other parts of the country have been documented throughout this Nation’s history by respected historians and journalists,that occasional examples have surfaced in recent years,and that Indiana’s own experience with fraudulent voting in the 2003 Democratic primary for East Chicago Mayor—though perpetrated using absentee ballots and not in-person fraud—demonstrate that not only is the risk of voter fraud real but that it could affect the outcome of a close election.

There is no question about the legitimacy or importance of the State’s interest in counting only the votes of eligible voters. Moreover, the interest in orderly administration and accurate recordkeeping provides a sufficient justification for carefully identifying all voters participating in the election process. While the most effective method of preventing election fraud may well be debatable, the propriety of doing so is perfectly clear.

The incentive to commit voter fraud for political gain is indisputable. Hillary’s policy proposal would only amplify such incentives. Moreover, President Obama’s unilateral lawmaking executive action on immigration has made it easier for illegal immigrants to register to vote (and vote) by granting them drivers’ licenses and Social Security numbers.

Clinton’s remarks indicated that the automatic registration should occur when an individual turns 18, but it’s unclear how such automatic registration would be executed. It is clear, however, that under New York v. United States and its progeny, the federal government cannot commandeer States to carry out federal law, so the federal government would have to implement such automatic voter registration itself somehow, perhaps via Social Security’s database.

States already have the capability of requiring automatic voter registration if they wish.  So this is truly another attempt by Democrats to impose a one-size-fits-all “solution” to a non-problem.

TRANSGENDER TROOPS NEXT?: The NYT editorial board, “Let Transgender Troops Serve Openly.” Magic 8-Ball says, “Reply hazy. Try again.”

HOW FAIR: Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby seeks to block release of Freddie Gray autopsy report. Smells like her narrative of murderous cops isn’t holding up as the evidence comes in.

A NATION OF MEN, AND NOT LAW: To be precise, a nation of one man/person, the President. A Hillary Clinton presidency would be more of the same. Daniel Henninger nails it in his latest column:

To the list of questions Hillary Clinton will never answer, add one more: Would a second Clinton presidency continue and expand Barack Obama’s revision of the American system of government that existed from 1789 until 2009?

The central feature of Mr. Obama’s rewrite of what one might call the Founding Fathers’ original vision has been to abolish Congress. Yes, the 535 men and women elected to Congress still show up at the old Capitol building, as they have since November 1800. But once past passage of ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank, the 44th president effectively retired Congress from its historic function. If you put the president behind the wheel of a car in front of the White House to visit Congress, he’d probably get lost. . . .

Barack Obama, channeling decades of theory, says constantly that the traditional system has failed. He said it in his 2011 Osawatomie, Kan., speech: “It doesn’t work. It has never worked.” He has attacked Congress repeatedly as a failed institution, teeing it up for mass revulsion just as he did the 1%.

With Congress rendered moribund, the new branch of the American political system is the federal enforcement bureaucracy. The Department of Health and Human Services’ auto-revisions of the Affordable Care Act are the most famous expressions of the new governing philosophy. But historians of the new system will cite the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights’ 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter on sexual harassment as the watershed event.

This letter—not even a formal regulation—forced creation of quasi-judicial systems of sexual-abuse surveillance on every campus in America. The universities complied for fear of lawsuits from enforcers at the Departments of Education and Justice.

Yep. It’s not just about a “power grab” from a “do nothing” Congress. It’s about a fundamental transformation of a constitutional republic into a progressive’s wet dream of government-by-bureaucracy.

AN OFFER THE GOP SHOULDN’T REFUSE: Black Chicago Pastor: Dems “Failing” Us.

“African-Americans have been loyal to the Democratic Party,” Pastor Corey Brooks said. “But there is a group of African-Americans that feel like the Democratic Party has not been loyal to us.”

Not far from O Block — named for a fallen gang member killed by a female assassin — is New Beginnings Church of Chicago, where Brooks sat in his office Wednesday morning laying out the case for Republican presidential candidates to visit the area.

So far, only Rand Paul already has taken him up on his offer – extended to all candidates of each party. The two walked through Parkway Gardens, an apartment complex along O Block, after Paul’s speech to his congregation.

Brooks isn’t the only person to believe a great change must occur for inner cities across the country to be able to break free from the poverty and crime that envelope them. But the pastor is looking to a different source than others for that change, one that doesn’t usually count O Block among its campaign stops: Republicans.

Every single GOP presidential contender should take Pastor Brooks up on this offer. This isn’t about pandering to identity politics; it’s about reaching out to a community that thinks the GOP doesn’t care about them, and showing them that isn’t true, and discussing alternative ways to fight poverty and black-on-black violence other than government handouts and blaming police.