‘I have not done anything wrong’, Ms. Lerner told the committee, in an opening statement. Nevertheless, she declined to answer questions under oath, invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.She stated that she would not testify because lawmakers had accused her of making false statements to Congress about IRS targeting of conservative groups. This statement alone – which arguably constituted a waiver of her Fifth Amendment right – may constitute grounds for recalling Ms. Lerner and requiring her to testify before the Committee at a later date.

Although pleading the Fifth is not itself conclusive evidence of misbehavior, it is widely regarded as such. It is commonplace in criminal trials involving Mafia dons and other low-lives who mingle criminal with non-criminal behavior. Increasingly, the Imperial Presidency is morphing into the Cosa Nostra as it engages in threatening behavior right on the edges of the law. Middle range enforcers such as Lois Lerner are usually the first to fall before the FBI reaches upwards to those right at the top of the pyramid.

Like Cosa Nostra, the White House has developed a convenient strategy for evading ultimate responsibility for such behavior:

“President Obama’s former senior adviser, David Axelrod, told MSNBC recently that his guy was off the hook on the IRS scandal because ‘part of being President is there is so much beneath you that you can’t know because the government is so vast.” ‘The Unaccountable Executive’, The Wall Street Journal, May 23,2013

President Nixon once used the same defense. However, once all the president’s men collapsed like dominoes, as the investigstion advanced, Tricky Dick finally decided to take the fall and boarded Air Force One for one last time, heading out to San Clemente while relying on phlebitis and President Ford to protecty him from further probes.

President Obama may find himself in the same predicament, as his second term stumbles on, unless he chooses to admit wrong-doing and stops playing around on the outer edges of the law.

Tunisia’s secularists view a strict, austere Islam as alien to the country’s relatively open and moderate culture, as well as devastating towards the wealth-creating tourist industry. But the Salafis deploy much-needed social welfare programs to attract young Tunisians for whom Nahda is insufficiently Islamist and insufficiently successful in terms of job-creation.

Tunisia has become a fertile environment for radical fundamentalism. Weapons from the poorly-handled revolution in Libya have found their way to Tunisia and jihadi fighters have holed up in a region on the border with Algeria. Moreover, the civil war in Syria has attracted recruits from north Africa, including many Tunisians. Hardened jihadists eventually return to their homeland and turn their guns onto their own governments. Tunisia could easily become yet another welcoming watering hole for al-qaeda terrorists.

All this was entirely predictable when the Arab Spring began. Foolish Western governments that ignored trusted allies and fostered revolutions that brought them down, will suffer long-term for such short-sighted betrayals.

Hat Tip: ‘War within Islam’, Financial Times, May 22, 2013

Miniaturizing a warhead to fit on a missile is not an overwhelming technical obstacle. North Korea requires only one ICBM capable of delivering a single nuclear warhead in order to pose an existential threat to the United States.The Electromagnetic Pulse Commission, the Congressional Strategic Posture Commission, together with several other U.S. studies have established that detonating a nuclear weapon high above any part of the U.S. mainland would generate a catastrophic electro-magnetic pulse.

Sucn an EMP attack would collapse the electric grid and other infrastructure that depends upon it. 300 million Americans would be placed in immediate and serious life-threatening jeopardy. An EMP attack would plunge the U.S. electricity-powered civilization into a black-out potentially lasting for several years. The U.S. currently has no missile defense assets devoted to stopping a missile coming from the south. All such assets currently are positioned to intercept a missile strike in the middle or late part of its trajectory coming from the north polar region. The Obama administration indeed has cancelled the only two U.S. boost-phase or space-based defensive systems.

Wake up President Obama while sufficiwnt electricity remains for you to smell the coffee.A surgical strike to prevent North Korean development of an ICBM has never been more urgent.

Hat Tip: R.James Woolsey and Peter Vincent fry, ‘How North Korea Could Cripple the U.S.’, The Wall Street Journal, May 21, 2013

Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Given the modern Imperial Presidency, it takes a truly great man to withstand the temptation. Barack Obama is weak and dysfunctional as a consequence of a disturbed childhood, essentially orphaned by two utterly selfish and dysfunctional parents.

But Barack Obama is not entirely clueless. He remembers the fate of Richard Nixon, and does not relish the prospect of an aborted second term. All those golf treats with Tiger Woods and all those basketball treats with Michael Jordan! So this president is more tricky than Tricky Dick when he sets loose his IRS rattlesnakes on his political opponents.

The right-wing media may be sleuthing for some hint that Obama picked up the phone and sicced his tax snakes on his enemies. But that is not how things work in post-Watergate Washington. All that he needed to do was exactly what he did, in full view, throughout his three-year campaign for the 2012 elections: publicly suggest that conservative political groups were engaged in nefarious activities, publicly call out by name political opponents whom he wanted to be harassed,and publicly encourage his party to pressure for IRS investigations. Even in his 2010 State of the Union address, this paranoid president cast aspersions on the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, claiming that it opened the floodgates to conservative special interests. Well guess which party expended most on the 2012 elections?

The president publicly derided ‘tea-baggers’. Vice President Joe Biden compared them to terrorists. In case the IRS missed the point, Obama publicly raised the threat of illegality: ‘All around this country there are groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity, who are running millions of dollars of ads against Democratic candidates…And they don’t say who exactly the Americans for Prosperity are. You don’t know if it’s a foreign corporation.’

How much more prodding do you think was necessary to set loose the IRS snakes on the names that Obama listed? Does this paranoid man think that Americans are completely stupid? Does he truly believe that Americans- independent of his left-leaning ideology – will ever believe that he played no role whatsoever in this disgusting partisan episode?

I’m from the government, and I’m here to take you down’.

Hat Tip: Kimberley A. Strassel, ‘The IRS Scandal Started at the Top’, The Wall Street Journal, May 17, 2013

“We are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate. The reputation of the Obama White House has, among conservatives, gone from sketchy to sinister, and, among liberals, from unsatisfying to dangerous. No one likes what they’re seeing. The Justice Department’s assault on the associated Press and the ugly politicization of the Internal Revenue Service have left the administration’s credibility deeply, possibly irretrievably damaged….Something big has shifted. The standing of the administration has changed. As always it comes down to trust. Do you trust the president’s answers when he’s pressed on an uncomfortable story? Do you trust his people to be sober and fair-minded as they go about their work? Do you trust the IRS and the Justice Department? You do not.” Peggy Noonan, ‘This Is No Ordinary Scandal’, The Wall Street Journal, May 18, 2013

President Obama, albeit sheepishly, acts as though these scandals are unconnected to the White House.Like the chief of police in Casablanca he is shocked, shocked, to discover in the newspapers what has happened! President Obama, however, is deeply connected to these scandals. He is not a bystander, like you and I. This happens to be his administration. The Justice Department and the IRS are his executive agencies. He runs and oversees them.

In this column, I focus on the IRS scandal, once again. For it is much the more serious of the two. There are two parts to the IRS scandal. The first is the obviously deliberate and targeted abuse harassment and attempted suppression of conservative groups. The second is the auditing of taxes of conservative political activists.

In order to suppress conservative groups the IRS demanded donor rolls, membership lists, data on all contributions, names of volunteers, the contents of all speeches made by members, Facebook posts, minutes of all meetings, and copies of all materials handed out at gatherings. When asked what its members were reading, one group responded: The U.S. Constitution! Now I can assure you from first hand experience that these questions are not routinely requested by the IRS. When The Locke Institute applied for 501 (c) 3 status in 1994, it took about a year to secure that status. But the questions were always fair and politically unbiased. And that was during the administration of President Bill Clinton, who was not above a dirty trick or two to harass his supposed enemies.

The second part of the scandal is the auditing of political activists who have publicly opposed the administration. Such politically-oriented audits constitute the use of government power to intrude on the privacy and shackle the political freedom of American citizens. The purpose is to overwhelm and intimidate – to kill the opposition, audit by audit by audit. Such behavior is to be expected of such low-lives as Vladimir Putin, Tsar of All the Russias. Perhaps now it must be expected by such low-lives as President Obama, Tsar of the United States of America.

Shame on you Barack Obama! You disgrace the high office that you are privileged to hold.

The details of the Gosnell case, presented to a Philadelphia jury who sat for weeks listening to every grisly detail concerning how this abomination of a doctor set about murdering late-term babies by piercing and snipping them as they lay helplessly on the delivery table, born alive, are too horrific for many of us to stomach. The jury did the right thing. Kermit Gosnell was reluctantly spared the death penalty. Instead he will serve the remainder of his life in prison without any possibility of parole. He will not be pierced and snipped on death row.

So the law thankfully is now clear in the State of Pennsylvania. If a baby is outside the womb and is alive, and if a doctor performs a procedure on that baby that causes it to die, that is first-degree murder.

That said, in some states, if the baby is alive and inside the womb, late stage, when procedures similar to Gosnell’s are done, that is legal.The Gosnell verdict,nevertheless, has changed the abortion environment. Any doctor in the U.S. who performs abortions past 20 weeks is looking at that verdict and wishes that there was more clarity about what falls along the spectrum between a day at the office and first-degree murder.

The political debate about late-term abortions, inevitably, is about to recommence, following years of uncomfortable silence since Bill Clinton famously stated that ‘abortion should be safe, legal and rare.’

Hat Tip: Daniel Henninger, ‘America’s Second Civil War, The Wall Street Journal, May 16, 2013

A sequence of weak and corrupt agency beads has pursued audits and harassment against named individuals and organizations – left and right depending on the politics of the president – deemed to be dangerously critical of White House activities. A few examples will suffice to tell the story.

FDR used the IRS to harass newspaper publishers who were opposed to the New Deal. Those so attacked included William Randolph Hearst and Moses Annenberg. FDR also dropped the IRS hammer on Democratic Party political rivals, such as Huey Long and Father Coughlin as well as on such prominent Republicans as Andrew Mellon. In 1944, he reached out to spike an IRS audit of illegal campaign contributions made by a government contractor to Congressman Lyndon Johnson. Johnson’s political career would have justifiably ended in 1944, but for that illegal intervention.

JFK was a quick learner from FDR. Within days of capturing the presidency, King Arthur of Camelot launched the Ideological Organization Audit Project. This targeted right-leaning groups such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade and the Foundation for Economic Education. Steel executives who defied the administration were singled out for IRS audits.

Richard Nixon was determined to take Republican revenge. He created the Special Services Staff to mastermind what a memo called ‘all IRS activities involving ideological, militant, subversive, radical and similar type organizations. More than 10,000 individuals and groups were targeted because of their political activism or slant between 1969 and 1973.

There followed a lull in IRS political harassment until Bill Clinton assumed the presidency in 1993. In 1995, The Clinton White House and the Democratic National Committee produced a 331-page report entitled ‘Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce’ that attacked magazines, think tanks, and other entities and individuals who had criticized the president. More than twenty organizations identified in that document – including the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute – and almost a dozen high-profile individuals, including Paula Jones and Gennifer Flowers, were audited.

So now that a truly third rate president occupies the White House, it is not at all surprising to find that low-grade harassment has been meted out by the IRS against organizations that have such epithets as ‘tea party’ or ‘patriot’ in their nomenclotures. No doubt the epithet ‘Christian’ or even ‘true American’ will have elicited White House rage from the current occupant.

What manner of men and women are attracted to senior positions in the IRS? Evidently, not individuals with any regard for the rule of law or the First Amendment to the Constitution. History suggests that many IRS appointees stem from the dregs of society, no doubt from the Mafia gangs that extract protection monies from hard-working businessmen in the big cities, and from the crooked police forces that protect the guilty and harass the innocent.

Hat Tip: James Bovard, ‘A Brief History of IRS Political Targeting’, The Wall Street Journal, May 15, 2013

The economic case for exit is now dominating debate across the Pelagic Isle. The large single market of the EU has brought benefits to Europe’s many small economies,especially those with a relatively large industrial base. It is bringing transfer benefits to the profligate PIIGS who are exploiting the charity of German savers. The UK, however, is a large economy with a small industrial base. It is fully capable of correcting its own fiscal excesses, especially under Conservative Party governance. For the United Kingdom, the regulatory burden of the single market massively outweighs the benefits.

The key assumption that underpins this judgment is that Britain – in the absence of becoming a member of the European Economic Area – Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein – would still enjoy access to free trade with the European Union. This assumption is highly probable, since Germany and the Netherlands – the two best functioning EU economies – would welcome open access to the large British market. A negative trade shock imposed on the UK is in the economic interest of no EU economy, however perfidious, Albion may be regarded by some of its former allies and enemies.

Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union, one of the two treaties known together as the Lisbon Treaty, provides the option for an exit. Negotiations would be required between the British government and the various European institutions. Most likely, Britain would secure an exit placing it into a comparable situation with Switzerland i.e. a bilateral free trade deal. This would be a sweet deal for a country that desires to retain the City of London as Europe’s major financial center, and to evade the strangulation of the financial transactions tax and European-style banking regulations that the EU bureaucracy is panting to impose.

So, contrary to the advice given today by President Obama to Prime Minister David Cameron in the Oval Office, my advice is that Britain should exit now, without attempting to reform the EU from within. A country operating outside the euro-zone has precious little leverage to secure a deal that will weaken the social market philosophy that now dominates euro-land. Remember that Britons are still predominantly Anglo-Saxons, Prime Minster Cameron, and that their ties remain closer to North America and other former colonies than to Old Europe.

Hat Tip: Wolfgang Munchau, ‘Lawson is right – Britain does not need Europe’, Financial Times, May 13, 2013

Throughout my time in Virginia the team that I have supported is Manchester United, the Red Devils, a team that has dominated the English soccer scene for the past 26 years. Throughout that time period, Man U has been managed by Alex Ferguson, now Sir Alex Ferguson, who announced his imminent retirement last week at the age of 71 years, after 1,500 games in charge of what has become one of the world’s richest and most popular sports clubs. Few Britons have been more successful, in any sphere, in recent times.

His longevity as manager is a mark of this success. There are twenty clubs in the Barclay’s Premier League. Over the past year alone, 8 of these clubs have sacked their managers. Many others have faced speculation about their imminent demise. Only Sir Alex, a Glaswegian Scot from the blue-collar shipyards of that famous city, has been entirely secure, so secure indeed that he has been privileged to choose his own successor, and has been elevated to the Man U board of directors following his retirement. Sir Alex has earned job security and widespread respect because he is a winner. Under his leadership, the Red Devils have lifted 38 trophies – Premier League, F.A. Cup and European Championship – a record that no future manager is ever likely to match.

How has he achieved such success? Hard bloody work is one answer. Sir Alex is not some Spanish, Portuguese or Italian playboy management consultant, like Jose Mourinho. He is a rough-hewed, gritty, foul-mouthed Scot, prepared to apply the dreaded ‘hairdryer’ to under-performing stars during the half-time interval, even to kick a soccer boot at the head of one of his most famous stars, David Beckham, when the occasion so deserved. Sir Alex controls everything in his club, from brand-management, to talent-spotting, to the players’ tea. When Wayne Rooney experiences the ‘red mist of rage’ on the soccer pitch, he knows that he will be benched by his manager and that he will experience a much more dreadful red-rage from that fearsome Scot, once he returns to the dressing room.

Economy is another answer. Soccer management is about squeezing out more performance per salary pound than one’s highly competitive rivals. This Sir Alex has done, season after season, spending a lower proportion of the club’s revenues on wages than any other Premier League club. This achievement has attracted the attention of businessmen and political leaders, especially from those within his beloved Labour Party.In particular, Sir Alex and Tony Blair bonded deeply, each recognizing the leadership qualities of the other. Although Gordon Brown is a fellow-Scot, Sir Alex despised his shambolic leadership, though he was never tempted to cross party lines.

Sir Alex may be a committed Labour Party supporter, but that does not mean that he is anti-capitalist. Far from it. He embraced New Labour long before Tony Blair invented the name. English soccer would become the best, during his 26 year reign at Old Trafford, because it pays the most. The average weekly wage in the Premier League rose by 1,500 per cent between 1992 and 2010. Sir Alex accepted his fair share of the rewards. He named his mansion Fairfields, after the dockyard where his father once labored.

Most of all, Sir Alex’s success was based on an enthusiastic embrace of globalization. He inherited a squad that contained two Danes, four Irishmen, and 18 Britons. He leaves a squad with players from a dozen countries, including Serbia, Ecuador, and Japan. In this respect, the politician whom Sir Alex most resembles is not Tony Blair, but rather his Tory nemesis, Margaret Thatcher. Of course, Sir Alex claims to detest the Iron Lady, for her blue rather than his red color. Yet, in truth they are very similar. Both won global success through a combination of simple truths and relentless drive. Both revered aspiration and opportunity. Both made Britain great.

The man that I honor today is no Red Alex but rather he is the Iron Man.

Hat Tip: Bagehot, ‘The socialist international’, The Economist, May 11, 2013

A not-uncommon response to the sequence of lies exposed by Gregory Hicks, Mark Thompson and Eric Nordstrom before the House oversight committee this week is ‘who cares?’ The dead are long buried, other events now dominate public discussion, and come 2016, Hillary Clinton will be on her way to the White House. The victors get to write the history.

Now all this may be true. It is an old adage that a democracy gets the government it deserves. And the present government is showing itself to be about as despicable as one could ever imagine. So that pretty much sums up the moral and intellectual caliber of the electoral majority that currently controls the United States political market-place.

However, I beg to differ with this dismissive view of Benghazi. What Benghazi told a watching world is that the President and the Secretary of State of the United States both care more for their political prospects than for the honor of their country. Both are prepared to lie, not just to the world at large, but to the families of the fallen, about the reason for their murders and the retribution that will be exacted. For an al Qaeda attack on U.S. property and personnel, a crackpot California video-maker will be wrongly jailed. Some honor regained, some retribution extracted!

“From the day of the attack until this week, the White House spin was too clever by half. In the weeks and months after the attack White House spokesmen said they were investigating the story, an internal review was under way. When the story blew open again, last week, they saiud it was too far in the past: ‘Benghazi happened a long time ago’, Jay Carney, The White House press secretary, really said that. Think of that. They can’t give answers when the story’s fresh because it just happened, they’re looking into it. Eight months later they don’t have anything to say because it all happened so long ago. Think of how low your opinion of the American people has to be to think you can get away, forever, with that.” Peggy Noonan, ‘The Inconvenient Truth About Benghazi’, The Wall Street Journal, May 11, 2013

Well, not the entire American people. Just those who sheepishly voted a Chicago-machine politician back into office in the teeth of one of the worst first-term records in the history of the Republic. These voters truly got what they expected and what they deserved. Their children and their grandchildren may well live to despise them for their failure of good judgment if, that is, they are not wiped out by a nuclear terrorist attack on their undefended homeland.