John Boehner made use of another food metaphor today to describe President Obama’s recent string of jobs speeches. “His speech turned out to be all sizzle, no steak,” Boehner told reporters at his weekly press conference. “That’s assuming there is any sizzle left after you’ve reheated this thing so many times.”

Yesterday, the speaker called the president’s address at Knox College in Illinois an “Easter egg with no candy in it.”

In a closed-door meeting this morning, about a dozen members of the Republican Study Committee and 40 staffers met with attorney Cleta Mitchell for a briefing about the IRS targeting scandal.

“We’re not letting up,” RSC chairman Steve Scalise told me afterward.

“If you make one mistake then [the IRS is] going to rain on you,” he added. “And yet they lie to Congress and they think they can get away with this.”

In a handout members received, Mitchell listed what they could do next, suggesting, for one, that members assign at least one staffer to keep track of the evidence and monitor the hearings on the scandal.

“Don’t let the IRS and the Obama administration make you lose interest in this scandal,” she wrote. She also noted that members should insist on “regular updates at GOP Conference meetings from the House Committees investigating the IRS.”

“For pete’s sake, we are conservatives, the IRS is in the crosshairs – do not let this become just another ‘issue,’” her memo explained.

The handout also offered members a few possible legislative solutions, including prohibiting the unionization of IRS employees and reforming the tax code to curtail the scope, size, and power of the IRS.

Mitchell, who works with conservative groups facing IRS abuse, also charged Democrats with “perpetrating several ‘myths’ to divert attention from the truth, including the following FALSE statements offered in the House Committee hearings”:

“Progressive groups also were subjected to the same scrutiny”.  False.  A subset of liberal groups (with ‘progress’ or ‘progressive’ in their names) were initially ‘screened’ but then released and processed normally.   Compare that to 100% of the groups with the BOLO terms in their names or missions.  None of the liberal groups were held in legal limbo for years as conservative groups were and still are being held.

“This is all because of Citizens United to avoid donor disclosure.”  The vast majority of the targeted tea party groups are tiny, ‘mom and pop’ organizations who sprang up to oppose Obamacare and reduce the deficit and size of government.  They did not apply for c4 status to avoid disclosure of their donors. Most of them don’t have major donors in the first place

“This is all because of Citizens United which caused a huge increase in the number of applications.”  There was not a huge increase in the number of applications for c4 status.  In fact, when the IRS began the targeting in 2010, the number of applications for c4 status was actually lower than in 2009.  See http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/05/17/there-were-fewer-c4-a...

“501(c)(4) organizations should not be allowed to make any political expenditures”.  Under current law, 501(c)(4) rules for political activities are the same as those for most other 501(c) organizations except for 501(c)(3) entities, which are prohibited from making any expenditure for intervention in a political campaign.  That includes 501c5 organizations:  labor unions.  The Wall Street Journal reported in 2012 that labor unions spent approximately $3.3 billion dollars from their treasury funds (NOT their PACs) on politics between 2005 and 2011.  It isn’t the 501(c)(4) groups who are making the big political expenditures…it is the labor unions.

Scalise tells me that over August recess members will reach out to constituents to learn more about their experiences with IRS targeting.

“It was an insult for President Obama yesterday to call these phony scandals,” he said. “The president ought to be chastising the IRS, instead of defending them for targeting Americans.”

A Fox News poll released yesterday shows President Obama falling to a 25 percent approval rating among independents.

That’s a 6 percent drop from last month, and a 20 percent drop from Fox News’s 2012 election exit polling (Romney led Obama among independents, pulling 50 percent to Obama’s 45). Overall, Obama has dropped 27 percent in approval among independents since 2008. Fox describes the ratings as “a new low.”

Overall, President Obama’s approval rating is one point underwater with 46 percent approval and 47 percent disapproval. This is actually better for him than last month; in June Obama had a 51 percent disapproval and a 43 percent approval rating.  

Via Weasel Zippers.

In a speech to the National Urban League in Philadelphia today, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that he will ask a federal judge to require the state of Texas to once again seek Justice Department approval before making any changes to its election laws. The announcement portends a new contest over the federal voting-law review process, known as “preclearance,” which was instituted by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to prevent certain jurisdictions — mostly in the South — from discriminating against racial minorities or other subgroups of voters.

In Shelby County v. Holder last month, the Supreme Court struck down Section 4(b) of the Act, which mapped the jurisdictions that needed federal preclearance. The justices ruled 5–4 that the formula was outdated and therefore unconstitutional; since the map no longer reflected American racial attitudes, the federal government was no longer justified in violating the equal sovereignty of the states:

Nearly 50 years later, things have changed dramatically. Largely because of the Voting Rights Act, “[v]oter turnout and registration rates” in covered jurisdictions “now approach parity. Blatantly discriminatory evasions of federal decrees are rare. And minority candidates hold office at unprecedented levels.” Northwest Austin supra, at 202. The tests and devices that blocked ballot access have been forbidden nationwide for over 40 years. Yet the Act has not eased §5’s restrictions or narrowed the scope of §4’s coverage formula along the way. Instead those extraordinary and unprecedented features have been reauthorized as if nothing has changed, and they have grown even stronger.

With the coverage formula gone, many assumed that the preclearance restrictions in Section 5 were now a dead letter, unless Congress enacted a new formula mapping which jurisdictions ought to receive federal supervision. Holder evidently thinks otherwise — and he also seems to hold a considerably lower opinion of race relations in the South, or at least in Texas. The attorney general announced that he will use Section 3(c) of the VRA to ask the judge to “bail in” Texas, on account of “evidence of intentional racial discrimination” and the state’s “history of pervasive voting-related discrimination against racial minorities.” Under the “bail-in” provision, a jurisdiction found in violation of other parts of the Act can be placed under federal supervision, even if it is not already covered by the now-defunct 4(b) formula.

Below is Holder’s statement in full:

Texas state senator Wendy Davis received more than three times the amount of network-news coverage than the airtime given to the entire trial of abortionist Kermit Gosnell, according to a report from the Media Research Center’s Culture and Media Institute.

In the 19 days following her eleven-hour filibuster against an abortion-restriction bill on June 25, the Texas state senator was featured on ABC, NBC, and CBS programs for a total of 40 minutes, 48 seconds. The 59-day trial of Gosnell received only 13 minutes, 30 seconds of coverage on the same networks.

Gosnell was convicted on three counts of murder for killing three infants who had been born alive, and one count of involuntary manslaughter in the death of one of his female patients. As Americans learned of his appalling, unsanitary, and brutal practices, his Philadelphia clinic was called a “house of horrors” and a “slaughterhouse.” Wendy Davis and her pink sneakers, meanwhile, became a media sensation for her filibuster defense of the right to abortions after 20 weeks and opposition to regulations on Texas abortion clinics.

Jim McDermott urged President Obama and fellow Democrats to fight for Obamacare with the same muster as the soldiers in Gettysburg, comparing the law’s opponents to the Confederate South.

“This is Gettysburg, this is the big battle,” the Washington representative said on C-SPAN yesterday. “After this, the Civil War, it was pretty much downhill for the South.”

“That’s really what’s happening here for the forces against Obamacare,” he added. He suggested that Republicans oppose the law because voters will learn to like it so much that they “will never want to elect a Republican again.”

McDermott’s rallying cry comes on the heels of comments he made earlier in the morning in which he blamed the White House for being “terribly inefficient in dealing with the promotion of their bill” in the past. He vowed congressional Democrats were “going to make every effort we can to keep the president’s spine is made out of steel.”

Via CNS News.

Speaking of policing, here is my defense of stop-and-frisk in Politico today:

Already politically embattled, New York City’s stop-and-frisk policing is now in the cross-hairs as allegedly an officially sanctioned, city-wide version of George Zimmerman’s suspicion of Trayvon Martin that created the predicate for the tragedy in Sanford, Florida. “Stop and frisk is both racist and damaging to actual police work,” wrote Jamelle Bouie in the American Prospect.

Kelly unquestionably operates from this disadvantage: Musing from a podium is easy. Policing a city is hard. He doesn’t get to deal in airy generalities. He doesn’t get to wave off inconvenient realities. His job performance is ultimately judged not by the approval of pundits grading his remarks for their subtlety and deftness, but by lives saved and lost and criminal arrested or left on the streets.

I hazard to say that Ray Kelly cares as much about black lives as much as any of his critics, and I know he has certainly has done much more to save them.

I thought Weiner might be the best of the Democrats running for mayor — and now this. Although I have to say my faith was shaken when Weiner, who I thought would be more reasonable than the rest of the field on policing issues, loosely compared NYPD’s practices to those of Nazi Germany. 

A new Republican poll shows Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell with a wide lead over his conservative opponent, Matt Bevin.

Fifty-nine percent of GOP primary voters back McConnell, while 20 percent support Bevin in the poll, which was conducted by GOP firm Wenzel Strategies and reported by Politico. 

However, Bevin, a political newbie who just announced yesterday, isn’t well known in the state yet: 64 percent of likely voters have no opinion of him. Among GOP primary voters, 42 percent remained open to potentially changing their mind about what candidate they backed, while 58 percent felt very firm about their pick. 

Rep. Tom Cotton and Max Boot defend it; Julian Sanchez opposes it. I think Sanchez very effectively undermines the arguments in the program’s defense.

To conceive of the weave of the dark
is to lift forward the cloth
with a texture of silk, or wool, or nothing,
melting into the air, where the mind
is forever pulling for the edge, finding none,
or by the feel of the cloth, melting
away, like water from the ice
that was never cold, from a form
the mind could never hold:
it slipped away too fast.
And this edge, vanishing like a dream
of time, finds a place to hold fast
for a while, a gravity close
to the forgotten balance of the waters
of the womb, neither warm, nor cold;
the horror of drowning, suspended;
the ebbing ghost of nothingness,
formless in the world of darkness,
that can, for its time, offer
a drink, sheltered, cool and centering,
shield against the loss of the dark,
and the shapes, and landscapes,
like time, soon to slip forward
from it.

— From the August 5, 2013 issue of National Review.

There just wasn’t much to the president’s big economic speech yesterday. It followed the familiar pattern of his economic arguments—nostalgia for the America of the postwar era, some awfully shallow reflections on how much things have changed, and a series of tiny ideas that are supposed to bring it all back. Inadequate means to implausible ends and very little real contention with the actual circumstances of 21st century America. 

For all their policy differences, this is actually very much the pattern of the economic arguments of both the left and the right. The left yearns for problems to which the economic and social policies of the mid-1960s would be solutions and the right yearns for problems to which the economic and social policies of the early 1980s would be solutions. Neither wants to think too much about what economic and social policies might offer solutions to today’s rather different problems. That’s why our policy debates are so energizing and constructive. 

For what it’s worth, I think the right is in a much better position to actually offer some policy remedies to some of the key economic and social challenges we face. Democrats are far more hemmed in by the ideological blinders that keep them from seeing the American welfare state’s problems and by the demands of their electoral coalition, which for all its progressive rhetoric is deeply committed to the status quo (including of course the doubling down on Great Society entitlement policy design embodied by the left’s achievements of the past few years). Republicans are mostly hemmed in by intellectual and political inertia, which is a powerful force but not nearly so deep. Most of them have yet to see the opportunity they have now to offer a conservative reform agenda focused on the needs of working-class families. The almost total absence of a policy agenda on the left (an unusual situation for the left to be in, but one in which they seem likely to be stuck for a while) ought to cause ambitious conservative politicians to think anew about what applied conservative principles can offer the public. Various wonks on the right have gone some distance along these lines (I’d offer this compendium of such ideas, with quarterly updates, but there are many others). But it will take more than wonks. It will take political leaders. 

Thinking anew about how conservative principles apply to contemporary problems is the real lesson today’s Republicans ought to take from those of the Reagan era. They should emulate not so much the outcomes of that process—which after all had to do with the specific situation of the 70s and 80s—but the process itself, which today would yield some different means to the same crucial ends. That’s the kind of nostalgia we should get behind.

Check out the latest episode of Beltway Buzz. NR’s Patrick Brennan sits in for Andrew Stiles. We talk about Cruz, McConnell, and Christine O’Donnell.

Yesterday’s job speeches were more of the same from President Obama, says NBC’s Chuck Todd. “If you’re looking for the ‘new’ — No, there wasn’t ‘new’ in there,” he said on Morning Joe today.

Todd sensed that the speeches were also a sign that the “flagging” White House is “stuck” because of a lack of agenda. “I think the president needed to do this,” Todd explained. “I think he needed to go in front of crowds, I think he needed to reenergeize himself.”

After speaking in Illinois and Missouri yesterday, President Obama will travel to Jacksonville, Fla. today to give the last speech of his trip.

This week the Justice Department entered into a settlement agreement with the Arcadia, Calif., school district to resolve an investigation into allegations of discrimination against a transgender student that was, the press release says, “based on the student’s sex.” The complaint that had been filed alleged that the district had prohibited the student from “accessing facilities consistent with his male gender identity, including restrooms and locker rooms at school, as well as sex-specific overnight accommodations at a school-sponsored trip,” because the student is, well, not actually male.

Whatever one thinks of this as a matter of policy, it is quite dubious as a matter of law. The relevant statutes here, as the Justice Department’s press release acknowledges, “prohibit discrimination against students based on sex.” The Justice Department’s position is that “sex” includes not only sex but also “a student’s gender identity, transgender status, and nonconformity with gender stereotypes.”

Presumably the Justice Department has no objection (for now) to, say, separate restrooms and locker rooms for boys and girls. Rather, then, the objection the Justice Department has is to the refusal by the school district to draw a distinction between girls who identify as girls and girls who do not identify as girls (apparently on the theory that unless you believe you are a girl then you aren’t a girl, for purposes of the law). But the school district’s refusal to draw that distinction is not discrimination on the basis of “sex”; and, of course, if the legislators who passed these statutes in 1964 and 1972 had been told that this is what those statutes meant, they would have been understandably horrified.

Again, we can have a discussion about the best policy to follow for transgender students, but the U.S. Justice Department should not, by distorting a law, pretend that Congress has already resolved that discussion.

Here’s Eliot Spitzer’s new ad in his race for New York City comptroller, in which he seems to promise that the city’s most important industry will turn into a ghost town at the mere thought of him winning. Did I miss when he ran for Detroit comptroller?

Woops!: An earlier version of this post said this was his first ad. It’s not.

Wednesday was an emotionally exhausting, spiritually uplifting day for Pope Francis in Brazil. You could see it in his eyes.

We’ve seen him embrace people who have been made to feel as if they are outcasts, people who are sick — they line up to reach out to him at his every audience and public appearance in Rome. We’ve read his admonishments to the Roman curia — and to all of us – in his morning homilies at the Domus Sanctae Marthae at the Vatican, as he reintrouces virtue and all-encompassing sanctifying grace to a culture that is losing its understanding of real religion and what the Gospel requires of Christians.

But on Wednesday morning in Brazil, we got a beautiful look at a man in prayer. He went to the Shrine of our Lady of Aparecida, and, for a moment, all he wanted to do is pray. A peace overtook him — and that’s saying something for a man who typically seems quite at ease and receptive. Before he headed to Brazil, one of the last things he did was spend some quality time with the pope emeritus. Watching the scene, as clergy, dignitaries, the faithful, the curious, and reporters inside the shrine all wanted their moment with the pontiff, I imagined that Pope Benedict might be praying especially hard that his brother get the veneration time he needs.

As Andrea Tornielli explained:

The shrine is one rich in meaning and memories for Francis. It is significant that Francis wanted to add this trip to the shrine to his World Youth Day schedule. Today he will be here to venerate a little 40 centimetre -tall black statue of the Virgin Mary which was found in three pieces by three fishermen, in October 1717 in the Paraiba river. According to tradition the statue is black because it wants to be close to the oppressed and the fact it was found in pieces symbolises the broken lives of slaves.

The meeting of Latin American bishops in 2007 was the first general assembly to be held in a Marian shrine and the fact bishops had constant contact with faithful there – millions of them every year -, influenced their work, as it helped them to understand the importance of devotion and popular piety. “Celebrating the Eucharist with the people is different to celebrating it separately amongst us bishops. That gave us a live sense of belonging to our people, of the Church that goes forward as People of God, of us bishops as its servants.”

It was the first time one of the bishops’ General Conferences “didn’t start out from a pre-prepared basic text but from open dialogue” “to receive everything that came from below,” the future Pope explained. During that time, Latin America’s bishops got to know Bergoglio’s working style. His ability to listen and take all bishops had to say into account. Some of these bishops voted for him in the Conclave last March. It could be said that the election of the Pope “from the other side of the world” actually started at Aparecida.

The Aparecida document contains the key words and the messages which Francis now communicates to the entire Church, starting with his call to people to be missionaries: “To remain faithful we need to go outside. Remaining faithful one goes out. This is the message Aparecida essentially aims to get across,” Bergoglio said. In the Gospel, the most beautiful encounters between God and humanity take place on the street. Centuries of Christian history tell us this,” the late Franciscan archbishop and cardinal Aloísio Lorscheider used to say.

His day was a walk through tradition and engagement. Expect more of the same today as he visits Rio slums and at last greets the estimated 2 million young people gathered from throughout the Americas, and the world. (Listen to Dominican bishop Anthony Fisher from Australia talk about a sloth that held up a train and at least one recorded spider bite.)

California Republicans were flattened in last year’s elections, but this week they got off the ground and won a key special election for the state senate in a strongly Democratic area which is 60 percent Hispanic.

Andy Vidak, a 47-year-old cherry farmer, won 54 percent of the vote in a sprawling district that stretches from Fresno to Bakersfield and is home to some 1 million people. Democrats hold a 22-point voter-registration advantage in the district, and Barack Obama carried it by 59 percent to 39 percent in 2008 against John McCain. It’s the area of California where NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson has his ranch. 

Vidak’s major issue was ending environmental rules that have choked off water allocations to Central Valley farmers. This year farmers south of the delta will receive only 20 percent of their contracted allocations. Smelt apparently need protection from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta water pumps. Rather than deal with the wastewater from urban areas which are smelt’s biggest enemy, state officials are closing the spigot on the farms. Vidak summarizes the issue as being “fish versus farmer,” and liberals are enamored with the fish.

Leticia Perez, a county supervisor from Bakersfield, was Vidak’s Democratic opponent. Her issues were raising California’s minimum wage by $1.25 an hour and backing a bullet train from the Bay Area to Los Angeles as a job-creation program. Vidak scoffed that the train was a boondoggle. ”We don’t have clean drinking water in some areas of our district,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “And they want to build an $80 billion bullet train!”

Jim Brulte, a former leader of California state senate Republicans and the party’s state chairman, is cheered by the news of Vidak’s victory. While the issues he won on were local, environmental extremism may become a statewide issue next year as a renewable-energy mandate, cap and trade, and a low-carbon fuel standard are fully implemented. “As the issues liberals push hardest start hurting Californians, we will have opportunities to win,” he told me earlier this year. Certainly, Vidak’s strong victory is a sign that that could already be happening. 

In the new, liberated Egypt, leading imam Abu Islam explains that Christianity originated in penis worship:

I swear to God the Almighty – and believe me, I am not lying – that the Church worship originated in the worship of the penis. I swear to God. This is documented in dozens of pictures.

Let me tell you something – it’s indecent, but true. Take a look at a picture of Jesus, and you’ll see a penis, right here. Or is it on this side? Oh, it’s on the right side. A penis, right here. There are many pictures like this. They worship it.

If you replace the word “Church” with “Democratic party” and the word “Jesus” with “Anthony Weiner,” it’s actually a pretty sound analysis.

From my most recent NRO article, on President Obama’s failure to lead: “Like a charmed sleepwalker, this president has strolled along the tightrope distracting the voters with lofty disparagements of those who busy themselves with guns and religion, a faddish notion of ecology, a formidable conjuration of a Republican ‘war on women,’ and spurious claims of an economic miracle in the making.”

Whether you agree or disagree, your comments are, as always, most welcome.