Pat Smith, the mother of Sean Smith, an American dipomat killed in the 9/11 attacks in Benghazi, accused President Obama, the vice president, and two Cabinet members of not keeping promises they made to her at her son’s funeral. She said Obama, Joe Biden, then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton, and then-secretary of defense Leon Panetta all told her they would look into the circumstances of her son’s death and get back to her, but they never did.

“I heard nothing, absolutely nothing,” Smith told Bill O’Reilly last night. She said a clerk called her at one point and read her the timeline of the night’s events, which she already had. 

Smith also said Obama, Clinton, and U.N. ambassador Susan Rice blamed the YouTube video for the attacks when she spoke with them at the coming-home ceremony of the bodies. “They all told me the reason that this happened was because of the video,” Smith said. “Nose-to-nose, they were hugging me.”

Brother Geraghty leads the Morning Jolt today with the breaking news from ABC that President Obama’s spokesman, Jay Carney, lied on behalf of his principal when he told the public that the fraudulent Benghazi talking-points were essentially an intelligence community product that represented the IC’s best analysis of what had happened on September 11.

Steve Hayes broke the essence of this news in the Weekly Standard a week ago, so maybe it’s better to describe ABC’s report “breaking elaboration.” Recall, though, that the fraudulent talking-points were the basis for the fraudulent appearance on the Sunday talk shows by President Obama’s ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice. She pretended on behalf of her principal that the jihadist massacre in Benghazi resulted from a spontaneous “protest” provoked by the purported scourge of Islamophobia (here, an anti-Islamic Internet video). As the administration well knew – indeed, knew from on-scene intel supplied throughout the siege – the State Department compound was actually subjected to a coordinated attack by al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists.

ABC News reports that the talking-points went through at least 12 different edits, gradually deleting, among other key things, references to Ansar al-Sharia. That’s the local al Qaeda franchise that orchestrated the Benghazi operation, in which four Americans, including our ambassador to Libya, were murdered and many others were wounded, some quite seriously. The rewrites to which the talking-points were subjected blatantly contradict Carney’s whoppers, which maintained that the talking points were the substantially unvarnished assessment of intelligence professionals as to which only a “single adjustment” was made by the White House and State Department (changing “consulate” to “diplomatic facility”), and any other changes were “stylistic and not substantive.”

Two thoughts occur.

First, does the White House press corps have any self-respect? Sometime during the administration of that other Clinton, these journalists went from seeing their job as watchdog keeping democratic government honest to admiring raconteurs of how artfully the were lied to. Compared to Bill Clinton, Barack Obama is a crude liar – more brass-knuckles, Chicago-style “What are you gonna do about it?” than Yale Law School meets Bubba glib – and Benghazi cannot be sloughed off as “lies about sex.” Are these reporters going to keep functioning as the adjunct to Carney’s office, or will a few of them actually start treating a travesty involving four murdered Americans as if it were nearly as serious as a kerfuffle involving sixteen words?

Second is the State Department. In my weekend column – on the home-page this morning – I explain how Obama’s Mohammed Video fraud undermined the Islamic-democracy project. This project was the top Middle East policy priority of the Bush- and Clinton-era State Department, and Obama has claimed to champion it. We now know, however, that the Obama State Department, under Secretary Clinton, was just as complicit as the White House in peddling the video canard, and may have been even more culpable in editing the truth out of the talking points – motivated, as Jim observes, by a naked desire to keep Congress and the public in the dark about Clinton’s recklessness in failing to ensure adequate security at a facility that had already been targeted by terrorists before the night of September 11.

I’m not a fan of “Islamic-democracy” promotion for reasons I’ve articulated more times than I can count in these pages. But most in Washington and in the press are. That being the case, shouldn’t some heads be rolling at Foggy Bottom?

Gallup announces: “Few paying attention to trial, but many criticize lack of media coverage.”

Once there was some reporting on the trial, views on abortion remained “steady” — with the majority of Americans wanting some restrictions, according to Gallup. (Suggesting maybe the majority might not be into President Obama’s Planned Parenthood cheerleading — invoking God’s blessing on their work – if they knew about abortion quotas there.)

But Gallup finds that most still aren’t paying attention. 

From the report:

Although the latest Gallup survey was conducted after much of the testimony in this trial had already been reported in the news, the stability in Americans’ views about the legality of abortion suggests the trial has not swayed public opinion. Part of the reason could be that relatively few Americans are paying attention to the case.

One-quarter of Americans say they have followed news of the case either very closely (7%) or somewhat closely (18%), but that is well below the 61% average level of attention Americans have paid to the more than 200 news stories Gallup has measured since 1991. An additional 20% of Americans say they are following Gosnell case “not too closely” while 54% say “not at all.” This makes the Gosnell case one of the least followed news stories Gallup has measured.

Republicans, as well as Americans describing themselves as “pro-life” on abortion, are somewhat more likely to report having followed the case closely than are Democrats, independents, and “pro-choice” Americans.

People are hearing the Cleveland story — Amanda Berry’s name is on people’s lips, unlike that of Kermit Gosnell or Karnamaya Mongar, a woman who died in his clinic. They are intimately aware of the details. Part of the reason, I think, is there is a happy ending, good news to tell — right?

But here, we have the opportunity for redemption, too, in the wake of 40 years of euphemisms that led to newborn snips for in the name of “women’s health.” It’s going to be a long haul of investigation and introspection. But it’s our moral and civic duty to quit looking away from the horrific injustice being done to the innocent unborn — and newborns marked for abortion — and women. I give Leroy Carhart credit for at least being forthright with the truth in Live Action’s most recent undercover video, that abortion changes you, and that a late-term abortion means killing a baby.

Kirsten Powers gets it. Marlin Stutzman gets it. Mollie Heminway gets it. Rich Lowry gets it. Robby George and Ramesh, of course, get it. Jonah gets it. The list does, thankfully, go on — but there is a whole lot of awakening yet to happen. 

CORRECTION: This post originally attributed the Gallup poll to Pew. Apologies. 

Everyone’s attention is rightly focused on what was said at the Benghazi hearings on Wednesday. But what was not said, or much discussed, is at least as illuminating — and alarming. My New York Post column today takes a look at two non-barking hounds: 

The political ramifications of Wednesday’s hearing on the Benghazi fiasco are actually secondary to two far more serious issues: the continuing politicization of the Intelligence Community and the shocking state of our military.

First, the IC — especially the CIA and its nominal overlord, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

Clapper, you’ll recall, popped up back in November to take the fall for having edited all references to al Qaeda and terrorism out of the unclassified talking points on the Benghazi attack. But we now know that the blame falls on the State Department, whose demands the White House ordered the CIA to meet. . . .

So why did Clapper lie so publicly and so blatantly about the decision to read al Qaeda out of the official record? Why cover for the White House and Foggy Bottom? Politics is the only possible answer.

The IC certainly has not covered itself in glory during this wretched episode, at least in the heroic Battle of the Beltway Desk Jockeys. In the field, of course, it’s a different story; the things I’m hearing about the firefight at the consulate and the CIA annex are stunning. We couldn’t ask for braver men standing watch on that wall, and for this administration to besmirch their memory — as Hillary Clinton did by continuing to stick to the ludicrous video meme even after the bodies were brought home — is the very pinnacle of moral disgrace.

In that context, it’s worth revisiting what the late William Safire wrote about the former first lady, former distinguished senator from the great state of New York and former secretary of state back in 1996, when most of her public life still lay before her: 

Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our First Lady — a woman of undoubted talents who was a role model for many in her generation — is a congenital liar.

Drip by drip, like Whitewater torture, the case is being made that she is compelled to mislead, and to ensnare her subordinates and friends in a web of deceit. . . .

Therefore, ask not “Why didn’t she just come clean at the beginning?” She had good reasons to lie; she is in the longtime habit of lying; and she has never been called to account for lying herself or in suborning lying in her aides and friends.

At least that record’s still intact.

The other toothless non-woofer is the Pentagon, which was either unwilling or unable to muster a single manned aircraft in defense of our diplomats directly across the Med from Italy and Greece. Heck, Scipio Africanus could have had boots on the ground there faster than the DOD:

Assume that the administration is telling the truth when it says there were no US assets in the region that could be mobilized in time to make a difference in the ferocious Libyan firefight — in which a handful of Americans held off dozens or even hundreds of jihadis for 10 hours. What does that tell us?

Once, the Sixth Fleet made the Mediterranean an American lake — and yet it was unable to scramble a single fighter jet to at least buzz the compounds in the North African coastal city of Benghazi. Force reductions throughout the Navy have left the service with a mere 288 ships to patrol the seas, about half what it had under President Ronald Reagan.

My conclusion:

And that’s why Benghazi matters. In the scheme of things, it was a small engagement on the fringes of the civilized world. But that’s how civilizations fall — when they’re too weak or enervated to defend themselves and the principles for which their emissaries stand. Just ask ancient Rome.

Whoops, my bad — Rome fell in 410 when it was sacked by barbarians. 

.

In the first item of today’s Impromptus, I mention Oswald Spengler. (This column is the last in a series on Roger Kimball’s latest book, The Fortunes of Permanence.) I say that Spengler is better known as an adjective than as a writer and man. The same may be true of Orwell as well.

I do not happen to mention Spengler’s most famous work, The Decline of the West — and I thought I’d say something about it here. Something linguistic. In German, his title is Der Untergang des Abendlandes — that last word meaning, literally, “Evening Land.” The land where the sun sets.

I think of that chestnut from American history, where Franklin asks about the sun carved into Washington’s chair: Is it a rising sun or a setting sun? I also think of Cyril Connolly’s line, about “closing time in the gardens of the West.”

Whether the sun is rising or setting — or just hanging on — Roger Kimball’s book is exceptionally stimulating. It stimulated five columns from me, and I could have done at least five more. Barack Obama’s stimulus? More of a deflator, it seems to me. But that’s a whole ’nother post.

A final word, on the German language: Say what you will about the Germans — and, boy, is there a lot to say — their language is marvelous. When I was growing up, people said, “It’s ugly.” But then you hear a Schubert song and think, “Um, really?”

N.B.: This post has been amended.

The Founder of Mother’s Day Later Fought to Have It Abolished.

These 4 Sisters Were Photographed Every Year For 36 Years.

How high can a human throw something?

14 Animals Demonstrating Why A Mother’s Love Is So Special.

A Polish man blew up his own house when he realized his wife and children had gone on a picnic without him.

Does swearing make you feel better?

Charles Krauthammer called State Departmant spokesman Patrick Ventrell’s response to the Benghazi Hearing “pathetic.” Ventrell told reporters earlier today, ”We dont believe that new information was necessarily presented that hadn’t been already either entered into the pbulic record through congressional testimony or investigated by the ARB or otherwise looked at.”

“That statement from the State Department is pathetic. They’re still hanging on, they’re still trying to cover their tracks,” Krauthammer argued, though he went on to say he believes John Kerry will in fact conduct a thorough investigation into the events. “I believe the new secretary of state when he says he is going to look into this after all. He is entirely untained and he would be tainted if he continues in the cover-up.” 

As Kentucky secretary of state Alison Lundergan Grimes (D.) considers whether or not Alison Lundergan Grimes should challenge Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) in 2014 – after almost every other potential challenger, including Hollywood actress Ashley Judd, declined — the Republican Party of Kentucky wants to know if Alison Lundergan Grimes will keep Alison Lundergan Grimes’s promise to Kentucky voters to serve the entirety of Alison Lundergan Grimes’s four-year term, which began in Janurary 2012. 

A travel warning circulated by the State Department this afternoon warns American citizens against all travel to Benghazi and elsewhere in Libya, including the entire southern region of the country. 

A little over a year ago, China’s heroic blind lawyer, Chen Guangcheng, escaped from house arrest, eventually fleeing to the United States with his wife and child. The Chinese government is now retaliating against the members of his family who remain in China.

This morning, Chen’s elder brother, Chen Guangfu, was riding his motor bike about two miles away from his house. Suddenly, a black car with no license plates came to an abrupt halt in front of him, forcing Guangfu to stop. Then two young men dressed in black jumped out and began assaulting Guangfu, hitting him in the head and chest, then kicking him. When they had finished beating him, they ruined his motor bike, then drove away.

Guangfu called the police, and as they were questioning him about the incident, he saw the car and pointed it out, says Bob Fu, the president of ChinaAid and a friend of Chen Guangchen. The police did nothing, Fu says — no surprise, as such incidents are doubtless government-instigated.

Chen Guangfu told the South China Morning Post that “I don’t know whether they are trying to end my life,” adding that “they can’t do anything about Guangcheng, so they are taking revenge on me.”

This is not an isolated instance, either. Chen’s nephew, Chen Kegui, was sentenced to 39 months in prison after he defended himself with a knife, wounding authorities who raided his house last year after they’d discovered Chen’s escape. Kegui was recently diagnosed with acute appendicitis, but he’s being refused medical treatment beyond antibiotics, which potentially endangers his life. Kegui has also suffered beatings during his time in prison, his father has reported.

And since late April, thugs have assembled late at night, throwing rocks, bricks, and beer bottles at the home of Chen’s elder brother. They’ve also hurled dead chicken and ducks (at a time when dozens of Chinese have reportedly died from bird flu) and paper money (traditionally burnt for the dead). Finally, posters have been distributed near Chen’s family members calling him a traitor, a collaborator with the U.S. and Japan, and a supporter of Taiwanese and Tibetan independence.

The irony, of course, is that Chen first found himself on the wrong side of the government while attempting to uphold China’s own laws. A self-taught lawyer, he took on cases others feared to touch, fighting for the rights of the disabled and for victims of forced abortions and sterilizations. But he did so within China’s existing legal framework, and the fact that this made him a political target says as much about Beijing as it does about Chen’s courage.

Secretary of State John Kerry, Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns, and Ambassador Gary Locke have reportedly brought up the Chen family’s treatment in official talks.

“That’s a positive step taken by the State Department on the side,” Fu says. “But the White House has still been largely silent, has not spoken or issued a statement about what’s going on to Chen’s family members. That’s not, I think, a good sign.”

Speaking at the New York City Bar Association in February, Chen Guangcheng said: “When an injustice happens, we cannot worry about the adverse consequences of speaking out.” The price of his moral stand is rising by the day.

Well, that didn’t take long. The State Department’s Office of Defense Trade Controls Compliance has requested that Defense Distributed remove the digital blueprint for its “Liberator” 3D-printable gun. Where a link to the blueprint once appeared, DD’s website now features this message:

And this warning:

DEFCAD files are being removed from public access at the request of the US Department of Defense Trade Controls. Until further notice, the United States government claims control of the information.

Arguing that, by making the files available internationally, Defense Distributed may have violated International Traffic in Arms Regulations, the State Department issued the following letter to the group’s founder, Cody Wilson:

The Department of State, Bureau of Political Military Affairs, Office of Defense Trade Controls Compliance, Enforcement Division (DTCC/END) is responsible for compliance with and civil enforcement of the Arms Export Control Act (22 U.S.C. 2778) (AECA) and the AECA’s implementing regulations, the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (22 C.F.R. Parts 120-130) (ITAR). The AECA and the ITAR impose certain requirements and restrictions on the transfer of, and access to, controlled defense articles and related technical data designated by the United States Munitions List (USML) (22 C.F.R. Part 121).

The DTCC/END is conducting a review of technical data made publicly available by Defense Distributed through its 3D printing website, DEFCAD.org, the majority of which appear to be related to items in Category I of the USML. Defense Distributed may have released ITAR-controlled technical data without the required prior authorization from the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC), a violation of the ITAR.

Technical data regulated under the ITAR refers to information required for the design, development, production, manufacture, assembly, operation, repair, testing, maintenance or modification of defense articles, including information in the form of blueprints, drawings, photographs, plans, instructions or documentation. For a complete definition of technical data, see 120.10 of the ITAR. Pursuant to 127.1 of the ITAR, it is unlawful to export any defense article or technical data for which a license or written approval is required without first obtaining the required authorization from the DDTC. Please note that disclosing (including oral or visual disclosure) or tranferring technical data to a foreign person, whether in the United States or abroad, is considered an export under 120.17 of the ITAR.

The Department believes Defense Distributed may not have established the proper jurisdiction of the subject technical data. To resolve this matter officially, we request that Defense Distributed submit Commodity Jurisdiction (CJ) determination requests for the following selection of data files available on DEFCAD.org, and any other technical data for which Defense Distributed is unable to determine proper jurisdiction:

1. Defense Distributed Liberator pistol
2. .22 electric
3. 125mm BK-14M high-explosive anti-tank warhead
4. 5.56/.223 muzzle brake
5. Springfield XD-40 tactical slide assembly
6. Sound Moderator – slip on
7. “The Dirty Diane” 1/2-28 to 3/4-16 STP S3600 oil filter silencer adapter
8. 12 gauge to .22 CB sub-caliber insert
9. Voltlock electronic black powder system
10. VZ-58 sight

DTCC/END requests that Defense Distributed submits its CJ requests within three weeks of the receipt of this letter and notify this office of the final CJ determinations. All CJ requests must be submitted electronically through an online application using the DS-4076 Commodity Jurisdiction Request Form. The form, guidance for submitting CJ requests, and other relevant information such as a copy of the ITAR can be found on DDTC’s website at http://www.pmddtc.state.gov.

Until the Department provides Defense Distributed with the final CJ determinations, Defense Distributed should treat the above technical data as ITAR-controlled. This means that all such data shoudl be removed form public access immediately. Defense Distributed should also review the remainder of the data made public on its website to determine whether any additional data may be similarly controlled and proceed according to ITAR requirements.

Additionally, DTCC/END requests information about the procedures Defense Distributed follows to determine the classification of its technical data, to include aforementioned technical data files. We ask that you provide your procedures for determining proper jurisdiction of technical data within 30 days of the date of this letter to Ms. Bridget Van Buren, Compliance Specialist, Enforcement Division, at the address below.

Despite the removal, the file is still hosted on upload site Mega, linked to seven different times in the Pirate Bay library, and referenced on various bittorrent sites across the Internet. More important, the file is now on at least 100,000 private hard drives. The cat is out of the bag. Once again: The only people who are going to follow the rules on this are the people who you don’t need to worry about in the first place.

I haven’t read the supposedly racist Harvard dissertation of Jason Richwine, the coauthor of Heritage’s flawed immigration study. But I have read summaries of it in the coverage and have two related questions, both of which — in very different ways — undermine the relevance of the dissertation to the study. 

1) Of those journalists pointing out Richwine’s ties to (kindly put) ”nationalist” theories on immigration and intelligence, neither come right out and say what the knock on the dissertation is supposed to be. Is it that his claims about persistently lowers IQs for immigrant populations (and particularly Hispacnics) are empirically wrong? Or that IQ is capturing something other than intelligence (a view I’m sympathetic with)? Or that even if his views are empirically valid, that’s not how you should do immigration policy (a view I’m unsure of one way or another)?

Suffice it to say, if the knock on the dissertation is just that it’s racist, everything else be damned, well that might impeach Richwine’s motives, but it tells us nothing interesting about the Heritage study. 

2) Insofar as it’s worth asking about immigrant populations’ IQ, isn’t the so-called Flynn Effect, and not the gap between immigrants and white Americans, the important trend here? In a variety of research, the Flynn Effect shows robust increases in scores on cognitive tests across the years — major increases from about the 1930s to about the 1970s, and more modest increases since then. That is, we are all, as a species, getting smarter over time. Various theories are posited as to why this is happening, from better and earlier education to improved nutrition, but the important thing for our purposes is that it’s happening across all groups.

Doesn’t this cut pretty clearly against the implication not just of Richwine’s dissertation, but of the Heritage study, that “low-skill” immigrants and their progeny are doomed to zero social mobility in perpetuity? Furthermore, as mentioned above, the Flynn Effect seems to be slowing down in developed countries’ native populations, at the same time as there is some evidence of immigrants population IQs improve the longer they hang around in developed countries. Thus it seems completely plausible that immigrants could “catch up” to native populations in developed countries given enough time.

And if that’s true it joins “static scoring” as another reason to doubt the doomsday scenario of dependence and social determination imagined by the Heritage study.

This week the American Enterprise Institute released a report by economist Benjamin Zycher analyzing the impact of state-level Tax and Expenditure Limitations (TELs) on government growth. Analyzing fiscal data from a range of states, Zycher concludes that TELs are largely ineffective. He argues that the presence of a TEL does not change the underlying public demand for government services. Similarly TELs do not stop rent seeking, interest-group demands, or other activities that lead to expanding government.

Zycher’s data collection is thorough and his analysis is methodologically rigorous. His study is consistent with a body of academic research which has found that revenue and spending limits are an ineffective tool for limiting the growth of government. The reasons he present explain part of this. However, Zycher spends little time considering the incentives of those drafting TELs. Many TELs are largely symbolic measures enacted by state legislatures. These TELs allow legislators to publicly take a position in favor of smaller government. However, they contain loopholes that give legislators the freedom to avoid cutting popular programs.

Conversely, my 2010 State Politics and Policy Quarterly article shows that TELs that are drafted by taxpayer groups — and passed through the initiative process — have features conducive to limiting government growth. Some of these TELs, such as Washington State’s I-601 and California’s Gann Limit, both enjoyed some short-term success at limiting the growth of government in their respective states. However, the best example of an effective TEL was Colorado’s Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR), which was adopted in 1992.

TABOR had three characteristics that made it especially effective. It was constitutional, it set a low limit for government growth, and it mandated taxpayer rebates of surplus revenues. Between 1997 and 2002, Colorado taxpayers received $3.2 billion in tax rebates from the state government. Colorado led the nation in both tax relief and economic growth during this time. Furthermore, because of the popularity and visibility of the tax rebates, most statewide ballot measures to spend over and above the TABOR limit were unsuccessful.

Unfortunately, in the early 2000s, Colorado’s economy slowed down. This was partly due to the national economic slowdown after the September 11 attacks and also due to the fact that Colorado suffered a severe drought. Overall, Colorado’s revenue declined by 15 percent between 2001 and 2003. Making matters worse, in 2000, TABOR opponents strategically enacted Amendment 23, which mandated annual increases in K–12 education spending. These spending increases coupled with the decline in state revenues strained the Colorado budget. Many politicians and media outlets opportunistically blamed this on TABOR. The end result was the passage of Referendum C in 2005, which suspended TABOR’s revenue limit for five years.

Since the passage of Referendum C in 2005, TABOR’s reputation has been tarnished and subsequent efforts to enact TABOR-style TELs elsewhere have failed. As such, fiscal conservatives turned their attention elsewhere. Zycher’s study is thankfully giving TELs some much-needed salience. However, he should have given more attention to success stories like Colorado’s TABOR. Indeed, TABOR’s history provides good evidence that a properly designed TEL can be a powerful tool for fiscal conservatives. Indeed, TELs can result in smaller government, tax relief, and economic growth.

— Michael J. New is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Michigan — Dearborn, a fellow at the Witherspoon Institute, and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. Follow him on Twitter @Michael_J_New

Senator Lindsey Graham says Hillary Clinton’s management of the Benghazi crisis could cost her a “promotion” to the presidency.

“In the military, she wouldn’t be promoted,” the South Carolina Republican tells National Review.

Graham, a colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserve, argues that if Clinton were an officer her stumbles would likely cripple her career.

He points to her media appearances in the wake of the attacks as evidence of her shaky leadership skills. “How in the world could she have believed that the death of Chris Stevens was a spontaneous riot motivated by a hateful video? Either she is completely disconnected from reality or that was political spin.”

“Ultimately, the voters will decide, but if you’re running to be commander in chief, people are going to judge you by the job you’ve done,” he explains. “She will have to prove to people that the debacle that happened on her watch can be overcome.”

“Remember, [during the 2008 campaign] she talked about the 3 a.m. phone call,” he says. “That was a pretty clever move, asking if Barack Obama was ready. But when Greg Hicks made a 2 a.m. call, she said, ‘Here’s what I’m going to do to help you,’ rather than asking, ‘what do you want me to do to help you?’”

Graham has been involved with the Benghazi investigation for months, and he was one of the first lawmakers to meet with Hicks, who was the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Libya during the attacks. Their first meeting came in March at Graham’s Senate office, and Graham quickly put Hicks in touch with House Oversight Committee chairman Darrell Issa.

“When I first met Greg, he was very worried, very nervous, not sure what to do, but felt that he had to do something,” he recalls. “He’s the ultimate professional, and he has dedicated his life to foreign service.”

“Greg is not the only one, though,” he adds. “There are more people who want to come forward and share what they know.”

Graham has recently met with several people close to the situation, and he is helping investigators connect with them.

In an interesting blog post, Mickey Kaus yesterday outlined three possible responses to challenges faced by so-called low-skill workers and how these challenges might be exacerbated by the Gang of Eight bill:

1. “Cato, the Club for Growth, the Wall Street Journal editorial page,”  Grover Norquist, etc, value markets and dynamism. If society overall gets richer, they don’t much care how it is distributed or whether it creates nasty social divisions (not just rich vs. poor, but skilled vs. unskilled, smart vs. not-smart, lucky vs. unlucky).  Those divisions may even create a powerful incentive to acquire valuable skills ( if you can).

2. Obama and the Democrats don’t like the distributional and social effects of open borders, but plan to handle them with a bigger web of government income transfers, social provision of benefits, training, and counseling (the  cost of which is what Heritage is estimating), and by spreading unionism in the private sector. Also they need Latino votes.

3. Amnesty opponents (NumbersUSA, Frum, National Review)–the “bitter enders” : Would like to avoid the problem, perhaps at some cost to GDP, through the simple, traditional expedient of enforcing a border. That would tighten up the labor market at the bottom and give basic workers now in this country a shot at a middling income without relying on a more elaborate web of government transfers and services.

Will all due respect to Kaus (who himself chooses Option No. 3), there might be a fourth response, one that incorporates aspects of 1 and 3. Over the past decade or so, the working and middle classes have been hollowed out, struggling with diminished wages, depressed opportunity, and increased expenses (especially in the health-care sector). Perhaps it is no coincidence that, along with the decline of the economic middle, there has grown an increasingly complex web of government services and also a dismal fall-off in GDP growth. Real GDP per capita increased only 7 percent between 2001 and 2011; between 1990 and 2000, it increased by over 23 percent. While the Great Recession has influenced that number, it is not the only explanation for that diminished growth. The average annual real GDP growth per capita during the economic expansion of 2001–2007 was a little over half the average annual growth of the 1990s.

Due to the complexity of economic feedback loops, assigning causality can be a challenging task. Still, it perhaps is at least somewhat plausible that the stagnation of the middle has caused significant drag on the national economy as a whole. (And to those readers who see the growing web of government services as the primary source of this drag: A declining middle makes it much more likely that government services will be radically expanded.) If that is the case, there might not be such a trade-off between gains for the economic middle and gains for the economy as a whole, and a policy that harms the interests, incomes, and opportunities of the middle and working classes in the name of greater economic growth might end up being a self-defeating enterprise. So Kaus’s Option No. 1 (which prioritizes growth) can be synthesized with No. 3 (which prioritizes a tighter labor market to secure higher pay for workers). Strengthening the incomes of the middle class might go hand-in-hand with prioritizing economic growth.

And even those who are disciples of free-market growth at all cost might also acknowledge that the Gang of Eight bill is far from a paragon of laissez-faire principles. As Yuval Levin and Byron York have explained, the Gang of Eight’s bill is larded with anti-market provisions. It creates a new government bureaucracy to manage the employment and wages of guest workers and to assess the hiring needs of the nation as a whole. It is full of special set-asides. It could create a two-tier labor market. Such central-planning provisions would seem to run offend supporters of a fluid free market.

Skeptics of the Gang of Eight’s bill’s effects on the bottom 90 percent of Americans might not just have moral, political, fiscal, and social arguments against this bill; they might have an economic one, too.

There’s a front-page story in the current issue of Education Week (available here) about how the broad support for requiring better academic qualifications for teachers is running up against concerns that this might result in fewer black and Latino teachers. It’s yet another variation on the “disparate impact” theme: Perfectly legitimate job qualifications have to give way to politically correct workforce statistics. There’s no mention in the article, by the way, of the potential legal problems — under both the Constitution and Titles VI and VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act — with deliberately choosing selection criteria in order to achieve a predetermined racial and ethnic result.

Charlie, Dan, let’s walk down Memory Lane (which can be a pretty scary street): Senator Boxer said, “I think when you bring your baby home” — well, then the little shaver acquires rights. (The infamous exchange between her and Rick Santorum is here.) Later, running for the Democratic presidential nomination, Wesley Clark said, “Life begins with the mother’s decision.”

Babies are often more lovable than 14-year-olds. Pity a mother has to decide so early . . .

Environment and Public Works Committee chairwoman Barbara Boxer seethed over her Republican colleagues’ boycotting a hearing for President Obama’s nominee to head the EPA, Gina McCarthy, repeatedly calling them “fringe.” “This is outrageous,” Boxer said ”They’re fringe, they’re out of the mainstream, they’re trying to force their pro-pollution stance on the Obama administration.”

“Get out of the fringe lane,” she later exclaimed.

Charlie, NARAL is considering adopting this as their official anthem:

From my Politico column today: 

Nakoula Basseley Nakoula deserves a place in American history. He is the first person in this country jailed for violating Islamic anti-blasphemy laws.

You won’t find that anywhere in the charges against him, of course. As a practical matter, though, everyone knows that Nakoula wouldn’t be in jail today if he hadn’t produced a video crudely lampooning the prophet Muhammad.

My goodness me, we’re confused on the issue of life. Ariel Castro, it seems, could be executed for his crimes. Not for rape or kidnapping — the nonsense of Coker v. Georgia took care of that — but for “aggravated murder.” Per USA Today, the prosecution’s report,

alleges that Castro impregnated Knight five times, forced her to starve for weeks at a time and punched her in the stomach until she miscarried. Castro, the report said, also forced Knight to deliver Berry’s baby in a plastic kiddie pool and threatened to murder Knight if the newborn died.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, Ohio law treats unborn children as potential murderees:

Ohio Rev. Code Ann. § 2903.01 et seq defines aggravated murder, murder, voluntary manslaughter, involuntary manslaughter, negligent homicide, aggravated vehicular homicide, aggravated vehicular assault, felonious assault, aggravated assault, assault and negligent assault. The law applies to a person, which includes an “unborn member of the species Homo sapiens, who is or was carried in the womb of another.

Castro could thus be executed for the “murder” of these unborn children. 

Yet abortion is legal in Ohio, as everywhere else in the United States. This means that if you kill an unborn child in Ohio with the mother’s permission, it’s okay; if you do it without her permission, it’s murder. The unborn child, therefore, is only a life if the mother says it is a life. That makes no logical sense at all. It is the logic of slavery, not of individual liberty. Who will defend it?

Over on the home page, House majority leader Eric Cantor chats with National Review about his agenda. He also criticizes the president for being disengaged.

COSTA: Speaking of tense relations, House Republicans don’t have much of a relationship with the president. He goes golfing with GOP senators, he hosts Democrats for dinner, but he doesn’t seem to socialize with your conference.

CANTOR: Well, I just had drinks with [White House chief of staff] Denis McDonough the other night. We talked about how we could work together and improve things. The one thing I’ve always said — and I’ve said it to Rahm [Emanuel] and Jack Lew — is that this president has squandered an opportunity to use the office to do some good and actually get some things done. Compare that with the personal relationships that existed during my time in the Virginia state legislature, for example, where it was all about personal relationships between the executive and legislative branch. It just doesn’t exist here. Either the president doesn’t like to engage with people, or it’s somehow beneath him to do so. I don’t know, and I told Denis that the president could benefit himself and the country a lot by developing those relationships and understanding where conservatives are, instead of just thinking that he knows where we are. But that has not been the case over the last four years of his tenure.

Just now, I noted that 100,000 people have already downloaded the digital blueprints to Defense Distributed’s 3D-printable gun. This gem was among the comments on my post:

The answer is we have to ban 3D. No one really needs a third dimension. If it will save just one life, it will be well worth it. Living in a two-dimensional world is just a sensible limitation on our depth perception.

This is pretty funny but, as with most things that are pretty funny, it strikes at a real point – that being that the Second Amendment implications of limiting the printing of guns are the least of America’s worries. If previous panicked attempts to prohibit items of which the state disapproves are anything to go by, the whole Bill of Rights will eventually find its way into the crosshairs of the censors, liberty interests being subjugated as usual by ostensible “necessity.” There is simply no way of making a serious effort to prevent — not prosecute after the fact, but prevent — people from making, carrying, and transporting 3D-printed guns without going after Americans’ First Amendment right to distribute whatever blueprints they wish and without undermining in some way their Fourth Amendment right to privacy. Moreover, as we have seen with the disatrous War on Drugs, in the absence of a Prohibition-style constitutional amendment, the Constitution would likely get quite the run around in the process. The Gonzales v. Raich decision made clear that when it comes to prosecuting people of whom the federal government doesn’t approve, the Tenth and Fifth Amendments are deemed to be irrelevant in the face of the all powerful Commerce Clause. Do we really trust Chuck Schumer to consider the implications of his new hobby horse?

True, “. . .sensible limitation on our depth perception” is a hilarious line. But it would be even funnier if one couldn’t imagine somebody in Congress actually going there whilst in hot pursuit of their own tail.

John McCain joked, in the course of a speech yesterday at the State Department, that his former Senate colleague John Kerry is doing “a sh***y job” as secretary of state.

Oklahoma senator Tom Coburn revealed that he believes “the State Department has real trouble” after yesterday’s House Oversight Committee hearing on Benghazi, but said this morning that, at the moment, he can’t reveal why. 

“Having sat on the Intelligence Committee and seen the review of e-mails that went back and forth as they developed the list, there’s a glaring problem there that will eventually come out — and I can’t talk about it now — but there was an omission that was given to the intelligence committee,” Coburn said on Morning Joe today. It was not clear what “list” Coburn was referring to in his answer.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has rejected an amendment to the Gang of Eight’s immigration reform bill that would require the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to effectively secure the southern border for six months before granting legal status to illegal immigrants. 

Polling suggests that a significant majority of voters favor such an approach, and think that other elements of immigration reform, such as granting legal status to illegal immigrants, should only be considered after the border is secure. As written, the legislation merely requires that the DHS secretary submit a plan to secure the border before illegal immigrants become eligible for legal status. The amendment, offered by ranking member Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa), would also require that heightened security measures be applied to all nine sectors of the southern border, as opposed to just three sectors identified as “high risk.”

Grassley’s amendments was defeated by a vote of 6 to 12. Senators Jeff Flake (R., Ariz.) and Lindsay Graham (R., S.C.), the GOP committee members who are also part of the Gang of Eight, voted against it. 

Excellent. The other day I opined here that all legal efforts should be made by Republicans to impede the Independent Payment Advisory Board from becoming operational. One way, I suggested, would be for Speaker Boehner and Minority Leader McConnell to refuse to participate in naming people to the would-be board — since it would be paradoxical to state on one hand that the IPAB is horrible policy, and then on the other, suggest people you would like to see in its leadership. Well, wonder of wonders: Both have informed President Obama that they will not be recommending names for nomination. From the Washington Examiner story:

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., sent a letter to President Obama today informing him that they would not be making recommendations for the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), as they are allowed to do under the president’s 2010 health care reform law. ”We believe Congress should repeal IPAB, just as we believe we ought to repeal the entire health care law,” the Boehner and McConnell letter reads.

Way to go! The next step is to use Senate confirmation hearings to educate the American people about why the IPAB is un-American and shatters representative democracy. Pound it, pound it, pound it! Then, Republicans and commonsense Democrats in the Senate should refuse to confirm any nominated members to the board, using a filibuster if necessary. After that, defunding and eventual repeal. 

That unstoppable “tide” I referred to the other day? Here it comes:

The blueprint used to produce a 3D-printed plastic gun has been downloaded about 100,000 times since going online earlier this week, according to Forbes.

Defense Distributed told the news site it was surprised by the amount of interest its Liberator gun had generated.

Earlier in the week, the company demonstrated the firearm being fired

But even before any more guns come off the DIY printing presses, there are moves afoot to ban it.

In other news, analysts are surprised by the interest that free downloadable music is generating and are beginning to think that this online pornography thing is really going to take off.

Legislators, if it makes you feel good, by all means try to close the barn door after the horse has bolted. Just don’t expect it to do anything particularly constructive.

The BBC has the rest here.

House speaker John Boehner started his weekly press conference this morning asking for President Obama to release unclassified inter-agency e-mails regarding the 9/11 attacks in Benghazi. Yesterday’s House Oversight Committee hearing revealed that senior State Department officials were aware that the attacks were not a result of a demonstration, and that the White House and Foggy Bottom insisted on removing references to the event as a terrorist attack from the official talking points. He explained that, “while a few of our [House] members were able to review these e-mails, they were not allowed to keep them or to share them with others.”

“Last I remember, the president said that he — and I’ll quote — ‘would be happy to cooperate with Congress in any way the Congress wants,’” Boehner said. “Well, this is his chance to show his cooperation, so that we can get to the truth of what happened in Benghazi.”

The Washington Post reports on an — at best — highly misleading letter the Justice Department recently sent in response to an April 10 subpoena from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. 

The committee, chaired by Representative Darrell Issa (R., Calif.), is investigating a quid pro quo deal engineered by Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez, President Obama’s labor-secretary nominee (his Senate committee confirmation vote was postponed last Thursday until May 16). Under the deal, the City of St. Paul, Minn., agreed to drop a Supreme Court case in exchange for the Justice Department dropping a $200 million claim against the city under the False Claims Act. DOJ wasn’t even a party in the Supreme Court case but Perez was afraid the court would throw out the “disparate impact” legal theory Perez has been using to extract large settlements from the financial industry.

During the course of its investigation, the committee asked Perez, under oath, if he had ever used his personal e-mail account to conduct government business, including for this questionable deal.  Perez claimed he “could not recall” — although Justice subsequently admitted that he had sent more than 1,200 e-mails on Civil Rights Division business.

Principal deputy assistant attorney general for legislative affairs Peter J. Kadzik admitted that Perez’s use of his private e-mail account violated the Federal Records Act. But the new letter from Justice to Issa attempts to excuse the violation by claiming that Perez used his personal e-mail account “to allow him to review or edit documents after normal working hours.”

Nonsense. I worked in the Civil Rights Division as a counsel to the assistant attorney general. All of us were cautioned not to use our private, nonsecure home computers and e-mail accounts to conduct Justice Department business. Moreover, Justice provided us with secure Blackberries to read our work e-mails when we were not in the office. 

My former colleague Christian Adams points out that we were enabled to log into a secure Justice Department server from outside of the office using high-security protocols. This ensured that we could read our e-mails and Justice Department documents at home or when travelling. 

In the four years I worked at the Division, I never had any need to conduct Justice Department business through a personal e-mail account. And if I had done so, I would have been disciplined.

As head of the Civil Rights Division, Perez most certainly had the same type of equipment and tools, completely obviating the need to use a personal e-mail account “to review or edit documents after normal working hours.” A far more plausible reason for using a personal e-mail account to conduct official business is to avoid having to produce e-mails in response to Freedom of Information Act requests and congressional subpoenas or having those e-mails become part of the official Justice Department files.