I’m seeing some Republicans e-mail this Buzzfeed article by Rosie Gray, headlined “Benghazi Investigation Creeps Closer to Hillary Clinton.”

As I said on “Daily Rundown,” it is a mistake for the media — and Republicans — to examine the events in Benghazi, the decisions before, during, and after it, and the investigation into all of this, through the lens of the 2016 presidential race.

A full uncovering of the facts may be enormously damaging to any presidential aspirations of Hillary Clinton, or it may not be. (We may strongly suspect it will be, but we don’t know that, and it would be foolish to let that concern drive the investigation.) A thorough account of everyone’s actions that night may leave Clinton looking awful, or the facts may reveal she did the best she could in difficult circumstances. The point is that we don’t really know right now, and the issue should not be dropped until the public feels like they know how and why those key decisions were reached.

The Pickering-Mullen investigation, requested by the U.S. State Department, had so many strange omissions and failed to interview so many key witnesses and figures that even the State Department’s inspector general is reviewing it.

Today Andrew Malcolm asserts that “the big Benghazi mystery” was “where was Obama while four Americans perished?” The answer has always been pretty clear: at the White House. He was informed at the beginning of the evening by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and General Martin Dempsey, and then informed of the aftermath the following morning. As far as he and his administration were concerned, his staff was on it.

SEN. KELLY AYOTTE (R-NH): But just to be clear, that night [the president] didn’t ask you what assets we had available and how quickly they could respond and how quickly we could help those people there-

PANETTA: No. I think the biggest problem that night, Senator, is that nobody knew really what was going on there.

AYOTTE: And there was no follow up during the night, at least from the White House directly?

PANETTA: No. No, there wasn’t.

DEMPSEY: I would, if I could just, to correct one thing. I wouldn’t say there was no follow-up from the White House. There was no follow-up, to my knowledge, with the president. But his staff was engaged with the national military command center pretty constantly through the period, which is the way it would normally work.

AYOTTE: But no direct communication from him?

DEMPSEY: Not on my part, no.

It’s not clear that the president’s staying awake and getting constant updates would have changed the outcome. The president’s involvement matters if A) there was some sort of operation that only he could authorize, and that he failed to, or B) he ordered forces to stand down, an allegation not yet proven.

Hicks testified yesterday that “Lieutenant Colonel Gibson,” a Special Operations Command Africa commander in Tripoli, wanted to board a C-130 that was going to fly to Benghazi. According to Hicks, Gibson commanded a four-person Special Forces team, a quartet that was once part of a 14-person team assigned to establish security for U.S. diplomats after the 2011 Libyan revolution.

Gibson told Hicks that he had been ordered he was not to proceed to board the airplane.

I realize that Representative Ann Wagner stated that only the president could give a “stand down” order for a rescue operation. But right now, the only witness we have for this “stand down” order is Hicks, and at this point we don’t even know Gibson’s first name.

For now, one of yesterday’s most stunning revelations was the news that at no point did the U.S. ask the Libyans for permission to fly into their airspace for a rescue operation, presumably one of the first steps in putting together an operation like that. In other words, at no point during the seven hours did the ball get rolling on an effort to rescue them. With all of the U.S. military personnel, aircraft, and NATO air bases in Italy, Greece, and Turkey, nothing got moving. Baffling to the point of madness. If their had been an operation in the works that arrived too late, the public reaction would be completely different — the fury out there isn’t because these four Americans weren’t rescued in time; it’s because at this point, there’s no evidence anyone in our entire apparatus tried.

Let the facts of this investigation lead us to the conclusion, not the other way around.

UPDATE: Today’s “Daily Rundown” appearance:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The Pentagon accused China of cyber-espionage; the conflict in Syria is now “a brutal campaign of sectarian cleansing,” with death toll around 80,000; sectarian violence is spreading to Iraq and Lebanon; North Korea is issuing new threats; more bombings in Pakistan; our overseas consulates have indicated possible terror attacks this summer; the suicide rate is up 28 percent in the past ten years; millions of part-time U.S. workers may see their hours cut because of the Obamacare rules; wages have been virtually flat since 2009 and, as Bloomberg puts it, “long-term unemployment is turning the jobless into pariahs”; only 57 percent of Americans are doing any saving for retirement at all (down from 65 percent in 2009); and the rate of single parenthood has increased more dramatically as the Great Recession drags on.

So, what’s the president doing tonight, Mark Knoller? “This evening, Pres Obama attends a DNC fundraiser at a local hotel. His 5th fundraiser this year. But no press coverage.”

He golfed yesterday, of course, his twelfth round in his second term.

Oh, look who’s in the news again:

Bill Ayers says people can’t equate the bombings that he and others in the Weather Underground did 40 or so years ago with the April 15 twin bombings in Boston that killed three people.

There is no relationship at all between what Weather Underground members did and the bombings that two brothers allegedly committed on April 15 in Massachusetts, Ayers said in response to a reporter’s question. No one died in the Weather Underground bombings.

Wrong.

Three Weathermen are killed when bomb manufacturing goes awry. The organization becomes the Weather Underground as key players including Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers and Kathy Boudin go into hiding .  . Kathy Boudin resurfaces to participate in an armed robbery in Nanuet, New York, which results in the shooting deaths of three men.

Ayers goes on to say . . .

“How different is the shooting in Connecticut from shooting at a hunting range?” Ayers said. “Just because they use the same thing, there’s no relationship at all.”

First, it’s good to see that Ayers sees the futility of cracking down on lawful, responsible gun owners because of the actions of the Newtown shooter. Secondly, show me the safe, responsible use of a pipe bomb.

U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., committed daily war crimes in Vietnam “and I get asked about violence when what I did was some destruction of property to issue a scream and cry against an illegal war in which 6,000 people a week are being killed,” Ayers said. “Six thousand a week being killed and I destroyed some property. Show me the equivalence. You should ask John McCain that question . . . I’m against violence.”

“I’m against violence,” said the bomb-builder. Finally, the reporter covering the event feels the need to point out the glaring gaps in Ayers’s story of himself as a misunderstood hero:

In his talk to the crowd, Ayers mentioned that in 1970, he lost three friends in the Weather Underground, including his lover, Diana Oughton. He did not explain in his talk how they died — they were killed when nail bombs they were making in a Greenwich Village townhouse blew up.

Telling the crowd the circumstances of those deaths would have been “inappropriate,” Ayers said afterward. “Everybody here knows,” he said.

Authorities said the bombs were intended to be used at a dance at the Fort Dix Army base in New Jersey.

But remember, Bill Ayers is totally, totally different from the Boston bombers, honest!

Ayers recently elaborated on his relationship with Barack Obama and his political allies earlier in life:

David Axelrod said we were friendly, that was true; we served on a couple of boards together, that was true; he held a fundraiser in our living room, that was true; Michelle [Obama] and Bernardine were at the law firm together, that was true. Hyde Park in Chicago is a tiny neighborhood, so when he said I was “a guy around the neighborhood,” that was true.

As Ben Smith summarized:

Ayers and Dohrn, who have been semi-officially rehabilitated in Chicago but still inspire a wide range of feelings, played a modest but real part in launching Obama’s political career.

Over on the homepage, Bob Costa breaks the news that Ted Cruz is thinking about running for president in 2016. A few weeks back, Elaina Johnson shined a spotlight on the Cruz “birthers.“

Some Birthers sound like they’ve never really read the law that they’re allegedly citing.

The whole reason anyone would care about the location of Obama’s birth is because his parents’ citizenship status did not automatically qualify him for U.S. citizenship:

When one parent was a US citizen and the other a foreign national, the US citizen parent must have resided in the US for a total of 10 years prior to the birth of the child, with five of the years after the age of 14.  An exception for people serving in the military was created by considering time spent outside the US on military duty as time spent in the US.

Barack Obama Sr. was a Kenyan citizen. The president’s mother, Ann Dunham, was a U.S. citizen but not yet a citizen  for the purposes of determining U.S. citizenship of offspring born overseas.

For a child to become a U.S. citizen, one parent must have resided in the United States for five years after the age of 14. Dunham was 18 when she gave birth to the president. Had Barack Obama Jr. been born in Kenya, he would not be a citizen; because he was born in Hawaii, he automatically became a U.S. citizen. This is what the whole current “birthright citizenship” debate is about – under current law and the law in effect in 1961, if you’re born here, you’re a citizen, no questions asked.

(I know, I know, the Honolulu Advertiser birth notice was an elaborate cover, and the birth certificate is faked, and there’s a vast conspiracy out there…)

These rules were in effect for those born between December 23, 1952 and November 13, 1986 – covering both Barack Obama and Ted Cruz.

Cruz’s mother, Eleanor Darragh, was in her mid-thirties when she gave birth to the senator, so she had spent well more than five years residing in the United States.

The midweek edition of the Morning Jolt features grim statistics on attitudes in the Muslim world, thoughts on Marvel’s superhero film franchises, and then these notes from the president’s press conference:

‘Hello,’ the President Lied

Three quick points on Obama’s press conference from Tuesday…

First, Obama demonstrates that the term “Game Change” is now the most useless buzzword since “value-added”:

THE PRESIDENT:  If I can establish in a way that not only the United States but also the international community feel confident is the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime, then that is a game-changer because what that portends is potentially even more devastating attacks on civilians, and it raises the strong possibility that those chemical weapons can fall into the wrong hands and get disseminated in ways that would threaten U.S. security or the security of our allies.

Q    By game-changer you mean U.S. military action?

THE PRESIDENT:  By game-changer I mean that we would have to rethink the range of options that are available to us.

Watch your rear, Assad, or we might have to rethink the range of options.

In Syria and all of the world’s trouble spots, the American people are going to resist intervening internationally until they’re confronted with something more horrible than the loss of blood and treasure spent in the war in Iraq. Right now, Americans aren’t convinced that anything can happen overseas that is so bad, so consequential and horrific, they’ll wish they had sent their sons and daughters and neighbors to go fight and die for something. For now, they’re right; they will probably be wrong someday.

Secondly, examine Obama’s reaction to Jessica Yellin’s question:

YELLIN: Lindsey Graham, who is a senior member of the Armed Services Committee, has said that Benghazi and Boston are both examples of the U.S. going backwards on national security.  Is he right?  And did our intelligence miss something?

THE PRESIDENT:  No, Mr. Graham is not right on this issue, although I’m sure generated some headlines.

I think that what we saw in Boston was state, local, federal officials, every agency rallying around a city that had been attacked — identifying the perpetrators just hours after the scene had been examined.  We now have one individual deceased, one in custody.  Charges have been brought.

I think that all our law enforcement officials performed in an exemplary fashion after the bombing had taken place.  And we should be very proud of their work, as obviously we’re proud of the people of Boston and all the first responders and the medical personnel that helped save lives.

Notice the sneer that Graham merely wants to “generate headlines” with his statement, as if it’s outlandish to argue that a terrorist murdering our ambassador or a terrorist bombing on the streets of Boston constitute “going backwards on national security.”

Then notice that Yellin asks about the intelligence before the bombing, and Obama responds by citing the work of law enforcement after the bombing.

Thirdly, Obama declared about his signature health care reform, “ A huge chunk of it has already been implemented.  And for the 85 to 90 percent of Americans who already have health insurance, they’re already experiencing most of the benefits of the Affordable Care Act even if they don’t know it.  Their insurance is more secure.”

Jonathan Weisman of the New York Times responded, “Obama’s claim that folks who have insurance now have already gone through the ACA implementation is just not right. Lots of issues left.”

The tax penalty for not having insurance isn’t in effect yet. Businesses may still decide to drop coverage and pay the fines  (for some companies, it may actually be cheaper to pay the fines). We’re seeing companies try to shift as many employees as possible to less than 30 hours a week.  As Inc. put it:

The law’s new mandates–such as requiring insurers to cover preventive care at 100 percent–could drive rates higher. And small employers that buy insurance through the newly created Small Business Health Options Programs, or SHOP exchanges, may find higher costs once they are lumped in with a general-population risk pool.

And as for that claim that your health insurance is “stronger,” perhaps the president meant, “more expensive”: “Premiums could increase by an average of 30 percent for higher-income people in California who are now insured and do not qualify for federal insurance subsidies, the study said.”

From today’s Morning Jolt…

Forget the Rest of the World; President Personally Calls Some Athlete You Never Heard Of Before

Hey, remember North Korea? They’re detaining a U.S. citizen.

Unless the Syrian rebels figured out some way to fake the presence of Sarin in the bloodstream of some volunteers, the Syrian regime used chemical weapons and crossed the red line… and no one can come up with a way to demonstrate the consequences of crossing that line.

Oh, and the guys we may soon intervene to help, the Syrian rebels, may have just tried to shoot down a Russian airliner.

Remember Boston?

But U.S. Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.) told ABC News yesterday that the FBI is also looking into “persons of interest” in the U.S. possibly linked to the Boston bombings.

U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) said he’s spoken with the FBI about the probe into possible trainers the brothers had.

“Are they overseas in the Chechen region or are they in the United States?” he said. “In my conversations with the FBI, that’s the big question. They’ve casted a wide net both overseas and in the United States to find out where this person is. But I think the experts all agree that there is someone who did train these two individuals.”

Remember Boston, again?

State lawmakers have launched an investigation into whether the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings improperly received public benefits.

Sources who have seen the 500 pages of documents sent to the House Committee on Post Audit and Oversight told News Center 5’s Janet Wu that the Tsarnaev family — including the parents of the two bombing suspects, the two suspects themselves, their sisters, the widow of the suspect killed and their child — received “every conceivable public benefit available out there.”

Remember the economy?

We’re still stuck in the muck.

That’s the conclusion to draw from the new report on gross domestic product. The U.S. economy grew at a 2.5 percent annual rate in the first three months of the year, which was an improvement from the weak 0.4 percent of the final months of 2012… We’re muddling along at basically the same pace we’ve been at for nearly four straight years of this dismal recovery, with growth too slow to make up the lost economic ground from the 2008-2009 recession.”

National debt? $ 16,756,644,393,707.05,as of Friday. (That’s $16.7 trillion.)

Remember Obamacare?

In total, it appears that there will be 30 million to 40 million people damaged in some fashion by the Affordable Care Act—more than one in 10 Americans. When that reality becomes clearer, the law is going to start losing its friends in the media, who are inclined to support the president and his initiatives. We’ll hear about innocent victims who saw their premiums skyrocket, who were barred from seeing their usual doctor, who had their hours cut or lost their insurance entirely—all thanks to the faceless bureaucracy administering a federal law.

With all of this going on, guess what the top story was on Memeorandum, measuring what bloggers and news sites are writing about?

An NBA player coming out of the closet as gay. Wait, there’s more:

A groundbreaking pronouncement from NBA veteran Jason Collins — “I’m gay” — reverberated Monday through Washington, generating accolades from lawmakers on Twitter and a supportive phone call from President Barack Obama.

Hours after Collins disclosed his sexuality in an online article, Obama reached out by phone, expressing his support and telling Collins he was impressed by his courage, the White House said.

Collins, 34, becomes the first active player in one of four major U.S. professional sports leagues to come out as gay. He has played for six teams in 12 seasons, including this past season with the Washington Wizards, and is now a free agent.

This president can’t get squat done about North Korea or Syria, and so he doesn’t want us to focus on those far-off lands. His policies have done diddlysquat for most of the long-term unemployed. He’s not interested in throwing people off public assistance, even when they don’t deserve it, and he wants to insist that every terror attack is a one-time occurrence, instead of connected bits of an international ideological movement dedicated to killing Americans. Obamacare’s a mess, and he’s hoping you don’t notice. The debt continues to increase, even with the alleged horrors of sequestration.

“God, gays and guns.” That’s what he’s got left. And that’s what he hopes stays on your mind, for as many days between now and November 2014 as possible.

From the Thursday edition of the Morning Jolt:

Ultimately, the Obama Presidency Isn’t Really About Governing.

Obamacare’s implementation is a “train wreck,” in the words of retiring Montana Democratic senator Max Baucus.

The president’s gun-control proposals are rejected, because he can’t persuade red-state senators in either party that they would really be of any use in preventing gun violence.

The great news is that the Boston bombers were killed and apprehended quickly, but Boston’s ordeal left serious questions about the government’s ability to keep an eye on those deemed dangerous, and how carefully it scrutinizes those who seek to become American citizens.

Time magazine’s Joe Klein gave conservatives an “Alleluia” moment a few weeks ago. The Obama administration announced that the “exchanges” designed to help small businesses buy health insurance for their employees won’t be ready by the promised deadline. Instead of having multiple health-insurance plans, with differing prices, to offer to their employees, small businesses will be able to pick . . . one plan. Pointing to this and the inability the of the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs to come up with a unified electronic health-care-records system, Klein lamented, “we are now seeing weekly examples of this administration’s inability to govern.”

Klein’s dark assessment is probably driven by all of the other promises about Obamacare that have been left in the dust.

“If you like your plan, you can keep your plan” . . . except for the 7 million people who will lose their coverage, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

“Your premiums will go down . . .” except that premiums have gone up in the past years, with more hikes projected.

And let’s not forget one of then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s promises, that Obamacare would “create 400,000 jobs almost immediately” and eventually 4 million jobs.

Klein writes, “as a Democrat — as someone who believes in activist government — [Obama] has a vested interest in seeing that federal programs actually work efficiently. I don’t see much evidence that this is anywhere near the top of his priorities.”

At moments like this, conservatives feel an enormous temptation to snicker, “Welcome to the party, pal!” But brutally honest assessments like this one from Klein ought to be applauded on the right. One of the reasons the era of Big Government never really ended is because many of its usual fans on the left avert their eyes when it fails so badly. You can’t address a problem if you refuse to see a problem.

Unfortunately, there’s not much indication that Obama sees the problems and even less indication he wants to see them. The bold promise and the awful delivery have become the signature of this administration, extending well beyond the implementation of health care.

Elsewhere in his column, Klein writes, “faced a terrible economic crisis — and he has done well to limit the damage.”

The damage is limited . . . except for the fact that more Americans are living in poverty than when Obama took office. And our workforce participation rate is now the lowest since 1979. And the number of Americans on food stamps is at an all-time high. And the nearly 5 million long-term unemployed have defined life since autumn 2008 as an era of barely scraping by, month after month, year after year..

Of course, the “shovel-ready jobs” of the stimulus didn’t really live up to the promises, as Obama himself admitted.

And the web site meant to detail how every dime of stimulus spending ended up full of bad data and nonexistent congressional districts.

And as of June 2012, three and a half years after the stimulus passed, nearly $8 billion was still waiting to be awarded or sitting in agency accounts.

And the entire green-jobs initiative clearly hasn’t quite lived up to the hype, including the president’s infamous pledge that “companies like Solyndra are leading the way toward a brighter and more prosperous future.” Now another one of the administration’s high-profile loan recipients, Fisker Automotive, is contemplating bankruptcy; the company hasn’t built a car since July.

Tuesday we learned, “Taxpayer-backed funds kept flowing to electric carmaker Fisker Automotive months after the company failed to meet key production benchmarks, lawmakers said at a congressional hearing on Wednesday.”

All of these problems in the stimulus and the administration’s overall economic policies fit in a pattern, don’t they? Klein’s creeping sense that making sure “federal programs actually work efficiently” isn’t really an administration priority?

Time and again, we hear anecdotes of the president angered, befuddled, and frustrated that the policies implemented in the beginning of his presidency, with a compliant Congress, haven’t generated the results he promised. But very little seems to change, other than a bit of fuming at aides behind closed doors.

President Obama was surprised to learn, in discussions with economic adviser Christina Romer, that large-scale investment in infrastructure and clean-energy projects wouldn’t create enormous numbers of new jobs.

In a December 2010 meeting with economic advisers, he “boiled over” with frustration that his housing policies hadn’t helped struggling homeowners like he promised.

When federal program after federal program fails to generate the desired result, it’s not crazy talk to become at least a little skeptical of the latest pledges and promises and idealistic visions.

But Democrats often speak as if the Right’s skepticism of the government’s problem-solving ability is driven by some sort of abstract ideological theory. It’s not. It’s usually built upon hard experiences. Human behavior isn’t predictable, particularly their interactions with the government. Unintended consequences pile up like a car crash. The pattern is depressingly predictable: Someone in government comes up with some laudable goal, and announces some new program. After the press conference, when the cameras and microphones are away, implementing the idea proves more complicated than the press-conference announcement made it seem. Deadlines get missed. Costs turn out much higher than expected. Bureaucratic inertia begins to exert the gravitational pull of a black hole.

Perhaps it is the nature of the modern presidency for the occupant of the Oval Office to glide from photo-op to photo-op, and never spend too much time getting entangled in the messy work of actually making his policies live up to his promises. Certainly that’s the pattern for this president; even in this non-campaign year, the schedule is heavy with a campaign-style rally on gun-control initiatives here, a DCCC fundraiser there, then off to a tour of a national laboratory. He flits from issue to issue; to judge from his remarks and his schedule, the health-care issue is resolved and our health-care system’s problems are fixed. Maybe White House press secretary Jay Carney will get a question about the health-care exchanges or electronic health-care-records system, which he’ll defuse with another defensive, meandering word salad.

Implementing Obamacare? Hey, that’s for somebody else to worry about.

In over his head?

How short did the Romney campaign fall in 2012? If he had moved 429,000 votes in four states, he would have finished with 270 electoral votes — and won the presidency.

SmartMediaGroup.com has a great graphic on which counties a Republican must win, in which counties he (or she) must improve upon Romney’s performance, and in which counties the candidate must narrow the gap:

The Washington Post asks Americans how they feel about President George W. Bush today, and the results may surprise his critics:

Days before his second term ended in 2009, Bush’s approval rating among all adults was 33 percent positive and 66 percent negative. The new poll found 47 percent saying they approve and 50 percent saying they disapprove. Among registered voters, his approval rating today is equal to President Obama’s, at 47 percent, according to the latest Post-ABC surveys.

Apparently Douglas Adams was off by a bit; the answer isn’t “42,” it’s “47 percent.”

I am reliably informed that Virginia’s GOP gubernatorial candidate, Ken Cuccinelli, will soon release his tax returns for the past eight years and call for his Democratic counterpart, Terry McAuliffe, to do the same.

In a mirror image of the attack against Mitt Romney last summer, Republicans in Virginia and Washington are ready to point to any delay as a sign that there’s something shady or scandalous in McAuliffe’s tax returns and personal finances. Republicans have a long list of quotes from David Axelrod, DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, former White House Press Secreary Robert Gibbs, and other Obama campaign officials demanding the release of Romney’s returns, with some comments insinuating or explicitly stating that failure to release the returns indicates criminal behavior.

McAuliffe may or may not release all those returns; as the Virginia Pilot notes, candidates for governor in this state typically don’t release tax return information partly because the state requires them to submit personal financial disclosure statements that are considered public records. And the returns may not reveal much in terms of wrongdoing, but two figures might be intriguing or cause indigestion for the McAuliffe campaign. First, just how wealthy is McAuliffe? Back in 2009, the disclosure forms revealed “a net worth of at least $5.8 million. But McAuliffe is likely worth considerably more because candidates in Virginia do not have to report the exact value of an investment that tops $250,000.”

Secondly, how much as McAuliffe made from his investment/role with GreenTech Automotive in the past four years?

Here’s the old quote to get the spotlight: last cycle’s head of the Democratic Governors Association:

Then DGA Chairman Martin O’Malley on Romney’s failure to release his tax returns: “His failure to release those is a bit of an implicit admission of…guilt…” (Zeke Miller, “O’Malley: McCain Saw Romney’s Tax Returns And He Chose Palin,” BuzzFeed, 7/13/2012)

Okay, gun control supporters, including President Obama. Let’s see if you’ll put your money where your mouth is.  If you’re so totally convinced by that 90 percent poll figure you keep throwing around, if you’re so utterly certain that your viewpoint represents the will of the American people, let’s see you back pro-gun-control challengers to the three Democrats who voted against the Toomey-Manchin compromise who are up for reelection in 2014: Max Baucus of Montana, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, and Mark Begich of Alaska.

Because if you really believe that voting “no” on that proposal is the equivalent to voting for more dead children, you can’t say that it’s an utterly unforgivable act for the Republican senators but an understandable concession to public will for the Democrat senators.

(Well, you can, but that will just reveal that you’re partisan hacks, posturing opportunists who use the emotion of the Newtown horror as a cudgel against your Republican opponents, with no real principled opposition to their position, since it’s acceptable from a Red State Democrat.)

Here’s how Obama tried to thread the needle yesterday:

A  few minutes ago, 90 percent of Democrats in the Senate voted for that idea. But it’s not going to happen, because 90 percent of Republicans in the Senate just voted against that idea…

It came down to politics. They worried that that vocal minority of gun-owners would come after them in future elections. They worried that the gun lobby would spend a lot of money and paint them as anti-Second Amendment. And obviously a lot of Republicans had that fear, but Democrats had that fear, too. And so they caved to the pressure, and they started looking for an excuse, any excuse, to vote no.

If you really think that the only reason to not vote for the bill was shameless politics, you can’t later on tell us that Baucus, Pryor and Begich are good senators who deserve reelection. You can’t come to their states for fundraisers, and you can’t go to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee events where you know the cash will be used to try to keep them in office. You can’t mobilize Organizing for Action to pull out all the stops to keep them in office, because you prefer a ‘D’ who votes for more dead children (your rhetoric, not mine) over an ‘R’ who would cast the same vote.

Of course, there’s almost no chance Obama or the DSCC or OFA will take these steps. Bloomberg’s groups may throw money at pro-gun control challengers, but that’s because they’ve got oodles of money; in all likelihood, they’ll help some no-name gun control advocate go from single-digit support in a Red State Democratic primary to double digits.

What yesterday’s vote demonstrated is that nobody really believes that a vote against the Toomey-Manchin compromise is the moral equivalent to voting for more dead children. And that all of this hyperventilating on camera is empty rhetoric.

From the Thursday edition of the Morning Jolt:

Spare Us the Usual Partisan Blame Game During Terror Crises, Mr. President

A big reason why no version of any gun control proposal passed the Senate with 60 votes Wednesday was because none, or almost none, of the senators believed it would actually prevent another massacre. Vice President Joe Biden, leading the president’s gun task force, declared, “Nothing we’re going to do is going to fundamentally alter or eliminate the possibility of another mass shooting or guarantee that we will bring gun deaths down to 1,000 a year from what it is now.” (Video here.) I don’t need to rehash it much: the Newtown shooter stole the guns he used; none of the recent massacre perpetrators purchased their firearms at gun shows; most of them hadn’t done anything that would flag them in the instant check system until they pulled the trigger; police ignored the warnings of the Aurora shooter’s psychiatrist, and so on.

When we learned the details about the Newtown shooter, it was painfully clear that no policy, short of banning private gun ownership and forcibly collecting every last firearm in private hands could prevent something like that from happening again. And yet the whole argument for this bill was driven by invoking Newtown every moment possible.

Even my half-hearted cut-Toomey-some-slack argument was based upon the political realities, not the sense that the bill would prevent another awful day. Suburban soccer moms who have marinated in the Oprah-fied feel-don’t-think culture for decades demand “something be done” so incumbents who want to appeal to those soccer moms must appear to be attempting to “do something,” regardless of whether it accomplishes the stated goal. (My cynicism may be appalling, but it does enjoy a lot of supporting evidence and footnotes.)

The White House video of kids begging for gun control, the constant use of the parents of slain children as the primary advocates, the knee-jerk declarations from the likes of Piers Morgan that to disagree with any of the legislative proposals is to desire more dead kindergarteners, all of this represented a particularly ruthless and emotionally manipulative form of politics…

… and then Monday, real life intruded.

Mr. President, we’ve got real problems to worry about, much bigger than whether a feel-good, largely-symbolic measure passes the Senate and you get a political win.  Somebody blew up Boston’s happiest day of the year, dozens maimed, families torn apart, and we don’t know (as of this writing) if it’s one guy or a group or whether he’s got more efforts planned or whether he’ll inspire copycats.

(Dear store clerks: if, in the coming days, somebody wants to buy a pressure-cooker and wants to pay cash, take their picture. And if somebody wants to buy a bunch of pressure cookers all at once, feel free to ask a lot of probing questions.)

Some guy decided to take out his grievances with the government by sending Ricin, either not knowing or caring that his most likely victims would be postal workers and unpaid Capitol Hill interns. Across the country, airport terminals, courthouses, high schools,  train stations, and city halls are getting evacuated every time someone absent-mindedly leaves their bag somewhere.

We don’t have time for your usual let’s-start-messaging-for-the-midterms pep rallies, Mr. President. We have some non-symbolic problems we would like to see resolved. It’s time to stop worrying about wasting crises and start focusing on resolving them.

Perhaps the president was in a particularly foul mood because of this headline:

At Pivotal Point in Presidency, Obama Routed on Gun Control

Ron Fournier’s lead lays out the cynicism of the whole gun control push from the beginning:

Blame the gun lobby. Blame Republicans. Blame a handful of skittish Democrats who gave the GOP cover. Blame the entire band of demagogues who killed the modest attempt to close loopholes in a law requiring background checks for guns.

Blame them, too, for jeopardizing President Obama’s entire legislative agenda. That was the point, anyhow, right?

Look, Mr. President, it’s not like it was a secret that Baucus, Begich, Heitkamp, and Pryor would be the likely swing votes on the Toomey-Manchin proposal. Heitkamp’s not up until 2018. The Huffington Post’s Elise Foley notices, “None of the Dems who voted no on background checks were invited to dinner with Obama.” Mr. President, if you needed them, did you act like you needed them?

Fournier continues:

The defeat raises questions about Obama’s ability to unify congressional Democrats and to mobilize supporters via his nascent Organizing for Action, a first-of-its-kind political machine controlled by the White House. The president will need party unity and grassroots muscle to battle the GOP on immigration, federal spending, climate change and other White House interests.

Coming into the week, Obama’s agenda appeared to be at an important juncture—with guns, immigration, and deficit-reduction talks at various stages of progress. Winning an expansion of the background check, even as bolder gun measures failed, would have given Obama momentum to push the other two items.

Conversely, his rivals may now feel emboldened to block Obama’s entire agenda. In their most cynical moments, Republican leaders privately cheer themselves with the fact that a president’s approval rating usually suffers amid gridlock.

Obama’s team took news of the defeat hard Wednesday, with some advisers predicting that gun regulation won’t be revived. It is hard for them to explain the failure of a measure supported by 90 percent of the public without making the president appear weak.

Kemberlee Kaye: “Political opportunism is not an effective means of governance, as @TheDemocrats learned today. Plus, Constitution and stuff.”

Ace: “Obama showed the passion and anger at his personal defeat that he wasn’t able to manage after the Benghazi slaughter.”

Richard Grenell: “More anger on one’s failed Senate vote than on international terrorism is a sure sign of a large ego.”

King Shamus: “Obama throws a temper tantrum because his permanent campaign couldn’t make it happen. He’s basically admitting his failure as a politician.”

John Ondrasik, also known as the voice of Five for Fighting: “I love how politicians only blame politics when they lose.”

Iowahawk: “Most popular president in history can’t persuade own party to vote for commonsense legislation supported by 90% of voters. Or something.”

The Thursday edition of the Morning Jolt features an examination of the Toomey-Manchin proposal on background checks, news about Terry McAuliffe’s GreenTech Automotive company, an intriguing quote from the White House, and then this . . .

Obama’s Outreach to Republicans, for the Cameras Only

Wednesday night, President Obama dined with Republicans.

This latest round of mealtime diplomacy — which will take place in the White House’s Old Family Dining Room, rather than the Jefferson Hotel — will feature lawmakers ranging from moderate Maine Sen. Susan Collins to conservative John Boozman (Ark.). Other attendees include GOP Sens. Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), Mike Crapo (Idaho), Mike Enzi (Wyo.), Orrin Hatch (Utah), and John Thune (S.D.).

You’ll recall that Obama did almost no outreach to Republicans in his first term.

If there were ever a Republican for President Obama to work with, it was Maine Senator Olympia Snowe. She was one of just three Republicans in the entire Congress to vote for his economic stimulus plan in 2009 and even tried to work with him on health care, but in an interview with ABC’s Senior Political Correspondent Jonathan Karl, Snowe makes a remarkable revelation: She hasn’t had a face-to-face meeting with President Obama in nearly two years.

Now, if you’re a Democratic President looking to build bipartisan coalitions, isn’t Olympia Snowe the first place you start?

Of course, you’ll also recall some unnamed White House staffer who said that all of the recent outreach to Republicans was just window-dressing to get the media off his case; he, and apparently his colleagues and perhaps the president believed there was no practical use to actually meeting and eating with legislators in the opposing party.

“This is a joke. We’re wasting the president’s time and ours,” complained a senior White House official who was promised anonymity so he could speak frankly. “I hope you all (in the media) are happy because we’re doing it for you.”

So is the outreach “real” or for the cameras? Well, when Paul Ryan came to NR’s offices in Washington yesterday, he offered a nugget that appears to shed some light. Our Andrew Stiles wrote up that portion of the conversation:

Representative Paul Ryan hasn’t heard from President Obama since their lunch meeting in early March, the House budget committee chairman told reporters on Wednesday.

“Not that I know of,” Ryan said when asked if the president had made any effort to follow up on their meeting, which he noted was “the first time we ever had a conversation” since Obama took office. “I don’t really know him very well.”

Rep. Paul Ryan stopped by National Review’s Washington offices today. Towards the end of the meeting, I asked him about the contrast in his life in the past year — last autumn, when he spent every day in the white-hot spotlight running for vice president, and now, when he’s back chairing the House Budget Committee. I asked whether a part of him felt happy to be back in his budget-policy element.

“No, I actually wished I was doing something different,” Ryan said with a laugh. “I had a different vision than this.”

“I guess one of the most distressing things is that . . . I worked with Mike Leavitt — after my debate was done, I got to jump into the transition planning more. Mitt had two more debates to go. So I worked with Mike Leavitt and Chris Liddell and his team on the transition plan. And knowing what we were going to do in the first 200 days, how we were going to tackle the entitlement problems, the debt crisis, tax reform, energy exploration, all the things we said were going to do, we were going to do. And we were really getting down to the specifics. Losing the election and now seeing where the country is headed in this kind of level of detail . . . [holding up a summary of President Obama’s budget proposal, unveiled today] . . . Very few people have such a clear view of the whole alteration of trajectory that has occurred. And that’s obviously . . . I won’t say it’s despairing, it’s distressing, I’m distressed. I gave up despair for Lent this year,” he joked.

“I look at the situation now, and I do what you have to do as a legislator: make the best of a situation as it is, and try to improve things. I want to get an agreement to get a down payment on this problem to buy the country time, and help create some space for economic growth. But it’s distressing that all of these things are happening — I think Obamacare is going to destroy health care. I think the tax code is holding us back. I think we’re on the cusp of an energy renaissance, if we allow it happen, that could be a game changer for America. I think they’re regulating jobs out of existence with uncertainty. We could have changed all that. But we didn’t. So let’s go to Plan B, which is make the best of it.”

Remember when the Citizens United court case was the root of all evil? Well, now a Democratic super PAC is suing to allow unlimited donations in their effort to help Democratic candidates for the state legislature:

A Washington DC “super PAC” has sued New Jersey’s campaign finance watchdog agency, saying the state can’t limit how much it can raise from an individual donor.

The Fund for Jobs and Growth filed the complaint against the state Election Law Enforcement Commission (ELEC) in federal district court on Friday.

The group, organized under Section 527 of the IRS code, plans to make independent expenditures on behalf of Democratic state legislative candidates in this year’s election. It argues that under the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC, it’s unconstitutional to limit how much money it can raise from an individual donor.

Last year, President Obama declared that the Citizens United decision was so harmful to society, that “I think we need to seriously consider mobilizing a constitutional amendment process to overturn Citizens United (assuming the Supreme Court doesn’t revisit it).”

Will he denounce an effort by allies within his own party to eliminate limits on donations to state campaigns?

The final Morning Jolt of the week offers a lengthy assessment of polls indicating that a majority of Americans support marijuana legalization, a bit of lighter thought on “Castle,” and then this bit of pitch-perfect presidential-rhetoric assessment:

‘We Need to Rebuild Trust,’ the President Lied

Yeah, I just can’t improve upon Tom Maguire’s quick assessment of Obama’s recent comments on guns:

The NY Times regales us with an account of Obama’s gun control speech in Denver:

He waved toward the assembled officers and local politicians and added, “We’ve got to get past some of the rhetoric that gets perpetuated, that breaks down trust, that’s so over the top that it just shuts down all discussion.”

In contrast to some of his earlier, more emotional remarks about the impact of gun violence, the president portrayed the debate as one of a principled difference that needs to be bridged.

If he really wants to rebuild trust he could take a step in that direction by dropping his phony stat about 40 percent of guns being obtained without a background check.

Nor does it bolster his credibility when he tells a room of California’s One Percenters that the Newton shooting was done with a semi-automatic weapon and then “corrects” himself to make it an automatic.

Jobless claims are up again, the poverty rate is at a 50-year high, North Korea is threatening to nuke us, Obamacare is turning into an unmanageable mess, and —

OMG OMG OMG JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE IS PERFORMING AT THE WHITE HOUSE!!! 11! OMG OMG

No, really:

The White House announced this week that the 32-year-old artist is slated to perform there on April 9 as part of an evening of celebration for Memphis Soul music.

Timberlake will join other artists like The Alabama Shakes; William Bell; Steve Cropper; Ben Harper; Queen Latifah; Cyndi Lauper; Joshua Ledet; Sam Moore; Charlie Musselwhite; Mavis Staples; and the artist who’s given President Obama some of his best karaoke material, Al Green. The evening is part of the President and First Lady’s “In Performance at the White House” series, and it’ll air on PBS April 16 at 8 p.m. ET.

Because when you think Memphis Soul music, you think Justin Timberlake.

The sound you hear is millions upon millions of low-information voters squealing with delight at their president. If Obama’s numbers go underwater again, they’ll have to unleash the Kraken Bieber.

Hey, can I get some bread with these circuses?

We may scoff that Obama writing a check to the U.S. Treasury for $1,666 a month is a meaningless gesture designed to fool those who can’t do math that he’s making a significant sacrifice in the Age of the Sequester . . . but I suppose there are more objectionable approaches for a lawmaker to take:

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Thursday that she opposes a cut in congressional pay because it would diminish the dignity of lawmakers’ jobs.

“I don’t think we should do it; I think we should respect the work we do,” Pelosi told reporters in the Capitol. “I think it’s necessary for us to have the dignity of the job that we have rewarded.”

The comments were made in the context of the looming sequester, which would force across-the-board cuts affecting most federal offices, including Congress.

As House minority leader, Pelosi is slated to make $193,400 this year; most members of Congress make $174,000.

Pelosi’s net worth is estimated to be $26.4 million, which reflects her husband’s real-estate investments.

Also unmentioned in the coverage: will Vice President Joe Biden be writing a check for 5 percent of his salary as well?

Above, Nancy Pelosi at a May 2012 ceremony where Middle Drive East in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park was renamed “Nancy Pelosi Drive.” Naturally, the road heads south and bends to the left.

Today’s Morning Jolt is big and busy — more tensions in North Korea, with a lot of unfilled positions at the U.S. State Department; our new national pastime of giving marital advice to strangers; a debate on fire about “A Movement on Fire”; and then this big gesture by the Munificent Sun King:

Obama’s 5 Percent Solution for the Sequester

Big question for the next news cycle: Is this covered as a bold, magnanimous, generous gesture on the part of our Munificent Sun God/President? Or does it get treated as a meaningless publicity stunt?

President Barack Obama will put 5% of his paycheck back into the federal government’s coffers in a show of camaraderie with furloughed federal workers, a senior administration official said Wednesday.

Obama, whose $400,000 annual salary is set in law and can’t officially be changed, will write a check made out to the U.S. treasury every month beginning in April. Since the mandatory across-the-board spending cuts went into effect March 1, his payment for that month will be paid retroactively.

Obama will give back 5 percent of all his paychecks from March to December, so we’re talking about $16,666.66 or so. That amount would cover the costs of Air Force One in flight for about five and a half minutes.

President Obama has a net worth estimated between $2.6 million and $11.8 million; he makes $400,000 per year before taxes, lives rent-free at the White House, pays absolutely nothing in official travel costs, and gets $169,000 to cover expenses, personal travel, and entertainment. The government pays for state dinners and other official functions, but the president pays for personal services like dry cleaning and food that he, his family, and personal guests consume.

But he’s giving up about $1,666 per month, so, hey. Shared sacrifice!

Erik Soderstrom offers a great graphic to illustrate it all.

Cameron Gray: “The auto pen will now use 5% less ink when signing laws.”

Cam Edwards: “5% fewer guns to Mexican Drug Cartels!”

Dave Weigel: “Can we give him TWO Nobel Prizes? #hero”

Oh, one more catch:

President Barack Obama could be able to claim a tax break for his decision to return 5 percent of his salary to the government.

Obama is giving back part of his $400,000 in salary in solidarity with federal workers facing furloughs because of budget cuts in the sequestration of federal funds.

Voluntary payments to reduce the public debt can be taken as deductions for charitable contributions, according to the Congressional Research Service.

At the 39.6 percent top federal tax rate — the one Obama insisted on last year — the $20,000 deduction for this returned pay would put $7,920 in tax relief back in his pocket.

If this happens, the government would pay Obama, who would pay the government, which would then pay Obama.

Of course, Obama won’t take the tax break. The point is that he, and his top donors, and a good portion of the people he interacts with every day, live a lifestyle where $7,920 in tax relief makes no real impact on daily life at all.

The Tuesday edition of the Morning Jolt features the “I Told You So” Coalition on Obamacare, some thoughts on whether conservative policies can alleviate the agony of traffic-ridden commutes, what our next ambassador to Japan can expect, and . . .

Obama’s $1 Million Trip to Colorado to Talk About Gun Control

Today President Obama  travels to Colorado to “meet with law enforcement and community leaders to discuss the gun control package signed into law by Gov. John Hickenlooper.”

That’s a three hour flight, right?

At  $179,750 per hour, that comes out to $1,078,500 in costs for Air Force One for the trip.

That’s just about the cost of public tours of the White House for one year.

“On the road again . . . Just can’t wait to get on the road again . . .”

Eh, you knew I was kidding . . . Obama’s not just flying across the country to give a predictable speech on gun control; he’s also traveling out to San Francisco for a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee fundraiser, and he’ll stay overnight. (Yes, our president is already preparing fundraising for November 2014 midterm elections.) So the cost of the flights for today and tomorrow is really closer to $1.4 million.

Boy, that sequestration demands a lot of sacrifices from all of us, doesn’t it?