Jazz Shaw notices more spending “Spared by the Sequester”: $14 million per year for catfish inspections.

Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department spent $500,000 on lodging, hotel conference rooms. and other services in San Jose, Costa Rica; the cost is associated with President Obama’s May 3 visit.

Oh, and there’s a new $16.3 million “Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Complex” to be built at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

Despite the dire warnings, the Sequester has not yet required President Obama to look for loose change that fell behind the Oval Office couch cushions.

Another busy Jolt today . . . two sections to preview this morning:

BOOM: Quinnipiac Sees Obama’s Approval Take a Sudden Tumble

For a couple of weeks, Obama fans have been high-fiving each other, looking at polling numbers and concluding the public didn’t really blame the president for any of the scandals engulfing his administration.

Well, looks like they celebrated too early:

American voters say 76 – 17 percent, including 63 – 30 percent among Democrats, that a special prosecutor should be appointed to investigate charges the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative groups, according to a Quinnipiac University national poll released today.

President Barack Obama gets a negative 45 – 49 percent job approval rating, compared to 48 – 45 percent positive in a May 1 survey by the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University, conducted before the IRS allegations surfaced.

The president’s biggest drop is among independent voters, who give him a negative 37 – 57 percent score, compared to a negative 42 – 48 percent May 1. He gets a negative 9 – 86 percent from Republicans and a positive 87 – 8 percent from Democrats, both virtually unchanged. Women approve 49 – 45 percent while men give a negative 40 – 54 percent score.

Americans are divided 49 – 47 percent on whether Obama is honest and trustworthy, down from 58 – 37 percent, the last time Quinnipiac University asked the question September 1, 2011.

Gee, what could cause that drop? Moving along . . . 

News-Junkie Hipster-ism and ‘The Real Scandal’

If you’ll allow me to quote Matt Welch twice, he articulates an irritation buzzing around the back of my head, pundits’ all-too-frequent declaration that whatever scandal is in the headlines is an obviously frivolous and inconsequential distraction, and that they’ve figured out what we really ought to be talking about if we’re serious, thoughtful people. You know . . . “the real scandal,” as they incessantly declare.

But the real party comes when you search on “the real scandal.” So much to choose from!

There’s “child poverty” (Jesse Jackson, Chicago Sun-Times), “political gridlock” (Ned Barnett, Charlotte News & Observer), “the Republican party’s devotion to grandstanding over governance and its preference for slime over substance” (Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., The Huffington Post), “secret money influencing US elections” (Ari Berman, The Nation), “that 501(c)(4) groups have been engaged in political activity in such a sustained and open way” (Jeffrey Toobin, New Yorker), that “they let General Electric not pay any taxes” (Michael Moore, HuffPost Live), sex abuse in the military (Katrina vanden Heuvel, Washington Post), and even “the IRS itself” (John Tamny, Forbes).

This is like news junkie hipster-ism. “Oh, you’re following that news story? Pshaw. I was following that story years ago. The really important story now is [some obscure story they’re fairly certain you haven’t read about yet].”

Now, some of those items are real problems, i.e., child poverty and sex abuse in the military. But only a fool would argue that the existence of one problem automatically de-prioritizes any other problem. Maybe there are a lot of big problems in our government and society that the American people should be concerned about and try to solve or improve. Maybe we really have a lot of scandals going on.

The real scandal is that we have so many real scandals going on.

So, other than Israel intervening in Syria — with no heads-up to the United States — and unnamed administration officials telling the New York Times that the “red line” policy was a giant accident, and the fact that the Benghazi hearings appear set to have the deputy chief of mission contradicting all kinds of administration statements about the attacks, and bad news for Democrats in South Carolina and Virginia . . . well, other than all that, President Obama had a good weekend.

From the first Morning Jolt of the week:

The New White House Line: Maybe We Don’t Care About Chemical-Weapons Use After All

Ladies and gentlemen, some unidentified White House official, within our government:

“How can we attack another country unless it’s in self-defense and with no Security Council resolution?” another official said, referring to United Nations authorization. “If he drops sarin on his own people, what’s that got to do with us?”

I realize that we’re all tired of war, that we’re tired of being asked to intervene in Arab countries, with their tribal loyalties and factionalism and blood feuds and cycles of revenge and seemingly endless reserves of cruelty and capacity for bloodshed. But if we don’t see any purpose or value in attempting to prevent, deter, or punish the use of chemical weapons against civilians, we might as well close up shop. Every two-bit dictator and ruthless regime is watching the international response to Syria or lack thereof, and we’ve already sent the signal that you can probably escape serious consequence if your use of chemical weapons is hard to prove and on a small scale.

Elliott Abrams:

How soon they forget. According to the Times that line was uttered last August, not quite four months after Mr. Obama established his “Atrocities Prevention Board.” In a speech on April 23, 2012 he said this at the Holocaust Museum:

And finally, “never again” is a challenge to nations. It’s a bitter truth — too often, the world has failed to prevent the killing of innocents on a massive scale. And we are haunted by the atrocities that we did not stop and the lives we did not save.

We may feel like the use of chemical weapons isn’t enough to justify airstrikes, a no-fly-zone, a “safe zone” for refugees, or any other steps beyond a sternly worded United Nations resolution, but other countries see their own interests in what happens in Syria, and they’re acting.  Also this weekend:

Israel launched airstrikes into Syria for the second time in three days, said Syria and its allies, targeting what it believes are stores of advanced missiles that could be transferred to the militant group Hezbollah, amid new concerns that the Syrian civil war could widen into broader regional conflict.

Surely a lot of factors go into the decision to use military force, but it’s tough to ignore that that the Israeli Defense Force suddenly got a lot more active in Syria just a couple of days after Obama said that crossing the red line meant . . . well, that we would “rethink the range of options that are available to us.”

The Benghazi Hearings: This Week’s Must-See TV

Jake Tapper offers a preview of what we can expect from this week’s hearings on Benghazi, and everyone crying “oh, this is a partisan witch hunt” can go sit in the corner.

Greg Hicks, former deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli, Libya, told congressional investigators that the State Department internal review of the catastrophe at the mission in Benghazi “let people off the hook,” CNN has learned.

The Accountability Review Board “report itself doesn’t really ascribe blame to any individual at all. The public report anyway,” Hicks told investigators, according to transcript excerpts obtained by CNN. “It does let people off the hook.”

The board’s report on the Benghazi attack, in which Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed in September, is being reviewed by the State Department’s Office of Inspector General.

Rep. Darrell Issa, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said Sunday on CBS that Hicks will testify Wednesday in a congressional hearing on the deadly attack in Benghazi.

“In our system, people who make decisions have been confirmed by the Senate to make decisions,” Hicks told investigators. “The three people in the State Department who are on administrative leave pending disciplinary action are below Senate confirmation level. Now, the DS (Diplomatic Security) assistant secretary resigned, and he is at Senate confirmation level. Yet the paper trail is pretty clear that decisions were being made above his level.

Whom might Hicks be referring to? He specifically mentions Under Secretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy.

“Certainly the fact that Under Secretary Kennedy required a daily report of the personnel in country and who personally approved every official American who went to Tripoli or Benghazi, either on assignment or TDY (temporary duty), would suggest some responsibility about security levels within the country lies on his desk,” Hicks said.

In the interview, conducted on April 11, Hicks also makes clear that he immediately believed the September 11 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi had been conducted by terrorists, though the White House and other officials in the Obama administration initially suggested that the attack was the result of an out-of-control demonstration against an anti-Muslim YouTube video.

“I thought it was a terrorist attack from the get-go,” said Hicks, who was in Tripoli during the attack. “I think everybody in the mission thought it was a terrorist attack from the beginning.”

Looks like a rough week ahead, Mr. President.

This Tweet from Democratic strategist Donna Brazile is getting a great deal of attention.

What’s on your menu? Just got off the phone with my health care provider asking them to explain why my premium jumped up. No good answer!

— Donna Brazile (@donnabrazile) February 27, 2013

I guess it depends upon your definition of a “good” answer. Once Obamacare requires insurance companies to cover preexisting conditions, kids under 26, birth control pills and so on, the companies will cover those costs by… raising premiums for all customers.

So that’s a “good answer” in the sense of explaining the situation. But I guess if you’re a fan of Obamacare, it’s not really a good answer.

But cheer up, Ms. Brazile! You’re not alone!

Health insurance companies across the country are seeking and winning double-digit increases in premiums for some customers, even though one of the biggest objectives of the Obama administration’s health care law was to stem the rapid rise in insurance costs for consumers.

Particularly vulnerable to the high rates are small businesses and people who do not have employer-provided insurance and must buy it on their own.

In California, Aetna is proposing rate increases of as much as 22 percent, Anthem Blue Cross 26 percent and Blue Shield of California 20 percent for some of those policy holders, according to the insurers’ filings with the state for 2013. These rate requests are all the more striking after a 39 percent rise sought by Anthem Blue Cross in 2010 helped give impetus to the law, known as the Affordable Care Act, which was passed the same year and will not be fully in effect until 2014.

 In other states, like Florida and Ohio, insurers have been able to raise rates by at least 20 percent for some policy holders. The rate increases can amount to several hundred dollars a month.

So the secondhand tale of House Speaker John Boehner’s assessment that President Obama “can’t make a decision. He’s got balls made out of marshmallows” … has a certain precedent, as Exurban Jon reminds me:

“If Hillary gave him [Obama] one of her balls, they’d both have two,” Democratic strategist James Carville told the Christian Science Monitor at a breakfast on Thursday morning.

The editorial board of the Washington Post uses nicer language, but reaches the same conclusion:

… why is Mr. Obama not leading the way to a solution? From the start, and increasingly in his second term, Mr. Obama has presented entitlement reform as something he would do grudgingly, as a favor to the opposition, when he should be explaining to the American people — and to his party — why it is an urgent national need. Obama priorities such as health and energy research, preschool education and job training: Those come from the discretionary budget.

Why? Because it would mean telling his party and his supporters things they don’t want to hear. And he doesn’t have the, er… stomach for it.

Over on the home page, I audaciously and arrogantly declare… the state of our satire is weak.

A lot of folks will attribute this to Hollywood’s fear of mocking Obama; certainly something odd is going on when Saturday Night Live greets Obama’s second inauguration with a sketch in which the ghost of Martin Luther King Jr. is obsessed with Beyonce, Michelle Obama’s bangs, and Twitter hashtages, and Obama is the straight man.

But I think it’s a bit more than that. Satire’s purpose is to mock those in power who deserve it, and our most prominent satirical voices have a hard time mocking those in power they agree with… and are meandering around, looking for new targets with a palpable sense of desperation. Couple that with the ubiquitous attempts at satire in our culture, and it’s nearly impossible to generate really stinging, memorable examples of it today.

When everybody’s getting mocked, there’s not much consequence to the mockery. The audience becomes conditioned to just letting the microwave-worthy instant satire wash over them and moving on to the next topic, because they intuitively sense that the figure wasn’t chosen for any particular trait that deserves the mockery.

The older notion of satire as a tool for addressing some wrongdoing or social ill may be falling apart before us. We don’t hold many of our national political or cultural leaders in high regard, and yet somehow they keep on with business as usual. Some of the egos attracted to political power have proven that no amount of ridicule can deter them.

As I conclude, “In a real world that increasingly resembles the Onion’s satires, the Onion is superfluous.”

With gasoline prices slated to reach an all-time high in 2013, we can expect President Obama to make another pledge to crack down on nefarious energy traders who are driving up prices of oil and gasoline. After all, he made that pledge in 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012.

So why are gas prices rising? The Post lists several reasons, including Middle East tensions, but this one seems key: “Several refineries have been shut down for routine maintenance, and in the eastern United States, several refineries simply went out of business in the past year.”

As you often hear, the United States has not built a new oil refinery since 1976. Hess closed down its last refinery in New Jersey earlier this year. There’s an effort to build a new one in South Dakota, but that effort has been tied up in paperwork, permits, and lawsuits for six years and now people doubt it will ever be built. There’s now talk of a potential one in North Dakota.

So, looking at the headlines this morning . . .

Jobless Claims Bounce Higher

U.S. economy contracts for first time since recession

Chinese Cyber Hackers a Growing Threat

U.S. faces new Al Qaeda threat as terror group’s ‘strike map’ is revealed

Report: Iran, Hezbollah terror threat rising

Iran Is Said to Be Set to Accelerate Uranium Enrichment

Syria, Iran threaten retaliation against Israel

And what’s going on at the White House?

Mark Knoller: “Today at the White House: No public events on the president’s schedule today, though Vogue is bringing camera gear into the White House this morning.”

Beautiful day for a photo-op, isn’t it?

Lefty commenters and folks on Twitter, shortly after the last post, paraphrased:

“Only a nitpicking partisan hack would think it was appropriate for a president to drop everything and go to a major natural-disaster site!”

The news, an hour ago:

WASHINGTON — President Obama will travel Friday to areas of Colorado devastated by wildfires, the White House announced Wednesday afternoon.

The president has spoken with Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper and the mayor of Colorado Springs to get the latest developments and express his concern about the extent of the damage, the White House said in a statement.

During his visit, he will “view the damage and thank the responders bravely battling the fire,” according to the statement.

The reaction from those same folks, momentarily: “Thank goodness our wise, sensitive, and empathetic president is dropping everything to go to a major natural-disaster site!”

Putting snark aside for a moment, I’ll just put up the link to HelpColoradoNow.org again.

In light of the TSA patting down a toddler in a wheelchair . . .

If more of our elected officials did their own taxes, pumped their own gas (no official office travel budgets or reimbursement), flew commercial and got to enjoy TSA pat-downs, waited on line at the post office to mail their own packages, had to wait on line at the DMV, and so on, would they have the same views and support the same policies?

When the president, most members of Congress, and most members of the cabinet debate a policy, most of the time they’re discussing something that is entirely theoretical to them. They’ll never have to deal directly with the federal policy they’re discussing, and the consequences of the policy will have no impact on the quality of their life whatsoever.

Most of them live a life completely different from ours. Many of them have chauffeurs or staffers to drive them around. Their travel expenses, including gas, are covered or are reimbursed by their office. They’re too busy to wait on line in places like the post office, the DMV, or other offices of government bureaucracy, so they have staffers do that where possible. At a high enough level, they have personal security, so the threat of violent crime is entirely theoretical to them. (How many politicians who support gun control travel with armed security guards?) They have their career path set ahead of them; they’re not attempting to launch a small business. If they did, they would just hire someone to deal with all of the paperwork and regulations.

They make a salary that is astronomical for the average American: $174,000 for most members of the House and Senate, $199,700 for cabinet members, $223,500 for the Speaker of the House, $230,700 for the vice president, $400,000 for the president. They receive generous pensions. Their careers after leaving office include many lucrative opportunities in academia, publishing, media, and lobbying.

For those at the highest level of our government, the process of passing laws is not too different from playing “The Sims” or some other game. They make the changes and observe how others react; they themselves are distanced and cushioned from the actual impact of the laws.

I was reminded of a closing passage in Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes:

The White House is the thickest and shiniest bubble of all.

It’s not just that we can’t see him. From the White House, he can’t see anything outside. Why didn’t [George H. W.] Bush get it?

Well, the White House was running like a top! Everyone who walked into his office had a wonderful job — and were excited by the swell things they were doing for the country and its people. Every microphone over which he peered had a thousand faces upturned to his, ready to cheer his every applause line. If he left Washington, every tarmac on which Air Force One touched down had a line of prosperous people in suits, to pump Bush’s hand and tell him things were, we were, he was . . . great!

Sometimes our elected officials do a poor job of showcasing their relief that they don’t have to interact with the federal government the way that we do.

Reid Wilson looks at the numbers and suggests that 2012 might be a genuine anti-incumbent year, as opposed to previous “anti-incumbent” years that turned out to be bad for only one party’s incumbents.

For all the attention the “Republican Revolution” class of 1994 received, more new members came to Congress after the 1992 election. More than a quarter of the entire House — 110 members — were freshmen (compared with 85 in 1994).

This cycle’s mood mirrors 1992. Just 9 percent of the electorate approve of Congress, according to a recent CBS News/New York Times poll. And 79 percent told ABC News/Washington Post pollsters they are dissatisfied with the way the country’s political system is working, only 2 percentage points off the 81 percent who said the same thing just before the 1992 elections.

And, as in 1992, redistricting is adding to the tumult as even seemingly safe members have to contend with thousands of new voters who want change. As in 1992, no incumbent next year is truly secure, whether in primary or general elections.

The only problem with this assessment that the ideological division in the 2012 presidential election is going to be pretty stark. Could Americans, dissatisfied by what they’re getting under divided government of a Democratic president and a Republican House, decide they want a Republican president and a Democratic House? That they want a conservative approach in the executive branch, and then lower on the ticket, they want a congressional candidate explicitly running against that approach? Not unthinkable, but a bit hard to imagine. Presidents have coattails, long and short, for a reason.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee marks the one-year anniversary of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s “Welcome to the Recovery,” op-ed, as well as a slew of other comments from President Obama, Harry Reid, Claire McCaskill, Jay Carney, Tim Kaine, Joe Manchin, Jon Tester, and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, in a new web video: