That’s what I’ve been on my whirlwind visit. It’s been a great time at the Hillsdale College symposium here, where I just spoke. Going to spend an hour in studio with the great Michael Medved — starting around 4 Eastern — before heading home. I wonder if there’ll be anything to talk about …

I write today about the uphill battle to fire Lois Lerner, and the statistical rarity of firing any federal employee. There’s a tidbit buried on the second page that could become much more significant depending on how this plays out. There are a set of infractions known in IRS circles as “The Ten Deadly Sins” that can constitute iron-clad grounds for termination. Among them? Violating the constitutional rights of a taxpayer.

More here.

The “Cooper’s Hill Cheese-Rolling and Wake” is a sporting event unlike any other. Each spring for two centuries, hundreds of competitors have gathered in Brockworth, Gloucestershire, in southwest England to chase a cheese wheel one foot in diameter the 200 yards down Cooper’s Hill. Very rarely does someone catch the cheese, which can roll at speeds topping 70 mph.

This year, though, there might be no cheese to chase. The Telegraph reports that British police visited the home of 86-year-old Diana Smart, the farmer who has been making the event’s hunk of Traditional Double Gloucester for the past quarter-century, and threatened her with liability for any injuries that may occur during the race if she supplies the cheese in the coming year:

Mrs. Smart said the “heavy handed” police visited her home last week and told [her] in a “threatening” manner she would be responsible for any injuries caused – and so has pulled out.

“They threatened me, saying I would be wholly responsible if anyone got injured,” she said. “I’m 86, I don’t have the will or the cash to fight any lawsuits. It’s crazy.”

British authorities revoked the event’s government endorsement after 2009, deeming the event too dangerous for official sanction: Several people require medical treatment each year for anything from dislocated shoulders to broken ankles. Since 2009, the cheese has rolled unofficially.

You can watch the Cheese-Rolling (including via helmet-cam) and meet Diana Smart here. (Content warning: Video includes skimpily clothed chubby men and extreme Anglophilia.)

Jonathan points out the logical fallacy underlying Scheiber’s piece for The New Republic. There are (at least) two other problems with the piece: another logical fallacy, and a factual mistake. The second paragraph begins, “As The New York Times reported this past weekend, the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt groups was chronically understaffed and overwhelmed even before a surge in applications from political groups in 2010.”

If the IRS division was “understaffed and overwhelmed,” then why did it make so much extra work for itself by asking for thousands of pages of information from conservative groups? If the division was truly “understaffed and overwhelmed,” it seems like the more likely outcome would be groups’ slipping through the cracks.

Moreover, as The Atlantic has reported, there was no surge in applications for 501(c)(4)s. There might have been an increase in the number of applications from political groups, but Scheiber claims that the IRS division was “understaffed and overwhelmed.” Maybe it was, but not because there were so many more applications. It shouldn’t matter what type of groups were applying to tax-exempt status. Either the workload went up, or it didn’t.

Prompted by Dan Pfieffer’s statement that it is “largely irrelevant” where the president was during the attack in Benghazi, I wrote my Politico column today on the president’s mystery night:

He must have experienced the loneliness and responsibility of command during all his unspecified phone calls with unspecified national security personnel from an unspecified location until unspecified hours of the night.

How does same-sex marriage affect marriage’s relationship to procreation, given that infertiles couple may marry? A reader writes to me: “I have yet to hear a satisfying explanation for why same-sex couples must be excluded from the institution of marriage, but infertile couples or couples that are legally incapable of having children (e.g. incarceration) should not be excluded.”

Here is my answer, yet again, patiently:

Dear [Name Redacted]:

I have made this argument repeatedly.  I understand you either disagree with it or can’t hear it.

Childless and older couples are part of the natural lifecycle of marriage.  Their presence in the mix doesn’t imply anything about the relationship between marriage and procreation. They’ve always been there.

I went around saying for years “marriage matters because children need a mom and a dad.” Nobody ever said: that’s not true because infertile couples can marry. Never, not once. Sexual union of male and female who are co-parents in itself points to affirms, and regulates an ideal.

Whereas two men, if married, clearly clearly state that either the ideal for a child is not a mom and a dad or that marriage has nothing important or integral to do with that ideal.  When anyone says children need a mom and dad now, the response is a powerful rejection from gay marriage advocates:  that’s a discriminatory idea that has been disproved by science.  The logic of marriage equality has a real cultural force.

I think that is playing out in the rapid abandonment of the idea that marriage is related to children among the young.  I can’t prove it because cultural logic while a powerful force is hard to translate into social science evidence.

I can provide evidence but not proof.

If we cared seriously about marriage’s role in regulating childbearing, we would not be disrupting this norm on behalf of the maybe one-half of one percent of the population (and that is generous) who wants to enter this institution.  It cannot remain the same institution, as many gay marriage scholars have acknowledged, any more than a boy’s school can admit girls and remain a boy’s school.

Marriage equality is going to be used primarily to enforce the new moral norm: no differences between straight and gay can matter.  Or as Think Progress put it recently “At a basic level, it’s logically impossible to say that heterosexuality is better — or should be the norm — compared to homosexuality without simultaneously stating that homosexuality is worse — or abnormal. Either all people are equal in society or they are not; she cannot have her straights-only wedding cake and eat it stigma-free.”

It is possible to affirm an ideal without stigmatizing the alternatives–to affirm in the positive without pushing the negative.  But gay marriage advocates insist that any affirmation of the ideal represents a denigration of them, no matter how expressed.

We see it happening all around us while you say you cannot see it at all. Hmm, interesting.  why do you think that’s so?

If I weren’t curious I would be crushed.  So that’s a real question not a snarky comeback.

Thanks for writing to me. 

Maggie

The captain of the Costa Concordia cruise ship, which capsized last year killing 32 people and leaving dozens injured, will face trial for abandonment of his ship, causing a shipwreck, and multiple counts of manslaughter, among other charges. Captain Francesco Schettino abandoned the ship while its roughly 4,200 passengers and crew members were still on board.

The Costa Concordia hit a reef off the Italian island of Giglio, causing the ship to take on water. Schettino initially claimed that he accidently fell off the ship in the aftermath of the crash, but an Italian judge has determined there is enough evidence to prove he voluntarily left; Schettino continues to deny the charges.

The trial is set to begin in July. If convicted, Schettino could face up to 20 years in prison.

Our friend Jason Trennert of Strategas continues his effort to revive, in the Wall Street community and elsewhere, the Memorial Day tradition of wearing a poppy flower to honor those who have made the ultimate sacrifice. We wish him well and tip our hat. For more information visit The Poppy Project.

I don’t believe that we can’t fix our budget problems by only focusing on “waste, fraud, and abuse.” However, I find it very disheartening (not to mention annoying) to hear over and over again that lawmakers faced with a government program that’s duplicative or doesn’t work still refuse to end the spending on it. According to the Hill:

Congress and the Obama administration have scrapped just a fraction of the duplicative programs targeted for cuts by Government Accountability Office (GAO), the agency’s chief told lawmakers Wednesday.

Comptroller General Gene L. Dodaro said just 12 percent of more than 300 recommendations issued by GAO since 2011 to eliminate, combine or modify duplicative programs have been fully carried out. [...]

Among its findings is the existence of two separate programs responsible for federal catfish inspections, 76 different drug abuse programs and a general lack of coordination between departments charged with providing veterans services. 

The Pentagon has wasted $82 million in unnecessary expenses for military uniforms that now come in seven different camouflage patterns. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is in danger of losing $8.35 billion over 10 years on an unproven Medicare Advantage bonus program, the GAO found. 

The report identified billions more in revenue lost as a result of untargeted enforcement by the Internal Revenue Service and dozens of contracts awarded by the Department of Homeland Security that overlapped with activities already conducted elsewhere in the department. Together the contracts totaled roughly $66 million.

As always, Senator Coburn should be commended for his constant efforts to expose the vast amount of government waste taking place in every agency, including in the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security. I wrote about some of the senator’s efforts on that front here. 

The problem obviously is that Congress and the executive branch (this one and others) in this case are often more concerned about catering to interest groups than protecting the interests of taxpayers. These programs should be terminated, but they benefit entrenched constituencies who don’t care that taxpayers’ money is being wasted or that a given program isn’t delivering results, or even that it is actually hurting those it is supposed to help.

Public-choice economists such as James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock have spent their career exposing all the ways that government fails, including the way that interest groups capture bureaucracies and politicians to do their bidding. If you are interested in an overview of their work, you can read this piece by Jane Shaw over athe the Library of Economic and Liberty. She writes:

Public choice takes the same principles that economists use to analyze people’s actions in the marketplace and applies them to people’s actions in collective decision making. Economists who study behavior in the private marketplace assume that people are motivated mainly by self-interest. Although most people base some of their actions on their concern for others, the dominant motive in people’s actions in the marketplace—whether they are employers, employees, or consumers—is a concern for themselves. Public choice economists make the same assumption—that although people acting in the political marketplace have some concern for others, their main motive, whether they are voters, politicians, lobbyists, or bureaucrats, is self-interest. In Buchanan’s words the theory “replaces… romantic and illusory… notions about the workings of governments [with]… notions that embody more skepticism.” [...]

Public choice economists also examine the actions of legislators. Although legislators are expected to pursue the “public interest,” they make decisions on how to use other people’s resources, not their own. Furthermore, these resources must be provided by taxpayers and by those hurt by regulations whether they want to provide them or not. Politicians may intend to spend taxpayer money wisely. Efficient decisions, however, will neither save their own money nor give them any proportion of the wealth they save for citizens. There is no direct reward for fighting powerful interest groups in order to confer benefits on a public that is not even aware of the benefits or of who conferred them. Thus, the incentives for good management in the public interest are weak. In contrast, interest groups are organized by people with very strong gains to be made from governmental action. They provide politicians with campaign funds and campaign workers. In return they receive at least the “ear” of the politician and often gain support for their goals.

The whole thing is here.

Pat’s post is a bit of a spoiler. I was hoping to play my favorite game: Vice President Joe Biden or Onion Article?

Here’s the President of the United States Senate and statutory member of the National Security Council:

“I believe what affects the movements in America, what affects our attitudes in America are as much the culture and the arts as anything else,” he said at a Democratic National Committee reception for Jewish American Heritage Month. He cited social media and the sitcom “Will and Grace,” giving Jews a large part of the credit for both. 

“I bet you 85 percent of those changes, whether it’s in Hollywood or social media are a consequence of Jewish leaders in the industry,” he said. “The influence is immense, the influence is immense. And, I might add, it is all to the good. ”

And here’s The Onion circa 2002:

Affable Anti-Semite Thinks The Jews Are Doing Super Job With The Media

PLANO, TX—Henry McCullers, an affable Plano-area anti-Semite, praised the Jewish people Monday for doing “a bang-up job” running the media. “This has been such a great year for movies, and the new crop of fall TV shows looks to be one of the best in years,” McCullers said. “And the cable news channels are doing a terrific job, too. Admittedly, they’re not reporting on the Jewish stranglehold on world finance, but, hey, that’s understandable.”

The Onion has done important work on Biden, capturing his essence in caricature. But I hope they’ll also start going back and ret-conning articles like this to feature VPOTUS as their protagonists–nay, as their heroes.  

My New York Post column today concerns the administration’s war on the media, which should come as no surprise to anyone who’s been following the gang from Chitown from its first appearance on the national scene. But now Chicago’s chickens . . . comin’ home to roost:

The Justice Department’s secret seizure of phone records from The Associated Press and its monitoring of Fox News reporter James Rosen are nothing less than thuggish attempts to criminalize the practice of journalism — the only profession specifically protected by the US Constitution.

Free and open inquiry is also the cornerstone of our democracy, a legacy of the Enlightenment that found its clearest expression in the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”

By which the Founders specifically meant political speech.

They understood that, even with the checks and balances built into the Constitution, there was still a need for an unfettered press to keep an eye on “public servants” with access to both state treasure and power. And that an absolute guarantee of freedom of inquiry was vital.

“Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty, without freedom of speech,” wrote “Cato” (British essayists Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard) in a 1720 essay that greatly influenced the Framers. “Whoever would overthrow the liberty of the nation, must begin by subduing the freedom of speech.”

I’m a big fan of Trenchard and Gordon, and especially of this essay, whose echoes of emanations of penumbras inform our First Amendment. Especially this passage:

To assert, that King James was a papist and a tyrant, was only so far hurtful to him, as it was true of him; and if the Earl of Strafford had not deserved to be impeached, he need not have feared a bill of attainder. If our directors and their confederates be not such knaves as the world thinks them, let them prove to all the world, that the world thinks wrong, and that they are guilty of none of those villainies which all the world lays to their charge. 

In other words: In a functioning free society the burden of proof is on the rulers to demonstrate their innocence. It is the precise opposite of the bill of goods the legal profession — which in many ways is synonymous with the political profession — has been peddling for years: that they are innocent until proven guilty. But such codswallop is endemic in leftist cant: Phrases such as “you can’t prove it” and “there’s no evidence” droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven from their lips, when they’re not taking the Fifth. Their touching faith in the institutions of justice needs to be seen for what it is – a self-protective mechanism to keep the swag coming as long as possible, unto the day they’re finally dragged off to jail or escape out the back door. An independent press is supposed to be the check on this; that’s the role assigned to it by the Founders. But even they could not foresee the day when the media would merrily join in the ring of organized crime itself. 

But hey — being Jake Lingle means getting to play both sides of the street! And speaking of Jake Lingle: 

Since Campaign ’08, most of the media has been in the tank for Obama, seeing in him the culmination of half a century of liberal social progress.

Like them, Obama is a product of elite schools and shares their values. In a world in which reporters and political operatives live and work in the same neighborhoods, vacation together and routinely intermarry, the president is viewed as “one of us.” Where once they reveled in their status as outsiders, today’s media elite are now drawn from the same social class as the people they cover.

With David Axelrod, a former Chicago Tribune journalist turned campaign guru, pulling their strings, the media has been loath to do or say anything against their hero, preferring to applaud the Hope, rather than investigate the Change.

It never seems to have occurred to them that they might become targets themselves.

Yet here we are, with Fox News and the AP under the gun of the gun-runners at the Department of Justice, who know a thing or two about guns. 

Following the tactics outlined by socialist radical Saul Alinsky, the father of “community organizing,” the Obama governing ethos is one of slander, intimidation and — as the burgeoning IRS scandal so vividly illustrates — occasional blunt force to keep its “enemies” demoralized and incapacitated in its pursuit of “fundamental transformation.”

Whether there are still enough self-respecting mainstream reporters and editors willing to fight back, though, is another question.

I guess we’ll find out.

So says the man himself in an interview with WNYC:

“It is what it is,” Weiner said. “People may decide they want to come forward and say, here’s another email that I got or another photo. I’m certainly not going to do that. So people may hear things that are true, they may hear things that are not true, but I’m going to try to keep being focused on issues that are important to New York City.”

Should be a fun, and NSFW, campaign season.

“I was being asked these questions before we even pulled the dead people out of the rubble,” Oklahoma senator Tom Coburn said about the controversy over federal disaster aid after deadly tornados hit his home state earlier this week.

Coburn, who supports offsetting the costs of such aid, slammed “porker senators” calling for “parochial benefits” under the guise of supporting disaster-stricken states. He called it “a crass political game” and blamed “that kind of thinking” for the country’s financial problems.

When asked if he would vote against federal aid, Coburn said, “We’re not going to need a bill” because the FEMA fund could cover the costs.

He worried that any aid bill for Oklahoma would be similar to the one passed in response to Hurricane Sandy, which he voted against. Coburn explained that he supported the first $20 billion designated for emergency relief after the superstorm, but opposed the additional $40 billion, which would be used over the next five years.

Vice President Joe Biden offered praise for the Jewish community that raised some eyebrows and seems to have delighted anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists. At a DNC event for Jewish American Heritage Month on Tuesday evening, after noting Jewish Americans’ disproportionate representation in Congress, impressive share of Nobel Prizes, and role in the civil-rights and womens’-rights movements, Biden then praised their work in behalf of gay marriage via their control of the media.

“I believe what affects the movements in America, what affects our attitudes in America are as much the culture and the arts as anything else,” he explained, “. . . Think behind of all that, I bet you 85 percent of those changes, whether it’s in Hollywood or social media are a consequence of Jewish leaders in the industry.”

Biden also cited one of his favorite explanations for the success of gay marriage — “it wasn’t anything we legislatively did. It was Will and Grace, it was the social media. Literally. That’s what changed peoples’ attitudes. That’s why I was so certain that the vast majority of people would embrace and rapidly embrace” the measure.

In those developments, Biden explained, “the influence [of Jewish people] is immense. The influence is immense.”

The vice president’s comments have been seized upon and praised by a range of anti-Semitic and white-supremacist groups and websites, even though he said, “I might add” the Jewish community’s influence in the media “is all to the good.”

A young JFK thought the Nazis were really on to something. If only someone wrote a book that could explain how that’s even possible.

Noam Scheiber says the IRS scandal is all conservatives’ fault. Apparently the IRS began to target tea-party groups in 2010 because they knew Republicans would push for IRS budget cuts in 2011.

Chicago billionaire Penny Pritzker failed to disclose at least $80 million in income from the past ten years on forms submitted for her nomination as Commerce secretary. The original version of the documents submitted last week reported that she had earned about $32.2 million for consulting on her family’s trusts, but new filings, released on Tuesday, reveal that she received at least $80 million on top of that previously reported income, according to Bloomberg.

“It is a substantial amount,” Pritzker’s spokesman said in a statement, “and we moved to correct the mistake as soon as it was discovered.”

As the spokesman explained, Pritzker’s consulting work meant she ”was engaged by the U.S. trustee of trusts for the extended Pritzker family for advice on restructuring trust investments for the purpose of dividing assets along individual family lines,” a process at least as concerned with ensuring that the family members don’t pay a huge amount of taxes on their holdings as it is with the actual division of assets. 

The Hyatt Hotels heiress, worth an estimated $1.8 billion, also earned a tidy $54 million last year alone for advice on the restructuring and division of the Pritzker family’s offshore trusts, most of which are apparently located in Bermuda. Such trusts, which are roughly similar in purpose to some of 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s holdings that attracted so much controversy, allow assets to appreciate without owing U.S. income taxes (the beneficiaries eventually have to pay taxes on the gains) and facilitate investments with foreign partners.

Pritzker was on the short list for the Commerce spot in 2008, but as John Fund reported for NRO, “Team Obama and Pritzker soon decided her nomination would be too controversial in the middle of a financial crisis caused in large part by banks’ reckless subprime lending.” The billionaire businesswoman was on the board of Chicago-based Superior Bank, which failed in 2001, according to a federal report, because of its risky subprime-lending strategies and ineffective management by its board.

She will be appearing before the Senate Commerce Committee today for a confirmation hearing.

Professors at George Washington University support adding President Obama to Mt. Rushmore. Katherine Rodriguez of The College Fix has the story.

House oversight-committee chairman Darrell Issa has a new approach to paying down the national debt.

Regarding former IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman’s testimony at yesterday’s hearing, Issa quipped, “He must’ve said ‘I don’t remember’ enough times that if I had a nickel for each time, I could pay off the national debt.”

He also criticized the White House’s tardiness in providing Congress with requested documents: “This White House’s attitude is that they don’t have to give us anything unless it serves their spin.”

Former Senator Fred Thompson, who was a tremendous trial lawyer long before he played one on TV, has an excellent column on the home-page this morning about Lois Lerner’s gamesmanship yesterday — first testifying to her fully exculpatory version of events in the IRS’s scandalous targeting of conservative activists, then refusing to answer the House oversight committee’s questions. (I wrote a post about this here on the Corner last night.) 

Fred observes that committee chairman Darrell Issa had never seen anyone pull that stunt before, and neither had Fred. But as I noted in my post, it happens from time to time — which, of course, is why the “selectivity” rule that Fred describes exists. As it happens, I’ve not only seen it happen, I’ve prosecuted someone for doing it.

In the “Pizza Connection” case of the mid-eighties (at 17 months, still the longest federal criminal trial in history, I believe), our lead defendant, Gaetano Badalamenti (the boss of the Sicilian mafia), gave direct testimony that was fully exculpatory with regard to the drug and racketeering charges against him. At the conclusion of his direct, he indicated that he would not answer questions about various subjects (in particular, the mafia) on cross. A court otder striking his direct testimony would not have been a realistic remedy under the circumstances – the jury had heard the testimony, paying it the rapt attention one would expect in a case of this nature. Declaring a mistrial was also not a practical option at that point — we were in the 14th month of trial, I think. Instead, the judge properly found that Badalamenti had waived his privilege against self-incrimination by offering a self-serving, exculpatory version of events on direct. He was then cross-examined at length (by the lead prosecutor on our team, Louie Freeh, later the FBI director). Badalamenti persisted in refusing to answer over 75 questions, despite repeatedly being directed to answer by the judge — each refusal being a contempt of court.

After the testimony was concluded, I went to the grand jury and indicted Badalamenti for criminal contempt. (We sealed that indictment while the Pizza Connection trial was still ongoing, (a) to avoid the possibility of prejudicing the jury with negative publicity about the defendant, and (b) to avoid any suggestion that the indictment could be retaliation in the unlikely event Badalamenti were to be acquitted.) After he was convicted a few months later, we unsealed the contempt indictment. Badalamenti ultimately pled guilty to the contempt charge. The Second Circuit court of appeals eventually upheld the trial court’s rulings that Badalamenti had clearly waived his Fifth Amendment privilege and that his refusals to answer questions was contemptuous.

Like Fred, I think Ms. Lerner has waived her privilege to refuse to answer questions. If the committee calls her back, and she persists in refusing to answer questions, I believe she would could properly be held in contempt of Congress.

If we can’t agree on anything else, can we at least agree that Jonathan Rauch’s noble dream (it was noble) that gay marriage could be part of strengthening a marriage culture generally is now demonstrably untrue? In the Daily Mail, Patricia Morgan asks David Cameron’s Tories to stop making this claim:

In Scandinavia, where hostility to the two-parent family is central to the ruling political orthodoxy, the widening of the legal definition of marriage has done nothing to stop the institution decaying.

The same applies in Spain, where the Catholic Church still retains significant social influence and state policy has not been so antagonistic to traditional family life. Gay marriage was first sanctioned in 2005, and since then the decline in heterosexual marriage rates has been precipitous.

Likewise in Holland, where the traditional Protestant culture has fought against the increasingly predominant tolerant anarchy so beloved of liberal campaigners.

Since the Dutch legalised same-sex marriage in 2001, the concept of long-term commitment among heterosexuals has been evaporating — not least because of the parallel introduction of ‘registered partnership’ or ‘cohabitation agreements’ for heterosexuals.

Forty per cent of first babies are now born to unmarried mothers in Holland, a doubling of the rate since 2000. 

This is tragic proof of the misguided belief that same-sex marriage could help to reinforce the value of traditional marriage. And, in any case, this belief has always been absurd and is wholly undermined by the evidence.”

Marriage is decaying so rapidly that it’s hard to pinpoint gay marriage as the cause. We can point out that the young, precisely the group most committed to gay marriage as a social ideal, do (and to me not surprisingly) increasingly disconnect marriage and children.

The change in the law is a marker of the underlying cultural shift, and the campaign for gay marriages crystalize a particular vision of what marriage is and why it is valuable. 

All that may be debateable, but can we at least agree the noble dream of Jonathan Rauch, David Brooks, and others that gay marriage will strengthen marriage as a social institution just doesn ‘t happen?

Senator Lindsey Graham refuses to apologize to U.N. ambassador Susan Rice, despite calls from the White House for Republicans to do so after it was revealed that her take on the Benghazi attacks was the product of others.

“Not only does she not deserve an apology from me or anybody else for the way she misled the American people, she deserves to be subpoenaed by the Congress,” Graham said on Fox News last night. Rice should be the one apologizing, he said, specifically to Gregory Hicks, the State Department whistleblower who testified that his “jaw dropped” when he heard Rice blame the Benghazi attack on a YouTube video.

On Sunday, senior Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer said Republicans owe Rice an apology, but Graham said “this guy that went out Sunday is just on a different planet.”

“I guess he thinks everybody in the country is stupid,” Graham concluded.

​Speaker John Boehner has serious doubts about Jay Carney’s claims that the president had no knowledge of the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups before he heard about it through news reports.

“It’s pretty inconceivable to me that the president wouldn’t know,” Boehner told Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren yesterday. Boehner pointed out that he interacts with his office’s senior staff regularly enough that it would be hard to imagine an issue like this wouldn’t come up

The speaker admitted it was possible that White House staff “attempted to insulate the president from this news,” but was still skeptical given the investigation’s scope and the people involved.

Jack: I prefer the Beatles, in “Taxman”:

If you drive a car, I’ll tax the street 
If you try to sit, I’ll tax your seat 
If you get too cold, I’ll tax the heat 
If you take a walk, I’ll tax your feet …

Now my advice for those who die 
Declare the pennies on your eyes 
’Cos I’m the taxman 
Yeah, I’m the taxman 
And you’re working for no one but me

In Connecticut, reported Wednesday’s New Haven Register, “Some Democratic state lawmakers are proposing to raise the 1 percent tax on such products to match the state’s 6.35 percent sales tax, making Connecticut one of nearly two dozen states to extend sales taxes to downloaded products.” When I read this on the train earlier, I couldn’t help but whistle the tune from the 1952 revival of the Kaufman/Ryskind/Gershwins musical Of Thee I Sing, the “Senatorial Roll Call,” where lawmakers merrily break out singing:

The people think they’ve got taxation.
Ha! Ha! Ha!
Just wait for further legislation.
Ha! Ha! Ha!
Today is really full of laughter.
Ho! Ho! Ho!
Compared to what will follow after!
Ho! Ho! Ho!
With fury though you may be seething.
Ha! Ha! Ha!
Just wait until we tax your breathing.
Ha! Ha! Ha!

On taxes,
None relaxes
When this happy group convenes!
Be it payroll, be it income-
We are gathered here to sink ‘em.
Till there’s no one with a nickel in his jeans.
If you think you’ve got taxation,
Wait for further legislation,
And you’ll find out what taxation really means!
Ha! Ha! Ha!
Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

By the way, Morrie Ryskind wrote many pieces for National Review, including two in the 1955 premier issue. 

You can always rely on the administration of Barack Obama, a former constitutional-law lecturer (or as his résumé-inflating fans put it, “professor”), to do the sleazy thing when it comes to the Constitution the president is sworn to defend. Thus, the performance on Wednesday of Lois Lerner, chief of the Obama IRS’s Conservative Harassment Division, before the House oversight committee.

There’s an old scam criminal defendants occasionally pull. They give a bit of exculpatory direct testimony – just enough to gaze plaintively at the jurors and swear, cross-their-hearts, that they are pure as the driven snow. Then, just as the moment of submitting to cross-examination approaches, they announce that, even though they’re really, truly innocent, they just can’t answer the mean prosecutor’s questions – on advice of counsel, of course, in reliance on the Fifth Amendment.

Everyone familiar with this area of the law knows that this is contemptuous conduct. To testify, by definition, is to agree to submit to cross-examination. Once you begin to answer questions – i.e., to testify – you waive your right not to testify – i.e., not to answer questions.

In a trial, the judge does not put up with such shenanigans, which are, after all, a fraud on the process. The court rules that, by giving exculpatory testimony on direct examination, the defendant has waived his Fifth Amendment privilege; therefore, the defendant is directed to answer the prosecutor’s questions on cross-examination. If he persists in refusing to answer, he is held in contempt. Thereafter, each refusal to answer is a separate contempt, for which the defendant can (a) be jailed by the judge (until he relents and agrees to be cross-examined), and (b) later prosecuted by the government, because contempt is an indictable crime, too.

The point of the scam is obvious. The defendant wants to get his proclamation of innocence out in the public domain – maybe it will influence a juror or two. Lerner is not on trial (not yet, anyway) but her tactic had the desired effect: all day long the networks have been running loops of her assertions of innocence.

In this situation, the prosecutor has a choice to make. Option 1: Move to have the testimony stricken. But though the Court will grant this motion, it really does not cure the problem. After all, the jury has already heard the testimony; even if the jurors are told not to consider it, they may be influenced by it. Thus, Option 2: Be prepared to ask numerous pointed questions showing the various weaknesses in the claim of innocence, and put the defendant in the position, every single time, of refusing to answer these questions.

The main disappointment this morning was Chairman Darrell Issa’s stunning unpreparedness. Representative Issa is not a lawyer, but one must assume he has access to decent legal advice as chairman of the House oversight committee (in addition to being a member of the judiciary committee). An experienced lawyer could see this stunt coming a mile away. Indeed, the press reported all day on Tuesday that Lerner would take the Fifth.

Again, there are two obvious ways to handle the dilemma Issa found himself in. Option 1: Before permitting Lerner to read her self-serving statement into the record (and the cameras), you put her under oath and ask her, with her lawyer standing next to her, whether she intends to refuse to answer the committee’s questions; if she and counsel indicate that that’s the plan, you can either dismiss her there and then, or ask her a few questions to demonstrate that she will take the Fifth – but in either event, you don’t let her read her opening statement.

Or there’s Option 2: You let her read her statement, but then be ready to go with about 30 or 40 pointed questions designed to show how crooked she appears to be and thus how suspect her protestations of innocence are. When you do that, Mr. Chairman, your questions and her refusals to answer go on the TV news loop, too, and they make the administration look every bit as terrible as it deserves to look.

Chairman Issa clearly did not know what to do, resorted to neither option, and ended up with the worst of both worlds: Lerner got her self-serving statement out and then was not pounded by exacting, factual questions. Fortunately, South Carolina Republican Trey Gowdy, an excellent prosecutor in his former life, interrupted the proceedings to explain exactly what Lerner was trying to pull and why it was a willful perversion of the truth-seeking process. (And that made the loop, too.)

One last thing. Ms. Lerner also predictably did a song-and-dance about how the Fifth Amendment privilege is designed to protect innocent people, and how no one should think she’s guilty of any wrongdoing just because she has declined to explain herself. This is part untrue and fully disingenuous.

The Fifth Amendment privilege is not designed to protect the innocent. The innocent do not need protection from the truth (just from the IRS). The privilege is designed to protect the bedrock principle that the burden of proof is always on the government and, derivatively, that a person is never required to prove his innocence. (No surprise, I suppose, that an IRS official is unfamiliar with these foundational pillars of Anglo-American law.) And though Lerner, ever mindful of the cameras, went out of her way to avoid saying so, the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination can be asserted in good faith only if the person has reason to believe a truthful answer could tend to incriminate her.

Hopefully, Chairman Issa learns how to do this dance. The music doesn’t sound like it will be stopping any time soon.

On Special Report, Charles Krauthammer attempted to explain IRS official Lois Lerner’s choice to plead the Fifth before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform — but observed that by making a “substantive statement” on the issues before the Committee, “She clearly gave up her Fifth Amendment right, if not entirely, at least on the things she said: ‘I didn’t break any laws, I didn’t break any of the regulations, I did nothing wrong.’ On those she must speak with the Committee.”

He also criticized committee chairman Darrell Issa for his handling Lerner’s brief appearance “weakly and with such uncertainty.”

I hate to say it, but unless Kevin changes his mind, the next mayor of New York City is probably going to be a Democrat. And I strongly suspect that Anthony Weiner is the most reasonable and tough-minded of the bunch. (I know this constitutes a harsh condemnation of New York City politics.)

Wow.