Impressive column by Utah senator Mike Lee:

It would be wrong to view the controversy over the IRS scandal as a typical Republican vs. Democrat squabble. . . .

This has nothing to do with what party is in power. . . . [Americans] should understand that it is a fight between Washington and everyone else. . . .

At its core, the IRS scandal is not the result of one political party attacking another. It is the inevitable consequence of a federal government that has gotten too big and too expensive to control. The federal government’s massive bureaucracy is inherently dysfunctional, corrupt, intolerant, and incompetent — regardless of who is in charge. These are not random incidents perpetrated by bad actors. They are systemic features of the $4 trillion enterprise known as the federal government.

Some more senators like Lee and this country might have a fighting fiscal chance.

Excellent column by Charles Murray on the Jason Richwine controversy.

Glenn Reynolds favors "a flat tax or a national sales tax" in place of our current system. In 2004 Bruce Bartlett explained why the latter won't work, and in 2011 Ramesh Ponnuru argued that the former is "the fool’s gold of conservative politics." The goal should be to shrink government; then either approach would become feasible.

Crime of the (nineteenth) century.

The photographer was a pioneering criminologist whose innovations included the mug shot.

(Via Neatorama.)

The years rule us all.

(later) Some comments from the photographer.

Norman Podhoretz reflects on his controversial essay "My Negro Problem—and Ours," published fifty years ago:

[James Baldwin] was very much mistaken if he thought that I felt even the slightest degree of guilt toward him or toward Negroes in general. How could I, when I had grown up in a slum neighborhood where it was the Negro kids who persecuted us whites and not the other way around?

I then proceeded to tell him a few stories about my childhood encounters with black thugs of my own age and about the resentment and bitterness and even hatred with which this experience had left me. It had also left me, I said, with an irritable attitude toward all the sentimental nonsense that was being propagated about integration by whites who knew nothing about blacks and by blacks who imagined that all their problems would be solved by living next door to whites.

* * *

[T]he almost complete abdication of black responsibility and the commensurately total dependence on government engendered by so obsessive and exclusive a fixation on white racism as the root of all racial evils has been nothing short of calamitous.

* * *

In 1963, the stories I told about my own childhood experience of such thuggery and aggression were very shocking to most white liberals. In their eyes, blacks were all long-suffering and noble victims of the kind who had become familiar through the struggles of the civil-rights movement in the South—the “heroic period” of the movement, as one of its most heroic leaders, Bayard Rustin, called it. Although none of my white critics denied the truthfulness of the stories I told, they themselves could hardly imagine being afraid of blacks when their first-hand acquaintance with them was limited to nannies and cleaning women.

Today, it is still other blacks who are most often the victims of black crime, but black-on-white violence is much more common than it was in 1963, so that many whites could now top my stories with worse. And yet even today, few of them would be willing to speak truthfully in public about their entirely rational fear of black violence and black crime. Doing so remains dangerous to one’s reputation. . . .

* * *

[R]elations between the races have deteriorated. Gone on the whole are the interracial friendships and the interracial political alliances that were quite common 50 years ago. In their place we have the nearly impassable gulfs of suspicion and hostility. . . .

* * *

I was wrong to think that miscegenation could ever result in the elimination of color-consciousness. . . .

[W]hat settled the matter once and for all for me was what has happened since the election to the presidency of a pure product of miscegenation. For the ascension of Barack Obama from out of nowhere to the White House has if anything heightened the American consciousness of color. Worse yet, instead of putting an end to the compulsive insistence on the racism of American society, it has given this obsession a new lease on life. Thus, any and every criticism of Obama’s policies is now ascribed to racist motivations, and any and every little incident involving the mistreatment—or the alleged mistreatment—of a black is seized upon and blown up into another proof that racism remains rampant, if largely hidden, in American society.

* * *

Today the root cause of all the ills that plague the black community is the astounding proportion of black babies born out of wedlock who grow up without fathers, and who are doomed to do badly in school, to get into trouble on the streets, and to wind up in jail. Efforts have been made to blame even this tragic state of affairs on white racism, but they all founder on the simple fact that in 1963, when white racism was by any measure far more pervasive than it is today, only about 23 percent of births among black women were illegitimate, whereas the number is now fast approaching 75 percent.

Six-year-old drummer Avery plays "Hot For Teacher" at home and live with Brad Paisley, who does an impressive EVH.

Good advice from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to his younger self.

A good science fiction short story. (Via Newmark's Door.)

Very cool: Hugh McCracken's guitar track from "Hey Nineteen."

From Jim Geraghty, a sensible question (emphasis in original):

The world has always had angry young men, and for generations they've found various outlets for it — booze, women, rock and roll, drugs, gangs, sports, driving cars and motorcycles too fast, you name it. For some small but significant number of young men in today's society — Muslim and non-Muslim, immigrant and native-born — none of those other quasi-traditional outlets is sufficient.

And maybe the big question, to be aimed at everybody from the black-clad teen who writes of slaughtering his classmates in his diary and sends threatening letters to school, to the angry young Islamist men fantasizing of inflicting bloodshed upon us infidels, to the kids who wear black masks and smash windows at Occupy protests . . . what the hell do you have to be so angry about? You live in a country and an era of unprecedented technological innovation, better public health, lower crime, less discrimination, than ever before. Probably 90 percent of the world's people would trade places with you in an instant, and even at your worst, you're living a life better than that of 99.99 percent of all people in human history. There's no draft. No one owns you. People endure troubles a hundred times worse than yours, and soldier on. Your life is what you make it.

What, your life isn't like what you see on MTV's Cribs, showcasing the luxurious homes of wealthy music stars and athletes?

And for any immigrant who's feeling anti-American . . . leave. We don't need you. You wanted to come here.

In today's Morning Jolt.

(If you aren't subscribing to NRO's newsletters, you're missing a lot of good free commentary.)

Dan Wilson on cowriting "Someone Like You." (Spotify.) A bad song, but the article's interesting.

Jonathan V. Last: "Bitcoin is the first piece of computer technology to pose a fundamental challenge to the nation-state."

Does SPIN magazine block readers' substantive criticisms?

A couple of days ago SPIN posted an article deriding politicians' objections to Beyoncé and Jay-Z's recent visit to Cuba. The writer, Marc Hogan, singles out Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL—the article is titled "Beyonce and Jay-Z's Cuban Vacation Fuels Republicans' Latest Crooked Crusade"). Hogan notes that "Ros-Lehtinen opposed South African leader Nelson Mandela's visit to Florida in 1990," and concludes that "she's not exactly been a defender of human rights in all instances." He adds, "It's not clear what Mandela might've done to upset South Florida lawmakers."

I submitted a comment. A day later the comment hadn't appeared, so I submitted it again. (Only five words were mine, so I had no trouble reconstructing it.) It still hasn't shown up. Here's what I wrote:

"It's not clear what Mandela might've done to upset South Florida lawmakers."

http://biography.yourdictionary.com/ileana-ros-lehtinen

"While there seemed to be a near unanimous outpouring of praise for Mandela and his efforts to end apartheid (racial segregation) in his native country, Ros-Lehtinen felt she could not honor a man who had not only publicly embraced such advocates of violent revolution as the Palestine Liberation Organization's Yasser Arafat and Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, but who also was on record as a strong supporter of Castro. She pointed out that Cuban Americans longing for a return to democracy in their country of origin could not forget that members of Mandela's African National Congress had received military training on Cuban soil."

The world's a complicated place.

Maybe SPIN had good reason to reject my comment. If so, I'd like to know it. (For the kind of opinion SPIN is happy to post, see comments three through five here, as long as you don't mind obscenity.)

Andrew Ferguson in Commentary (sub. req.):

The president today can afford to ignore mainstream White House reporters to a degree unimaginable just 10 years ago. The Internet and the public’s growing reliance on it for news allow Obama and his press office not merely to make news but to package it, too: If you haven’t seen the Internet TV show West Wing Week, in which the president’s staff chronicles his activities day by day, you’re missing a treat. Not since Nicolae Ceausescu has a world leader spent so much time surrounded by adorable children.

More important, through the Internet the president has access to a universe of fanboys—blogging and tweeting around the clock—who don’t even require marching orders before they double-time it into battle. Bob Woodward can tell you all about them. In late February, the well-known and often idolized Watergate reporter wrote a damaging op-ed in the Post, refuting the president’s careful denial of his own role in bringing on the sequester. Woodward even went on Fox News to drive the point home.

The White House press office issued a limp denial, but it was the fanboys who leapt into action. One of them, a blogger called Josh Marshall, compared Woodward to one of the crackpots who think Obama was born in Africa. Another blogger from Time magazine portrayed him as a befuddled has-been. “Bob Woodward is senile,” said another. Salon magazine’s tweeter insisted: “Bob Woodward has lost it, let’s all stop indulging him.” The blizzard of tweets and posts had the intended effect of burying Woodward’s original accusation. The story was no longer whether the president’s version of events surrounding the sequester was honest or even accurate. The story was, bizarrely, Woodward himself: his character, his politics, his sanity.

Commentary's (excellent) blog is here.

West Wing Week is painful.

My song blog, underheard, has a new home and a Twitter feed. Long may they last.

Excellent article on pitch correction and the pop-music industry.

All one’s work might have been better done; but this is the sort of reflection a worker must put aside courageously if he doesn’t mean every one of his conceptions to remain for ever a private vision, an evanescent reverie.

Joseph Conrad, “Author’s Note” to A Set of Six

David Pryce-Jones's blog is one of the gems of the Internet. His latest post, on Iraq, is even better than his usual.

A nice tribute: the Mary Higgins Clark Award, named for the mystery writer and sponsored by her publisher:

The winner is selected . . . for the book most closely written in the Mary Higgins Clark tradition, according to the following guidelines set forth by Ms. Clark:

• The protagonist is a very nice young woman, 27-38 or so, whose life is suddenly invaded. She is not looking for trouble - she is doing exactly what she should be doing and something cuts across her bow (as in ship).
• She solves her problem by her own courage and intelligence.
• She's in an interesting job.
• She's self-made - independent - has primarily good family relationships.
• No on-scene violence.
• No four-letter words or explicit sex scenes.

This year's nominees, along with everyone else up for an Edgar, are listed here.

Excellent interview of Daniel Pipes. I hope he's right that "modern Islamism . . . will not last as a world-threatening force for more than a few decades."

Jim Geraghty explains our reluctance to intervene in Syria. Leftists of the world, take a bow. (I'm glad we're staying out, for now at least.)

Lots of Dave Barry: in the New York Times, a video interview, and a recent column. All good, especially the Times piece, in which, I'm happy to see, he names P. G. Wodehouse as one of his favorite writers. If you like Barry and you're unfamiliar with Wodehouse, try My Man Jeeves, available free at Project Gutenberg.

A blooper:

This would make me stop watching Glee, if I watched.

Richard Blanco's poem for Obama's second inauguration is awful: exploitatively maudlin ("the impossible vocabulary of sorrow that won't explain / the empty desks of twenty children marked absent / today, and forever"); ostentatiously humble ("or ring-up groceries as my mother did / for twenty years, so I could write this poem," "hands / as worn as my father's cutting sugarcane / so my brother and I could have books and shoes"); saccharinely multicultural ("saying: hello, shalom, / buon giorno, howdy, namaste, or buenos días / . . . spoken into one wind carrying our lives / without prejudice"); and more. Much more. Elizabeth Alexander's poem four years ago was bad; this one's worse.

Later: Mark Steyn refers to Blanco as "that poet from hell."

Maybe someone else has written this, but I haven't seen it. The reason for the large proportion of white men in Obama's proposed Cabinet is simple: he'd rather order white men around than women or minority men. (Link via Instapundit.)

Dave Barry's annual "Year in Review" column is a useful indicator of the state of the nation. When things are good, it's hilarious; in more troublous times, as now, not so much. Still a few laughs.

Jonathan Last on "Japan’s disfigured age structure."

Nicely sardonic, on some of Obamacare's consequences.

Thorium reactors advance. Mostly in China rather than here, unfortunately, but at least it's happening.

Jay Nordlinger defends Mitt Romney, rightly and well.

Thoughts on boys, guns and manly responsibilities.

From Joshua Davis at Wired, a gripping article on John McAfee.

From Lifehacker, a list of free online courses, and where to find many more.

Why raising taxes on the rich doesn't work.

Visual vocabulary quizzes.

Good video interview of a thinker worried about the Singularity.

On the psychological importance of forgetting.

John Derbyshire:

"If there is hope it lies with the proles," says the hero of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. I feel the same way about the Republican Party that Winston Smith felt about the proles: despair at their leaderless blindness, their meek acceptance of a corrupt system, their gullible swallowing of shallow lies and empty promises, yet awareness that while there is little to hope for from them, there is nothing whatever to hope for from the other party.

So just keep repeating to yourself: "If there is hope it lies with the proles" … and try not to remember how things turned out at last for Winston Smith.

From IMDb's "Trivia" section for English actor Michael Byrne:

Has played a Nazi foil for Harrison Ford twice, in Force 10 from Navarone (1978) and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). In both movies, his character ends up in a vehicle falling off a cliff.

Funny commercial. Writing, directing, acting, editing all first-rate.

From Craig Newmark, eight rules of economics.

Nonie Darwish:

America is heading towards a society similar to where we immigrants came from, where the government turns into the keeper of a human zoo where we all live in cages waiting for government to throw food at us every day. But even the government will not be able to sustain the zoo expenses. The U.S. government is on its way to becoming the nightmare totalitarian system from which we immigrants tried to escape.

Europe will see more and more of this:

Muslim immigrants in a town near Copenhagen have forced the cancellation of traditional Christmas displays this year even while spending lavishly on the Islamic Eid celebration marking the end of Ramadan.

. . . [T]he Muslim majority on the Board of Directors refused to authorize spending 7,000 Danish kroner ($1,200) for the community's annual Christmas event.

The vote came shortly after the same Board of Directors authorized spending 60,000 kroner ($10,000) on a large communal celebration of the Muslim holiday Eid. Five out of nine of the board members are Muslims.

Hamas are bastards:

The Israeli Defense Forces knocked out Hamas’s communication infrastructure with a strike in Gaza City this weekend. Hamas had placed its equipment atop a building housing foreign press, but Israel managed to surgically eliminate only Hamas’s apparatus.

(Emphasis added.) How can media around the world fail to be outraged by Hamas's use of journalists as involuntary human shields? (I know, I know . . .)

Daniel Pipes on the current Hamas-Israel clash.

From Kevin Williamson, an insightful examination of Romney's loss in Ohio and its implications for Republicans.

How did the lackluster John McCain draw more popular votes (59,934,814) than the better-liked Mitt Romney (58,159,408 as of today)? The answer: Sarah Palin. Whatever her detractors say, Palin possesses star quality, with huge, widespread appeal; as Thomas Sowell has noted, the only time McCain led Obama in the 2008 race was shortly after Palin joined the GOP ticket. She’s the reason Obama’s victory in 2008 wasn’t a Reagan/Carter-type blowout.

The lesson is this: in US politics charisma and biography matter enormously, possibly more than credentials or competence, definitely more than experience. Romney was a plainly decent and able man, but too few people felt connected to him; Obama’s a disastrous president, but enough people like his story that he managed to sneak out a win. Republicans must choose nominees who inspire passion in voters, even if other candidates have better résumés. Luckily there are several young conservatives with the requisite talent and charisma. For 2016 the best of them is Marco Rubio. We need to start fighting for him now.

Later: John Fund writes that when all ballots are counted Romney will have earned more votes than McCain. I believe him, but I stand by my argument. The electorate is bigger than in 2008, Romney was a more attractive candidate than McCain, yet the nominees' vote totals basically matched. Palin's appeal explains the lack of difference and shows the way ahead for the GOP.

Later still (11/14/12): Romney's total is now 59,133,398.

And (1/16/13): Romney's total has reached 60,931,959.

Jim Geraghty on the election:

I feel a bit like when Jerry Brown beat Meg Whitman out in California: If you really think that the guy with the tired promises of spending more and taxing more is really going to save you, I can't help you.

(In today's Morning Jolt.)