Blow, Nocera and Collins

In “Blacks, Conservatives and Plantations” Mr. Blow has a question:  Why do Republicans keep endorsing African-American voices intent on comparing blacks who support the Democratic candidates to slaves?  In “Here Comes the Sun” Mr. Nocera says despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary presented by a Senate panel, Apple denies avoiding taxes.  Ms. Collins, in “Somebody Did Something,” says yes, people, it’s true. Immigration reform has advanced in the Senate. At least the committee didn’t repeal anything.  Here’s Mr. Blow:

Why do Republicans keep endorsing the most extreme and hyperbolic African-American voices — those intent on comparing blacks who support the Democratic candidates to slaves? That idea, which only a black person could invoke without being castigated for the flagrant racial overtones, is a trope to which an increasingly homogeneous Republican Party seems to subscribe.

The most recent example of this is E.W. Jackson, who last weekend became the Virginia Republicans’ candidate for lieutenant governor in the state.

In a video posted to YouTube in 2012 titled “Bishop E.W. Jackson Message to Black Christians,” Jackson says:

“It is time to end the slavish devotion to the Democrat party. They have insulted us, used us and manipulated us. They have saturated the black community with ridiculous lies: ‘Unless we support the Democrat party, we will be returned to slavery. We will be robbed of voting rights. The Martin Luther King holiday will be repealed.’ They think we’re stupid and these lies will hold us captive while they violate everything we believe as Christians.”

He continues:

“Shame on us for allowing ourselves to be sold to the highest bidder. We belong to God. Our ancestors were sold against their will centuries ago, but we’re going to the slave market voluntarily today. Yes, it’s just that ugly.”

(Jackson also took swipes at the gay community and compared Planned Parenthood to the Ku Klux Klan.)

The Democrat Plantation theology goes something like this: Democrats use the government to addict and incapacitate blacks by giving them free things — welfare, food stamps and the like. This renders blacks dependent on and beholden to that government and the Democratic Party.

This is not completely dissimilar from Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” comments, although he never mentioned race:

“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what.

Star Parker, a Scripps Howard syndicated columnist, failed Republican Congressional candidate and author of the book “Uncle Sam’s Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America’s Poor and What We Can do About It,” argued in an article in 2009 on the conservative Web site Townhall:

“A benevolent Uncle Sam welcomed mostly poor black Americans onto the government plantation. Those who accepted the invitation switched mind-sets from ‘How do I take care of myself?’ to ‘What do I have to do to stay on the plantation?’”

Mackubin Thomas Owens, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, R. I., put it more bluntly in an editorial on the Ashbrook University Web site in 2002:

“For the modern liberal Democratic racist as for the old-fashioned one, blacks are simply incapable of freedom. They will always need Ol’ Massa’s help. And woe be to any African-American who wanders off of the Democratic plantation.”

That last bit hints at the other part of Democrat Plantation theology: that black Democrats and white liberals are equal enforcers of enslavement.

A 2010 unsigned article published on the Web site of the conservative weekly Human Events reads:

“If black Americans wish to be Democrats, that is their choice — or is it? Despite the fact that Democrats enjoy the support of over 90% of black America, the other 10%, those who dare to ‘stray from the plantation,’ have been routinely vilified — by other black Americans.”

The article continued:

“The not-so-subtle message? Support liberal dogma — or face social ostracism.”

Dr. Ben Carson, who delivered a speech blasting the president during the National Prayer breakfast this year and quickly became a darling of the right (The Wall Street Journal declared: “Ben Carson for President”), said of white liberals in a radio interview:

“They are the most racist people there are. Because they put you in a little category, a little box. You have to think this way. How could you dare come off the plantation?”

(Carson also got in trouble for comparing homosexuality to pedophilia and bestiality. He later apologized for those comments, “if anybody was offended.”)

Unfortunately, the runaway slave image among many black Republican politicians is becoming ingrained and conservative audiences are applauding them for it.

Herman Cain, for example, built an entire presidential campaign on slave imagery.

C. Mason Weaver, a radio talk show host, failed Republican Congressional candidate from California and author of the book “It’s OK to Leave the Plantation,” said of President Obama at a 2009 Tea Party rally in Washington: “You thought he was saying was ‘hope and change’; he was saying was ‘ropes and chains,’ not ‘hope and change.’ ” Weaver continued: “Decide today if you’re going to be free or slaves. Decide today if you’re going to be a slave to your master or the master of your own destiny.” Weaver would repeat the “rope and chains” line on Fox and Friends that year.

The Rev. C.L. Bryant, a Tea Party member and occasional Fox News guest, even made a movie called “Runaway Slave,” in which he says that America should “run away from socialism, run from statism, run away from progressivism.”

While these politicians accuse the vast majority of African-Americans of being mindless drones of the Democrats, they are skating dangerously close to — if not beyond — the point where they become conservative caricatures.

The implication that most African-Americans can’t be discerning, that they can’t weigh the pros and cons of political parties and make informed decisions, that they are rendered servile in exchange for social services, is the highest level of insult. And black politicians are the ones Republicans are cheering on as they deliver it.

Now who, exactly, is being used here?

Next up is Mr. Nocera:

Among the many things Tim Cook apparently learned at the knee of Steve Jobs, during his long tenure as Apple’s No. 2, was how to create a “reality distortion field.” Or so it would appear after watching Cook, now Apple’s chief executive, testify on Tuesday at a Senate hearing on the company’s tax avoidance schemes.

Jobs was so persuasive that he could claim the sun was setting when it was actually rising, and everyone would nod in agreement. On Tuesday, despite the overwhelming evidence presented by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations that Apple engaged in dubious tax avoidance gimmicks, Cook claimed that Apple never resorted to tax gimmickry. Even though the company appears to pay about 10 percent of its pretax income in taxes — when the federal corporate tax rate is 35 percent — Cook said, “We pay all the taxes we owe — every single dollar.” He added that Apple had never shifted any of its American profits to an offshore tax haven when, in fact, that is basically what it has done, routing tens of billions in pretax profits to a shell corporation in Ireland that exists solely to avoid taxes in the United States. He even said that the low taxes Apple pays overseas is on the profits of its overseas sales. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this was a flat-out lie.

In other words, Cook spent Tuesday claiming that the sun was setting when it was actually rising, and, predictably, by the time the hearing had ended, most of the senators were agreeing with him. Senator John McCain, the committee’s ranking Republican, who had earlier labeled Apple “a tax avoider,” was soon swooning over Apple’s “incredible legacy.”

Indeed, Apple’s fabulous success over the past decade or so — its creation of the iPads and iPhones that the world lusts over — is a large part of the reason it always gets the benefit of the doubt, whether deserved or not. Two years ago, when David Kocieniewski of The Times reported on General Electric’s tax-avoidance prowess, a storm of protest resulted. Last year, however, when Kocieniewski and Charles Duhigg wrote about Apple’s tax avoidance schemes as part of a series about the company that won a Pulitzer Prize, it was greeted mainly with yawns. Nobody really wants to hear anything bad about Apple.

Yet as documented both by The Times and the Senate subcommittee, Apple is as much an innovator in tax avoidance as it is in technology. Take, for instance, a scheme known as The Double Irish, which it largely invented and which many American companies have since replicated. This strategy, which was the primary focus of Tuesday’s hearing, involves setting up a shell subsidiary in an offshore tax haven — a k a Ireland — and transferring most of Apple’s intellectual property rights to the dummy subsidiary. The subsidiary, in turn, charges “royalties” that allows it to capture billions of dollars in what otherwise would be taxable profits in the United States. In Ireland, according to Apple, it pays an astonishing 2 percent in taxes, thanks to a deal it has with the government. (The Irish government denies giving Apple a special deal.)

Here is another whopper from Mr. Cook on Tuesday. He said that his company not only doesn’t violate the letter of the law, that it doesn’t even violate the spirit. He may be right on the first part, but he is wrong on the second. As the subcommittee’s chairman, Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat, pointed out to me on Wednesday, one of the main goals of American corporate tax policy is to tax profits in the jurisdiction where they are produced.

“That intellectual property and patents are the crown jewels of the company,” Levin said. “The Irish subsidiary had nothing to do with creating those crown jewels. It has no employees. It has no offices. Yet most of Apple’s profits are now offshore because they were able to utilize a shift of their intellectual property to a tax haven.”

(Question for the government of Ireland: Do you really want your country to be known as an offshore tax haven? Indeed, at a time when your citizens are dealing with the pain of an austerity program, how can you justify allowing Apple to pay virtually no taxes on a subsidiary established solely to avoid taxes in the United States? Just wondering.)

Levin has proposed a bill that would curb the most blatant abuses of the tax code like the Double Irish. Part of the purpose of the hearing was to bring these abuses to light and generate bipartisan support for closing them. When I asked Levin whether he felt that the subcommittee had made a mistake in singling out Apple, given its Teflon reputation, he said no. “You can’t ignore the most blatant examples just because it is a popular company,” he said.

He’s right about that, of course. But that’s only obvious if you are willing to say the sun is rising when Apple says it is not.

And now here’s Ms. Collins:

Whenever the world of Washington seems hopeless, someone will point out that the Senate Judiciary Committee did a good job on immigration reform.

That’s it? Yeah, pretty much.

Immigration reform has been the 2013 bipartisan bright spot in the Senate, unless you were really moved by the day they voted to debate gun control before killing all the gun control plans. The committee members cheerfully plowed through 300-odd proposed amendments, while taking turns telling which country their great-grandfather came from. There was, of course, a lot of disagreement, although almost everybody seemed to enjoy slapping down ideas offered by Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama.

Mainstream Republicans have been super-energized to do immigration reform ever since the Hispanic vote went against them in the last election. Democracy does work. If somebody came up with a dramatic poll showing that all the people with diabetes, asthma and chronic back problems had voted against Mitt Romney, there would no longer be a problem getting funding for health care reform.

High points in the committee’s long slog toward passage included a proposal from Tea Party icon Mike Lee of Utah to exempt employers of “cooks, waiters, butlers, housekeepers, governesses, maids, valets, baby sitters, janitors, laundresses, furnacemen, caretakers, handymen, gardeners, footmen, grooms, and chauffeurs of automobiles for family use” from checking to make sure their help had the proper legal status. It didn’t go anywhere, but if you happen to run into Lee, feel free to say: “The butler did it.”

The most painful low point in the committee’s deliberations came at the end, when the Democrats gave up on an amendment allowing same-sex spouses the same right as heterosexuals to apply for permanent resident status for their partners. It’s not every day when you hear a senator announce that he had decided to support a move that involved “rank discrimination.” But the Republicans who were needed to get an immigration bill through the Senate had made it supremely clear that if any hint of gay marriage entered the legislation, they were going to take their toys and go home.

Decide for yourself how you feel about this one, people. Stand up for equality or finally get a major bill through the Senate? Defend equality or cave in and hope that the Supreme Court bails you out when it rules on the Defense of Marriage Act next month?

It is, at minimum, a useful reminder of what lawmaking looked like back in the days when the two parties made deals and we complained that nobody was sticking to their principles. Back to the can-do days when senators routinely said things like Senator Orrin Hatch’s explanation of his thinking on immigration: “I’m going to vote this bill out of committee because I’ve committed to do that.”

The bill, which would give millions of undocumented residents a path toward eventual citizenship, now goes to the full Senate, where it actually looks as though it’s going to pass. Any further progress would require cooperation from the House of Representatives, the circle of hell where the damned are condemned to spend eternity voting to repeal the health care reform law.

Perhaps you missed the one last week. Let me summarize:

■ “The Obamacare law must be ripped out by its roots!”

■ “The 37th time! The 37th time!”

■ “A malignant tumor that’s metastasizing on America’s liberty!”

■ “We have spent over 56 hours on the floor debating repeal of the law of the land!”

The House Republican leadership would probably rather have been working on something else. But the newer members whined that they’d hardly had any opportunities to vote to repeal Obamacare at all. “It sends a great statement back to our district,” said Representative Ted Yoho, Republican of Florida, who many people enjoy quoting because they like saying Ted Yoho.

Also, it’s hard for the Republicans to agree among themselves about anything else. One influential conservative organization recently urged Speaker John Boehner to drop the whole legislation idea completely and just hold committee hearings about the I.R.S. scandal and Benghazi forever.

“Recent events have rightly focused the nation’s attention squarely on the actions of the Obama administration,” argued the Heritage Action for America. “It is incumbent upon the House of Representatives to conduct oversight hearings on those actions, but it would be imprudent to do anything that shifts the focus from the Obama administration to the ideological differences within the House Republican conference.”

We really hate it when they get imprudent.

Blow, Nocera and Collins

In “Resonance Resistant” Mr. Blow says that Republicans miss another chance to honestly engage the public as they race off the cliff in the supercharged outrage machine.  Joe Nocera shrieks that “Energy Exports Are Good!”  But he has a question:  Why is the Dow Chemical Company lobbying to keep a lid on them?  Apparently he’s as big a fan of fracking as he is of the Keystone pipeline.  (Well, as long as the shit doesn’t end up on his block, I guess…)  Ms. Collins, in “Hard of Hearings,” says don’t worry, people. If you missed the heated hearing on the I.R.S. held by the House Ways and Means Committee on Friday, she has a complete rundown.  Here’s Mr. Blow:

Whether one thinks the demiscandals being howled about in Washington should or should not resonate more widely, they don’t.

According to a Gallup report released Thursday, “The amount of attention Americans are paying to the I.R.S. and the Benghazi situations is well below the average for news stories Gallup has tracked over the years.” (The Associated Press phone records case wasn’t mentioned.) Why might this be? I have a few theories:

CREDIBILITY People know that the Internal Revenue Service is the conservatives’ bogeyman. It’s the agency that collects the taxes that Republicans hate so much. Some Americans see taxes as, at worst, a necessary nuisance; Republicans see them as an absolute evil. The I.R.S. is the agency that collects the wealth from “us” for the government to redistribute to “them.” As National Journal pointed out Friday, “The agency also implements much of the country’s social policy through the tax code.” We all know that anything with “social” in its name activates the conservative gag reflex.

And on the Associated Press front, it just doesn’t ring true to have Republicans standing up as defenders of the “lame-stream media.” It’s like the person with the club feigning common cause with the baby seal. People just don’t buy it.

Furthermore, Republicans have exhibited a near-pathological need to say anything, no matter how outlandish, that would invalidate the Obama presidency. This has left them with little credibility now that there may be legitimate problems. This is the story of the political party that cried “Kenyan.”

COMPLEXITY Where is Benghazi? Seriously, folks, quickly point it out on a map. Thought so. Now, to the controversy: the talking points — what they said, and the machination of how that was altered, and whether Al Qaeda should have been immediately blamed, and whether the word “terror” should have had an “-ist” or an “-ism.” Seeking to find the killers of four dead Americans is honorable; endless testimony about a fussed-over script used to explain the tragedy is mind-numbing.

UNPOPULARITY It is clear that the Justice Department overreached on the Associated Press scandal and that its strong-arm tactics are likely to have a chilling effect. But Americans are not big fans of mass media. A November Gallup poll found that only a fourth of Americans rate the honesty and ethical standards of journalists highly. Even bankers ranked higher.

As for Tea Party groups that received extra scrutiny from the I.R.S., an Associated Press-GfK poll released last month found that fewer than a fourth of Americans say they support the group. The Tea Party may well be passé.

The policy issue is a different story, as The Washington Post pointed out this week: “In 2010, the Supreme Court’s landmark ‘Citizens United’ decision cleared the way for corporations and labor unions to raise and spend unlimited sums of money, and register for tax-exempt status under section 501(c)(4).”

That decision was extremely unpopular. An ABC News/Washington Post poll released nearly a month after the decision was handed down found that 80 percent of Americans opposed it.

So an unpopular movement applied for tax-exempt status under conditions made possible by an unpopular court decision, in order to influence politics with unfathomable amounts money from unnamed donors? Good luck gaining sympathy for that.

ZEALOTRY The Congressional Tea Party Caucus founder, Michele Bachmann, who never misses a chance to say something asinine, suggested to the conservative site wnd.com that it was “reasonable” to worry that the I.R.S. might use Obamacare to kill conservatives.

The article reads, in part:

“Since the I.R.S. also is the chief enforcer of Obamacare requirements, she asked whether the I.R.S.’s admission means it ‘will deny or delay access to health care’ for conservatives. At this point, she said, that ‘is a reasonable question to ask.’ ”

“Reasonable” and “Bachmann” don’t even belong in the same conversation, let alone the same sentence, and yet she remains one of the most visible spokeswomen for the movement.

Even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich warned Republicans against overreaching. In an NPR interview that aired Friday, Gingrich, referring to the impeachment of President Clinton, said, “I think we overreached in ’98 — how’s that for a quote you can use?”

He continued, advising his party to be “calm and factual.” Ha! That’s too rich, and too late. Republicans are already invoking the I-word.

Republicans are their own worst enemies at times like these, unable to leave well-enough alone, and missing chances to honestly engage the public as they race off the cliff in the supercharged outrage machine.

Well, if you have nothing to offer that the country wants, just howl louder…  Here’s Mr. Nocera’s love song to the energy industry:

What first caught my eye was the op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal. Published in late February, it was written by Andrew N. Liveris, the chairman and chief executive of the Dow Chemical Company. Liveris, an Australian, has become quite the Washington player in recent years. Among other things, he heads President Obama’s efforts to revive manufacturing.

The op-ed was about one of my favorite subjects: the abundance of natural gas reserves discovered in the United States since the “fracking” revolution began. This newly found gas, Liveris wrote, offered “a historic opportunity to strengthen the economy, increase national competitiveness and create jobs.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Within a few paragraphs, however, the Liveris article took on a Pravda-like quality: a political insider sending a coded message to other insiders. He wrote, for instance, that the new jobs the natural gas boom was expected to create would depend on an “affordable” and “plentiful” supply. Given that that’s exactly what we currently have, what was the real subtext?

Then it became clear: Liveris’s plan for ensuring cheap domestic gas was — are you ready for this? — limiting exports. An export market driven by, you know, supply and demand was described as “unchecked.” What was left unsaid was that if natural gas could not be exported, the resulting oversupply would depress prices — and boost Dow’s profits.

Finally, Liveris acknowledged that Dow owned 15 percent of a proposed facility in Texas, which was causing “advocates of unchecked exports” to “attack” the company for being in a position to profit from exports while publicly opposing them. But, he insisted, Dow would not make a profit. Hmmm.

I bring all this up because on Friday, the Department of Energy, after a two-year hiatus, granted a permit to a facility called Freeport LNG, which will allow it to export liquefied natural gas to countries with which we do not have free-trade agreements.

Originally built to import natural gas, the plant will cost as much as $11 billion to retrofit and take years to complete. It will export only a tiny fraction of the natural gas that is consumed by Americans. And wouldn’t you know it? This is the facility in which a Dow Chemical limited partnership holds a 15 percent stake.

Exporting natural gas has enormous benefits for the United States. Exports create jobs that are every bit as good as manufacturing jobs. They help our trade deficit. They tie us closer to important allies like Japan, which desperately need the gas. According to Michael Levi, the author of an authoritative new book, “The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America’s Future,” the prospect that America could export natural gas has even helped our European allies gain leverage with its primary supplier of fossil fuels, Russia.

“Most studies suggest that the main impact of exports will be to increase U.S. production rather than take away other uses,” Levi says. Thus, it will not likely have a major effect on the price of gas. Levi told me that one legitimate fear is that the additional drilling could increase the potential environmental risks posed by fracking. But the answer is to ensure that wells are drilled in an environmentally safe manner. That is true whether we export gas or not.

And what does Dow Chemical say now that “its” facility has been approved? I spent much of Friday afternoon peppering the company with questions, most of them revolving around Dow’s seeming hypocrisy in opposing “unfettered” exports while owning a big chunk of a facility that would someday be shipping natural gas to Japan.

Finally, more or less in exasperation, a Dow spokesman put Liveris on the phone. The Dow chairman pointed out that when the company originally invested in Freeport LNG, the facility was meant to import gas rather than export it. He said that the company won’t make money because its stake will be so diluted once capital is raised for the retrofitting. He insisted that he is a believer in market forces, but that the natural gas market is so different from other commodities that it must be treated differently.

He also said, though, that the company was not opposed to natural gas exports — just so long as it was limited.

Earlier, a Dow spokesman had sent out a press release claiming that the permit approval by the Department of Energy was actually a victory for Dow’s position. To put it in words that the press representative would never use, so long as the Department of Energy permitting process is so absurdly slow — thus creating a government bottleneck that restrains “unfettered” exports — Dow and Liveris have gotten exactly what they’ve been seeking: limited exports and plenty of cheap domestic gas to help fuel their profits.

There is a technical term for this. It’s called “having your cake and eating it, too.”

Now here’s Ms. Collins:

Before Congress is finished with the Internal Revenue Service, there’s a serious danger some of us are going to wind up feeling sorry for the auditors.

And, honestly, that is not the way we were planning on spending the spring. Especially since it appears that there are people making decisions at the I.R.S. who have the intelligence of a wet Frisbee.

But, so far, the Congressional hearings of outrage have been even less sympathetic. Perhaps you didn’t have time to spend much of your Friday watching the House Ways and Means Committee grill Steven Miller, the newly axed I.R.S. head, about the agency’s targeting of groups with names like “Tea Party” for unwelcome in-depth attention.

Let me summarize:

Committee Chairman Dave Camp: Thank you all for coming here today. Our topic is abuses in the Internal Revenue Service, an entity that I believe is about the size of China, with long, spiky tentacles that reach out and squash all the hopes and dreams of the American people. My first question, Mr. Miller, is whether your agency is so enormous and evil that it will one day destroy the nation as we know it, or whether it already has, and this committee is actually just sitting on the scattered shards and rubble of what once was a great republic.

Steven Miller: Thank you for inviting me here today. I would like to begin by apologizing for mistakes that have been made. Now I am prepared to begin answering your questions, and then gradually fade into sullen exhaustion.

Sander Levin, Ranking Democrat: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for organizing this bipartisan outpouring of rage. I would like to begin by welcoming Inspector General J. Russell George, and asking him to repeat his conclusion that none of the bad things we’re discussing were the result of partisan pressure. Possibly he could say that twice. Then I would like to ask him to confirm that he was appointed by George W. Bush. And then to point out that the guy who was in charge of the I.R.S. when all this happened was also appointed by George W. Bush.

Representative Devin Nunes, Republican of California: Mr. Miller, how would you like it if we were to subpoena your e-mails and phone calls and records of anyone you’ve met with over the last four years? Also, have you ever had any contact with the Obama re-election campaign?

Mr. Miller: I would just like to say in my defense that the I.R.S. provided horrible customer service.

Representative Dave Reichert, Republican of Washington: What the I.R.S. did was inexcusable. Also, I want to register my strong protests about the way Mr. Miller keeps interrupting me while I am demanding that he answer my questions.

And then everybody went home for the weekend.

What are we going to do about the I.R.S.? Some of its workers made wildly inappropriate judgments and some of its top brass appears to have the spunk of a pillow. Congress is demanding that heads roll, but the inspector general says that, so far, there’s no evidence of political pressure, just ineptitude. There is literally only one person in the entire operation who’s not covered by civil service, so I wouldn’t expect a purge. Miller, in his testimony, said that, so far, one employee has been relocated in punishment for his or her role in the case. The American people cry out for blood and they get a transfer.

But here’s where the sympathy comes in. The I.R.S. employees were stuck with a pile of 70,000 applications for the tax-exempt status that’s awarded to organizations engaged in social welfare issues. Recently, political groups have been gaming the system, announcing they’re just do-gooders with a minor political sideline in order to qualify. When they succeed, they get to keep their donors secret. The rules for who qualifies are murky, and, according to Miller, only about 150 to 200 people were making the decisions about who got further scrutiny.

Also, they were working at the Determinations Unit of the Rulings and Agreements Office of the Exempt Organizations Division of the Internal Revenue Service. Spending their lives trying to clarify the 501(c)(4) status. You try that for a while and see how you like it.

If Congress wanted to help, the members could simplify the law so I.R.S. minions aren’t trying to figure out which groups spend only 49 percent of their resources on politics as opposed to 51 percent.

Or, they could give the I.R.S. more money to do the job it’s stuck with now. The budget has been cut almost $1 billion over the last few years, while its duties have expanded. Next Friday, I.R.S. workers will enjoy the first of a series of unpaid furloughs thanks to that sequester.

Or Congress could just keep holding committee hearings in hopes that investigators will finally discover that the I.R.S. offices in Cincinnati are actually controlled by a pack of left-wing operatives who are not only Obamaphiles but also vampires. Vampires who had no respect for the laws regarding 501(c)(4) status.

Blow and Collins

Both Mr. Blow and Ms. Collins have been pondering scandals.  In “Scandalous vs. Scandal Lust” he says Outrage! Disgrace! But, really, there’s not enough there there.  Ms. Collins has a suggestion in “On The Plus Side …,” and says it’s been quite a week of scandals! Maybe, as part of crisis-management, our fearless leaders could come together and do something worthwhile like name a national rock.  Here’s Mr. Blow:

I have watched in recent days as a parade of conservatives have used specific and real governmental missteps to justify their wide-ranging paranoia and irrational hostilities. “Aha!”

You have to take their glee in sorrow with a grain of salt. For them this is more about their scandal lust than what’s scandalous. These people have been searching for a scandal — Kenyan birth certificates and a Michelle Obama “whitey” tape — for years. The fact that they now have something solid and not made of sand is going to make sad souls happy. That’s to be expected.

What’s not to be expected — but has become depressingly predictable — is to watch liberals rending their garments and gnashing their teeth in woe-is-us doom chanting. The overreaction is exhausting and embarrassing.

Let’s say what this confluence of missteps is and what it is not — at least as the evidence now suggests.

First, the three issues — Benghazi, the targeting of conservative groups by the I.R.S. and the Department of Justice’s monitoring of Associated Press journalists — appear to be completely unrelated, try as politicians and pundits may to connect them. Second, the president does not appear to have had any direct involvement in any of the episodes. Third, their weight and resonances differ greatly, although all could be diminished by their emerging concurrently.

At this point, this is about flaws of procedures — some possibly illegal, all very disturbing — and problems of perception. But they are neither fatal nor unfixable.

Now, let’s separate the well-worn Benghazi witch hunt from the other two. From all appearances that is just a callous use of a tragic event to take a political slap at President Obama and a stab at the likely Democratic presidential heavyweight Hillary Clinton. It is being conducted by hyperpartisan politicians and aggravated by Fox News, both with a stake in justifying their unjustifiable contempt for this Democratic administration, and foiling the next one.

But Americans appear to be tiring of all that chasing of smoke and little finding of fire.

According to a Pew Research Center poll issued this week, the percentage of Americans closely following the Benghazi news has continued to fall. Less than half of the respondents believe that the Obama administration has been dishonest, while almost as many say that the Republicans have gone too far in the hearings. At least one in five don’t know either way.

According to the Pew Poll:

“About half (56 percent) of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say they regularly watch the Fox News channel, and this group is particularly frustrated over the Benghazi situation. Fully 79 percent of Republicans who regularly watch Fox News say the Obama administration has been dishonest, compared with 60 percent of Republicans who don’t watch Fox regularly. Nearly half (46 percent) of Republicans who regularly watch Fox News say they are following the story very closely — compared with 23 percent among other Republicans. Those who regularly watch Fox News are also far more critical of the news media: 59 percent say the hearings have not received sufficient coverage by the news media.”

On the I.R.S. scandal, however, it certainly appears that the agency behaved stupidly. Not because they sought to scrutinize the mockery that is these 501(c)4 “social welfare” groups, but because they did so unevenly. But what will be left after all the hue and cry? As the Notre Dame law professor Lloyd Mayer told the Christian Science Monitor this week:

“What has been missed in the outrage is the recognition that this problem arose from much deeper sources than the poor judgment or possible partisan bias of a handful of I.R.S. employees.”

He continued:

“Congress has given the I.R.S. the difficult task of applying an incredibly vague definition of political activity and an uncertain standard for how much political activity tax-exempt social welfare organizations may engage in.”

That, in the end, is the real scandal.

And now to the Associated Press scandal. The Justice Department was just wrong in the employ of its dragnet, and the administration — as represented by a spokesman, Jay Carney — was disingenuous in its insistence that the administration supports “unfettered” journalism. It just doesn’t. But we’ve always known that, at least we in the media have. The scandal here is that an atmosphere of intolerance for leaks — which Republicans ironically accused the Obama administration of encouraging — seems to have overtaken the Justice Department.

On Wednesday the White House took steps to mitigate the damage, releasing more than 100 pages of Benghazi talking point e-mails, seeking to revive a shield law for reporters who refused to disclose confidential sources, and having the president himself deliver a statement on the I.R.S. In it he announced the resignation of the acting commissioner of the agency, the implementation of new safeguards and a pledge to work with Congress in investigating the matter. As the president said, “The good news is that it’s fixable.”  And, it is.

That’s it — the gist of all three as far as we know at this point. These are not administration-enders. People can be punished, or fired or even jailed, if Speaker John Boehner has his way, but at this early stage signs are not pointing to any of those people being in the White House.

Even if I had hair, I wouldn’t be setting it on fire, not yet anyway.

And now here’s Ms. Collins:

Let’s try to come up with some positive thoughts about the recent political fortunes of the Obama White House:

• Economy’s getting a little better. Deficit’s dropping.

• Bill Clinton had a really terrible second term and look how well things turned out for him.

• Nobody in the administration has been caught driving to Canada with Bo the dog strapped to the car roof.

It’s been quite a week, what with the I.R.S. scandal, the Benghazi controversy and revelations about the Justice Department’s sweep of The Associated Press’s phone records. Plus, the Russians came up with an alleged American spy in a bad wig who they said was caught carrying a compass, an atlas of Moscow and a ridiculous traitor-recruitment letter. That one could be a set-up, but if it’s real, then we are just going to have to cancel the summer.

Republicans were leaping joyfully through the capital like overcaffeinated gazelles. There is not a committee chairman in the House of Representatives who isn’t planning hearings of outrage about something — except maybe the poor woman John Boehner appointed to run the committee in charge of housekeeping.

Heads must roll! Senator James Inhofe announced that “people may be starting to use the i-word before too long,” having apparently missed all the prior calls for the president’s impeachment for everything from failure to balance the budget to gun control.

Senator Marco Rubio demanded “the I.R.S. commissioner’s resignation,” possibly unaware that the nation had not had an I.R.S. commissioner since last November. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid expressed doubt that the nation would be satisfied just with the head of “some temporary guy” and called for a permanent appointment. This was presumably due to Reid’s desire for stability, not just a more rewarding target.

The acting commissioner did, indeed, get the ax on Wednesday, but the chances that the Senate is going to approve a new Internal Revenue Service commissioner are approximately as good as the odds it will include zombies under Social Security. Reid is still struggling with the nominations for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Environmental Protection Agency, which have been held up by the Republicans on the grounds that they don’t really like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Environmental Protection Agency. The Labor Department appears likely to get a new leader the very second hell freezes over. Also, Republican Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri has vowed to put a hold on E.P.A. nominee Gina McCarthy until he gets a new flood-way project.

Serious problem for Washington: How do you get heads to roll when there aren’t any heads? Except for Attorney General Eric Holder, who’s been running the Justice Department for what seems like 100 years, and appears linked to just about every disaster in the history of the Obama administration. I believe we may soon discover that he was the one who provided the would-be spy in Russia with a brown wig that looks like an obese cat.

People, this too shall pass. We’re in a moment, not a map for the entire Obama second term. It is, of course, possible that things will get worse, and we’ll discover the president’s health care plan is, as Michele Bachmann claims, part of a plot to deny medical treatment to conservatives. Or things could get better. The White House seems to be getting some traction on the I.R.S. Maybe the economy will really improve, the scandals will run their course, and people will turn their attention to worthy causes like early childhood education or stopping climate change.

Admittedly, the last scenario is a long shot. And even if Barack Obama ascended into heaven, the Republicans would point out that before he went, the I.R.S. picked on the Tea Party.

Maybe, while he’s crisis-managing, the president could also figure out a way to show people government working at something other than reorganizing troubled agencies. Maybe he could start off with passing a bill that’s supereasy. I notice that in state legislatures, when times are tough, parties are sometimes able to get together in order to pick a new state thing. You know, state bird, state animal. Some states find this so relaxing they never stop. (New Mexico has an official state guitar, state tie and state aircraft, which, unfortunately, is the hot-air balloon.)

The United States has a few of these items, like a bird and an anthem, but there’s plenty of territory to cover. The president could demand that Congress pick an official national rock. Committees could hold hearings about the relative merits of slate and granite. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell would threaten to filibuster unless his colleagues considered coal. But, in the end, I believe everybody would rally around a grand compromise for marble. And the country would feel much, much better.

Baby steps. Then we can get to the debt ceiling.

Blow and Collins

In “Terms of Art” Mr. Blow says that many on the political right have a bone-deep contempt for those who are different.  Ms. Collins, in “Guess Who’s Back!”, says with the newest member of the House of Representatives being a disgraced ex-governor, we now know that voters today are willing to overlook bad judgment of epic proportions.  Well, Gail, it is South Carolina…  Here’s Mr. Blow:

Many on the political right simply can’t get this diversity thing right — and I deeply doubt that they want to. Theirs is a bone-deep contempt for otherness, a congenital belief in the superiority-inferiority binary, a circle-the-wagons, zero-sum view of progress, prosperity and power.

This became apparent yet again Wednesday when it was revealed that one of the co-authors of a much maligned Heritage Foundation “study” about “The Fiscal Cost of Unlawful Immigrants and Amnesty to the U.S. Taxpayer,” Jason Richwine, had written a Ph.D. dissertation at Harvard in 2009 titled “IQ and Immigration Policy.”

Dylan Matthews of The Washington Post summarized Richwine’s dissertation thusly:

“Richwine’s dissertation asserts that there are deep-set differentials in intelligence between races. While it’s clear he thinks it is partly due to genetics — ‘the totality of the evidence suggests a genetic component to group differences in I.Q.’ — he argues the most important thing is that the differences in group I.Q.s are persistent, for whatever reason. He writes, ‘No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach I.Q. parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-I.Q. children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.’ ”

Matthews continues:

“He does caution against referring to it as I.Q.-based selection, saying that using the term ‘skill-based’ would ‘blunt the negative reaction.’ ”

Skill-based. Clever. Or Machiavellian.

In reality, it’s just another conservative euphemism meant to cast class aspersions and raise racial ire without ever forthrightly addressing the issues of class and race. This form of Roundabout Republicanism has entirely replaced honest conservative discussion, to the point that anyone who now raises class-based inequality is labeled divisive and anyone who raises race is labeled a racist.

It’s a way of wriggling out of unpleasant debates on which they have stopped trying to engage altogether. The new strategy is avoidance, obfuscation and boomerang blaming.

This “skill-based” phraseology is simply the latest in a long line of recent right-wing terms of art.

There was Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” comment about the people who would “vote for the president no matter what.” He continued: “there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.”

That was in line with the other-ing of President Obama, whether in the form of aspersions about his birth or his faith or his understanding of and commitment to the country he leads. Recall John Sununu, a top Romney surrogate, saying that Obama “has no idea how the American system functions” and saying that he wished the president “would learn how to be an American.”

Representative Paul Ryan, Romney’s vice-presidential running mate, blamed turnout in “urban areas” for their loss, rather than their ragtag campaign operation and a coreless nominee who was utterly inept when attempting to connect with average voters. Remember Romney liked grits, y’all.

The former House speaker and failed presidential candidate Newt Gingrich — the one who said that poor children had no habit of working “unless it is illegal” — told Fox News last year that President Obama was “not a real president.” During that same television appearance, Gingrich said of the president: “I’m assuming that there’s some rhythm to Barack Obama that the rest of us don’t understand. Whether he needs large amounts of rest, whether he needs to go play basketball for a while, um, watch ESPN, I mean, I don’t quite know what his rhythms are.”

Huh. Needs large amounts of rest and to go play basketball and watch television. Nothing subliminal there. Moving along.

This list could extend to more than one column — including terms like “job creators” and “we built this,” and the candidate Rick Santorum (who has three degrees) calling the president a snob for wanting “everybody in America to go to college ” (which is not at all what the president said).

And it could stretch back further to the patron saint of the right Ronald Reagan’s use of the welfare queen meme and George Bush’s and Lee Atwater’s invocation of Willie Horton in the 1988 presidential campaign.

But I think you get the picture.

The right is constantly invoking class and race as cudgels in our political discussions; they just hide the hand that swings the club.

The rebranding of the Republican Party is to a large degree the renaming of intolerance.

Now we have Ms. Collins:

Right now you are undoubtedly asking yourself: What does the return to Congress of the disgraced ex-governor Mark Sanford mean to me?

Well, we now definitely know that 21st-century voters are willing to overlook not just a moral lapse, but also bad judgment of epic proportions. This is useful information if you happen to live in a city where Anthony Weiner is thinking about running for mayor.

“I want to acknowledge a God not just of second chances, but third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth chances,” said a jubilant Sanford in his victory speech Tuesday night.

So far, the voters — and God — have awarded Sanford at least five or six do-overs, what with the adultery, his decision to go to Argentina for an assignation without leaving his gubernatorial staff a phone number where he could be reached, that inclination to discuss embarrassing details of his sex life during press conferences, the ethics fine, the trespassing accusation, and so on. But talk about the availability of eight chances seems to suggest the newly elected congressman is leaving daylight for additional forgiveness opportunities in the future.

Still, this does not necessarily mean that Weiner gets to be mayor of New York City. People are way more careful about picking a mayor or a governor than they are a legislator. Because, really, how much judgment does it take to be a member of Congress? The House delegation from the State of New York is always losing people because of stupid sex tricks: marathon tickling sessions with the aides, the e-mailing of half-naked photographs, or Weiner’s habit of texting pictures of his private parts to strangers. And life goes on, unchanged. But you want an executive to be better-behaved, or you could wind up with … Eliot Spitzer.

One surefire result of this special election will be a plethora of Republican candidates debating cardboard versions of Nancy Pelosi next fall. It looked stupid when Sanford tried it, but, by gosh, it really did seem to do the trick. To be fair, Sanford’s opponent, Elizabeth Colbert Busch, didn’t seem to come out in public very often, and he needed to argue with somebody. However, the demonizing of the House minority leader has its limits. Pelosi’s own opponent last year ran a very exciting ad depicting her as the queen of a zombie cult, and it had no effect whatsoever.

Everybody got excited about the South Carolina race when, at one point, Public Policy Polling showed Colbert Busch nine points ahead. Clearly, that wasn’t the case, and, in retrospect, I’m afraid we may have to revisit the P.P.P. poll last year that showed that 15 percent of Ohio Republicans believed that Mitt Romney had killed Osama bin Laden.

In the end, Sanford’s victory was just about a very Republican area picking a Republican member of Congress. South Carolina’s Republican mapmakers have spent eons stuffing as many Democrats as possible into the House district represented by Democrat James Clyburn in order to keep the other six districts as deeply red as possible. Their party controlled the seats anyway, but you never knew when there might be some emergency, like a special election with a Republican candidate who was due in court two days after the balloting to answer charges of trespassing at his ex-wife’s home.

The political makeup of Congress will be unchanged; Sanford replaces Republican Tim Scott, who was promoted to the Senate to replace Jim DeMint, who recently retired to lead the Heritage Foundation and do war against the immigration reform bill. While Sanford was celebrating his victory, DeMint was unveiling a big study showing that immigration reform would cost the country trillions and trillions of dollars. Its methodology was ridiculous, and The Washington Post discovered its co-author had once argued that Hispanic immigrants would have “low I-Q children and grandchildren.” Truly, South Carolina politics is a gift that just keeps on giving.

Nobody outside the state seemed terribly thrilled by Sanford’s political resurrection. The National Republican Congressional Committee, which has a tolerance for screwing up that’s notably less extensive than God’s, had wiped its hands of his campaign awhile back. Gabriel Gomez, the Republican candidate in Massachusetts’ special Senate election, called him “pathetic.” And the House leadership needs another Tea Party zealot the way it needs another vote to repeal Obamacare.

“Mr. Sanford will have the opportunity to make a difference for his constituents as a member of the Republican House majority,” said a spokesman for John Boehner, in a statement that reflected the general euphoria over the ex-governor’s return.

So, Representative Mark Sanford. Where do you think he’ll live? Sanford was in the House once before and he slept in his office. This was possibly about staying close to his work but more likely about the same qualities of thriftiness that caused him to give his then-wife a $25 used bicycle for Christmas and her birthday combined. And what committee do you think he’ll serve on?

Please God, let it be Foreign Affairs.

Blow, Nocera and Collins

Today we have Blow, Nocera and Collins.  Mr. Blow, in “Dear College Graduates…” says congratulations and good luck, Class of ’13. You’ll need it.  Mr. Nocera has a question in “2 Killings and 2 Guns, Unattended:”  Why is it that a reckless driver can be prosecuted but not an irresponsible gun owner?  Gee, Joe, I don’t have a clue.  Why don’t you ask the NRA?  Ms. Collins, in “An Ode to Helium,” says forget the hot air jokes, people. Who said that Congress hasn’t been getting anything done lately?  Here’s Mr. Blow:

I’m scheduled to deliver the commencement address Friday at my alma mater, Grambling State University in Louisiana, so I’ve been giving quite a bit of thought to the America into which these students are graduating.

I must admit that finding hopeful, encouraging things to say has been exceedingly difficult, in part because the landscape at the moment — particularly for young adults — is so bleak.

Here are some of the facts that I’m up against rhetorically and that these students will be up against more literally.

1. Being a college graduate is becoming less exceptional. As the Pew Research Center pointed out in November, “Record shares of young adults are completing high school, going to college and finishing college.” College graduation rates are growing even more in other countries. And Anya Kamenetz noted in The Atlantic magazine in December, “During the past three decades, the United States has slipped from first among nations to 10th in the percentage of people holding a college degree, even as the job market has eroded for Americans without one.”

2. Graduates are emerging with staggering amounts of debt and entering a still-sluggish job market. This is causing them to delay major life decisions, like marriage or buying a home or even moving out of their parents’ home.

A Pew report from February 2012 found that:

“Since 2010, the share of young adults ages 18 to 24 currently employed (54 percent) has been its lowest since the government began collecting these data in 1948. And the gap in employment between the young and all working-age adults — roughly 15 percentage points — is the widest in recorded history. In addition, young adults employed full time have experienced a greater drop in weekly earnings (down 6 percent) than any other age group over the past four years.”

3. Emerging markets, like China and India, have become major competitors for exportable jobs.

4. Income inequality between top earners and the rest of America has risen. And the recovery since the Great Recession has essentially been a recovery of the rich. A recent study by Emmanuel Saez, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, found that:

“From 2009 to 2011, average real income per family grew modestly by 1.7 percent but the gains were very uneven. Top 1 percent incomes grew by 11.2 percent while bottom 99 percent incomes shrunk by 0.4 percent. Hence, the top 1 percent captured 121 percent of the income gains in the first two years of the recovery.”

This was similar to a finding by the Pew Research Center last month:

“During the first two years of the nation’s economic recovery, the mean net worth of households in the upper 7 percent of the wealth distribution rose by an estimated 28 percent, while the mean net worth of households in the lower 93 percent dropped by 4 percent.”

5. At the same time, the cost of basic goods has soared. For example, when I graduated from college the average price of a gallon of gas was about $1 (adjusted for inflation, that would still be less than $2), and it’s currently nearing $4. Some people now have to make desperate choices: a tank of gas, a bag of groceries or a bottle of medicine.

6. Our politics have become polarized to the point of paralysis. A Pew poll last June found that Americans’ “values and basic beliefs are more polarized along partisan lines than at any point in the past 25 years.”

What gives me hope is that despite this dire environment, young people remain more optimistic than anyone else. Some of that may simply be the intrinsic glow of youth, but I believe that with this generation, something more is afoot.

This is a generation of people who have come of age in an era of overlapping traumas — terrorism and wars and recession. They have also come of age in changing times, and are more tolerant and less punitive in their social view. They see this country, and the world, differently than we older folks do. Theirs is an America waiting to be made better, not one that is simply, and irreversibly, getting worse.

According to a CNN/ORC poll released last month, young adults (those 18 to 34) were the most likely to think that things were going well in this country.

I plan to tap into that optimism on Friday, and I hope to reflect some of it back at those beaming faces under square hats.

Dear college graduates, this is your moment and your America. Both need your vision and demand your efforts. Keep your head up and your hopes rising. Congratulations and good luck. You’ll need it, and I’ll be rooting for you. (Flip tassels.)

Next up we have Mr. Nocera:

On the afternoon of Aug. 7, 2012, Greg Imhoff — a big, friendly 61-year-old construction superintendent from Madison, Wis., who had moved to Florida with his partner, Shari Telvick — went to check on the home of a neighbor.

The neighbor, Richard Detlor, was a friend, someone Imhoff had known back in Madison, where the Detlors still lived for part of the year. Whenever the Detlors went back to Wisconsin, Imhoff would look in on their house, something he did for many of his neighbors.

It is impossible to know whether, on that August afternoon, Imhoff ever saw the stranger in the house with the .22 caliber revolver; all we know for sure is that Imhoff was shot in the head. When Telvick and a friend found him that evening, he was lying in a pool of blood, dead.

The killer turned out to be a man named Billy Ray Retherford, who was on the lam after killing a woman two weeks earlier and was hiding in the Detlors’ empty home. The next day, Retherford was killed in a shootout with the police. He was using the same .22 handgun.

The gun, however, was not his. It belonged to Richard Detlor, who, according to the police report, had left it, loaded, in the nightstand by his bed before departing for Wisconsin several months earlier.

When Imhoff’s murder was brought to my attention recently, I was stunned that a supposedly “responsible gun owner” would leave a loaded gun in a house that was empty for months at a time. Yes, the odds of someone breaking into the house and using the gun were small, but they weren’t zero. That the Detlors didn’t take the simple precaution of unloading their gun and locking it up struck me as incredibly negligent.

Not surprisingly, that’s how Shari Telvick sees it, too. “I think the Detlors had a responsibility to secure their weapon,” she told me when I spoke to her earlier this week. “I think they should be held accountable.” But when she talked to a lawyer, she discovered, to her dismay, that leaving a loaded gun in an empty house doesn’t violate Florida law. As Arthur Hayhoe, the executive director of the Florida Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, explained to me, “Safe storage laws in Florida only apply if a minor lives in the house. If it’s adults, you can do whatever you want.” (He added, “In Florida, there are more laws to protect guns than people.”)

For all the protestations by gun owners that most are responsible with their weapons, I have been struck by how many killings take place because people do careless, stupid things. In the gun report that my assistant, Jennifer Mascia, and I compile on my blog, I see daily examples of children accidentally shooting other children with a gun found in the house.

Just the other day, in Burkesville, Ky., a 5-year-old boy shot and killed his 2-year-old sister with a small rifle that had been given to him as a present. Who gives a 5-year-old a gun? (The rifle is called a Crickett; incredibly, it is marketed specifically to children.) Who leaves the room where their children are playing without checking whether the rifle in the corner is loaded? For that matter, who puts a shotgun within such easy reach of a child?

Gary White, the county coroner, was quick to say that no charges would be brought because it was an accident — and, after all, “accidents happen.” But it was a completely preventable accident. When a passenger dies in a car accident that is the result of negligence, there are usually serious legal consequences for the driver. If we really want to reduce gun violence, there must be consequences for negligent gun owners, too. The entire culture of gun ownership has to begin emphasizing safety in a way it doesn’t now. It is as important as universal background checks, or limits on magazine rounds.

Shari Telvick couldn’t live in Florida after Imhoff’s death. “It was unbearable to be in that house without him,” she said. She remains devastated. Two months after Imhoff died, she told me, his first grandchild was born.

Telvick had never been friendly with the Detlors, and she made it clear that she didn’t want to see them. But she’s been surprised, she said, that they’ve never reached out to Greg’s children, whom they’ve known for years.

I decided to call the Detlors. The woman who answered refused to put Richard Detlor on the phone.

“Do you think he is sorry?” I asked. “Sorry for what?” she said, before hanging up on me.

A few days later, I called again. The same woman picked up. This time, she said, “We are as much victims as anyone else in this.”

Then, once again, she hung up the phone.

And, according to the NRA, the obvious answer to any problem at all is MOAR GUNZ!!!  Here’s Ms. Collins:

We have not been paying nearly enough attention to helium legislation.

Seriously. We’ve been complaining about the way Congress fails at everything except scheduling vacations. So it seems only fair to salute the Responsible Helium Administration and Stewardship Act. The way things are going, it could be the most significant piece of legislation to make it into law this year.

The issue is our helium stockpile, which is scheduled to go out of business. The House approved a bipartisan bill to save the program just before the members — yes! — left town for vacation. The Senate seems inclined to go along, unless, of course, Ted Cruz decides it’s a United Nations plot.

The House debate took two days, which some people felt was way more than enough time, given the fact that the final vote was 394 to 1. The lone “nay” came from Representative Linda Sanchez of California, who accidentally pressed the wrong button.

Democrats complained that the House could have taken care of helium in an hour, if the Republicans hadn’t been afraid of discussing anything else. It’s been a tough stretch for Republican leaders, who had set aside several days to debate a plan to improve the Obama health care act, before the rank-and-file rejected the idea on the grounds that it might improve the Obama health care act.

So, helium. “I’m pleased to support this bill, which shows that this Tea Party Congress will make the tough choice to keep children’s birthday parties on schedule and give industries that rely on helium the lift that they deserve,” sniped Representative Hank Johnson of Georgia.

The second most popular theme for speeches, which Johnson ignored, was: look, helium is not a joke.

“Despite what many think, helium is not just used for party balloons,” said Representative Doc Hastings of Washington, the Republican who brought the bill to the House floor.

Actually, if you’d heard the entire debate you would have been so impressed with helium that you would be wondering whether it should be wasted on balloons at all. It’s used in M.R.I. machines, scientific research, fiber optics, aerospace technology. And it’s not all that easy to come by, being the product of slow radioactive decay deep in the earth.

“It’s liquid down to absolute zero. You can pour it on M.R.I. magnets. It’ll cool those superconductive magnets down. There’s nothing else like it,” said Representative Rush Holt of New Jersey, a physicist who has very strong feelings about helium.

The United States began stockpiling helium after World War I because Congress was worried about catching up with the Germans in the race to build a fleet of dirigibles. Miraculously, despite the Pentagon’s affection for continuing to build things that have no earthly use in modern warfare, the government eventually cut back on the blimp program. But it kept the stockpile going at a helium reserve near Amarillo, Tex.

In 1996, during the Newt Gingrich era, Congress voted to go out of the helium business and let private enterprise take over as soon as the reserve paid off the money the government had sunk into it.

Hasn’t quite worked out. The debt is almost paid off, but the magic of the marketplace hasn’t kicked in. If the reserve closes now, the country loses 40 percent of its helium supply. So, last week, the House voted to extend the program. “Many people don’t believe that the federal government should be in the helium business, and I would agree,” said Hastings, as he pushed the bill to keep the government in the helium business.

There are two ways to look at this story. One is that it’s about the impossibility of ever actually stopping any government program. Former Representative Barney Frank, who said in 1996 that if Congress could not manage to get rid of the helium reserve “then we cannot undo anything,” hasn’t changed his mind. “Everybody is against waste, but strongly defends this or that particular piece,” Frank said in a phone interview.

He’s right. I have fond memories of listening to protests after Congress managed, with great effort, to end a totally useless subsidy on mohair. Most of the howls came from lawmakers from Texas, land of many mohair goats. “I have a mohair sweater! It’s my favorite one!” cried Republican Lamar Smith. The subsidy came creeping back a few years later.

But there’s another possible moral. The helium program is great; it provided the country with a crucial product that business wasn’t prepared to produce. It spurred economic growth and scientific research and made enough profit to pay the taxpayers back.

Maybe the only mistake was trying to pull the plug in the first place.

“The federal government going into helium in the 1920s I think was a fine thing,” said Holt. He looks upon the current bill not as a temporary fix but as “a validation” of government’s role in looking after things that the private sector is reluctant or afraid to take on.

The helium reserve, by the way, is still going to run dry in five or 10 years. Maybe private enterprise will step up to the plate. But if not, somebody’s going to have to organize one hell of a balloon recycling program.

Blow and Collins

In ” ‘The Juice,’ The Jousting and the Job” Mr. Blow says President Obama’s second term is just beginning. Let’s let him have it before skipping ahead to 2016.  Ms. Collins has turned her attention to the state to my north.  In “The Luv Guv’s Last Stand” she says Mark Sanford is on the barricades, and his fate might tell us something about how far Americans are willing to go in overlooking a politician’s misbehavior.  Well, seeing as it’s South Carolina, and given what they’ve elected in the past…  Here’s Mr. Blow:

During Tuesday’s presidential news conference, Jonathan Karl of ABC News asked the president if he still had “the juice” to get the rest of his agenda through Congress.

The president responded jokingly.

It was a funny exchange, but also a telling one, less about this president’s ability to maneuver and push policy than about media organizations that are forever looking beyond the moment, so much so that they do little justice to — and demonstrate a marvelous vacuity about — the present.

Too many people want to skip — or write off — the second term of this presidency and begin covering the contenders for the next one.

O.K., if that’s the way you want it, let’s take a glance at that lot of unbridled ambition and hapless long shots. Get your fill. Then maybe we can get back to talking honestly about the true encumbrances to Obama’s agenda. The president’s issue is not so much his unwillingness to coax or threaten or sweet talk or browbeat. It’s the compromise-resistant form of conservatism in this country that has fed on Obama’s very existence: an illogical, immutable opposition to him. In short, Obama leads an army amassed against him.

But, so that we can get this out of our system, here’s a look at the distant 2016 presidential race, the never-ending campaigning and invariably incorrect prognosticating.

The likely candidates are in full maneuver mode and the media are hanging on it. No sooner had the Republican Party released its autopsy of why Mitt Romney lost than a slew of Republican upstarts began stampeding over the campaign’s corpse.

Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana — who chided his party for being the “stupid party” after the November election — has seen his poll numbers plummet, in part because of his failed, stupid plan to replace the state’s income tax with a higher sales tax. A Southern Media and Opinion Research poll released in March showed that his approval rating had dropped to 38 percent, down from 51 percent in September. Jindal is now even less popular than President Obama in Louisiana, and Obama lost that state by 18 percentage points.

The Washington Post reported this week that the F.B.I. was looking into the relationship between the Republican governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell — “Governor Vaginal Probe” (remember that ultrasound bill he supported?) —and an executive who “gave more than $100,000 in political contributions and thousands of dollars more in gifts to McDonnell’s family.”

There was Senator Rand Paul’s disastrous speech at Howard University, where he sought to overlook decades of Republican Party hostility to African-Americans, subtly shift his own positions and educate students about a history they already knew all too well.

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey may be the Republicans’ best hope, but it’s not clear that he could even get the nomination: he’s so disliked by the G.O.P. base that he wasn’t even invited to speak at CPAC. One of the biggest laughs during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday came when the host, Conan O’Brien, joked:

“I’d like to acknowledge that earlier this evening, there was some confusion with the seating chart. For a moment, someone accidentally sat Governor Chris Christie with the Republicans. That was awkward, and I apologize.”

Jeb Bush’s own mother threw him under the campaign bus last week, saying of a possible run by the former governor of Florida, “We’ve had enough Bushes.”

National Review reported Wednesday that Senator Ted Cruz “is considering a presidential run, according to his friends and confidants.” Enough said.

This, of course, leaves Senator Marco Rubio. The problem is that he’s relatively unknown by most Americans. A February Fox News poll found that while 25 percent of respondents said that they thought he would make a good president, 33 percent said that they had never heard of him. Still, because he is Hispanic, the party may believe that he will up their support among that much needed voting bloc. But an April Wall Street Journal/Telemundo survey found that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s approval rating among Hispanics was nearly three times higher than Rubio’s.

Speaking of Clinton, and the Democrats, they are jousting for position, too.

Clinton is still being coy about whether she can resist the gravitational pull of the most powerful job known to man — or woman — and the history she would make if she won.

Last week, the Democratic governor of Maryland, Martin O’Malley, announced while visiting Jerusalem that he might consider a run for president. He told reporters, “I plan for the latter half of this year to dedicate some more thought time — reflection time — to the question of whether or not I would run in 2016.”

And The Times reported this week that the Democratic governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, who just passed a sweeping gun-control law, would be penning a memoir. We all know that memoirs by rising-star politicians are just 60,000-word résumés for the next job.

There you have it, many of the big names at least. (I’m sure you have others.) Now, any of these potentials could straighten things out — make up their minds or clean up their messes — before the next election. There’s time for them. But there’s also time for President Obama.

The second term of the Obama administration isn’t over, it’s just beginning. There are three and a half years left, for Pete’s sake. The hapless and the hopeful for 2016 will take care of themselves.

Oh, hell.  We were being “treated” to breathless speculation about who would be running in 2016 BEFORE the 2012 election fergawdsake…  It’s only going to get worse.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

Former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford’s fight for post-Appalachian Trail forgiveness ends Tuesday with a big Congressional election. The focus, of course, is on issues, issues, issues.

“He skipped town to be with his mistress on Father’s Day,” says a Democratic ad currently being broadcast in the district. “Sanford even asked his wife for permission to have the affair and wasted our taxpayer dollars on himself.”

O.K., but that was then.

“Do you think that President Clinton should be condemned for the rest of his life based on a mistake he made in his life?” Sanford asked during a recent debate with his opponent, the Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch. That would be the same President Clinton that Sanford once voted to impeach.

The issue divide is actually pretty clear. Sanford is straight Tea Party; in the debate, he warned the audience that overspending had put us at the “tipping point as a civilization.” Colbert Busch, who more than held her own, kept linking herself to the Chamber of Commerce and the dredging of the local port. If the Republicans who dominate South Carolina’s First Congressional District want someone who will fight to reduce federal spending on everything except their area, she’d be perfect.

Sanford kept reminding the audience that Colbert Busch contributed $500 to his first gubernatorial campaign. Unfortunately, the debate came shortly before Hustler founder Larry Flynt announced that he had donated $2,600 to Sanford “because no one has done more to expose the sexual hypocrisy of traditional values in America today.” The former governor has certainly been plagued with unwanted supporters. His picture is prominently displayed on billboards recently erected by a Web site dedicated to connecting people who want to have extramarital affairs.

This election won’t change the composition of the House of Representatives, which will remain its same old wild and crazy self no matter who wins. But Sanford’s fate might tell us something about how far Americans are willing to go in overlooking misbehavior on the part of a politician. We all know that voters don’t generally punish adultery. The question is whether they at least require some reassurance that the pol under scrutiny won’t wind up being really weird forever.

Right now in New York, we need all the guidance we can get on this point, since we’re facing the distinct possibility of having to live through an Anthony Weiner for Mayor campaign. True, the chances are pretty slim that Weiner will ever again text pictures of his private parts to complete strangers of the female persuasion. But I think I speak for all city residents when I say that we do not have the emotional energy to come up with a complete list of other sexual feats we want taken off the table.

It’s pretty certain that Sanford will never again go jetting off to meet with a South American mistress while his aides desperately assure callers that he’s gone on a wholesome camping expedition. But ever since he was found out, the former governor has been periodically behaving as if he has a screw loose.

Sanford began this particular campaign with a meeting with his former wife, Jenny, in which, she said, he asked her to run his campaign. She declined, and the next time she saw him, he was standing on her back porch under the glow of his cellphone flashlight, violating their divorce settlement that prohibits him from entering her home without permission. At a minimum, the candidate suffers from an overoptimistic assessment of his relationship with the ex.

After court documents involving Jenny’s trespassing complaint became public, Sanford ran a full-page ad comparing himself to the defenders of the Alamo.

The ad was disturbing, and only partly because Sanford got the date of the fall of the Alamo wrong. It was written in the first person, in a manner that seemed designed to remind people that this is the same guy who once gave rambling, T.M.I. interviews about his marriage, his affair, and how he drew a “sex line” between normal lust objects and his Argentine “soul mate.”

“It’s been a rough week,” the ad understated. Sanford launched into an explanation of the trespassing incident and then a rebuttal of his opponent’s charges that he had spent taxpayer money on his affair. That part was virtually impossible to understand, possibly because Sanford delicately referred to paying for his flights to assignations in South America as “dealing with business class tickets.”

After quite a long ramble, Sanford wound up at the Alamo, where “a South Carolinian by the name of William Travis drew a line in the sand. …” Travis has a lot of fans, but you could definitely argue he was an overemotional, self-dramatizing failed family man who was precisely the kind of person you would not want as the designated leader.

“I’m outnumbered right now but will fight to the end toward freedom and financial sanity in Washington so important to sustaining it,” Sanford concluded.

Also, the candidate really needs an editor.

Blow and Nocera

In “The Morose Middle Class” Mr. Blow says the “true engine of America’s economic growth” sure seems to have stalled.  Well, sweetie, when there’s a concerted effort to move wealth upward and away from that “true engine” the engine must be expected to stall.  Mr. Nocera is all fizzy and excited.  He has a question in “How to Build a Spoon.”  He says Manufacturing is making a comeback in Brooklyn. Have you seen the Spuni?  I hate to break this to you, Joe, but that thing looks very much like the silver baby spoon my mother fed me with about 67 years ago.  There really is nothing new under the sun.  Here’s Mr. Blow:

The Middle Class is in a funk, its view of the future growing dim as fear rolls in like a storm.

An Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor poll released Thursday found that while most Americans (56 percent) hold out hope that they‘ll be in a higher class at some point, even more Americans (59 percent) are worried about falling out of their current class over the next few years. In fact, more than eight in 10 Americans believe that more people have fallen out of the middle class than moved into it in the past few years.

The poll paints a picture of a group that is scared to death about its station in life.

By the way, 58 percent of respondents in the poll viewed themselves as either middle class (46 percent) or upper middle class (12 percent).

According to the poll, Americans see a middle class with less opportunity to get ahead, less job security and less disposable income than the middle class of previous generations.

Respondents were most likely (52 percent) to say that losing a job would put them at the greatest risk of falling out of their current class, followed by an unexpected illness or injury in the family.

Most of those polled believe that higher education is the key to staying in the middle class, but many worry about its prohibitive cost and inaccessibility.

And who did most of them say is responsible for making it worse for the middle class? Congress, chief executives of major corporations and big financial institutions.

Of those who blame politicians, there is some evidence that Republicans get more of the blame than Democrats. A CNN/ORC poll released last month found that 32 percent of respondents thought that Democrats favor the middle class compared with 27 percent who believed the same of Republicans. Sixty-eight percent of those polled believed that Republicans favor the wealthy, compared with 24 percent who believed that Democrats do.

This anxiety about a shrinking middle class is understandable.

A Pew Research Center study, “The Lost Decade of the Middle Class,” released in August, found that “since 2000, the middle class has shrunk in size, fallen backward in income and wealth, and shed some — but by no means all — of its characteristic faith in the future.”

According to the report, “Fully 85 percent of self-described middle-class adults say it is more difficult now than it was a decade ago for middle-class people to maintain their standard of living.”

The report continued:

“Their downbeat take on their economic situation comes at the end of a decade in which, for the first time since the end of World War II, mean family incomes declined for Americans in all income tiers. But the middle-income tier — defined in this Pew Research analysis as all adults whose annual household income is two-thirds to double the national median — is the only one that also shrunk in size, a trend that has continued over the past four decades.”

It’s important to note that many of the people who describe themselves as middle class would not be placed under that rubric by most objective observers. For instance, the Pew study found that 35 percent of people making $30,000 and under and 46 percent of those making $100,000 and over self-identified as middle class. (Meantime, six percent of those making $30,000 and under self-identified as upper class, and six percent of those making $100,000 and over self-identified as lower class. Go figure.)

As Pew pointed out, over the last decade, “middle-tier median household income” fell and median net worth plummeted, and people in the middle class said it was becoming harder to maintain their lifestyles.

To add insult to injury, another Pew report, released this week, found that “during the first two years of the nation’s economic recovery, the mean net worth of households in the upper 7 percent of the wealth distribution rose by an estimated 28 percent, while the mean net worth of households in the lower 93 percent dropped by 4 percent.”

As The Washington Post reported in September after the release of a frightening Census report: “The vise on the middle class tightened last year, driving down its share of the income pie as the number of Americans in poverty leveled off and the most affluent households saw their portion grow.”

The wealthy have come surging back, riding record stock market highs, but many in the middle class are at best treading water and at worst sinking.

In his State of the Union speech in February, President Obama said that the “true engine of America’s economic growth” is “a rising, thriving middle class.”

It certainly looks as if that engine has stalled.

Now here’s Mr. Nocera, all fizzy and excited:

I have seen the future, and it is in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

I’ve seen young entrepreneurs creating companies that actually make things — not some digital app (not that there’s anything wrong with that!) — but actual products you can hold in your hand. I have seen prototypes being churned out on 3-D printers. I have seen the Navy Yard’s 300-acre complex of buildings — whose disrepair was once a symbol of manufacturing’s decline — become a symbol of manufacturing’s revival.

Sorry to sound so highfalutin, but it is easy to get carried away after you’ve been to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It offers something you don’t often feel these days when you contemplate the future of the American economy, with its loss of middle-class jobs and the widening of the income gap.

It allows you to feel hopeful again.

I went there this week because I had gotten interested in Spuni, a little start-up that was operating out of a development called New Lab — essentially shared space in one of the Navy Yard’s buildings for entrepreneurs and artists. (To be more precise, David Belt, New Lab’s developer, is using temporary space in the Navy Yard to house his tenants, while he refurbishes some 85,000 square feet in the old naval machine shop.)

Spuni is a product dreamed up in the Boston kitchen of Isabel and Trevor Hardy. The 30-something parents of two small children, they got to mulling the mess that William, their first child, made as he was transitioning from a bottle to a spoon.

“We both have design backgrounds,” said Isabel, “and we were trained to solve problems by using simple design solutions.” The problem, the Hardys concluded, was that spoons are poorly designed for small children. As they bite into the spoon, the food in the back half has nowhere to go but the floor. One day, as they were kicking around this idea with their friend Marcel Botha, a serial entrepreneur who shares a South African heritage with Trevor, they came up with the idea of a flatter-shaped, more ergonomical spoon that would allow a baby to suck the food off it.

Trevor and Isabel have full-time jobs. Once upon a time, their little idea would have remained just that — an idea. But Marcel, who had considerable small-manufacturing experience, was convinced that they could create a company to make the Spuni, as they quickly named it. First sketched in the spring of 2011, the Spuni saw its first prototype within two months. Using a 3-D printer, they went through a half-dozen prototype iterations until they felt they had the Spuni and its packaging exactly right.

To raise capital, they relied on crowd-sourcing, generating almost $38,000 by preselling Spunis on the Web site Indiegogo. Marcel, meanwhile, cut a deal with a small German manufacturer he had used before. When we spoke on Friday, he was just returning from Germany, where he had supervised the first quality tests. Within weeks, some 8,000 Spunis will be available for purchase. Marcel expects to be manufacturing 600,000 Spunis within a year’s time. If all goes according to plan, Spuni will be churning out around one million spoons a year by 2015.

The role of the Navy Yard is as an incubator of companies like Spuni. Andrew Kimball, who runs the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation, a nonprofit with a 99-year lease from the city, told me that between public and private investment, around $1 billion has been raised to make the Navy Yard a destination for small entrepreneurs and other members of the creative class. According to a recent study by the Pratt Center for Community Development, the companies in the Navy Yard have been responsible for $2 billion in direct economic output and another $2 billion in indirect economic benefits. Kimball says there is a waiting list of 150 companies trying to get space in one of the Navy Yard’s buildings. “It’s cool to make things again,” he said.

Still, for all this glorious activity, the Navy Yard companies employ only 6,400 people. That’s up from 3,600 in 2001, but it is a far cry from the 70,000 men who once built ships during the Navy Yard’s muscular manufacturing heyday. That, of course, is the downside of the manufacturing revival in the U.S. — it simply doesn’t create the number of jobs that the old-style assembly lines used to. When I asked the Spuni founders how many employees they would need in the U.S. if they got to 600,000 in annual production, the number stunned me: 10. In Germany, the factory, at peak production, would probably not need more than 20 employees.

Marcel told me that his goal is to create a small manufacturing center in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He would like to employ 100 or more people and produce a variety of products, not just Spunis. This is the model of modern American manufacturing.

Welcome to the future.

Blow and Nocera

Ms. Collins is off today, and Mr. Kristof is still on book leave.  In “Politics of Paranoia” Mr. Blow says far-right Republicans throw up their hands and expect the worst.  Mr. Blow is much too polite to say that they piss their pants…  Mr. Nocera is still engaged in a love affair with the Keystone pipeline.  In “Canada’s Oil Minister, Unmuzzled” he says that on a visit to New York and Washington, Joe Oliver has a few things to say to opponents of the Keystone XL oil pipeline.  Frankly, Mr. Nocera, I don’t give a crap what he has to say.  The goddamn pipeline isn’t running over his aquifers, and won’t be leaking shit all over his country.  Canadians can do what they like to their land, but they can keep their filthy shit to themselves.  Here’s Mr. Blow:

Out-of-control federal government. An immediate and immense Muslim threat. Gun grabbing, national registries and eventual mass confiscations. Tyranny.

The politics of the political right have become the politics of paranoia.

According to too many of them, the country is collapsing, and the government is not to be trusted. The circle of safety is contracting. You must arm yourselves to defend your own.

It is no wonder, then, that in this environment, a Washington Post/Pew Research Center poll released Wednesday found that while 47 percent of Americans were angry or disappointed that new gun control legislation in the Senate (including the enormously popular background-checks provision) had failed to pass, 39 percent were very happy or relieved. Fifty-one percent of Republicans had those sentiments, compared with 22 percent of Democrats.

This underscores just how frightened of the government far-right Republicans are.

A Quinnipiac University poll this month found that 91 percent of Americans (including 88 percent of Republicans) said that they supported background checks for all gun buyers. But that same poll found that 61 percent of Republicans worried that if there were background checks for all gun purchases, the government would use that information in the future to confiscate legally owned guns.

Furthermore, a January Pew Research Center report found that for the first time since the question was asked in 1995, most Americans now believe that the federal government threatens their personal rights and freedoms.

According to the report:

“The growing view that the federal government threatens personal rights and freedoms has been led by conservative Republicans. Currently 76 percent of conservative Republicans say that the federal government threatens their personal rights and freedoms and 54 percent describe the government as a ‘major’ threat.”

The report continued:

“By comparison, there has been little change in opinions among Democrats; 38 percent say the government poses a threat to personal rights and freedoms and just 16 percent view it as a major threat.”

Incidentally, 62 percent of those who had a gun in their home thought the government posed a threat, as opposed to 45 percent of those without a gun in the home.

In January, the right-wing Web site World Net Daily, writing about a poll the site conducted with the consulting firm Wenzel Strategies, bemoaned:

“The seeds of a tyrannical government are present in the United States, with a citizenry happy with a heavily armed law enforcement presence and a disbelief that their government could do anything that would make them want to revolt, according to a new poll.” The poll revealed “widespread belief” that the Second Amendment “really is for self-protection and hunting, not for ‘fighting back against a tyrannical government.’”

Fritz Wenzel of the consulting firm is quoted as saying that the poll’s finding “demonstrates the downside of more than 230 years of government stability. This survey shows it is hard for many Americans to think of a situation in which their government would need to be overthrown. Of course, the last time there was a serious fight for the future of the federal government, in the Civil War, Washington won.”

And that’s just the tip of it. Last month, Glenn Beck described the makeup of what he believed was the coming “New World Order.” It did not bode well for America.

“I think you might even have some Nazi influence in the United States, unfortunately, because we’ve had it before. And it will happen there and there, I think,” Beck said, placing dots over the Northwest and the Northeast on a map.

Discussing the Muslim Brotherhood’s “influence,” Beck said:

“I think there’s going to be a slight influence in South America and Mexico and in the United States. I think it is going to be more significant than anyone imagines, and I believe that you are also then going to be co-ruled by a thug-ocracy of this part of the world. And I think it’s going to be, at least in our case, I think it’s going to be China. China will be the balance of our power. They will use Muslim, um, Islam as the real enforcers that they will then help us and whoever is in power in our country. We will be ruled by an American, but it will be a technocrat that will answer to China. And, they will stomp things out and use Islam as much as they have to, to get rid of anyone who’s standing up, I think.”

O-kay.

And Beck delivered this prattle in a suit jacket, not a straitjacket.

This is the constant stream of desperate drivel that has fostered a climate of fear on the far right that makes common-sense consensus nearly impossible.

Next up is Mr. Nocera:

The last time your friendly scribe sought an interview with Joe Oliver, Canada’s minister of natural resources, he was turned down flat. It was February last year. Oliver had made a series of impolitic remarks about the efforts to block the Keystone XL oil pipeline, which, if it’s ever built, would import oil from the tar sands of Alberta to refineries along the Gulf Coast — and which Canadians believe that the United States would be nuts to reject.

“I referred to the fact that some U.S. environmental groups were sending money to Canada to advance their anti-pipeline, anti-hydrocarbon agenda, and I just felt that that effort was working against Canada’s national interest,” is how he puts it now. But shortly after Oliver began speaking out, Stephen Harper, the Canadian prime minister, told his cabinet to refrain from making any remarks that might be construed as commenting on the upcoming presidential election. Hence, no interviews with American columnists.

Which is not to say that Oliver — and Harper — didn’t have other means to send a message. After President Obama, looking to shore up his base, temporarily delayed the Keystone pipeline — an action that stunned Canada — the Canadian leaders jetted to China for a series of meetings with Chinese officials. Thanks to the Alberta sands, Canada is sitting on the third largest oil reserves in the world after Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. “That oil will be sold,” says Oliver, “if not to you, then to somebody else. That is not meant as a threat. It is just a fact.”

As you can tell by now, Oliver is talking again. With the election over; with a presidential decision on Keystone imminent; with the pipeline rerouted to mollify the concerns of Nebraskans; with the State Department having issued a recent report saying there are no environmental impediments — with all of that as the backdrop, Oliver came to New York and Washington earlier this week to preach Canada’s energy message.

In part because of enormous new natural gas finds, made possible thanks to hydraulic fracturing (a k a fracking), and in part because of the oil sands, energy independence is finally within reach for North America. As recently as five years ago, this goal would have been “inconceivable,” Oliver said on Monday, at a Bloomberg energy conference. Canada, he added, “has the resources to meet all of America’s future needs for imported oil.”

When I spoke to him before his speech, Oliver pointed out that Venezuela, which currently supplies the United States around one million barrels a day, has more than once threatened to cut us off. “That would never happen with Canada,” he said. “We honor our contractual obligations.” As a longtime supporter of Keystone, I could only nod my head in agreement.

Perhaps a quick refresher on the benefits of Keystone are in order. First, notwithstanding the development of alternative energy sources, the world is going to continue to need oil; Oliver, quoting the International Energy Agency, says that global energy demand is expected to grow by at least 35 percent over the next 20 years. The notion, pushed by environmentalists, that blocking the oil sands will spur green energy is delusion.

Second, energy independence is a long-sought national goal. We would no longer need OPEC, a cartel of countries with values, in many cases, antithetical to ours. Third, that oil is coming here anyway — by rail and boat, where spills are common, and via pipelines that are older, and hence less safe, than Keystone would be.

And one other thing: Oil mined from the sands is simply not as environmentally disastrous as opponents like to claim. Extraction technology has improved to the point where there is almost no difference, in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, between sands oil and old-fashioned oil drilling. The government has insisted that the companies extracting the oil return the land to its original state when the mining is completed. Indeed, for all the hysteria over the environmental consequences of the oil sands, there is oil in California that is actually dirtier than the oil from the sands.

Even now, nothing gets under Oliver’s skin more than the accusation that Canada’s oil sands will be ruinous to the environment. “That statement that the Keystone pipeline would mean ‘game over’ for the environment is absurd,” he said. He was referring, of course, to the line first used by James Hansen, the recently retired leader of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who is one of the most prominent critics of the oil sands and the Keystone pipeline.

I couldn’t help myself: I asked Oliver what he thought of Hansen’s willingness to chain himself to the White House fence to protest the pipeline.

He couldn’t help himself either. Given the dirty oil in California, he replied, “he should be chaining himself to a mannequin in Rodeo Drive.”

Gee, maybe he was “turned down flat” by Oliver in February of last year because he hadn’t started his crusade to build the pipeline yet… Nocera should go back to having fits about the NCAA and STFU about oil pipelines.

Blow and Nocera

Ms. Collins is off today.  Mr. Blow takes a look at “The Mind of a Terror Suspect” and says his tweets paint a fuller picture.  Oh, yes, by all means let’s focus on twitter-twatting…  Mr. Nocera considers “That Spineless Gun Vote” and says even the personal pleas from a survivor of Columbine can’t trump the power of the N.R.A. on Capitol Hill.  Here’s Mr. Blow:

While the Boston area lay paralyzed by a lockdown, with one terror suspect dead and another on the loose as a massive manhunt filtered through the area’s arteries, we got a better sense of the second young man.

It’s complicated.

The suspects were brothers. The one who was on the loose was taken into custody on Friday evening. He was the younger of the two, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19. The elder, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, was killed in a confrontation with authorities, but not before participating in the fatal shooting of an M.I.T. police officer, the carjacking of an S.U.V. and the shooting of a transit police officer, who was critically injured.

They were of Chechnyan heritage. Tamerlan was a boxer; Dzhokhar, a college student.

“A picture has begun to emerge of 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev as an aggressive, possibly radicalized immigrant who may have ensnared his younger brother Dzhokhar — described almost universally as a smart and sweet kid — into an act of terror,” The Boston Globe reported Friday.

The Globe quoted a person named Zaur Tsarnaev, who the newspaper said identified himself as a 26-year-old cousin of the suspects, as saying, “I used to warn Dzhokhar that Tamerlan was up to no good.” Tamerlan “was always getting into trouble,” he added. “He was never happy, never cheering, never smiling. He used to strike his girlfriend. He hurt her a few times. He was not a nice man. I don’t like to speak about him. He caused problems for my family.”

But what about that image of Dzhokhar as sweet?

On Friday, BuzzFeed and CNN claimed to verify Dzhokhar’s Twitter account. The tweets posted on that account give a window into a bifurcated mind — on one level, a middle-of-the-road 19-year-old boy, but on another, a person with a mind leaning toward darkness.

Like many young people, the person tweeting from that account liked rap music, saying of himself, “#imamacbookrapper when I’m bored,” and quoting rap lyrics in his tweets.

He tweeted quite a bit about women, dating and relationships; many of his musings were misogynistic and profane. Still, he seemed to want to have it both ways, to be rude and respectful at once, tweeting on Dec. 24, 2012: “My last tweets felt too wrong. I don’t like to objectify women or judge anyone for their actions.”

He was a proud Muslim who tweeted about going to mosque and enjoying talking — and even arguing — about religion with others. But he seemed to believe that different faiths were in competition with one another. On Nov. 29, he tweeted: “I kind of like religious debates, just hearing what other people believe is interesting and then crushing their beliefs with facts is fun.”

His politics seemed jumbled. He was apparently a 9/11 Truther, posting a tweet on Sept. 1 that read in part, “Idk why it’s hard for many of you to accept that 9/11 was an inside job.” On Election Day he retweeted a tweet from Barack Obama that read: “This happened because of you. Thank you.” But on March 20 he tweeted, “Evil triumphs when good men do nothing.” This sounds like a take on a quote from Edmund Burke, who is viewed by many as the founder of modern Conservatism: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had strong views on the Middle East, tweeting on Nov. 28, “Free Palestine.” Later that day he tweeted, “I was going to make a joke about Hamas but it Israeli inappropriate.”

Toward the end of last year, the presence of dark tweets seemed to grow — tweets that in retrospect might have raised some concerns.

He tweeted about crime. On Dec. 28 he tweeted about what sounds like a hit-and-run: “Just saved a bunch of money on my car insurance by switching my car into reverse and driving away from the accident.” And on Feb. 6 he tweeted, “Everything in life can be free if you run fast enough.”

He posted other tweets that could be taken as particularly ominous.

Oct. 22: “i won’t run i’ll just gun you all out #thugliving.”

Jan. 5: “I don’t like when people ask unnecessary questions like how are you? Why so sad? Why do you need cyanide pills?”

Jan. 16: “Breaking Bad taught me how to dispose of a corpse.”

Feb. 2: “Do I look like that much of a softy?” The tweet continued with “little do these dogs know they’re barking at a lion.”

Feb. 13: “I killed Abe Lincoln during my two hour nap #intensedream.”

The last tweet on the account reads: “I’m a stress free kind of guy.” The whole of the Twitter feed would argue against that assessment.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 20, 2013

An earlier version of this column misstated the origins of the suspects. They were not from Chechnya, but of Chechnyan heritage.

And now here’s Mr. Nocera:

On April 20, 1999, Katie Lyles, a high school sophomore, was taking a math test when she heard a popping sound. “I assumed it was a prank,” she says.

It wasn’t. The fire alarm soon went off, and a teacher shouted, “This is not a drill. Go, go, go!” Katie and several classmates ran through the neighborhood, seeking shelter. All around them, they could hear the screams of sirens and the whir of helicopter blades.

Finally, a woman answered their frantic knocking. “Are you all from the high school?” she asked. When they said yes, the woman invited them in. That is where they learned that two of their fellow students at Columbine High School had gone on a murderous spree, killing 13 and wounding 21, before turning their guns on themselves.

On Wednesday, 14 years later, I met Katie Lyles in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. Now 30 and married, Katie is a grade-school art teacher in Littleton, Colo., the same town where she became, in the sad vernacular of our age, “a Columbine survivor.” She was in Washington as part of a lobbying effort by the National Education Association, the big teachers’ union, to back the handful of simple, common-sense gun bills, starting with universal background checks, that the Senate would be voting on later that day.

Until the shootings in Newtown, Conn., Katie had never spoken publicly about her experience. She is still affected by what happened that day. But after Newtown, Katie realized that the school where she now teaches was as vulnerable to gun violence as Columbine had been in 1999. And she couldn’t stay silent. “I realize that my life has led me to this moment,” she says.

We talked for maybe 20 minutes before Katie and the N.E.A. lobbyists went off to their next appointment. And, of course, a few hours later, the Senate voted down every single gun proposal that was on the table. Among those who cast votes against universal background checks, which should have been a no-brainer, were four Democrats. They are: Max Baucus of Montana, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Mark Begich of Alaska and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota. (The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, changed his vote from “yea” to “nay,” but that was said to be for tactical reasons, so he could bring the legislation up again at a later date.)

I spent much of Thursday calling the offices of the four Democrats with one question: Why? Why had they voted against universal background checks? Begich’s office put out a statement claiming that universal background checks “do not reflect Alaska values.” How so? His office wouldn’t say. Although Heitkamp issued a press release boasting of protecting “the Second Amendment rights of North Dakotans,” calls to her office produced only busy signals. The phone in Baucus’s office rang and rang and rang. Nobody answered.

Of course, we all know the reason: The four Democrats — along with many Republicans — quake in fear of the National Rifle Association. In 1994, Baucus voted in favor of the assault rifle ban — and then nearly lost his re-election bid. He never again stood up to the N.R.A. Yes, his phones were undoubtedly jammed this week. Still, it seemed to me that his unanswered phone was a potent symbol. I could almost picture him cowering in his office, waiting for us to stop asking why he sold the country down the river.

I loathe single-issue politics, but maybe this is what it has come to. Maybe it is going to take senators like Max Baucus losing their jobs because they wouldn’t stand up to the N.R.A. Maybe it is going to require the majority of Americans who support sensible gun laws to turn themselves into an avenging political force. I wish it weren’t so, but nothing else seems to move them — not even the sight of 20 slaughtered children in Connecticut.

On Thursday afternoon, I spoke again to Katie Lyles. She was deeply disappointed, of course, but she wasn’t ready to give up. A few months earlier, she had testified before the Colorado State Legislature as it debated stricter gun laws, including mandatory background checks and a limit to the size of magazines. The laws passed a month ago.

“It took a long time,” she said. “Fourteen years. You can’t give up just because you lose one battle.”

She pointed out something else. Colorado has seen some of the nation’s worst gun tragedies — not just Columbine, but last year’s shooting in Aurora. “We’re a Western state,” she said. Colorado has plenty of gun owners. Yet it was still willing to pass tough new gun laws. Katie believes that all that pain Colorado has experienced is the reason.

“I fear that people are going to have to experience that pain for themselves before we can pass these bills,” she said.

“But I hope not.”

Blow, solo

Ms. Collins is off today, so Mr. Blow is flying solo.  In “The Kids Are (Not) All Right” he says in a Unicef report, the United States once again ranked among the worse wealthy countries for children’s well-being.  Proving once and for all that the forced birth fanatics don’t give a fck about “the children” once they leave the womb.  Here he is:

The United States has done it again — and not in a good way.

According to a Unicef report issued last week — “Child Well-Being in Rich Countries” — the United States once again ranked among the worst wealthy countries for children, coming in 26th place of 29 countries included. Only Lithuania, Latvia and Romania placed lower, and those were among the poorest countries assessed in the study.

But let’s start with the good news, or what little there is to glean from the report: the United States has one of the lowest rates of children reporting that they smoke regularly or have been drunk at least twice, and our children are among the most likely to exercise daily. We also have one of the lowest levels of air pollution. We’re in the middle in terms of overall educational achievement, so I guess that could be considered “good” (give me a break, I’m reaching here). But that’s where the good news ends.

According to the report, the United States has the second highest share of children living under the relative poverty line, defined as 50 percent of each country’s median income, and the second largest “child poverty gap” (the distance between the poverty line and the median incomes of those below the line).

The United States ranked 25th out of 29 in the percentage of people 15 to 19 years old who were enrolled in schools and colleges and 23rd in the percentage of people in that cohort not participating in either education, employment or training.

We have the highest teen fertility rate, and among the highest infant mortality rates. We have one of the lowest child immunization rates and lowest average birth weights.

Although our children were among the least likely to smoke cigarettes, they were among the most likely to smoke marijuana. (For the record, I’m strongly in favor of the decriminalization of marijuana, but I don’t believe that children are fully capable of understanding the risks and implications of smoking anything.)

Although our children were among the most likely to exercise, they were also the most overweight.

But perhaps the most interesting part of the study is what children themselves say about their levels of personal satisfaction and the quality of their relationships.

American children were in the bottom third when ranking their own level of “life satisfaction.” Our children were 28th out of 29 countries in ranking the quality of their relationships (the French were dead last). Only 56 percent of children in the United States find their classmates “kind and helpful,” 73 percent find it “easy to talk” to their mothers and 59 percent find it “easy to talk” to their fathers.

These were among the worst rankings in the study.

In fact, according to data released last month by the Children’s Defense Fund, each day in America:

2 mothers die in childbirth.

4 children are killed by abuse or neglect.

5 children or teens commit suicide.

7 children or teens are killed by firearms.

67 babies die before their first birthdays.

892 babies are born at low birth weight.

914 babies are born to teen mothers.

1,208 babies are born without health insurance.

1,825 children are confirmed as abused or neglected.

2,712 babies are born into poverty.

2,857 high school students drop out.

4,475 babies are born to unmarried mothers.

That is a supremely sad list of numbers, and it’s only a small sample.

This says nothing of the violent society that we have created for our children. We have the third highest homicide rate among developed countries, according to Unicef. And according to a December Gallup poll, a third of parents fear for their children’s physical safety at school, and most believe it’s likely that a shooting like the one in Newtown, Conn., could happen in their communities.

That only makes sense in a country with nearly as many guns as people, where nearly half of all households have guns in them and where extending federal background checks — while supported by the vast majority of the American public — can’t make it through the Senate.

We hear so much about what we’re leaving behind for future generations, but not nearly enough about how we are failing them today. It is a failure of parenting, a failure of society, a failure of politicians.

We need smart and courageous parenting, as well as policies that invest time and money, love and understanding in our children.

Failures sown one season will surely bloom the next.