The story of the day is without doubt the murder of cartoonists and policemen at the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. James Joyner remarks on it:

If witness accounts are correct, this almost certainly qualifies as a terrorist attack. It’s politically motivated and organized, rather than the spontaneous act of a mob or the actions of a lone psychopath.

We can only infer the motivations of the murderers. In today’s environment in which everyone carries a video camera there is, of course, some video coverage of the events. I will spare you the videos. One of them shows one of the gunmen murdering a wounded policeman who was writhing on the ground in pain in cold blood. The policeman posed no threat to them. He was killed out of sheer blood lust.

Eyewitness accounts leave little doubt that the gunmen were Muslims.

Al Jazeera provides some balancing reaction:

The attack, as yet unclaimed, comes amid what a number of commentators have identified as rising xenophobia in Europe, with thousands of protesters in several German cities rallying earlier this week against Muslim immigration. France’s five-million-strong Muslim population is Europe’s largest.

“I am extremely angry. These are criminals, barbarians. They have sold their soul to hell. This is not freedom. This is not Islam and I hope the French will come out united at the end of this,” said Hassen Chalghoumi, imam of the Drancy mosque in Paris’s Seine-Saint-Denis northern suburb.

For more coverage see memeorandum here and here.

This incident has taken place in the context of a Europe in which anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim populist parties are rising in influence across the Continent. In Sweden the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrat Party has seen a rapid rise to prominence. It’s at bay now but I suspect not for long. The anti-immigrant group PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident) has been conducting substantial demonstrations in Dresden. Anti-immigration parties are on the rise in the UK, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Greece, just to name a few countries.

I do not believe that the editors of the New York Times appreciate the difference between the United States and the ethnically-defined states of Europe:

In part because of its Nazi past, Germany has long been liberal in offering asylum. In the past year, it took in about 200,000 asylum seekers, most of them from Iraq and Syria — the largest intake of any other country in Europe and four times the German total in 2012. Fortunately, the rise of an anti-immigrant movement has not dissuaded the government from its policy. On the contrary, after a similar Pegida-organized march in Dresden in December, Chancellor Merkel used her New Year’s address to strongly urge Germans to keep their distance from such rallies.

Admirable as they are, such exhortations will not stop Pegida or other anti-immigrant movements across Europe. Germany and every other European government must find ways to integrate immigrants into their societies and to speak out clearly and firmly against the rise of racism and xenophobia. But there is a limit to what any one government can do to control the flow of people fleeing poverty, war and repression.

Given the open or porous borders across the continent, immigration and asylum demand pan-European action. Shiploads of desperate refugees braving the Mediterranean cannot be the sole responsibility of coastal nations like Italy, nor is it fair for some states to accept thousands of asylum-seekers while others shut their borders. At the least, the European Union should sharply increase the funds it earmarks for handling immigration. Beyond that, it has become essential for the union to shape a common policy on asylum. An equitably shared burden should be easier for politicians to defend, and united action on multinational problems is what the European Union is all about.

The U. S. has historically defined itself as a “nation of immigrants”. European countries have not. Whether they will be able to make a transition in how they define their own identities will be a challenge moving forward.

Refusal to accept local standards and resorting to extreme violence as in this heinous incident will certainly not help the immigrants’ case.

There’s an interesting quiz on energy over at Forbes you might want to try out. I got all but one right. I find that quizzes like this usually reveal the areas in which my background of knowledge is weakest and this one was no exception. As it turns out I did not know how many miles of oil and gas pipeline we had in the U. S.

Did Homer write The Iliad? Did he even exist? Did a whole culture write it?

The earliest fragments of The Iliad date from about 200 BC. To the best of my knowledge the earliest complete text of the work is from the 10th century AD and all present texts derive from a particularly fine manuscript called Venentus A. If The Iliad can be said to have had an author he was probably a medieval monk, working from a manuscript tradition that preceded him by about a millennium. Presumably, that in turn was preceded by an oral tradition but about that we can only make guesses.

Somehow Heinrich Schliemann took that mess and used as it a roadmap to dig up an ancient city he called “Troy”. More than anything else I think that probably suggests that you can dig just about anywhere in what’s modern Turkey and come up with important archaeological findings.

I think that Michael Gerson is underestimating President Obama’s accomplishments. Not only has he undone Bill Clinton’s accomplishments, he’s undone FDR’s.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal proffer advice on how the new Congress can be a better Congress:

So the overall GOP goal should be to craft an agenda centered on faster economic growth, job creation and raising middle-class incomes. Theme by theme, Republicans can show the country how they would govern if they take the White House in 2016 while accepting as many incremental policy gains as they can get.

The leadership can start with policies most likely to get through the Senate and onto Mr. Obama’s desk. Two good candidates are bipartisan bills to approve the Keystone XL pipeline and restore the normal 40-hour workweek under ObamaCare. If the President vetoes, he’ll be the obstructionist.

Republicans can then suss out what else is possible with Democrats, with or without Mr. Obama. The most cited areas of potential agreement are trade promotion authority, regulatory restraint and perhaps corporate tax reform. This White House has a talent for inflaming debates when the real policy differences are few and small, but Republicans might as well try to do business, and the sooner the better.

There are quite a few factors left out of their calculus. We already know what a House Minority Leader Pelosi will be like. She’ll act much as she has for the last several years: she will oppose just about everything the majority wants to accomplish and have varied success in holding her caucus together.

But what will a Senate Minority Leader Reid do? Will he be more eager for compromise and, frankly, more interested in enacting legislation than he was as majority leader? I find that prospect hard to credit. Or will his primary objective be not leaving fingerprints as it was when he was majority leader? That resulted in disaster for his party—not leaving fingerprints meant that Democratic senators had no record on which to run other than the areas in which they supported the president which didn’t make for strong re-election campaigns. There are people who believe that if they just keep repeating the same losing strategy over and over again it will eventually succeed. We’ll soon learn if Harry Reid is one of them.

As to whether Mitch McConnell’s leadership will be any better, we can only speculate. John Boehner continues to face opposition from within his own caucus from radicals, some newly elected, who believe they were sent to Washington for the express purpose of not working with establishment Republicans let alone Democrats or the president.

Will the 114th Congress be a better Congress or just a different one? I’d put my money on the latter but I’m always ready to be pleasantly surprised.

Last night two plainclothes police officers were shot in New York City:

Two plainclothes cops were shot in the Bronx after trying to stop a robbery Monday night, police sources said.

The shooter and his accomplice are at large.

Officer Andrew Dossi, 30, was shot in the arm and back, while Officer Aliro Pellerano, 38, was shot in the arm and abdomen at about 10:30 p.m. in Fordham Heights, police sources said.

The two went to St. Barnabas Hospital, where they are expected to recover.

Dossi went into surgery and is in critical but stable condition, Police Commissioner Bill Bratton said. Pellerano is in stable condition.

For more commentary and coverage on the incident see memeorandum.

It is not my general practice to criticize or even attempt to analyze state and local governments other than my own on the principle that people living in other states and towns are entitled to any blame-fool government they wish. However, I think it’s obvious that New York Mayor Bill de Blasio finds himself on the horns of a dilemma in the matter of his relationship with the New York Police Department. His election campaign was based in part on abandoning New York’s “stop and frisk” policy and police officers in New York took this as being anti-police. That’s not unreasonable under the circumstances. I don’t know what New York’s like in this regard but in Chicago last year alone here police officers experienced 7,000 incidents in which they were faced with firearms.

de Blasio’s dilemma is this. On the one hand his staunchest supporters are anti-police, at least as seen by the police. On the other New York is a tough place and the city probably needs the police more than it does Bill de Blasio. He’s bound to make somebody unhappy.

David Frum’s musing over whether immigrants help or harm native workers is interesting but his peroration is the best part:

Theoretically, a nation could determine that high-skill labor is complementary to low-skilled labor and make decisions such as the following:

“If we admit a lot of foreign-born surgeons, we could hugely drive down the cost of major medical operations. American-born doctors would shift their labor to fields where their language facility gave them a competitive advantage: away from surgery to general practice. This policy would hugely enhance the relative purchasing power of plumbers and mechanics, enabling them to eat out more often and buy more American-made entertainment, increasing GDP and creating jobs.”

Or: “The ratio of CEO pay to other workers has skyrocketed. Obviously we are suffering from a glut of workers and massive CEO scarcity. We should issue work permits automatically to any executive with a job offer that pays more than $500,000 a year. Americans with organizational skills will be pressed to shift to the public sector, improving the quality and lowering the cost to taxpayers of government services.”

But that’s not how things are done. In the United States, the hypothesis of native-immigrant complementarity is deployed to justify policies that intensify competition for the lower and middle echelons of the society, rarely near the top. Perhaps it doesn’t have to be that way, yet somehow it always is.

Much of the article is devoted to the notion of complementarity, the idea that specialization will impel native workers to seek employment farther up the skill chain. What if there are no such jobs? What if you hire immigrants for the jobs farther up the skill chain, too?

However much training (or retraining) they might receive every displaced native workers cannot become a neurosurgeon, a nuclear physicist, or even a petroleum engineer. There are substantial barriers to entering those fields not the least of which is the rarity of the basic attributes of mind required to do those jobs. What becomes of the rest of the population? This is not Lake Wobegone. All the children are not above average.

Illinois’s failure to increase its state minimum wage for this year inspires the banner image for this post at Quartz on state minimum wage increases around the country for 2015:

In 2015, minimum wage workers in 23 states and Washington, DC. will see bumps to their paychecks, to varying degrees.

Twenty of those states, and DC, saw increases on Jan. 1. Some of the increases are staggered, beginning on the first day of the year, with an additional increase over the next 12 months.

As I’ve said before, I wouldn’t oppose an increase in the national minimum wage, particularly one that was gradual, measured, and could be halted if it cost jobs. I think that a higher state minimum wage for Illinois would be foolish and the reason is highlighted by the map that accompanies the Quartz post:

The map shows that Illinois’s minimum wage is higher than that of any state it adjoins. What it doesn’t show is that most of Illinois’s population centers are on the state’s borders: Chicago is near both Indiana and Wisconsin, Rock Island borders Iowa, Rockford is near the Wisconsin border, East St. Louis on the border with Missouri, and so on. The exceptions are Bloomington, a college town that depends on state funding, Springfield, the state capital, and Peoria. Peoria’s unemployment rate is nearly 8%, a point and a half higher than the state average. Peoria needs jobs more than it needs a higher minimum wage. Under the circumstances a higher minimum wage is a prescription for driving business out of the state, something Illinois can hardly stand.

The states that have raised their minimum wage, particularly those that have raised them substantially and rapidly, e.g. Washington, are conducting a real-life experiment. We will soon be in a position to evaluate its results.

Am I just crepe-hanging or when pundits start advising us that the economy is starting to kick into high gear and some are calling for new taxes does it make you think that the next downturn in the business cycle might be sooner than we might want?