For sheer schadenfreude it’s hard to beat this pick-up by Kimberley Strassel:

About the only thing Ms. Slaughter didn’t do in five hours was offer House Speaker John Boehner her litigation notes. For it seems to have slipped Ms. Slaughter’s mind—and the press’s attention—that a mere eight years ago she was a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by congressional Democrats against George W. Bush. The year was 2006, just as Democrats were, uh, peaking in their campaign to take back the House.

Democrats were sore that they’d lost a fight over a budget bill that made cuts to Medicaid and student loans. They dredged up a technical mistake—a tiny difference between the House and Senate version of the bill. Michigan Democrat John Conyers, ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, decided to (how did Ms. Slaughter put it?) file a lawsuit against the president brought by half of the Congress. He was joined as a plaintiff by nearly every other then-ranking Democratic member and titan in the House— Charles Rangel, John Dingell, George Miller, Collin Peterson, Bennie Thompson, Barney Frank, Pete Stark, James Oberstar and Ms. Slaughter herself.

How things have changed in just one administration! Some of the same people who were complaining about President Bush’s high-handed attitudes towards the law then are lambasting the Republicans for complaining about President Obama’s expansive view of what is “necessary and proper” now. And in much the same language:

In an April 2006 Huffington Post piece titled “Taking the President to Court,” Mr. Conyers explained that he was “alarmed by the erosion of our constitutional form of government,” and by a president who “shrugged” about “the law.” After “consulting with some of the foremost constitutional experts in the nation,” he had determined that there was “one group of people” who were “injured” by Mr. Bush’s lack of respect for “checks and balances”: Congress. So he was “going”—or as Ms. Slaughter might put it, “running”—”to court.”

I guess it looks different when the other guy is doing it.

Miles White, CEO of Chicago-based Abbott Laboratories, explains corporate inversion, companies’ changing of national jurisdictions, frequently seeking tax relief:

First, inversion is legal. Period. It’s allowed in the tax code. The tax code even specifies the terms and conditions under which it may be done. Reference 26 U.S. Code Section 7874.

Inversion doesn’t change a company’s tax rate. A company pays the same tax rate in the U.S. after inversion as it does before inverting. A company also pays the same tax rates in foreign domiciles before and after inversion.

Inversion does not relieve any pre-existing tax burden. It does not reduce the tax that any company would ultimately have to pay on past earnings overseas that have been deferred under the U.S. tax system.

The tax law today views overseas earnings that have not been repatriated as part of the U.S. tax system, regardless of whether a company has inverted. Therefore, those past foreign earnings, if repatriated to the U.S., are still subject to full U.S. taxation.

What does change after inversion is a company’s access to its future foreign earnings generated outside of the U.S. tax system. Those future earnings may be used for any capital allocation purpose the company may have, including investment in the U.S., without the additional U.S. repatriation tax. Foreign taxes will have already been paid on those profits earned outside the U.S. It is the additional repatriation tax, imposed by high corporate tax rate in the U.S., that is not paid after inversion.

When a company changes its headquarters some portion of the jobs associated with corporate headquarters are inevitably lost.

For me that raises the question of what sort of jobs the Obama Administration actually wants? They clearly don’t want more corporate staff jobs. They don’t want more mining or logging or power plants or oil refining. They don’t want more heavy manufacturing. The tens of thousands of jobs for solar panel installers failed to materialize. We are so overbuilt in housing and infrastructure that larger numbers of new construction jobs are unlikely. States, their budgets pressed by tax revenues inadequate to pay their Medicaid bills and the pensions and benefits promised to past employees are reducing the number of present employees.

The economy isn’t like an army where you command and things happen but like farming. You prepare the soil, sow the seed, fertilize the crops, fend off predators and diseases. Nature (or God, if you prefer) produces the crops but the richness of the harvest can be influenced by the skill and effort you put into it.

It’s like the parable:

“Behold, a sower went out to sow. 4 And as he sowed, some seed fell by the wayside; and the birds came and devoured them. 5 Some fell on stony places, where they did not have much earth; and they immediately sprang up because they had no depth of earth. 6 But when the sun was up they were scorched, and because they had no root they withered away. 7 And some fell among thorns, and the thorns sprang up and choked them. 8 But others fell on good ground and yielded a crop: some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. 9 He who has ears to hear, let him hear!”

We’ve been sowing among the thorns and on the stones for a long time. And yet, somehow, we’re surprised at the results.

I don’t really have a great deal to say about the Malaysian passenger jet that was shot down over the eastern Ukraine:

A surface-to-air missile struck a Malaysia Airlines plane carrying 298 people that went down Thursday in Ukraine near the Russian border, a U.S. official told ABC News.

The official said U.S. intelligence and analysis of the situation determined that it was a single missile that struck the Boeing 777-200 aircraft while at cruising altitude. It is unclear whether the missile was fired from inside Ukrainian or Russian territory and who fired it, the official added.

I can see only a few likely possibilities.

1. It was shot down by Russian regulars operating within Ukraine.
2. It was shot down by Russian regulars who’d removed their uniforms operating within Ukraine (a war crime).
3. It was shot down by pro-Russian Ukrainian irregulars who’d received a Buk missile from the Russians.
4. It was shot down by somebody who’d captured a Buk missile from somebody.

Whichever of these is the case it’s disturbing. Alternative C is particularly disturbing in its foolhardiness. I doubt that this event is a “game-changer” as some are claiming so much as a signal that events in Ukraine are out of anyone’s control.

That’s particularly distressing since the only power in a position to bring things under control is Russia.

You know, it seems to me that the hunt for the Great White Whale comprehensive immigration reform is actually impeding immigration reform. There’s a limited group of measures that have broadbased public support and I’ll bet a shiny new dime could actually get bipartisan support in Congress including reforming the law that requires Central American kids who present themselves at the border be treated differently than Canadian or Mexican kids that do the same, some version of the DREAM Act, and stricter enforcement.

However, that won’t satisfy the activists on either side. I don’t believe that legislation is being held hostage by rank-and-file Democrats or Republicans. I think it’s being held hostage by the most extreme on each side.

One last observation: if we want to be more like Canada or Australia we’re going to need immigration laws more like Canada’s and Australia’s. The linchpin of our policy, family reunification, is a much lower priority for the Canucks and Aussies. I don’t think we want our policy to be like Mexico’s where irony of ironies, immigration law is much more restrictive and severe than it is here.

Eric B. Schnurer and Daniela Glick have some reasonable-enough sounding suggestions for reforming our federal jobs development program. Here are the highlights of their proposal:

1. Create a more flexible, integrated, and comprehensive system.
2. Integrate workforce-development initiatives into broader efforts to improve the economy.
3. Focus on demand: what local employers need now and what they expect to need in the future.
4. Broaden the system’s focus and client base.
5. Connect education to workforce needs.

I’m pretty sure that institutional inertia will prevent any of those reforms from being implemented. We’ll just keep doing what we’ve been doing. Indeed, Congress is on the cusp of re-authorizing the existing job development program which is expensive, byzantine, a product of another age, and, not to put too fine a point on it, not working.

If you keep doing what you’ve been doing, getting the results you’ve been getting is actually the best case scenario.

Oh, well. I guess re-authorizing the program is better than what we’ve been doing for the last several years which is continuing to budget the old, expired program without re-authorizing it. Baby steps.

There’s a report that Microsoft will be laying off a significant number of employees:

Microsoft is planning to shed thousands of jobs in what could be the largest round of layoffs in its history, Bloomberg reported Tuesday, citing anonymous people familiar with the company’s plans.

Microsoft, Redmond, Wash., will likely cut jobs from its marketing and engineering teams, as well as from its Nokia handset unit, which it acquired for $7.2 billion in a deal that closed in April, Bloomberg reported.

The layoffs will probably be more painful in Finland than here or anywhere else but still… Proof positive there’s a STEM shortage!

Speaking of stomach-churning, you might want to take a look at Robert Kagan’s Washington Post op-ed on the conditions under which the United States should use force in its dealings with other nations. Then again, you might not. Here’s his opening paragraph:

Was the Iraq war the greatest strategic error in recent decades, as some pundits have suggested recently? The simple answer is no. That honor belongs to the failure to take action against al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden before the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans on U.S. soil on Sept. 11, 2001. And if one wants to go back a few decades further, it was the failure to stop Hitler in Europe and to deter war with Japan, failures that dwarf both Iraq and Vietnam in terms of their tragic consequences and the cost in lives and treasure.

I’ll answer the question. We should only use force when it is just to do so and all other alternatives have been exhausted. None of the examples he cites meets those criteria.

Not wanting to take the measures short of using force that would have obviated the use of force does not not mean that you have exhausted all alternatives. It means you just don’t like the alternatives.

If you can subject the choice to a cost-benefit analysis, you should not use force. Using force under the circumstances is unjust and immoral. Not to mention illegal if it hasn’t been authorized by the UN Security Council.

Thomas Kedsall points out an interesting development in intra-party Democratic politics:

David Leege, an emeritus professor of political science at Notre Dame, wrote in an email to The Times that younger Democrats “are products of a totally different environment and culture than their grandparents.” As a result, he said, “there is a vast difference between the communitarianism of the elders and the individualism of the younger liberals.”

In the future, Leege argues, “the combination of unanchored and individualistic electorates and the post-Citizens United political arena can make elections perpetually close.”

Money, in Leege’s view, will likely trump the demographic trends favoring Democrats.

I think there’s a lot in Mr. Kedsall’s column that just isn’t quite right. For example, I don’t believe that young people are notably less “communitarian” than their elders. It’s just that their communities don’t align with the neighborhoods they happen to live in or their legislative districts. By the magic of Facebook and Twitter their communites are smeared all over the country and throughout the world. The implications of that for government legitimacy or policy whether here or in China or in Sweden haven’t been realized yet.

In reaction to the reports of flagging union support for Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and an apparent viable opponent in the person of CTU president Karen Lewis, Joe Gandelman writes:

So much for having him being seen as a political whirlwind who’ll easily serve many years as Chicago’s mayor. Rahm Emanuel has hit a political speed-bump. Part of it is due to the blood-fest that descended on Chicago on the 4th of July. And part of it is because no one has ever accused his political style of being endearing or even in power-politics terms utterly irresistible.

But the bottom line is this: one new poll has his political numbers are tanking faster than a new van of pet fish being unloaded at PetCo. And you can tell his side is worried when they respond as partisans almost always do: questioning the methodology of a poll that shows them in a bad light.

His analysis:

Yes, his problem has been arrogance – and merely dismissing a poll by questioning how it’s conducted could provide proof when voters go to the polls that further arrogance when it comes to the seriousness of your political situation could be hazardous to your political health and long-term political ambitions.

I disagree with that. Arrogance has never been a barrier to Chicago mayors being elected and re-elected, term after term. As I’ve written before, Rahm Emanuel has Peter Principled out.

To refresh your memory, the Peter Principle, first enunciated by Laurence Peter, is the proposition that in a large, hierarchical organization people tend to be promoted to their “level of incompetence”. Not their maximum level of competence, mind you. Their level of incompetence.

It stands to reason after a fashion. Pay and status aren’t determined by productivity or even your value to the organization but by the your job title, description, and seniority. The most effective mailroom clerk isn’t paid more than the least effective. The most senior, who may or may not be more effective, is paid more. The reason for this is obvious: it’s easier to administer.

As Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel is so far beyond his level of competence it is stomach-churning. His election as mayor is a sad illustration of how far being a top Democratic Party fund-raiser will take you. Raising money is a necessary skill in politics today but it doesn’t make you a good mayor of Chicago.

However, incompetence, too, is no barrier to holding high elective office for year after year. And Mayor Emanuel doesn’t depend on local resources for his campaign fund so local funds drying up that won’t be a problem, either.

My own view is that I don’t think that Rahm Emanuel has the time to be the mayor of Chicago. He’s too busy raising money for the party and will be heavily involved in the presidential campaign of whoever ends up running for president on the Democratic ballot.

But given the power of incumbency and his large war chest pronouncing his re-election in trouble is, well, an exaggeration. The only thing he has to fear is a large voter turnout.