The Watcher’s Council has announced its winners for last week.

Council Winners

• *First place with 5 1/3 votes!Joshuapundit–Obama’s Loving Requiem For A Prominent Communist – And Mine
• Second place with 2 2/3 votes –The Noisy Room – The New Progressive McCarthyism
• Third place with 2 votes –The Razor – China’s Rise No Longer Peaceful
• Fourth place *t* with 1 vote –The Right Planet – The Inequality of Equality
• Fourth place *t* with 1 vote –Ask Marion – The Power and Ruling Elite
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote –The Independent Sentinel – What Obama Won’t Dare Talk About in His State of the Union Speech
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote –Simply Jews – Now, what will State Department say about that?
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote –Bookworm Room – Dachau: The bitter fruit of a terrible evil, in color
• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote –Nice Deb – Comments on proposed IRS rule targeting the Tea Party Overwhelmingly negative
• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote –GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD – Iran’s Next Supreme Leader
• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote –Liberty’s Spirit – How frightening is this Hillary 2016 reality?

Non-Council Winners

• First place with 3 1/3 votes! –Kevin Williamson/NRO – Great Caesar’s Ghost submitted by Joshuapundit
• Second place with 2 2/3 votes -Sultan Knish –Totalitarians of New York submitted by The Noisy Room
• Third place with 2 1/3 votes – – Dangerous Minds – It didn’t always suck to be a woman in Afghanistan submitted by GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD
• Fourth place *t* with 1 vote –The Passing Parade – The Canard Conspiracy, only vaguely by Robert Ludlum…or someone like him, only still living submitted by Simply Jews
• Fourth place with 1 vote–Watchdog Wire – Citizen Files Ethics Complaint Against Wendy Davis submitted by Rhymes with Right
• Fourth place *t* with 1 votes ––Dennis Prager/National Review–What Bothers You Most?submitted by Bookworm Room
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote –Maggie’s Notebook –Malik Obama, Obama’s Brother Photo’d with Hamas Scarf & Slogan: ‘Jerusalem is ours – WE ARE COMING! submitted by The Independent Sentinel
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote –Crystal Wright/Washingtonian Times –Hillary Clinton and Chris Christie – Oh, how the mighty may fallsubmitted by Ask Marion
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote –MoreRight.Net –Splitting Apart the United States submitted by The Razor
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote – JustOneMinute – They Lost Me With ‘Hello’ submitted by The Glittering Eye
• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote ––Allen West – Tonight: The State of the Dictator — uh, Union submitted by VA Right!
• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote – –Gary Schmitt/The Weekly Standard – Privacy or Security: a False Choice submitted by Liberty’s Spirit
• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote ––Rick Moran/PJ Media –Media Not Very Curious about D’Souza Indictment submitted by Nice Deb

The announcement post at the Watcher’s site is here.
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You might want to check out this column by Robert Samuelson in the Washington Post respecting myths about income inequality. His basic point is that the poor aren’t poor because the rich are rich.

I think that depends a bit on how you define “rich” and “poor”. If you define rich as anybody with a household income over $250,000, as the Obama administration seems to do, and poor as anybody who has a lower income than that, as many people seem to do (it’s the only way you could evoke sympathy for the financial plight of a married couple who are both Chicago Public School high school teachers, for example), I think there’s a case to be made.

As I’ve said any number of times before, I reserve the term “rich” for what’s called the “ultra-rich”—individuals in the top .1% of income earners and “poor” for those in the bottom quintile of income earners. I don’t honestly believe that using those definitions the poor are poor because the rich are rich. I think those rich are rich because they’re the few who are in the “long tail” of income earners and those poor are poor because they’re immigrants without working skills, black, disabled, and so on.

There’s an interesting article here about the seven largest producers of greenhouse gases. They are China, the United States, India, Brazil, Russia, Germany, and the United Kingdom. I found some of the issues mentioned in the article remarkable non sequiturs. Does it really matter what your emissions per square mile or even per person are? There’s also a surprising omission: trends are not mentioned. In the United States the total emissions and emissions per additional dollar of GDP have been stable or falling. In China and India they’re rising sharply. Germany, too, has seen its emissions increase recently albeit from a much, much lower level. See this chart.

Nonetheless, the U. S. still has a lot of low-hanging fruit left to pick in this area and a lot could be done without tremendous cost. Conversion from coal to natural gas may even do a lot of the heavy lifting for us, as it has been doing in recent years. As in so many areas I’d rather have our hand than China’s.

While I continue to wade through the same boring arguments, most of which could have been written two weeks or even two years ago, I wanted to make one out-of-the-blue observation about a putative run for the presidency by Hillary Clinton. Despite the impressions of inevitability and invincibility that are being conveyed in the media, I don’t think that either are the case.

As to invincibility, Ms. Clinton will either need to run as the standard bearer for a third Obama term or run against a third Obama term. To try to remain mute on the subject would cede the initiative to her opponents, allowing them to define her position for her. On November 8, 2016 the president’s approval rating is unlikely to be higher than it is today, today it’s well below 50%, and the historic experience is that we can expect a certain level of “Obama fatigue”. To run against the president would alienate a significant portion of the very constituencies she would need to win.

In addition, Ms. Clinton has negatives of her own.

In her favor, she is very well thought of in some Democratic circles, she probably won’t make the same mistakes again, and she will undoubtedly have Bill Clinton in her corner, an ally who should not be underestimated.

As to inevitability, nothing is inevitable as Ms. Clinton learned to her sorrow in 2008. She might decide not to run; she might be prevailed upon not to run; her health could deteriorate; any number of things might intervene. Although the necessities of modern presidential campaigns mean that serious presidential campaigns are already organizing, two years is a long way away.

It’s been said that running for the presidency is a taste you never get over. That’s among the factors that would impel her to run—the same factor that might impel Mitt Romney to try again in 2016.

My wife and I just finished making a batch of marshmallows more or less following this recipe. This is candy-making which I would characterize as chemistry or even physics. I wouldn’t attempt it without a good, reliable candy thermometer. Expect your stand mixer to get a workout.

We’re waiting now for the marshmallows to season for several hours. I don’t know how they’ll turn out texture-wise but I’m ready to proclaim them delicious.

Based on this experience here’s a combination of what we did differently and what we would do differently:

• We used two teaspoons of good vanilla extract rather than the one to three tablespoons for which the recipe calls.
• There is no conceivable way I would do this without lining the pyrex baking dish we used as a form for the batch.
• I would use a smaller dish than the 9 X 15 inch dish we used.
• I used parchment to line the dish. While you’re beating the marshmallows, prepare the paper by spraying or painting it with flavorless cooking oil and dusting it with the powdered-sugar cornstarch mixture using a sifter or fine-meshed tea strainer. When you’re ready, place the paper in the dish.
• Dust the top of the marshmallows, oil another piece of paper, put the paper on top of the marshmallows, and roll the batch into the dish to get an even thickness and smooth surface.

Although it’s probably a good project to do with kids, be aware that the marshmallow “batter” is extremely sticky so this project has the potential to become disastrously messy. Also, after you’ve cooked the syrup, it’s dangerously hot. Handle with care!

James Joyner muses over Amazon’s ability to maintain a high profile, high stock price, and vast riches for its owners and top management while barely showing a profit:

At the end of the day, then, does it really matter if a company makes a “profit” if its founder has gotten rich, its senior executives are making lavish salaries, and its work force are all making comfortable wages?

Well, yes, it matters. Amazon’s stock price, the basis of the wealth of its owner and founder, is itself based on the expectation of profits. Amazon doesn’t continue to exist by stock issues but depends on its ability to borrow.

If it could be proven that Amazon could never run a profit, I suspect it would soon find itself in trouble with federal authorities. The general term used for a concern that continues to pay its present stockholders by selling stock to new stockholders and has no prospects for actually operating at a profit is a “Ponzi scheme”.

If its creditors no longer believed that Amazon was able to run a profit, I suspect the company would eventually run into problems financing its debt, something that has happened to countless companies, large and small, in the past.

If Amazon could no longer find purchasers for its stock, I suspect that Mr. Bezos would find himself in trouble and, ultimately, the worth of Amazon stock must depend on profits.

None of the puzzlement over Amazon is new. I recall in the mid to late 90s when Amazon was just getting off the ground hearing it characterized as a plan for becoming rich by selling stock, creating a company, and then backing a business plan out of it, rather than the other way around as was thought to be customary. Amazon was originally a bookselling company (actually a book broker), then the online equivalent of the old Sears catalog—a place where you could buy anything, then a large (if not the largest) online portal for retail sales, then a retail services company. Its business model is still evolving.

There are already signs of it but I think that just as Google and Microsoft are fated to go head to head Google and Amazon are fated to go toe to toe. They both can’t be the primary Internet portal for retail sales and it certainly appears to me that each company has that objective. There can be only one.

The state of Illinois is sound. As long as you ignore all of the state’s problems and grade on the curve. That’s the message I took away from Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn’s State of the State message today:

SPRINGFIELD — Gov. Pat Quinn fashioned his State of the State speech Wednesday into a 2014 re-election treatise, calling for a hike in the minimum wage, touted his pension-reform efforts and repeatedly stressed that “Illinois is making a comeback.”

“We’ve led Illinois’ comeback one hard step at a time. We’ve worked to repair decades of damage, and we’re getting the job done,” Quinn told a joint session of the General Assembly during a speech interrupted repeatedly by applause from the House and Senate Democratic supermajorities.

Ignored was that Illinois’s minimum wage is higher than that of any adjoining state, making it hard for Illinois businesses to compete with their just across the border competitors. Note that many of Illinois’s population centers (Chicago, the Quad Cities, East St. Louis) are on the state’s border. Or that Illinois’s taxes and lousy fiscal condition make poaching Illinois’s businesses away very attractive to neighboring states.

Ignored was the recent study from the University of Illinois that found that the state’s public pension reform measure, enacted into law with so much difficulty, does almost nothing to solve the state’s public pension problems.

Ignored were the serious legal challenges to the pension reform law.

Ignored was that Illinois has one of the highest unemployment rates of any state in the Union and the highest of any large state.

Ignored was that most of Illinois’s counties still haven’t recovered from the Great Recession.

Ignored was the impending lapse of the temporary income tax hike that was supposed to give state legislators breathing room to solve the state’s problems.

Almost ignored was that Illinois’s credit rating remains the lowest in the nation. But the credit agencies are reviewing the situation, we’re assured.

Completely absent was any message of the city of Chicago’s public pensions cliff. I don’t know where Chicago is going to come up with a billion dollars the state has demanded it put into its public pension fund. Gov. Quinn didn’t drop any hints, either.

The chart above, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, illustrates the minimum wage in 2012 dollars from its inception in 1938 to 2012. As you can see, the present minimum wage is just about trend. The low point was in 1938 when it started. Its high point in 1968.

The president is proposing to return the minimum wage to that level. The arguments in favor of doing so are the ones he’s made—the minimum wage is not a living wage. The arguments against are that the minimum wage is not intended as a living wage, the number of individuals that receive the minimum wage is very small, and many of those who earn minimum wage are young workers with low skills who aren’t trying to live on it.

The effect that raising the minimum wage would have on employment is a bone of contention—there are arguments both ways. One point that hasn’ been mentioned—the uptick in illegal immigration began just about the time that the minimum wage reached its peak. That might just be a coincidence or it might be that a higher minimum wage would incentivize a black market in labor of which illegals are a significant part.

I think it’s reasonable to speculate that the president wants to see the minimum wage play a different role than was intended and than it has historically. As I’ve said before, I’m of mixed minds on this subject. To gain my full support I’d need to believe that an increase in the minimum wage would help a lot more people than it would hurt and that it wouldn’t have much in the way of adverse unintended secondary effects. Neither of those seem to have been explored much in the discussion to date.

I watched the bulk of the State of the Union address last night and the balance on Youtube this morning. Also, as is my practice, I went back and re-watched a substantial portion of the speech with the sound off. I recommend that for picking up the paralinguistic message of the speech.

So far I’ve been disappointed with the professional commentary on the speech. Where you stand definitely seems to depend on where you sit. Overall they give the impression of having been written a couple of days ago. If you run into any really insightful commentary, I’d appreciate knowing about it. I’m particularly interested in supporters of the president who didn’t care for the speech or opponents of the president who liked it.

As usual, Joe Gandelman has a solid round-up of commentary from the professional media and the blogosphere.