A student’s bid to become associate vice president of diversity and inclusion at Northwestern University was derailed last Wednesday over accusations that his status as a white heterosexual male would make it impossible for him to perform the position’s duties.

The Wednesday hearing began with student senator Jesse Seitz reportedly asking the nominee, Stephen Piotrkowski, how he could possibly interact and serve a minority community as a white male.

Piotrkowski reportedly attempted to appeal to the Student Senate on the grounds that he identifies as a religious minority and has a lesbian sister, but it was to no avail.

After about thirty more minutes of questioning, the Senate voted to block Piotrkowski’s appointment.

Ian Coley, a student on the Associate Student Government Diversity and Inclusion Committee, later said white heterosexual males are not qualified to hold the position of associate vice president of diversity and inclusion.

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Democracy is in peril: That is an emerging theme of the liberal left’s response to the Obama scandals. The argument misses the point, no doubt deliberately. What we are witnessing now is not a crisis of democracy but a crisis of authority. The administrative state, in thrall to a decadent cultural elite, has lost the consent of the governed.

“After a week of scandal obsession during which the nation’s capital and the media virtually ignored the problems most voters care about–jobs, incomes, growth, opportunity, education–it’s worth asking if there is something especially flawed about our democracy,” declares the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne.

He goes through a partisan litany of complaints–”a radicalization of conservative politics, over-the-top mistrust of President Obama on the right, high-tech gerrymandering in the House and a Senate snarled by non-constitutional super-majority requirements”–but makes no mention of the abuses of power by the Internal Revenue Service and the Justice Department. He does hint at Benghazi, in his concluding paragraph, but only to pooh-pooh it.

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DAVID GREGORY: Bob Woodward, you’re no stranger to these kinds of controversies in Washington. How has the administration handled this, this past week?

BOB WOODWARD: Well, first of all, I mean people are making comparisons to Watergate. This is not Watergate. But there are some people in the administration who have acted as if they want to be Nixonian. And that’s a very big problem. I think–

DAVID GREGORY: And how?

BOB WOODWARD: Well, I think on the whole Benghazi thing, you look at those talking points. And I mean the initial draft by the CIA very explicitly said, “We know that activists who have ties to al-Qaeda were involved in the attack.” And then you see what comes out a couple of days later, and there is no reference to this. This is a business where you have to tell the truth. And that did not happen here. (Meet the Press, May 19, 2013)

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Keeping alive the long history between National Socialism and Jihaddist Islam, the twisted cross of Nazism is flying high and proud over a heavily Arab-Muslim town south of Jerusalem today.

In the West Bank town of Beit Omar, an over-sized red, white, and black swastika-emblazoned flag of the Third Reich was reportedly clearly visible to Israeli residents living in the southern outskirts and suburbs of Jerusalem, especially the Jewish town of Gush Etzion.

According to an enraged Gush Etzion resident, Uri Arnon:

You know you are in trouble when a crowd of baying Canadian hockey fans stops laughing and helps you complete your butchering of the Star Spangled Banner.

Folk and jazz singer Alexis Normand claims she had only a few hours to learn the American national anthem, however her embarrassment was broadcast nationally during Saturday’s Portland Winterhawks-Halifax Mooseheads game.

The Canadian singer started to turn her rendition into a live train wreck as she approached the third line, but in true professional style she powered through, much to the mirth of the crowd who helped her along.

Approaching the line, ‘whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight’, Normand was became flumoxed and ended up singing, ‘those broad stripes and bright stars… at the dawn’s early light.’

After that point, it all went downhill for Normand, as she began making up words, pausing and missing her cues.

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His answers were certainly better than Barack Obama and Eric Holder’s standard answer which is “I don’t (or didn’t) know about that.” It’s hard to believe that if he wasn’t flipping around the channels looking for reruns of NCIS last Friday, Obama would have never heard about the IRS scandal.

As the Congress and (in some cases) the mainstream media do their job and investigate these scandals, there are soft rumblings of the “I” word coming from the right wing blogosphere and from Republicans in Congress. (Note: The “I” word is not the new politically correct way to say Islamist terrorists. The initial stands for impeachment). Allow me to suggest that what we know so far does not even approach “I” word levels, and even if they did, impeachment would be a horrible option for the country and for the party.

The last two presidents who approached impeachment level were Nixon and Clinton, both of whom went way over the line to break the law. Clinton committed perjury, something to which he eventually admitted after DNA testing. Nixon might have survived Watergate if there hadn’t been an audio record of his crimes (the tapes).

The current administration, in contrast, is careful to protect its senior leaders by putting very little in writing. Heck the Attorney General didn’t even put it writing that he recused himself from the IRS case even though he is required to by law.

But let us say that eventually it is proven that the scandals were directly ordered by the president (a long shot, but suppose). On Benghazi it can be proven that he lied for political purposes (he would not be the first), but the only really culpable administration figure would be Hillary Clinton. She lied to Congress, which (whether she was under oath or not) is a crime.

The AP scandal may prove to be immoral, but doesn’t seem like a crime because the DOJ got a court order. The IRS scandal probably has the biggest chance of toppling an administration, but the real question is this: Even if it is proven to be directed by Obama, is impeachment the best option?

The answer is a clear “not necessarily,” and for a host of reasons. The first would be these three horrible words: “President Joe Biden.” Imagine the SCHMOTUS, this gaffe-meister making foreign policy decisions/statements, Under President Biden, there would have been no surge in Afghanistan, we would be living with a nuclear Iran, and Bin Laden would still be alive. Although it might be funny if he had a summit with North Korean Leader Kim Jong Il and said, “Come on Kim, stand up and take a bow … what am I saying, you are standing!”

A Joe Biden-led domestic policy would be just as bad. Perhaps the government would even waste money on pamphlets teaching women to protect themselves by emptying their shot guns through closed doors.

But don’t worry, America, this will never happen. Let’s take this scenario a bit further. Say Obama is implicated directly in the IRS scandal and there is a smoking gun. Let’s say he is impeached by the House and there is a trial in the Senate. There is no way that august body is going to come up with the 67 votes needed to toss the president out of office.

What’s worse is if the House were move in that direction, Barack Obama would cease to be a scandal-ridden president and becomes a martyr to Republican obstructionism. The GOP would be branded for eternity as the racist party that threw out the first African-American president. Any voters on the fence would go Democrat just based on that meme.

On the other side, if Obama is proven to be behind the IRS and other scandals, a weakened Obama is still much better than a Biden. It is also better than the charges of obstructionism and racism that would be sure to come with any House action.

Thinking longer-term, if Obama is implicated in these scandals and stays in office he would be too weakened to push through his radical freedom-stealing agenda during the remaining 921 days of his administration. Additionally, it will make ripe campaign fodder for the Senate and House campaigns in 2014 and the presidential campaign of 2016.

Any talk of Obama impeachment is way premature, but even if Obama is directly tied to these scandals, impeachment would be bad for the United States and bad for the GOP.

First lady Michelle Obama in her commencement speech at a high school in Nashville, Tenn., on Saturday said she could “take up a whole afternoon talking about” her husband’s failures.

“And then there’s this guy, Barack Obama, who lost – I could take up a whole afternoon talking about his failures, but – he lost his first race for Congress, and now he gets to call himself my husband,” she told graduates of Martin Luther King Jr. Magnet High School during commencement exercises held at Tennessee State University.

Mrs. Obama told students that “failure is the key to success for so many great people,” pointing to Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Oprah Winfrey.

“Take Steve Jobs, who was fired from Apple early in his career, and now his iPods and iPads and iPhones have revolutionized the entire world.  Oprah was demoted from her first job as a news anchor, now she doesn’t even need a last name,” the first lady said.

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Scientists say the recent downturn in the rate of global warming will lead to lower temperature rises in the short-term.

Since 1998, there has been an unexplained “standstill” in the heating of the Earth’s atmosphere.

Writing in Nature Geoscience, the researchers say this will reduce predicted warming in the coming decades.

But long-term, the expected temperature rises will not alter significantly.

The slowdown in the expected rate of global warming has been studied for several years now. Earlier this year, the UK Met Office lowered their five-year temperature forecast.

But this new paper gives the clearest picture yet of how any slowdown is likely to affect temperatures in both the short-term and long-term.

An international team of researchers looked at how the last decade would impact long-term, equilibrium climate sensitivity and the shorter term climate response.

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News reports from the time indicate the now-chief counsel of the IRS, William Wilkins, helped a church connected to President Barack Obama’s friend Rev. Jeremiah Wright get out of an IRS probe in 2008 while working as a private attorney.

“Lawyers from Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr have won the dismissal of an IRS case against United Church of Christ, Sen. Barack Obama’s denomination,” The American Lawyer’s Zach Lowe wrote on May 22, 2008.

The IRS initiated an investigation early this year after a speech by Obama at a 50th anniversary celebration of the church last June. It was a reference by Obama to his presidential candidacy in a talk otherwise focused on faith that caught the agency’s attention. Tax laws prohibit non-profits–including churches–from engaging in political speech or promoting candidates. The IRS can withdraw an organization’s tax-free status if the organization is found to violate the rule.

Lowe noted that Obama had been a “member of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago–a UCC congregation–for more than 20 years. The church has been in the headlines for several months now as the congregation lead by the controversial Reverend Jeremiah Wright.”

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Chilling effect. That’s the term lawyers and judges use to describe the result of government actions that deter people from exercising their right of free speech.

There have been plenty of examples in the past 10 days.

The Obama administration’s Justice Department issued a sweeping demand for two months of office, cellular and home telephone records from multiple Associated Press reporters and editors to investigate an alleged breach of national security.

The AP story in question, on a foiled terrorist plot, had been withheld for days at the request of the CIA. It finally went out on the wire on a Monday, after the AP was told that administration spokesmen would officially announce it the next day.

That tends to undercut Attorney General Eric Holder’s claim that the story was based on one of “the top two or three most serious leaks that I have ever seen” and “put the American people at risk, and that is not hyperbole.”

I don’t think enough facts are known to conclude that Holder was wrong. But it does seem likely that the AP material was less damaging to national security than some stories The New York Times ran despite pleas from the George W. Bush administration.

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