​Jonah Goldberg, taking a hint from George Will's column last week, offers another angle on the ironic juxtaposition facing President Obama and all central planners alike:

The best defenses of his administration require undermining the rationale for his presidency.

He then proposes "the flip side of the conspiracy theory": the redeemer fantasy. Both delusions require bestowing on political leaders almost god-like knowledge and power, and that's really just absurd.

Well-intentioned human error rarely gets the credit it deserves. People want to connect the dots, but that’s only possible when you assume that all events were deliberately orchestrated by human will. This is the delusion at the heart of all conspiracy theorists, from Kennedy assassination crackpots to 9/11 “truthers.”

Behind all such delusions is the assumption that government officials we don’t like are omnicompetent and entirely malevolent. The truth is closer to the opposite. They mean well but can’t do very much very well.

This brings us to the flip side of the conspiracy theory — call it the redeemer fantasy: If only we had the right kind of government with the right kind of leaders, there’d be nothing we couldn’t do.

That was the very message behind President Obama's first campaign, yet his administration is once again helping make the case against such a far-reaching and intrusive government. The problem with the IRS isn't a few allegedly rogue agents abusing their power. The problem is that the agency has such power to begin with. Time to decimate the tax code. It's hard to abuse power that you don't have in the first place.

​Well, when Washington throws the little guys under the bus, it's not surprising when they see no reason to keep toeing the party line.

From the Washington Examiner:

Number crunchers, whose work is nonpolitical, don’t necessarily enjoy the spotlight, especially when the media and the public assume they’re engaged in partisan villainy.

“We’re not political,’’ said one determinations staffer in khakis as he left work late Tuesday afternoon. “We people on the local level are doing what we are supposed to do. . . . That’s why there are so many people here who are flustered. Everything comes from the top. We don’t have any authority to make those decisions without someone signing off on them. There has to be a directive.”

The ever insightful ​George Will on the irony facing President Obama:

Everything he advocates requires Americans to lavish on government something that his administration, and big government generally, undermines: trust.

...with the highest excise tax rate on beer in these United States.

​From Betabeat:

Defense Distributed, the Texas-based nonprofit that wants to empower people to 3D print their own guns, has hit a bit of a legal snag. According to founder Cody Wilson, DEFCAD, the open source weapon-printing project powered by Defense Distributed, received a letter from the State Department’s Office of Defense Trade Compliance, telling him to remove the blueprints of the Liberator, his 3D printed gun, from the web so that they may be reviewed by the department.

The group’s website currently has a red banner appended to the top that reads, “DEFCAD files are being removed from public access at the request of the US Department of Defense Trade Controls.  Until further notice, the United States government claims control of the information.”

“I immediately complied and I’ve taken down the files,” Mr. Wilson said. “But this is a much bigger deal than guns. It has implications for the freedom of the web.”

Of course, since this is the Internet, the files are already all over the web, even though Mr. Wilson complied with the takedown.

“I still think we win in the end,” he added. “Because the files are all over the Internet, the Pirate Bay has it–to think this can be stopped in any meaningful way is to misunderstand what the future of distributive technologies is about.”

The information is already out there. Shocking to discover the bureaucrats don't know how the Internet works.

From the Associated Press:

​Gun homicides have dropped steeply in the United States since their peak in 1993, a pair of reports released Tuesday showed, adding fuel to Congress' battle over whether to tighten restrictions on firearms.

Gun-related homicides down 39% by raw numbers, down 49% by percentage given the population of the country. Non-fatal gun crimes are down 70%. Major improvements, mind you, and all in an era when gun control was overall becoming more relaxed. But yeah, we definitely need more gun laws. Especially reactionary gun control legislation that wouldn't have done a thing to prevent whichever event those boobs are using as an excuse this time.

Oscars? Emmys? Grammys? White House Correspondents' Association Dinner.

​I've had just about enough of these arrogant, anti-Southern bigots. Glad to see Matt Welch give him whatfor.

​Ray Ortlund, thoughtful as always:

...as a Christian, I am my brother’s keeper (Genesis 4:9).  To deny that would go against God.  Every person around me – and the closer they are, and the more vulnerable they are, the greater my responsibility – has the right to expect me to care about them.  After all, God cares.

That means, among many other things, that if – God forbid – I should ever find myself in a situation where people are being harmed by a violent person, I must try to protect them. Sadly, that is not an inconceivable scenario.

I have a handgun permit from the state of Tennessee.  My gun is secured where no child or intruder can gain access to it.  But I am prepared to serve as my brother’s keeper.  I am saying to my family and community, “I will place your safety above my own.”

I can see Christians disagreeing – hopefully, in a charitable manner – about aspects of this. And I will not be distracted from my life mission: to advance the gospel of Jesus.  But one blog post will suffice to say, I am my brother’s keeper.  God says so.

​So the Gosnell case is a rare exception, right? A one-off abortion clinic run by a lunatic. A non-story because it's a local crime story. That's what we're being told.

From the ABC affiliate out of Delaware, and this time it's a Planned Parenthood:

"He didn't wear gloves," said [former employee Jayne Mitchell-Werbrich].

Another former employee, Joyce Vasikonis told Action News, "They were using instruments on patients that were not sterile."

The former nurses claim that a rush to get patients in and out left operating tables soiled and unclean.

Werbrich said "It's not washed down, it's not even cleaned off. It has bloody drainage on it."

"They could be at risk of getting hepatitis, even AIDS," added Vasikonis.

Both of these nurses said, they quit to protect their own medical licenses, stunned by what they called a meat-market style of assembly-line abortions.

​CNN:

If Anne Frank had not died a teenager in a Nazi concentration camp in 1945, Justin Bieber hopes she would have been his devoted fan.

That's what Bieber, 19, wrote in the guestbook at the Anne Frank House when he visited there Friday, according to the Amsterdam site.

​Trevin Wax provides an undeniable list of reasons the news media has so far ignored the case of the monster abortionist in Philadelphia. I was going to write up an expansion on the thoughts I had the other day, but he does better.

You know how one of the chief arguments for abortion has long been that if it's not legal, abortions will still happen anyway, but they'll take place in squalid, dangerous conditions?

From The Atlantic:

On February 18, 2010, the FBI raided the "Women's Medical Society," entering its offices about 8:30 p.m. Agents expected to find evidence that it was illegally selling prescription drugs. On entering, they quickly realized something else was amiss. In the grand jury report's telling, "There was blood on the floor. A stench of urine filled the air. A flea-infested cat was wandering through the facility, and there were cat feces on the stairs. Semi-conscious women scheduled for abortions were moaning in the waiting room or the recovery room, where they sat on dirty recliners covered with blood-stained blankets. All the women had been sedated by unlicensed staff." Authorities had also learned about the patient that died at the facility several months prior.

Horrifying. This sounds like the makings for quite a movie. Glad to see the media finally start to pick this one up.

UPDATE: Amidst all this devilry, why was nothing done? Why didn't the state shut him down? The grand jury's indictment concludes:

We think the reason no one acted is because the women in question were poor and of color, because the victims were infants without identities, and because the subject was the political football of abortion.

Louis C.K.:

​Let them be upset. It’s not the worst thing in the world... It’s a desperate thing to need everybody to be really happy with everything you say... As soon as you crack your knuckles and open up a comments page, you just canceled your subscription to being a good person.

Seth Godin, being brilliant as usual:

​But when we're discussing our goals, our passion and the way we interact with the culture, it seems to me that what works is significantly more important than what's new. Racing to build your organization around the latest social network tool or graphics-rendering technology permits you to spend a lot of time learning the new system and skiing in the fresh powder of the unproven, but it might just distract you from the difficult work of telling the truth, looking people in the eye and making a difference.

"I can't describe the value we deliver, I'm too busy integrating this new technology into my workflow!"

All too often, the ones who are aggressively seeking the theory of the day don't have a lot to show for what they did yesterday.

Chasing the hot new shiny and complaining about the work others do hardly leaves you any time to do great work and show it off yourself. But maybe that's the point...