• Weiner is trying to come back much sooner than Sanford did, two years versus four years.

• Weiner is aiming for a more prestigious job – mayor of the biggest city in the United States, currently held by Michael Bloomberg. Sanford had the good fortune of seeing his old congressional seat open up, allowing him to show a little humility as he ran for a job less prestigious than the governorship.

• Sanford had less difficult competition than Weiner does – not that Sanford’s political resurrection was a sure thing. Plenty of voters in South Carolina’s First Congressional District weren’t ready to forgive and forget. He had to compete in a runoff for the Republican nomination. Then in the general, he faced a well-funded Elizabeth Colbert Busch, sister of satirist Stephen Colbert. Toward the end of the campaign, Sanford’s ex-wife accused him of trespassing on her property, and the National Republican Congressional Committee stopped investing in the race. But the district was heavily Republican, and Ms. Colbert Busch was a political novice. Sanford won by nine percentage points.

• Perhaps the biggest issue weighing against Weiner is the “ick” factor. The “weiner” jokes are back, as voters are treated to rehashes of Weiner’s lewd texts and tweets sent to women he had met online. Back in 2011, when confronted, Weiner lied about his actions before admitting to them.

Those are all pretty compelling reasons, but I still get this feeling Weiner is going to pull this out.

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa said embattled IRS official Lois Lerner waived her Fifth Amendment rights and will be hauled back to appear before his panel again.

The California Republican said Lerner’s Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination was voided when she gave an opening statement this morning denying any wrongdoing and professing pride in her government service.

This is gonna get gooooooooood.

Apparently Greece’s government still doesn’t understand that spurring entrepreneurial creativity is absolutely essential to economic recovery. In a recent Bloomberg View economics column, Megan Greene dismissed headlines touting a Greek turnaround. Greece’s business operating environment “remains unattractive because of high levels of red tape, an unstable regulatory environment, an opaque legal system” and judicial corruption.

Greene’s list of Greek business afflictions would resonate with Neuwirth’s System D entrepreneurs. Rejecting poverty, they operate beyond the reach of crooked politicians levying confiscatory taxes. Rejecting poverty, they sidestep expensive legal business registration costs.

Fair bet The Great Recession and our onerous “authorized regulatory administrations” have vexed American debrouillards. Indeed, our System D has grown. In a recent New Yorker column, James Surowiecki asked why Americans didn’t report $2 trillion in income to the IRS. Economist Edgar Feige mentioned red tape and distrust of government. Irked Americans want to avoid regulators’ “elaborate hoops.”

This dovetails perfectly with something Glenn linked to a few years ago, but I can’t find the link. But I do remember the author’s main thrust, which is that when the middle class gives up on lawfulness, then it’s really all over for a country.

What Bay has written is yet another clear sign that that’s exactly where the middle class is headed.

When the 360 launched, smartphones hadn’t yet trickled out of the corporate world; Netflix was strictly a DVD delivery service; the “cloud” was something that got in the way of a suntan. (Hell, in 2005, people suntanned.) And a big part of the 360’s longevity was Microsoft’s ability not only to develop games but also to forge partnerships that took advantage of these new staples of online life. So as those deals proliferated, so did the things the Xbox 360 could do. People played Halo 3 on their Xbox, but they also watched Netflix. They bought Kinect sensors for controller-free experiences, but they also burned through seasons of Deadwood on HBO Go and caught sports highlights on an ESPN app. But all of this new functionality was built on patches and firmware updates. The 360 simply wasn’t constructed that way, so when the Xbox One was greenlit in the fall of 2011, “the decision wasn’t, ‘We need a gamebox,’” Whitten says. “It was, ‘We need a living-room experience.’” Built that way from the ground up.

This is Microsoft playing at the absolute top of its game (no pun intended). They’ve leveraged everything they’ve learned about gaming, consoles, services, and streaming, and worked them together into a single system. To call the Xbox One a mere “console” is to undersell what it is and what it does. This is an entertainment system-in-a-box, all for a few hundred dollars.

How was Microsoft able to do this, when they’ve pretty much flubbed every single other consumer device they’ve tried to build in the last few years? How did the company that build the ill-fated Zune with its infamous “Squirt” feature manage to get something so spectacularly right?

Former Rep. Anthony Weiner, whose career in public life came to an abrupt end when he sent lewd pictures to a college student on Twitter, jumped back into politics on Wednesday by announcing a bid for mayor of New York City.

“Look, I’ve made some big mistakes and I know I’ve let a lot of people down,” the Democrat said in a two-minute video announcing his bid. “But I’ve also learned some tough lessons. I’m running for mayor because I’ve been fighting for the middle class and those struggling to make it for my entire life. And I hope I get a second chance to work for you.”

I can’t wait.

The anecdotes are nice, but the broader data just don’t bear it out. Manufacturing employment over the last 12 months has essentially been flat, stuck at around 11.9 million workers since April 2012. The industry has added around 500,000 jobs since the recession ended, but that’s a drop in the bucket compared with the 1.8 million manufacturing jobs lost from November 2007 through the end of 2010.

It’s not just employment that’s been sagging. Industrial production shrank 0.5 percent in April, according to new data from the Federal Reserve. Overall, the country is using about 77 percent of its total industrial capacity, nearly 3 percentage points below the 40-year average.

The latest bad news comes from the Philadelphia Fed’s report on regional manufacturing activity, which plummeted to a -5.2 reading this month. The average estimate of economists surveyed by Bloomberg called for a gain of 2. Anything below zero indicates contraction.

With the jokers we have in charge, never, ever believe the hype.

Full story with video here.

The Wii U has been defeated by the most humbling of challengers – consumer apathy. When the inevitable “Nintendo halts Wii U production” stories hit, the majority of those that bought the original Wii won’t even notice. The mainstream bought the Wii because it was a fun novelty, they didn’t buy it for a new Zelda game. What’s the Wii U’s novelty? That it does everything a current-gen console does but a little bit slower and with a Fisher Price tablet attached?

Retailers have given up on the Wii U. It’s not discounted at the supermarkets because they want to sell more, it’s been cut in price so they can get rid of it quickly. Software drives hardware sales. But there are no credible software sales because there are no games being released. Retail is desperate to sell anything, that’s why GAME is now selling sci-fi and fantasy books and HMV has cans of Coke and sweets at the till – anything to squeeze a penny out. They aren’t going to sit around and make space for a handful of Wii U games near the end of the year. They’ll be pushing the Wii U to one side to make more space for the Xbox 360, the PlayStation 3 and hopefully the PS4 and next Xbox.

One reason Windows Phones have fared so poorly is that consumers want iPhones, and retailers are paid handsomely by Samsung to push Samsung phones. That leaves Microsoft without consumer mind-presence, and without retail allies. Try it sometime: Go into a Verizon store and tell the salesman you want a smartphone, but you’re not sure which one. Odds are he won’t let you anywhere near a Windows Phone. Samsung’s spiffs are just too good.

If Nintendo finds itself in a similar fix, then it’s game over, man — game over.

We don’t even know how many new states will emerge from the old order’s wreckage. But the Scramble for the Sand is on, with Iran, Turkey, treacherous Arab oil sheikdoms and terrorists Sunni and Shia alike all determined to dictate the future, no matter the cost in other people’s blood.

We had our chance to extend the peace and keep both Iran and Wahhabi crazies at bay after we defeated Iraq’s insurgencies. But a new American president, elevating politics over strategy, walked away from Baghdad, handing Iraq to Iran. Now it’s too late. If George W. Bush helped trigger the Arab Spring, Barack Obama made this Arab Winter inevitable.

He’s calling it “The Arab Collapse,” which is about as accurate a shorthand as anyone could manage.

My wife and I were watching Anthony Bourdain’s new CNN show last night, the episode on Libya. Even though we’re fans of the show, we ended up skimming through much of it. There wasn’t a whole lot of food to see, and the politics and the history were just so incomplete. The story seemed to be: Gaddafi is dead and everyone is happy. Maybe the country wasn’t as safe as it could be, what with all those guns and rockets left over from the Civil War — but that was about it.

If there was any talk of Benghazi or how the Islamists are steadily working to control whatever they can (or to fester in areas no one controls), we missed it. I’m afraid most of us in the West are missing it.

I was once at a Town Hall meeting in Cupertino where Steve Jobs commented on this type of wearable computing. An Apple employee in the audience asked Steve a question to the extent of: “How can we reach out to our leadership if we have a really good idea”. Steve immediately put him on the spot and made him pitch the idea in front of everyone there. An opportunity to pitch Steve Jobs. What? The employee proceeded to pitch an idea about glasses you can wear that display various types of information. A heads up display a’la terminator cyborg vision if you will. He continued to explain how he wished he had a way to see projected information while he perhaps went for a run outside. Keep in mind this is happening in a room filled with a lot of people. Steve immediately shot his idea down and told the guy that he would probably trip and fall if that were the case. Steve also suggested he should get a girlfriend so he has someone to keep him company while running.

Me, I flashed on on William Shatner and “get a life.”

For Apple’s current fiscal year, the company plans to pay more than $7 billion in taxes to the U.S. Treasury.

The testimony also argues that Apple does not use so-called “tax gimmicks.” Specifically, Apple has said it does not:

Move its intellectual property into offshore tax havens and use it to sell products back into the U.S. in order to avoid U.S. tax.
Use revolving loans from foreign subsidiaries to fund its domestic operations.
Hold money on a Caribbean island
Have a bank account in the Cayman Islands.

The justification for Apple’s “substantial foreign cash,” as the company put it, is because the majority of its products are sold outside of the U.S. The iPhone maker’s international operations accounted for 61 percent of its revenue last year, and increased to two-thirds of its revenue last quarter.

Cook will also testify to the need for tac reform to make it more desirable to repatriate foreign-earned capital back to the United States.

Swamped in controversies, President Obama and his slow-footed team are essentially telling the American public, “We’re not crooked. We’re just incompetent.”
The IRS targeting conservatives, the Justice Department snooping at The Associated Press, the State Department injecting politics into Benghazi, the military covering up sexual assaults, and the Department of Veterans Affairs leaving heroes in health care limbo – each of these so-called scandals share two traits.

First, there is some element of “spin,” the cynical art of telling just enough of the truth to avoid political embarrassment. Obfuscation and demagogy, the dirty tools of political quackery that Obama pledged to purge from Washington, enjoy top-shelf status at his White House.

In just two short grafs, Fournier said Obama or his Administration is

• Swamped

• Slow-footed

• Incompetent

• Spinning

• Using dirty tools

• Hypocritical

But then he mentions “these so-called scandals.”

Ron, buddy? Where there’s smoke, there’s probably a liar with his pants on fire.

Presidents also wield power by influencing those who deeply admire, strongly identify with or highly respect them. This is referent power, which focuses on ability to exploit others’ trust.

Celebrities — with no formal power and little expertise — wield influence through referent power; some people feel so close to and trustful of celebrities that they act upon their perceptions of what a celebrity wants them to do.

“To be clear, referent power does not work through order, command or threat,” Nichols explained. “Instead, it works through suggestion and the creativity of the fawning admirer.”

We don’t know yet how involved the White House was in today’s scandals. Yet, at a minimum, they suggest a government — from the State Department to the CIA, the military leadership, the IRS and Justice — filled with sycophants under the sway of Obama’s referent power.

Read the whole thing, of course, but this is exactly it. Reagan might have been the first President to use the power of celebrity effectively. Clinton, I thought, perfected it. But Obama has brought it to an entirely new level.

Appear on The View, non-political magazine covers, the outlandish parties. I’d denigrate him for it, except that it’s just so damn effective. And until the GOP re-learns how to play this game, they’ll probably be shut out of the White House.

A team of Croatian researchers are training honeybees to sniff out unexploded mines that still pepper the Balkans.

Nikola Kezic, a professor in the Department of Agriculture at Zagreb University, has been exploring using bees to find landmines since 2007. Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina and other countries from former Yugoslavia still have around 250,000 buried mines which were left there during the wars of the early 90s. Since the end of the war more than 300 people have been killed in Croatia alone by the explosives, including 66 de-miners.

Tracking down the mines can be extremely costly and dangerous. However, by training bees — which are able to detect odours from 4.5 kilometres away — to associate the smell of TNT with sugar can create an affective way of identifying the locations of mines.

I can’t tell if that’s cooler than it is creepy or creepier than it is cool. And of course this is going on in Croatia, because you know the EPA would shut that program down faster than you can say, “Did you hear a click?”

H/T, Doug Mataconis.

The remarks came from Dan Pfeiffer, a member of the president’s inner circle, as he appeared on all five major Sunday morning talk shows in an effort to move the administration past what commentators have described as a “hell week” of controversy and missteps. He pointedly rejected Republican criticisms of the president’s actions and leadership style as “offensive” and “absurd,” and he said the administration would not be distracted from doing the nation’s business.

I don’t know about offensive, but critiques this effective are certainly unaccustomed. Even Bob Schieffer is tired of getting stonewalled:

“I don’t want to compare this in any way to Watergate … but I have to tell you, that is exactly the approach the Nixon administration took. You’re taking exactly the same line,” Mr. Schieffer said.

He then castigated the White House for taking credit when the federal government does something right, but passing the buck when problems arise. Republicans and other critics have made similar claims that Mr. Obama seems to have little knowledge of what’s happening in his own federal government.

“When the executive branch does things right, there doesn’t seem to be any hesitancy for the White House to take credit for that,” Mr. Schieffer said, citing the killing of Osama bin Laden as an example. “When these [scandals] happen, you seem to send out officials many times who don’t even seem to know what’s happened.”

The last couple of weeks have been one Sergeant Schultz act after another from various Administration officials. And that breaks the cozy compact between Official Washington and the MSM (but I repeat myself), in which the former has to help the latter make it appear as though they’re doing their jobs.

As I approached the line to the restroom, I took a deep sigh, thinking that I might find some respite from the hundreds of cameras strapped to people’s heads at the conference.

Yet when it was finally my turn to approach the rows of white urinals, my world came screeching to a halt. There they were, a handful of people wearing Google Glass, now standing next to me at their own urinals, peering their head from side to side, blinking or winking, as they relieved themselves.

Google Glass snaps a picture for you when you wink.

I’m a gadget freak. Always have been, always will be, always want the latest and greatest of whatever is new & gadgety. But after forty-plus years, I’ve finally found my limit.

Google Glass is clearly a case of just because you can make it, doesn’t mean you should.