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1.) Will Obama’s war on women never end? — Even though he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, President Obama refuses to let up on his merciless war against women. TheDC’s Caroline May reports:
“While President Barack Obama handily won the women’s vote by 11 percentage points in November over Republican nominee Mitt Romney, his administration paid the women on his payroll less than his male employees last year. A Daily Caller analysis of the administration’s ‘2012 Annual Report to Congress on White House Staff’ shows that while women comprised about half of the 468 staffers — as the president touted during his press conference Monday — they also earned about 13 percent less, on average, than their male counterparts. The median 2012 salary for female employees of the White House was $62,000; for men that number was $71,000.”
And you thought the Taliban’s Afghanistan treated women poorly.
2.) Guess who pays for Bill Clinton’s “Skinemax?” — It’s the same people who were awarded Time’s Person of the Year in 2006: You. TheDC’s Alex Pappas and Vince Coglianese reports:
“Bill Clinton is a multi-millionaire, but you’re paying for the Cinemax in his office. That’s just one eyebrow-raising expense a former occupant of the White House has been allowed to put on the taxpayer tab every year, even though every living ex-president is quite wealthy. In an attempt to shed light on this little known perk of being a former commander in chief, The Daily Caller — through a Freedom of Information Act request filed last year — has obtained thousands of pages of emails and documents from the government detailing how taxpayer money is spent on former presidents each year.”
What outrage! Actually, TheDC Morning isn’t particularly outraged. But perhaps it is time we means test some of these post-presidential perks — which is to say: eliminate them.
3.) History’s verdict — Military historian Max Boot is out with an “epic” history of guerrilla warfare, appropriately titled, “Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present.” And in an epic interview on his new book with TheDC’s Jamie Weinstein, Boot discusses the legacies of Generals Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus:
“The verdict is still out and subject to matters beyond their control. There is no doubt that Petraeus and McChrystal had tremendous success in Iraq: McChrystal turned the Joint Special Operations Command into a finely honed terrorist-takedown machine and Petraeus saved the country from the abyss of civil war in 2007 by implementing a comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy. Few if any counterinsurgents have managed to reverse a situation as far-gone as Iraq was at the start of the surge. But President Obama failed to negotiate an agreement to keep U.S. troops in Iraq past 2011, as recommended by his commanders on the ground, and that throws into doubt the long-term prospects for Iraq’s stability. As for Afghanistan, McChrystal and Petraeus designed and implemented a counterinsurgency strategy that has shown considerable progress in Helmand and Kandahar. But they never had as many troops or as much time as they would have liked.”
Read TheDC’s full interview with Boot, in which he discusses the most brutal guerrilla war in history, what lessons he learned by studying the history of guerrilla warfare, what would constitute success in Afghanistan and much, much more.
4.) The Boomers are bums — TheDC’s Matt Labash, the generous man that he is, spends hours of his day, every day, evaluating questions from readers. And he answers the most important questions in print for The Daily Caller. In his latest dispatch, he explains why he is no fan of Baby Boomers:
“Well, I’m not a Boomer. I’m a Gen-X’er — a label I was never entirely thrilled with, hoping for something snazzier, like The Latest Generation — on account of my inability to show up on time, as readers of this erratically published column know. But I’m not sure you and me are living in the same country. I’ll grant you that while most Boomers spent the ‘60s through the ‘80s doing whatever they felt like doing, then celebrating themselves for it, they’ve morphed into a new strain of liberalism. Nowadays, they take much more pleasure in telling others what they can’t do (smoking, eating trans fats, burning fossil fuels) rather than partaking in what they once loved to do themselves (having promiscuous sex and smoking lots of weed). To many of them, prudish sanctimony is the new hedonism. Any idiot can make their own fun. But real fun is ruining somebody else’s. Yet in the America that I know, Boomers are still the same solipsistic, self-entitled, vainglorious, reap-all-the-benefits-while-making-few-of-the-sacrifices, over-spending, materialistic, nostalgizing, sentimentalizing, collagenized, botoxed, forever-young-because-they-refuse-to-act-their-age centers of the universe as they’ve always been. So go easier on your generation. They deserve some points for consistency.”
If Labash is erratic in the filing of his column, it is only because he is occupied doing the Lord’s work — or, as he says, Xenu’s work — writing articles for the Church of Scientology that are published on The Atlantic’s website.
5.) Tweet of Yesterday — Noah Pollak: It’s pretty amazing to hear a lecture on fiscal responsibility from Barack Obama
6.) Today in North Korean News –BREAKING: “Young People’s Unemployment Gets Serious in S. Korea”