National Review Roundup

National Review Online has a great collection of essays today.

Rich Lowry writes that we no longer build things, we obstruct them:

We don't excel at building things. We excel at studying things, and putting up obstacles to building them. We delay, cavil, and sue. We protest and micromanage. It is not the age of the engineer but of the bureaucrat, the lawyer, and the environmental activist.

Mona Charen comments on the Democrats continuous campaign:

Democrats are so focused on blaming any misfortune on Republicans that they've become almost cartoonishly predictable. Mr. Obama devoted the first two years of his term, after his policies failed to deliver the economic results his administration had promised, to blaming his predecessor. Following the 2010 elections, the president continued to shake the George W. Bush mask with one hand and point the finger at the Republicans in Congress with the other. It was the Republicans who were to blame when the recovery dissipated, unemployment remained high, and labor-force participation tanked. The how part was a little vague, but never mind.

Charles Cooke explains why the government is buying so much ammunition:

Nonetheless, one could reasonably ask why the Social Security Administration would need any ammunition at all. Are the elderly especially unruly these days? Jonathan L. Lasher, in the SSA's external-relations department, explained to the Huffington Post that the ammunition is "for the 295 agents" in the outfit's office of inspector general "who investigate Social Security fraud and other crimes." Divide the rounds by the number of agents, and you get about 590 per agent; in a given year, that's about ten rounds a week. "Most will be expended on the firing range," Lasher continued.

John Lott looks at what motivates mass murderers. He concludes:

We should be trying to deprive these killers of what they crave: attention and easy targets. Instead, we ignore measures that might keep them from getting attention and pass laws that give them defenseless victims.

Victor Davis Hanson on Barack Obama's relationship with the press:

(T)here are plenty of reasons to assume that Barack Obama has established the tenor and methodology of press relations from the very outset of his administration, characterized by expectations of unfailing support, coupled with a general vindictiveness toward his few critics among the press corps. In the past, Obama's habit of leaking the divorce records of opponents, his calls for supporters to confront opponents and "get in their face," petty threats in St. Louis by prosecutors against any who might say untrue things about Obama, and successful pressure to keep unpublished the Obama speech praising the radical Palestinian-American Rashid Khalidi were not even news, but usually written off as the normal pro-Obama zeal. Obama alone could not have elevated The View to a supposedly serious 60 Minutes-type news show - and reduced 60 Minutes to the inanity of The View.