Victor Davis Hanson: Liberals: Exempt from Scrutiny

As for Gore, he cannot really believe in big green government or he would not have tried to beat the capital-gains tax hike when he peddled his failed cable network to a petrodollar-rich Al Jazeera, whose cash comes from the very sources of energy that Gore claims he hates. Do you make millions, and then in eleventh-century fashion repent so that you can enjoy them all the more? Gore certainly in the past has not lived modestly; the carbon footprint of keeping Al Gore going - housing, travel, and tastes - is quite stunning. Both the Steyers and the Gores of our human comedy know that it is lucrative business to appear green, and that by doing so one can keep one's personal life largely exempt from scrutiny in general and charges of hypocrisy in particular. For them, 21st-century liberalism is a useful badge, a fashion not unlike wearing good shades or having the right sort of cell phone.

Kevin D. Williamson: Unnecessary Lies

It should go without saying that the Obama administration should have been forthright about what happened that day rather than try to deflect blame on to a "right-wing Christian" filmmaker and his alleged provocations. Beyond that, even with an election on the near horizon, the Obama administration probably did not really politically need to mislead the public about those events. Having our embassy in Cairo overrun was humiliating, and the deaths in Benghazi were shocking, but Americans are by this point used to seeing their countrymen killed in lands where Islam predominates, and they have suffered enough humiliations that one more was not going to cost anybody an election.

(T)he Obama administration did not mislead the American public about Benghazi out of political necessity; it misled the American public out of habit. And why wouldn't it? From the economic effects of the stimulus bill to the GM bailout to blaming last quarter's poor economic numbers on the fact that it is cold during the winter, the Obama administration has an excellent record for wholesaling fiction to the American electorate, which keeps enduring it. There is apparently enough collective intelligence in the Obama administration to hold in general contempt the wit and attention span of an American public that has elected it twice.

Robert Bryce: Gambling with Eagles

In March 2013, a peer-reviewed study published in the Wildlife Society Bulletin estimated that in 2012 alone, wind turbines killed 888,000 bats and 573,000 birds. Those bird kills included 83,000 raptors.

In September 2013, some of the Fish and Wildlife Service's top raptor biologists reported that the documented number of eagles being killed by wind turbines has increased dramatically over the last few years, going from two in 2007 to 24 in 2011. In all, the biologists found that wind turbines have killed some 85 eagles since 1997. And Joel Pagel, the lead author of the report, told me that that the eagle-kill figures they used are "an absolute minimum." Among the carcasses: six bald eagles.

Michael Barone: Obama's Era of Bad Feelings

But in his second term, Obama has shown zero interest in bipartisan reform. He campaigns on mini-issues such as the minimum wage and patches up Obamacare with executive orders that put him on the cusp of ignoring his constitutional duty to faithfully execute the laws. [...]

And House Ways and Means chairman Dave Camp has come forward with a serious tax-reform proposal.

But Obama seems uninterested. He sent Camp's negotiating partner, Finance chairman Max Baucus, to China. He has stayed in campaign mode since he broke up the "grand bargain" talks with Speaker John Boehner by upping the ante in August 2011.