The United States has suffered a huge diplomatic defeat, with ominous consequences that will reverberate for decades.  Yet I feel relieved, because the alternatives were worse. * * * * The silver lining in this cloud is that if America can survive the next 40 months, the odds are the America 3.0 Jack Wheeler described here will be ushered in on January 20, 2017. * * * * Despite spending about 8 times as much as their opponents, two Democratic state senators lost recall elections in Colorado.  This has ominous implications for gun grabbers and Democrats nationwide. * * * * Despite liberal smears, conservatives won landslide victories in Australia Saturday and Norway Monday. **** At its convention in Los Angeles Thursday, the AFL-CIO passed a strongly worded resolution against Obamacare. * * * * Syria may mean curtains for John McCain's sidekick.

Members of Congress -- spooked because their constituents oppose intervening in Syria's civil war, and alarmed by the president's inept handling of the crisis -- were about to vote down the resolution he tardily asked for to authorize military strikes.  It would have been a humiliating defeat for Barack Hussein Obama. Then Russian President Vladimir Putin tossed him a lifeline, which Mr. Obama went for like a trout to a fisherman's lure. "Putin openly despises your president," Russian political analyst Andrei A. Piontovsky told the New York Times.  Why would he help Mr. Obama out of a jam? Because  Putin knows Mr. Obama is so vain, he'd be more likely to act to protect his own reputation than to protect America's.  This of course is exactly what has happened -- and Zero is so clueless he hasn't figured out yet the extent to which he has been humiliated.

Syria is thought to have at least 1,000 tons of chemical munitions.  They loom large in the debate over whether to launch air strikes against the regime of dictator Bashar Assad. Larger than they ought to.  Chemical munitions -- along with nuclear bombs and biological agents -- are classified as "weapons of mass destruction."  This is deceptive.  To lump poison gas with nukes and bugs is like comparing a high school football team to the Pittsburgh Steelers or the Green Bay Packers.  They don't really belong in the same league. The Germans, in the second battle of Ypres in 1915, were the first to use lethal chemical weapons.  They were used extensively by both sides for the remainder of World War I, but hardly ever since. This has less to do with humanitarian restraint on the part of the combatants -- or fear of retaliation in kind -- than it does with the fact that chemical weapons aren't very effective.  Here's why:

We must intervene in the civil war in Syria because "if a thug and a murderer like Bashar al-Assad can gas thousands of his own people with impunity," it would set a bad example for others, Secretary of State John Kerry told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Tuesday (8/03). Secretary Kerry's moral outrage would have been more moving if Sen. Kerry -- who met with the Syrian dictator six times, and urged "engagement" with his regime -- hadn't said so many kind things about Mr. Assad in the recent past.  Secretary Kerry's change of direction at Tuesday's hearing doesn't inspire confidence either.  A resolution authorizing military action should not forbid the use of ground troops, he said, but flip-flopped after receiving criticism. He was right the first time.  No war has ever gone the way the side that fired the first shot assumed it would.  For recent examples, see Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq.

The National Security Agency violated legal restrictions or privacy rules at least 2,776 times in the 12 months before May of 2012, an internal audit found. "In just a single one of those 2,776 incidents, 3,000 people had their rights violated," noted Conor Friedersdorf of the Atlantic magazine. The audit was only of collections made at NSA headquarters at Ft. Meade, Maryland, and other NSA facilities in the Washington D.C. metro area.  "Three government officials, speak­ing on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified matters, said the number would be substantially higher if it included other NSA operating units and regional collection centers," said the Washington Post's Barton Gellman, who broke the story Aug. 15.  The NSA is an outlaw agency,

Despite having, by far, the world's largest and most lavishly funded "intelligence community," we suffered a massive intelligence failure on 9/11/2001, and repeated embarrassment since. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon "could have and should have been prevented," Admiral Michael McConnell, the Director of National Intelligence, told Congress in 2007.  We failed to stop tBoston Marathon bombers in April of this year (even though the Russians had warned us they were dangerous.)  Our intel community was surprised by the "Arab Spring," the subsequent Arab winter, and the attack on our consulate in Benghazi on 9/11/2012. How come?  In large part because we have the world's largest and most lavishly funded intelligence community, I think.  Before we go there, let's review what it takes to prevent nasty surprises.

Barack Hussein Obama interrupted his presidential vacation briefly last week to deplore the bloody crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.  To show his displeasure, he cancelled a joint military exercise scheduled for next month -- but said nothing about the $1.3 billion in aid the U.S. gives to Egypt each year. He should have suspended aid, said Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt, Carl Levin, D-Mich, John McCain, R-Ariz, Ted Cruz, R-Tex, and Rand Paul, R-Ky, and many others. The editors of the New York Times and the Washington Post agree.  So do pundits from left to right. Rarely in politics these days has there been so broad a consensus.  But it's as shallow as it is broad, thinks columnist Charles Krauthammer.  "Anything John McCain and Rand Paul agree on has to be wrong," he said. Mr. Krauthammer is right. Here's why.

Equality before the law is the fundamental principle that undergirds democratic government.  Remove it, and there is just the arbitrary exercise of power. Lincoln understood this.  Barack Hussein Obama doesn't.  If a law is inconvenient for him, he ignores it.  The president's scofflaw behavior culminates a century long assault on the Constitution.  It's ironic those making it style themselves "Progressives," for theirs is a return to the ways of Pharoahs and Caesars. The combination of the Supreme Court's arrogated power of judicial review with life tenure for federal judges has made it possible.  The federal government can do what the Constitution forbids because, said Justice Charles Evans Hughes, "the Constitution is what the judges say it is." To restore the Constitution our Founders wrote, Mark Levin, chief of staff to Attorney General Ed Meese during the Reagan administration, proposes 11 amendments to it in his new book, "The Liberty Amendments." Let's talk about The Levin Solution.

He would restore American prestige in the world, which had been battered by the war in Iraq, Mr. Obama said when he was running for president.  In contrast to President George W. Bush, who relied on military force, he would exercise "smart power" to charm America's adversaries -- Russia in particular. The result?  "Relations with Russia have fallen off a cliff, making the theatrical ‘reset' of 2009 look, frankly, cringe-worthy," said Frida Ghitis, World Affairs columnist for the Miami Herald. President Obama responded to Russia's latest affront by cancelling a meeting with Mr. Putin scheduled for next month.  That, apparently, will be the extent of U.S. retaliation. "In Barack Obama's mind, the ultimate punishment is to deny you the opportunity to meet with Barack Obama," tweeted the humorist Iowahawk.

Members of Congress created a big problem for themselves when they passed Obamacare. Section 1312(d) requires them to get their health insurance through the insurance "exchanges" established by the law. Currently, lawmakers and Congressional staff get health insurance from the Federal Employees Health Benefit Program, which offers a wide variety of plans, and subsidizes up to 75 percent of their cost.  This year that averages about $4,900 for individual plans, $11,000 for family plans. They'll no longer be eligible to participate in the FEHBP when Obamacare goes into effect Oct. 1, Section 1312(d) implies.  And nothing in it authorizes the government to subsidize insurance obtained through the Obamacare exchanges. That means, in effect, a pay cut of $5,000, or $11,000, for lawmakers and their higher paid aides.  "The result was a full wig out on Capitol Hill," said the Wall Street Journal.  Here's how they got taxpayers to pay for it.

U.S. diplomatic missions throughout the Middle East were closed Sunday (8/4) in response to the threat of terrorist attack from al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) which may involve bombs surgically implanted in suicide bombers. Nothing bad happened Sunday. But closing 21 diplomatic missions sends the wrong signal, worries Rep. Ted Poe, R-Tex, who chairs a House subcommittee on Terrorism and Non-Proliferation. "Terrorism works -- because we're closing all of our embassies and consulates on one day," he said. "We'd rather be safe than have somebody hurt but the long term answer is every time someone gets information, we can't shut them all down all over the world." "I find this pre-emptive cringing unworthy of a great country, even humiliating," said Daniel Pipes, president of the Middle East Forum. "Why do we allow a bunch of extremist thugs to close us down, rather than the reverse?"

This week the "phony" scandals stopped seeming phony. CNN aired an interview Wednesday (7/31) with Ahmed Abdu Khattala, who Libyan officials think was one of the ringleaders of the attack on our consulate in Benghazi on 9/11/2012. Khattala said he'd be happy to talk to American investigators about what happened that night, but nobody in the FBI or the Libyan government  has asked him about it.  There were "dozens" of CIA operatives on the ground at the annex during the attack, CNN said in a report Thursday (8/1). What were all those guys doing there?  The answer to that question is the key to the Benghazi coverup, says Joe Curl's source in the CIA. * * * * Lois Lerner, the IRS official at the epicenter of the targeting of conservative groups, passed confidential information to a lawyer at the Federal Elections Commission in an apparent effort to keep a conservative group from winning a case pending before the FEC, emails obtained by the House Ways & Means Committee indicate. "This means more than just an expansion of the probe to the FEC," said Kim Strassel. "It's a new link to the Obama team."

There's a dreary similarity to how Republicans blow opportunity after opportunity, because they all stem from the disdain and distrust the GOP's major factions have for each other. It's conservative insurgents vs. moderate pros; flyover country vs. the D.C. beltway, or -- as they're viewed by their antagonists -- the Hicks in the Sticks vs. the Establishment Squishes. The Hicks propose rash courses of action and make unreasonable demands because they haven't a clue about how government works, the Squishes think. In battles with Democrats, Squishes often raise the white flag before the first shot is fired, think the Hicks. Today, there's a bitter struggle between the Hicks and the Squishes over Obamacare.  One faction offers a hopeless kamikaze charge.  The other, doing next to nothing in the face of a grave threat to liberty and to the economy.  There's another choice.  Here it is.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a potential presidential candidate in 2016, took a shot "libertarian foreign policy" over the weekend, and at its principal advocate, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky, another potential 2016 GOP presidential candidate. So did Rep. Peter King, R-NY, compared GOP libertarians to "the anti-war, left-wing Democrats of the 1960s that nominated George McGovern."  But the libertarian Republicans they attacked are more closely aligned with public sentiment, and more nearly in accordance with the warning President Eisenhower gave in his Farewell Address.

For most in the bigfoot media, the big story this week was another texting scandal for New York Mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner.  Which was a godsend for San Diego Mayor Bob Filner, because it distracted attention from all the women who say he's sexually harassed them.  Eliot Spitzer, who resigned as governor of New York after his affair with a prostitute was disclosed, was back in the news, too.  This week it was hard to remember it's the Republicans who are supposed to be waging a war on women. * * * * There was real news, too, but the bigfoot media have little interest in covering it.  Perhaps most important was the surprise scare the Surveillance State received Wednesday. * * * * For the 9th, or the 19th time, depending on who is counting, President Barack Obama has "pivoted" to the economy.  His speech at Knox College bombed, said liberal as well as conservative journalists, but, warns Matt Continetti, his political goals may have been achieved. * * * * Dr. Ben Carson has given us yet another reason for hoping he'll be on the GOP ticket in 2016.

The best educated children in America don't go to school. Brian Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute, compared home schoolers and public school students on the results of three standardized tests -- the California Achievement Test, the Iowa Test of Basic Skills and the Stanford Achievement Test -- for the 2007-2008 academic year.  With public school students at the 50th percentile, home schoolers were at the 89th percentile in reading, the 86th percentile in science, the 84th percentile in language, math, and social studies. The explosive growth in home schooling has been fueled by dissatisfaction with public schools.  That dissatisfaction is huegely justified.

Jack Wheeler is hidden away in the Hidden Alps, so I'll be filling in for him on the HFR for a couple of weeks. Most discussed by the news media was an event that happened last week, in which Americans had only "modest" interest.  That's usually a sign of a slow news week.  But appearances can be deceiving.  There was a lot going on the Bigfoot Media didn't want to talk about: A "bombshell" was dropped in the House Oversight Committee's investigation of IRS targeting of conservative groups...   ...More evidence emerged of a coverup of what happened at our consulate in Benghazi on 9/11/2012.  Special Operations Speaks, co-founded by former Navy SEAL and TTPer Larry Bailey, will hold a rally on the steps of the U.S. Capitol this coming Tuesday to urge House Speaker John Boehner to form a Select Committee to investigate Benghazi... ...Three of the most powerful labor bosses blasted Obamacare in an "unusually harsh" letter to Senate and House Democratic leaders.  The House passed a bill to make legal the delay in the employer mandate the administration announced last week, and another to delay the individual mandate too.  President Obama threatened to veto both... ...Both Republicans and Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee told those running the Surveillance State to clean up their act, or the Patriot Act won't be renewed.  For details, and lots more, read on...

Odds are high you've heard about Edward Snowden, who told a British newspaper the National Security Agency is spying on American citizens. But have heard of Thomas Drake, William Binney, J. Kirk Wiebe, or Edward Loomis? They also worked for the NSA, also believe the collection of electronic data on Americans doesn't protect us from terrorists, and violates the law. If you haven't, its probably because they did what Edward Snowden's critics say he should have done.   They expressed their concerns through proper channels.  And what happened to them likely prompted Mr. Snowden to blow his whistle differently.

Is obeying the law optional?  President Barack Hussein Obama seems to think it is -- at least insofar as it applies to him. The administration announced quietly last week that it plans to delay enforcement of the employer provision in Obamacare, even though the Constitution says the president "shall take Care that the laws be faithfully executed." (Article II, Section 3). In 1998, the Supreme Court ruled a law passed by Congress to permit the president to veto individual items in spending bills was unconstitutional because, "There is no provision in the Constitution that authorizes the president to enact, to amend, or to repeal statutes." (Clinton v. City of New York). This was no oversight.  The Founding Fathers knew well that King James II of England was deposed in large part because he refused to enforce laws passed by Parliament he didn't like.  They wrote Article II, Section 3 to keep such an abuse from happening here.  But it has.  Will Mr. Obama suffer the same fate as King James II?

Neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman "profiled" black teenager Trayvon Martin, "stalked" him, and started the fight that led to his death, prosecutors asserted. But the testimony of nearly every witness for the prosecution bolstered Mr. Zimmerman's claim he acted in self defense, said attorney Andrew Branca, author of "The Law of Self Defense." The prosecution's case was so weak that Judge Debra Nelson should have granted the defense motion for a directed verdict of acquittal, said Mr. Branca, who is covering the trial for the blog Legal Insurrection. If George Zimmerman had Hispanicized his first name (as Geraldo Rivera did) and adopted his maternal last name, it's doubtful he'd have been arrested, much less put on trial for murder, said historian Victor Davis Hanson.  What a racist train wreck of a trial.

I hope you and your families had a wonderful Fourth of July. I don't think Barack Obama is having a good time.  In what has been the worst week ever for his presidency, there's been a race to see which would collapse completely faster - his foreign policy or his domestic policy. Because of the big doings in Egypt, my money's on foreign policy.  But when Zero's administration admits, in effect, that his "signature achievement" in domestic policy is unworkable, you have a strong contender for biggest flop. It's been so bad his fan club in the news media has been reduced to calling Obama incompetent - because all other plausible explanations are worse.  Liberal journalists are starting to realize they've made a Faustian bargain, Victor Davis Hanson thinks. People now think Obama is more dishonest and more incompetent than was George W. Bush, according to a Pew poll released Monday. The prosecutors in the murder trial of George Zimmerman may have had a worse week.  Every witness they called bolstered the case for the defense. Details are coming up.  But first, let's revisit the most important Fourth of July week ever.  Then we'll Walk Like An Egyptian.

Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal is a journalist for whose judgment and integrity I have great respect.  So I was embarrassed for him when he wrote June 19 that building a fence along our border with Mexico "would be America's Berlin Wall-a historic embarrassment." The Berlin Wall was built to keep East Germans from getting out, not to keep West Germans from coming in.  But the more fundamental problem with Mr. Henninger's grossly offensive analogy is that the Berlin Wall worked. Walls work.  The Romans figured that out 2,000 years ago and the Israelis have today.  Here's how and why they'd work for us.

The fact that James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, was a lieutenant general in the Air Force makes me think the Air Force needs to re-examine its promotion policies. "The term Muslim Brotherhood is an umbrella term for a variety of movements," Mr. Clapper told Congress Feb. 11, 2011. "In the case of Egypt, a very heterogeneous group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence and has decried al-Qaeda as a perversion of Islam." An intelligence officer who says that is either a liar or a fool.  Then again, he may be both, and here's why.

Hello.  We're from the government. You think we're here to help you?  Ha-ha, very funny.   We're here to take lots of your money -- about twice as much as we took in 1985 -- and to boss you around.  We say you can't build on your own property without our permission.  You must buy health insurance if we tell you to. Federal spending has risen 23 percent since the recession began, median household income has fallen.  We're richer.  You're poorer.  But to pamper ourselves at lavish conferences, give bonuses to IRS executives who harass conservatives, and pay for the president's vacations, we must have more. More - always more. Government programs rarely deliver what we promised, cost more than we said, you whine? So what?  You better think carefully before you complain about how we do things.  Each day we collect 1.7 billion electronic records on you and other Americans.  We could be reading your emails, monitoring your telephone calls and tracking your credit card purchases. We didn't want you to find out about this.  But since that little jerk Snowden has let the cat out of the bag, we want you to know we do it only for your protection.

Were the leaks about the government's collection of data on our telephone calls, credit card transactions, and emails orchestrated by Obama aides to distract attention from other scandals? More than a few seasoned political observers suspect this.  Snooping by the National Security Agency can at least partly be blamed on former President George W. Bush, and the furor has pushed the Benghazi and IRS scandals off the front page, they say. True.  But I doubt any of his aides think the president benefits by having comedian Stephen Colbert describe Mr. Obama as "a tyrannical despot who ignores all the rules," and the New York Times declare he's lost all credibility.  "We wanted a president that listens to all Americans -- now we have one," joked comedian Jay Leno.  But few liberals are laughing.  Dismaying his base is a high price for the president to pay for distraction that will only be temporary.  The NSA Prism scandal could be Obama's Katrina.

Confidence in President Barack Hussein Obama Jr.'s stewardship of the economy has declined, especially among young adults, according to polls conducted in late April.   Young voters aren't the only ones regretting they opted for Obama last year. CBO estimates the cost of Obamacare insurance  subsidies at $1.4 trillion for the years 2012-21.  But CBO assumed few companies would drop their insurance plans - ridiculous in view of the incentives to do just that.  The actuary for Medicare and Medicaid estimates 14 million workers will lose their private health insurance.  If so, costs could be 46 percent higher. As unions learn they're likely to lose their health insurance plans, they're also experiencing buyers' remorse. 

I'm enjoying immensely Attorney General Eric Holder's frantic efforts to keep his job.  But why the White House wants him to is mystifying. Mr. Holder's troubles began when we learned the Justice Department seized the telephone records of reporters and editors for the Associated Press.  Those troubles vastly multiplied when it was learned the attorney general himself had signed off on snooping the phone records of Fox News diplomatic correspondent James Rosen, then lied under oath about it to Congress. The longer Eric Holder remains attorney general, the more he and the president bleed.  So why does the president want him to stay?

After a tornado struck Moore, Oklahoma May 20, two prominent Senate Democrats proved how profoundly mistaken are those who assume liberals are smarter and more moral than conservatives. As most Americans mourned the 24 dead and 277 injured, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., blamed the tornado (and hurricanes and wildfires) on Republicans, because so many dispute the theory of anthropogenic (man-made) global warming or AGW.  There'd be fewer tornadoes if her bill to impose a carbon tax became law, said Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Cal, who chairs the Environment and Public Works Committee. Compared to Sens. Whitehouse and Boxer, the Flat Earth Society (yes, it still exists) seems scientifically respectable.  Are Whitehouse, Boxer & Co idiots?  Or have they another motive for saying things so preposterously false about warming and violent storms? 

Barack Hussein Obama didn't know security was so lax at our consulate in Benghazi, wasn't aware the IRS was targeting his critics, wasn't told Attorney General Eric Holder was combing through the telephone records of journalists, both he and his aides say. If so, the president was remarkably detached from what was going on in his administration.  His speech at the National Defense University last week (5/23) indicates he's also remarkably disconnected from what's happening in the world. "Every war has come to an end," he said.  The War on Terror must end, too, so he plans to ask Congress to "refine, and ultimately repeal" the authorization to use military force Congress passed three days after 9/11. Mr. Obama believes he can end this war simply by declaring it to be over.  What has ended, what is over, is Mr. Obama's connection to reality,

As we all know now, in 2012 the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative groups (but not liberal groups) applying for tax exempt status, demanding the names and addresses of their members and donors, and their contacts with journalists and legislators. "Please detail the content of the members of your organizations' prayers," the IRS asked a pro-life group in Iowa. Tax collectors have no right to demand such information from Americans. We must find out who is responsible for targeting critics of the Obama administration, and hold them accountable. But the more important reason for getting to the bottom of this breathtaking abuse of power is so we can keep it from ever happening again.  The only way to do it is to eliminate the IRS.  But how?

It was drummed into us in boot camp that "Marines go back for their wounded.  Marines go back for their dead.  We leave no one behind." I found the same ethos in the Army Special Forces when I joined them later.  During the Vietnam war, the Air Force went to extraordinary lengths to rescue downed pilots.  But on 9/11/2012, Americans at our consulate in Benghazi were left behind. It may well be true, as Defense Secretary Leon Panetta claimed, that military help couldn't be sent because it was unavailable.  But if that is true, somebody screwed the pooch, big time.  Was it the POTUS?

Though arguably the least significant of three burgeoning scandals that have made this the worst fortnight ever for the presidency of Barack Hussein Obama, the Justice Department's covert seizure of the telephone records of Associated Press reporters may cause him the most grief.  Journalists unmoved by evidence his Justice Department ran guns to Mexican drug cartels and promoted vote fraud are very, very upset. Some Democrats who faithfully parroted administration talking points on Benghazi jumped ship after the Internal Revenue Service admitted targeting Tea Party groups. The FBI has now launched a criminal probe. Fewer have been willing to parrot the party line on Benghazi since the number two guy in our embassy in Libya testified that during the attack on 9/11/2012, he told Secretary of State Hillary Clinton it was the work of terrorists affiliated with al Qaeda.  All told, this is a Hat Trick of Scandals.

Thanks to the testimony of whistleblowers last week, and subsequent reporting of how "talking points" were systematically scrubbed of every reference to the truth, we know for sure President Barack Hussein Obama and senior aides were lying when they blamed a Youtube video for the attack on our consulate in Benghazi. More important is what is being covered up.  To get to the bottom of what may be more a looming national security crisis than a scandal in the past, we must have answers to a large number of critical questions.  The way to get them is for the House of Representatives to form a Select Committee, armed with subpoena power, to investigate what was going on before and during the attack on 9/11/2012, and what's been happening since. Here's how to form it, who should be on it, and what its members should focus on.  Hint: not impeachment.  There are very good reasons why - at least not before the mid-term elections in November 2014.

How different history might have been if the news media then were as blasé about Watergate as they've been about Benghazi, if Republicans then were as disinterested in truth as Democrats are now. If Watergate had not brought Richard Nixon low, the "emerging Republican majority" Kevin Phillips predicted in his 1969 book might well have.  Democrats wouldn't have won the lopsided majorities in the 1974 congressional elections that led to the vast expansion of domestic spending that now threatens to bankrupt the country. President Nixon, if unweakened by scandal, wouldn't have abandoned South Vietnam when the North Vietnamese invaded. The Watergate burglars were caught while removing a bug on the phone of a Democratic National Committee official they believed supplied prostitutes for visiting Democrat big shots.  President Nixon and his senior aides were furious when they found out. They were undone by their attempt to cover up a crime in which they were not involved.  A crime in which no one died, like those in Benghazi.

President Barack Hussein Obama held a news conference Tuesday.  When it was over, his friends in the news media wondered why. * * * * Obama thinks he can say anything, and get away with it. But foreign leaders pay attention to what the president of the United States says, so the weakness and passivity Zero displayed in his news conference - especially his backing and filling on "red lines" in Syria, is sure to cause us trouble. * * * * The news media's Omerta about Benghazi may be about to break. * * * * The genuinely conservative UK Independence Party has done spectacularly well in local elections in Britain, early returns indicate - despite press coverage that makes the treatment the Tea Party has received from journalists here seem favorable.

A few weeks ago, the odds an immigration reform bill could pass in both the Democrat-controlled Senate and the Republican-controlled House of Representatives were closer to “none” than “slim.” The main interest Democrats have in immigration reform is the prospect of having millions of newly enfranchised voters voting for them. But there were indications President Barack Obama would rather have the issue than a bill that could pass the House. But the president’s humiliating defeat on gun control and the Boston Marathon bombing have changed the dynamic. After the gun control debacle, Mr. Obama badly needs a “win” on a substantive issue, lest he become a lame duck far earlier than any president before him. He can get that “win” only on immigration.