“After the last two years, many would view gridlock as progress,” said Morrissey. “A lot of [the Tea Party's] platform was negatives: to stop what the administration and Democrats had been doing. … If they see the House working hard and passing things, keeping up with all of these issues, even if not all of them get through the Senate, or if the president vetoes them, they’ll understand.”

The most interesting discussion, however, came in response to a question about entitlement spending and whether the Tea Party and the next Congress will find the resolve to tackle the issue, as all three panelists offered different views that nicely summarize the divergent takes on the issue.

“We know it is a problem,” said Tucker. “We know we can’t talk about doing away with spending without talking about entitlements. But we don’t like thinking of Social Security as an entitlement. … We paid into a system. The problem is corruption happened and they didn’t do with the money what was supposed to happen with the money…. When it comes to entitlements for poeple who are not willing to work, we’re willing to talk about that, but [we need to] take care of people who pay into the system.”

“Social Security and Medicare are not two equal entitlement areas,” said Morrissey. “Medicare is an utter disaster just waiting to happen and you just can’t get around that. It will be a measure of the new Congress’ seriousness whether or not they’re willing to address it. … Whether they’re willing to do something about it is really going to be a function of how much the Tea Party holds them accountable.”

“When they were drawing up their pledge, Republicans debated about what to include in terms of entitlement spending and ultimately left it out,” said York. “My guess is you won’t see any serious action in the next two years in terms of entitlement reform.”

So you’ve got three competing takes within the GOP in a nutshell. Morrissey’s take represents the true fiscally conservative approach to the issue, while York is the realist about what the GOP will actually have the political courage to take on. Tucker, meanwhile, channels the debate into a common undertone of concerns among the Tea Party: the belief that if the government rooted out corruption and only rewarded those who paid into the system, there would be no problem. No talk of demographic realities, an aging population or the rising cost of health care — just a sense that the program is being dragged under by government corruption and/or poor people.

The third view won’t close the deficit, but it might give Republicans a free pass to focus on smaller yet more visible instances of waste, fraud and abuse, or unemployment insurance, and yet stay in the good graces of the Tea Party.

Despite serving as the ‘safe schools’ czar, Jennings has demonstrated a willingness to look the other way on sexual abuse. His life’s work has been the promotion of homosexuality, even in elementary schools, and he has demonstrated no qualifications to make students safer in our schools.

Apart from passing legislation to prevent “czars” from taking salaries — and Rep. Jack Kingston’s (R-Ga.) bill that would do that is up to 116 co-sponsors — there’s not much King can do on this front in Congress. He can, however, get some free media attention for the campaign against Jennings, and he’s succeeding.

One more thing. In his report, York includes this curious detail:

Jennings wrote that in 1988, when he was a high school teacher, he was approached by a 15 year-old boy who said he had become involved with an older man. Instead of notifying the boy’s parents or any authorities, Jennings instead offered the boy advice: “I hope you used a condom.” Critics accused Jennings of turning a blind eye to child abuse. In response, Jennings’ defenders said the boy was 16 years old, not 15, suggesting that Jennings had no responsibility to protect him.

My emphasis. Jennings’ defenders have not “suggested” this. They have provided the driver’s license of the boy in this story, which proves that he was 16 at the start of the school year, after which time this conversation occurred. And the point of that evidence is not that “Jennings had no responsibility to protect him,” but that because the boy was of legal age in Massachusetts, Jennings was not an accomplice in a crime. Jennings erred in his original telling of the story and accidentally implicated himself. York’s blurring of the line here changes the story.

In the past, you’ve probably heard about secret holds in the Senate, in which a single senator hides behind the rules to block a nomination while remaining anonymous.  Grassley wouldn’t do that. Fastidious about keeping the public informed on what he’s doing, if Grassley tries to stop a nominee, he’ll do it out in the open, by name, and he’ll tell the White House exactly why he’s doing it.  And he’ll keep doing it until he gets what he wants.

Basically, the political oomph of the story depends on Grassley and on Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.).

In 1993, just after Bill Clinton was elected and Democrats controlled both the House and Senate, a lone Republican congressman, Rep. Bill Clinger, wanted to investigate the suspicious firings of the White House Travel Office staff. But majority Democrats had no inclination to pursue the matter. Clinger tried and tried, wrote letter after letter, and jumped up and down, but he didn’t begin to get results until after November 1994, when Republicans took control of both Houses of Congress.

The Travel Office? Really? To call “Travelgate” a phony scandal is to bring discredit to the concept of “phoniness.” After a seven-year investigation (nearly seven years after five of the fired employees got new federal jobs) all the inspectors discovered about the Travel Office firings was that then-First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton made some false statements about how it began. The Americorps story, like that story, might take on momentum, but “Travelgate” is typically and correctly remembered as an example of how politicized scandals can be spun out of nothing. If the Obama administration didn’t realize this before, it really should now.

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I wrote that citing Obama’s “sky-high ratings among African-Americans make some of his positions appear a bit more popular overall than they actually are” … Maybe “across-the-board” would have been better than “overall,” but I doubt that would have kept a left-wing activist like Matthew Yglesias, or Andrew Sullivan, who has himself been accused of racism and, quite recently, anti-Semitism, from branding me a racist.

York doesn’t seem to realize that “actually are” was just as problematic, but let’s ignore his drive-by accusations of two people who haven’t written themselves into a mini-controversy this week.

My question was why York was engaging in the occasional conservative habit of asking what a Democratic politician’s support would be like if there were no blacks in the equation, something that is usually done after an election to talk down the Democrat’s electoral mandate. You heard a lot of this after November 2008, with conservatives arguing that black voters’ racial solidarity pushed President Obama over the finish line, and that they were “the real racists,” unlike white voters who had been accused for months of possibly lying to pollsters about whether they’d support Obama. York’s answer:

What if a president were wildly popular with one group, and only middlingly popular with another group and yet was often portrayed as being hugely popular with the whole group?  It seems worthwhile to point that out that there are differences within the group — something that is done all the time with political polls.

It’s done all the time because politicians are always trying to expand their margins with various members of their base. It’s rarely done to argue that one group’s extreme support shouldn’t count, because that’s moronic.

It’s the old joke:  Six people are in a bar.  They’re all middle class; their average net worth is about $100,000.  Bill Gates walks in.  Seven people are in a bar; their average net worth is in the billions.  A wealthy group, right?  Internal numbers are revealing.

That’s actually the way that Fox Business Channel views the economy (GDP is up, therefore everyone is richer and has higher wages) but it’s a foolish way of viewing a political poll. Public opinion isn’t about what the average person thinks, but about whether a majority can be cobbled together out of a group of people to push the Congress to make a decision or to re-eleect a politician. If you have one group of actors you can count on, you try and build up your support with other groups. This is what, for example, Mississippi Republicans do as a result of their low support with the state’s large black population — they try to win black votes on the margins and maximize the white vote.

62 percent of whites approve of the job Obama is doing as president. Among blacks, the number is 96 percent.

Obama won 43 percent of the white vote and 95 percent of the black vote. His black support has increased by only one percent, but his white support has soared by 44 percent.

The other strange thing about York is that all of this appeared in one of Washington, D.C.’s three newspapers — a city that’s 55 percent black, with an electorate that’s 56 percent black. The Examiner isn’t generally read by black Washingtonians, though, which might be one reason why the paper’s op-ed brass thought it wise to publish a piece about why those people didn’t really count.

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[Obama's] sky-high ratings among African-Americans make some of his positions appear a bit more popular overall than they actually are. Asked whether their opinion of the president is favorable or unfavorable, 49 percent of whites in the Times poll say they have a favorable opinion of Obama. Among blacks the number is 80 percent. Twenty-one percent of whites say their view of the president is unfavorable, while the number of blacks with unfavorable opinions of Obama is too small to measure.

Wow! That’s really something! What could possibly explain this if not racial solidarity? Except …

The Obama Effect even spills over to the subject of Vice President Joe Biden. Forty-four percent of white respondents say they approve of the way Biden is handling his job, while 81 percent of blacks approve.

Wait — why is the gap between white and black voters even higher for Biden than it is for Obama? Is this an Obama Effect or is it the preference of black voters for the Democratic Party? Let’s pick a random 2008 race between two white candidates: the North Carolina race between now-Sen. Kay Hagan (D-N.C.) and then-Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R-N.C.). Seventy-five percent of voters were white, and Dole won them by 18 points. But 19 percent of voters were black, and Hagan won them by 95 points. Obama only defeated Sen. John McCain by 90 points among black voters in North Carolina (while losing whites by 29 points).

So there are two explanations here. Explanation A: There is an Obama Effect that is dazzling black voters to such an extent that they are supporting white Democrats even more strongly than they support Obama. Explanation B: Black voters strongly support the Democratic Party, and have since the 1960s, for a number of complicated reasons. I think Explanation B is more likely, which is problematic for Republicans if they, like York, equate the “actual” support for Obama’s policies with “support from whites.”

Update: One quick note: I contrasted Biden’s approval numbers with Obama’s favorable numbers, and obviously those are calculations of two different things. However, the white-black gap on Obama’s job approval is 34 points, even bigger than the 31-point gap on the favorable numbers. York puts that number near the end of the column, possibly because the 62 percent job approval number that Obama enjoys from white voters make it even stranger that York is trying to argue that the guy’s not that popular.

And one more quick thing: Part of York’s argument is that black support is higher than white support for some of Obama’s specific polices, on the economy (higher by 36 points), on foreign policy (higher by 32 points), on “bringing real change in the way things are done in Washington” (higher by 36 points). That still doesn’t explain why the usual racial gap in party support matters here, unless the implication is that black voters are dazzled and supporting whatever Obama says. That’s not a criticism you often hear of, say, white evangelical voters vis-a-vis Republicans.

2nd Update: I have more on York’s column here.

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• “A former Bush aide” who accuses President Obama of being “gratuitous, slightly petty, and slightly obsessive.”

• “Another” former Bushie who calls Obama’s behavior “completely gratuitous.”

• “A third” former Bushie who calls it “unfair.”

• “A Bush veteran” who complains that Obama took unwarranted credit for Webcasting the Easter Egg Roll.

York is a fine reporter who beat just about everyone to the story of the left’s Bush-era infrastructure and think tank-building, but I struggle to see the point of this kind of story and this kind of sourcing.

At the big pro-illegal-immigration rally on the Mall in Washington on April 10, thousands of demonstrators held aloft dark blue signs that read, “We Are America.” Below those words, in smaller letters, was the name “New American Opportunity Campaign,” and below that was a web address, www.cirnow.org.

Although not obvious at first glance, the small print on the signs said something important about the aggressive new drive to win acceptance of illegal immigrants. A visit to the website www.cirnow.org — those letters stand for “Comprehensive Immigration Reform Now” — leads to a site for the New American Opportunity Campaign, which in turn leads to a request for donations to an organization called the Coalition for Comprehensive Immigration Reform.

York again, covering the Tea Parties.

A number of press reports have characterized the tea parties as anti-Obama exercises. The Wall Street Journal carried an online story headlined “Anti-Obama ‘Tea Party’ Protests Mark Tax Day.” CNN introduced a tea-party story by saying, “This is a party for Obama-bashers.”  The Los Angeles Times ran a column headlined, “Anti-Obama Taxpayer Tea Parties Steeped in Insanity.”  But in Winchester at least, the atmosphere was not so much anti-Obama — organizers posted a note on their website asking that everyone “Please DO NOT personally attack the President or any member of Congress by name” — as it was a classic conservative Republican, limited-government, anti-spending talkfest.

The 2006 immigration rallies drew two to threee times as many people as the Tea Parties. But in The Washington Examiner, it’s clear which one of these events was grassroots and which was a fraud.