MOVIES BASED ON VIDEOGAMES: Just how bad are they?
Archive for 2008
February 8, 2008
PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: A look at where the candidates stand on earmarks:
John McCain abhors them. Hillary Rodham Clinton embraces them. Barack Obama does a little of both.
The leading contenders for president cover the spectrum in their attitudes toward political pork known as earmarks.
In recent years, earmarks have become mired in controversy and scandal — from a $220 million earmark for a “Bridge to Nowhere” in Alaska to the corruption convictions of lobbyist Jack Abramoff and Rep. Duke Cunningham. Still, members of Congress continue to parcel them out, arguing that part of their job is to bring federal dollars back to their states.
Legions of lobbyists coax lawmakers each year to drop thousands of earmarks for their clients into spending bills with little to no scrutiny or debate. The 2008 defense bill bulged with more than 2,100 earmarks, costing $8 billion, according to the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense.
The use of earmarks and the powerful influence of lobbyists on Congress have been hotly debated in the presidential race. As that debate has continued, the top presidential candidates dealt with earmarks as senators in starkly different fashion from each other.
In the defense bill, for example, The Seattle Times found that Clinton sponsored 66 earmarks totaling $150 million. Obama sponsored six earmarks totaling $34 million; all were for nonprofit organizations. McCain didn’t ask for any earmarks this year.
Read the whole thing.
FACTCHECK.ORG: “The Democratic National Committee proposes to spend unlimited amounts of money to ‘tell the real story’ about John McCain before Republicans can ‘start smearing’ the eventual Democratic nominee. But the line of attack the Democrats outline to their potential donors in an e-mail contains some claims that are false or misleading.”
MAJOR JOHN TAMMES: Right, then, I’m off! Godspeed, Major John.
MORE ON climate change fears.
THE L.A. TIMES got more than 94 million pageviews in January. Wow, that’s more than 10 times what InstaPundit got. Sadly, their most-viewed item was about Britney Spears. . . .
TIES TO HILLARY PROVE TENUOUS at Yale Law School.
IN THE VERY UNLIKELY EVENT that I ever drive a big-rig truck, I’d want something like this one. Fuel-efficient yet luxurious!
UPDATE: Mike Hendrix isn’t buying.
WHO’LL RUN AGAINST LAMAR ALEXANDER? Nobody, on the Democratic side, so far.
MICKEY KAUS: “Remind me again, what is the evidence–in terms of policies, not affect or attitude or negotiating strategy–that Obama is not an unreconstructed lefty (on the American spectrum–a paleoliberal or a bit further left)? For example, would he roll back welfare reform if he could?”
AT ADVERTISING AGE, some advice for Hillary.
TOM BEVAN does the Veepstakes roundup. Plus, some related thoughts from The Anchoress.
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND AND the failure of liberal multiculturalism. It’s interesting, however, that Rowan Williams need have no fear for his personal safety after saying that Sharia is inevitable in England, while had he said bad things about Sharia the reverse would have been true. Under such circumstances, is behavior like his surprising?
UPDATE: Demands for Rowan Williams’ resignation.
ANOTHER UPDATE: More thoughts from Johnathan Pearce: “Frankly, a man of such supposed learned views as Dr Williams should know that a religion that has a legal code that applies to women in the way that it does is outrageous; doubly outrageous, considering that the Church, with all its faults, has in the past acted as a moral beacon on stirring up consciences on issues like the slave trade. I am sure there are admirable aspects of sharia: it is hard to believe that it would not have died out were it not to have contained such features. But let’s be crystal clear: if the Archbishop thinks it is right that whole groups of the UK population can choose to deal with issues like marriage, divorce and treatment of women outside the structure of the English Common law and its insistence upon treatment of women as consenting adults in matters of marriage, then he might as well hang up his cassock.”
MORE: Archbishop receives an almost universal and appalled No.
Plus this: “I’ve just been speaking with a Muslim friend who has always opposed sharia law. ‘Where does it leave me’, he asks, ‘when the Archbishop of Canterbury is calling for sharia?’ The beautifully hostile press reaction to Rowan Williams’ disgusting views is the only aspect of this story that could provide any hope. But the story is running big across the Middle East, and people there are seeing Britain’s surrender to sharia played out on a news-loop. Do we think that Islamic extremists in the Middle East and beyond will be be more demoralised or more emboldened by this news?”
STILL MORE: Williams issues a clarification of his remarks.
MORE STILL: Eugene Volokh offers a defense of Williams. I think, however, that he misses the explosive context — marked by domestic violence and a concerted campaign by some hard-core Muslims in Britain to establish sharia law for everyone, not just contractually consenting parties — that made sure that Williams’ remarks would have an explosive impact, as they have, both within Britain and in the Middle East. It’s true, of course, that decrees of religious “courts” are often enforced in the same fashion as arbitrations and other mutually-agreed-upon dispute resolution mechanisms. However, with honor killing reportedly on the rise in Britain, we may rightly wonder whether women in Muslim immigrant communities are likely to freely consent to a regime that is generally much, much less favorable than existing English law, and whether this approach makes problems of assimilation worse. As head of the Church of England, Williams’ words matter, and these words were quite unwise and damaging. Which is why he has even drawn criticism from among his own bishops: “The Rt Rev Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, who holds dual British and Pakistani citizenship, said Britain should learn from the example of Canada, where Muslim women’s groups managed to crush attempts to introduce Islamic law in matrimonial cases.”
Still more here: “The Archbishop of Canterbury was facing demands to quit last night as the row over sharia law intensified. Leading bishops publicly contradicted Dr Rowan Williams’s call for Islamic law to be brought into the British legal system.” Even Tariq Ramadan thinks he should have kept his mouth shut.
FINALLY: A reader emails:
This reminds me of a Monty Python skit called “The Bishop” in which Terry Jones played a crime fighting Anglican bishop who roared around in a right-hand drive Pontiac along with four young vicars as assistants. When they came to a locked door, three of them picked up the fourth and used him as a headfirst battering ram.
The vicars were not credited on screen, but the fourth was undoubtedly Dr. Williams.
That would explain a lot. Of course, so would this . . . .
ARNOLD KLING: “John McCain is no Dwight Eisenhower.” It’s hard to argue!
AT TAXPROF, some details on the “stimulus” package.
DEMOCRACY: A luxury we can’t afford in light of climate change!
IN THE MAIL: Troy Dunn’s Young Bucks: How to Raise a Future Millionaire. Interestingly, sending your kids to expensive schools isn’t the key.
MATT DUFFY NOTES THAT WE WERE HEARING A LOT ABOUT THE DEFICIT until the bipartisan “stimulus” package came up. Then, suddenly, it was no big deal.
Meanwhile, Tigerhawk notes that oil prices are doing the job on their own:
The price of oil may be the best automatic stabilizer that we have. The economy soars and the price of oil increases, imposing an automatic synthetic “tax” that dampens growth. The opposite is also true; the price of oil now falls because the economy is softening, and that will put a lot of money in the hands of American consumers. Oil is already down almost 12% from its peak. If a typical suburban family buys, say, 2000 gallons of gasoline a year, the price savings embedded in a 12% reduction will exceed the silly one-time payment from the stimulus package that passed the Senate today. If oil were to retreat to $60 with concommitant declines in the price of gasoline and heating fuel, the savings for a typical family would dwarf the artificial stimulus in the rebate bill.
But Congress couldn’t take credit.
UPDATE: Though it doesn’t seem to be helping them much: Bush, Congress hit bottom in AP poll.
FROM NAME THAT PARTY to Name That Hijacker!
ROGER KIMBALL: Who will rid us of this troublesome priest? “The triumph of Islam in Britain is eminently avoidable. But the triumph of civilizational Quislings like Rowan Williams might just change that.”
UPDATE: More here.
IF YOU MISSED IT ON XM SATELLITE RADIO LAST NIGHT, you can still listen to this week’s PJM Political online today.
IRAQPUNDIT on the loneliness of the Al Qaeda terrorist in Iraq.