RESPONDING TO A DEER SURPLUS: “For nine days in December, Knox County was one of the top deer-hunting destinations in the state. That’s just what biologists with the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency were hoping.” Heck, I see ’em in my neighborhood all the time. And wild turkeys. That was unheard of just a few years ago. Somebody tell David Baron.
Archive for 2009
January 12, 2009
RICH PEOPLE VS. POLITICIANS:
Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, with about $60 billion in assets each, are America’s richest men. With all that money, what can they force us to do? Can they take our house to make room so that another person can build an auto dealership or a casino parking lot? Can they force us to pay money into the government-run retirement Ponzi scheme called Social Security? Can Buffett and Gates force us to bus our children to schools out of our neighborhood in the name of diversity? Unless they are granted power by politicians, rich people have little power to force us to do anything.
A GS-9, or a lowly municipal clerk, has far more life-and-death power over us. It’s they to whom we must turn to for permission to build a house, ply a trade, open a restaurant and myriad other activities. It’s government people, not rich people, who have the power to coerce and make our lives miserable. Coercive power goes a long way toward explaining political corruption.
Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s hawking of Barack Obama’s vacated U.S. Senate seat; Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel’s alleged tax-writing favors; former Rep. William Jefferson’s business bribes; and the Jack Abramoff scandal are mere pimples on the government corruption landscape. We can think of these and similar acts as jailable illegal corruption. They pale in comparison to what’s for all practical purposes the same thing, but simply legal corruption.
Read the whole thing.
HELPING HORSES AT HORSE HAVEN. My sister does a lot of work with this charity. Its website is here.
CHANGE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN: Former top Bush officials back Eric Holder.
DID AMERICAN POLITICAL HISTORY begin in 2001?
15,000 MARCH AGAINST HAMAS in Marseilles. Well, good.
INDEED: “One might think that when the battle is between Israel on the one side, tacitly supported by the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, and Jordan, and Hamas on the other, supported by Iran and Hezbollah, one would at least hope for an Israeli victory, even if one is dubious about its prospects. But I get the feeling that for many, it’s more important that Israel, and the world, learn a lesson about the ‘limits of military force’ than that a violent, fanatical, backwards, illiberal, anti-Semitic terrorist organization be humbled defeated.” I’d rather see Hamas learn a lesson about the limits of terrorism, but that’s just me . . . .
A BAD REVIEW: “What would someone have to say on Meet the Press to prompt a follow-up question from David Gregory.”
“Or was Gregory patronizing black people?“
MICKEY KAUS: “Does the GOP Congressional leadership dare launch a fight over whether Davis-Bacon style wage schedules, beloved by organized labor, apply to various projects that use Obama’s stimulus funds?” I think they have to. The military term is “spoiling attack.” Plus this: “The incoming Obama team should actually want wages on stimulus projects to be a little below normal market wages, in order to nudge people to move into regular, non-stimulus private and public projects as the economy recovers, no? That was FDR’s policy for the WPA, though he had to break a strike to get it.”
GM ROPER: Today, I am a Jew.
ORIGINALISM AND HELLER: Randy Barnett on Nelson Lund on Justice Scalia.
A LOOK AT the politics of Hamas in London.
TWO MORE REPORTS ON turning adult stem cells into pluripotent stem cells.
Plus, New Method Releases Adult Stem Cells From Bone Marrow.
DANIEL DREZNER: So much for “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb bomb Iran.”
SOME THOUGHTS ON pensions and taxes.
But hey, it could be worse. And will, if some people have their way . . . .