USING MASS TRANSIT can ruin your hearing.
Archive for 2009
June 21, 2009
I THINK SO: If it’s too big to fail, is it too big to exist?
DEALING WITH IRAN: Reader Paul Levitt is reminded of these words from John Howard:
If you imagine that you can buy immunity from fanatics by curling yourself in a ball, apologising for the world – to the world – for who you are and what you stand for and what you believe in, not only is that morally bankrupt, but it’s also ineffective. Because fanatics despise a lot of things and the things they despise most is weakness and timidity. There has been plenty of evidence through history that fanatics attack weakness and retreating people even more savagely than they do defiant people.
I miss him.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: What do these first six months mean?
Knoxville, Tennessee. Gay Street, at lunchtime.
RAND SIMBERG: First, they came for the pilots.
RON ROSENBAUM: CNN’s Shocking Suck-Up to Iran’s Fascists.
DAN RIEHL HAS lots of disturbing video from Iran.
HAPPY HAPPY: Swine flu ‘could infect up to half the population.’
JOHN KASS: Obama’s political play should shock no one.
It’s amusing to watch the Washington political establishment feign shock, now that President Barack Obama’s reform administration has used a clay foot to vigorously kick one inspector general and boot another out the door.
One inspector general foolishly investigated a friend of the president. Another inspector general audited those juicy bonuses given to AIG executives as part of $700 billion federal bailout of the financial industry. . . .
The use of political muscle may be prohibited in the mythic transcendental fairyland where much of the Obama spin originates, sprouting green and lush, like the never-ending fields of primo Hopium.
But our president is from Chicago. Obama’s Media Merlin David Axelrod and chief of staff Rahm Emanuel come right from Chicago Democratic machine boss Mayor Richard Daley. They don’t believe in fairies.
Daley can’t wait to be rid of his own inspector general, David Hoffman, who had the audacity to question why Daley’s nephew received $68 million in city pension funds to invest. The mayor insists he didn’t know anything about it. Nobody with a functioning brain believes the mayor.
It’s the Chicago Way, which doesn’t have much to do with “hope and change,” as the rubes are discovering. . . .
TEHRAN: “Residents of the area described firefights after protesters grabbed weapons from security forces.”
ANN BARTOW: “Obama won my support by making claims he is not living up to in a number of contexts, and he deserves to be called on it.”
HEH. Unintentional irony on the New York Times front page today:
Thanks to reader Shelley Hartman for the tip.
HAPPY FATHER’S DAY: On the latest Ask Dr. Helen. (Bumped).
TOM MAGUIRE: Emotion trumps research every time.
ANTHONY RANDAZZO: Government action caused the economic crisis, not the free market.
Related: An economic “roadmap to nowhere.”
FARHAD MANJOO: Why newsprint beats the Kindle.
DEREGULATION UPDATE: Distillery Bill Passes: “Moonshiners could face new competition from legal distilleries in as many as 44 Tennessee counties, including several in the Knoxville area, under legislation given final approval in the waning hours of the 2009 General Assembly.”
June 20, 2009
VIRGINIA POSTREL ON NAOMI WOLF ON ANGELINA JOLIE:
Unlike Paskin, I do not regard Wolf as “a serious feminist and thinker.” She’s a feminist, certainly, but neither serious nor a thinker. She is an emoter, whose work typically generalizes from her narcissistic neediness to “the female experience.” It is usually an intellectually frivolous approach.
But this time it works brilliantly, though not in the way Wolf intends.
Read the whole thing.
QUESTION: Does Obama Care About The Gays?