ADVICE TO THE REPUBLICANS: “They need to become hard line zealots against the ‘public option’ health care ‘reform’.”
Archive for 2009
June 28, 2009
A “WAR AGAINST SCIENCE?” E-mails indicate EPA suppressed report skeptical of global warming. Chris Mooney, call your office!
IS DUMBER REGULATION BETTER REGULATION? Well, it matches the regulators more closely. . . .
DEREK LOWE ON THE ZICAM DEBACLE: “At any rate, snorting zinc salts has actually been known, for some time now, to injure the sense of smell in some people. So it’s proved with Zicam, with several hundred victims. The moral? If you’re going to sell homeopathic medicine – and boy, is it a lucrative business – make sure that you don’t put anything in there except sterile water. That’ll cut down on your expenses, too, since most ingredients cost more than water, anyway. Stick with that strategy, and you can be absolutely sure that nothing bad will happen to your customers. Nothing good will happen to them either, but they won’t know that. When their cold/headache/whatever goes away of its own accord, they’ll ascribe it to your miracle product.”
THE SIX WILDEST BUG ZAPPERS you can actually buy now.
IN THE MAIL: From Paul Gottfried: Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers. I think Nixon and Marcuse had more in common than is generally appreciated.
ZONATION: AlfonZo Rachel Schools a Naughty Gov. Sanford: Plus, advice to others.
BARNEY FRANK UPDATE: Barney’s Back.
Rep. Barney Frank says that unless Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac relax their recent tightening of mortgage standards on new condominiums, the economic recovery could be threatened.
That would be the same Barney Frank who famously boasted that the two federal agencies — which lost billions by making improvident loans — were “fundamentally sound financially and [can] withstand . . . disaster scenarios.”
Then came the disasters.
But to Barney Frank, Fannie and Freddie are essentially taxpayer-funded social-service agencies whose mission is to turn all Americans into homeowners — whether or not they can afford it.
Indeed.
GOING HANK REARDEN ON SHOPPING BAGS?
Rebekah Allen of Concord came to Market Basket yesterday to do her shopping, and planned to look for the new trash bags required by the city’s pay-as-you-throw system. The bags were not there.
Market Basket, alone among Concord’s major supermarkets, has decided not to stock the trash bags. Their logic is simple: Why sell an item for which the store gets no profit?
Allen, when told of the decision, said she would still shop at Market Basket, and she did not mind going to another store for trash bags.
“I think it’s a bad program anyway,” Allen said of pay-as-you-throw. “I agree with (Market Basket).”
By refusing to sell the purple pay-as-you-throw bags, Market Basket has inserted itself into the controversy over a new trash system that will require Concord residents to pay for each bag of trash they throw out, beginning July 6.
Market Basket’s decision was made on the corporate level, not at local stores. David McLean, operations manager for Market Basket, said the company is reviewing its policy in Concord and in multiple other communities where pay-as-you-throw has been instituted. Market Basket has 59 stores in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.
“All of a sudden, all these towns are taking on these programs and wanting businesses to subsidize the towns and do it for nothing, and have their customers foot the expense of carrying those products,” McLean said. . . . “They want businesses to buy the product, pay for the product, pay for losses incurred if bags disappear, to manage the product, warehouse the product, and then turn all the money over to a company in South Carolina that sends most of it to the towns or cities,” McLean said. “There’s no profit, no gain.”
Well, good for them. Let the towns pay for their own programs.
JIM GERAGHTY ON NEXT WEEKEND’S TEA PARTIES: “When they held the first Tea Parties earlier this year, I noted the inherent challenges of organizing working people who hate higher taxes on a weekday (and the day taxes are due). The next round of nationwide events will be on July 4 — bringing its own challenges of time conflicts with parades and barbecues, but at least almost everyone has the day off.”
There’s a list of planned events at Tea Party Patriots. And if you’ll be attending one, please sign up as a citizen reporter for PJTV.
Quite a few of ’em seem to be in the works.
AS LONG AS THESE THINGS ARE SELLING, the economy can’t be totally in the tank. On the other hand, they are marked down . . . .
They do look rather comfy. Hmm.
OBAMACARE: Doing for healthcare what Fannie Mae did for mortgages? “In sum, a public plan would possess formidable and perhaps overwhelming competitive advantages — generated not by efficiency but by the artificial advantages of ‘public’ status. This would have two disastrous consequences. The first will be to cause most Americans now covered by private insurance to move to public insurance — one step away from single-payer health care. The second will be to undermine incentives to develop more of the immensely valuable medical technology that is central to all of health care.”
I’m particularly worried about undermining new lifesaving medical technologies, just as we reach a point where big things are in the offing.
TAKING AN “ARMY OF DAVIDS” APPROACH to business regulation?
WANTING AN EDEN, without Adam or Eve.
TOBIN HARSHAW ON OBAMACARE AT THE NYT’S “WEEKEND OPINIONATOR:”
It was a bit like planning the dream wedding only to have a hurricane rip away the chapel roof as you make your way down the aisle. ABC News and the White House probably thought they had scored a coup in arranging “Questions for the President: Prescription for America,” a prime-time opportunity (with a followup session on “Nightline”) for Barack Obama to explain his health care proposal to the voters and for ABC to monopolize an hour-plus with the most famous man in the world. And then came Iran. And Mark Sanford. And, well, there was the fact that it was about health care reform. The result: the 10 p.m. show drew 4.7 million viewers, or nearly 3 million fewer than a competing repeat of CBS’s “CSI: New York” and less than half what the evening’s top draw, NBC’s “America’s Got Talent,” attracted in the previous hour. Well, could the president’s plan have got a second-day bump at at America’s water coolers? Not likely.
But read the whole thing.
June 27, 2009
AT THE BERMAN POST: Iranian Revolution (Day Fifteen): A Roundup. Attacks on Iranian embassies in a couple of countries, which is an amusing turnabout.
MICHAEL JACKSON’S SAD STORY, and weird connections.
WELL, GOOD, I GUESS: Charm Overcomes Comic Anarchy at U.S. Box Office.
DER SPIEGEL: Obama’s Mistakes: Chancellor Merkel Visits the Debt President. “The occupant of the White House may have changed recently. But the amount of ill-advised ideology coming from Washington has remained constant. Obama’s list of economic errors is long — and continues to grow.”
Reader Erik Fortune, who sent the link, comments: “The piece drips with der Spiegel’s typical anti-Americanism, but when your spending alarms even the Europeans, it’s time to reconsider.”
And this bit from the article is worrisome: “It is often said that the Chinese and the Japanese will buy government bonds. But the truth of the matter is that trust in the gravitas and reliability of the United States has suffered to such a great degree that fewer and fewer foreigners are purchasing its government bonds. That’s why the Federal Reserve is now buying securities that it has printed itself.”
IF YOU’RE GOING TO BE AT ONE OF THE JULY 4TH TEA PARTY PROTESTS, please sign up as a citizen reporter for PJTV.
YOUR NEXT HOUSE could come out of a printer.