AND IF SO, WHICH END? Will Sluts Be The End of Twitter?
Archive for 2009
September 3, 2009
WORKING ON A 1,000 MPH CAR.
IN THE MAIL: Vali Nasr’s Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World.
UPDATE: Michael Totten emails that the book is very good, and that he’s got a review coming out in the New York Times. He adds: “Obama hired him as an advisor, and I’m glad he did. Nasr is a staunch capitalist who argues at length how much damage state management of the economy has done to Middle Eastern countries. I hope the president gets an earful.” It could be educational.
CHARLES RANGEL UPDATE: Staff as “Forgetful” as the Boss.
Charlie Rangel’s “forgetfulness” is apparently contagious.
Two of his top aides are among about a dozen highly paid staffers on the powerful tax-writing Ways and Means Committee who have filed a flurry of amendments correcting their financial-disclosure statements since 2002.
Jim Capel, chief of staff for Rangel’s personal office, failed to file any such statements for six years.
On the afternoon of July 14, Capel filed five years’ worth of delinquent reports.
Capel told The Post yesterday it was a simple oversight.
Taxes, and forms, are for the little people. I’d like to see someone look into whether bigshots are getting more lenient treatment from the IRS than ordinary taxpayers here. It sure seems that way.
UPDATE: Did Rangel Pay Off Ethics Committee Members?
ANOTHER UPDATE: To be clear, while there’s evidence, per Byron York, that Rangel got sweetheart treatment from the IRS, we don’t know that regarding his staffers. All we know for sure is that there’s been a sudden flurry of updated disclosures. Thanks to reader Ian Watson for pointing out that I wasn’t sufficiently clear on that.
WSJ: Wrong Turns: How Obama’s Health-Care Push Went Astray. “When pollsters told the advocacy groups the public option probably wouldn’t fly, they were told to paper over the problem with a better ‘message,’ according to a participant in the project.”
UH OH: When Does School Start? The President Doesn’t Know. It’s a well-oiled machine at the White House . . .
NPR: Coveted Ambassadorships Go To Obama Fundraisers. “When Obama came into office talking about change, he raised some expectations that he would alter the way he would choose new ambassadors. . . . But so far, more than half of the ambassadors he has named are political appointees — including several so-called bundlers, or superfundraisers who organize and collect campaign contributions, according to Dave Leventhal of the Center for Responsive Politics.” Hope and change!
CONGRESSMAN DRIEHAUS breaks Tea Party promise.
INTERESTING LINE IN THIS NYT STORY about the Pfizer case:
Although the investigation began and largely ended during the Bush administration, top Obama administration officials held a news conference on Wednesday to celebrate the settlement, thank each other for resolving it and promise more crackdowns on health fraud.
They’re stronger on self-congratulation than performance, but it’s interesting to see the Times note that in paragraph three . . . .
YES WE CANNIBAL!
BYRON YORK: Health care reform means more power for the IRS. “If the plan envisioned by President Barack Obama and Congressional Democrats is enacted, the primary federal bureaucracy responsible for implementing and enforcing national health care will be an old and familiar one: the Internal Revenue Service. Under the Democrats’ health care proposals, the already powerful — and already feared — IRS would wield even more power and extend its reach even farther into the lives of ordinary Americans, and the presidentially-appointed head of the new health care bureaucracy would have access to confidential IRS information about millions of individual taxpayers.” Well, what could go wrong?
HEALTH CARE for Clunkers.
JAMES TARANTO: Death Panels for Terrorists! Just how over the top can a pro-ObamaCare pitch get? “Such behavior is puzzling, to say the least. One could understand why the Angry Left was angry when they were out of power, but now that they have the White House and big congressional majorities, they seem to be angry that their power is less than absolute.”
INTERVIEW: Michael Yon, live from Afghanistan.
STEPHEN GREEN: “The President of the United States — whether an Obama a Bush or a Lincoln — is not my son’s daddy. That’s my job.”
MICKEY KAUS: Not a death panel, but a death pathway. “I can’t help but feel that the reason the President doesn’t effectively rebut the ‘rationing’ argument is that he kind of believes we have to move toward rationing. But couldn’t he fake it?” We’ll find out, I suspect . . . .
DANIEL HENNINGER: The Revolt of the Masses: Electorates are casting a global no-confidence vote in their leaderships. And with good reason. While the United States is currently suffering the worst political class in its history, things aren’t especially great elsewhere, either. . . .
And I love this: “It’s beginning to look as if the globe’s lumpen proletariat has decided they’ve had about enough of the lumpen bureaucratariat. It could be a revolution under way, though not the one predicted by the boys at the barricades.”
1,000 SHOW UP AT Sen. Bob Corker’s healthcare town hall.
The audience was a mix of ages and ideologies, although Corker was largely playing to a home crowd. A hand-lettered poster reading “No Cap Trade/Nurses Against ObamaCare” drew heavy applause, similar sign-waving and only a few half-hearted “boos,” while preprinted signs urging “Health Care Reform” and “Public Option = Affordable Health Care” were smaller in both size and number. . . . Dr. Mark Green of Blount County got applause when he presented a 26-page health reform bill, written by area doctors and nurses, that he said could be funded with no more money than is already being spent.
Preprinted vs. handmade signs? Nice to see folks in the press noticing. And only 26 pages? What will you do with the other 974?
VIA FACEBOOK, I SEE THAT MICHELLE MALKIN’S Culture Of Corruption is at Number One on the NYT bestsellers’ list for the fifth straight week. It’s probably just a coincidence, but it seems to me that things really started going south on Obama just about five weeks ago . . . .
HELLO, LADIES: Fur Flies at Bay Area Cougar Convention.
GETTING A GUN IN D.C.: “It took $833.69, a total of 15 hours 50 minutes, four trips to the Metropolitan Police Department, two background checks, a set of fingerprints, a five-hour class and a 20-question multiple-choice exam. Oh, and the votes of five Supreme Court justices. They’re the ones who really made it possible for me, as a District resident, to own a handgun, a constitutional right as heavily debated and rigorously parsed as the freedoms of speech and religion.” Most other constitutional rights don’t involve so many government barriers, or such open hostility from the government officials who, theoretically, should be protecting them, not trying to kill them.
UPDATE: A couple of readers wonder when we’ll see news stories expressing concern that firearms ownership in D.C. is reserved for the rich.
HOWARD KURTZ: “The criticism of Barack Obama has turned strikingly personal as some of his liberal media allies have gone wobbly on him. After playing a cheerleading role during the campaign, some are bluntly questioning whether he’s up to the job. If Obama is losing Paul Krugman, can the rest of the left be far behind? . . . It was liberal commentators, of course, who formed the leading edge of the most favorable coverage that any White House contender has drawn in a generation. Having swooned as they did, some were probably more susceptible to having their hearts broken.”
TOWN-HALL HATER CAROL SHEA PORTER slips in the polls.