FROM SUSANNAH BRESLIN, The War Project.
Archive for 2010
June 30, 2010
“AND JOINING HANDS, THEY MADE A METAPHOR.”
In sum total, what you people did was drive someplace where there wasn’t a problem, complain about something you don’t fully understand, get in the way of people who may actually be performing a function, and then do nothing, en masse, except hope that someone else notices your little snit and makes it all better.
Heh.
CASH FOR CLUNKERS: A RETROSPECTIVE. Top-down industrial policy carried out through the sheer force of incentives is welcomed by behavioralist Washington.
UPDATE: Reader Paul Jackson writes:
Before the first piece comes out that postulates “Where it all went wrong for Obama”, may I be the first to say: when he took that ill-fated trip to Copenhagen in order to secure Chicago’s 2016 Summer Olympic bid. That was the first time the public at large sat up and thought it was amateur hour at the White House. They haven’t done much since to dispel that notion.
On an unrelated note, given the consistent media phrasing of “the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression”, high unemployment, mortgage failures galore, how come Whoopi/Robin/Billy haven’t done an HBO special for the homeless/out of work? Surely there must be more homeless people than ever in our recent history? Did we, without my knowledge, already solve that problem? I know, I know, doesn’t fit the narrative.
It’s all about the narrative.
DON’T CRITICIZE THEM — THEY MIGHT BEHEAD YOU: Iran: “In Iran, the Bahais play much the same role that Jews do elsewhere: the canary in society’s coal mine. What is emerging in the Islamic Republic today is noxious indeed.”
WHO’S THE BOSS: Steve Carell leaving The Office.
MORE ON ANDREW BREITBART’S OFFER OF $100,000 for the JournoList archives. My thoughts:
(1) If, as Jonathan Chait says, there’s nothing there, why not relieve Breitbart of his bucks?
(2) If you’re worried about your own stuff being released, you don’t really safeguard it by not selling out to Breitbart — you just ensure that if one of the 400 other members does, you won’t get the $100K.
(3) Here’s your chance to be Deep Throat — and maybe to settle some scores along the way . . . .
AL SHARPTON: 90% OF MY LISTENERS SUPPORT THE SUPREME COURT’S GUN DECISION. “I would say 90% of the calls I received yesterday were in support of the Supreme Court and people say they want to bear guns. They’re tired of the violence and it’s very very interesting. I have had a few on both sides today, but yesterday was overwhelming, it was stunning to me.” Given that disarming black people was one of the main purposes of gun-control laws, it shouldn’t be that surprising.
Some years ago we had a program at my law school where ex-Black Panther Kathleen Cleaver (with whom I went to law school) came to speak. It was heavily attended by Knoxville civil-rights veterans, and I think some of my colleagues were surprised when an elderly black preacher launched into a defense of the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms. I wasn’t.
JUSTICE THOMAS’S MCDONALD CONCURRENCE: His Finest Hour?
JOHN EDWARDS parties on.
A TRENT LOTT MOMENT for Kay Hagan? I don’t think she ever wished that Byrd had been elected President during his Klan days.
THE ELITES DOUBLE DOWN: Fed Economist Attacks Uncredentialed Econo-blogging.
UPDATE: Reader Gord Richens emails: “Two of the field’s most celebrated academics, Myron Scholes and Robert Merton shared the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1997 – the year before they helped fly Long Term Capital Management into the ground.”
OKAY, I HAD THIS THE OTHER DAY, BUT IT’S WORTH REPEATING AGAIN: Dutch Oil Spill Response Ships Could Suck 99% of Oil From Gulf, But Can’t Get Approved, Because EPA Demands 99.9985% Purity. The 99% is an estimate, but the point holds.
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: G-20 Fiddles; World Burns. “The verdict on the G-20 meeting is in. It wasn’t delivered by the spinmeisters of the global leaders hailing their bosses’ groundbreaking accomplishments. It wasn’t delivered by the clueless journalists gravely assessing whether the summit was a win for Merkel’s message of austerity or Obama’s message of spending. The verdict was delivered by the world’s financial markets and it can best be summed up by the Edvard Munch painting: ‘The Scream.'”
JAMES RUMMEL: A Blast From The Past: ‘Back in the bad old days of the Cold War, a lot of successful espionage projects run by the Soviets hinged on a certain type of snobbery. . . . I was strongly reminded of that long ago time when reading about the latest Russian spy ring that the FBI broke up recently.”
CANADIAN HEALTH CARE, IN SLATE:
Two months ago, my mother died very unexpectedly. After reviewing her medical records, my siblings and I discovered that her physician ignored test results and treated her for an illness she did not have. If she had received proper care, my mother would be alive today. This being Canada, we don’t intend to sue, although we do expect an apology from the doctor and the hospital.
Good luck with that.
June 29, 2010
DAILY KOS POLL FRAUD. Markos is suing his pollsters, who weren’t able to fake randomness.
DECRYPTING the Plato code?
IOWAHAWK: I’ll Take a Cashier’s Check, Mr. Breitbart. Heh. It’s just what you expected . . . .
FASTER PLEASE: No more fillings? Gel regenerates teeth.
A BUDDING KAGAN SCANDAL? It’s pretty clearly an ACOG scandal, at least.
UPDATE: Reader Aric Giddens emails: “I am an Ob/Gyn and while I am pro-choice, I do respect the position of those who are against abortion. I said at the time, however, that the ACOG statement was not true and and no basis in medical fact. It was clearly a political statement. A so called ‘partial-birth abortion’ is almost never performed and doesn’t have to be to save the life of or protect the life of the mother. I thought President Clinton was pandering to his base to opposed such a ban. I have never seen a medical need for such a procedure in 20 years in my field. Such a ban would not have endanger any woman’s life or health. While I am opposed to the government dictating what medical procedure may or may not be performed, there was not science behind the ACOG statement.”
ILYA SOMIN responds to Justice Breyer’s consequentialism.
This argument ignores social science evidence suggesting that extreme gun bans like those of DC and Chicago cost at least as many innocent lives than they save. Still, gun rights probably do cause at least some deaths that might otherwise have been prevented.
In that respect, however, they are no different from numerous other constitutional rights. Justice Breyer’s argument in McDonald is actually very similar to Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent in Boumediene v. Bush, where Scalia warned that giving habeas corpus rights to War on Terror detainees “will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.” That argument didn’t move Breyer, who voted with the majority to extend those rights.
Read the whole thing.
IS TV TEACHING US TO OVERREACT? I’m quoted in the piece, but in a passage not quoted, I suggested that it may make people more passive when they’re not in front of the TV, by getting them used to a higher level of stimulus to provoke a reaction. Kind of like how porn and violence have been good for America’s children. . . .