CHILDREN RUNNING AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL? Well, heck, look who’s running the healthcare push. . . .
Archive for 2010
March 3, 2010
GREG GUTFELD: The Phony Rage of Ratigan. It worked, though. Last week I had never heard of him. Now I just wish I hadn’t . . . .
MEGAN MCARDLE: Toyota Drags Rivals Down With It. “Anyone who thought that the Big Three were finally getting a break when the chairman of Toyota was hauled in front of a congressional committee [should think] again. Zero-percent financing for five years is going to make it very difficult for GM to return to profitability–and presumably Chrysler will be forced to follow suit. These companies are going to be on taxpayer life support for quite some time.”
FROM DICK MORRIS, a list of swing House members on health care.
RESPONDING TO RECONCILIATION: I’ve never seen Dan Riehl this angry. Is he an outlier, or a leading indicator? The Dems had better hope it’s the former. . .
PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE: The problem is the driver, not the pedal. “Outside the world of trial lawyers, Democratic congressmen, and their ilk, anyone who’s looked at the problem knows that the vast majority of cases of sudden unintended acceleration are the fault of the driver applying the gas pedal when s/he thinks s/he’s pressing the brakes. Efforts to prove otherwise have proven to be frauds or failures.”
BILL WHITTLE, STEPHEN GREEN, SCOTT OTT: TRIFECTA: Obama’s Smart Man Answers The Tough Questions With The Same Old Song And Dance.
These and hundreds of other survivors of Chile’s devastating earthquake have organized neighborhood watch groups, arming themselves and barricading streets to protect their damaged homes from looters. The groups have stepped in as police were overwhelmed by looting and soldiers were slow to restore order after an earthquake and tsunami.
“We take care of ourselves here,” said 51-year-old Maria Cortes. . . . Throughout the quake zone, survivors lived in fear and fed on rumors of roving mobs. Gunfire punctuated the night in Concepcion, Lota and other towns.
The eruption of banditry shocked the nation and put President Michelle Bachelet on the defensive. Chile’s much-praised urban rescue teams were hampered by slow-to-arrive equipment – and the looting of their local base in Concepcion.
Almost everywhere, citizens have banded together to eat, get water and protect damaged or destroyed homes.
This is why Americans have guns. And why getting to know your neighbors is an important part of disaster preparation.
WORLD’S LARGEST ARTHROPOD: The nearly-10-pound monster crab.
DOC ZERO: To Keep And Bear Arms.
OBESITY IN 3-YEAR-OLDS linked to inflammation.
HOTLINE: SHADES OF ’06 FOR SHELL-SHOCKED DEMS:
Embattled incumbents with ethics problems. Allegations of sexual harrassment leading to a competitive open seat. Dems have seen this movie before — only last time, it happened to the other guys.
Read the whole thing.
LEARNED VIA FOIA: BREAKING: ‘Anti-Lobbyist’ Obama Administration Recruited Left-Wing Lobbyists to Sell Bogus ‘Green Jobs.’ “After two studies refuted President Barack Obama’s assertions regarding the success of Spain’s and Denmark’s wind energy programs, a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request reveals the Department of Energy turned to George Soros and to wind industry lobbyists to attack the studies.”
NALP REPORTS plunging law student employment. That matches what I’m hearing from law students around the country.
CAR LUST: Remembering the 1953-54 Studebaker “Loewy Coupes.”
ANN ALTHOUSE’S WEDGIE upsets Hendrik Hertzberg. Funny, I’d think he’d have gotten used to those. . . .
ON IRAQ, AN I-TOLD-YOU-SO:
Those like Joe Klein and Tom Ricks, who claimed the Iraq war was “probably the biggest foreign policy mistake in American history” (Klein’s words) and “the biggest mistake in the history of American foreign policy” (Ricks’s words), were wrong. Ricks went so far as to say in 2009 that “I think staying in Iraq is immoral.”
Now, if we had followed the counsel of Klein and Ricks and not implemented the surge, their predictions might have been closer to the mark. (Bush’s decision was one of “adolescent petulance” and “the decision to surge was made unilaterally, without adequate respect for history or military doctrine,” Klein wrote on April 5, 2007.) As it is, if the positive trajectory of events continue and Iraq does end up reshaping the political culture of the Arab Middle East, the Iraq war will, on balance, have advanced American interests in the region.
On the other hand, if Obama somehow manages to blow it, retroactively that will turn out to be Bush’s fault.
UPDATE: Reader Jeff Weintraub writes in defense of Tom Ricks:
Most of Wehner’s I-told-you-so is justified, and the targets deserve it. However, that particular quotation from Ricks is misleadingly truncated. What Ricks actually said was …
“I think staying in Iraq is immoral, but I think leaving immediately would be even more so, because of the risk it runs of leaving Iraq to a civil war that could go regional.”
And that was part of a post in which Rick’s central message, and bottom line, was that the US should NOT withdraw from Iraq. Furthermore, Ricks has made it clear over and over again, in his book The Gamble and since, that he thinks Bush’s decision not to cut & run in early 2007, but instead to renew the US commitment and switch to the Petraeus/Odierno counter-insurgency strategy, was Bush’s “finest moment.”
OK, Wehner may well think that Rick’s overall perspective in the 2009 post from which he quoted was still too gloomy, since Ricks saw continued US commitment to Iraq as a lesser evil more than a positive good. But there’s no question that Wehner distorted Ricks’s point (carelessly, I trust, not deliberately).
Fair enough — though I think if you read the entire Ricks piece it’s still awfully gloomy.