Archive for 2010
February 15, 2010
THE UNEMPLOYMENT CRISIS, the Governing Class, and the feminist critique of society.
THE WILD WORLD OF do-it-yourself synthetic biology.
MY DINNER WITH ANDREW (BREITBART): Me, Jim Hoft, Dana Loesch, et al., in table-talk, courtesy of FoundingBloggers and Evan Coyne Maloney.
BAYH’S BOW-OUT: Is he planning a primary challenge against Obama?
UPDATE: Rumors of a Barbara Mikulski retirement?
ANOTHER UPDATE: Post-Bayh procedural fireworks in Indiana?
Plus, from the comments:
Hmmm.. Althouse and Meade take a whirlwind trip to Indiana, and the following day, Bayh retires…..
Coincidence? Doubtful….
Heh.
L.A. TIMES: ‘Tea party’ activists filter into GOP at ground level. “Across the country, tea party groups that had focused on planning rallies are educating members on how to run for GOP precinct representative positions. The representatives help elect county party leaders, who write the platform and, in some places, determine endorsements.”
RED WINE AND DARK CHOCOLATE: cancer killers?
LOOKS PRETTY: The Hyundai I-Flow.
IN THE MAIL: How to Achieve a Heaven on Earth.
BILL WHITTLE’S AFTERBURNER: KSM, Not Guilty: Why Obama’s 9/11 Show Trials Assault The Rule Of Law.
EVAN BAYH to retire? Wow.
A HISTORICAL OBSERVATION ON CLIMATEGATE: As this scandal runs on, it’s beginning to remind me of the Michael Bellesiles scandal. (Here’s a thorough dissection by Jim Lindgren in the Yale Law Journal — it’s a PDF; here’s a shorter summary from Wikipedia, and a thorough summary by Joyce Malcolm.)
Bellesiles, for those who don’t remember, was a historian at Emory who wrote a book making some, er, counterintuitive claims about guns in early America — in short, that they were much rarer than generally thought, and frequently owned and controlled by the government. Constitutional law scholars who expressed doubts about this were told to shut up by historians, who cited the importance of “peer review” as a guarantor of accuracy, and who wrapped themselves in claims of professional expertise.
Unfortunately, it turned out that Bellesiles had made it up. His work was based on probate records, and when people tried to find them, it turned out that many didn’t exist (one data set he claimed to have used turned out, on review, to have been destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake). It also turned out that Bellesiles hadn’t even visited some of the archives he claimed to have researched. When challenged to produce his data, he was unable to do so, and offered unpersuasive stories regarding why.
Bellesiles eventually lost his job at Emory (and his Bancroft Prize) over the fraud, but not until his critics had been called political hacks, McCarthyites, and worse. But what’s amazing, especially in retrospect, is how slow his defenders — and the media — were to engage the critics, or to look at the flaws in the data. Instead, they wrapped themselves in claims of authority, and attacked the critics as anti-intellectual hacks interested only in politics. Are we seeing something similar with regard to ClimateGate? It sure looks that way to me.
ILLINOIS UPDATE: Emperor Has No Clothes: Pensions Are Short Cash.
In early January, while everyone was busy watching the nasty campaign commercials, the State of Illinois pulled an end-run on the budget process. On Jan. 7 the state sold $3.5 billion of “pension obligation notes.” In simple English, the state borrowed money to finance the state’s contribution to its five retirement systems.
These five-year debt securities carry an interest rate of 3.84 percent, tax free to bondholders. It’s a much higher yield than you could get in the bank because of the risk involved. Moody’s and Standard and Poors rated them at least 6 notches below the top AAA rating. In fact, all the rating agencies characterized the outlook for Illinois finances as “negative.”
It just gets worse.
EMBRACE ISLAM, or lose your job. “Christian Filipino workers in Saudi Arabia are complaining that their employers are threatening to fire them if they do not convert to Islam. It’s against the law for a Moslem in Saudi Arabia to convert to another religion. The punishment is death, and anyone attempting to convert Moslems is subject to the death penalty. This sort of double standard, and use of coercion, is a big deal in the Philippines, although the government there, and in Saudi Arabia, try to play down this particular problem.”
INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: “Didn’t Acorn, the corrupt community organizer, get its federal funding yanked after its last scandal? Actually, no. Through municipal middlemen, it’s poised to rake in another $4 billion. Where is the outrage?”
SHIKHA DALMIA: Markets don’t reward smart people. They reward value.
HEY, RUBES! Report: Obama considering indefinite detention of terrorists without trial. “Exit question via David Frum: Why does Dick Cheney continue to attack Obama instead of pointing out that, in some respects on terrorism, The One is actually out-Bushing Bush? No wonder the White House wants to tangle with Cheney. The more they squabble with him, the easier it is to convince their base that they’re actually high-minded civil libertarians who would never do anything as nefarious and neocon-ish as, er, detaining people indefinitely without trial.”
They told me if I voted for McCain we’d be locking up people and throwing away the key without even the thought of a trial. And they were right!
MICKEY KAUS ON PUNDIT RESPONSES TO THE TEA PARTY MOVEMENT:
For decades good government types have been attempting to summon broad popular interests in order to defeat narrow economic interests. Now that it’s happening they’re having second thoughts (because they don’t like the first result). . . . Anyway, in the “good old days” of elite corporatist dealmaking you still would probably have trouble passing a giant piece of legislation that was 10 points underwater in terms of popularity. We had democracy even in 1950.
Plus this: “Lots of intellectual effort now seems to be going into explaining Obama’s (possible/likely/impending) health care failure as the inevitable product of larger historic and constitutional forces. There’s something to this of course–the Framers went overboard in making it hard for the government to act, for example. But in this case there’s a simpler explanation: Barack Obama’s job was to sell a health care reform plan to American voters. He failed. He didn’t fail because 55% of Americans can never be convinced of anything. It happens all the time. He just failed. He tried to sell expanding coverage as a deficit reducer. Voters didn’t believe him and worried that they would pay the bill in some unadvertised way (through Medicare reductions or future tax increases, mainly). That’s not constitutional paralysis or Web-enabled mob rule. It’s just bad salesmanship.”
MOVIE COUPLES WHO flunked Chemistry 101.
PRETTY SURE THIS IS A BAD IDEA: Tea Party to run 3d party candidate against Harry Reid. I think it’s smarter for Tea Party activists to target primary races, rather than starting their own party as seems to be happening in Nevada. Two words: “Ross Perot.” Two more: “Ralph Nader.”
THINGS YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED THIS WEEKEND:
My Wall Street Journal column on the Tea Party movement’s prospects.
A new report from Michael Yon, posted in full at InstaPundit.
A new musical production from Andrew Klavan.
Raising the debt limit by nearly $2 trillion.
Questions for Rep. Bill Delahunt.
Some more explosive ClimateGate development.
Tea Partiers brave the cold . . . in Orlando.
Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim one of the NYT’s biggest shareholders now.
A review of The Lightning Thief.
In New Jersey, a Menendez recall battle.