JASON MATTERA goes after Kate Zernike.
Archive for 2010
February 22, 2010
RESPONDING TO KEITH OLBERMANN: The Dallas Tea Party Invites the White People of MSNBC. Heh.
The funny thing is, more people will probably watch these YouTube videos mocking Keith Olbermann . . . than watch Keith Olbermann.
CATO ON OBAMACARE 2.0: Meet The New Plan, Same As The Old Plan. Or it may be even worse. “If anything, those price controls make the president’s new plan even more bureaucratic and government-heavy. . . . Those new government powers could make it even harder for people to obtain the coverage and care that they need.”
IN THE MAIL: From Robert Heinlein, a two-in-one: The Green Hills Of Earth and The Menace From Earth. I’m glad they’re keeping these works in print.
DAN MITCHELL ON what’s wrong with money-laundering laws.
I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ANY MORE ABOUT MY CARBON FOOTPRINT when U.N. “climate change” commissars are meeting on Bali — again. “Yet again, we are asked to believe the UN deserves special exemptions from its own preachings. Its conferees are jetting to Bali for the greater good of all the little folk, whose job is merely to pay the bills for such pleasures, and live with any resulting rationing and regulation. According to the Jakarta Post, some 1,500 people from 192 countries are expected to attend this shindig — where UNEP claims that envoys of some 140 governments will be present.” Somebody tell these people about Skype.
CHANGE: Tennessee gun permits up 23% last year. “Knoxville has the highest concentration of permit-holders among the state’s largest cities: More than 11 percent of its residents 21 and up are licensed to carry firearms.” No wonder I feel so safe.
OUR LOW-TECH tax code.
I’ve read a lot about prohibition, but I never read about the government’s deliberate effort to make industrial alcohol undrinkably poisonous. Thousands of people seem to have died as a result.
I wish I could say I found it surprising, but it seem to me to be of a piece with too many other brutalities in American law. We pass a law with the best of intentions, and find it doesn’t work, and so we pass new regulations and policies designed to crack down on non-compliance, until we are brutalizing the population all out of proportion to the original good we were pursuing.
The important thing is to punish defiance.
UPDATE: Jim Treacher writes: “Punishing defiance is also probably why Percocet is mostly acetaminophen. It’s to make sure you don’t abuse the opiate, right? But now the FDA wants to ban it altogether because acetaminophen can cause liver damage. So let’s make people suffer in pain because of something that never needed to be done in the first place! . . . I wouldn’t wish the last 3 weeks of my life on anybody, let alone begrudge them some relief from the constant pain. Enough meddling in people’s lives. Enough nanny-state bullshit! That’s what doctors and patients are supposed to do, figure this stuff out. It’s just wrong to take that out of their hands.” Wrong, perhaps, but wonderfully productive of money and power.
IS THE COLD WAR coming back? “The Middle Kingdom is certainly growing faster than the Grand Old Republic, but by any conventional measure — economic output, military capabilities, scientific and technological capacity — the United States is the most powerful country in the world. And it’s not a close-run thing.”
BOINGBOING: ACTA “internet enforcement” chapter leaks. “I’ve read it through a few times and it reads a lot like DMCA-plus.”
Much more here. “The US, Europe and other countries including New Zealand are secretly drawing up rules designed to crack down on copyright abuse on the internet, in part by making ISPs liable for illegal content, according to a copy of part of the confidential draft agreement that was seen by the IDG News Service.”
MIKE HUCKABEE BLASTS CPAC: “CPAC has becoming increasingly more libertarian and less Republican over the last years, one of the reasons I didn’t go this year.” He says that like it’s a bad thing. It’s certainly true that his brand of big-government conservatism is in bad odor these days.
UPDATE: Flashback: Helen and I ask Mike Huckabee what he’s got against libertarians. It starts about 7 minutes in. When Huckabee talked about looking good in a teddy, I thought he might be trending libertarian, but it was not to be . . . .
ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader emails:
It’s interesting that Huckabee et al. are still seeing the Tea Party folks in a zero-sum power-struggle with the right, rather than as an attempt to make common cause for the small government stuff upon which the social right and the libertarians and the pro-biz folks all agree. Seems as if the penny hasn’t quite dropped that a whole bunch of us are as worried about a nanny state for the soul as we are about a nanny state for the body, but that we’d happily defer a debate on the former for action against the latter.
Yes, I think Huckabee’s missing the big picture here.
A ONE-DAY SALE on the Pentax K7 SLR.
ARE THE FEDS COMING AFTER YOUR 401K? “I doubt it. Because first on the list of those who have accumulated wealth in reliance on the laws governing private savings accounts are lawyers.” Aside from that, I think that we would see — literally, not figuratively — members of Congress swinging from lampposts if that happened.
PJTV: Dana Loesch interviews Isaac Hayes, who’s running for Congress against Jesse Jackson, Jr.
KENNETH ANDERSON ON Amnesty International and the World Of International NGOs. “The international NGO question is important, and the attention it receives is far too much from in-the-tank academics besotted with the idea of academic activism.” I think that Anderson raises a lot of issues, but underestimates the degree of financial motivation, and even corruption, present.
HOW THE U.S. MILITARY used social network theory to capture Saddam Hussein.
BIG HEALTH CARE RESEARCH NEWS: Everything Obama Thought He Knew About Health Cost Control Is Wrong. Apparently the big Dartmouth study they’ve been touting as support for their approach is looking pretty shaky.
NICK GILLESPIE: Even More on The Coming War Over Public-Sector Pensions.
A CPAC PHOTO ROUNDUP from John Hawkins.
CLIMATEGATE: Another Global Warming retraction: “Scientists have been forced to withdraw a study on projected sea level rise due to global warming after finding mistakes that undermined the findings.” But the science is settled.
UPDATE: Reader Chuck Browning writes: “Didn’t President Obama predict the sea levels would cease to rise or something to that effect, if he were elected?” Heh.
HERE, THEY MOSTLY JUST IGNORE IT: Left Wing European Press Attacks IPCC, UN Climate Change “Dilettentes.”
L.A. TIMES: Obama helped bring on the healthcare backlash. “By leaving the overhaul in the hands of Congress, he has given the public a full view of how its lawmakers do business. The result is an anti-Washington mood that Republicans have tapped into. . . . The spectacle of Congress’ horse-trading, secrecy and gridlock has fueled today’s virulent anti- Washington mood. The public’s reaction was all the greater because Obama had campaigned on a promise to change the way Washington did business, and because healthcare reform engendered such personal high hopes and anxiety.”
HIROSHIMA BOOK A FABRICATION?
A new book about the atomic destruction of Hiroshima has won critical acclaim with its heartbreaking portrayals of the bomb’s survivors and is set to be made into a movie by James Cameron. . . .
There is just one problem. That section of the book and other technical details of the mission are based on the recollections of Joseph Fuoco, who is described as a last-minute substitute on one of the two observation planes that escorted the Enola Gay.
But Mr. Fuoco, who died in 2008 at age 84 and lived in Westbury, N.Y., never flew on the bombing run, and he never substituted for James R. Corliss, the plane’s regular flight engineer, Mr. Corliss’s family says. They, along with angry ranks of scientists, historians and veterans, are denouncing the book and calling Mr. Fuoco an impostor. Facing a national outcry and the Corliss family’s evidence, the author, Charles Pellegrino, now concedes that he was probably duped.
Hey, don’t be too hard on him. Impostors are everywhere these days.