OOPS: Free Press And The Art of Profligate Fudging.
Free Press, the media reform and pro-net neutrality think tank, *seemingly* has mud on its face yet again: It appears that in their haste to besiege the Federal Communications Commission with petitions signed by “real Americans,” calling for the implementation of “net neutrality” rules, Free Press mixed up their documents.
The problem isn’t ideology, it’s competence. Oh, who am I kidding? It’s ideology, too.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Is Going To An Elite College Worth The Cost? “The sluggish economy and rising costs of college have only intensified questions about whether expensive, prestigious colleges make any difference. Do their graduates make more money? Get into better professional programs? Make better connections? And are they more satisfied with their lives, or at least with their work?”
AN ATM THAT spits out gold bars.
FORGET FRIENDS-WITH-BENEFITS: Now it’s ex-husbands with benefits. There was a New Yorker cartoon about this years ago.
YOU KNOW, THIS LAME-DUCK SESSION WORKED OUT PRETTY WELL: Food-safety bill victim of omnibus defeat, incompetence.
When Harry Reid pulled the plug on the omnibus spending bill Thursday night, he also ended his best hope of fixing a monumental blunder committed earlier in the lame-duck session. Senate Democrats bragged that they had passed a far-reaching food-safety bill opposed by conservatives for its overreach and regulatory expansion, until their counterparts in the House pronounced it dead on arrival for its unconstitutional creation of new tax policy. Reid had hoped to sneak the House version into the omnibus in order to wipe the egg off of his face, but that plan ended up under the omnibus.
You’d think the Senate Majority Leader would pay closer attention to constitutional requirements, but . . . oh, who am I kidding? Anyway, it was a lousy bill, and it’s dead because of his ineptitude and overreaching. T.S. Eliot said that there’s no greater treason than to do the right thing for the wrong reason — but when you’re talking about Congress, you take what you can get.
DAVE PRICE: Muddled In the Middle: “The problem with the No Labels idea is that it amounts to defining ‘reasonableness’ as something between center-leftism and centrism and then declaring everyone else out of bounds. That’s not especially useful.” Oh, some find it so.
FIGHTING OVER CROSSES at an Oklahoma bank.
A CUBAN HOSPITAL IS NO PLACE TO BE SICK. And according to the WikiLeaks cables, the Cuban government banned Michael Moore’s Sicko because “it knows the film is a myth and does not want to risk a popular backlash by showing to Cubans facilities that are clearly not available to the vast majority of them.”
For fifteen minutes the Long Beach Police watched Douglas Zerby sitting on an interior courtyard stoop playing with a toy gun. They never announced their presence. There was no danger to anyone. They never announced their presence. There were at least five police officers there. Then, after fifteen minutes, two or three of them opened fire with shotguns and pistols. There was no warning, and no command to drop the weapon. Apparently his first notification that the police were present was to be shot dead.
This, according to the LBPD, was to protect the citizens and make certain no one got hurt.
Heroic.
If they have the resources for this kind of thing, then they ought to be able to handle a 50% budget cut. More here. It was apparently a pistol-grip water hose, and police say he pointed it at them.
KEVIN WILLIAMSON ON THE VALUE OF FEAR:
Something has got into the Republican leadership, and that something is: fear. Wonderful, salubrious fear. For this we can thank the Tea Party movement, for several reasons. The first is that, while our European cousins are out rioting in the street for more and more government spending, the one significant, genuinely popular movement afoot in American politics is demanding the opposite. No Washington poobah wants to get yelled at by rowdy constituents at a town-hall meeting back in the district. They really hate that.
Funny what catches the notice of politicians. I was a newspaper editor for years, and I’ve had at least a dozen politicians tell me: “We don’t really give a damn what you write about us in the editorials. We don’t even really read them. But if we start seeing letters to the editor, we notice. Any time one constituent is ticked-off enough to take the time to write a letter, that’s significant. One guy writing a letter means that there are 500 more who agree but don’t take the time to write.” One guy writing a letter represents a few hundred people in the mind of Joe Congressman. Those Tea Party rallies, too, loom a lot larger than the raw numbers would suggest, impressive as those raw numbers have been. Joe Congressman does not want to see that crowd camped out on his doorstep.
The second reason used to dabble in witchcraft. Say what you like about Christine O’Donnell and her incompetent nut-cluster of a campaign, she showed the Republican establishment that the Tea Party, and the fiscally discontent at large, are willing to run a kamikaze candidate against any RINO target of opportunity.
Yes, that was the best argument for Christine O’Donnell. She scared the right people. Plus this:
The third fear factor is: reality. In Washington and in statehouses around the country, the reality of the pending Fiscal Armageddon is starting to seep into the thick skulls of the elected class. Jerry Brown pronounced himself “shocked” once he got a good peek at California’s balance sheet. Off the record, politicians of both parties are starting to concede that a lot of the old ideological disputes at now moot, because there simply isn’t any money. It’s not a question of whether there are going to be deep cuts and fundamental restructuring, but when and how much.
Indeed. The answers, by the way, are soon and rather a lot, really.
NEWLY-BUILT GHOST TOWNS haunt banks in Spain. “It sits in a desert surrounded by empty lots. Twelve whole blocks of brick apartment buildings, about 2,000 apartments, are empty; the rest, only partly occupied. Most of the ground floor commercial space is bricked up.”
ON FACEBOOK, DAVID BOAZ WRITES: “The distinguished economist Alan Blinder says it’s a ‘Christmas present’ when the government doesn’t raise taxes on the rich. So I’ve got a present for Dr. Blinder: I’m not going to steal his car.”
ERIC SCHEIE: Defending Evil Can Be A Good Career Move. Just ask Walter Duranty! Or Michael Moore.
AT AMAZON, Top Christmas Deals. Buy early and often!
OBAMA SIGNS TAX PACKAGE INTO LAW: A roundup at TaxProf.
IS AN “IDEOLOGICAL MONOCULTURE” sustainable?
THE ECONOMIST: Jonathan Chait’s Regulatory-Capture Denialism. “I must say I’m dazzled by the audacity of Mr Chait’s claim that the ‘private capture of public functions’ is rare. My reading of the economic and political history of the United States is that regulation is very, very, very often turned into (or originally fashioned) as a weapon of business power. . . . Mr Chait’s regulatory-capture denialism is especially notable when the matter at hand is the Washington-Wall Street nexus, as the case for a significant degree of coprorate control over financial regulation is extremely compelling. Indeed, that this revolving door is so well-trafficked constitutes perhaps the most impressive piece of evidence that financial regulators are too bound up socially, professionally, and ideologically with their regulatees to offer impartial oversight in the public interest.” Indeed.
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR: Collapse of the omnibus spending bill: rise of the ‘tea party Congress’?
CHANGE: The UBS Dress Code Memo. “If business casual was a by-product of the tech bubble, where everyone was making so much money we didn’t care what we looked like and anyway the richest people are wearing jeans and sneakers, then the current fiscal realities are turning back the clock to office conservatism. . . . Wear black, gray, navy. Skirts should be mid-knee. Men should leave the earrings and bracelets at home.”
They told me if I voted Republican everything would become stuffy, uptight, and buttoned-down. And they were right!
WELCOME TO “POST-RACIAL” AMERICA: Meeks says minority contracts should only go to blacks.
JUST SAY NO TO GEOFFREY NUNBERG: “And that’s how NPR sees you voters: You’re children. You’re resisting potty training. Your Tea Potty Party is mindless emotionalism. You’re — as Andrew Sullivan would put it — intellectually inert brats.”
InstaPundit is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.