Archive for 2011
February 6, 2011
THOUGHTS ON caring about sports.
NOBODY TELL THE FIRST LADY:
The rest of the menu for the 100 or so guests at the White House bash is tailgate-friendly even if served inside the Executive Mansion: bratwurst, kielbasa, cheeseburgers, deep-dish pizza and Buffalo wings with sides of German potato salad, twice-baked potatoes and assorted chips and dips.
What about our national anti-obesity campaign? Is this any kind of an example to set?
UPDATE: Reader Jeff Dobbs writes: “I get the impression that healthy eating for the Obamas is a lot like ObamaCare — make rules that demand a particular behavior, but then issue waivers to a privileged class who can be exempt from them.”
SAYUNCLE blogged the Super Bowl commercials.
AT AMAZON, markdowns on grilling tools. Hey, grilling season is just around the corner. I hope!
TIMOTHY SANDEFUR responds to Akhil Amar.
CLARICE FELDMAN: The Incredible Lightness of Obama. “The Egyptian, an 82-year-old with terminal cancer, easily bested the community organizer, the man elected by people who quite clearly confused the last presidential election with an American idol contest. While many who elected the American president probably do not yet realize it, it is lucky for them that he lost the showdown, for had he not, the results would have created worldwide havoc and devastation.”
UNEMPLOYMENT RATES: Male vs. Female.
UPDATE: Mark Perry emails: “This is an old Carpe Diem chart. That chart is from this post. And here’s an updated chart through Jan. 2011.”
SO I EXPRESSED SOME DOUBT when I linked this story initially, but apparently it’s true: CNN: Obama adviser mistakes 4-star general for waiter.
Four-star Army Gen. Peter Chiarelli — the No. 2 general in the U.S. Army — says he is absolutely not offended that Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett mistook him for a waiter at a fancy Washington dinner this week and asked him for a glass of wine.
It could have happened to anybody, Chiarelli tells CNN.
“It was an honest mistake that ANYONE could have made. She was sitting, I was standing and walking behind her and all she saw were the two stripes on my pants which were almost identical to the waiters pants — REALLY. She apologized and will come to the house for dinner if a date can be worked out in March,” Chiarelli wrote in an e-mail.
It’s a good thing Sarah Palin didn’t make this mistake. Because if she did, it would be a univerally reported indicator that she’s an idiot and should never be allowed anywhere near issues of public policy. Luckily, since it was Valerie Jarrett, it’s all in good fun.
Much more discussion here.
SO FAR, MY MAIN TAKE ON THE SUPER BOWL is that the commercials seem really disappointing. The one with the guy getting repeatedly kicked in the balls merely inspired an unfortunate association with the bottom-feeder insurance company it advertises. And that was the only memorable one. . . .
THOUGHTS ON THE DECLINE OF MALE SPACE. And the beginnings of a renaissance? If you’re watching the Super Bowl from an elaborate Man Cave, then you’re part of it. . . .
TOM MAGUIRE: Winning The Future In Egypt (Ongoing…).
THE ONION: Obama Caught Lip-Syncing Speech. “After Obama slips up during an address on health care, White House officials are forced to admit the president occasionally uses a backing track for important speeches.”
JONATHAN ADLER ON COMMON CAUSE’S FILIBUSTER FLIP: “This sort of flip-flop is expected from partisans, but not from purportedly non-partisan, good-government organizations.”
YEAH, WHO WANTS A RELIABLE OIL SUPPLY FROM A FRIENDLY NEIGHBOR? Big Green Groups Tell Obama To Tell Canada To Drop Dead. It’s almost like these people want to hurt the economy.
BILL GATES ON THE VACCINES/AUTISM HOAX:
Well, Dr. Wakefield has been shown to have used absolutely fraudulent data. He had a financial interest in some lawsuits, he created a fake paper, the journal allowed it to run. All the other studies were done, showed no connection whatsoever again and again and again. So it’s an absolute lie that has killed thousands of kids. Because the mothers who heard that lie, many of them didn’t have their kids take either pertussis or measles vaccine, and their children are dead today. And so the people who go and engage in those anti-vaccine efforts — you know, they, they kill children. It’s a very sad thing, because these vaccines are important.
Yes, they are.
STEEP MARKDOWNS ON Men’s Clothing.
I’D NEVER HEARD OF PHILLIP GIRALDI, but Pejman Yousefzadeh says he has more influence than he deserves.
HOW TO REDUCE UNEMPLOYMENT TO ZERO. Heh.
CHANGE: “I’ve noticed my commute on BART has become substantially more crowded the past few weeks. Somehow I doubt it’s due to a sudden surge in employment. Might it stem from the ever-increasing gasoline prices? You know… the ones that when it happened during the Bush administration made for screaming headlines yet now warrant barely a whisper? Funny how that works.”
YESTERDAY I WROTE ABOUT RESILIENCE ENGINEERING AND POWER SUPPLIES. Now reader Chris Birkett emails:
I work for an electrical utility. When I first started there, in the late 70’s, we were taught about the separability and redundancy built into the system, which was designed by cold war engineers. Each region had its own generation, subtransmission, and distribution components, and could be operated as a separate entity. The regions were connected at a high level for efficiency and redundancy. Not true today. No one wants generation plants anywhere near, so they are far away and out of mind. I remember standing on top of a mountain, looking down and seeing the fragile thread of the transmission lines across the desert. The strongest impression I had was one of vulnerability. We still have a comparatively robust system with a fair amount of redundancy at lower levels. But like the rest of our infrastructure, much of the system is old and overloaded. Solar panels and high speed rail won’t solve the problem. We need a national program to rebuild our infrastructure, combining people who are willing to sweat and get dirty with the most effective of the new technologies we have developed. In the meantime, I just remembered that I am overdue for maintenance on my portable generators…
Yeah, we’ve pinched pennies by reducing robustness. That’s a poor practice that produces rotten results.
UPDATE: Reader Jeffrey Hollister writes:
If Obama back in ’09 had used the gazillions in ‘stimulus’ funds for an FDR-style plan to rebuild roads, bridges and the power grid, the actual work on the associated projects would probably be going into high gear right about now. Between the skilled jobs directly generated and the multiplier rate of those jobs, the unemployment rate would be heading downward without the need for statistical hocus-pocus; state and local governments’ balance sheets would gradually be repairing themselves through added tax revenue; and Obama himself would be a prohibitive favorite for reelection next year, even without the assistance of his MSM sockpuppet corps. But rebuilding the country and stimulating the economy (the real one, not the public-sector hog trough) was never Obama’s objective. Has everyone forgotten Robert Reich’s call to congressional Democrats to make sure they keep stimulus funds out of the hands of ‘white male construction workers?’ Just in case anyone HAS forgotten, here’s the video…
Yes, and the feminists wanted to be sure that the money didn’t go to white male construction workers, too.
Last November, President-elect Obama addressed the devastation in the construction and manufacturing industries by proposing an ambitious New Deal-like program to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure. He called for a two-year “shovel ready” stimulus program to modernize roads, bridges, schools, electrical grids, public transportation, and dams and made reinvigorating the hardest-hit sectors of the economy the goal of the legislation that would become the recovery act.
Women’s groups were appalled. Grids? Dams? Opinion pieces immediately appeared in major newspapers with titles like “Where are the New Jobs for Women?” and “The Macho Stimulus Plan.” A group of “notable feminist economists” circulated a petition that quickly garnered more than 600 signatures, calling on the president-elect to add projects in health, child care, education, and social services and to “institute apprenticeships” to train women for “at least one third” of the infrastructure jobs. At the same time, more than 1,000 feminist historians signed an open letter urging Obama not to favor a “heavily male-dominated field” like construction: “We need to rebuild not only concrete and steel bridges but also human bridges.” As soon as these groups became aware of each other, they formed an anti-stimulus plan action group called WEAVE–Women’s Equality Adds Value to the Economy.
The National Organization for Women (NOW), the Feminist Majority, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, and the National Women’s Law Center soon joined the battle against the supposedly sexist bailout of men’s jobs. At the suggestion of a staffer to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, NOW president Kim Gandy canvassed for a female equivalent of the “testosterone-laden ‘shovel-ready’ ” terminology. (“Apron-ready” was broached but rejected.) Christina Romer, the highly regarded economist President Obama chose to chair his Council of Economic Advisers, would later say of her entrance on the political stage, “The very first email I got . . . was from a women’s group saying ‘We don’t want this stimulus package to just create jobs for burly men.’ ”
No matter that those burly men were the ones who had lost most of the jobs.
Or, you know, fixed things like electrical grids. The feminists won. So the money went elsewhere, and we got . . . er, what did we get, anyway?
MORE: A reader emails: “In the past, many utilities maintained a 60-90 day coal inventory at the power plants. Now I’ve heard that some state regulators have forced the utilities to reduce their inventories in order to keep rates low. As low as thirty days.” So if coal shipments are delayed by weather, etc., that could be a problem much sooner than in the past.
MORE STILL: Reader Dan Harlan writes: “As much as I would like to blame Obama for not doing anything about the sorry state of the American power grid, I have to give credit where it is due. The Bush administration did nothing after the northeast regional blackout in 2003, which should have been the wake up call for the entire country. I don’t know why anyone is surprised about the lack of any real stimulus in the so-called stimulus bill. The main problem with Keynesian Economics has always been the fact that governments do not spend money for economic reasons, they spend it for political reasons.”
IN THE MAIL: The Fathers Know Best.
PEJMAN YOUSEFZADEH enlightens the constitutionally uninformed.
THE SPIN IS KIND OF FRIENDLY, but the ATF gun-running story makes the L.A. Times. Key bit:
Dick DeGuerin, who represents Houston gun dealer Bill Carter, owner of Carter Country, said the company is now being threatened with a federal indictment as a result of multiple sales to purported straw purchasers — sales he said were not only reported to the ATF, but which federal agents encouraged Carter Country employees to complete.
“What’s going on now is some of these agents are scared of their own careers, and are afraid to own up to the fact that they encouraged Carter Country to go through with these sales,” DeGuerin said. “The breakdown came with, what did the ATF do with the information that Carter Country was delivering to them? Apparently, they didn’t do much.”
Background here. Bottom line: Hundreds or thousands of guns made it to Mexico with the ATF’s connivance, even as the ATF was loudly trumpeting that it was . . . finding U.S.-origin guns in Mexico. Was this a book-cooking PR operation, or just utter incompetence? Either way, seems like another candidate for budget cuts.