A MOBILE NETWORK: Switzerland to equip buses, trams with air quality sensors.
Archive for 2011
July 11, 2011
AN URGENT Space Political Action Alert. “As a result of the disastrous initial markup of the House appropriation for NASA last week, the Space Access Society, the Space Frontier Foundation, and Tea Party in Space have all put out alerts for everyone to call your Congressman (extra points if your congressman is one of the chairs of the appropriations committee or subcommittee, Hal Rogers or Frank Wolf).”
SHOCKINGLY, THIS DIDN’T WORK: “President Obama offered Speaker Boehner the president’s own budget outline and called it a compromise.”
UPDATE: In his own mind, he’s the only reasonable person: “It also was a rewrite of history. A completely irresponsible president who just months ago proposed a budget with devastating deficits, repeatedly demanded that the deficits and debt be dealt with now, without any delay. Where has he been for two years? . . . It was a good press conference, for Obama, because he was largely unchallenged, and was permitted to frame the issue for the 2012 campaign. In other words, Obama was able to deal with his own failures without acknowledging any of those failures.”
ANOTHER UPDATE: Boston Globe: Spin Meter: Obama, Dems skirt issue on tax hikes.
MORE STILL: Rob Long emails: “I didn’t see the press conference because I’m working… was the President wearing a cardigan sweater when he told us we need to eat our peas?” Only metaphorically.
And Charles Austin writes: “I’m visualizing whirled peas.”
IN THE MAIL: Garner’s Dictionary of Legal Usage.
IN THE MAIL: From Iain Murray, Stealing You Blind: How Government Fat Cats Are Getting Rich Off of You.
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: An Unhappy Ending To The Drug War.
ASSOCIATED PRESS: What recovery? Unemployment remains high and jobs scarce 2 years after Great Recession ended.
Has it ended? Time for another Insta-Poll!
FOR ONCE I THINK HE’S RIGHT: “Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner says many Americans will face hard times for a long time to come.” Hope and change!
IT’S 1979 ALL OVER AGAIN: Assad Loyalists Storm U.S. Embassy In Damascus.
UPDATE: More here: “Obama had better act quickly to make clear to Assad that this kind of attack won’t be tolerated. The last thing Obama needs now is yet another parallel to the Carter administration in a sacking of a Middle East embassy by ‘students.'”
Well, if Obama wants an excuse to bomb Syria, he’s got his act of war. But as eager as he seemed to be to bomb Libya, he appears to be looking for excuses not to bomb Syria, even though it’s an Iranian ally and major enemy of Israel.
IN PRAISE OF YE OLDE KITCHEN GARDEN.
Just watch out that it doesn’t land you in jail:
Julie Bass, of Oak Park, Michigan, wanted to grow her own food. She was a fan of organic vegetables, so she decided to convert her front yard from the grass-and-tree landscaping typical in her neighborhood into an edible garden. Because she had just torn up the front lawn to install a new sewer system, she had a perfect opportunity to start fresh. She planted cabbage, carrots, tomatoes, cucumbers and herbs in raised wooden planters, and waited to reep her produce.
A neighbor didn’t like her choice of landscaping.
The neighbor called the city and complained that Bass’s yard disrupted the look of the neighborhood. The city agreed, and issued Bass a ticket.
Bass was offended. Organic produce is expensive. If she wants to grow her own, she reasoned, why shouldn’t she be allowed to? She refused to change her yard. The city insisted; she lawyered up.
Now, with neither party being willing to back down, the case is likely to go to a jury trial. If Bass loses, she faces up to 93 days in jail. All for following the example of the White House! Has news of Michelle Obama not yet made it to Michigan?
Tar. Feathers.
UPDATE: A reader emails that Bob Dylan was onto this decades ago:
I’m a long time reader who’s been reluctant to chime in because I work in a prestigious academic environment where people think The New Republic is a far-right rag.
Your post today about a woman getting ticketed for work on her own garden reminded me of a line from one of Bob Dylan’s best and most underrated songs of the 80s, Union Sundown:
“They used to grow food in Kansas /Now they want to grow it on the moon and eat it raw. /I can see the day coming when even your home garden /Is gonna be against the law.”
The song was way ahead of its time in excoriating the collapse of American manufacturing. Ironically, the song was panned upon its release because many of Bob’s liberal fans felt that he was being closed-minded, or nationalistic, or something. Now the song is more relevant than almost any of his more famous protest stuff from the 60s.
Good catch.
POT, MEET KETTLE: Roger Kimball on Journalistic Ethics and the NYT. “Let’s pause to consider how the Times treated that case of the Duke lacrosse players and the accusations made against them.”
WELL, UTTER PUBLIC HUMILIATION WILL DO THAT TO YOU: Susan Feinberg clams up.
UPDATE: More here.
PROF. JOSEPH CAMPBELL ON the disingenuous Carl Bernstein.
ERICA YAWN.
AT AMAZON, markdowns in Patio & Garden.
TRIBE SMACKS GEITHNER TWICE OVER DEBT-LIMIT POSTURING: It is pretty clear now that Geithner only floated the 14th Amendment option as a lame attempt to provide Obama with more leverage at the negotiating table. I told you so. . . .
MICHAEL BARONE: Man-Cession Ends As Men Learn New Job Skills.
What I see beneath these data is something like this — a picture of men hustling to acquire new skills and learn how to do different jobs than they have in the past, while women have been more likely to sit back and accept whatever the macroeconomy doles out.
A lot of men seem to have figured out that health and education, as Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz argue in the lead article in the latest National Affairs, have become the “commanding heights” of the economy.
What we are seeing, I think, is that individuals, most of them men, have been responding to cues sent by the market economy and have been adjusting far more rapidly than centrally designed government programs could ever do. . . . What I see beneath these data is something like this — a picture of men hustling to acquire new skills and learn how to do different jobs than they have in the past, while women have been more likely to sit back and accept whatever the macroeconomy doles out.
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE: Reader Rosie Moore writes:
Michael Barone’s piece states that most job losses during the recession were in the private sector while gains were made in public sector jobs, then doesn’t connect the dots by noting that most health and education jobs (credited for easing the man-cession) are in the public sector. This means that with the exception of retail, which is overwhelmingly private but low-rung on the pay scale, the job “rebound” for men comes almost exclusively from public sector jobs that got direct “stimulation” (and will end at some point, presumably?) I see this less as an encouraging sign than as a shift to public sector jobs (largely union) which seems to be a goal of this administration. Love Michael Barone’s perspective but I read this one and thought “ugh” rather than “yippee”.
That’s my reaction to most economic news lately.
BRIT HUME: The Obama DOJ reminds me of nothing so much as the Nixon Justice Department. “You have the scent of high-level knowledge of serious wrongdoing and you have the smell of cover-up and I think the stench of cover-up on this gun-running operation is very strong indeed.”
UPDATE: A reader says the Watergate comparison is entirely unfair — to Nixon’s people:
Fast & Furious is a Nixonian Cover-up? AFAIK no one died because G. Gordon Liddy broke into Watergate. And at least AG Elliot Richardson and Asst AG William Ruckelshaus had the decency to resign when faced with firing Archibald Cox. This lot doesn’t bat an eye at firing an inconvenient Inspector General or honest public servant. I think we can comfortably state that the current administration is more ethically impaired then Richard Nixon’s.
Ouch.
CIVIL RIGHTS PROGRESS: Wisconsin’s Walker signs must-issue carry permits into law. “Walker had tried to get the bill passed for years while a state legislator, but his Democratic predecessor, Jim Doyle, and Democrats in the legislature had stymied those efforts. This time the bill passed with bipartisan support and allows Wisconsin residents to get permits on a must-issue basis — meaning that the state cannot deny a permit application without justifiable cause, such as a felony record.”
WHAT EVERYONE NEEDS: A wireless solar keyboard?
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Number of Legal Jobs Continues to Shrink, Number of Lawyers Continues to Rise.
TECHNOLOGY: The Story Of Dick Cheney’s Heart.
WALL STREET JOURNAL: The Gift and Generation-Skipping Taxes May Save John Edwards.