IN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, an excerpt from Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch’s new book, The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong With America. “Though rhetorically and theoretically at odds with one another, the two parties have managed to create a mostly unbroken set of policies and governance structures that benefit well-connected groups at the expense of the individual.”
Archive for 2011
June 19, 2011
JENNIFER RUBIN: The Abortion Pledge Mess.
PROFESSOR JACOBSON TARGETS RACISM: Why do they presume ex-felons will vote for Democrats?
AT AMAZON, MARKDOWNS ON BESTSELLING KNIVES.
FATHER’S DAY THOUGHTS FROM JOEL KOTKIN: Hey, Dad: Family Still Matters. “Ignore the claims of pundits on right and left who long have predicted the demise of the family. The family will prove more important than ever in determining where people live, work and, especially, settle. . . . Margaret Mead once wrote, ‘No matter how many communes anybody invents, the family always comes back.’ Those who have children, not those who do not, define and create the future. It’s a lesson companies and economic developers would do well to learn.”
CLAYTON CRAMER: The Department Of Education’s Crackdown On For-Profit Colleges. “Let me be clear: Public institutions and private non-profits also turn out plenty of graduates who can’t get jobs — especially right now. The incentives are not quite as direct, but a college president with 20,000 students gets a higher salary than a president with 5,000 students. The fact that the Department of Education thinks that this problem only applies to for-profits suggests that there are other incentives in play here besides just concern for students. . . . It appears that someone might have been planning the short selling of for-profit colleges, while persuading the Department of Education to impose regulations that would impair their profitability. The Department of Education’s inspector-general is looking into this very convenient coincidence.”
I’ll believe they’re serious about outcomes when the feds look at places like Chicago State University as closely as they’re looking at the for-profits.
JACK BALKIN: Hey, the Obama Administration is looking a lot like the Bush Administration on this whole War Powers Act thing. “Obama’s strategy, like Bush’s, also short circuits the normal process of seeking opinions from the OLC; it simply does so in a different way. . . . Obama came into office promising to reform the abuses of the Bush Administration and its manipulation of the OLC. The best way to do that is not to create entirely new abuses of one’s own.” They told me if I voted — oh, hell, that’s too easy.
Obama is, of course, not bound by the opinions of any lawyers in the executive branch other than himself. However, when he does this sort of thing he’s not able to hide behind such opinions, either. Which is why this sort of behavior by presidents is “extraordinarily rare.”
Meanwhile, Greenwald says the Obama lawyers are worse than the Bush lawyers:
That George Bush would knowingly order an eavesdropping program to continue which his own top lawyers were telling him was illegal was, of course, a major controversy, at least in many progressive circles. Now we have Barack Obama not merely eavesdropping in a way that his own top lawyers are telling him is illegal, but waging war in that manner (though, notably, there is no indication that these Obama lawyers have the situational integrity those Bush lawyers had [and which Archibald Cox, Eliot Richardson and William Ruckelshaus had before them] by threatening to resign if the lawlessness continues).
All I can say is, you expected respect for legal niceties from a Chicago machine politician? Hey, Rube!
HAPPY FATHER’S DAY: If you forgot, it’s not too late to send an Amazon gift card. You can even email ’em.
THE ELECTION’S A LONG WAY OFF, but the bumper stickers are proliferating already.
MODERN LOVE: Women Daters Rate 80% Of Men “Below Average.” “Paradoxically, it seems it’s women, not men, who have unrealistic standards for the ‘average’ member of the opposite sex.” (Via the Insta-Wife).
THE CHICAGO WAY: Expose prosecutorial misconduct, get investigated.
I wrote about this a while back.
SUSANNAH BRESLIN: My Father, The Writer.
June 18, 2011
SUPPLY WORRIES spur corn prices. “Corn supplies are expected to hit a 15-year low by the end of August, and surging prices in the physical market are an indication that demand is still strong.”
JEFF CARTER: Losing Our Way As A Nation.
TIM CAVANAUGH: Green Shoots Bustin’ Out All Over: How Much More Awesome News Can One Economy Take? Those aren’t green shoots, they’re Simbelmynë.
JIM TREACHER ON NETROOTS NATION: Was it as good for you as it was for me?
FIRST AMENDMENT? WHAT FIRST AMENDMENT? “The mayor said Carlos Osegueda, director of HUD’s regional Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, told him Huntsville is being reviewed because of negative public comments about fair housing in The Times and local blogs.”
We’ve seen this kind of thing from HUD in the past.
RAND SIMBERG: The Surprise Space Policy Debate.
THE SILENT MAJORITY WALK AND THE NAKED BIKE RIDE.
BLOG COMMENT OF THE DAY, on Obama’s overruling of lawyers from Justice and Defense about the War Powers Act:
I couldn’t muster much outrage about this one.
On a question of foreign affairs law, the Attorney General’s lawyer disagreed with the Secretary of State’s lawyer. The President then listened to his own lawyer and resolved the matter in favor of State. That’s what chief executives do when their subordinates disagree.
The President gets to make these calls. Of course, when the President makes this sort of a call, in a war that never had any sort of Congressional approval, it’s pretty risky — or, if you prefer, “gutsy” — but that choice is the President’s to make, and the political risks are his to run.
WALL STREET JOURNAL: Funny, Obama’s not talking much about the NLRB and Boeing. “Mr. Obama has been touting his plan to double the country’s export growth by 2015, thereby creating two million new jobs. Now one of the country’s foremost exporters is under assault for seeking a lower-cost venue for manufacturing to stay globally competitive, and the President has had nothing to say.”
TEST-FIRING THE KEL-TEC KSG: “Obviously, with 14 rounds on board, capacity is never going to be an issue. Those factors make it perhaps the best shotgun for home defense we’ve seen in a while.”
HILLARY CLINTON: You know, come to think of it that Assad guy’s not so much of a moderate after all. “By following Iran’s lead, President Assad is placing himself and his regime on the wrong side of history. He will learn that legitimacy flows from the consent of the people and cannot be forged through bullets and billyclubs.”