Archive for 2011
July 9, 2011
TODAY ONLY, a sale on biometric safes. Suitable for guns and other small valuables.
AMY ALKON: When Women Confuse Being Asked Out With Being Raped At Knifepoint In An Elevator. So we’ve gone from No means no, to No means you shouldn’t have asked.
Plus, from the comments:
The irony of this entire story for me is that this is a community of skeptics.
Yet if anyone within the skeptic community is skeptical of Rebecca Watson’s interpretation of events and hence calls into question her interpretation, they are immediately branded a sexist or a misogynist.
Apparently there are some things you aren’t allowed to be skeptical of within the skeptics community.
They use up all their skepticism on one topic. There’s none left for others.
And, as always, wisdom from XKCD.
SO I WAS JUST LOOKING AT AMAZON’S bestsellers in science fiction, and I noticed that Ric Locke’s Temporary Duty was at #7. Congratulations, Ric!
INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY ON THE ATF’S GUNRUNNING SCANDAL: The Stimulation Of Murder.
Clearly somebody is lying here. At a House oversight hearing last month, three federal firearms investigators testified they wanted to “intervene and interdict” the guns at the border, but were repeatedly ordered to step aside and let the traffickers proceed.
Acting ATF Director Kenneth Melson, in closed-door testimony in front of Rep. Darrell Issa’s committee, said administration officials sought to control and limit his communications with Congress, including withholding documents that made Melson “sick to his stomach” after he reviewed them.
On Dec. 14, Terry was fatally shot in the Arizona desert while patrolling one of the region’s most dangerous drug- and human-smuggling corridors. He was shot in the back with an AK-47 assault rifle. Two weapons that were allowed to cross the border as part of Project Gunrunner were found at the scene.
The evidence suggests that Agent Terry’s death was financed by the president’s stimulus package with the full knowledge and support of Attorney General Holder.
Is it time for a special prosecutor?
DAVID LEONHARDT: “The main problem with the job market is the lack of hiring by private employers. Above all, they aren’t sure what the future will bring.”
Well, how can they be when the Administration lurches around, driven by whatever makes a convenient sound bite? Alas, Leonhardt seems to have missed that aspect.
Time is running out on President Obama’s self-imposed deadline to rescue the nation’s slumping economy by his third year in office or risk losing re-election — a cavalier pronouncement punctuated yesterday by dismal jobless figures that prompted even Democrats to second-guess the president’s audacious 2009 assertion. Obama told TV titan Matt Lauer during a Feb. 1, 2009, MSNBC interview that he would be “held accountable” to improve the economy by the American public and, “If I don’t have this done in three years, then there’s going to be a one-term proposition.”
“He said it. He can’t go back and un-say it,” declared Washington, D.C.-based Democratic consultant Tom Ochs. “(The Obama campaign is) going to have to fight to the death on the economy, and I think they know that.”
Well, with Plouffe’s statement I think they are trying to un-say it. Or, more accurately, to signal to the still-friendly press that it would be bad form to pay too much attention to the unfortunate economic situation between now and election day.
A BREATH OF SANITY: Shep Smith: C’mon, do we really need a new law aimed at Casey Anthony situations?
“Caylee’s Law?” Really? I think we need a law against opportunistic legislators cashing in by naming bills after dead children.
GREG SARGENT TRIES TO REHABILITATE DAVID PLOUFFE, but Ann Althouse is not impressed.
Plouffe’s job is probably safe, though, as the White House doubles down.
Plus this: “You mean they now want to argue that they can get the jobless rate down to almost the level that they promised it wouldn’t exceed if we just let them spend more money?”
HOW BAD ARE THOSE JOBS NUMBERS? THIS BAD: May-June Hiring Pace Just 10% That Of February-April.
Weak economic reports usually contain glimmers of hope. Friday’s jobs report was just grim.
Employers added a scant 18,000 workers in June, the Labor Department said, far below views for 80,000. May’s gain was cut to 25,000 from the initial estimate of 54,000. It’s the starkest evidence of an economic soft patch: The May-June hiring pace was just 10% of the 215,000 average in February-April.
“It was an abysmal report,” said Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at IHS Global Insight.
The jobless rate ticked up 0.1 point to 9.2%, the third straight increase, even though the labor force declined by 272,000.
And, of course, if the trend holds these lousy numbers will be quietly revised in an even lousier direction next week.
UPDATE: Reader Laurie Borski writes: “Soft patch my foot! I suppose that Investors’ use of the term ‘soft patch’ in the title of their web article means their thesaurus did not contain a delicate term for ‘quicksand.'”
ISP PIRACY WARNINGS: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW.
A coalition of copyright holders and ISPs like Comcast and Verizon this week signed up for the “Copyright Alert System,” which will provide notices to consumers if they are suspected of illegal downloading.
Many ISPs already provide warnings to users if sketchy behavior is detected, but the Copyright Alert System is intended to provide a standardized approach that all ISPs will use. But how does it actually work? Is my ISP going to be snooping on my Web activity to catch me illegally downloading an episode of “Dexter”? Will ISPs hand this info over to the RIAA and MPAA so they can sue me? We took a look at the new plan and some of the top questions that have emerged since the announcement.
If the Republicans in Congress were smart, they’d repeal the DMCA — socking it to Hollywood while winning plaudits from Internet users. But note the conditional here. . . .
UNEMPLOYMENT, by the numbers. “The jobs numbers could hardly have been worse. Not only did the unemployment rate rise to 9.2 percent, and the economy create only 18,000 jobs, but the percent of Americans choosing to participate in the labor force declined to 64.1 percent, the same level as in March, 1984. Over 44 percent of the unemployed have been out of work for six months or longer, making their reentry into employment even more difficult. . . . What’s needed is regulatory reform to make it easier for employers to hire workers.”
Why yes, yes it is.
ENERGY SECRETARY STEVEN CHU: “We are taking away a choice that continues to let people waste their own money.” Yes, it’s much more noble to waste other people’s money.
“NEVER WALK ALONE?” From the comments: “You should walk in threes: you, Smith and Wesson.”
July 8, 2011
JOHN HINDERAKER: Our Excuser-In-Chief. “One wonders whether, when the history of this era is written, today might go down as a turning point. Americans have been steadily giving up on the Obama administration, as evidence accumulates that its policies have failed and it has no solutions to the nation’s economic problems. Not only that, its purported solutions–most of which are really just pretenses for government takeovers–have made the situation worse rather than better.”
TREASURY DEPT. REJECTS Garrett Epps’ Debt Ceiling Theories.
JENNIFER RUBIN: What was the point of that Rose Garden speech? “Following the release of the dreadful jobs numbers, President Obama appeared in the Rose Garden this morning. However, it was entirely unclear why he was there or what his plan is for digging the economy out of the deep hole in which we find ourselves. The speech, if you can call it that, seemed to be a disconnected collage of one-liners and excuses.”
I think that was Obama’s “I’m still relevant” appearance.
“Living as you do in New York, the navel of the universe, it is easy to confuse the Midwest and the South.” John Fleischman.
Clearly Mr. Fleischman and other East Coasters with this opinion just have not paid very close attention. Drop a southerner into the Midwest and I promise you that you can tell the difference. Just ask me.
Indeed.
HOW TO ACTUALLY MAKE TEXT look interesting.
PROFESSOR JACOBSON: Obama’s Catch-2012: “The only way for Obama to stimulate the enormous private sector job growth needed to ensure Obama’s reelection is for Obama to announce he is not running for reelection, which would unleash a wave of investment and economic activity not seen since the Great Depression.” (Emphasis added).
RUTH WEDGWOOD: Obama’s Prison Hulks and Al Shabab: The Complications of the Law of War.
With rope work worthy of any cowpoke, the Obama Administration has captured itself in its own legal lasso.
President Obama came into office pledging that his view of the law would be different from George W. Bush and that he would close the prison facilities at Guantanamo within a year. But governing is always harder than the sound bites of a campaign trail. And though this is no surprise to anyone with radar, there appear to be dangerous leaders of al Qaeda and its affiliates still parked at Guantanamo, against whom there is not sufficient evidence for a criminal conviction by proof beyond a reasonable doubt, either under the restrictive common law rules of evidence in a federal district court or even in a military commission. And where intelligence was first obtained from a prisoner under unconventional circumstances, the path to trial is even murkier. Thus, President Obama may—like it or not—end up far closer to the policies of George W. Bush than some of his supporters will like.
Read the whole thing. Especially this bit: “Well, there is one rule that the White House and the Defense Department seem to have overlooked in this inconvenient instance. It is the rule that flatly forbids holding prisoners captured in war in any locale other than ‘on land’—a rule with a history that stems from the American Revolution itself, when rebellious Americans caught by the British were interned in the death-dealing conditions of British prison ships hulking in New York harbor. . . . Thus, it’s hard to see why it was adjudged as convenient to hold the al Shabab leader as a shipboard prisoner for more than two months, with intelligence officials flying in and flying out, rather than transporting him to Guantanamo.”
HOW DID I MISS THIS? Today Only Sale: Friends: The Complete Series on DVD.
STEPHEN CARTER ON liberal fears about Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “It is no more the business of the president to tell a justice when to step down than it is the business of a justice to tell a president to leave office. The authority of the executive branch over the courts ends with nomination, and that of the legislative branch ends with confirmation. After that, politicians are free to complain about decisions they dislike, but they have no constitutional business trying to rearrange the court’s personnel to their liking. . . . If liberals calling for Ginsburg to step down believe that she is somehow no longer up to the job, let them say so forthrightly. Based on the best informed reports, such a claim would be nonsense. If, on the other hand, they want Ginsburg to stand aside to better serve the goals of their movement, then she has an even better reason to ignore their plea: She doesn’t work for them.”
OLD SUN SETS, NEW SUN RISES: Behind The Scenes At SpaceX’s Cape Canaveral Launch Site. “While in Cape Canaveral for the final launch of the Space Shuttle . . . PM senior editor Joe Pappalardo paid a visit to the place where SpaceX hopes to launch the next craft capable of docking with the International Space Station.”