RIGHT THINKING FOR THE LEFT COAST: City Journal California, as its name implies, is a one-stop homepage from City Journal magazine on what ails the once-Golden State, and how to solve those problems. But is anyone in Sacramento actually listening?
Archive for 2011
May 6, 2011
JAY COST: “If Our ‘Food Stamp Recovery’ Persists, Obama Will Lose Big.”
“MASEL WAS THE LONGTIME ORGANIZER OF WEEDSTOCK, an annual celebration of marijuana and the call to legalize it. It was held in different counties and locations, often attracting the attention of local law enforcement. The Great Midwest Marijuana Harvest Festival outside the Capitol drew criticism from Attorney General Don Hanaway in 1990. Masel challenged Hanaway to a chess match, saying it would prove that past marijuana use hadn’t hurt his brain. Masel said he would even pay $5,000 if he lost any one of the four games in the match. He also said that he would stop smoking marijuana, which he said he has done ‘almost every day’ for 21 years, if he lost the match. Hanaway refused, saying, ‘Some things aren’t funny, and drug abuse is one of them.'” From the Milwaukee State Journal obituary for the great Madison, Wisconsin activist Ben Masel, who died last Saturday of lung cancer at the age of 56.
You can read the posts at my blog that are tagged with his name here, including this one from March 24, with video of him in the state capitol rotunda conducting “a test of the emergency free speech system.”
“IF GOV. SCOTT WALKER’S UNION BARGAINING MEASURE BECOMES LAW and forces do-or-die recertification votes for public employee unions, some large public unions may simply skip the votes and drop their official status with the state…. To stay alive, the unions under Walker’s legislation would have to get 51% of the vote of all the potential union members in their bargaining unit, not just the ones who actually cast ballots. They also will have to win the vote again every year or their union will cease to function and be unable to reconstitute itself for at least a year after that.”
“TOEING THE LINE BETWEEN being an anthem of sex positive feminism and a pin-up for the patriarch…” It’s #142 on the top 200 list of #1 songs.
OSAMA BIN ELVIS MEETS AL GORE, POET LAUREATE. All this and more on the latest edition of Stephen Kruiser’s Kruiser Control on PJTV:
Al Gore and OBL mentioned in the same sentence together? Hey, it’s not the first time it’s happened.
BLACK FLIGHT: “Blacks are leaving San Francisco faster than any other major US city, citing ‘substandard schools, a lack of affordable housing and the dearth of jobs and black culture,'” the San Francisco Chronicle reports, as spotted by Richard Fernandez at the Belmont Club, who has much more on the topic. Richard adds that San Francisco is far from the only American city from which blacks are deserting at record rates.
To add to San Francisco’s unique structural woes, it’s worth noting, as the SF Examiner did recently, that the city is “becoming a child-free zone as [its] youth population declines.”
Nanny State Utopias sure seem to come with expiration dates, don’t they?
POLITICS AFTER OSAMA: “It’s not 1992 again, but it isn’t Morning in America, either,” Jonah Goldberg writes. “By killing Osama bin Laden, [President Obama] got what he wished for. And that may just be the beginning of his problems.”
Particularly when, as Fausta Wertz quips, statistically, “It’s easier to get into Princeton than it is to get a job in this economy.”
In contrast, at Investor’s Business Daily, “Lessons From The Land Of 15% Growth.”
THE FALSE-MODERATE Tariq Ramadan is slippery as usual when asked about the death of Osama bin Laden.
OBL: THE WEST’S VERY OWN CELEBRITY TERRORIST: “Whether he was droning on about climate change or consumption, OBL’s ‘ideas’ were born and bred in the West,” Bill Durodié wrote yesterday at Spiked.
And of course, Osama wasn’t the only member of Al Qaeda to sound like a western postmodern academic, there was also “Mohamed Atta, Socialist Critic of Capitalism.”
All of which brings to mind what Mackubin Thomas Owens, a Naval War College professor, wrote in September of 2002: “9/11 revealed an emerging geopolitical reality: that the world’s most important fault line is not between the rich and the poor, but between those who accept modernity and those who reject it.”
Update: Rand Simberg isn’t surprised on the western sources of Osama’s ideas: “Most ideas that kill millions were born in the West.”
“LEAVE IT TO PRIMITIVE AMERICANS to ruin a perfectly good kinetic military operation by taking too much enjoyment, too visibly, in its success. If you believe German political scientist Herfried Münkler, Europeans find the spectacle of ordinary Americans spontaneously celebrating the death of Osama bin Laden a ‘somewhat embarrassing’ display of ‘unthinking naïveté.’”
YUM! Horse… meat?
AT AMAZON, 25% or more off on toys.
LILEKS: “2000 WORDS, AS REQUESTED.”
WHERE IS HAROLD KOH WATCH: Over at Volokh, I discuss how the Obama administration seems to be losing the narrative over something you might not have thought possible to lose, killing OBL. When even the UN’s demanding information, think about regaining the initiative. Hint: Secretary Clinton, call your lawyer! Koh’s the right official to impose some order on the administration’s international law chaos – smart, knowledgeable, articulate, revered, and he’s already said most of what needs to be said as the “considered view” of the United States on international law. And for heaven’s sake, get Eric Holder out of the way. Perhaps Congress should be asking Koh to testify – Monday morning, say?
WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH CONNECTICUT? “Old and Busted: Why Are All These Less-Well-Off Rural Folks Voting Against Their Interest? New Hotness: Why Are All These More-Well-Off Suburban Folks Voting Against Their Interest?”
VIDEO: EVA LONGORIA SAYS SHE WAS ‘BRAINSTORMING’ with President Obama at The White House: “You can’t really blame the President for using the most attractive messengers available to him. But why is it there are never any celebrities interested in standing up for taxpayers?”
ADVANCED INSTRUMENT USED to read cells’ minds.
WE ALMOST HAD AN EVEN BETTER WEEK: Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born Al Qaeda leader in Yemen, was almost, but not quite, killed by an American missile attack.
This whole operation in Yemen is seriously under-the-radar, at least in the U.S. I wonder how many Americans even know who al-Awlaki is and that we’re firing missiles into Yemen in the first place?
YOU WENT FULL COMMIE, MAN — never go full commie.