AN INTERVIEW WITH DAVID COX, the North Carolina man accused of practicing engineering without a license for making a too-persuasive critique of North Carolina DOT traffic management.
Archive for 2011
February 11, 2011
THE TUCSON ATTACK: A CASE OF GOVERNMENT FAILURE? Well, if by “government” you mean Sheriff Dupnik, who knew Loughner had problems and did nothing.
MARKDOWNS ON HDTVs.
ANDREW KLAVAN: STOP THE HATE!
JUSTICE DEPARTMENT’S FOIA UNFAIRNESS: Rep. Frank Wolf demands answers. “Virginia Congressman Frank Wolf sent a terse letter to the Inspector General at the Justice Department demanding her current investigation of Civil Rights Division politicization include this line of inquiry. The DOJ IG is investigating a series of things, including whether infamous DOJ political appointee Julie Fernandes and others including voting section management are treating employees differently because of their religious views and political beliefs.”
A JOB-KILLING TAX POLICY, in Rick Perry’s Texas? “Online retail giant Amazon.com is closing a suburban Dallas distribution center and scrapping plans to expand Texas operations after a dispute with the state over millions of dollars in sales taxes, an executive informed employees Thursday in an e-mail obtained by The Associated Press.”
WALL STREET JOURNAL: Crisis Flummoxes White House. “In the White House, frustration is giving way to a sense of powerlessness.”
ROGER SIMON: GOProud Party Breitbart’s Proudest Hour: “The party staged by Andrew Breitbart for GOProud — the gay Republican and conservative group — was as close to a game changer as things get and the most interesting event at CPAC by far, at least to this point — and that’s meant as no insult to CPAC. With sexy Sophie B. Hawkins singing to a boisterous, supportive crowd, the party almost obliterated in one night the conception that Republicans are anti-gay and gave the impression that young libertarians — and some not so young — are taking over the GOP. Pretty soon it may be cool to be a Republican and square to be a Democrat.”
IN EGYPT, mob civility. “To see men and women voluntarily picking up trash in a country where the streets are generally regarded as a public landfill and people often throw bags of food remains out of their moving cars is astounding.”
HERMAN CAIN: If I run for President, it won’t be out of vanity.
MUBARAK HELICOPTERS OUT OF CAIRO. But only to his country house in Sharm-El-Sheikh, so I don’t know if this means anything other than depriving protesters of a handy target.
AMAZON 1, NORTH CAROLINA TAXMAN 0: NC tax man drops bid to see Amazon buyers’ data. Plus, the state pays $90,000 in attorney’s fees.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The Obama Doctrine At Play In Egypt. “All the above said, the actual implementation reflects somebody with the experience of two years in the Senate, who had never navigated outside of academia and Chicago tit-for-tat politics. So Mubarak is/is not a dictator, must leave now/yesterday/sometime soon as he serves as sort of a figurative leader/a critical transition player/a suspicious counter-revolutionary inasmuch as the U.S. must lay down conditions/advise only/respect Egyptian prerogatives, as private conversations with Egyptians are spilled to the press, Obama suggests the Cairo desire for freedom somehow channels his own support, and Biden, Clinton, and Obama contradict one another hourly. This is very sad.”
UPDATE: Sigh: “There are two possibilities, and they’re both appalling. One is that Clapper knew everything he was saying was a gross distortion of reality but said it anyway, thereby deliberately misleading the American people and giving aid and comfort to a group whose interests are completely antithetical to those of the United States. The other is that Clapper is genuinely ignorant of the agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood, a thought that is just about as unnerving as can be imagined. If it needs to be to pointed out to the Director of National Intelligence that Google is his friend, we are in a boatload of trouble, folks. I wish I was kidding.”
ROGER KIMBALL: Ouch! More “Smart Diplomacy.” “That smart diplomacy, it turns out, wasn’t ‘smart’ as in clever. It was ‘smart’ as in how your cheek feels when it’s been slapped hard. The bigger issue here concerns the place of the United States on the world stage. We just sent a message to our friends and allies about how they should value our professions of friendship and our commitments to help them. President Obama has mastered a certain rhetorical schtick. It revolves around the communication of a certain emotion of righteousness. You look out a crowd, eyes raised, and turn your head slowly to the the left, then to the right, then to the left again. It requires a certain arrogance, which Obama certain commands. To work, however, it also requires competence, an understanding of the way the world actually works, which he has once against demonstrated he lacks utterly.”
UPDATE: A reader emails: “I point out that the Obama supported the ‘young people’ against our ally Mubarak, but did not support the young people against the Iran regime. It almost makes you wonder what this man really wants.”
SALIM MANSUR: A Letter From A Fearfully Concerned Muslim.
ASTEROID UPDATE: Doomsday Determined? Asteroid Apophis Could Strike Earth in 2036.
DONALD TRUMP: If I Run And If I Win, I Will Make America Great Again.
FOOD PRICES: Kraft says more price increases ahead. “As one of the world’s largest food companies, Kraft is feeling the pinch from higher costs for wheat, corn, sugar and other commodities.”
THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Inspector General: The IRS Pays $12 Billion/Year in Phony Earned Income Tax Credit Claims — A 25% Error Rate.
SO IS THIS HOPE, OR CHANGE? Housing seizures rise. “The bright note of the dismal foreclosure uptick is that the faster we work through the shadow inventory, the faster we find the bottom and can start making some rational decisions again.”
February 10, 2011
CHANGE: U.N. Food Agency Issues Warning on China Drought.
China has been essentially self-sufficient in grain for decades, for national security reasons. Any move by China to import large quantities of food in response to the drought could drive international prices even higher than the record levels recently reached.
“China’s grain situation is critical to the rest of the world — if they are forced to go out on the market to procure adequate supplies for their population, it could send huge shock waves through the world’s grain markets,” said Robert S. Zeigler, the director general of the International Rice Research Institute in Los Baños, in the Philippines.
Which would, likely enough, create more government instability around the world.
YA THINK? Panetta Comments Stoked Unmet Expectations. “Panetta, who had little intelligence experience before taking the CIA job two years ago, has been praised for his skill in leading a notoriously temperamental agency, and for handling public controversies with a deft touch.” Deft.
UPDATE: Obama Intelligence Official Prepared For Congressional Testimony On Egypt…By Watching CNN. Why do we spend those billions on intelligence, again?
ANOTHER UPDATE: A call to fire Panetta.
RELATED: CIA: Our Mideast Forecasts Kind Of Suck. Ya think?
THE DEATH KNELL FOR MULTICULTURALISM? We can hope so. Today French President Nicolas Sarkozy joined Germany’s Angela Merkel and Britain’s David Cameron in pronouncing multiculturalism a failure. So with Europe changing its tune, will America’s chattering classes go unilaterally for multiculturalism now?
ILYA SOMIN OFFERS THOUGHTS ON The Demise of the Democratic Leadership Council and the Future of Liberaltarianism. “Although the New Democrats were far from being libertarians themselves, there was important common ground between the two groups. The weakness of the DLC and other similar organizations today is an indication of the extent to which liberal Democratic thinking has moved left over the last decade. This movement makes it much harder to achieve any viable liberaltarian coalition.” Liberaltarianism was always just a lure for a certain batch of susceptible rubes.