KEEP IT UP, FOLKS — YOU’RE JUST MAKING IT WORSE: Wisconsin Protesters Lock Their Heads To Metal Railings, And Become Their Own Metaphors. Prof. Jacobson comments: “Locking one’s head to a metal railing without a key is a pretty accurate metaphor for what the public employee unions want to do to the taxpayers and union members.”
Archive for 2011
June 16, 2011
ROCK STARS, then and now. Everybody ages, some better than others. Sometimes it’s the years, sometimes it’s the mileage . . .
HOW TO GET your missing phone back.
MICHAEL WALSH: The Good Guys Won In Wisconsin.
The last thing the country needs is more wrangling over what should be a few simple principles. One is that the three branches of government are separate and equal, each given autonomy within their own spheres. Another is that elections ought to mean something.
Walker ran on a clear platform of fiscal reform, and the voters agreed. If, in 18 months, the residents of Wisconsin don’t like the results, they’re free to alter the makeup of the Legislature, which now has Republican majorities in both houses, and in 2014, throw Walker out on his ear.
On the other hand, Russ Feingold says “The game’s not over until we win.” By any means necessary, apparently.
PETER MOSKOS: Forget Prison And Bring Back The Lash. “Suggest adding the whipping post to America’s system of criminal justice and most people recoil in horror. But offer a choice between five years in prison or 10 lashes and almost everybody picks the lash. What does that say about prison? America has a prison problem. Never in the history of the world has a country locked up so many of its people.”
PHOTO GALLERY: Japan, Three Months After The Earthquake. The news cycle may have moved on, but things still look pretty grim.
UNEXPECTEDLY! Most Illinois Specialists Won’t Take Medicaid Patients. “Obviously, this has implications for the plans to cut Medicare reimbursements. And for the success of ObamaCare, since most of the coverage expansion will come, not from the exchanges, but from extending Medicaid.”
POPULAR SCIENCE: What A Giant Solar Eruption Would Do To The Earth.
TURNING THE IPAD into a weapon.
MORE ON THAT ATF GUNRUNNING DEBACLE: The Definitive Scandal: ‘Gunwalker’ Much Worse Than ‘Iran-Contra.’
AT AMAZON, markdowns in Grills & Outdoor Cooking.
SO IS THIS THE HOPE, OR THE CHANGE? Gallup: U.S. Satisfaction Dips To 20% In June. “Americans’ satisfaction with the way things are going in the country fell to 20% in early June from 26% at the start of May. Seventy-eight percent of Americans are now dissatisfied with the nation’s direction, according to a June 9-12 Gallup poll.”
WELCOME TO THE 21ST CENTURY, WHERE “A good wife is a good sex worker.”
“Disobedient wives are the cause for upheaval in this world,” the club’s vice president and co-founder, Dr. Rohayah Mohamad, told told the Associated Press. She blames the country’s rising divorce rate—as well as incidents of prostitution, rape, and even incest—on wives who have neglected to keep their husbands satisfied in bed.
Isn’t that what Chris Matthews was saying about the Weiner affair?
18 THINGS MEN NEED TO KNOW that women won’t tell them.
HOW SMOKING suppresses appetite.
COULD EFFORTS TO KILL COAL produce nuclear resurrection?
NISSAN HAS HANDLED THIS WHOLE PRE-ORDER THING MISERABLY: People Dropped from Leaf Waiting List for Not Having Home Chargers.
GIVING A NEW MEANING TO “GOING GREEN:” Potential Chevy Volt buyer turned off by $4,300 “market availability adjustment.”
WELL, WHY SHOULDN’T THEY BE? Are Law Schools That Misreport Placement Data Liable for Consumer Fraud?
RECOVERY SUMMER II: Second manufacturing report shows decline amid mixed signals. “Yesterday it was the Empire State manufacturing index that turned unexpectedly negative. Today, it’s the Philadelphia Fed’s manufacturing index that dropped into the red … ‘unexpectedly.'”
ILYA SOMIN: The Growing Conflict Over the Legality of the Libya Intervention. “The Libya intervention has long since passed the point where it is large enough to be considered a war. . . . Legal questions aside, the growing willingness of Congress to challenge Obama over Libya illustrates the political dangers of waging war without congressional approval. If anything goes wrong, the president ends up taking all the political blame. That’s why most presidents have in fact sought congressional authorization for major military actions, whether or not they believed it to be legally necessary.”
Here’s more on the White House’s legal position.
UPDATE: It’s a war, but it isn’t a war-war.
So people who like to say that “if you aren’t part of the solution, you’re part of the problem” argue that blockading the enemy at sea, suppressing enemy air defenses, identifying targets to be bombed, refueling aircraft that drop the bombs, engaging in electronic warfare to aid the planes that drop the bombs, and supplying many of the actual bombs themselves don’t count as waging war because we are not actually dropping the bombs (well, other than from our unmanned drones) and because the enemy is unable to effectively shoot back?
Well, the last part at least that fits with the old anti-war slogan that “it takes two sides to make war.” Although I suspect what they had in mind was that if we–and only we–stop fighting an enemy there would be no war–not that our shooting alone does not count as war.
I find this fascinating.
I do believe that under this logic, we could nuke somebody and not fall under the administration’s definition of war.
Heh.
KENNETH ANDERSON: DOD or CIA in Yemen? “Before turning to the legal question, let me say first that one of the most important features of the WSJ and WaPo reporting was the observation that apparently one of the reasons the CIA was being tasked with the mission was because of its experience in Pakistan not merely in running drones — which, after all, are often actually piloted by USAF — but rather in the utterly crucial intelligence-gathering operations on the ground that make possible what the drones do with missiles. The success of the drone program in counterterrorism operations in Pakistan has come about, so I have been told, on account of the CIA managing over the past several years to set up its own ground-level intelligence gathering operations in both Afghanistan and Pakistan — independent of Pakistan’s ISI. That independence has been crucial, for obvious reasons (to readers of The Onion, anyway) and apparently that ability to independently determine targets, not just independently strike at them, has greatly irritated Pakistan’s military. This illustrates a crucial feature about targeted killing through drone warfare or, for that matter, using human teams. It is not solely a technology, the technology of drones, but instead equally or more dependent on an extraordinary intelligence effort at the ground level in order to identify targets.”
SMART DIPLOMACY: Czechs don’t trust US, withdraw from missile defense plans. “Gee, I seem to remember a presidential candidate in 2008 who ran on the promise to improve relations with our allies.”