FROM ANDREW BREITBART: Reckless Disregard?
Archive for 2011
September 22, 2011
THE HOME FOR NINETIES NOSTALGIA: 90s411.com.
MARKETWATCH: Obama’s Debt Plan May Hit Your Retirement. I’m pretty sure it already has.
REVISITING THE great Euro swindle. “Finally, the Eurosceptics have been vindicated. But will their dishonest opponents ever be held to account? . . . One urgent lesson concerns the BBC. The corporation’s twisted coverage of the European Union is a serious problem, because the economic collapse of the eurozone means that a new treaty may be needed very soon — plunging the EU right back into the heart of our national politics. The problem is that the BBC’s record is dreadful. It simply cannot be trusted not to become part of a partisan propaganda operation.”
IN THE MAIL: From Jeffery M. Anderson, Ephemera.
INSTAVISION: I talk with Michael Yon, author of Moment of Truth in Iraq, about what he’s seeing in Afghanistan — including problems with medevacs amid a generally improving military situation.
And, of course, be sure to visit his blog, and maybe even hit the tipjar if you like his work. (Bumped).
MATT WELCH: Why The $16 Muffin Is No Joke.
The lesson of government waste, whether on $16 muffins or $535 million loan guarantees to solar power companies or $48 billion in “improper” Medicare payments, is one worth relearning every day.
Managers whose budgets do not depend on customer satisfaction and who do not face competitive pressure in the marketplace, will not, on balance, spend their money wisely. Vendors selling to those managers know that price matters much less than it does to, say, Wal-Mart. And anywhere there is political urgency and official involvement high up the command chain, conditions will begin resembling a gold rush.
Read the whole thing.
Related: Unemployment Cheats Raked in $16.5 Billion Last Year.
UPDATE: Gallup: Americans Say Federal Government Wastes Over Half Of Every Dollar. (Via Kaus on Twitter, who comments: “Davis-Bacon, civ. service, unionism, unfireability–it all adds up 2 kill liberalism.”)
THE WRONG KIND OF GREEN: Solyndra employees speak out about mismanagement and sloppy spending. “After we got the loan guarantee, they were just spending money left and right.”
Related: Solyndra’s ‘Green Jobs’ Included Employment for D.C. Lobbyists — Including Former Democrat Aides. Can you say “culture of corruption?”
MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT: OC Couple Threatened With $500-Per-Meeting Fines For Home Bible Study.
More here.
MORE ON THE SAUDIS, CANADA, AND “ETHICAL OIL:
Kudos to EthicalOil.org. In the space of 30 seconds, the non-profit group has managed to enrage an entire kingdom, put an army of lawyers to work, and make the front page of newspapers across Canada. All thanks to a television ad which does nothing but state a set of facts, and posit a choice between two products, one produced “ethically” and the other “unethically”.
The ethical product is of course Canadian crude, extracted from the oil sands, while the unethical stuff flows from the oil fields of Saudi Arabia. As the ad points out, Saudi doesn’t allow women to drive, leave their homes without a male guardian present, and values their court testimony at half that of a man. As a timely aside, Newsweek magazine recently surveyed the 165 “best and worst places to be a woman”: Canada placed third, while Saudi Arabia clocked in at a dismal 147th.
But in today’s era of cultural relativism, “ethics” have become a relative term as well. How else can one explain the silence of the left, particularly feminists, on this issue? Instead of valuing the rights of half the human population, most focus their efforts instead on “protecting the planet”. When it comes to fashionable causes, oil-soaked birds take precedence over Saudi girls murdered for having a boyfriend, or women jailed for getting behind the wheel.
It shouldn’t be that way, but it is. And that’s a sign of serious moral failure on the left.
AT AMAZON, bestselling tablet PCs.
THE HILL: Bickering over rescue of Post Office escalates.
UPDATE: Reader Michael Becker writes:
Last July I bought a returnable thingy from an infomercial company. It was delivered, I didn’t like it and I shipped it back for a refund. As with all returnables, when I shipped it USPS, I requested a “return receipt”. The company followed up on my return and within a week of my sending the item back my debit card was credited for the purchase amount.
The return receipt from USPS showed up last week. It’s one of those green card things. It was signed for by the company I returned the product to on August 4, 2010. It was delivered to my mailbox one week ago yesterday nearly 14 months after the return was processed. Thankfully, the infomercial company is more productive than USPS.
Ouch. But on the bright side, the USPS employs a lot of unionized workers who provide reliable votes for the Democrats.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Jack Hoysted suggests an Australian example:
In 1992 I had a conversation a senior exec with Australia Post, our equivalent of your postal service.
Auspost was a sponsor of the Aussie team at the Barcelona Olympics and he was just back from there, which is how I can date this conversation to late 1992.
He said, “We are looking at a future where no-one much will be sending letters, apart from bills and circulars and the occasional postcard, and that has been our core business for a hundred odd years, and we are planning for a future pretty much without letters. It will all be electronic, so we have to adjust.”
In 1992 I was a tad gob-smacked, it had never occured to me that people would stop sending letters.
His business did adjust and they are still are a successful government run business.
Of course they changed, they now run an instant bill paying by cheque or cash service, sell stationary, franchise Aussiepost stores, have privatized individual post offices, they sold off prime real estate they don’t need, many changes to staff levels etc, etc.
All pretty painless, and Auspost remains a pretty treasured institution.
It can be done.
Yes, we can!
KNOX COUNTY MAYOR TIM BURCHETT EXPLAINS WHY WE SHOULD ABOLISH THE KNOX COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY. Well, when I read this piece on his lame political-posturing effort to ban sex offenders from public libraries, that’s what I thought.
To many people, making things “public” means making them available to everyone. But — as Burchett’s move demonstrates — it actually means letting grandstanding politicians make them unavailable to anyone who is sufficiently despised. Whenever you put money into a “public” project, you’re really just giving more control to politicians with a finger in the wind and an eye on future elections.
If having a public library system just means giving more power to guys like that, I’d just as soon rely on the private sector, thank you.
CULTURE OF CORRUPTION (CONT’D): Soros turns up in Obama’s LightSquared imbroglio. “As Republican lawmakers begin to dig into the White House’s cozy relationship with a startup wireless company and the wealthy Democratic donor who owns it, a new character has appeared on the story’s edges: liberal superdonor, conservative bete noire and controversial investor George Soros. Soros reportedly invested in the telecom company LightSquared through a hedge fund, and many of the nonprofits he finances have backed LightSquared in regulatory and policy disputes.”
How convenient.
RAND SIMBERG ON SPACE POLICY: The Fable Of The Shoes.
Such a bias toward the status quo similarly infects our thinking and debate on space policy. The highest achievement in the minds of many was landing a man on the moon, and such a feat is viewed as the epitome of a human spaceflight program, and the only model to follow. Ignoring the issue of the pork, such thinking resulted in the Constellation plan (“Apollo on Steroids”) and now it’s giving us the disastrous Senate Launch System (as I discussed over at Pajamas Media yesterday). It’s what I have called the Apollo Cargo Cult — in too many minds, if we don’t have a really big rocket developed and operated by NASA, we don’t have a Real Space Program.
The problem is that, while (fortunately) the government hasn’t always supplied shoes, in the minds of too many, it has always supplied human spaceflight, and when you propose to do it in any other way, no matter how much more cost effective, the same cries arise: “Are you crazy?! Why do you hate space exploration?! Spaceflight is hard! Only NASA knows how to put people into space! Who is going to do it if not NASA? These people are just hobbyists in garages! What if all of the commercial companies fail and go out of business?! (Yes, people really ask that.) What if they can’t hit their cost targets? What material will they use? What if we can’t store propellant in orbit?”
Like people who can’t imagine life without a government post office, or air traffic control (it’s private in Switzerland), or other things with which they have no experience, they can’t conceive of space activities that don’t consist of a few government employees on top of a really big rocket, with lots more government employees at desks in control rooms directing the show.
Read the whole thing.
FACT-CHECKING THE FACT-CHECKERS (CONT’D): Fact vs. Opinion: Does the Washington Post Know the Difference?
September 21, 2011
ATF GUN-SMUGGLING UPDATE: New Fast & Furious audio: Border Patrol agent killed by F&F weapons was “collateral damage.”
Plus: “Is the DOJ’s probe of Fast & Furious actually a way to derail the House’s investigation?” What we need is a special prosecutor — someone without ties to the tainted operation at Justice.
AT AMAZON, bestsellers in Science Fiction & Fantasy. I noticed yesterday that Neal Stephenson’s new book was delivered to my Kindle. Now all I need is to find time to read it . . . .
LOOK AT ME! Jonah Goldberg notes that this picture says a lot.