CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Gun Dealer Could Operate Out of DC Police Headquarters. Change has come to Washington, DC!
I don’t see why the NRA or someone doesn’t set up as an FFL holder in DC, though.
Archive for 2011
July 21, 2011
IGNORANCE AS AN EXCUSE: Eric Holder’s only defense of the ATF’s “Fast and Furious” program is that he didn’t know it existed. And the only problem with that defense is that nobody believes him.
WHY HORROR IS GETTING MORE HORRIBLE: “One theory . . . is that life has actually grown too comfortable in our country, up and down the social ladder. Challenges are few, and people have a lot of time on their hands. They seek increasing levels of horror, violence, profanity, obscenity, and other kinds of extremism in entertainment in order to feel alive.”
THE DEFINITION OF INSANITY: Anti-obesity programs fail, so feds try again.
BUDGET UPDATE: Concerned Women Blast Big Spenders.
WELL, THEY’RE JUST EMULATING THE FEDS: Consumers in the U.S. are increasingly using credit cards to pay for basic necessities as income gains fail to keep pace with rising food and fuel prices.
SARAH HOYT ON the sorry state of airline travel. “On Monday on the shuttle to Atlanta we joked about the returning leg being cancelled. Then we got there. It had been cancelled. First they told us it was because of another storm in Denver. When a fellow passenger with a cell phone proved them wrong, then said it was still because of the same hail storm. AND THEN they claimed the problem was weather and they would not help us with hotel and/or food. We managed to get hotel after much argument, but when you add the shuttle to and from two airports, the dinner in Atlanta and dealing with luggage loss we’re out $500 again.”
I keep hearing stories of airlines lying about the reasons for cancellation — because if it’s weather they can get out of compensating passengers — and I’m surprised that some enterprising class-action lawyer hasn’t jumped in.
UNEXPECTEDLY! JOBLESS CLAIMS JUMP. “New claims for jobless benefits unexpectedly rose last week following two declines, a setback for a sector that hasn’t been producing many jobs.” Expect the number to be revised upward next week, as usual.
WAR AGAINST PHOTOGRAPHY UPDATE: Police accountability activists and their supporters celebrate court victory. “Northwestern Assistant District Attorney Jeffrey Banks argued that because the officers were unaware their images were transmitted to a third party and uploaded to the Web, that process took place in secrecy — a violation of a so-called wiretapping statute forbidding the secret recording or hearing of a conversation, or aiding in the transmission or hearing of that conversation.” He should be embarrassed to have his name associated with this dumb argument. Let me suggest some remedial reading.
AT AMAZON, bestselling tablet PCs. Interesting to see that the Asus Transformer is number one. A lot of people seem to like it, but it hasn’t gotten a lot of hype.
WANT TO CUT SPENDING? Get specific. Or, you know, just cut a percentage across the board. It’s sort of one or the other, I think.
IF THIS GETS OUT, CONGRESS MAY RISE IN THE POLLS: The Hill: Washington’s long debt-ceiling debate hits K Street in the wallet.
Washington’s all-consuming focus on the debt ceiling has eaten away at K Street’s revenues.
Several of Washington’s prominent lobby firms reported declines in their lobbying earnings for the first half of this year compared to the same point in 2010, according to forms filed Wednesday under the Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA). . . .
Several pieces of legislation that generate work for lobbyists have stalled since divided government took hold in January. The surface reauthorization transportation bill, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) reauthorization bill, the patent reform bill and the long-wanted trade deals with Colombia, Panama and South Korea are just a sampling of what’s been stuck in Congress.
This year’s inactivity stands in stark contrast to the last Congress, when a flurry of legislation from Democrats had companies flocking to K Street for help.
As Bob Dole said, sometimes a little gridlock can be a good thing.
LIBYA UPDATE: Why America Always Has To Pay. Plus this: “Meanwhile, as a percentage of GDP, American military spending continues a decline that has been going on since the 1960s (when, because of the Vietnam war, defense spending was 10.7 percent of GDP). That went down to 5.9 percent of GDP in the 1970s and, despite a much heralded defense buildup in the 1980s, still declined in the 1980s (to 5.8 percent.) With the end of the Cold War, spending dropped sharply again in the 1990s, to 4.1 percent. For the first decade of the 21st century, defense spending is expected to average 3.5 percent of GDP.”
WELL, REALLY, WHAT WOULD MAKE PEOPLE THINK BETTER OF HIM? L.A. Times: Obama Job Approval Mired Below 50 Percent For Sixth Straight Quarter.
IN ATLANTA, cheating students out of an education. “Cheating is wrong. Cheating by teachers, who are supposed to be role models, is worse. And cheating by teachers that harms students is worse still.”
JAMES TARANTO: “Keep Rockin'” — Does the Los Angeles Times “Deserve” The First Amendment? “Would the Los Angeles Times’s editors publish an op-ed titled ‘Criminals Don’t Deserve the 4th, 5th, 6th and 8th Amendments’? They would have to be awfully ignorant to do so–but then again, only as ignorant as they have already demonstrated themselves to be.”
AND WITH REASON: Michael Barone: Young Hispanics Skeptical Of Big Government.
AT AMAZON, a sale on jumpstarters and power supplies. I had occasion to use mine recently — the dome light in the Mazda had been left on for about a week while we were out of town — and it worked perfectly. Much easier than calling AAA. It’s the first time I’ve used it to start a car, though I’ve used the built-in air compressor a number of times. (I have this model, which is now discontinued; it’s been fine but I’m sure the others are just as good — when I bought it, it was because it was cheap, not because I did extensive research.)
BUSINESS LACKS CONFIDENCE: Home Depot Co-Founder: ‘I’m Not Sure Obama Would Understand Anything That I’d Say.’ “In a discussion about the current moribund job climate, Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus discusses the situation today contrasted with when he first started up the retail giant in 1978. Remarkably, the darkest days of Jimmy Carter were brighter than today’s despair under the failed Obama presidency.”
I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ONE GODDAMNED THING ABOUT MY CARBON FOOTPRINT: Michelle Obama Flies To Aspen and Back For Fundraiser Tuesday. “But those with Aspen ties aren’t done giving. First Lady Michelle Obama will arrive in our fair city a week from today, on Tuesday, July 26, for a luncheon to benefit her husband’s bid for a second term, according to the Chicago Sun Times. The first lady will be hitting up two ski resorts in one day, first stopping in Park City, Utah, for a breakfast before hopping a flight to Aspen. It will be a quick fundraising trip. She will promptly return to Washington, D.C.”
UPDATE: Reader Brad Sandy writes: “Glenn, Is the first lady traveling in any of the green approved modes or is she using the evil corporate jet to make two stops in one morning?”
I don’t think it’s an evil corporate jet. I think it’s a virtuous government jet.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Some safety advice for the U.S. military.
BACK, SCRATCHED: Politico Reporter Who Covered Palin Quits For Democratic Party Job.
TOM BLUMER: The Fear-Based Economy. “The economy, which has failed to grow at the brisk pace required for a genuine recovery in employment since the end of the recession, has shown signs of serious deterioration in the past few months.”
BILL FREZZA: Give Greece What It Deserves: Communism. “What the world needs, lest we forget, is a contemporary example of Communism in action. What better candidate than Greece? They’ve been pining for it for years, exhibiting a level of anti-capitalist vitriol unmatched in any developed country. They are temperamentally attuned to it, having driven all hard working Greeks abroad in search of opportunity. They pose no military threat to their neighbors, unless you quake at the sight of soldiers marching around in white skirts. And they have all the trappings of a modern Western nation, making them an uncompromised test bed for Marxist theories. Just toss them out of the European Union, cut off the flow of free Euros, and hand them back the printing plates for their old drachmas. Then stand back for a generation and watch. The land that invented democracy used it to perfect the art of living at the expense of others, an example all Western democracies appear intent on emulating. Being the first to run out of other people’s money makes Greece truly ripe to take the next logical step beyond socialism.”
That’s just cruel.