REPORT: Lawyer for Ohio police threatens state legislator who voted against unions. Another reason why the police shouldn’t be allowed to unionize.
Archive for 2011
March 3, 2011
HOW MUCH does a 20-petaflop computer cost?
IN THE MAIL: From Jack Cashill, Deconstructing Obama: The Life, Loves, and Letters of America’s First Postmodern President.
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: The World’s Top Ten Khaddafy Toads. “There has been no tyrant so bloody, no dictator so unscrupulous in the last 100 dismal years of world history that he hasn’t found a plethora of American intellectuals to serve as unpaid flacks. . . . Gaddafi gave them the kind of snow job that Hitler and Stalin used to give visiting foreigners — and too many of them fell for it. Read this column in the Washington Post from Benjamin Barber and weep.” Not all of them were unpaid.
NICK SCHULZ ON PUBLIC-EMPLOYEE UNIONS: It’s Time To End A Rigged System. “Public sector employees want to maximize their wages and benefits, too. But unlike their private sector counterparts, they have a very big role to play in choosing the employers on the other side of the negotiating table. They do this by taking funds earned through collective bargaining and sending them right back to the people they bargain with in the form of political contributions. If that sounds like a rigged system; well, that’s because it is.”
OBAMA PLAYING HIDE AND SEEK ON LIBYA: “President Obama has been largely missing in action of late, ducking direct comments on Libya and issuing a statement only after the extension of the continuing resolution was passed. . . . Ever since the lame-duck session and the much-praised speech at the Arizona memorial service, the White House has been adrift. A boring State of the Union address, a status quo budget, a muddled approach to the Middle East and some partisan jabbing (e.g. on Romneycare, on Wisconsin) are about all we’ve seen. Staff changes at the White House were supposed to usher in a more competent and politically moderate administration. It hasn’t happened.”
IOWAHAWK: Longhorns 17, Badgers 1. In which Paul Krugman has an unfortunate encounter with someone who actually knows stuff. “Perhaps the most striking thing in these numbers is the within-state gap between white and minority students. Not only did white Texas students outperform white Wisconsin students, the gap between white students and minority students in Texas was much less than the gap between white and minority students in Wisconsin. In other words, students are better off in Texas schools than in Wisconsin schools – especially minority students. Conclusion: instead of chanting slogans in Madison, maybe it’s time for Wisconsin teachers to take refresher lessons from their non-union counterparts in the Lone Star State.”
GOOD NEWS: JOBLESS CLAIMS ARE DOWN. Bad news: Job openings are down too — by 30%.
IS MODERN WARFARE OVERLAWYERED? Yes.
THE TROUBLE WITH speed-dating.
PJTV: My interview with Donald Rumsfeld. It was supposed to be a two-parter, but the producers left it in one piece after all: “It just seemed to flow naturally.” We talk about his new book, Known and Unknown: A Memoir, now a #1 bestseller, about why the Bush Administration changed its stance on pushing democracy in 2005, civil-military relations, and how the United States should be responding to events in Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc. (Bumped).
THAT WISCONSIN BOGUS-MEDICAL-EXCUSES SCANDAL draws condemnation in the world of medical societies:
Last week the American College of Physicians (ACP), which represents 130,000 internal medicine physicians and students, released a statement speaking to the lapse of judgement demonstrated by the FP doc’s in Wisconsin. The fact that this was addressed to the members of the ACP and not to the American Board of Family Practitioners does little to take the sting out of the blow. On February 28 the ACP “reminded physicians that professional ethics does not allow for them to sign off on false “sick notes” to excuse patients to engage in political advocacy purposes.” This may not seem like much, but in the world of governing medical bodies, this is blistering criticism.
Full statement, and more, at the link.
ROGER SIMON: Obama And The Tea Party: The Race Card Keeps On Turning. Obama would rather believe that his problems stem from the fact that he’s black, rather than from the fact that he’s proved himself a schmuck.
UPDATE: How big a schmuck? This big: Libyan Rebel Begs For Help From George Bush.
A ONE-DAY-ONLY SALE on an iPod/iPhone speaker dock with remote.
I finally made the leap to a smartphone and bought a Verizon iPhone the other day, with the mobile hotspot feature. So far I’m quite happy with it. Battery life won’t match my old Motorola, which could go two weeks between charges, but it’s better than I expected.
THIS AWOL THING IS GETTING OLD: Small Business Goes to Indianapolis in Search of their Representatives.
PENTAGON POURS COLD WATER ON no-fly-zone idea.
MARK TAPSCOTT: Paranoia 2011: Beware of the Koch behind every bush. “William F. Buckley Jr. struck a blow for reason and truth when in 1962 as National Review editor he effectively excommunicated John Birch Society founder Robert Welch from the conservative movement. . . . Is there a liberal editor today willing to do for the Left what conservative Buckley did decades ago for the Right?”
UPDATE: Professor Jacobson: The Paranoid Style of Politics In Madison and The Left-Blogosphere.
THE RORSCHACH TEST JOKE COME TO LIFE: “Me? Anti-Semitic? You’re the one who’s showing me the Jew pictures.”
NEAL MCCLUSKEY ON THE GAO FOR-PROFIT SCHOOLS SCANDAL:
In dribs and drabs the plot thickens in the quiet little saga surrounding the GAO’s brutal and broken August report on for-profit colleges. The latest development is the near-silent transformation of the GAO office that produced the knee-capping report that was later quietly reissued with lots of new, for-profit-exonerating material.
I say “near-silent transformation” because word about it somehow got to the Coalition for Educational Success, a career college advocacy group. Yesterday, CES issued a press release on the matter, and this morning I contacted GAO’s public affairs office about it. To the GAO’s credit, their public affairs folks quickly sent me a copy of a memo announcing the end of the Forensic Audits and Special Investigations (FSI) team. Sadly, it was clear that there would be no public announcement of the change, which is utterly consistent with the behind-your-back way GAO has handled every development in this story. Well, every development save the very public release of the original, fatally flawed report. . . .
As a member of the public it sure would be nice to know the answers to these questions, especially since these are the guys who are supposed to be holding the rest of the federal government “accountable.” For proprietary schools’ employees and investors — the people who were most hurt by the dubious August report — these are thing they absolutely should know. But the GAO insists on telling us that nothing major went wrong while refusing to share information we’d need to confirm that. It’s not only totally unsatisfactory, it only makes you even more suspicious.
The attack on for-profit schools seems to have been quite political, involving a bogus report and what looks suspiciously like an effort to protect traditional Democratic constituencies against free-market competition. I’m also suspicious that the assault on Kaplan in particular is a way of keeping the Washington Post — which depends on Kaplan’s revenues to survive — in a pliable frame of mind vis-a-vis the Administration.
When you add to this the problem of insider-trading at the Department of Education where for-profit schools are concerned, it’s not clear that more government regulation is the answer.
IT’S ALL political.