LIVING THE BLOGGER DREAM: Attended a small dinner party at James Taranto’s tonight, featuring sous vide and cigars. It doesn’t get any better than that!
Archive for 2012
December 2, 2012
IT’S A GOOD IDEA, AND I’M SURE C-SPAN WOULD BE WILLING: Put Fiscal Cliff Talks On TV.
ABOUT MY MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD POST LAST NIGHT, Rick Brookhiser emails:
Your advice to Egyptian moderates tracks what Arnold Beichman, old socialist, said to to me as we looked at the Winter Palace c. 1985: “Kerensky, that jerk–if only he’d shot a few people, millions would be alive!”
You can’t be halfhearted in a revolution. Values that serve well in a civil society don’t work in a state of nature.
SPIN: Iraqi refugee arrested for bombing Arizona Social Security office with IED, media silence ensues. “I just spoke again with my contact in the FBI Phoenix field office (who is not authorized to speak on behalf of the FBI office) that it is highly unlikely that Aldosary will be charged with any terrorism offense. While they are internally treating it like a domestic terrorism investigation, including looking at if he had any help constructing the explosive device, the FBI is saying very little and and will prosecute this as a simple explosives and arson case because of ‘the political sensitivities involved.'”
Is there a YouTube video we could blame?
ROSS DOUTHAT: More Babies, Please.
BRYAN PRESTON: Bob Costas’ Shame. When did sportscasters turn into such a bunch of whiny manginas?
More here.
UPDATE: Reader Rob Cooper emails: “Can someone remind me what caliber weapon OJ used on Nicole and Ron Goldman?” Maybe someone should ask Costas. Honestly, he should be taken off the air for such a rant. But he probably won’t be, given his employer.
The need for a permanent campaign was another drum he beat. Politics is NOT my number one priority in life. For the Left, it seems like it may be. There seem to be Statists who view politics as life itself. A lady in the audience mentioned a rich Obama family (around Richmond, maybe) that put up four Obama operatives for a full year leading up to the election. Think of Democrats as political Jehovah’s Witnesses. I say that in admiration of a work ethic, not endorsement of either viewpoint. . . .
“Organization wins elections,” said a fellow in the crowd. Not just the phone calls and door knocks by random people from wherever. The precinct captains who know their turf are what the GOP lacks. As a terrible neighbor who hardly knows anyone on my block, I have to own my slice of the problem. If we’re not engaging in a minor invasion of privacy to get to know people, we’ll be suffering increasing major invasions of privacy from Leviathan.
Read the whole thing.
AT AMAZON, Coupons Galore.
COMING: A Tea Party Tsunami? It’ll happen if people work to make it happen.
The first Tea Party wave was a threat to Democratic control of Congress, and the response was vicious demonization and false accusations of racism.
Operation Demoralize is the Democrats’ attempt via sympathetic media to convince opponents of the Obama agenda that there is no hope and no alternative but capitulation.
Post-election, Operation Demoralize is in full swing. We are told the permanent liberal majority has arrived, that we live in a media bubble and cocoon, and that we were dishonest — not just wrong — in our 2012 assessments.
Expect Operation Demoralize to go bipartisan. Already we are told to blame the Tea Party movement for not taking back the Senate, even though more “moderate” Republicans lost their races than Tea Party supporters. (Todd Akin uniformly and incorrectly is described as a Tea Party candidate, when he was not.)
In reality, the Tea Party movement gave rise to our next generation of leaders, including Marco Rubio (the establishment backed Charlie Crist) and Ted Cruz (the establishment backed David Dewhurst).
The next thing for Tea Party people to do is to take over their county and state GOP operations. That shouldn’t be especially hard, especially in the wake of a big defeat. Work on recruiting good candidates — not just candidates who say the right thing, but candidates who can win, by not saying the wrong thing — and building networks to support them.
Don’t worry about 2016 right now. Work toward keeping the House in GOP hands — and encouraging those hands to be fiscal-restraint types, not old-style GOP establishment types — and taking back the Senate.
UPDATE: Andrew Morriss recommends Robert Heinlein’s Take Back Your Government. “A good manual for that Tea Party Tsunami!” It’s a little dated technologically, but the basic advice remains sound — particularly the part about how easy it is to get involved at a local and state level.
FIXING DIABETES WITH GASTRIC BYPASS SURGERY.
Sorry, but I’d try the Gary Taubes approach, first. With a dash of Mark Rippetoe.
AT AMAZON, Deals And Bargains. On all sorts of things.
HOW MANY PEOPLE DIED BECAUSE OF BAD, POLITICIZED SCIENCE? Rachel Carson Was Wrong.
NO, BUT IT USUALLY IS: Prof. Bainbridge: Does Clinical Legal Education Really Have To Be About Left-Liberal Politics? “Most of the clinical professors whose work we have reviewed this semester have pursued a model of inculcating left-liberal political values in students and deploying those students to advance left-liberal political causes. . . . This model is troubling on several levels. First, it privileges a certain set of political views in the hiring process, contributing to the marginalization of conservative viewpoints among law faculty. Second, it inevitably will tend to exclude students of moderate or conservative viewpoints, who will either self-select out of clinical classes or be harassed out of it. Third, cause lawyering is wholly unrelated to the work most of our students will do most of the time. . . . Fourth, at state schools such as ours, it often deploys taxpayer funds to advance fringe causes that may damage the state economy or antagonize important mainstream groups such as the business community. . . . Fifth, much clinical legal education really seems to be about limousine liberals assuaging their guilt for living lives of extreme comfort (law professor salaries put most of these folks in or near the evil 1%).”
INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: White House’s Own Data Debunk Myth Bush Cuts Built Deficit.
While President Obama insists the Bush tax cuts caused the recession and record deficits, his own economists say otherwise.
He might want to consult their data for the truth.
Kicking off fiscal cliff negotiations last month, Obama said: “What I’m not going to do is extend Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% that we can’t afford and, according to economists, will have the least positive impact on our economy.”
During the White House press conference, he added, “If we’re going to be serious about deficit reduction, we’ve got to do it in a balanced way.”
Obama argued voters made it clear in the election that they don’t want to go back to Republican policies that “cost” the Treasury revenues and “blew up the deficit,” as he told them repeatedly during the campaign.
The Washington media by and large share these assumptions. And they’re driving the debate over what to do about the federal budget crisis before Jan. 1, when the tax cuts and spending programs are set to expire.
But the assumptions are faulty, based largely on political demagoguery rather than hard numbers — including ones certified by Obama’s own fiscal policy advisers and bean counters in the White House. . . . Based on Bush fiscal policies, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected budget deficits of 0.7% to 1.5% of GDP for the years 2008 through 2011. The CBO even predicted surpluses for the subsequent years through 2018. . . . Obama’s economic report shows that the average deficit-to-GDP ratio during the entire Bush administration — 2001 to 2009 — was 2%, which is well below the 50-year average of 3%. During the Obama years, in contrast, the same deficit ratio has averaged 9.1%.
Check out the graphic.
TENNESSEE: Prof. Jacobson: The first battle of the next Tea Party wave — December 5 rally in Nashville against Obamacare exchange. Crap, I’ll be on a plane that day or I’d be there. Someone be sure to send me pics and reports. (Bumped).
SHOCKER: Tina Fey Not As Good A Mom As Thought. The comparison to Honey Boo-Boo’s mom is just cruel, though.
THE CLEVEREST BUSINESS MODEL in online education.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Slow Cooker Shortcuts.
Here’s my recipe for Lamb And Guinness Stew. And here’s the Insta-Chicken recipe again. It does well in the slow cooker, too. On my cooker, it’s fine at either the High or the Low setting; a bit tenderer on Low, but not much difference.
BRAINSTORMING RESPONSES to America’s plummeting birthrate.
WORST PRISONS IN THE WORLD? Sierra Leone.
READER BOOK PLUG: Reader Sheldon Townsend asks me to plug his book. Rock Klller. Done! It’s asteroid miners vs. eco-terrorists.
A LOOK AT BUTTER CHURN TECHNOLOGY. “I mean, the difference between how people made butter in the 1700s and how they made butter in the 1940s—seems hopelessly small. Butter is formed when the membranes surrounding fat globules in cream are stripped through the process of physical agitation; this allows the fat to clump together into a single mass, i.e., butter. Thus all churns work the same way—they transfer human power into physical agitation within a vessel holding cream—and that’s why they never really advanced until humans found a feasible alternative to human power. Until industrialization came along, all churning was the same: You spent minutes or hours plunging or cranking a shaft until, at some point you couldn’t quite predict, long after you felt your arms were about to fall off, butter began to form.”
I was looking at Consumer Reports’ mixer recommendations yesterday, and they liked this KitchenAid. Now I’m thinking I should buy it and make some homemade butter.
UPDATE: At the Insta-Daughter’s request, just ordered the mixer!
HOUSE INTEL CHAIR: “Gross Negligence” In Handling Benghazi.