IF YOU CANT TRUST THE POLICE, WHO IN THE GOVERNMENT CAN YOU TRUST? Florida Cop Fired for Planting Dope, Says He Did That and More Under Orders.
Archive for 2012
July 2, 2012
IF YOU WISH TO BE MADE INTO SAUSAGE, come between me and my ham sandwich.
MARC THIESSEN: Why Are Republicans So Awful At Picking Supreme Court Justices? Because they listen to the media, and because they’re intellectually insecure. Thiessen:
Just compare the records over the last three decades. Democrats have appointed four justices — Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Stephen G. Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. All have been consistent liberals on the bench. Republicans, by contrast, have picked seven justices. Of Ronald Reagan’s three appointees (Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia and Anthony M. Kennedy) only Scalia has been a consistent conservative. George H.W. Bush appointed one solid conservative (Clarence Thomas) and one disastrous liberal (David Souter). With George W. Bush’s appointments of Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Roberts, conservatives thought finally they had broken the mold and put two rock-ribbed conservatives on the bench — until last week, that is, when Roberts broke with the conservatives and cast the deciding vote to uphold the largest expansion of federal power in decades.
So Democrats are four-for-four — a perfect record. Republicans are not even batting .500.
Why is the Democratic record so consistent while the Republican record is so mixed? For one thing, the whole legal and political culture pushes the court to the left. Conservatives are pariahs if they vote against the left on certain issues. But if they cross over vote with the left, they are hailed as statesmen. Just look the pre-emptive attacks on the Roberts Court when everyone thought it was about to strike down Obamacare — and contrast that with all the accolades Roberts is now receiving from his erstwhile critics.
Indeed. But generally speaking, Establishment Republicans care more about remaining part of the Establishment than they do about being Republicans.
UPDATE: On a related matter, reader Eugene Dillenburg writes: “If Chief Justice Roberts’ goal was to reduce political pressure on the Court, it will almost certainly fail. Indeed, his actions will simply encourage more pressure in the future. As a wise man once said, if you reward a behavior, you get more of it.” Indeed.
STACY MCCAIN: A Drawer Full of Sockpuppets: Another Neal Rauhauser ‘Persona’ Exposed. “In recent days, Rauhauser has committed new blunders, and when his latest errors are revealed, his friends will suffer new embarrassments.”
Rick Ellensburg was unavailable for comment, but I imagine these people wish they’d never drawn Stacy’s unrelenting attention by making the — deeply unwise — decision to try to shut him up.
DESPAIR NOT: Peter Ingemi Responds To Victor Davis Hanson.
THE FUTURE OF SPACE EXPLORATION: Running Down A Dream.
A CAR SERVICE APP THAT USES HYBRIDS: “Uber, a start-up based in San Francisco, has won a following among urbanites with its novel twist on calling a car service: its app lets you summon a luxury sedan with a tap on your phone. Now it is trying to appeal to the less affluent by adding less luxurious cars. In San Francisco and New York on Wednesday, Uber will start to give customers the option of choosing a hybrid car at a price that it says will be 10 to 25 percent more than a taxi. That compares with the 40 to 100 percent premium that customers pay for a black town car.”
AT AMAZON, markdowns on summer fun in Toys & Games.
SOUNDS GOOD TO ME: A Declaration Of Internet Freedom.
ANDREW KLAVAN: Happy Dependence Day!
Like the song says, They’ll turn us all into beggars ’cause they’re easier to please.
NATIONAL SECURITY: Stu Eizenstat says don’t believe Obama on Iran.
STEVE CROWDER: don’t believe what they tell you about marriage and divorce.
A LOOK AT MITOCHONDRIAL DNA DAMAGE IN AGING.
IT’S A GOOD TIME TO HONOR the Steve Jobs of Air Conditioning.
And don’t forget that air-conditioning in warm climates uses less energy than heat in cold climates. So don’t be ashamed to run the A/C.
ON THE MID-ATLANTIC POWER OUTAGE, reader Wayne Fiebick writes: “Where is the outrage at President Obama at the lack of Federal response that there was over Bush/Katrina?” Ask Kanye West.
LATEST DUMB IDEA: “The salt-and-ice challenge.”
GIVE ‘EM FOUR PINOCCHIOS FOR THE ORIGINAL REPORT: ‘Washington Post’ Backs Off Claim Romney Outsourced Jobs.
BILL WHITTLE: Firewall: Don’t Be Depressed.
DAN MITCHELL: The Laffer Curve Wreaks Havoc In The United Kingdom.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Death By Degrees. “Over the last thirty years, the university has replaced the labor union as the most important institution, after the corporation, in American political and economic life. As union jobs have disappeared, participation in the labor force, the political system, and cultural affairs is increasingly regulated by professional guilds that require their members to spend the best years of life paying exorbitant tolls and kissing patrician rings. Whatever modest benefits accreditation offers in signaling attainment of skills, as a ranking mechanism it’s zero-sum: the result is to enrich the accreditors and to discredit those who lack equivalent credentials. . . . Of course, one man’s burden is another man’s opportunity. Student debt in the United States now exceeds $1 trillion. Like cigarette duties or state lotteries, debt-financed accreditation functions as a tax on the poor. But whereas sin taxes at least subsidize social spending, the ‘graduation tax’ is doubly regressive, transferring funds from the young and poor to the old and affluent. The accreditors do well, and the creditors do even better. Student-loan asset-backed securities are far safer than their more famous cousins in the mortgage market: the government guarantees most of the liability, and, crucially, student loans cannot be erased by declaring bankruptcy. . . . One sort of false consciousness may be involved when a low-income person votes Republican out of mistrust for the credentialed establishment; another occurs when the credentialed establishment denies its own existence. An article in the New Yorker last year demonstrated what might be called the class unconsciousness of the credentialed. There Jeffrey Toobin, a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, profiled the villainous Clarence and Virginia Thomas. Clarence Thomas was born in an impoverished Gullah-speaking community on Georgia’s Atlantic coast, attended Holy Cross and Yale Law School, and eventually became the second African American to sit on the Supreme Court. Thomas’s hatred for the Ivy League is legendary; he felt mistreated at Yale and has claimed that he suffered in the job market because firms assumed he was the beneficiary of affirmative action. Thomas likes to rail against ‘élites,’ a term Toobin smirkingly quarantines in quotation marks, as if the concept to which it referred were a chimera and not a plain reality.”
Obviously written by some sort of radical anti-intellectual type.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Will Rutgers-Camden Fill Only 100 of 269 1L Seats This Fall?
UPDATE: Judge Guts Education Dept’s ‘Gainful Employment’ Rule.
WHEN IT’S COLD IN THE WINTER IT’S JUST WEATHER, but when it’s hot in the summer, it’s “climate change.” Bill Nye should be embarrassed to put this out.