BLOG COMMENT OF THE DAY:

Obama wasn’t experienced enough to be President. He’s in over his head.

The blue social model is killing Europe and the three states closest to bankruptcy are California, New York, and Illinois.

Anyone who would spend time rationalizing Obama’s failure is as crazy as the guy who was obsessed with Sarah Palin’s uterus.

Oh, come on. Nobody’s that crazy.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Sydney Phillips: I Got Food Stamps And So Can You! “No one ever asked for a copy of my birth certificate or Social Security card, nor for my student identification card. I answered all of their questions truthfully, but how were they to know that I was who I said I was?”

FROM STEPHEN GREEN, debate drunkblogging.

AMERICA, before the entitlement state.

JENNIFER RUBIN fact-checks “King of Bain.” I agree that Newt’s anti-Bain attack plan has been a “colossal misstep.”

SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE IS FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Valerie Jarrett Attacks GOP in Speech From MLK’s Church Pulpit.

FRANK J. FLEMING: Private-Sector Experience? Oh, No!

People have started to learn some disturbing facts about likely Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney: He once worked for Bain Capital — which is what’s known as a private-sector business. Harmless as the term sounds, it’s much scarier once you understand how such outfits operate.

A private-sector business doesn’t even pretend to make decisions based on how to best help people or what creates the most jobs or even on what will most equally distribute income. It makes decisions based only on what creates a profit.

Yes, it’s frightening to think that something so mercenary even exists — even worse that someone who worked for something like that could actually become president. Of course, the only people who should lead our country and manage our economy are those who remain unsullied by the private sector’s for-profit mentality: career politicians. sn’t there something just so reassuring about a career politician? He has never worried about “profit” or “efficiency” or “success”; his every job has involved only helping people.

Look at President Obama. His first job was “community organizer.” Do you think that job made a profit for anybody? No way. Did it provide goods or services a consumer might want to pay for? No.

The purpose of a community organizer is . . . well, I’m still kind of vague on the specifics, but I’m pretty sure it’s about helping people. People who live in a community — a disorganized one.

The point is, while Obama was doing this, Romney was rubbing his hands together like Gollum, exclaiming, “Precious, precious money!” And to get that money, he worked hard to trim costs and do whatever else he could to make a business successful. If elected president, he might look on the economy with cold, cynical eyes that judge everything by how profitable it is — as opposed to Obama, who looks at the economy and says, “Yay, look at all this money I can take to help people!”

Also, Romney had to answer to investors — people who expected a return on their money. This made him very hesitant to spend money. That’s a completely different perspective from that of a career politician, who’s only ever spent the money of taxpayers — people who long ago learned never to expect any sort of return on their investment.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Or, if you don’t have time, here’s reader Fred Seisel’s summary: “Bain Capital v. Das Kapital.” Heh.

RHODE ISLAND BAKERY creates TSA-compliant cupcake.

CONSTITUTIONAL LAW: Prof. (and Former Judge) Michael McConnell on the OLC Recess Appointments Opinion.

LIFE IN A POST-FEMINIST ERA: Forget women and children first. Burly crew men led the race for the lifeboats.

UPDATE: Reader Steve Ford writes:

Glenn,

All societies are based on rules to protect pregnant women and young children. All else is surplusage, excrescence, adornment, luxury, or folly, which can — and must — be dumped in emergency to preserve this prime function. As racial survival is the only universal morality, no other basic is possible. Attempts to formulate a “perfect society” on any foundation other than “Women and children first!” is not only witless, it is automatically genocidal. Nevertheless, starry-eyed idealists (all of them male) have tried endlessly — and no doubt will keep on trying.
-Robert A. Heinlein

These ARE The Crazy Years.

Oh, yeah.

UPDATE: You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby: “This was not so much predictable as predicted. Women have methodically attacked the concept of male duty and honor through every possible means for the past ninety years, and now they are whining that they don’t get special treatment simply because a ship happens to be sinking. Why, exactly, should any man ‘prioritise women, expectant mothers and children’? On what grounds can they be reasonably expected to do so, those outdated traditional grounds that the schools teach is hateful, sexist, and bigoted? Those big, burly crewmen shoving aside women as they prioritized their own escape should have been wearing t-shirts that said ‘this is what a feminist looks like’. Enjoy the crash.”

As ye sow, so shall ye reap.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: At Chicago City Colleges, A 7% Graduation Rate.

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: A turning point in European gun regs? One can hope.

NOT BAD for a nobody.

AT AMAZON, markdowns on cookbooks, food, & wine.

WHILE MIKE BLOOMBERG CONTINUES TO DEFEND NEW YORK’S BARBARIC GUN LAWS, Michael Walsh exposes their unsavory origins.

In 1903, the Battle of Rivington Street pitted a Jewish gang, the Eastmans, against the Italian Five Pointers. When the cops showed up, the two underworld armies joined forces and blasted away, resulting in three deaths and scores of injuries. The public was clamoring for action against the gangs.

Problem was the gangs worked for Tammany. The Democratic machine used them as shtarkers (sluggers), enforcing discipline at the polls and intimidating the opposition. Gang leaders like Monk Eastman were even employed as informal “sheriffs,” keeping their turf under Tammany control.

The Tammany Tiger needed to rein in the gangs without completely crippling them. Enter Big Tim with the perfect solution: Ostensibly disarm the gangs — and ordinary citizens, too — while still keeping them on the streets.

In fact, he gave the game away during the debate on the bill, which flew through Albany: “I want to make it so the young thugs in my district will get three years for carrying dangerous weapons instead of getting a sentence in the electric chair a year from now.”

Sullivan knew the gangs would flout the law, but appearances were more important than results. Young toughs took to sewing the pockets of their coats shut, so that cops couldn’t plant firearms on them, and many gangsters stashed their weapons inside their girlfriends’ “bird cages” — wire-mesh fashion contraptions around which women would wind their hair.

Ordinary citizens, on the other hand, were disarmed, which solved another problem: Gangsters had been bitterly complaining to Tammany that their victims sometimes shot back at them.

So gang violence didn’t drop under the Sullivan Act — and really took off after the passage of Prohibition in 1920. Spectacular gangland rubouts — like the 1932 machine-gunning of “Mad Dog” Coll in a drugstore phone booth on 23rd Street — became the norm. . . . Every state but Illinois has some form of concealed-carry permission — although some, like New York, California and New Jersey, are heavily restricted. Some sort of reciprocity is needed.

Meanwhile, savor the irony of an edict written by a corrupt politician to save his bad guys from the electric chair’s now being used against law-abiding citizens from other states.

Of course, we’ve seen some of this in the scholarship, too. As Markus Funk points out:

For example, the 1911 Sullivan Law was passed to keep guns out of the hands of immigrants (chiefly Italians–“[i]n the first three years of the Sullivan Law, [roughly] 70 percent of those arrested had Italian surnames”). Two New York newspapers reveal the mind-set which gave rise to the Sullivan Law: the New York Tribune grumbled about pistols found ” ‘chiefly in the pockets of ignorant and quarrelsome immigrants of law-breaking propensities,'” and the New York Times pointed out the “affinity of ‘low-browed foreigners’ for handguns.”

Corrupt and racist. And vigorously supported by Mayor Bloomberg. Barbaric indeed. New York needs to join the mainstream of states enacting sensible gun laws — laws that don’t oppress minorities or entrap honest citizens.

EUROPE: Eurozone Bailout Fund Loses AAA Rating.

FROM THE CONSUMER ELECTRONICS SHOW: 4 of the Hottest New Cameras.

DAVID STEINBERG REVIEWS Mark Levin’s Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America. “Utopian thinking has never represented brilliance or historical greatness; if it did, there wouldn’t be utopians in every age and nation and we wouldn’t be littered with the evidence of their perfect failure rate. Utopianism instead represents the simplest of philosophical thinking: trying to make survival easier not with innovation but with brute force. Indeed, a defining characteristic of utopian thought is neglect of the math and economics of the idea — details for the philosopher class to hammer out later while the leader poses for portraits.”

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Magnetic storage systems shrink from a million atoms per bit to twelve.

PUTTING MEDICAL RECORDS into patients’ hands.

TECHNOLOGY: Plastic Surgeons Use Cell Therapies For Facial Upgrades. “I’ve been expecting the plastic surgeons to take an aggressive approach to use of cell therapies than most medical specialties. Plastic surgery is one of most free market-oriented areas of medicine.”

TRANSPARENCY! New Bill Would Put Taxpayer-Funded Science Behind Pay Walls.

SHOCKER: U.S. plug-in vehicle interest driven down by high pricetags.

REPORT: House Kills Sopa. “In a surprise move today, Representative Eric Cantor(R-VA) announced that he will stop all action on SOPA, effectively killing the bill. This move was most likely due to several things. One of those things is that SOPA and PIPA met huge online protest against the bills. Another reason would be that the White House threatened to veto the bill if it had passed. However, it isn’t quite time yet to celebrate, as PIPA(the Senate’s version of SOPA) is still up for consideration.” Bury it at a crossroads with a stake through its heart. Then vote against its sponsors. (Via Slashdot).

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Joe Biden Goes After “Too High” Faculty Salaries.

UPDATE: “Say, did anyone tell him that Dem US Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, the woman who provided the ‘intellectual foundation’ for people crapping on police cars, was paid $430,000 per year by Harvard?”