GOING TO PRISON? Hire a Prison Consultant. “Prison consultancy seems to be one of the few businesses where the owners aggressively advertise their criminal record.”
Archive for 2012
April 10, 2012
WHITE HOUSE: Uh, no, that “Buffett Rule” won’t actually do anything for the debt.
The Obama administration is emphasizing “fairness” over deficit reduction in its renewed pitch for the “Buffett rule” ahead of next week’s scheduled Senate vote.
Introducing a minimum 30 percent income tax on millionaires “was never our plan to bring the deficit down and get the debt under control,” Jason Furman, the principal deputy director of the White House National Economic Council, told reporters on a conference call Monday afternoon.
Nope.
NEW TREND: Segregated Hospital Emergency Rooms. “The NYT is acting like this is sort of posh. But one look at the headline — ‘For the Elderly, Emergency Rooms of Their Own’ — and my ‘Death Panels!’ red flag went up. Let’s make them very comfortable, let’s palliate, but let’s not save them. The heroic treatments are in that other emergency room, the one for the people who are still useful.”
THIS SUGGESTS THAT ALL THAT “DIVERSITY” MONEY COULD BE BETTER SPENT ELSEWHERE: The longer students are in college, the less they care about racial understanding. I’m not sure that this fits under “higher education bubble” exactly, but it does suggest that spending priorities are out of whack, given that even in times of budget cuts many universities are actually increasing spending on diversity offices and diversity studies programs.
#GREENFAIL: Most Hybrid Car Owners Wouldn’t Buy Another One. “Only 35% of hybrid vehicle owners chose to purchase a hybrid again when they returned to the market in 2011, according to auto information company R.L. Polk & Co. If you factor out the super-loyal Toyota Prius buyers, the repurchase rate drops to under 25%.” That’s particularly striking given that 2011 was a year of high gas prices, if not as high as 2012 so far . . . .
And, in case you’re wondering, I still like my hybrid.
JOHN HAWKINS interviews Herman Cain.
MICKEY KAUS: “Maybe there should be a law that prohibits naming anything after a sitting (or living) legislator? Or even a dead legislator. That might actually be more effective than banning earmarks. Some earmarks, after all, may reflect a legitimate disagreement between local representatives and the federal bureaucrats who would otherwise decide the allocation of funds. But it’s hard to trust a legislator’s calculation of the public interest if what he’s funding has, or will have, his name on it.”
This is just another form of corruption.
AS PEOPLE REMEMBER MIKE WALLACE, read this piece.
NO, BUT IT’S A GOOD START: Getting Rid of Chavez Won’t End Venezuela’s Problems.
INFLATION: Lower U.S. Crop Reserves Raising Food Costs in Election Year. “U.S. corn stockpiles are poised to be the smallest in 16 years by August and soybean reserves will be lower than the government expected, potentially accelerating food-price inflation in an election year.”
PROFESSOR JACOBSON: NY Daily News whitewashes its Sanford neo-Nazi faux pas. “The Daily News went a step further, and completely replaced its first report with a second story using the same url as the first, but with very different approaches. As these screenshots indicate, the first story pretty much repeated the Miami New Times report as true, while the second story reduced it to a future intention by neo-Nazis to patrol, noting the denial by Sanford Police.”
Related: James Taranto: Wild Goose-Step Chase: Journalists propagate neo-Nazi bluster. “While part of this is sheer sensationalism, there’s an ideological agenda at work here as well: The left imagines that ‘right wing’ hate groups are on a continuum with mainstream conservatives and the Republican Party. Somebody like Jeff Schoep is primarily pandering to the prejudices of the left, and the Miami New Times report shows just how credulous the left can be when its prejudices are pandered to.”
April 9, 2012
LIFE AMONG THE 0.0001 PERCENT: President Obama’s $1 Million Pizza Party In Detroit! “Pizza! But, we’ll be serving it on sterling silver plates!”
MICHAEL BELLESILES UPDATE: Historian Jerome Sternstein explores the various contradictory stories Bellesiles has told about the loss of his notes and the inconsistencies in his data. The gist of Sternstein’s piece: Bellesiles is guilty of fraud, but most historians are too polite to say so, even though they think so. Bellesiles responds, calling Sternstein’s piece a “relentless polemical attack” and “politically driven.” Sternstein responds to Bellesiles with more details.
Bellesiles is still trying to make a comeback, but without much success. Even his big boosters, like Garry Wills, admitted that he was a fraud.
WHERE THE MONEY GOES: “Taking 1967 as our starting point, 30% of the cost of the things we consumed that year went to manufacturing them; by 2007, that figure had fallen to 16%. In contrast, what we spent on business services over the same period jumped from 12% to 26%. That’s because baked into the price of everything we buy is the rising cost of advertising, accounting, legal services, insurance, real estate, consulting, and the like—jobs performed by the high-wage workers of our modern economy. These days, 52% of all compensation goes to office workers. That includes the manufacturing sector: nearly a third of workers aren’t on the factory floor; they’re behind desks.”
PJTV: Trayvon Tragedy: Manufactured Racism? How NBC Edited Racism Into the George Zimmerman 911 Call. In an edit bay, demonstrating why this wasn’t a simple “mistake.”
SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER: Zimmerman family challenges Holder on New Black Panthers, says no arrests ‘based solely on your race.’ Personally, I think Holder is prejudiced against Latinos. But I may just be taking that impression from the general tenor of media coverage these days. . . .
UPDATE: A reader emails: “I would imagine AG Holder has a serious problem with ‘Latinos’. How else can we explain his total disregard for the countless Mexican (‘Latino’) lives lost to all those Fast and Furious guns that now arm Mexico’s bloody drug cartels he not only allowed to be sold, but is now fighting and blocking the Congressional investigation?”
SEE, AIRPLANE-BASED FLYING CARS ARE AMUSING BUT USELESS. I want Jetsons style antigravity, preferably with that cute bleebling sound.