Archive for 2012
August 13, 2012
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: We Can’t Afford Any More In-State Students!
SEAN SORRENTINO visits a Sikh temple, encounters friendly, patriotic gun enthusiasts. “The guys I was sitting next to were both Sikh and gun owners. We talked about guns, and we’ll be getting together sometime soon to go shooting. One of my new friends said that he was surprised that no one in the Temple shot at the intruder. He was mystified as to why there was no one with a gun available to shoot back. He assured me that it was almost certain that there were concealed carriers in the congregation. I did not go to the temple to advocate for concealed carry. I was, however, treated to a discussion of how banning guns would not change anything. I was told that criminals would get guns no matter what the laws, and that taking guns from the honest people would only make things worse. In short, it was a discussion pretty much like any that you would read on any pro-gun blog. Then we had a tasty lunch.”
VIRGINIA POSTREL: Mission Creep Leads TSA to Racially Profile in Pursuit of Non-Terrorists to Arrest. “The TSA has no business looking for drugs, outstanding arrest warrants, or immigration problems unless it has serious reason to believe that the person involved poses a serious threat to air safety. If it is going to serve as an extension of every other sort of law enforcement, then its searches should be subject to the same requirements for probable cause, which would allow almost everyone to travel without submitting to TSA examination.”
Plus, a reference to a prescient warning from 1:49 p.m. on 9/11/2001.
ROGER SIMON: Remove The Media From The Debates. “I was appalled, although not surprised, to read the just announced list of moderators for the forthcoming presidential debates: Jim Lehrer of PBS, Candy Crowley of CNN, Bob Schieffer of CBS and Martha Raddatz of ABC (VP debate). All liberals from liberal news organizations. Not even a token representative from Fox or the Wall Street Journal – not in the moderator seat anyway. Don’t we live in a democracy? . . . I don’t have any idea why the tradition of allowing a biased media to run these events continues. It is a testament to the passivity of the Republican Party. We saw how it worked during the primary season. Now we are going to get a rerun during the main event, with more subtlety and ultimately more subversion. But there is something we can do about it even at this late date: protest and protest loudly. In this manner, we highlight the bogus quality of the debates.”
AS ED DRISCOLL NOTED, IT’S LIKE THEY WORK FROM A TEMPLATE OR SOMETHING: Ryan’s Not the First: Video of Media’s History of Trashing GOP VP Nominees. “Here’s a video compilation of the left-wing media trashing GOP Vice Presidential nominees dating all the way back to Dan Quayle in 1988.”
JOURNALISTIC MALPRACTICE? Report: Ryan Medicare Mom story edited out of 60 Minutes broadcast.
RAND SIMBERG: Capitalism in Space: It’s time for a competitive, privatized approach to spaceflight. “Ever since the Obama administration’s rollout of its space policy two and a half years ago, conventional ideological wisdom has been turned on its head. An administration that had seemed eager to increase government involvement in everything from auto companies to health care proposed a more competitive, privatized approach to spaceflight, and people claiming to be conservatives blasted it, demanding that the traditional (and failing) NASA monopoly continue. Jim Muncy, a former aide on space policy to California congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R.), put it cleverly: ‘Democrats don’t think that capitalism works within the atmosphere, and Republicans apparently don’t think it works above it.'”
This is one of the relatively few policy areas where Obama has gotten it right. He deserves the credit.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Big Troubles Ahead For Online Learning? I don’t think I buy this critique. The real problem with higher education as it exists today isn’t class-resentment of academics on the part of other Americans, it’s that higher education costs too much and delivers too little, and over the past decades the costs have been going up faster than inflation even as the value delivered has gone down. And that value has gone down even in non-economic terms, as the rigor in even “useless” humanities courses has faded.
CHANGE: Iraq: Oil Production Beats Iran, but Many Iraqis Still Fear the Future. “It’s not just oil production. GDP growth is also explosive, growing at 9.9 percent in 2011, which beats China and is one of the fastest growth rates in the world.” Not all is rosy, though I don’t see how anyone could be concerned given that they live under the protective umbrella of “smart diplomacy.”
CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: How Harry Reid has been pulling strings for Chinese solar energy company. “There are indications that senior Obama administration officials were also involved in granting special consideration for the ENN project, and may have helped forge an agreement between the Chinese company and U.S. utility firm Duke Energy, which is run by a prominent donor to President Obama and the Democratic Party.”
WATCH HIM WRIGGLE, WATCH HIM SQUIRM: Axelrod: Priorities ad doesn’t blame Romney for woman’s death. Malignant.
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HOW’S THAT “SMART DIPLOMACY” WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): “Remember last year, when we were told that the Muslim Brotherhood was uninterested in taking power in Egypt?”
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT YESTERDAY: I QUOTE IOWAHAWK in my USA Today column on the Ryan choice. “Paul Ryan represents Obama’s most horrifying nightmare: Math.”
GROWNUPS: Video: Erskine Bowles says Ryan budget “sensible … honest, serious.” “Why is this important? Erskine Bowles has a long pedigree as a Democratic budget thinker — and presidential adviser. When Barack Obama needed to pick the co-chair for his deficit committee, which he roundly ignored in the end, he chose Bowles to represent his side on the panel. Bowles served as Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, and earlier ran the Small Business Administration for Clinton. Ezra Klein predicted on Friday that Bowles would be the front-runner for Tim Geithner’s job at Treasury if Obama wins a second term.”
Related: The 5 Most Outrageous Attacks On The Paul Ryan Budget.
Also: Dem electoral strategy – convince Grandparents to throw Grandchildren off fiscal cliff.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Our Not-So-Best and Not-So-Brightest. “From Eliot Spitzer to Elizabeth Warren to Fareed Zakaria — what is wrong with our elites? Do they assume that because they are on record for the proverbial people, or because they have been branded with an Ivy League degree, or because they are habitués of the centers of power between New York and Washington, or because they write for the old (but now money-losing) blue-chip brands (Time magazine, the New York Times, etc.), or because we see them on public and cable TV, or because they rule us from the highest echelons of government that they are exempt from the sorts of common ethical constraints that the rest of us must adhere to — at least if a society as sophisticated as ours is to work?”
Yes.
TAXPROF: Tax Reform Is Coming, No Matter Who Wins The Election.
I have some suggestions.
CHARLES GASPARINO: The Fight’s On: “Romney’s business-community backers fretted that their candidate wasn’t up to the task, and the country would have to endure four more years of Obamanomics with its constant attacks on wealth creators crippling taxes, massive deficits and persistently high unemployment. But naming Paul Ryan as his running mate is a game changer. The pick signals that Romney was listening to his critics and is now ready to fight — not necessarily over how many jobs he created at Bain and how many steel mills he didn’t close, but over how best to repair the damage Obama has done to the once-mighty US economy.”