BIGOTRY WILL SLIP OUT: CNN’s John King calls Romney, ‘Governor Mormon.’
Archive for 2012
February 5, 2012
IN THE MAIL: Golden Reflections.
MY SUNDAY WASHINGTON EXAMINER COLUMN: It’s Takers vs. Makers and the Takers Are Winning.
Inspired by Charles Sykes’ A Nation of Moochers.
MICHAEL BARONE: Obama’s isolation leads to skewed decisions. “Obama prefers getting information and making decisions by staying up late and reading memos rather than meeting with people — a temperament that’s a liability because face time with the president is one of his major sources of political capital.”
GWYNETH PALTROW Enters the Mommy Wars: ‘Compromise…To Be a Wife.’
Gwyneth Paltrow has stepped out of a magazine’s pages and into the mommy wars.
In a new interview with Harper’s Bazaar, the movie star and mother of two, revealed that she advised a girlfriend — an unnamed fellow actress — that she needs “to compromise…to be a wife.” She also talks about being home when her husband returns from work as a way to maintain her marriage and family.
Her words are rubbing a number of moms the wrong way, with some accusing Paltrow of being judgmental and out of touch.
Funny, but nobody seems to think there’s anything wrong with saying that you have to compromise to be a husband. . . .
GREEN PAYOLA? Sierra Club took $26M from gas industry to fight coal-fired plants. It’s like they’re just political mercenaries or something. Next they’ll be taking Arab money to oppose Canadian oilsands development.
IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO? Stopping Nosebleeds With Bacon. “A new medical study recommends a method called ‘nasal packing with strips of cured pork’ as an effective way to treat uncontrollable nosebleeds.”
I don’t know why I didn’t see this sooner.
AT AMAZON, Science-Fiction Bestsellers on Blu-Ray.
Also, today only, up to 65% off on cashmere. For women and men.
LAMAR SMITH’S PRIMARY OPPONENT: A reader writes:
You mentioned this guy before, and now he’s officially filed to take out Lamar Smith in TX-21.
He’s not only making an issue out of SOPA, but Smith’s Internet snooping bill.
Not working for the guy, and no need for a h/t.
I met him once back in the 1990s at a Second Amendment event in Arizona. Seemed like a nice guy.
UPDATE: Here’s more on Mack’s candidacy.
AND THE ROMNEY CAMPAIGN SAYS THANK YOU: Harvard Professor Attacks Mitt Romney As “Stealth Tea Party Candidate.”
WELL, AMERICA CAN HOPE: Stock Market Predicts Defeat For President Obama. The Insta-Wife was just saying that she thinks the stock market is rising because it’s pricing in an Obama defeat in November.
UPDATE: Link was wrong before. Fixed now. Sorry!
THE HORROR OF cheap energy from shale gas.
THE GREAT ASIAN GOLD THEFT CRISIS. This is in Britain. I wonder if anything similar is happening in the United States.
UPDATE: A reader emails: “I haven’t done any research myself, but there was a story on the radio late last year about burglars targeting Indian households in the Atlanta area because they were presumed to have more gold on hand. Metro Atlanta has a large Indian population.”
EQUAL JUSTICE: One Rule For TSA Managers, One Rule for You. “As we’ve mentioned here before, the almost daily parade of would-be flyers who are stupid (or forgetful) enough to unintentionally carry a gun or some other contraband through a TSA airport checkpoint has become tedious. As in hardly even newsworthy any more. The poor absent-minded schmucks are arrested, given the full prostate exam, their guns are confiscated and they’re charged with a felony. Their gun rights: gone baby, gone. It’s the same story over and over, right? Well not quite. Not if you’re a TSA manager. Once again, with monotonous regularity, we learn that there’s one set of rules for government employees and then there are the standards the rest of us are held to.”
When I visited the House of Lords’ minister, Lord Marland, at the Climate Change Department a couple of years ago, I asked him and the Department’s chief number-cruncher, Professor David Mackay (neither a climate scientist nor an economist, of course) to show me the Department’s calculations detailing just how much “global warming” that might otherwise occur this century would be prevented by the $30 billion per year that the Department was committed to spend between 2011 and 2050 – $1.2 trillion in all.
There was a horrified silence. The birds stopped singing. The Minister adjusted his tie. The Permanent Secretary looked at his watch. Professor Mackay looked as though he wished the plush sofa into which he was disappearing would swallow him up entirely.
Eventually, in a very small voice, the Professor said, “Er, ah, mphm, that is, oof, arghh, we’ve never done any such calculation.” The biggest tax increase in human history had been based not upon a mature scientific assessment followed by a careful economic appraisal, but solely upon blind faith. I said as much. “Well,” said the Professor, “maybe we’ll get around to doing the calculations next October.”
They still haven’t done the calculations – or, rather, I suspect they have done them but have kept the results very quiet indeed. Here’s why. . . . The UK policy’s mitigation cost-effectiveness – the cost of abating just 1 Kelvin of warming if every nation pursued the UK’s policy with the same cost-ineffectiveness – works out at $108 trillion per Kelvin abated
Read the whole thing.
February 4, 2012
HOW’S THAT “SMART DIPLOMACY” WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? Obama condemns violence in Syria, can’t secure UN Security Council resolution.
SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE: ‘The Army asked that the letter not be read from the pulpit.’
TEN YEARS AGO ON INSTAPUNDIT: CHUCK SCHUMER GOT THE MOST ENRON MONEY OF ANY DEMOCRAT: This story from the New York Daily News talks about why he got it. “Two months after Kenneth Lay, then the boss of Enron, held a Texas fund-raiser for Chuck Schumer, the senator-elect asked for a review of federal power contracts that eat into utility company profits. A Schumer spokesman denied any quid pro quo, but Enron officials praised the senator’s action in 1998 and said his letter asking for the review was a signal he was keeping a campaign promise to push for energy deregulation.”
ROMNEY wins Nevada.
MARK LEVIN EMAILS that his book, Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America, will be #1 on the New York Times bestseller list for another week.
RICK SANTELLI: What’s wrong with the jobs number: The labor-force participation rate. Obama is suffering “shrinkage.” Explained by Leo Cullum.
I’VE BEEN GETTING ILLITERATE AND ANTISEMITIC EMAILS in response to this link. Without even looking, I knew that Glenn Greenwald had written something about it. And I was right!
UPDATE: I can just add that if George W. Bush had listened to me instead of being a weenie, we’d be a lot better off. Instead, we had to wait until Barack Obama was President to start killing Iranian nuclear-weapons scientists and mullahs. If only Obama had appointed a tough-talking Secretary of State Atrios!
ROSS DOUTHAT: The Media’s Abortion Blinders. “In many newsrooms and television studios across the country, Planned Parenthood is regarded as the equivalent of, well, the Komen foundation: an apolitical, high-minded and humanitarian institution whose work no rational person — and certainly no self-respecting woman — could possibly question or oppose. . . . Three truths, in particular, should be obvious to everyone reporting on the Komen-Planned Parenthood controversy. First, that the fight against breast cancer is unifying and completely uncontroversial, while the provision of abortion may be the most polarizing issue in the United States today. Second, that it’s no more ‘political’ to disassociate oneself from the nation’s largest abortion provider than it is to associate with it in the first place. Third, that for every American who greeted Komen’s shift with ‘anger and outrage’ (as Andrea Mitchell put it), there was probably an American who was relieved and gratified. Indeed, that sense of relief was quantifiable: the day after the controversy broke, Komen reported that its daily donations had risen dramatically. But of course, you wouldn’t know that from most of the media coverage. After all, the people making those donations don’t exist.”
UPDATE; Reader Tagore Smith writes:
I’m going to stay out of the argument about abortion, because I think other people are going to cover any point I might make. But I’d like to point out that advocacy for breast cancer research is not entirely (or should not be entirely) uncontroversial. It’s not that I want women to die of cancer- my mother died of a non-sex-specific cancer this year, and all I can say is that I wish she hadn’t. I’m still single, and I’m not ashamed to say that I loved my Mom more than I loved anyone else. Someone else very close to me had a breast cancer scare last year- a biopsy revealed that the growth was benign. So I am certainly not against saving women’s lives through research.
But I am male, and I seem to recall that men die of cancer quite a lot more than women do (I’m not an expert on this subject, so I could be wrong about this.) It seems to me that there is a limited pie available for cancer research, and that quite a lot of that pie is already going to breast cancer research. I think that advocating that more dollars ought to go to breast cancer research _should_ be controversial. The message sent, otherwise, is that men are expendable. I don’t see big blue-ribbon prostate cancer campaigns all that often. Maybe it’s just that the prostate is not as sexy as the boob….
Good point, and one that’s been made here before.