GOLF AND PRIORITIES: New Yorkers Still In The Dark As Obama Hits The Links. “Imagine the howls if Bush played golf during the post-Katrina cleanup.”
New White House line: Hey, golf is work!
UPDATE: A reader emails that if we had a Republican president we’d see a reprise of this.
PAUL RAHE: David Petraeus & Barack’s Benghazi Bungle.
THE ELLEN JAMESIANS WERE UNAVAILABLE FOR COMMENT: Heartbroken Man Cuts Off Tongue to Win Wife Back He Verbally Abused.
HILLARY CLINTON refuses to testify on Benghazi.
CHANGE: Afghan Troops Switch From U.S. Copters To Donkeys. ” Just how big a void is the US leaving in Afghanistan?”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Deep tuition freeze affects pockets of academia.
All is proceeding as I have foreseen. And you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet. “Roger Williams is also making a concerted effort to encourage — but not require — undergrads who major in the liberal arts to add an actually useful minor, notes The Chronicle of Higher Education. So, for example, a student who majors in sociology might be urged to minor in business as well.”
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: My prudish husband has left me because I lied about my sex life.
OOPS: Crippling Stuxnet virus infected Chevron’s network too. “I think the downside of what they did is going to be far worse than what they actually accomplished.”
YESTERDAY A READER EMAILED asking me to send a link to what I regard as the best law review article ever. I thought I’d go ahead and repost it, too. It’s Arthur Allen Leff’s Memorandum From The Devil. It’s a review of Roberto Unger’s Knowledge and Politics, which ends, “Speak, God.”
Here’s a bit: “I am something of a connoisseur of these attempts by scholarly humans to find and describe some meaning in their personal and species existence, and when nonironic divine address comes out of Langdell Hall these days, attention must be paid.”
Oh, okay, one more irresistible passage: “But having opted for ‘mankind is the good,’ you just couldn’t stand it. It is not hard to see why. For if human nature were to be the good, then there was nothing for you or anyone else to do to change it in any way. Indeed, even as a matter of scientific curiosity, there wouldn’t be much call to find out what human nature was, for whatever it turned out to be would be what it ought to be. Now that is a loathsome idea. Under its reign, a man like you, rightly appalled at the world, would, have no role at all. That was too dreadful a possibility.”
If you like this, you might also read Leff’s Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law.
And give Unger credit for growing in office, or something. Though he’s one of Obama’s old professors, he recently said: “His policy is financial confidence and food stamps.”
ON PETRAEUS, QUESTIONING THE TIMING:
FBI agents on the case were aware that such a decision had been made to hold off on forcing him out until after the election and were outraged.
“The decision was made to delay the resignation apparently to avoid potential embarrassment to the president before the election,” an FBI source says. “To leave him in such a sensitive position where he was vulnerable to potential blackmail for months compromised our security and is inexcusable.”
Indeed.
READER BOOK PLUG: From reader Peter Salomon, Henry Franks: A Novel. Booklist calls it “the thinking teen’s horror choice of the year.”
JOEL GEHRKE: Obama 2012 Looks A Lot Like Granholm 2006.
A TALE OF THREE (OR MORE) ROGER SIMONS: Say the secret word, and you get to meet the Three Grouchos.
KYLE MCENTEE: Law Schools Should Cut Enrollment 50%.
ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Are the new Dallas Mavericks Dancers uniforms too skimpy? I say no.
HE’S PLAYING INTO MY HANDS: Obama: Compromise — But Not On Tax Cuts For The Rich.
Time to repeal the Hollywood Tax Cuts, then!
UPDATE: Reader Kevin Black emails: “Obama’s new negotiating strategy: Son of ‘I Won.’ This should turn out well…”
THERE’S NOTHING HOLDING THE JOINT UP, Mark Steyn writes:
So Washington cannot be saved from itself. For the moment, tend to your state, and county, town and school district, and demonstrate the virtues of responsible self-government at the local level. Americans as a whole have joined the rest of the Western world in voting themselves a lifestyle they are not willing to earn. The longer any course correction is postponed the more convulsive it will be. Alas, on Tuesday, the electorate opted to defer it for another four years. I doubt they’ll get that long.
Plus, Steyn reminds readers that he’s the author of “After America — or, as Dennis Miller retitled it on the radio the other day, Wednesday.“
KATRINA ON THE HUDSON (CONT’D): Missed Opportunities and Miscalculations in New York Gas Shortage.
IN THE MAIL: From Steve White & Charles E. Gannon, Extremis.
THE FIRST “moneyball” election?
“TSA employees will see their uniform allowances nearly double to $446 per year,” the House Transportation Committee noted in a press release on the TSA’s new collective bargaining agreement. “By comparison, a combat Marine Lieutenant receives a one-time uniform allowance of $400. The cost of the increase in TSA uniform allowance is an estimated $9.63 million annually.”
Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., faulted TSA for failing to streamline its bureaucracy or address criticism of security failures, such as the recent inspector general report on the failure to screen checked baggage at the airport in Honolulu, Hawaii.
The TSA should be abolished, and its functions privatized. For that matter, the entire Department of Homeland Security — whose creation, longtime readers will remember, I opposed in prescient terms — should be abolished, too.
GONNA BE SOME HARD TIMES COMING DOWN: Starting with that allusion to Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, Victor Davis Hanson explores the Anatomies of Electoral Madness:
The crux for the next four years is whether we become California or transform into a sort of socialist Germany, where the work ethic, fiscal sobriety, and ingenuity trump counter-productive energy and social policies. In other words, will the frackers, horizontal drillers, farmers, engineers, Silicon Valley, Napa Valley, the American farm belt, the coal industry, Boeing, Apple, and Caterpillar just keep chugging along, pulling the rest of us into the accustomed prosperity despite, rather than because of, us? Will the American spirit, like German industriousness, override socialist redistribution, or succumb to it?
As far as why a majority voted as it did, I prefer the wisdom of the Old Oligarch, Plato on Democratic Man, or Tocqueville to the latest spin from Republican grandees.
Read the whole thing.™
WELL, THAT CERTAINLY REPRESENTS A CHANGE, DOESN’T IT? Obama: Our top priority now is jobs and growth. Hence the “now,” I guess.
UPDATE: Reader Jeff Randles is unmoved: “It just doesn’t have the same impact it did the first 30+ times he’s said the same thing during the last four years.”
GOT A NICE LETTER from reader Tobias Truman who runs an online disaster-prep store. He sent me some Lifestraws and a bug-out bag — always nice to have another — and observes: “I’ve found our sales to be decent indicators of how the populace is feeling. While our Red-state sales have been steady after the election, our Blue-state sales have almost doubled. (Though folks in Puerto Rico still buy more supplies than any other as disaster-prep is a big part of church outreach there.) There’s no denying right-leaning folks are battening down the hatches in O-land.” Well, on the one hand, “do not take counsel of your fears,” but on the other hand, “be prepared.”
And I love this P.S.: “My wife and I are another Gary Taubes success story; thank you for your posts pointing us to him. My wife and I have lost 70lbs since summer . . . and we really do eat a LOT of bacon.” He’s worth a read.
HMM: Petraeus fell because of the affair, the drone program, or Benghazi — which is it? “Given the timing of these 3 sets of facts, it’s hard to believe Petraeus left because of the affair or the problem with his gmail. It seems much more likely to have to do with the drones or Benghazi.”
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