NANCY PELOSI: Tax Returns? What Tax Returns? “Facing questions about why she and other top Congressional officials won’t release their tax returns, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) downplayed her previous demands for presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney to release his, calling the issue a distraction.”
Archive for 2012
July 19, 2012
ED DRISCOLL: Quote Me As Saying I Was Misquoted: A roundup of reactions to Obama’s build-it gaffe.
UPDATE: More mockery: ObamaOutofContext.com.
ANOTHER UPDATE: #IBuiltThis: Bristol Palin jumps in on Twitter, starts ‘I built this, Mr. President’ photo campaign. That’s right, Barack. Now you’re being mocked by Bristol Palin.
Plus, seen on Facebook:
A GAO REPORT ON state gun-carry laws.
INTERESTED IN LAW AND BIOTECHNOLOGY OR BIOETHICS? Consider applying for a fellowship at Harvard’s Petrie-Flom Center.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Aging Student Debtors. “The New York Fed, which has become a chronicler of student loans in America through quarterly reports, recently released historical charts showing the growth in borrowers, balances and delinquencies over the past seven years. They show a steady upward march toward more borrowers, more loans and more debt. . . . In some cases, retirees are finding their Social Security checks docked to repay delinquent federal loans, and parents are paying for their children’s education while still grappling with their own student loans.”
Not surprising.
L.A. WEEKLY: California Democrats Split Over Teacher Sex Abuse.
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Energy Revolution 3: The New American Century. “Get ready for an American century: that appears to be the main consequence of the energy revolution that is now causing economic and political experts to tear up their old forecasts all over the world. The new American century won’t be a repeat of the last one, but in some very important ways the world now looks more likely to continue in the direction of global liberal capitalism that the US—like Britain before us—has seen as its geopolitical goal for many years.”
PROF. JACOBSON: Thank you Elizabeth Warren (for possibly costing Obama the election). “Obama has hitched his wagon to an alien ideology touted by a tainted candidate who might be too liberal even for Massachusetts. I don’t think this is going away. It is a theme handed to Romney on a silver platter, a silver platter built, of course, on roads the rest of us paid for. It is a game changer. And we have Elizabeth Warren to thank for it.”
PROGRESS: Your Laptop Can Now Analyze Big Data.
SCIENCE: Humans have long enjoyed nonhuman lovers—the proof is in our DNA. “DNA extracted from old Neanderthal bones proves that all people of European and Asian descent have a few percent of Neanderthal DNA inside them today, equivalent to the amount they inherited from each great-great-great-grandparent. In addition, scientists have discovered that Melanesians, the people who originally settled the islands between New Guinea and Fiji, seduced another archaic human race, the Denisovans, somewhere on the long haul from Africa to the south seas. The Melanesians still carry Denisovan DNA today. In some sense, then, neither Neanderthals nor Denisovans ever quite went extinct: Their DNA lives on in various non-African ethnic groups. . . . The study concluded that, about 35,000 years ago, some central Africans had children with an unnamed and now-extinct race of hominids. Like Europeans and Asians before them, these people couldn’t resist the temptations of nonhuman lovers. As scientists continue to probe the human genome, they’ll likely find even more examples of interbreeding in our past. The DNA memories of those deeds are buried deeper inside us than even our ids, but it seems that all peoples, everywhere, enjoyed cross-species love.”
Of course, if you can breed with them, do they really count as nonhuman?
MYTHBUSTERS: The Comic-Con Interview.
PROMINENT LEFTY BLOGGER outsourced to the UK.
PROGRESS: Shale Boom Creates “Sand Millionaires.” “Drilling rigs need sand, lots of sand. In 2011, 28.7 million tons of sand was used in hydraulic fracturing according to PropTester Inc. and Kelrik LLC. And rigs need a type of sand that can handle tremendous pressure. That type is found along the Minnesota-Wisconsin border. The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis reports that this demand has created a sand boom in communities there. This boom has created jobs. Each frac mine employs 10 to 20 workers, and each processing plant employs 40 to 50 people. These operations also require truck drivers to move the sand from the mine to the plant then to rail terminals.”
DRUDGE DOES IT AGAIN:
Thanks to reader Stephen Smith.
IN THE MAIL: From Michael Walsh, The People v. the Democratic Party.
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Middle-Aged People Drowning In Student Loan Debt.
Sadly, government’s fingerprints are all over this mess. In a well-intentioned effort to make higher education more widely accessible, the government offered large student loans without asking many questions. Two things happened.
First, colleges kept raising tuition. College tuition has been rising faster than inflation for quite some time, in part because schools added layers of administrative bureaucracy and offered gold-plated student services. As long as students could rely on government loans to help pay their way, colleges have chosen to compete on amenities rather than on value.
Second, students got out of the habit of thinking about a college education as an economic decision. Students were encouraged by parents, teachers, college guidebooks and guidance counselors to find the school of their dreams rather than a school that they could afford. Unfortunately, if you borrow money, you have to pay it back. Many graduates are now learning this lesson years too late.
Banks and Wall Street, as usual, got into this act too. And with all that student debt on their hands, they lobbied to make sure it couldn’t be discharged in bankruptcy. Now we have $1 trillion of student debt, and a lot of it can’t be repaired. Lives are being damaged, and young people who should be thinking about starting families and careers are instead being saddled with new burdens.
This is terrible social policy. It is deeply destructive.
NEW YORK POST: Kennedy family acting like crime clan after Kerry’s alleged drugged-driving crash: cops. Could just be another one of those seizure-while-driving things. But this part is intersting: “Scuiletti, who was suspended by his employer after he didn’t report that Kennedy plowed into him, called her apology ‘very heartwarming.'” Why wouldn’t he report that to his employer? Did someone suggest that he not do so?
NICK SCHULZ: The President’s Internet Blunder. “The implication is that government deserves a bigger slice of the wealth created in the private sector because that wealth was impossible without the initial taxing and spending — and because future taxing and spending will facilitate even more wealth. This argument is not just wrong but revealing in several interesting ways.”
UPDATE: Okay, this is worth quoting, too:
As economist and frequent Republican-party critic Bruce Bartlett recently pointed out, “As of March 31, $452.6 billion of net stimulus funds had been disbursed in ways that show up in the national income accounts. Of this, the vast bulk, $399.7 billion, went for transfer payments. Another $9.6 billion went for subsidies and $68.1 billion for capital transfers to state and local governments. Only $37.8 billion went for consumption and $11.8 billion for investment — the only two categories of outlays that we know add to growth.”
To the extent the Obama administration has been in favor of government investment, it has mostly been interested in explicitly political investments, such as in green-energy technologies; these expenditures satisfy elements of the president’s political base and have often been used to subsidize prominent supporters.
The shame is that there is a good argument to make in favor of government investment in basic research. It’s an argument that advocates of limited government should be comfortable making, along with their more spendthrift friends in government.
But this is not the argument the president is making. And given the spending priorities of the current administration, pointing to past government investment in national-security systems in making its case would be comic were it not so sad.
Indeed.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Louisville Outspends Financial Aid Budget by 136% to Land 1L Class; School to Eat $2.4m; Admissions Dean Resigns.
All is proceeding as Brian Tamanaha has foreseen.
PETER INGEMI: The House Races Tell The Story. “The people with something to lose see a downside to standing with the president and see no downside in opposing him. Why do you think Nancy Pelosi is telling her members to stay the hell away from the Democrat Convention?”