NEWS YOU CAN USE: After A Sprain, Don’t Just Walk It Off. Plus: “It’s best to wait 48 hours before taking an NSAID because you want the normal inflammatory process to kick in and begin the healing process. Then you take the NSAID to keep the swelling from getting worse.”
Archive for 2013
July 22, 2013
ANDREW KLAVAN: A National Conversation About Complete Crap. “President Barack Obama has already increased our national debt somewhere between five and six trillion dollars and shows no sign of stopping. Maybe that’s why women clutch their purses when he gets in an elevator.”
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Make Your Life Better By Sending 5 Simple Emails.
A BUNCH OF STUPID CHRISTIANISTS WILL BAN PORN IF YOU VOTE REPUBLICAN — OH, WAIT: UK’s Anti-Pornography Plan Is Scary, Pointless Grandstanding.
THIS DOESN’T SURPRISE ME: “Former smokers earn higher wages than smokers and people who have never smoked, according to new research.” I think it’s because quitting smoking takes more willpower than never smoking, as well as (obviously) not quitting smoking.
UPDATE: Rand Simberg emails with two examples: “Two cases in point: James Lileks, Rush Limbaugh.” Right. See, I’m not sure I have that much willpower, which is why I never started. I looked around and all the people I knew who smoked were trying to quit, and I figured it was a lot easier to quit before you ever had a cigarette, so I did.
Like my decision to skip the first marriage entirely and go straight to the trophy wife, this has saved me a world of grief . . . .
A NEW, CORY-BOOKERESQUE SUPERHERO IMAGE FOR GEORGE ZIMMERMAN? ABC News: George Zimmerman Emerged From Hiding for Truck Crash Rescue. “George Zimmerman, who has been in hiding since he was acquitted of murder in the death of Trayvon Martin, emerged to help rescue someone who was trapped in an overturned truck, police said today.”
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Sex Advice From The 1930s.
PRAGER UNIVERSITY: Public Sector Unions vs. The Public.
IN THE MAIL: From Bridget Siegel, Domestic Affairs: A Campaign Novel.
MICKEY KAUS ON THE LATEST IMMIGRATION SPIN: Americans can’t find jobs due to labor shortage! “Does that resonate with you? Do Americans get up in the morning and say to themselves, ‘Damn, this labor shortage!’ Or does it seem like we have more workers than jobs? …”
SHELBY STEELE ON THE ZIMMERMAN CASE: The Decline of the Civil-Rights Establishment: Black leaders weren’t so much outraged at injustice as they were by the disregard of their own authority. “Today’s black leadership pretty much lives off the fumes of moral authority that linger from its glory days in the 1950s and ’60s. The Zimmerman verdict lets us see this and feel a little embarrassed for them. Consider the pathos of a leadership that once transformed the nation now lusting for the conviction of the contrite and mortified George Zimmerman, as if a stint in prison for him would somehow assure more peace and security for black teenagers everywhere. This, despite the fact that nearly one black teenager a day is shot dead on the South Side of Chicago—to name only one city—by another black teenager.”
To possess moral authority, one must act morally.
THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Marshals Lose Track of Encrypted Radios Worth Millions: Loss of Equipment Could Endanger Judges, Witnesses.
The U.S. Marshals Service has lost track of at least 2,000 encrypted two-way radios and other communications devices valued at millions of dollars, according to internal agency documents, creating what some within the agency view as a security risk for federal judges, endangered witnesses and others. . . .
The Marshals Service guards judges and federal courthouses, and it runs the Witness Security Program, which provides new identities and security to witnesses or their families at risk of being killed. The Marshals also seek to apprehend fugitives.
“It is apparent that negligence and incompetence has resulted in a grievous mismanagement of millions of dollars of USMS property,” according to a 2011 presentation by the agency’s Office of Strategic Technology. “Simply put, the entire system is broken and drastic measures need to be taken to address the issues…The 800 pound elephant in the room needs to finally be acknowledged.”
Some involved in the work of tracking the missing equipment inside the agency estimated the value of the unaccounted-for radios at $6 million or more, according to documents and interviews with some of the people involved. Radios range from about $2,000 to $5,000 or more each. . . . A series of handwritten notes by one Marshals employee indicates that after the Journal began submitting FOIA requests, at least one person within the agency discussed the FOIA request and instructed others to communicate on the issue only by phone, not in email.
But remember, only law enforcement officers can be trusted with guns. Because they’re professionals.
HEY, DOES THIS MEAN HE’S PIVOTING TO JOBS AGAIN? Obama speech to fire opening salvo in new budget showdown. “President Obama will deliver the first in a series of economic speeches Wednesday aimed at gaining the upper hand in this fall’s looming budget showdown with Congress.”
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 74.
INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Government Motors Is Alive And Detroit Is Dead. “In the face of government incompetence, it was the people of Detroit who went on strike. Detroit lost a quarter-million residents between 2000 and 2010. A population that in the 1950s teemed with 1.8 million is struggling to stay above 700,000. Much of the middle-class and scores of businesses also have fled, taking their tax dollars with them.”
Obviously, we need a law making it illegal to move without government permission.
THE HILL: Mood turns somber for Democrats in 2014 contest for Senate control.
President Obama talked earlier this year of a Democratic takeover of the House, but instead his party is now in danger of losing the Senate.
The latest blow to their hopes of keeping the upper chamber came from former Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer (D),who opted out of a race to replace retiring Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.)
Schweitzer’s decision deflated the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s annual retreat on Martha’s Vineyard, where many senators heard the news.
“People were very upset,” said a Democratic donor who was there.
That party seems likely to lose seats in Montana, South Dakota and West Virginia, where it cannot find find strong candidates.
The GOP will probably need to capture six Democratic seats in 2014 to grab the majority, as Newark mayor Cory Booker is well positioned to win the seat held by interim Sen. Jeff Chiesa (R-N.J.) in a special election. Democrats hold a 54 to 46 advantage, counting two independents who caucus with them.
But they must also defend four vulnerable incumbents and the seat soon to be vacated by Sen. Tom Harkin (D) in Iowa, a swing state.
Sens. Mark Pryor and Mark Begich, Democrats from Arkansas and Alaska, where Obama lost badly in 2012, are in greatest danger. Sens. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), a three-term survivor perpetually on the GOP target list, and Kay Hagan (D-N.C.), who had a solid lead in a recent Public Policy Polling survey, will also have competitive races.
With all the scandals and the stagnant economy, taking the Senate should be easy for the Republicans — but instead it’ll be uphill since (1) they’re inept; and (2) the press is totally in Obama’s corner.
A SWAT RAID FOR SUSPECTED ANIMAL ABUSE? LEADING TO A SHOT DOG? Man Blames Steven Seagal for SWAT Raid that Killed Puppy. “An Arizona man is suing Steven Seagal after the actor-turned-lawman mowed down his fence in a tank as part of an animal cruelty raid by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s SWAT team that left 100 chickens dead. Yep, a tank. Oh, and the man says they also shot his puppy.”
MICHAEL BARONE: “When people ask me why I moved from liberal to conservative, I have a one-word answer: Detroit. I grew up there, on a middle-class grid street in northwest Detroit and a curving street in affluent suburban Birmingham, and I got a job as an intern in the office of the mayor in the summer of 1967 when Detroit rioted. I was at the side of Mayor Jerome Cavanagh and occasionally Governor George Romney during the six days and nights in which 43 people, mostly innocent bystanders, died. I listened to the radio in the police commissioner’s office as commanders announced, shortly after sundown, that they were abandoning one square mile after another. The riot ended only after federal troops were called in and restored order. Cavanagh was bright, young, liberal, and charming. He had been elected in 1961 at age 33 with virtually unanimous support from blacks and with substantial support from white homeowners—then the majority of Detroit voters—and he was reelected by a wide margin in 1965. He and Martin Luther King, Jr., led a civil rights march of 100,000 down Woodward Avenue in June 1963. He was one of the first mayors to set up an antipoverty program and believed that city governments could do more than provide routine services; they could lift people, especially black people, out of poverty and into productive lives. Liberal policies promised to produce something like heaven. Instead they produced something more closely resembling hell. You can get an idea of what happened to Detroit by looking at some numbers. The Census counted 1,849,568 people in Detroit in 1950, including me. It counted 713,777 in 2010.”
ELIANA JOHNSON: IRS SCANDAL CIRCLES BACK TO LERNER. “The investigation into the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of tea-party groups is likely to circle around Lois Lerner once again. Testimony from key witnesses indicates that the embattled former head of the IRS’s Exempt Organizations division and her senior adviser, Judith Kindell, involved the chief counsel’s office in the processing of tea-party applications.”
CATHY YOUNG: How Media Lies Have Distorted A Tragedy. “President Obama spoke some undeniable truths when he noted that the African-American community’s reaction must be seen in the context of a long, terrible history of racism. But there is another context too: that of an ideology-based, media-driven false narrative that has distorted a tragedy into a racist outrage. This narrative has transformed Zimmerman, a man of racially mixed heritage that included white, Hispanic and black roots (a grandmother who helped raise him had an Afro-Peruvian father), into an honorary white male steeped in white privilege. It has cast him as a virulent racist even though he once had a black business partner, mentored African-American kids, lived in a neighborhood about 20 percent black, and participated in complaints about a white police lieutenant’s son getting away with beating a homeless black man.”