NEW YORK POST: Americans Deserve Answers On IRS Scandal.
Archive for 2013
October 6, 2013
PRESIDENT PETULANT: Police prevent drivers from pulling over and viewing Mt. Rushmore. In an open highway viewing area.
UPDATE: Civil disobedience in action.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Open defiance.
MORE: The resistance spreads: WWII Vet – Removing Iwo Jima Memorial Barricades “Blew My Mind … It Was Great.”
WELL, YES: Government Medicine Is Politicized Medicine. Everything in government is politicized these days, and the notion of a neutral class of apolitical career civil servants has been exploded by the IRS scandals, etc.
SAY, REPUBLICAN LEADERS — AND, FOR THAT MATTER, DEMOCRATIC READERS — could do worse than going back to read my 2006 pre-mortem for the GOP Congress and apply it to today’s circumstances.
ILYA SOMIN: Why Political Ignorance Matters. Also, Why Political Ignorance Is A Serious Problem. Both posts drawn from his new book, Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter, which just came out from Stanford University Press last week. (Bumped).
WELL, THIS WAS THE POINT OF THE TEA PARTY’S PRECURSOR, PORKBUSTERS: Tea Party loosens K Street’s stranglehold on the GOP.
NEW YORK TIMES REPORTER: Obama admin “most closed, control-freak administration I’ve ever covered.”
IS THIS LIKE WHEN OBAMA “JOKED” ABOUT AUDITING HIS ENEMIES? Former NSA/CIA Chief Jokes About Putting Edward Snowden on Obama’s Kill List.
NICK GILLESPIE: What ObamaCare And The NSA Scandal Have In Common. “It’s a telling coincidence that the latest scandalous revelation about the National Security Agency (NSA) is hitting the front pages just as the enrollment period specified by the Affordable Care Act (ACA, a.k.a. Obamacare) is getting started.” Both are horribly intrusive, and both don’t work as described..
October 5, 2013
KARL BOCK, WHO BLOGS AT BILL QUICK’S PLACE AS “CHEF MOJO,” IS FIGHTING CANCER AND NEEDS HELP. If you’d like to donate, go here. I gave.
MICKEY KAUS: World’s Dumbest Blog Item Ever of All Time! You’ll never guess who wrote it. Well, it might take you two tries.
CANDY, COSTUMES, DECORATIONS AND MORE AT the Amazon Halloween Store.
Also, save up to 50% on Dog Toys.
Plus, deep discounts on used and open-box camera equipment.
And if you’ve been wondering what the fuss is regarding Duck Dynasty, you can watch it on Amazon Instant Video. Free if you’ve got Prime.
BARACKALYPSE NOW: Police remove veterans from Vietnam War Memorial. “It takes more manpower and costs the government more money to close down an outdoor wall than to let people walk past it and pay their respects.”
Obama really seems to be going out of his way to piss off veterans, doesn’t he?
ACTUALLY, IT’S NOT RACISM, BUT THE LACK THEREOF THAT’S HURTING HOWARD UNIVERSITY. Back when education was segregated, Howard, as the “black Harvard,” had a near-monopoly on a significant chunk of talent. Now other, better schools are actively recruiting the same students with generous “diversity” scholarships. Naturally, Howard is having trouble competing.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Pay Raises for Teachers With Master’s Under Fire.
The nation spends an estimated $15 billion annually on salary bumps for teachers who earn master’s degrees, even though research shows the diplomas don’t necessarily lead to higher student achievement.
And as states and districts begin tying teachers’ pay and job security to student test scores, some are altering—or scrapping—the time-honored wage boost.
Lawmakers in North Carolina, led by Republican legislators, voted in July to get rid of the automatic pay increase for master’s degrees. Tennessee adopted a policy this summer that mandates districts adopt salary scales that put less emphasis on advanced degrees and more on factors such as teacher performance. And Newark, N.J., recently decided to pay teachers for master’s degrees only if they are linked to the district’s new math and reading standards.
The moves come a few years after Florida, Indiana and Louisiana adopted policies that require districts to put more weight on teacher performance and less on diplomas.
This has higher education bubble implications, too, as a surprisingly large amount of graduation education is built around this sort of ticket-punching. Will this newfound skepticism spread to other professions, such as the military officer corps? All is proceeding as I have foreseen.
DAY BY DAY: Obamaha Beach.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Twitter Founder Reveals Secret Formula for Getting Rich Online. I remember emailing back and forth with Ev Williams back when InstaPundit and Blogger were both new. We’ve both come up in the world since then, but he’s come a lot farther. . . .
SCIENCE: Explaining The Difference Between Geeks And Nerds. Shiny.
MORE OBAMACARE PROBLEMS: 99% of Obamacare applications hit a wall.
It’s a batting average that won’t land the federal marketplace for Obamacare into the Healthcare Hall of Fame.
As few as 1 in 100 applications on the federal exchange contains enough information to enroll the applicant in a plan, several insurance industry sources told CNBC on Friday. Some of the problems involve how the exchange’s software collects and verifies an applicant’s data.
“It is extraordinary that these systems weren’t ready,” said Sumit Nijhawan, CEO of Infogix, which handles data integrity issues for major insurers including WellPoint and Cigna, as well as multiple Blue Cross Blue Shield affiliates.
Experts said that if Healthcare.gov’s success rate doesn’t improve within the next month or so, federal officials could face a situation in January in which relatively large numbers of people believe they have coverage starting that month, but whose enrollment applications are have not been processed.
“It could be public relations nightmare,” said Nijhawan. Insurers have told his company that just “1 in 100” enrollment applicants being sent from the federal marketplace have provided sufficient, verified information.
And remember, this is 1% of the comparatively small number of applications that people are able to complete on the website to begin with.
Related: Charlie Martin: Cocktail Napkin Website Planning and Obamacare.
PAULA BOLYARD: Navigating the Obamacare Marketplace Labyrinth: The efficiency of the DMV combined with the intrusiveness of the NSA and the credit bureau. With many illuminating screencaps.
ORWELLIAN? USA Today Shutdown Clock counts money not being spent on government as a “cost” of the shutdown.
Related: Nick Gillespie: Shutdown Highlights Basic Fact: Most of Government is ‘Non-Essential.’ “The shutdown provides the country with a perfect moment to ask why a federal government whose spending habits are an insult to drunken sailors everywhere is paying above-market compensation to hundreds of thousands of ‘non-essential’ workers.”
AN AMUSING, YET SOMEWHAT WEASELY, story from Malcolm Gladwell.
UPDATE: From the comments:
This Gladwell passage bugs me as an example of the constant need for liberals to affirm their liberal bonafides. He can’t just say something nice about Buckley, he has to qualify it, lest anyone think “oh my goodness! Is he a conservative too? I must burn all his books right away!”
And in so doing, he casually trashes his family, his community, his childhood friends who have done him no wrong but merely stand between him and the ever-present danger of having the gates of liberal acceptance closed against him.
Yeah, that’s what I meant by “weasely.” Or is it “weaselly?”
WELL, THAT’S A RELIEF: IPCC Calls Off Planetary Emergency. “IPCC now believes that in the 21st Century, Atlantic Ocean circulation collapse is ‘very unlikely,’ ice sheet collapse is ‘exceptionally unlikely,’ and catastrophic release of methane hydrates from melting permafrost is ‘very unlikely.'” Here’s more from Georgia Tech’s Judith Curry.
Bottom line: Al Gore’s catastrophism not backed by science, even the IPCC version thereof.