Archive for 2013
January 5, 2013
AT AMAZON, New Year’s markdowns on Exercise & Fitness equipment.
Also, today only: Up to 51% off on H&R Block Tax Software.
GERTRUDE HIMMELFARB: Compassionate Conservatism, Properly Understood.
AMITY SHLAES IN INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Think Obama’s Tax Hikes Are Low Compared With Rates Of The 1950s? Think Again.
NILE GARDINER: Barack Obama’s $7 million Hawaii vacation is an insult to America’s struggling middle class.
$16.4 trillion – that’s the latest figure for America’s massive national debt. Nearly $6 trillion of this debt was racked up in the first term of the Obama presidency – a 50 percent increase. It is horrifying to imagine what the debt will be when Obama leaves the White House in 2016, unless Congress has the willpower to stand in the way.
Meanwhile, as the world’s superpower is literally drowning in debt, President Obama is basking in the warmth of the beaches of Hawaii, at an exclusive resort way beyond the financial reach of most Americans. The president pays the cost of his own family’s accommodations, but there are a large number of associated costs which are paid from the public purse.
What is the actual cost of Obama’s lavish vacation to the American taxpayer? A staggering $7 million, according to veteran White House reporter Keith Koffler.
Remember when he was telling corporations not to have conferences in Las Vegas? I guess a sense of proportion is for the little people.
THE NEW YORK SUN ON ZERO DARK THIRTY:
There is a controversy surrounding the film for its depiction of torture, which moviegoers have to sit through in the first third or so of the film. The Manchester Guardian went so far as to liken Ms. Bigelow to the Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl (which would make the Obama administration what?). In fact the film treats torture in a way that we would characterize as more journalistic than anything else and, in any event, ambiguous. One can imagine, if still only that, the difficulty of sorting out the transcripts that torture produces. And the capacity for error. There is a particularly harrowing portrayal of the catastrophe at Forward Operating Base Chapman, where seven CIA operatives were slain by a suicide bomber in 2009.
Read the whole thing.
GOOD NEWS FOR ALL YOU UNEMPLOYED LAW GRADS: Case Western Dean: There’s No Oversupply of Lawyers. Yay!
UPDATE: He’s not winning many friends in the comments. And note this one:
Larry Mitchell was my corporations prof at GW. He was very big on teaching us the evils of corporations; the horrors of conflicts of interests amongst corporate boardmembers; and how badly minority shareholders could be treated due to a lack of voting power. The final exam was a joke – something to the effect of, “if you were going to rewrite Delaware corporate law, how would you do it?” But the evils of Big Academia? Conflicts of interest between university administrators and law students? How badly those law school administrators are treating their potential and actual students? Blinders…
As I keep saying, any other industry that behaved toward its customers as higher education does would be widely vilified.
WHEN REALITY COMES to low-information voters.
January 4, 2013
PAUL MIRENGOFF: Chuck Hagel’s nomination and the clarity it would bring. “Hagel has no natural constituency, except perhaps for those who want a foreign and defense policy that is tougher on Israel and softer on Iran. Unfortunately, as I have observed, Obama belongs to that constituency. . . . Nothing else can explain this odd nomination. Team Obama tried to couch it as a bipartisan act, inasmuch as Hagel was a Republican Senator. But key Republican Senators have made it clear that they don’t want Hagel at the Pentagon. Key Democrats have also failed to express enthusiasm over that prospect. Even Barney Frank opposes Hagel. If there’s a bipartisan consensus around Hagel, it’s that Obama should nominate someone else. Under these circumstances, nominating Hagel would make sense only if he brought something special to the table. And he does — his animus towards Israel and his desire to appease Iran, views that fall well outside the foreign policy and defense mainstream from which Defense Secretaries normally are selected.”
GUN CONTROL PLANS IN LINCOLN, NEBRASKA?
JOURNALISM: Inmates using newspaper’s gun owner map to threaten guards, sheriff says. “Law enforcement officials from a New York region where a local paper published a map identifying gun owners say prisoners are using the information to intimidate guards. Rockland County Sheriff Louis Falco, who spoke at a news conference flanked by other county officials, said the Journal News’ decision to post an online map of names and addresses of handgun owners Dec. 23 has put law enforcement officers in danger.”
GUNS: Woman hiding with kids shoots intruder.
A woman hiding in her attic with children shot an intruder multiple times before fleeing to safety Friday.
The incident happened at a home on Henderson Ridge Lane in Loganville around 1 p.m. The woman was working in an upstairs office when she spotted a strange man outside a window, according to Walton County Sheriff Joe Chapman. He said she took her 9-year-old twins to a crawlspace before the man broke in using a crowbar.
But the man eventually found the family.
“The perpetrator opens that door. Of course, at that time he’s staring at her, her two children and a .38 revolver,” Chapman told Channel 2’s Kerry Kavanaugh.
The woman then shot him five times, but he survived, Chapman said. He said the woman ran out of bullets but threatened to shoot the intruder if he moved.
“She’s standing over him, and she realizes she’s fired all six rounds. And the guy’s telling her to quit shooting,” Chapman said.
The woman ran to a neighbor’s home with her children. The intruder attempted to flee in his car but crashed into a wooded area and collapsed in a nearby driveway, Chapman said.
See, this is where one of those “assault weapons” might have come in handy.
UPDATE: A reader emails: “When some politician starts pontificating that no one needs more than a 10 round clip capacity (or 5, or 3) this is the story that should be shoved in their faces. She fired 6 shots, put 5 in the attacker and he was still kicking. What if there had been multiple attackers. Then that 30 round clip suddenly seems appropriate.”
See, that’s why I make sure the Insta-Wife has plenty of bullets. It’s out of kindness to any home invaders. Because what she’d do to them if she were out of bullets would be worse.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Donald Sensing emails:
I have some insight as a retired Army artillery officer. First, you never want to be in a gunfight with barely enough firepower. The principle is called, “overmatch,” which should be self explanatory. As a Marine friend told me, when you go to a gunfight, bring not just a gun, bring all your guns. Bring all your friends and have them bring all their guns.
Bottom line, you do not want a gunfight to be a fair fight, whether on the battlefield on inside your own home.
Every time I read some bozo gun controller talking about what he thinks is “not necessary” for self defense, it further proves that gun controllers know nothing about guns, but plenty about control, and the gun-control movement is heavily northeast urban in character.
There is more out here in the real world to defend against than muggers or home invaders, hence I explained, “Why I Am an Armed Pastor.”
I also read on another blog the comments by a western rancher who explained that he always carries a .223 semi-auto rifle when working his own property. Why? Because of wolves. Six charged him one day and it took far more than 10 rounds from his “assault” rifle to drop two of them, after which the other four fled. Naturally, he started shooting at them at long range and they were running fast to boot, so he missed most shots. Which is exactly right: “Don’t shoot until you see the whites of their eyes” is musket shooting, not a good tactic to defend against multiple predators.
But gun controllers don’t get things like that. They think everything works like on TV or the movies, when a shooter never misses and every hit immediately kills. A more ignorant bunch can hardly be identified in America today.
Well, that’s certainly true. And reader Ron Jones emails:
Take a look at the home in the story – this is the soccer mom haven, the bastion of the American middle where no evil doth enter, yet here is the worst scenario possible. Woman alone at home with her children. We need images like this house/setting to combat the images of the anti-gun lobby. Images are powerful!
Yes, and a guy who would chase down a woman and her kids to an attic crawl space was planning on something worse than lifting a TV, I suspect.
SPENGLER’S OMINOUS PROPHECY. Does decline lead to “a flight toward Caesarism?”
EUROPE: Desperate Spain Raids Pension Fund. “As more and more Spaniards retire, the government will have a major crisis on its hands as it attempts to pay pensioners through a fund composed mostly of its own debt.” Luckily, nothing like that could happen here.
OH, TO BE YOUNG AND HAMILTONIAN: The Founders’ Finance, And Ours.
Michael S. Greve reviews Thomas K. McCraw’s The Founders and Finance, which he calls “magnificent.”
SOME THOUGHTS ON GUNS FROM SAM HARRIS:
Coverage of the Newtown tragedy and its aftermath has been generally abysmal. In fact, I have never seen the “liberal media” conform to right-wing caricatures of itself with such alacrity. I have read articles in which literally everything said about firearms and ballistics has been wrong. I have heard major newscasters mispronounce the names of every weapon and weapons manufacturer more challenging than “Colt.” I can only imagine the mirth it has brought gun-rights zealots to see “automatic” and “semi-automatic” routinely confused, or to hear a major news anchor ominously declare that the shooter had been armed with a “Sig Sauzer” pistol. This has been more than embarrassing. It has offered a thousand points of proof that “liberal elites” don’t know anything about what matters when bullets start flying.
Consider the sneering response of the New York Times editorial page to Wayne LaPierre, the NRA vice president, after he suggested that we station a police officer at every school in the country:
His solution to the proliferation of guns, including semiautomatic rifles designed to kill people as quickly as possible, is to put more guns in more places. Mr. LaPierre would put a police officer in every school and compel teachers and principals to become armed guards…. Mr. LaPierre said the Newtown killing spree “might” have been averted if the killer had been confronted by an armed security guard. It’s far more likely that there would have been a dead armed security guard—just as there would have been even more carnage if civilians had started firing weapons in the Aurora movie theater.
The phrase “designed to kill people as quickly as possible” should tell us everything we need to know about the author’s grasp of the issue. The entire editorial is worth reading, in fact, because it makes the NRA’s response to Newtown seem enlightened by comparison.
Read the whole thing. Including this: “But my thoughts soon return to the armed guard, because our laws generally do not allow us to prevent crime—even when a person’s bad intentions are reasonably well understood. As someone who has received repeated death threats—several of them from the same person—I know that little can be done in advance of an attack. In fact, our laws do not even allow us to keep the most violent criminals permanently off our streets. Eighty percent of the people languishing in our maximum-security prisons will eventually be released back into society—many having become more violent for their time behind bars—and 70 percent of those will return to prison after committing further crimes. We live in a country where nonviolent drug offenders receive life sentences but a man who rapes a fifteen-year-old girl and cuts her arms off with a hatchet can be paroled for good behavior after eight years (only to kill again). I do not know what explains this impossible distortion of priorities, but given that it exists, I believe that good, trustworthy, and well-trained people should have guns. . . . Rather than new laws, I believe we need a general shift in our attitude toward public violence—wherein everyone begins to assume some responsibility for containing it. It is worth noting that this shift has already occurred in one area of our lives, without anyone’s having received special training or even agreeing that a change in attitude was necessary: Just imagine how a few men with box cutters would now be greeted by their fellow passengers at 30,000 feet.”
AT AMAZON, New Year’s markdowns in Kitchen & Dining.
UK/ARGENTINE FALKLANDS ROW REIGNITES:
The Falklands, windswept rocks a few hundred miles from the Argentinean coast, are home to no more than 3,000 people, most of whom claim descent from the UK as well as a stark loyalty to the land of their ancestors. The islands offer little value, aside from an unknown (possibly negligible) amount of oil under the seabed, and vast quantities of kelp.
Their true appeal lies in their potential to distract—for both Kirchner and Cameron. Argentine politicians always go for the Falklands when they’re having trouble at home, and Kirchner is having trouble indeed. The Argentine economy has been faltering under her rule, with soaring inflation and GDP growth of only 2 percent in 2012. Drumming up fervor among the fiercely nationalistic Argentinian population is a good way to divert attention from the sorry state of affairs at home. Meanwhile, Cameron gets to wrap himself in Thatcher’s mantle, flexing his iron muscles by stating his unwavering commitment to the sovereignty of British descendants abroad.
With its advanced crony-capitalism-under-the-guise-of-redistribution economy, Argentina is in deep trouble. Good thing nothing like that could ever happen here.
CHUCK HAGEL: “Let the Jews Pay For It.”
Related: Obama Expected To Pick Hagel.
IN MASSACHUSETTS, WARREN CAMPAIGN TURNS UP ZOMBIE WELFARE RECIPIENTS:
Red-faced state officials admitted last night they are trying to find as many as 19,000 missing welfare recipients — after the controversial taxpayer-funded voter registration pitches the state mailed to their addresses last summer were sent back marked “Return to sender, address unknown.”
The Department of Transitional Assistance contacted 477,000 welfare recipients who were on their books from June 1, 2011, to May 31, 2012, after settling a voter-rights lawsuit brought by Democratic-leaning activist groups that demanded an aggressive voter information effort by the state. That $274,000 push by DTA resulted in 31,000 new voter registrations — but revealed an alarming number of welfare recipients whose residency in Massachusetts can’t be confirmed.
I wouldn’t be surprised to find that votes were cast in their names . . . .
IMPORTANT NEWS FROM SCIENCE: Hot Chocolate Tastes Better In An Orange Cup.
FROM THE INSTA-WIFE, A RESPONSE TO DR. MARTIN SELIGMAN: PC Rhetoric Won’t Stop Mass Murder. “Why such a simplistic solution to such a complex problem?”