DOING JOBS AMERICANS WON’T DO: “The most economically free state in North America isn’t a state. It’s a Canadian province.” But we’ve been fundamentally transformed. So there’s that.
Archive for 2013
December 13, 2013
SO WAS THE SECRET SERVICE OFF CHASING HOOKERS AGAIN OR WHAT? Man who faked sign language at Mandela memorial has faced murder, other charges.
STEPHEN GREEN PEELS BACK ANOTHER LAYER on the ObamaCare onion of fail.
IF YOU HURT YOUR BACK CARRYING ALL THAT WATER, CAN YOU FIND AN OBAMACARE DOCTOR TO TREAT IT? L.A. Times’ Michael Hiltzik embarrasses himself defending ObamaCare.
WHAT THEY COMPLAIN ABOUT, THEY DO: Women’s rights lobbyist ‘pays nanny $3 a hour.’
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF LULULEMON: Buying fancy fitness clothes actually does encourage you to work out more.
PATHETIC POLITIFACT: PolitiFact rewrites its own history in Obamacare ‘Lie Of The Year’ decision. The airbrushing begins.
Blog comment of the day: “We already have some people who think Lincoln was a Democrat; at some point in the future the media will look back at this disastrous administration and tell us Obama was a Republican.”
THE INSTA-WIFE, IN THE CORNER: Tell Hunter Yelton It’s a Man’s World.
SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE Basil Fawlty.
The reason you have a majority to be speaker , are invited to Sunday shows and have your press conferences covered is because of the Tea Party that mobilized to elect that GOP majority
The reason you keep that majority is those Tea Party voters also gave the GOP the majorities in state houses when it was time to draw districts. . . .
It took great effort by an awful lot of people to achieve that GOP house majority that you preside over, and it will take more than Obamacare to get people to overcome their natural inertia to turn out to give the GOP the senate in 2014 and if you don’t believe me ask Senator Gabriel Gomez (R-Hisapnica) how easy it was to bring out the 50% of 2010 Scott Brown voters he needed to win or ask why former Senator Brown crossed the border rather than run in a state where he ran away from his base. . . . You’re the freaking leader of the GOP. If you’re pissed off, vent in private, let an aide leak something in background or do what I do, get yourself in front of a pinball machine and beat the crap out of it. You don’t repeatedly go after conservative groups and by extension the base in that way and feed the MSM’s ”GOP base crazy/angry” meme that they will jump all over because let me tell you, if you become the minority leader unlike Nancy Pelosi the media will have no interest in anything you have to say.
Our political class needs more self-discipline.
ASTROTURF ALL THE WAY DOWN: New Obama Advisor Podesta Started Income Inequality Think Tank a Month Earlier.
ANOTHER KICK TO MALTHUS: Huge Freshwater Reserves Found — Under The Oceans.
We may soon be looking to our oceans for our freshwater—or more accurately, we’ll be looking underneath our oceans. A new study, the first to comprehensively survey the world’s known reserves of undersea freshwater, estimates that there are roughly 120,000 cubic miles—more than 100 times the amount of freshwater we’ve drilled from the ground since 1900—of fresh and nearly-fresh water trapped underneath seabeds. The upshot: we could be seeing more offshore drilling for water as well as oil in the future. . . .
Some of these reserves will be fresh enough that they won’t need to go through the energy-intensive desalinization process, while some of them will be only slightly brackish, and will be easier and, importantly, cheaper to desalinate. In fact, this kind of offshore drilling for water is already happening; NPR notes that there are already operations in places like Cape May, NJ to drill for and eventually desalinate low-salinity water.
Water scarcity has been a favorite topic for the Chicken Littles of the world. Just 18 years ago the vice president of the World Bank was ominously warning that “the wars of the next century will be fought over water.” It’s easy to drum up fears of “water wars” some undetermined time in the future, but studies like this one, and discoveries of new water sources like this one in Kenya, or this one under the Sahara, suggest that these fears that have gripped Malthusians—and that Malthusians have in turn used to push through otherwise unworkable policy recommendations—are a lot less serious.
It’s as if they’re drumming up fear to consolidate power or something. But when someone announces a crisis whose solution requires less power for government and elites, I’ll listen more closely.
TOM BLUMER: Another Week, Another Trio of Obamacare Outrages. “Again, they can’t be this stupid and incompetent.”
AT AMAZON, Top Tool Gift Picks From An Unlikely Source. Well, seemed unlikely to me, anyway.
Plus, Top Holiday Deals in Electronics.
Also, today only: ER: The Complete Seasons 1-15, 79% off.
And, also today only: Swingline GBC Inspire Laminator, 73% off.
NOW ON YOUTUBE: My interview with Brian Kilmeade about his book, George Washington’s Secret Six: The Spy Ring That Saved The American Revolution.
ROGER SIMON: Mr. Ryan’s Dilemma. “Let’s stipulate this: No conservative or libertarian is going to get what he or she wants on government spending — or even anything remotely close to it — without winning the Senate in 2014 and the presidency two years later. Barring mass lobotomies, it ain’t gonna happen — not with Barack Obama and Harry Reid standing in the way. You have to get rid of these people first. The good news is, as of this moment — thanks to the Obamacare fiasco that will likely continue for some time, even get worse, and, to a lesser extent, the Iran deal that, in all probability, is headed for disaster — things are running in the right’s direction. What Ryan quite obviously was trying to do is keep it that way — tread some water until we have at least the first of those elections (2014). He was following Hippocrates’ prescription to do no harm.”
PEELING THE ONION OF FAIL (CONT’D): White House in Obamacare Panic Mode? Administration Announces Steps to Maintain Insurance Coverage as Worries About Disruptions Mount.
OBAMA WINS POLITIFACT’S “LIE OF THE YEAR:” And meanwhile, its 2009 Lie Of The Year — “Death Panels” — turns out to be true. Of course, everyone who was paying attention knew all along that “Death Panels” was true, and “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan” was a lie. Which raises a question: Who, exactly, is Politifact’s intended audience?
JAMES TARANTO: Hey, you know what’s racist? Citing crime statistics.
Of course it’s an editorial judgment, and by definition it’s the editor’s to make. But if readers are not permitted to question the editors’ judgments, what’s the point of having a comments section at all?
Finally we come to “crime statistics.” We tweeted the post last night with the comment: “News website bans discussion of crime statistics in comments,” which prompted Eyer to respond: “That’s a gross mischaracterization.” We’ll concede it was a slight exaggeration, but Eyer made a concession of her own by posting a comment to her own post this morning acknowledging: “I have edited the portion above on crime statistics to clarify exactly what I’m talking about.” We didn’t save the original; the following quotes are from the edited version.
“We’ve seen an uptick in commenters posting FBI crime statistics in an attempt to paint the problem as one of race,” she writes. “Usually these crime statistics are not helpful to the discussion because they lack other details, such as socioeconomic status, that give context.” So we’re back to “poverty” as the cause of crime.
The overall thrust of Eyer’s rules is to ensure that discussions of race at MLive conform to the media stereotype of black victimization at the hands of white oppression. . . .
These days elite culture, including the news media, routinely vilify whites, especially “white males.”
As we’ve noted before, feminists also frequently stipulate that they’re vilifying white males, even when race is irrelevant. Eyer promises in conclusion: “Next up, I will address issues related to gender.” We can hardly wait.
Indeed.
STUART ROTHENBERG: The DNC’s Deceptive Message on Louisiana.
PEELING THE ONION OF FAIL (CONT’D): Report: Less Than 15 Percent of Obamacare ‘Enrollees’ Are Actually Covered.
Obamacare administrators are counting people who’ve browsed the website and placed a plan in their virtual shopping cart — but who never finished the process by checking out — as “enrolled.” That’s a bogus metric. It’s even more bogus when you recall the last point in bold. People are not covered unless and until they’ve made their first premium payment.
It’s Potemkin enrollees all the way down.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: George Mason Law School Freezes Tuition.
NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: Air strike kills 15 civilians in Yemen by mistake: officials. “Fifteen people on their way to a wedding in Yemen were killed in an air strike after their party was mistaken for an al Qaeda convoy, local security officials said on Thursday. The officials did not identify the plane in the strike in central al-Bayda province, but tribal and local media sources said that it was a drone.”