CHARLIE MARTIN: L’affaire Snowden and (Computer) Security.
Archive for 2013
July 12, 2013
KIMBERLEY STRASSEL: You think the IRS is politicized? Take a look at the FEC. “More troubling to some FEC commissioners has been the staff’s unsanctioned and growing ties to the Obama Justice Department.” It’s thugs and apparatchiks all the way down.
JOHN FUND: Obama’s Alinskyite Administration: The Justice Department’s involvement in the Zimmerman case is highly suspect. “I wondered back in 2008 how the federal government’s focus would change with a left-wing ‘community organizer’ installed as president. We now have a partial answer.”
ROLL CALL: Filibuster: Mitch McConnell’s Grave Warning.
HMM: HuffPo Poll: 59 percent support 20-week abortion ban. This shouldn’t be surprising. By the 20th week of a pregnancy, most people have seen ultrasounds, know if it’s a boy or a girl, and have probably picked a name. It feels more like a baby. Earlier on, it’s different. You get a lot of miscarriages anyway in the first trimester. Both the sides in the abortion debate — at least, their public partisans — want pregnancy to be all or nothing: It’s a baby before the sheets have dried, or it’s okay to abort in the 9th month. This doesn’t correspond with most people’s moral intuitions, which are, I think, closer to the Roe notion of pregnancy being characterized by different aspects at different times.
There are so many scandals at once. Maybe Obama’s “dense pack” strategy is working. . . .
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: CFO Survey Reveals Doubts About Financial Sustainability. “In a new survey by Inside Higher Ed and Gallup, barely a quarter of campus chief financial officers (27 percent) express strong confidence in the viability of their institution’s financial model over five years, and that number drops in half (to 13 percent) when they are asked to look out over a 10-year horizon. . . . And more than 6 in 10 CFOs disagree or strongly disagree with the statement that ‘reports that a significant number of higher education institutions are facing existential financial crisis are overblown.'”
Can I say I told you so? Because, you know, I did.
UPDATE: Oh, note this, too:
“The way I read this, they’ve been using a set of strategies to try to do what they already do better, but they’ve exhausted the bag of tricks they’ve been using to try to keep it all together. There’s not another rabbit in there,” Staisloff says. “They get that the business model isn’t working, but they don’t quite see the bridge to the next model. And they seem to have some concern that maybe there isn’t a bridge.”
Actually, as you read through all the responses, I’d say that these guys are more pessimistic than I am.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE, PRIORITIES EDITION: Giving up cosmetic surgery rider could help save school music programs.
One of the most preposterous expenses that Western New York taxpayers are forced to bear is the cosmetic surgery rider included in some public union contracts, including that of Buffalo teachers, where the cost has become particularly onerous.
Facing elimination of nearly half the Buffalo School District’s band and orchestra programs, the School Board is targeting superficial anti-wrinkle procedures such as facial peels and microderm abrasions. The cost of such procedures to the district in the 2011-12 school year came to nearly $1.7 million, according to School Board member John B. Licata, who has sponsored a resolution to deny such claims from teachers and administrators.
Unsustainable.
A SMALL VICTORY FOR CIVIL RIGHTS: You Can Now Bear Arms in a Post Office Parking Lot. “Judge Matsch maintained that USPS did violate Bonidy’s rights by not permitting him to leave a gun in the trunk of his car. But guns inside the post office itself are still forbidden.”
This is actually significant, because Matsch read the “Heller safe harbor” — the passage saying that gun bans are okay in certain areas — narrowly. I believe that reading is correct, for reasons I’ve set out elsewhere.
UPDATE: Some doubts about the story linked above.
RANDY BARNETT ON sweeping blanket data seizures by the NSA and the CFPB. “The secrecy of these programs makes it impossible to hold elected officials and appointed bureaucrats accountable. Relying solely on internal governmental checks violates the fundamental constitutional principle that the sovereign people must be the ultimate external judge of their servants’ conduct in office. Yet such judgment and control is impossible without the information that such secret programs conceal. Had it not been for recent leaks, the American public would have no idea of the existence of these programs, and we still cannot be certain of their scope.”
Yes, and by cracking down on leakers, the Obama administration is delegitimizing itself further.
July 11, 2013
WHERE’S THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT: Cobb County man slaughtered in random hate crime mob attack.
CHANGE: Women Defect: Obama Ratings Down.
President Barack Obama’s favorable ratings are in negative territory, according to a Quinnipiac University poll out today that shows women voters souring on his performance in office.
Women voters were key to Obama’s re-election in 2012, giving him 55 percent of their votes, according to a CNN exit poll. In an April Quinnipiac survey, 56 percent approved of Obama’s job performance and 39 percent disapproved, and Obama had an overall approval rating of 49 percent positive and 45 percent negative.
In this latest poll, women approved of Obama’s performance in office by just 48 percent to 44 percent, and his overall ratings were 48 percent unfavorable and 44 percent favorable.
U.S. voters disapproved of the way Obama was handling the economy, 55 percent to 41 percent; Syria, 48 percent to 33 percent; immigration, 50 percent to 41 percent; and foreign policy, 52 percent to 40 percent.
This isn’t going to draw Dem candidates closer to him in 2014.
BUGS IN THE MACHINE: Reader Gerald Hanner emails: “I’m looking at a Citi Bank ad on your site. It’s in Russian. Those purveyors of systems that claim to know who we are, what we are, and what we like are not as good as they like to make us believe that they are.” Heh.
WHICH EXPLAINS A LOT, REALLY: Obama Voters Support Repealing the Bill of Rights.
#WARONMEN: Georgia State is worried that not enough female students are studying philosophy. But that worry attracts this comment: “Meanwhile, like their peer institutions in Georgia, the male/female ratio at GSU is stuck at 40%/60%. i wonder when/if they’ll get around to addressing *that* gender gap.” Gender gaps only run one way, though the tendency of men to avoid college — understandable for all sorts of reasons — will only accelerate the bursting of the higher education bubble.
OF COURSE NOT. HE’S CONNECTED. Exclusive: Criminal charges against Solyndra founder are unlikely – sources.
VENEZUELA AND IRAN’S joint intelligence program.
IF OBAMA CAN SUSPEND THE OBAMACARE MANDATE, COULD A REPUBLICAN PRESIDENT SUSPEND THE TAX ON CAPITAL GAINS? “Democrats too may acquiesce in Mr. Obama’s action, as they have his other aggressive assertions of executive power. Yet what will they say when a Republican president decides that the tax rate on capital gains is a drag on economic growth and instructs the IRS not to enforce it?” That’s thinking too small. What about not enforcing the entire Income Tax? I mean, as long as the Constitution’s “take care” clause doesn’t mean anything. . . .
ACADEMIC FEMINISTS HARDEST HIT: Princeton Mom Gets Book Deal.
Related: Are Princeton Mom’s critics racially insensitive?
AN EDUCATIONAL PROGRAM TARGETING FALSE RAPE COMPLAINTS: ‘Don’t be that girl’ posters in Edmonton spark debate. Well, as we’ve seen, false rape charges are hardly unknown. But noting that harshes the narrative.