Archive for 2014
February 11, 2014
YEAH, BUT THEY KEEP RAISING THE BAR ON WHAT IT TAKES TO BE RIDICULOUS: 9 Utterly Ridiculous Conspiracy Theories.
BRAVE SIR BOEHNER RAN AWAY. What, I wonder, accounts for his lack of backbone?
OBAMACARE DELAY gets instant ridicule. I like this pic, produced with admirable dispatch by the House Republicans.
UPDATE: Culture-Based Law Enforcement: How Obama Changes His Bill With No Fear of Prosecution.
IN THE MAIL: From Peter D. Salins, The Smart Society: Strengthening Americas Greatest Resource, Its People.
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 278.
MEGAN MCARDLE: What AOL’s Tim Armstrong Got Right.
What he said about the effects of changing the 401(k) match isn’t exactly true, however — it’s not just people who leave the company who will pay. All the AOL workers who contribute to a 401(k) will miss out on gains they might have made over the course of the year, had AOL stuck with its old program. In a boom year, that could add up to thousands of dollars.
But relatively few people objected to Armstrong’s misleading characterization of the 401(k) plan. Instead, the Internet went all atwitter at Armstrong for daring to mention that babies with special medical needs cost a lot, and that the money had to come from somewhere.1 The mother of one of the babies wrote a moving piece for Slate about her daughter’s “catastrophic birth,” which went viral even though it didn’t actually seem to rebut anything Armstrong had said. Fei’s baby is beautiful, and all of us are very glad that modern medicine was able to give her a shot at life she wouldn’t have had 20 years ago. But Armstrong didn’t say that he wished the babies weren’t alive; he just said they were expensive. . . .
Myself, I think AOL made absolutely the right choice: saving Deanna Fei’s baby, not 401(k) matches for job-switchers. But people seem mad at Armstrong for saying that this is a choice — that the resources to pay for such babies do not just materialize out of some primordial miasma surrounding the maternity ward but must be redirected from something else.
But he made a woman feel bad about her situation, which is an unforgivable sin in today’s America. If you’re actually right, that only makes the sin graver, since the woman might feel even worse.
DEMOGRAPHIC DESTINY: Kyle Smith: Aging America heading for disaster. “Don’t blame politicians, the decline of manufacturing, education or cheap foreign imports for the economic stagnation that has already begun and will continue for many years. Blame your parents and grandparents for losing interest in having children back in the Sixties.”
It’s a review of Harry S. Dent’s The Demographic Cliff.
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RON FOURNIER: Why I’m Getting Sick Of Defending ObamaCare.
IRS SCANDAL: Watchdog to IRS: Quit killing conservatives with paperwork.
Related: Chicago Sun-Times: Signs say IRS targeted tea party.
President Barack Obama maintains there’s “not even a smidgen of corruption” in the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of tea party and conservative groups, that it was just the result of “bone-headed decisions” by low-level IRS technocrats.
But testimony at a congressional hearing last week raised red flags about IRS abuse of conservatives that should trouble Americans no matter what their political leanings. . . .
In 2012, then IRS commissioner Doug Shulman told Congress there had been no targeting of tea party groups even though we now know it had been going on since 2009. “The last time I checked, lying to Congress is a felony,” Mitchell said.
Confidential donor information about several conservative groups, including the National Organization for Marriage, the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the Republican Governors Public Policy Council, were leaked to their political foes or the public. “That is a crime,” she noted.
And Mitchell pointed to the elephant in the room in the IRS controversy: former IRS executive Lois Lerner invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination before the same subcommittee. “She apparently knows of criminal acts involved in this scandal.”
Indeed.
JAMES TARANTO: Drunkenness And Double Standards: A balanced look at college sex offenses.
Winerip notes that between 2005 and 2010, “more than 60 percent of claims involving sexual violence handled by United Educators”–an insurance company owned by member schools–“involved young women who were so drunk they had no clear memory of the assault.” We know from Sgt. Cournoyer that the accused young men typically are drinking to excess, too. What is called the problem of “sexual assault” on campus is in large part a problem of reckless alcohol consumption, by men and women alike. (Based on our reporting, the same is true in the military, at least in the enlisted and company-grade officer ranks.)
Which points to a limitation of the drunk-driving analogy. If two drunk drivers are in a collision, one doesn’t determine fault on the basis of demographic details such as each driver’s sex. But when two drunken college students “collide,” the male one is almost always presumed to be at fault. His diminished capacity owing to alcohol is not a mitigating factor, but her diminished capacity is an aggravating factor for him.
As the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education notes, at some campuses the accuser’s having had one drink is sufficient to establish the defendant’s guilt. . . . In theory that means, as FIRE notes, that “if both parties are intoxicated during sex, they are both technically guilty of sexually assaulting each other.” In practice it means that women, but not men, are absolved of responsibility by virtue of having consumed alcohol.
That is self-evidently unjust, yet it turns out to be a matter of high principle for many feminists. Last fall Slate’s Emily Yoffe, the mother of a college-age daughter, was the target of a Two Minutes Hate for a post titled “College Women: Stop Getting Drunk,” even though she offered the same advice to college men: “If I had a son, I would tell him that it’s in his self-interest not to be the drunken frat boy who finds himself accused of raping a drunken classmate.”
Women are obviously too fragile to handle college. They should just get married young, have babies, and stay home. Luckily, ObamaCare encourages that!
I READ A REVIEW OF HER YEARS AGO THAT SAID NO ACT IS TOO UNSPEAKABLE FOR HER, SO LONG AS THE HAND THAT PERFORMS IT IS SUITABLY BROWN AND WEATHERED: Feminist Icon Germaine Greer Supports Female Genital Mutilation On Grounds Of Cultural Sensitivity. Female eunuchs are okay, so long as they’re not Europeans, I guess.
UPDATE: I question the voluntariness here.
RULE OF LAW: Mike Lee: Latest Obamacare delay is ‘lawless’ — ‘he is not an emperor.’
President Obama’s latest delay of the employer mandate is yet another “lawless” change to Obamacare, according to Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, who said Attorney General Eric Holder still hasn’t provided the legal basis for the last delay.
“[Obama] has no authority to do that,” Lee told the Washington Examiner after his speech on higher education reform at the Heritage Foundation. “He’s acting outside of what the law authorizes him to do and this has got to stop. At some point the president of the United States has to recognize that we are a nation that operates under a system of laws. He is not an emperor. He is not a super-legislature. And he doesn’t have the power to just trump what Congress does.”
Related: Obama: “As President I Can Do Whatever I Want.”
President Obama made what turned out to be an ill-timed joke while visiting Monticello with French President Francois Hollande.
“That’s the good thing as a president, I can do whatever I want,” Obama joked while walking to a typically off-limits terrace at the home of Thomas Jefferson in Charlottesville, Va., according to a pool report.
Reporters received the email shortly after the Treasury Department announced that it would again delay the Obamacare employer mandate for midsized businesses until 2016.
Yeah, he also “joked” about auditing his enemies.
.@mattyglesias Never gets old: pic.twitter.com/HuD3eN13SZ
— Steve K (@stephenkruiser) February 11, 2014
THE MILT WOLF EFFECT: Roll Call: Where He Really Lives Aside, Sen. Pat Roberts Has Moved to His Right.
Sen. Pat Roberts might be in additional re-election trouble, thanks to a weekend story in The New York Times that’s generating buzz about how the Republican doesn’t have a home he can call his own in Kansas — but he does have a new case to make about his conservative credentials.
After 16 years in the Senate (and as many years before that in the House) cementing a reputation as an establishment Republican, one driven much less by ideology than by a desire for accomplishment, Roberts tacked hard to the right last year. In fact, among the six members of the Senate Republican Conference facing viable primary challenges, Roberts was unique in this regard: He opposed President Barack Obama much more often than before and also stuck with his party significantly more than he usually does.
The CQ Roll Call vote studies for 2013 found that Roberts voted against the president’s wishes 66 percent of the time, 6 points higher than the Senate GOP average. During Obama’s first term, the senator’s presidential opposition averaged 55 percent. . . .
Roberts is up against radiologist Milton Wolf, who’s counting on an energized tea party base to carry him to an upset in the Aug. 5 primary.
That’s likely one reason for what amounts to a seismic shift for a politician who had molded himself after two of his Senate forebears, Bob Dole and Nancy Landon Kassebaum. Roberts was in the top 10 among GOP senators voting against George W. Bush in the final two years of his presidency and once merited the backhanded compliment “not one of the impossible ideologues” from liberal former Rep. Barney Frank.
Ouch.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Two Schools Bucking The Trend By Adding Faculty Instead Of Administrators.
TRAIN WRECK UPDATE: HealthCare.gov to be out of service. “HealthCare.gov will be out of service for two and a half days beginning on Feb. 15 — the last day people can sign up to obtain coverage that begins on March 1.
BANANA REPUBLIC UPDATE: Congressional Investigation: Treasury, IRS, HHS Conspired To Create An Unauthorized, Half-Trillion Dollar Entitlement.
Last week, two congressional committees issued a little-noticed report detailing how Treasury Department, Internal Revenue Service, and Health and Human Services officials conspired to create a massive new entitlement not authorized anywhere in federal law.
In the summer of 2012, the House of Representatives’ Committee on Oversight & Government Reform and Committee on Ways & Means launched an investigation to determine “whether IRS and Treasury conducted an adequate review of the statute and legislative history prior to coming to [the] conclusion that [the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act’s] premium subsidies would be allowed in federal exchanges.” Over the next 18 months, the committees held numerous hearings with senior Treasury and IRS officials, while investigative staff conducted interviews with key agency attorneys responsible for developing the regulations in question. Investigators also reviewed what few documents Treasury and IRS officials allowed them to see.
Heads should roll. And I’m not even sure I mean just figuratively, if this is true. It seems as if this sort of thing should be prosecuted as a crime.
February 10, 2014
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Wellesley students: Please censor art to protect our feelings. “Others make statements that seem to indicate that it is the whiteness and maleness of the subject of the sculpture that is the problem. One talks about ‘the power of the nearly nude, white, male body to disturb and discomfit,’ while another complains that ‘Mr. Matelli comes from a place of great privilege which has apparently been used to place a sculpture of the white male body on campus. I find it weirdly invasive.’ Readers can be forgiven for finding this explicit hostility towards a given race and sex to itself be a bit discomfiting.”
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: The Late, Great Manly Man. “When the Obama administration launched a campaign to attract enrollees into Obamacare, did they they front up a two-fisted, hard-drinking, cigar-chomping he-man? Hell no. They employed ‘Pajama Boy’ to lure the mice into the trap. This is who they reckoned the rising generation would admire.”