SO THE NSA IS JUST ANOTHER DRUG-WAR TOOL, THEN? NSA Records All Bahamas Cellphone Calls.
Archive for 2014
May 21, 2014
RON FOURNIER: How Obama Became The Superhero of Excuses. “President Obama won, twice, and then didn’t live up to anybody’s expectations, including his own.”
Related: The New Obama Narrative: Epic Incompetence. “From the botched rollout of the health-care website to the VA scandal, events are now cementing certain impressions about Mr. Obama. Among the most damaging is this: He is unusually, even epically, incompetent. . . . The emerging narrative of Barack Obama, the one that actually comports to reality, is that he is a rare political talent but a disaster when it comes to actually governing. The list of his failures is nothing short of staggering, from shovel-ready jobs that weren’t so shovel ready to the failures of healthcare.gov to the VA debacle. But it also includes the president’s failure to tame the debt, lower poverty, decrease income inequality, and increase job creation. He promised to close Guantanamo Bay and didn’t. His administration promised to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed before a civilian jury in New York but they were forced to retreat because of outrage in his own party. Early on in his administration Mr. Obama put his prestige on the line to secure the Olympics for Chicago in 2016 and he failed.”
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Battling Brain Tumors With An Electric Anti-Cancer Helmet.
CONTROLLING BLOOD SUGAR WITH INTERVALS OF EXERCISE: “Multiple, brief, snack-sized portions of exercise may control blood sugar better than a single, continuous workout, according to new research that adds to a growing body of evidence about the wisdom of spreading exercise throughout the day.”
HOPEY-CHANGEY GOVERNMENT HEALTHCARE: West Virginia Doctor: Veterans On VA Waiting List Are Committing Suicide.
21ST CENTURY LAW ENFORCEMENT: Exclusive: Dawn Military-Style Police Raid Leaves Meek Grandmother Angry, Humiliated.
“IT’S A SHOCK.” Bill and Hillary Clinton’s Relative Crushed in Primary for Congress. “Bill and Hillary Clinton went all out to campaign for her, each of them holding a fundraiser in her honor. Just last week, Bill cut a robo-call on her behalf touting how her vote ‘reversed trickle-down economics and set the country on the longest peacetime expansion in history — one that all Americans participated in.'”
Perhaps there’s less Clinton-love out there beyond the Beltway than people think?
IN THE MAIL: From Robert Buettner, Balance Point (Orphan’s Legacy).
Plus, today only at Amazon: Up to 71% off Battlestar Galactica: The Complete Series. On Blu-Ray and DVD.
And, also today only: 45% Off New Balance 1260v3 Running Shoes.
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 377.
“OTHERING:” Howard Dean: “Republicans Aren’t American!” “Yes, he really did say that Republicans aren’t American. And that they should stay away from the United States, and go to Russia where they belong. One gets the feeling that if the Democrats ever have the opportunity, they will have us all arrested. Or deported.”
MICKEY KAUS: Cantor’s Still Protecting Amnesty. “House Majority Leader Eric Cantor seems to be in a real race to retain his seat in the GOP primary. His challenger, economist Dave Brat, has attacked Cantor as soft on immigration amnesty. The charge is accurate.”
MEGAN MCARDLE: Taxing A Professor’s Privilege:
I’ve been reading Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century.” You’ll have to wait on my thoughts on the book until they’re a bit more fully formed. As I’ve been reading, though, I keep returning to a question I heard at an economics conference a couple of months back: If we did implement a wealth tax, should it tax tenure?
Professorial tenure is, after all, a valuable asset. As long as you show up and teach your classes, and you don’t make passes at your students or steal from the department’s petty cash drawer, you can draw a paycheck for the rest of your working life. And since the abolition of mandatory retirement ages, that working life can be as long as you like.
Ah, you will say, there are risks: Your school could go out of business, or you might get ill and be unable to work, or inflation could eat away at the value of that paycheck. Just so. All assets are risky. That doesn’t make them worthless; it just means that the price has to take the potential downsides into account.
Why single out professors? you ask. Isn’t this just more academic-bashing? You’re quite right: We shouldn’t single out professors. Everyone with civil-service protections or similar employment guarantees should probably have that asset taxed.. . .
Professors and civil servants implicitly recognize the economic value of this deal; whenever someone suggests abolishing lifetime job protections, they rush to argue that they have agreed to lower pay in exchange for these privileges. That’s not always true, in fact. Also overlooked is that the people who do this are effectively engaging in tax arbitrage: exchanging taxable income for untaxed guarantees that can be very financially valuable.
It is worth thinking of these things as you read Piketty because doing so reminds you just how limited and approximate are the government statistics that he must rely upon.
Indeed.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Summer Scramble: What Tuition-Dependent Colleges Do When They Miss Enrollment Goals. From the comments: “It may be that we simply have too many institutions of higher learning designed to serve niches that no longer exist. We don’t have too many seats for students but too many seats for administrators.”
ED DRISCOLL: Of Trigger Warnings And Campus Brownshirts.
THE SECRET SERVICE IS A MESS, AND THERE’S NO ACCOUNTABILITY: Exclusive: Secret Service agents accused of ordering ‘Operation Moonlight’ remain on the job.
Two Secret Service officials responsible for diverting members of a special White House unit to protect the assistant and friend of the agency’s director are still on the job and have not been placed on administrative leave while the matter is under investigation, according to two people familiar with the matter.
David Beach and Jim Donaldson, the two agents in charge of the Washington field office, ordered members of the Secret Service’s Prowler unit, which is responsible for patrolling the White House perimeter, to leave their posts and travel to the southern Maryland town of La Plata, an hour’s drive from Washington. The Washington Post first reported the story May 11.
The agents were diverted to their new assignment, known internally as Operation Moonlight, because then-Director Mark Sullivan was worried that a neighbor was harassing his assistant, Lisa Chopey, and that she was in danger, the sources said.
I wonder if there’s more to this.
Related: Whistleblowers tell Senate panel of alleged sexual misconduct by Secret Service agents.
Secret Service agents and managers have engaged in sexual misconduct and other improprieties across a span of 17 countries in recent years, according to accounts given by whistleblowers to the Senate committee that oversees the department.
Sen. Ronald H. Johnson (Wis.), ranking Republican on a Homeland Security subcommittee, said Thursday that the accounts directly contradict repeated assertions by Secret Service leaders that the elite agency does not foster or tolerate sexually improper behavior.
Here at InstaPundit, I’ve been noting management problems with the Secret Service for over a decade. But the problems seem to be getting worse, not better.
THIS HEADLINE CAPTURES A LOT: At fundraiser, Obama dismisses GOP scrutiny of Benghazi, Obamacare.
UPDATE: White House Won’t Confirm Whether Obama Actually Took Promised Sequester Pay Cut.
JAMES TARANTO: Don’t Stop Thinking About ObamaCare: More problems, and arguments, lie ahead.
There’s an additional ambiguity: What does it mean to leave the law “unchanged” when the Supreme Court has already struck down parts of it and the administration has declined to follow or enforce others? That’s not a salient question for immediate electoral purposes; in terms of voting intention, “left unchanged” can be taken as a statement of support for the Democrats. But even if the statutory language proves resistant to any effort at modification, there will be a new administration after 2016. That could mean more discretionary (or extralegal) changes and perhaps the end of ObamaCare as we know it.
“ObamaCare as we know it” is also an ambiguous turn of phrase, to say the least, for what do we know of ObamaCare? A few provisions are relatively straightforward, such as the expansion of Medicaid eligibility (in those states that have gone along with it) and the mandate that family insurance plans cover 23-, 24- and 25-year-old children of policyholders.
But the whole of ObamaCare is an insanely complicated scheme that even experts are still struggling to understand. “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it–away from the fog of the controversy,” then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously said in March 2010. We’ll be finding out for many years to come, and there’s no reason to think that “fog” will ever lift.
To the Dems, that’s not a bug, but a feature. If people had figured out what was being done to them all at once, the politicians would have been hanging from lampposts.
WITH NEARLY 3900 DOWNLOADS, my The Second Amendment As Ordinary Constitutional Law is still at #1 on SSRN. Thanks to everyone who read it!
SARAH PALIN MOCKS THE CHIN-TUGGERS: Palin: ‘Hillary’s Brain Is Off-Limits’ To Dems, But My Son Wasn’t.
Remember, the Dems try to turn anything that threatens their narrative into a breach of etiquette or decency.
RACISM IN OBAMA’S AMERICA: Professor Blows Whistle on Illegal Admissions Practices at UCLA.
CASS SUNSTEIN, POLITICIZED BY HIS TIME AT THE WHITE HOUSE? Randy Barnett: “‘Tea Party Constitutionalism’ is meaningless argument by pejorative label, which Cass seems to enjoy lately.”