Archive for 2018

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

● Shot:

In the late 1980s the U.N. was already claiming the world had only a decade to solve global warming or face the consequences.

The San Jose Mercury News reported on June 30, 1989 that a “senior environmental official at the United Nations, Noel Brown, says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000.”

That prediction didn’t come true 15 years ago, and the U.N. is sounding the same alarm today.

“25 Years Of Predicting The Global Warming ‘Tipping Point,’” Michael Bastach, the Daily Caller, May 4, 2015.

● Chaser:

The Merc used to be one of the largest daily newspapers in the industry with upward of 400 reporters and editors, according to the Media Guild. After the latest round of buyouts and layoffs, the number of union-represented newsroom staff in the South Bay is down to 41. The East Bay papers are left with 65.

—“Bay Area News Group Hammered by More Layoffs, Resignations,” San Jose Inside, yesterday.

When we lived in the Bay Area, I recall getting telemarketing calls from the Merc’s boiler room begging us to subscribe on a seemingly daily basis. We invariably told them we get all our news online to fight global warming. I’d be more sympathetic to its current feeble state, if it wasn’t for the Mercury’s leftwing bias, its 1990s series of articles, that as Mona Charen wrote last month, asserted that “the crack epidemic in African-American neighborhoods was a plot orchestrated by the CIA,” and its 2010 involvement in the infamous Righthaven copyright troll of mom and pop bloggers.

COMEY IS WRITING A BOOK ON ‘GOOD, ETHICAL LEADERSHIP:’ No, I am not making this up. In fact, the publisher of the former FBI Director’s forthcoming tome is moving up the publication date to take advantage of what the Associated Press calls the “intense scrutiny” Comey is now getting. Here are just two of the many reasons critics and others wonder what this guy could possibly have to say on anything having to do with ethical leadership.

HARD TO BELIEVE HE SAID THIS WITH A STRAIGHT FACE:

“Gingras said Google was “in the trust business” and felt “an extraordinary sense of responsibility” about the reliability of information highlighted by its search engine and news app.”

They keep insisting that they are a mere conduit, a common carrier like the phone company. But one look at “Google News” shows a selection and arrangement evidencing an editorial skew than simply cannot be attributed to a mere algorithm. And that skew extends well past editorial content: Google was fined $21 million by India’s competition commission for abusing its dominant position in the local search market for online general web search and web search advertising services.

“Don’t be evil”?

THAT WAS A BIPARTISAN PROJECT, ACCOMPLISHED WITH HELP FROM THE IRS: Republicans Repeal The Tea Party.

The sad truth is, there’s not a big enough constituency for reducing spending. It’s possible that the bond market will induce some responsibility — we may be seeing the first signs of that — but not enough voters, and even fewer politicians, care. Even if the GOP had 60 seats in the Senate, it’s very doubtful that would translate into 60 votes to cut spending significantly.

As I’ve written before, I’d like to see a 5% across the board cut on spending, followed by a multiyear hard freeze. But the chances of that are zero. And even if Trump is turning out to be more conservative (and more libertarian!) than I expected, he never pretended to be a big spending cutter. And even if he were, there would be bipartisan resistance in Congress.

I don’t have a solution. Any ideas out there?

Related: The Tea Party Is Dead. Long Live The Tea Party.

In 2010 at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference, I witnessed and heard some of these debates first hand. Everyone was walking around with pocket Constitutions, reading and trying to understand the relevance of that document. It doesn’t matter if the arguments weren’t on point or legally “correct.” What mattered was that ordinary people had taken a keen interest in preserving the spirit of the Constitution and the essence of our founding principles that are “self-evident” in that document at a time it has been under relentless attack.

In a word, it was awesome.

This side of the tea parties was never widely reported on by the media, for very good reasons. The left hates getting into a discussion about what the Constitution says because they can’t defend most of their ideas. Despite the fact that the founders wrote the constitution so that basically anyone who could read could understand it, the left keeps insisting the Constitution says things that it doesn’t.

Any clever lawyer and willing judge can twist the meaning of the Constitution so that it says anything they want it to say to accomplish any end they wish to accomplish. So the budget deal may have killed fiscal sanity in Washington and — perhaps — the tea party’s political power to some extent. And the GOP may have co-opted most of the larger tea party groups to do the party’s bidding.

What remains of the tea party is, to my mind, the best part. The desire of ordinary people to govern themselves, to take personal responsibility for their own lives, and to try to do something about the denigration and increasing irrelevance of the Constitution.

Don’t give up the ship.

PROGRESS: Bill to prohibit campus ‘free speech zones’ introduced in U.S. Senate.

Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah announced that he was introducing legislation to protect free speech on campus. The bill, called the “Free Right to Expression in Education Act,” would prohibit public institutions of higher education from quarantining free expression into small, misleadingly labeled “free speech zones” on their campuses. If enacted, the measure would free tens of thousands of public university students from these restrictive, unconstitutional zones.

The Free Right to Expression in Education Act states, in part:

Each public institution of higher education . . . may not prohibit . . . a person from freely engaging in noncommercial expressive activity in an outdoor area on the institution’s campus if the person’s conduct is lawful.

The bill would allow universities to “enforce reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions” on speech occurring in the open, outdoor areas of the public, but those restrictions would need to follow applicable standards set by the Supreme Court.

It should provide for $25,000 in statutory damages, plus attorney’s fees, for each offense.

YOU WILL SEE MORE PEOPLE SAYING THIS, FROM ACROSS THE POLITICAL SPECTRUM: Break Up Silicon Valley’s Tax-Avoiding, Job-Killing, Soul-Sucking Machine. “Four companies dominate our daily lives unlike any other in human history: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. We love our nifty phones and just-a-click-away services, but these behemoths enjoy unfettered economic domination and hoard riches on a scale not seen since the monopolies of the gilded age. The only logical conclusion? We must bust up big tech.”

And Silicon Valley has gotten itself into a situation where it can neither draw on a deep well of public trust and admiration, nor count on protection from either political party. Maybe they’re not as smart as they think they are.