Monday, February 08, 2010
Gillespie and Lessig debate free speech and campaign financing
Libertarian journalist Nick Gillespie and legal scholar Lawrence Lessig discuss public financing of campaigns and the effects of money on politics
GOP fires back: White House did not tell us about reading Abdulmutallab his rights
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/GOP-fires-back-White-House-did-not-tell-us-about-reading-Abdulmutallab-his-rights-83760942.html
On "Meet the Press," Brennan said that on Christmas night, just hours after Abdulmutallab tried to blow up Northwest Airlines flight 253, Brennan called GOP Senators Mitch McConnell and Christopher Bond, as well as Republican Representatives John Boehner and Peter Hoekstra, and told them that Abdulmutallab was in FBI custody. "None of those individuals raised any concerns with me at that point," Brennan said. "They didn't say, Is he going into military custody? Is he going to be Mirandized?"
Each of the lawmakers strongly denies Brennan's account. A spokesman for McConnell says, "During a brief call from the White House, Sen. McConnell was given a heads up that Abdulmutallab was in custody, but little else. He wasn’t told of the decision to Mirandize Abdulmutallab."
Saturday, February 06, 2010
Ronnie and Joe
Ronald Reagan was born on this day in 1911. Here's a little story about how he got along with the common folks...
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YTFkZTcyMzFmNjNhZWQ1ZTMwY2NiZTNjNTE0YTAxMGE=“Well, what does it look like?” asked Reagan. Clark noted he had a model in the car: Joe, who was wearing the belt. “Send him up,” ordered the president. They called for Joe, who entered via the door of Reagan’s secretary.Joe had worked for the federal government for half a century, but had never been within 50 yards of the Oval Office. He walked in. He saw Clark, Vice President Bush, the senior aides, and the president of the United States. He was in awe, overcome. Suddenly, this tough six-foot-four man began weeping: He had come so far since Jim Crow and the Great Depression. He was choked up.No one in the room was prepared for that reaction. They were dead silent, uncomfortable, unable to respond — except for Ronald Reagan. The president rose, walked over to the driver, extended his hand, breathed in, and said matter-of-factly, “Mr. Bullock, I understand you have a belt to show me?”It was an “everyman” touch. And it put old Joe immediately at ease. Business-like, Joe showed the belt, and then he and Reagan began swapping stories, chatting away like old friends.“The rest of us just faded away,” said Bill Clark, “as the two got along famously.” President and driver, remembering the old days.
Friday, February 05, 2010
Steyn: Credibility is what’s really melting
V. K. Raina, of the Geological Survey of India, produced a special report demonstrating that the run-for-your-life-the-glaciers-are-melting IPCC scenario was utterly false. For his pains, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the self-aggrandizing old bruiser and former railroad engineer who serves as head honcho of the IPCC jet set, dismissed Mr. Raina’s research as “voodoo science.” He’s now been obliged to admit the voodoo was all on his side. But don’t worry. By 2008, Syed Hasnain’s decade-old casual chit-chat over the phone to a London journalist had become “settled science,” so Dr. Pachauri’s company TERI (The Energy & Resources Institute) approached the Carnegie Corporation for a grant to research “challenges to South Asia posed by melting Himalayan glaciers,” and was rewarded with half a million bucks. Which they promptly used to hire Syed Hasnain. In other words, professor Hasnain has landed a cushy gig researching solutions to an entirely non-existent global crisis he accidentally invented over a 15-minute phone call 10 years earlier. As they say in the glacier business, ice work if you can get it.
Thursday, February 04, 2010
Gangster government targets Toyota
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/Gangster-government-targets-Toyota-83460857.html
What is it about the automotive industry that inspires such thuggish attitudes in the Obama administration? The Examiner's Michael Barone coined the term "gangster government" to describe threats by the White House last spring against Chrysler creditors who had the temerity to insist that bankruptcy laws be followed in the bailout of the perennially ailing third member of the once-fabled Detroit Big Three. Now along comes Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood muttering darkly that "we're not finished with Toyota" in the controversy over sticking gas pedals in vehicles made and sold in America by the Japanese automaker. [...] The potential of the current sticking gas pedal controversy to inflict damage on Toyota here in its largest single market is seen in the January sales figures. Toyota sales are down 16 percent while GM is up 14 percent (Ford, which declined a government bailout last year, is up 25 percent, while Chrysler is down 8 percent). Keep the controversy going and odds are good that Toyota sales will continue to drop. The biggest losers besides American consumers will be the men and women who own and work at Toyota's 1,200 U.S. dealerships and the 30,000 Americans who build Toyotas in its five factories here. LaHood might as well have said "Nice car company ya got there, be a shame if anything happened to it."
Monday, February 01, 2010
The Death of Global Warming
http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2010/02/01/the-death-of-global-warming/
After years in which global warming activists had lectured everyone about the overwhelming nature of the scientific evidence, it turned out that the most prestigious agencies in the global warming movement were breaking laws, hiding data, and making inflated, bogus claims resting on, in some cases, no scientific basis at all. This latest story in the London Times is yet another shocker; the IPCC’s claims that the rainforests were going to disappear as a result of global warming are as bogus and fraudulent as its claims that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035.
My comment: Global Warming is not really dead as long as our politicians believe in it, and our scientists can get grants to study it, and our celebrities can fly around the world in private jets to combat it. As long as there are Nobel Peace Prizes and Oscars to be awarded, there will be a Global Warming crisis. Even if it's not really true, aren't we better off believing in something? Aren't elaborate computer models more inspiring than mere data? Isn't caring about the planet more important than scientific truth? I think you know the answer deep in your heart.
Pelosi's Children and Grandchildren Used Military Jets As Private Cross-Country Shuttle Service
Air Pelosi must have a great Frequent Flyer program:
http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2010/01/pelosi-children-and-grandchildren-get.html Sunday, January 31, 2010
SNL Sketch with Jon Hamm as Scott Brown
Click for the video. NRO also got the real Scott Brown's reaction.
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ODdiNjc1Yzg3NDZkY2M1YzkxNGQxNTYyNjk2MmJiMjM= Friday, January 29, 2010
Class War - Reason Magazine
(via NRO)
A big part of California's financial problem is the amazingly generous retirement programs for government workers.
http://reason.com/archives/2010/01/12/class-war/The United States had 2.3 state and local government employees per 100 citizens in 1946 and has 6.5 state and local government employees per 100 citizens now. In 1947, Hodges writes, 78 percent of the national income went to the private sector, 16 percent to the federal sector, and 6 percent to the state and local government sector. Now 54 percent of the economy is private, 28 percent goes to the feds, and 18 percent goes to state and local governments. The trend lines are ominous. Bigger government means more government employees. Those employees then become a permanent lobby for continual government growth. The nation may have reached critical mass; the number of government employees at every level may have gotten so high that it is politically impossible to roll back the bureaucracy, rein in the costs, and restore lost freedoms. People who are supposed to serve the public have become a privileged elite that exploits political power for financial gain and special perks. Because of its political power, this interest group has rigged the game so there are few meaningful checks on its demands. Government employees now receive far higher pay, benefits, and pensions than the vast majority of Americans working in the private sector. Even when they are incompetent or abusive, they can be fired only after a long process and only for the most grievous offenses.It’s a two-tier system in which the rulers are making steady gains at the expense of the ruled. The predictable results: Higher taxes, eroded public services, unsustainable levels of debt, and massive roadblocks to reforming even the poorest performing agencies and school systems. If this system is left to grow unchecked, we will end up with a pale imitation of the free society envisioned by the Founders.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Coulter: Can't We At Least Get a Toaster?
For the past two decades, Democrats have specialized in insulating financial giants from the consequences of their own high-risk bets. Citigroup and Goldman Sachs alone have been rescued from their risky bets by unwitting taxpayers four times in the last 15 years.Bankers get all the profits, glory and bonuses when their flimflam bets pay off, but the taxpayers foot the bill when Wall Street firms' bets go bad on -- to name just three examples -- Mexican bonds (1995), Thai, Indonesian and South Korean bonds (1997), and Russian bonds (1998).As Peter Schweizer writes in his magnificent book Architects of Ruin: "Wall Street is a very far cry from the arena of freewheeling capitalism most people recall from their history books." With their reverse-Midas touch, the execrable baby boom generation turned Wall Street into what Schweizer dubs "risk-free Clintonian state capitalism."
Monday, January 25, 2010
Climategate: The Wheels Come Off for the IPCC
All in all, not a good week for the IPCC. Two major errors, both of them integrating inflammatory, un-reviewed results into what had been advertised as the most authoritative peer-reviewed summary of the state of climate science. This follows the collapse of Copenhagen, and the Climategate emails’ evidence of pressure to influence the results of climate science. All of them working in the same direction: to slant the evidence presented to the world toward the conclusion that AGW is a current crisis, a world cataclysm.
Now, suddenly, those conclusions are hard to credit.The wheels have begun to come off.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Linda Chavez: Fine Tuning the Message
http://townhall.com/columnists/LindaChavez/2010/01/22/fine_tuning_the_message
President Obama needs to give a few more speeches, maybe get his face on TV more often, give a few more interviews to friendly journalists and everything will be all right, despite Democrats' stunning defeat in the Massachusetts Senate race this week. "(W)e were so busy just getting stuff done and dealing with the immediate crises that were in front of us that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are and why we have to make sure those institutions are matching up with those values," the president explained to ABC's George Stephanopoulos. Yeah, that's the ticket.
The president gave only 411 speeches during his first 365 days in office; that's barely more than one a day. Maybe if he'd given two a day, the American people would have gotten through their thick skulls that he knows what's good for them, even if they don't like it.
‘Head Start’: The $166 Billion Fed Ed Failure
“Head Start,” the flagship pre-kindergarten program introduced in 1965, has been a $166 billion failure. That’s the upshot of a sophisticated multi-year study just released by the Department of Health and Human Services.
Why is this important? Because $166 billion has been squandered on this program over the past half century, and the Obama administration is wasting even more, even faster.
Krauthammer: The Meaning of Brown
After Coakley’s defeat, Obama pretended that the real cause was a generalized anger and frustration “not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years, but what’s happened over the last eight years.”Let’s get this straight: The antipathy to George W. Bush is so enduring and powerful that . . . it just elected a Republican senator in Massachusetts? Why, the man is omnipotent.
And the Democrats are delusional: Scott Brown won by running against Obama, not against Bush. He won by brilliantly nationalizing the race, running hard against the Obama agenda, most notably Obamacare. Killing it was his No. 1 campaign promise.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
SCOTUS Knocks Down McCain-Feingold
Here's a case where I blame Bush: he signed the bill knowing it was unconstitutional. Of course, I blame McCain even more for writing it in the first place.
The Supreme Court today struck down key elements of McCain-Feingold legislation in a decision that could radically alter campaign finance.
In a broad 5-4 decision in Citizens United vs. FEC, the Court found unconstitutional provisions in the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act that prevented corporate and labor union money from funding some kinds of political communication. Under the ruling these groups may now fund political advertisements out of their general treasuries.
The decision overturns Austin vs. Michigan Chamber of Commerce and part of McConnell vs. FEC, which separated individual and collective campaign contributions into two legal classes and restricted the latter. But it upholds restrictions on direct contributions by corporate bodies to candidates, as well as requirements that the funding sources of political advertisements be disclosed to the public.
What America Should Take Away from the Haiti Earthquake Relief Disaster
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/worst_case_scenarios/4343077.html
Here at Popular Mechanics, we've posted a number of special issues on disaster preparedness, with stories on the top first-aid kits you can buy, steps to save yourself when a natural disaster hits, stories about smart survival tactics that saved lives, hundreds of must-have survival gadgets and gear and a lot more. There's also lots of government help on such topics. (This L.A. Fire Department guide (pdf) on earthquake preparation is actually applicable to a lot of other potential disasters. And there's much more information available at Ready.gov.) Survival gear is important to have ready at home. In particular, water filters and water storage devices are often neglected, but critically important, since clean water is often hard to come by after a disaster.
Stunning, stubborn national-security incompetence
Quoting from Senator Sessions' statement released after hearings regarding the Christmas Day bomber:
I am deeply disturbed by the stunning revelations from today's oversight hearings in the Homeland Security and Judiciary Committees. The decision to prosecute Umar Abdulmutallab in civilian court, which required him to be given a Miranda warning and access to a defense lawyer, may have cost us crucial intelligence about current and future plots against our country. Even more alarming, we learned today that these rash decisions were made without consulting key counter-terrorism officials in the administration, including the Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair. In his testimony today, Mr. Blair stated that the administration failed to deploy the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group that was put in place for this very purpose. We learned that the administration had no policy in place to determine whether Abdulmutallab would be treated as a civilian or as an unprivileged belligerent-that, in effect, these decisions were made "on the fly" without any meaningful consideration of the consequences. And we learned from FBI Director Mueller's questioning that responsibility for the decision to switch gears from intelligence collection to criminal processing lies with an unnamed high-ranking official at the Department of Justice.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Tom Campbell on the National Debt
Campbell is a former Congressman, State Senator, and State Director of Finance under Governor Schwarzenegger. He is seeking the Republican nomination for US Senate in 2010 to take on Barbara Boxer.
America’s national debt is an economic burden, a moral failing, and a foreign policy vulnerability. It’s the single most important problem we face, and that’s why I’m running for the US Senate. The sheer dimension of the federal budget deficit, and debt, is almost beyond comprehension. We owe 12 trillion dollars. Our entire economy produces 14 trillion every year. So, we’ve now borrowed the value of almost an entire year’s production of every good and service by every worker in America. If we stopped borrowing today, and tried to pay back what we owe at the rate we’ve been paying it back, it would take 293 years.Every child born in our country inherits a $40,000 obligation to pay back money her or his parents borrowed. That’s the moral issue. Parents should save to give something to their children. The federal government, however, has done the opposite. It has borrowed from our children, to buy favor with current voters. That’s immoral.
Read the whole thing.
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