Sheila Bair: Fix income inequality with $10 million loans for everyone!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/fix-income-inequality-with-10-million-loans-for-everyone/2012/04/13/gIQATUQAFT_story.html

Under my plan, each American household could borrow $10 million from the Fed at zero interest. The more conservative among us can take that money and buy 10-year Treasury bonds. At the current 2 percent annual interest rate, we can pocket a nice $200,000 a year to live on. The more adventuresome can buy 10-year Greek debt at 21 percent, for an annual income of $2.1 million. Or if Greece is a little too risky for you, go with Portugal, at about 12 percent, or $1.2 million dollars a year. (No sense in getting greedy.)

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Mark Steyn: Buying ‘Buffett Rule’ makes you a fool

http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/buffett-349130-obama-tax.html#

Sometimes societies become too stupid to survive. A nation that takes Barack Obama's current rhetorical flourishes seriously is certainly well advanced along that dismal path. The current federal debt burden works out at about $140,000 per federal taxpayer, and President Obama is proposing to increase both debt and taxes. Are you one of those taxpayers? How much more do you want added to your $140,000 debt burden?

If you confiscate the total wealth of the Forbes 400 richest Americans it comes to $1.5 trillion, which is just a little less than the Obama budget deficit for year.

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Holder Meets Sharpton - Andrew C. McCarthy

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/296005/holder-meets-sharpton-andrew-c-...

> Holder is currently in “partnership” with his fast friend on the highly charged Trayvon Martin case. In the days before the nation’s chief federal law-enforcement official lionized the CEO of the nation’s racial-grievance industry, Sharpton had been in Florida, threatening that his “action network” — as in “direct action,” the community-organizer’s stock-in-trade — would “move to the next level” if authorities in Sanford, Fla., failed to arrest George Zimmerman, the man (or, if you prefer the New York Times Agitator’s Glossary, the “white Hispanic”) who shot Mr. Martin, a black 17-year-old.
> With such notches on his belt as Crown Heights and Freddie’s Fashion Mart, there’s not a lot of mystery involved when the Reverend Al starts conjuring “the next level” of “action.” Still, never what you’d call a master of subtlety, Sharpton — between inciting mobs with demands to “arrest Zimmerman now!” — expressly threatened to “occupy” the city of Sanford.
>> The nation’s chief federal law enforcer reacted to these threats of lawlessness with paeans to Sharpton’s besotted history.

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Medical Daily: Drinking Alcohol May Significantly Enhance Problem Solving Skills

http://medicaldaily.com/news/20120411/9496/alcohol-solving-skills-analytical-thinking-creativity-study.htm

Scientists found that men who either drank two pints of beer or two glasses of wine before solving brain teasers not only got more questions right, they also were quicker in delivering correct answers, compared to men who answered the questions sober.

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Why We Need Voter-ID Laws Now - John Fund

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/295431/why-we-need-voter-id-laws-now-john-fund?pg=1

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Shelby Steele: The Exploitation of Trayvon Martin

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303302504577323691134926300.html

So the idea that Trayvon Martin is today's Emmett Till, as the Rev. Jackson has said, suggests nothing less than a stubborn nostalgia for America's racist past. In that bygone era civil rights leaders and white liberals stood on the highest moral ground. They literally knew themselves—given their genuine longing to see racism overcome—as historically transformative people. If the world resisted them, as it surely did, it only made them larger than life.

It was a time when standing on the side of the good required true selflessness and so it ennobled people. And this chance to ennoble oneself through a courageous moral stand is what so many blacks and white liberals miss today—now that white racism is such a defeated idea. There is a nostalgia for that time when posture alone ennobled. So today even the hint of old-fashioned raw racism excites with its potential for ennoblement.

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A Conversation with Peter Thiel

http://the-american-interest.com/article.cfm?piece=1187

> It’s not like it has been defunded, so why has DARPA been doing so much less for the economy than it did forty or fifty years ago? Parts of it have become politicized. You can’t just write checks to the thirty smartest scientists in the United States. Instead there are bureaucratic processes, and I think the politicization of science—where a lot of scientists have to write grant applications, be subject to peer review, and have to get all these people to buy in—all this has been toxic, because the skills that make a great scientist and the skills that make a great politician are radically different. There are very few people who are both great scientists and great politicians. So a conservative account of what happened with science in the 20thcentury is that we had a decentralized, non-governmental approach all the way through the 1930s and early 1940s. At that point, the government could accelerate and push things tremendously, but only at the price of politicizing it over a series of decades. Today we have a hundred times more scientists than we did in 1920, but their productivity per capita is less that it used to be.
>
Read the whole thing.

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Carbon Emissions Are Good - Robert Zubrin

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/295098/carbon-emissions-are-good-rober...

> Putting aside for the moment the question of whether human industrial CO2 emissions are having an effect on climate, it is quite clear that they are raising atmospheric CO2 levels. As a result, they are having a strong and markedly positiveeffect on plant growth worldwide. There is no doubt about this. NASA satellite observations taken from orbit since 1958 show that, concurrent with the 19 percent increase in atmospheric CO2 over the past half century, the rate of plant growth in the continental United States has increased by 14 percent. Studies done at Oak Ridge National Lab on forest trees have shown that increasing the carbon dioxide level 50 percent, to the 550 parts per million level projected to prevail at the end of the 21 century, will likely increase photosynthetic productivity by a further 24 percent. This is readily reproducible laboratory science. If CO2 levels are increased, the rate of plant growth will accelerate.
>> Now let us consider the question of warming: If it is occurring — and I believe it is, based not on disputable temperature measurements but on sea levels, which have risen two inches in two decades — is it a good thing or a bad thing? Answer: It is a very good thing. Global warming would increase the rate of evaporation from the oceans. This would increase rainfall worldwide. In addition, global warming would lengthen the growing season, thereby increasing still further the bounty of both agriculture and nature.

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Guerrilla Street Art at the Gas Pump

Via Instapundit.com, Obama keeps a promise...

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/140181/

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Justice Kennedy's Million Dollar Question - Richard Epstein

http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/112856

The claim of an unbroken historical understanding of the Commerce Clause put forward by Obamacare supporters is nothing more than a myth cooked up for the occasion. But to supporters of the ACA, it is a necessary myth, which they invoke in order to lend legitimacy to their case for the constitutionality of the law. And on this point at least, for all their anger and resentment, they are correct. It is far easier to extend Wickard v. Filburn to the case of supposed inaction if that decision were on all-fours with Gibbons.

But once it is recognized that it these New Deal Commerce Clause decisions represent a conscious and violent departure from the pre-1937 precedents, we can fairly ask whether it makes sense to take a manifestly wrong decision one step further. The original constitutional balance is far wiser than the souped-up version whose chief contribution to the welfare of the nation was to legitimate the national agricultural cartels that the states could never form acting alone.

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A Narrow Escape For Taxpayers

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/04/a-narrow-escape-for-taxpayers.php

The collapse of the “green” energy industry continued today, as Solar Trust of America LLC filed for bankruptcy. Solar Trust was, it claimed, carrying out the world’s largest solar energy project in California.

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Skepticism in science rises — Glenn Harlan Reynolds

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/faith_in_science_ElyzoJm9wNW7Vl7m8ESXYP

In fact, the very core of the scientific method is supposed to be skepticism. We accept arguments not because they come from people in authority but because they can be proven correct — in independent experiments by independent experimenters. If you make a claim that can’t be proven false in an independent experiment, you’re not really making a scientific claim at all.

And saying, “trust us,” while denouncing skeptics as — horror of horrors — “skeptics” doesn’t count as science, either, even if it comes from someone with a doctorate and a lab coat.

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Peggy Noonan: Not-So-Smooth Operator

http://online.wsj.com/article/declarations.html

Faced with the blowback, the president offered a so-called accommodation that even its supporters recognized as devious. Not ill-advised, devious. Then his operatives flooded the airwaves with dishonest—not wrongheaded, dishonest—charges that those who defend the church's religious liberties are trying to take away your contraceptives.

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Spike Lee retweets wrong address

http://dailycaller.com/2012/03/27/believe-it-or-not-spike-lee-mightve-outsmarted-himself/

Hey, if these two didn’t want to be intimidated and terrorized by an angry movie director and his online followers, they should’ve thought about that before they moved into the house where, 10 years later, somebody would think Zimmerman lived.

If you’re against vigilantes taking matters into their own hands, except when it comes to dealing with George Zimmerman, #YouMightBeALiberal.

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George Will on The Inexorable March of Creative Destruction

http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2012/03/22/the_inexorable_march_of_creative_destruction_99578.html

Today's primary political and cultural conflict is, Postrel says, between people, mislabeled "progressives," who crave social stasis, and those, paradoxically called conservatives, who welcome the perpetual churning of society by dynamism.

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Obamacare: The reckoning - Charles Krauthammer

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/obamacare-the-reckoning/2012/03/22/gIQALF1QUS_story.html?tid=pm_opinions_pop

Rarely has one law so exemplified the worst of the Leviathan state — grotesque cost, questionable constitutionality and arbitrary bureaucratic coerciveness.

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The Reagan in Romney - Larry Kudlow

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/294317/reagan-romney-larry-kudlow

> Senator Jim DeMint, another conservative icon, recently told the National Journal after meeting with the former governor, “What I can tell conservatives from my perspective is that I’m not only comfortable with Romney, I’m excited about the possibility of him possibly becoming our nominee.”

> Romney made it clear that economic freedom is the key to the American economy. He said, “The history of the world has shown that economic freedom is the only force that has consistently lifted people out of poverty.” He added, “The genius of America is that we nurture these dreams and the dreamers. We honor them, and, yes, we reward them.”
>> Pause a moment on the idea of rewarding the dreamers. This is a crucial difference with Obama, who wants to penalize the dreamers. Make a bunch of money and you’re gonna pay higher tax rates. It’s the class-warfare 1 percent versus the 99 percent. Tax the rich. Redistribute.

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Obama’s whopper about Rutherford B. Hayes and the telephone

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/obamas-whopper-about-ru...

> So, rather than “not looking forwards,” as Obama put it, Hayes quickly embraced the new technology.

> Besides historians, Obama’s staff also could have checked with the White House Historical Association, which recounts Hayes’s interest in the telephone in a classroom lesson for children in grades 4-8.

http://www.whitehousehistory.org/whha_classroom/classroom_4-8-presidentspeak....

> In 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes (1877-1881) spoke on the telephone to the instrument’s inventor, Alexander Graham Bell. Two years later, Hayes had his own telephone in the White House. But the invention was so new that very few homes or offices in Washington had phones, so Hayes had few people to talk to. In fact, the president’s telephone number was "1."

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Rutherford B. Hayes is calling

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/hayes-has-first-phone-installed-in-white-house

May 10, 1877:
Hayes has first phone installed in White House

On this day in 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes has the White House's first telephone installed in the mansion's telegraph room. President Hayes embraced the new technology, though he rarely received phone calls. In fact, the Treasury Department possessed the only other direct phone line to the White House at that time. 

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Rutherford's revenge

(via instapundit.com)

lots more:

http://www.quickmeme.com/hip-rutherford-b-hayes/?upcoming

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