I hope I’m not the only one bothered by this. Any Presidential candidate who cracks down on the sale of military weapons to local law enforcement would get my vote.
This letter probably explains the reason I would consider voting for McCain. As I’ve said on the other blog, McCain’s policy positions are irrelevant. He’s going to have a Democratic Congress.
Ah, Houston police. Makes me almost glad I didn’t get that job down there.
Personally, I’ve always suspected as much. Human beings are so smart because we eat processed food, lessening the energy demands of our digestive system.
Not a link; just an observation. I’m enjoying the Olympics quite a bit. Last night’s gymnastic final was fantastic.
I’m not surprised that settling is better for malpractice plaintiffs than trial. Being familiar with several trials myself, the greed of the lawyers has a tendency to run afoul of reasonable juries.
A great look at why cap and trade won’t work. It’s one thing to cap and trade sulphur dioxide. It’s another thing to cap and trade the lifeblood of economics.
Prediction. Within a decade, the major airlines will either be bankrupt or running only international flights. Their business model — which consists of nickel and diming the customer to death — just isn’t feasible anymore.
If this doesn’t convince people that the government should stay the hell out of energy policy, nothing will:
The Environmental Protection Agency rejected on Thursday a request to cut the quota for the use of ethanol in cars, concluding, for the time being, that the goal of reducing the nation’s reliance on oil trumps any effect on food prices from making fuel from corn.
I am extremely dubious about both the practically and the usefulness of “energy independence”. But this is beyond the pale. The EPA is essentially saying that they don’t care if anyone starves or if tens of millions are pushed into poverty. ADM needs its subsidies, God dammit!
I got 7 out of 13. Watching too much Doctor Who, I think.
I honestly think that this perfectly encapsulates the thinking of the anti-school choice legions.
Never forget. Bush has not discredited small government ideas. He never pursued them. You can’t praise Bush in 2000 for departing from small government ideas and then claim he’s unpopular because of small government ideas he thoroughly abandoned.
Some hope on the eminent domain front. Slowly but surely.
This is what happens when you let parents control policy. They were scared kids were going to hurt themselves on play equipment. Now they’re angry because the protective mats get hot. They want the city — I shit you not — to put protective canopies over every playground. It’s only a matter of time until the city fixed on the best solution: demolish all the playgrounds.
LA just banned plastic bags from stores. I feel like I’m beating a dead horse pointing out that this is bad for the environment. And some people think we should have the government solve global warming.
How lovely. Pointlessly terrorize law-abiding citizens; get decorated for it.
Having tobacco regulated by the FDA? Bad idea. What is with politicians that they worship certain agencies so much? The FDA can’t keep up with their current tasks, let along regulating the billions of cigarettes Americans suck on every year. One feels that this is a backdoor attempt to outlaw cigarettes.
I exaggerate not a bit when I describe the prevailing politics of L.A. to be roughly as follows: Wal-Mart and big box stores = evil, and need to be stopped at all costs. Also, we need more cheap supermarkets! Mom and pop stores need to be defended from Big Corporations, unless they sell fried chicken or used tires, or get in the way of a big development project. We have an affordable housing crisis, which is why we need to raise property taxes, limit the footprint of houses on their lots, and bulldoze thousands of affordable houses to make way for schools that we don’t need!
I’ve finally figured out the best way to enforce the DMCA. Ban everything!. Oh, they’re already taking their advice, trying to ban comments. Yes, comments.
As a professional astronomer (for the moment), this made me laugh. Well, giggle. Well, grin at least.
Why does this happen in every economic downturn? The states splurge and splurge. And the second the economy tumbles, they scream poverty. Correction. I understand why they do it. Why does the press not call them on it?
Look like New Orleans is following New York’s bad example. Drumming up conviction rates by throwing minority pot smokers in prison. Why is Barack Obama not talking about this?
Megan McArdle defends oil speculators. I don’t know enough to really comment but I do know that banning oil speculation crosses me as (a) impossible and; (b) a ripe target for unintended consequences.
I generally disagree with almost everything Glenn Greenwald says. But his point on telecom immunity is very well made and highly persuasive. Maybe if the left hadn’t devoted so much effort to defending the ability of lawyers to sue everyone in subpoena distance, we’d pay more attention.
I’m going to shit myself laughing if the Republicans nominate a closeted gay man for vice-President.
An inspiring must-read about a school valedictorian who is there because of vouchers. Just remember, it’s horrible to give opportunities to smart kids and drain money from the all-important “system”.
In another example of how liberals hurt those they want to help, Oregon’s limits on paycheck lending is sending people into the arms of unscrupulous lenders.
Our stupid War on Drugs ruins another good life. But hey, if she wanted to live in housing, she should have turfed those troubled kids to the streets.
Is it just me or is there something a bit racist in the desire of rich westerners to keep uncontacted tribes out of contact?
More education dumbassery. Let’s not let smart kids get ahead of everyone. It’s not like we need smart people to solve our society’s problems or anything. We’ll just elect Obama and everything will magically heal.
That massive verdict against Vioxx on behalf of the cardiac patient who hadn’t even been taking the drug? Overturned.
Update: Just to show that stupidity is neither conservative nor liberal (just mostly liberal), the trial lawyers are bitching about “judicial activism”. Just because the court threw out a verdict that was based on … no scientific evidence.
Giving police assault weapons in a city that bans handguns. What could possibly go wrong? Why are we treating our police forces more and more like military forces — especially as crime rates fall?
Let’s unnecessarily redesign our currency to accommodate the blind — an accommodation, incidentally, they claim they don’t need. Why not? It will only impose a few tens of billions in compliance costs.
Maybe this will stir the academic liberals to reconsider wealth envy. Mass wants to tax the hell out of universities with big endowments (i.e., Harvard). I wonder if all the people who support taxes that are targeted specifically at Walmart will get behind this.
Yet more data on how the “growing inequality” meme is bullshit. As Levitt notes, the liberals are really going to hate this one. Walmart an globalization are propping us up.
Jesus, this Atlanta thing is getting worse each day. Our glorious War on Drugs.
Personally, I am completely unsurprised that admitting and apologizing for medical mistakes is dramatically lowering the number of malpractice lawsuits. In any business, nothing compounds an injury more than the insult of “lawyering up”. A couple of years ago, we bought a water softener. The RO filter on our sink flooded the cabinet. Rather than dispute, the company (Ecowater) apologized, sent out a plumber to repair the damage free of charge and cut us a check to repair the cabinets. We probably wouldn’t have sued anyway, but their quick decision to make things right guaranteed we wouldn’t and kept us as loyal customers.
Yeah, customer service. Who’da thunk it?
Update: Thinking about this, I’ve watched first hand the evolution of malpractice defense. There was a time when the mantra was “settle settle settle” and malpractice lawsuits were always settled out of court because of the fear of a big verdict. But then the lawyers figured out that — surprise! — this encouraged lawsuits. Additionally, juries weren’t quite as dumb as everyone thought. So the strategy changed to “settle when you’ve clearly screwed up”.
The mantra of “deny and defend” has been in place for a while but it really made no sense. I’m glad to see someone finally realized it. It only took thirty years.
Here’s a list of reasons that won’t work. More to the point, OPEC isn’t restricting production right now; pretty much everyone is working their capacity flat out. Hillary Clinton wants to sue OPEC for not producing oil from wells they haven’t drilled yet. Next: a lawsuit against Ford for not building us the cool flying cars we were promised in The Jetsons. I WANT MY FLYING CAR!!!!
Is it a dead cat bounce or are we avoiding a recession? We should know in just a few years.
The myth of organic food. It’s amazing how widespread ludditism is.
More environmentalist bullshit. Mass transit? Bad for the environment. They’re to foist one of these things on Austin right now, which is going to go over like a gay pride parade in Salt Lake City.
A very scary post on the search of ET life. That we aren’t finding it may indicate intelligent species are likely to destroy themselves. I’m thinking of the Large Hadron Collider. The “degree in astrophysics” part of my mind knows it’s safe. The “scared of nothing” part is worried.
Elliot Spitzer’s whore is all class. She’s suing Girls Gone Wild because she lied about her age to appear in a video at age 17.
Just a little insight into the country the Democrats are screwing over to pander to unions.
Pot arrests are way up in NYC. But I’m sure giving this people a pointless damaging drug conviction is accomplishing something.
This has got to be one of the dumbest things I’ve read. The Yanks spent five hours digging up a Red Sox jersey a worker buried in their new stadium. I’m with Jim Baker.
Before I go on the following rant, I just want to make sure I have my facts straight. You’re telling me that a couple of weeks ago, a large corporation authorized the demolition of recently completed construction to remove a piece of cloth from a non-load-bearing area of their new facility? Let me check to make sure this actually happened. OK. Now, let me check the calendar. Son of a gun, it says right here that it’s 2008.
You realize what this means, right? It means we are no better at gauging cause and effect than the brother-in-law of the guy who discovered fire. We have, in spite of technological developments that might argue otherwise, no more right to the high ground of logic than the fellow whose job it was to select the proper virgin to be dumped into the volcano to appease the rumbly god therein. We might have gotten over the notion that the world is flat, but that’s probably the best thing you can say about us.
Five hours with jackhammers, folks. Five hours! That’s not counting the time it took to remediate the damage, either. Please don’t tell me it’s “all in good fun,” either. Good fun is spending $50 to hire an actor to dress like a wizard and put a pretend curse on the other team. This, on the other hand, is the work of people determined to undo what they believe to be a palpable threat to the well being of their enterprise. I have to know: did the Age of Reason bypass the Bronx?
The biggest porker in Washington? Why, Hillary Clinton, is that you?
The gross incompetence of the Bush Administration continues to boggle the mind.
Can there really be any doubt that Media Matters is nothing but a part of the Clinton machine?
The recent spate of killings gives a misleading impression. Since the peak years of the early 1990s, the number of murders in Chicago has fallen by more than half. In the first three months of this year, homicides were down by 1.1 percent. No one would describe the current murder rate as acceptable, but the city has made huge progress.
It has done so despite the alleged problem cited by Weis, which is the availability of guns, and particularly one type of gun. “There are just too many weapons here,” he declared at a Sunday news conference. “Why in the world do we allow citizens to own assault rifles?”
Actually, in Chicago “we” don’t allow citizens to own assault rifles. Elsewhere they are allowed for the same reason other firearms are permitted. The gun Weis villainized is a type of semiautomatic that has a fearsome military appearance but is functionally identical to many legal sporting arms.
And its bark is worse than its bite. As of March 31, there had been 87 homicides in the city. When I asked the Chicago Police Department how many of the murders are known to have involved assault rifles, the answer came back: one.
Stupidy of the day: guys, have you read the Bible? I’m a Jew and I knew this was garbage.
How to get rich: beat a woman severely on a bus, then sue when they ban you.