I’m sorry. Am I the only conservative in America who thinks that Obama speaking at Notre Dame is a much ado about nothing? He’s the President; it’s an honor no matter what you think of him. Notre Dame welcoming him does not insult the memories of aborted fetuses.
Things like gender-selective abortions make my reluctant pro-choice position ever more reluctant. How do you think about something like this?
Britain is cracking down on bling. Just when you think the British Nanny State can’t get dumber.
Freakonomics asks why, if poverty causes crime, this recession is seeing a big drop. Damn facts.
Quote of the day: “Even in California, you may not be able to sustain a class action lawsuit against a product that worked fine and didn’t harm you.”
How bad is the Employee Free Choice Act? So bad that George McGovern is coming out against it in a great editorial. The words “McGovern” and “great editorial” show up on this space a lot more often than I’d think. He’s liberal, but a principled one.
Obama fires his first gay linguist. Change is happening so fast, there’s smoke.
You know those paltry budget cuts Obama has proposed? His own Congress is rejecting them. As I’ve said, the Congressional Democrats are going to be his biggest problem.
Matt Welch has a good take on the latest steroid hysteria.
You know, polls showing that a slim majority of Americans favor waterboarding of terrorist might mean something to me if we decided issues in this country based on popular vote and not, as we thankfully do, on the law and Constitution.
Obama improves international relations — by taking the EU line and blasting low-tax friends as tax havens. Nice touch.
Yet another good editorial on the torture issue. It hits a number of my pet whack-a-moles on this issue, notably the SERE canard:
The most common defense of waterboarding is that we subjected our own soldiers to it. That’s true–as a way of training them to withstand enemy torture. When you reverse engineer a torture-resistance program, you’re almost by definition engaging in torture.
In reality, Bush’s waterboarding methods did differ from the U.S. military’s torture-resistance training, in that our soldiers knew how far we’d go and could stop the exercise if they couldn’t bear it. Conservatives have inadvertently confirmed this point. Numerous Republicans object that the release of the torture memos will render waterboarding and other techniques useless–“terrorists are now aware of the absolute limit of what the U.S. government could do to extract information from them,” complain former Bush officials Michael Hayden and Michael Mukasey.
It’s true. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, or torture methods devised thereby. Our chief weapon is surprise. (Surprise and fear. … Amongst our weaponry are such elements as surprise and fear, as Michael Palin might put it.) That’s exactly why training soldiers to withstand waterboarding is different than actually waterboarding.
Nick Gillespie is having none of Obama’s “I’m a regular burger guy” stunt.
New Jersey is considering a law that would not prosecute teens for underage drinking if they bring a passed out friend to the ER. Here’s an idea: why not just stop prosecuting underage drinking at all?
No link, I don’t want to dig it up, but Arlen Specter’s statement that Jack Kemp would be alive today had we fully funded the “War on Cancer” is a perfect illustration of the stupidity of politicians. Never mind the laws of physics or the intricacies of biology and physiology. All we had to do was care enough and cancer would have been cured. Idiot.
The more I read about it, the more the Stimulus seems like a great big lottery. One day, there will be an accounting for all this.
What is it about environmental doomsayers that being wrong — being spectacularly wrong — being spectacularly wrong for 45 damn years does not discredit them?
How Reagan won the Cold War. He was, in many ways, a dove among hawks.
Baindbridge responds to Obama’s Wall Street comments. Money quote:
So we have a President with basically no business experience, guided by a bunch of Ivy League policy wonks most of whom have limited real world business experience, deciding how big businesses should be and where young people ought to work.
That about says it, doesn’t it?
The FDA wants to ban electronic cigarettes for reasons that make absolutely no sense.
The two best libertarian criticisms of Obama’s first 100 days. I’ve been very disappointed with how bereft of ideas these guys are.
Looks like Obama likes to make him up some employment statistics.
What is it with high speed rail? Why do people continue to buy into this chimera?
How bad is the debt picture for the Feds? So bad the New York Times has noticed. Finally.
I have to wonder if whoever is running USAir is trying to bankrupt the company. We just go an update on their fee policies:
Changing a ticket is $150.
If you change a ticket to a higher price, you have to pay the difference. If you change it a lower price, you forfeit the difference.
It’s $35 to get a ticket at the counter.
It’s now $15 to check a bag, plus $5 if you don’t check in advance.
Meanwhile, the most successful airline in the country charges no ticket change fee and checks the first two bags free (although we got tripped up by one being too big).
Your torture link of the day. Scott Horton runs the myths to ground. I wish the torture defenders could make up their minds. Either Bush authorized torture or he didn’t. You can’t, on the one hand, give him credit for keeping the nation safe; and, on the other hand, absolve him of all blame for Abu Ghraib.
My friend Cameron destroys the 2012 apocalypse myth.
The Obama Administration is pushing against the rule that you stop questioning a suspect after he asks for a lawyer. Remember when Democrats cared about civil liberties? I miss those days. What’s the point of electing Democrats if they’re going to be “tough on crime”?
There are two times when a woman can not be held responsible for anything she says. When she’s making a baby and when she’s having one. To threaten to take someone’s child because she said something dumb after labor is just bizarre.
Jimmy Carter, a man I try very hard to respect, gets dumb about supporting the assault weapons ban.
Only two today. I’m busy blogging about torture at the other place.
A review of the book Chave gave Obama. What is it about leftist screeds like Das Kapital and The Population Bomb that they retain their appeal even after everything they say is thoroughly disproved by history?
It turns out that the GOP was right about the cost of cap and trade after all. Wonder if the organizations who called the GOP liars wil back down? The price of cap and trade might be worth it. But to make that argument, you have to admit that it has a price to begin with.