I don’t follow any twitter feeds. But Christopher Walken’s is almost interesting.
Stories like this are heart-breaking. What kind of jerks harass a girl to commit suicide because she sent her boyfriend a nude video?
I got some flack on the other blog for suggesting that cosmetology should not be regulated beyond OSHA. Well, I still think licensing cosmetologists is dumb. If people want their feet chewed on, that’s no concern of mine.
Cato has some hopeful news on the school voucher front. As with the pot question, I feel a tide beginning to turn. The reason unions fought the pilot voucher programs so much was because they knew what would happen if competition got its foot in the door.
Hope and change, my butt. Stripping out the contents of one bill to put in the content of another is almost Cheneyian.
Why is Haley Barbour going to veto an imminent domain protection act? Is there any Republican out there who’s not a dimwit?
Shouldn’t laws concerning DNA evidence account for twins?
George Will has a fit over how we’re shredding the Constitution to deal with the financial crisis. Remember when shredding the Constitution to deal with terrorism was a bad thing? Sigh.
More stuff to be scared of: coronal mass ejections that could destroy our electrical grid. I think the article is overly pessimistic — humans are far more adaptable than social scientists like to think. But the danger is real. And if your government weren’t trillions of dollars into wars, bailouts and taking over banks, it would be the sort of thing they could and should make provision for.
Is it really keeping kids safe to have sex offenders freezing to death or going to prison forever because of the problems the registry system imposes on them? I’m not opposed to sex offender registries, per se. I just think we need to be a lot less stupid about them.
From the WTF File, the Dallas school district had cage fights between unruly students. Thank God e haven’t privatized the schools. I bet those private schools can’t even afford cages.
Obama is committing $2.4 billion to develop electric vehicles. This is the exact wrong way to go about energy policy — having politicians dictate investments in technologies that may or may not be feasible. Pouring that money into energy grants would be a far better idea.
I’m all in favor of making google block out people’s faces and stuff on their maps. But I find it ironic that it’s Britain — land of a million closed-circuit cameras, that’s pushing for this privacy measure.
BBC has a series on legalized prostitution in New Zealand. But there’s a part of me that says, screw the facts even when they’re on my side. To me, this is about who owns your body and what consenting adults are allowed to do. Imagine if the resources we devote toward busting hookers went to cracking down on genuine sex slavery and child prostitution.
Cato again makes the case against high speed rail. It’s pissing in the wind at this point. There are too many special interests and too much economic and environmental ignorance lining up behind high-speed rail. Hell, to be honest, I kind of believe in high-speed rail myself. I link to these articles because they contradict my personal view. If I could take a bullet train from Philadelphia to Atlanta, I’d be delighted.
Not a link, but a random thought caused by several RSS posts. The reason Dick Cheney and others are saying Obama’s abolition of torture is making America unsafe has nothing to do with America’s safety. They know that we will get hit by another terrorist attack at some point, no matter what Obama does. What they are doing is setting up the narrative. When the next terror attack hits, they will say, “See, I told you so!”.
The latest update on the Massachusetts healthcare reform. I haven’t put up another “Myth” post this week. But there will be one at some point arguing that the only way to cut healthcare costs is to cut healthcare. When you commit to “universal coverage”, you commit to more spending.
Card check gets worse all the time, although Ambinder is saying that big business and labor are working out a compromise — which probably means that small business will get screwed. Again.
Reason argues that state governors are right to turn down some federal stimulus funds. Accepting those funds will put them on a course of greater spending and even bigger future debts. I must say that I am very bothered by the extreme anti-federalism of the stimulus law. The provision that allow state legislatures to over-ride the governor is flat unconstitutional.
Not that that useless old document ever stopped anyone…
It turns out that shovel-ready projects aren’t so shovel-ready. I think the WSJ is being needlessly pedantic. The normal timescale to get a construction project started is years, whereas these projects are on a scale of months (which is why the bulk of the stimulus spending kicks in in 2010). Still, this should be brandished in he face of certain Nobel Prize winners who are already saying the stimulus obviously wasn’t big enough.
I wonder if Obama will boast about Caterpillar’s job cuts as vociferously as he boasted about the vague promises to hire. Actually, he’ll probably say the cuts would have been worse without the stimulus. The stimulus must have saved at least 500 million caterpillar jobs a month.
I think the increasing protectionism around the globe is the most worrying economic trend of late. We really don’t learn from our dumb mistakes, do we?
Good responses to the raw ugly populism surrounding the the AIG nonsense from Harsanyi and, um, me.
Why am I not surprised that Bush is going to be more respectful than his Vice-President?
How bad is the CPSIA when the government has to retract a demand that libraries pull children’s books off of their shelves due to outrage?
Ed Morrissey praises the head of AIG, who was dragged out of retirement, given a salary of $1, then pilloried when Congress allowed AIG bonuses to be paid out. Watching highlights of the AIG hearing yesterday, Liddy was the only one I didn’t want to punch in the face.
The United States is not and never was a fascist state, and the CIA prisons were not and never were the Gulag. These 14 men were not tortured as part of an ordinary and accepted routine, in other words, but according to special rules and procedures, set up at the highest level of government, by people who surely knew that they were illegal; otherwise, they would not have limited them so carefully. What we need now, therefore, is not an endless, politicized circus of a congressional investigation into every aspect of George W. Bush’s White House but a carefully targeted legal investigation of the CIA’s invisible prisons: who gave the orders to use torture, who carried out the orders, what exactly was done, who objected. The guilty, however senior, should be named, forced to testify and called to account — because the rule of law, and nothing else, is what makes us exceptional.
A case is made for letting the bonuses at AIG get paid. Right now, everyone is full of self-righteous rage about he AIG bonuses. And that sets off alarm bells in my head.
Bolivia seems eager to follow the Zimbabwe example. I’m sure it will have the same merry results.
Yet another way big business and government are crushing competition — cattle tagging.
The trade wars heat up. Mexico is imposing tariffs in response to our stupid ban on Mexican trucks. Looks like Depression II is moving right along.
The push for a longer school year creeps me out. Can’t we let kids be kids at all? The problem with our schools isn’t that kids aren’t in them enough … the problem is that the schools are a monopoly.
Obama wants to spend a billion bucks helping the small businesses he’s extracting tens of billions in new taxes from. I guess it make sense, after you’ve cut off and eaten someone’s leg, to throw them the bone.
The piling on to Jim Cramer is just stupid. He wasn’t the one who resisted regulating Freddie and Fannie, was he?
Putin continues his repulsive reign. In the end, Bush’s remark that he looked into Putin’s soul may go down as the dumbest thing he ever said. And that’s saying something.
Don Boudreaux fisks Paul Krugmann for arguing that the stimulus was too small.
Krugman’s opinion piece is nothing but a piece of ideology-driven twaddle. First of all, the stimulus was only passed a month ago and most of it won’t kick in until 2010. How can he possibly know that it’s not working? He doesn’t. He just wants more spending.
Second, is Krugman seriously arguing that the Keynsian economic multiplier is that non-linear? That it is essentially zero until it reaches a critical mass?
They don’t make Nobel Prize winners like they used to.