The Fair Tax Movementarians are so devoted to their silly tax plan that they will fall in line behind anyone who claims to support it. Witness Boortz’ limp defense of Huckabee’s 1992 call for AIDS patients to be quarantined:
We’ll let Huckabee respond to the charges
First, they’re not charges — he said it. Second, he has refused to address the issue and admit he was wrong. I once thought AIDS patients should be quarantined. I was also 16 and uninformed.
So .. what’s the difference? Simple. The reason Huckabee is taking such heat here is that while AIDS has a political constituency, Tuberculosis does not.
It might also have something to do with tuberculosis being spread by casual contact while AIDS is not. Well, that is, unless you believe what the abstinence-only crowd is peddling.
A fascinating examination of the Flynn Effect by the man who discovered it. I find his explanation very convincing.
Megan McCardle with two great posts on the subprime mortgage bailout.
The government used to protect poor people, and young people, and people with bad credit histories, from getting loans, by making it illegal to charge the high interest rates that would make those loans profitable. Were they better off? They didn’t have credit card debt, to be sure, or huge mortgages. Instead they had pawnshops, or time payments, or convictions for kiting checks, all of which used to be popular ways of handling things like emergency car repairs.
Borrowers may have had help getting in over their heads, but at the end of the day, “variable interest rates vary” is not in the realm of things it is unreasonable to expect them to have understood when they signed on for a gigantic mortgage. Indeed, many of the defaulters seem not to be able to afford their teaser rates, which is certainly something they should have been able to figure out on their own. One of the reasons that I do not currently own a home is that I cannot afford one. Now I get to pitch in my tax dollars to bail out people who also could not afford a home, but went ahead and bought one anyway.
You know all those hate crimes being thrown against Muslims? Um, no
Bill Buckley goes to the dark side, calling for a smoking ban. Apparently, smoking a cigarette is the equivalent of dumping Zyklon B into a chamber full of Jews. Who knew?
Chef Mario’s Dining Disasters: Stretchghetti & Critters ($1)
So how exactly does a tiny dish filled with rubbery fake spaghetti and little plastic rats and roaches constitute a “toy?” How do you play with it, exactly? Do you ditch the “critters” and fling the “stretchghetti” around? Re-enact scenes from Ratatouille? And what should we make of the package’s warning: “Do not leave stretchghetti on wood, fabric or other porous materials?” What alien civilization has foisted this abomination upon us, and how are they going to use it to control our young? One thing’s for sure: Chef Mario’s bound to lose a Michelin star over this.
Radley Balko argues that it’s not Walmart, it’s regulation:
People who decry the Wal-Mart-ification and Gap-ificaiton of America need to realize that regulation often does more harm to local businesses than predatory pricing, loss-leader business models, or some other imagined corporate evil.
I’ve lived in or near Old Town for most of the last 10 years. It’s not at all common to see an independently-owned antique shop or art gallery get boarded over, only to be replaced in ensuing months by a franchise. It’s not difficult to see why. Franchise operators can tap the resources of the parent company, particularly when it comes to accessing legal help with experience navigating through and working with local zoning laws and business regulations.
Local officials who simultaneously decry big box stores and national chains while doling out burdensome regulatory structures and complicated permit processes should understand that regulatory burdens hit the smaller, independent places hardest, because they’re the places that have the smallest amount of discretionary cash to hire legal aid (or, if you’re really cynical, to make the appropriate campaign contributions). They’re on a tighter budget and, therefore, have a smaller margin of error when it comes to hassles like delaying an opening because some bureaucrat determined their signage is a couple of inches out of compliance.
There’s a larger lesson in all of this, too. Those who push for federal regulations to rein in “big business” often don’t realize that the biggest of big businesses don’t mind heavy federal regulation at all. They have the resources to comply with them, not to mention the clout in Washington to get the regulations written in a way that most hurts upstarts and competitors.
Big businesses know that a heavy regulatory burden is the best way to make sure small- and medium-sized businesses never rise up to challenge them.
Women like shopping. Gee, ya think? Next they’ll be telling us there are similarities to our mating process.
Take your kids to the park? $250 fine. There are a lot of people — left and right — who wants us to live like this. “Take your kids to the park or you will be punished! No, not that park or you will be punished! Take them home and read them a story! No, not that story!”
Vanity Fair on the batshit crazy governor of New York. Jeez Louise.
An outrage in Ann Arbor. What country are we living in?
It’s a powerful argument, and it may well resonate with the conservative justices who think that judges often overreach and “substitute their own policy preferences” for those of the people’s elected legislators. But I wonder if Helmke really believes that judges should respect the will of legislators and not strike down laws. Does he believe that the Warren Court should not have struck down school segregation, which was clearly the will of the people’s elected representatives–and no doubt the people–in Kansas, as well as in South Carolina and Virginia, whose similar cases were combined with Brown? Does he believe that the Supreme Court was wrong to strike down Virginia’s law against interracial marriage in 1967? The Texas law outlawing sodomy in 2003? The Communications Decency Act in 1997? Does he indeed think the John Marshall Court was wrong to invalidate a section of the Judiciary Act of 1789 in Marbury v. Madison? That’s the implication of his ringing words in defense of legislative absolutism.
Here’s one VERY important distinction. Reagan had been formulating his plan for dealing with the Soviets for about 40 years. You can hear it in his radio commentaries for GE, which are available for download on iTunes if you’re interested.
This is an issue he thought and thought and thought about. He didn’t get into office and say, “Okay, what do we do about the economy and the USSR?” He was elected with a solid purpose and plan for dealing with these two issues.
This is the POLAR OPPOSITE of Bush. Bush had no idea what he wanted to do about terrorism, other than basically continue the policies of the Clinton administration. Then, after 9/11, every discredited and debunked national security idea that had been floating around was slapped together and called the Patriot Act. We went from widespread global support for the invasion of Afghanistan into a global pariah for our invasion of Iraq. Bush rolled the dice on Iraq because he was convinced that democracy would magically spring out of the ground.
Comparing Reagan and Bush is apples and oranges. Reagan knew what he wanted to do, he just wanted the opportunity to do it. Bush wanted the power, and 9/11 gave him a reason to grab it.
I missed the report that food and obesity are giving us cancer. Turns out, I didn’t miss anything. It’s garbage.
Why an “energy Manhattan plan” is a bad idea. Read the whole thing.
Want do donate toys to kids? Or kids to toys for that matter? Be sure to bring your lawyer.
35 million hungry Americans, say the Fetus Whisperer. Garbage says the Department of Agriculture.
Shame on Princess Cruise Lines. They all do this. My wife and I got quite nervous about our honeymoon. That’s why we booked our own airfare rather than go through their travel agency slime engine. I just wish they ID’d the woman so people could give her money for an actual trip — on someone other than Princess
Illegal immigrants are gobbling up our health care! Nope. Let’s see if Boortz or Hannity link to this study.
I’m opposed to many sorts of state interventions, but public health measures strike me as a no-brainer. I mean real public health measures: not nannying people about their trans-fat consumption, but preventing the transmission of infectious disease. The negative externalities of infection seem to me to give the state a perfect right–indeed, an obligation–to curtail your freedom to fanny about spreading cholera.
Vaccines work primarily not by protecting you, but by creating “herd immunity”: denying the virus a reservoir in which to incubate. Public schools* used to be the perfect incubators, because there you have large numbers of people with no prior immunity herded together, making disease transmission a near-certainty. Vaccines have destroyed those disease reservoirs.
Now that the disease reservoirs are destroyed, of course, parents are tempted to free ride on society. They trust in other parents to vaccinate their children, thus maintaining a disease-free environment in which their own precious princes and princesses can run around safely without taking precautions. They do this for reasons logical and illogical–vaccines do pose some very small risk to kids, but more of their fears seem to be based on junk science like the thimerosol-autism connection. But even their real fears about the safety of the vaccine would be vastly outweighed by their fears of disease if other parents didn’t vaccinate, so it’s accurate to describe their behavior as free riding.
I agree with every word, although I still oppose mandating the HPV vaccine.
Reason on the growing hysteria from the MADD folks. They now want zero tolerance on drinking. In principle, that’s OK. In practice, there is no impairment at low BAC levels. The problem is habitual drunk drivers with high BACs, not the person who has a glass of wine with dinner and has a low BAC.
Although alcohol nannies generally support zero tolerance, one dissenting voice doesn’t. “I thought the emphasis on .08 laws was not where the emphasis should have been placed,” Candace Lightner told the Los Angeles Times in 2002. “The majority of crashes occur with high blood-alcohol levels, the .15, .18 and .25 drinkers. Lowering the blood-alcohol concentration was not a solution to the alcohol problem.”
That’s one of the founders of MADD, BTW.
I especially like the idea of forcing everyone in America to blow into tubes to start their cars. Yeah, I’m sure that won’t have any unintended consequences.
Like Castro, like Ceausescu, like many other politicians, Mrs. Clinton prefers to be photographed surrounded by schoolchildren, an image that suggests either a kid’s birthday party or a hostage situation, depending on your point of view. I got past the cover photo, with its army of youngsters and Mrs. Clinton’s mandible-cracking smile, to search through the actual text, in hopes of finding some mention of Barbara Feinman who, in addition to other professional accomplishments, wrote the book. A decade ago, when Village was first published, Feinman was much talked about for having gone unmentioned.
Shortly before the book came out, Mrs. Clinton boasted of having “written a 320-page book in longhand over the last six months.” This came as a surprise to her ghostwriter. Feinman had often worked late nights at the White House and even followed Mrs. Clinton on vacation in hope of picking up stray thoughts she could use to bulk up the manuscript, and she had been assured her role as ghost would be generously acknowledged. Yet when Village finally appeared there was no mention of Feinman either on the cover or in the Acknowledgments. News stories appeared detailing Feinman’s role, but White House spokesmen backed the first lady in her contention that the book was her work alone.
It became a minor controversy, stoked not only by Mrs. Clinton’s political adversaries but also by Feinman’s friends in the Washington press corps (she’s a former researcher for Bob Woodward). With Mrs. Clinton’s claims of sole authorship long ago disproved, I picked up this expanded edition of Village to see whether she had expanded it enough to make room for Barbara Feinman. Nope: Mrs. Clinton still believes that while it takes a village to raise a child, it takes nobody worth naming to write her book for her.
We are left, unhappily, with the book itself, turgid and sanctimonious. It remains what its author called it in a speech a few years ago: “At best a mediocre political tract on the virtues of governmental responsibility in the raising of children.” I’m quoting Barbara Feinman, of course, not Mrs. Clinton. Anyway, the episode is worth recalling, and Village is worth keeping at hand, as another instance of the creepy, and often self-defeating, pettiness that marks every phase of the Clintons’ public life.
But … but … she’s a woman!
His review of Huckabee’s book hits everything I dislike about the man.
What’s troubling about The Man From Hope 2.0 is what he represents. Huckabee represents compassionate conservatism on steroids. A devout social conservative on issues such as abortion, school prayer, homosexuality and evolution, Huckabee is a populist on economics, a fad-follower on the environment and an all-around do-gooder who believes that the biblical obligation to do “good works” extends to using government — and your tax dollars — to bring us closer to the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.
For example, Huckabee has indicated he would support a nationwide federal ban on public smoking. Why? Because he’s on a health kick, thinks smoking is bad and believes the government should do the right thing.
And therein lies the chief difference between Paul and Huckabee. One is a culturally conservative libertarian. The other is a right-wing progressive.
Whatever the faults of the man and his friends may or may not be, Paul’s dogma generally renders them irrelevant. He is a true ideologue in that his personal preferences are secondary to his philosophical principles. When asked what his position is, he generally responds that his position can be deduced from the text of the Constitution. Of course, that’s not as dispositive as he thinks it is. But you get the point.
As for Huckabee — as with most politicians, alas — his personal preferences matter enormously because ultimately they’re the only thing that can be relied on to constrain him.
In this respect, Huckabee’s philosophy is conventionally liberal, or progressive. What he wants to do with government certainly differs in important respects from what Hillary Clinton would do, but the limits he would place on governmental do-goodery are primarily tactical or practical, not philosophical or constitutional. This isn’t to say he — or Hillary — is a would-be tyrant, but simply to note that the progressive notion of the state as a loving, caring parent is becoming a bipartisan affair.