The Economist, usually a very sober publication, is souring on Obama. I must admit some his recent policies are souring me as well.
Reason noted my hero Norman Borlaug’s 95th birthday by posting one of the most fascinating interviews they’ve ever done. Here’s hoping we keep Norman around for another 95 years. He’s the anti-Ehrlich — a incurable optimist who was right about everything. And he’s still working to battle the rust fungal epidemic in Africa.
You know, I want schools to be safe, but banning any physical contact is absurd. Kids thrive on physical contact.
GM is talking about bankruptcy. Couldn’t they have done this before we gave them $14 billion?
I have to agree with McArdle. Yes, technically, some of the plans being promulgated by the Obama Administration represent the economic side of fascism. But what’s the point of making that distinction? To bring Hitler into the equation. The socialism moniker will suit the discussion just fine.
This may be the only time I have something nice to say about Mitt Romney. He points out one of the more insidious aspects of the card check bill — unionizing charter schools.
You know, I’m pretty conservative. But drug-testing for welfare benefits seems like a dumb idea. This is mainly, I would suspect, going to damage people’s lives further and make them less likely to become productive members of society.
I have to agree with Balko. These arrests for “sexting” are just absurd. I’ve never understood the logic that you can teach people a lesson by ruining their lives. It’s making an example of someone — which is fine … if you’re not the example.
Does anyone take Olberman seriously? We need to put him in a small room with O’Reilly and let them shout each other to death.
Thanks goodness we don’t privatize schools. They’d be selling out to advertisers to make ends meet. Oh, wait…
As I predicted, Obama’s tax cut is dying the same quiet death as Clinton’s did. Although, bizarrely, he’s got the DNC campaigning against his own party members to get them to support his budget.
The WSJ launches another salvo against Romney’s Massachusetts healthcare “reform”. Spending is out of control and the state is going to have to do what they always do in universal healthcare situation: rationing and control.
Just when I begin to think Matthew Yglesias is reasonable, he suggests a 95 percent marginal rate.
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.
What’s this? Both the WaPo and the Chicago Tribune are blasting the Democrats for trying to quietly kill the DC school voucher program.
My thoughts are here. I think it’s disgraceful that the Democrats are scuttling one of the few bright spots in the DC school system to cater to Big Education. So much for standing up to special interests.
Social networking websites are causing alarming changes in the brains of young users, an eminent scientist has warned.
Sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Bebo are said to shorten attention spans, encourage instant gratification and make young people more self-centred.
The claims from neuroscientist Susan Greenfield will make disturbing reading for the millions whose social lives depend on logging on to their favourite websites each day.
Is there any evidence supporting this conjecture? Nope. What is it with people? Do we have to freak out over every technology that comes down the pipe?
I expect lawsuits over this. Virginia wants to strip the auto bailout money for their own car dealers. Crap like this is why the auto-bailers need to go the bankruptcy route.
A rule: always believe the opposite of whatever Naomi Klein thinks. If there’s anyone who has used the “shock doctrine”, it’s the socialists. See R, FD.
The cowardice that Britain and the Netherlands are showing on the Wilders issue is truly stunning.
Just to re-iterate, because the point never seems to be taken. Our schools are not underfunded, no matter what anyone says.
Is anyone surprised that limiting campaign contributions doesn’t reduce corruption?
The anti-vaccination crowd now has a kid dead of Hib virus.
The incomparable Megan McArdle explains why mortgage cramdowns are a seriously bad idea:
Think of these kinds of government cramdowns as doing it on the faux-cheap. It looks inexpensive, because the government isn’t shelling out directly. But making things artificially cheap by hiding the pricetag from yourself encourages you to do things you oughtn’t–just ask the current holders of “investment” properties purchased with “innovative” mortgages. In the end, the bill always comes due–and the accrued interest is usually a killer.
I really hope the rumors that the NYT will hire her to replace the disgusting Bill Kristol are true. McArdle is one sharp lady.
I love it. Monty Python decides to put high qualify videos of their sketches on YouTube. Absolutely free. The result. A 23,000% jump in DVD sales. They created new fans.
The Grateful Dead did this for years. Too bad no one at RIAA has learned the lesson.
Not too long ago, conservatives were thought of as the locus of creative thought. Conservative think tanks (full disclosure: I was one of the three founding trustees of the Heritage Foundation) were thought of as cutting-edge, offering conservative solutions to national problems. By the 2008 elections, the very idea of ideas had been rejected. One who listened to Barry Goldwater’s speeches in the mid-’60s, or to Reagan’s in the ’80s, might have been struck by their philosophical tone, their proposed (even if hotly contested) reformulation of the proper relationship between state and citizen. Last year’s presidential campaign, on the other hand, saw the emergence of a Republican Party that was anti-intellectual, nativist, populist (in populism’s worst sense) and prepared to send Joe the Plumber to Washington to manage the nation’s public affairs.
I think Reason needs to start a daily column responding to Paul Krugman and his depressingly smug leftie commenters. You wouldn’t think a Nobel Prize winner would fall for the Broken Window Fallacy, but there you are. My favorite is his argument that $825 billion divided by three million jobs created is apparently only $100,000 per job. Apparently, these workers will pay themselves in future years.
Carbon credit scams are a $118 billion business. You should watch Penn and Teller’s show in which they have a random woman sell these in a parking lot. No one cares for any documentation. They just hand over money.