VIRGINIA POSTREL reviews Sheena Iyengar’s The Art Of Choosing. “Just because people happily comply with the choices of an intimate — or, for that matter, an authority they’ve selected themselves — does not mean they want bureaucratic strangers making their decisions. Advocates who want to use psychology experiments to justify choice-limiting public policy should keep that lesson in mind.”
CLAUDIA ROSETT: The Gates Memo: World’s Least Well Kept Secret.
VEGETABLE SHORTAGES in Japan.
FROM DA TECH GUY: An Actual Tip Jar Request. I donated.
TOM MAGUIRE RESPONDS TO CHARLES BLOW: The Tea Party movement is more diverse than the New York Times Board of Directors. Blow’s just trolling these days. Don’t feed the trolls.
It’s all truly bizarre. We’re at the most gay-friendly time in American history and have, arguable, the most liberal administration ever on social issues. And yet they’re treating casual mention of Kagan’s sexuality as a smear orchestrated by the Right?
Yes, of course, appointing a lesbian to the Supreme Court would trigger a political fight. We’re much more tolerant of these things than we were ten or twenty years ago, but it’s still a controversial subject. But the reaction makes no sense whatsoever.
Further, CBS should be ashamed. What sort of journalistic ethics have they displayed here? First, they republish a four-day-old column and don’t bother fact-checking? Then, in response to pressure from the White House — at which point any journalist worth his salt would dig in, citing the sanctity of freedom of the press — they again don’t bother fact-checking but, instead, meekly pull the piece within hours? Seriously?
It’s a clown show all around.
NOW IT’S HARRISON SCHMITT: Former astronaut blasts Obama’s plans for space program. I still think Obama’s plan is right, but they clearly didn’t handle the PR well on this.
SCOTT BROWN ON TEA PARTY SUPPORT: “I’m very thankful.” As he should be. . . .
HEY, BABY, let’s get Seismic.
WORRYING ABOUT IRAN — in South America.
TIME-LAPSE IMAGE: Spread of volcanic dust from Iceland. It’s quite fast. More here.
BELDAR: Anatomy of a sham.
MICHAEL BARONE: Tea Parties Fight Obama’s Culture of Dependence. With a Susan Roesgen flashback. “Roesgen is no longer with CNN, and CNN has only about half as many viewers as it did last year. But her questions are revealing.”
AT AMAZON, markdowns on hand and power tools.
GEORGE WILL: Want a VAT? Ditch the Income Tax First.
ROGER KIMBALL: Whistlin’ “Dixie” with Frank Rich. “Just over a year ago, for people like Frank Rich dissent was the highest form of patriotism. Now it is a lethal threat to their most cherished political nostrums.”
WHO KNEW THAT CANADA WAS SUCH A CESSPIT OF BIGOTRY? Complaints overwhelm human rights watchdog.
Ontario’s newly streamlined human rights watchdog is swamped with allegations of sex, race and disability discrimination, the Star has found.
“We are really overwhelmed by our volume of cases now,” said Katherine Laird, the senior official whose job it is to support people who say they are victims. “Our phones are ringing off the hook.”
Thank goodness I don’t live there. It sounds hellish.
ERICK ERICKSON: Is the Obama Administration Behind An Astroturf Anti-Tea Party Website? I suspect Cass is going to be sorry he wrote that article, because — kind of like the “Crash The Tea Party” campaign — it just makes everything on his side suspect.
CYBERWAR: Exposing Hackers As A Deterrent.
DON’T BE AFRAID of the dark spirits.
WILLIAM BRIGGS: The Dismal Economics of Utopia.
GET READY FOR decades of Icelandic fireworks. Steven Den Beste emails that the problems with transatlantic flights will boost teleconferencing. Could be — and, really, that’s a boost that should happen. Not long ago I spoke to a bunch of environmental lawyers in Nashville via Skype, and it went pretty well, right from my basement. To speak in person would have blown a day of my schedule, entailed nearly 400 miles of driving and 14 or 15 gallons of gas, and cost them money for my expenses. This was fast and free. Not as good as being there in person, but close, and with many benefits.
UPDATE: What about iChat? It’s superior, in my opinion, but there has to be a Mac at the other end.
SYSTEM LACKS INCENTIVES to curb big spending. Plus, I admit I’m at a loss.
Yesterday I waded into a mass of tea party protesters gathered at the front of Colorado’s Capitol and completely forgot to brace myself for a “small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht” (as New York Times columnist Frank Rich once characterized these events).
As it turns out, earlier I happened to peruse a new CBS/New York Times poll detailing the attitudes of tea party activists, who, it turns out, are more educated than the average American, more reflective of mainstream anxieties than any populist movement in memory, and more closely aligned philosophically with the wider electorate than any big-city newsroom in America.
Read the whole thing.
IN THE MAIL: From Robert Bryce, Power Hungry: The Myths of “Green” Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future.
IF YOU MISSED IT LAST NIGHT ON SIRIUS/XM SATELLITE RADIO, the latest PJM Political is online. James Lileks, Michael Barone, Byron York, and, er, me. Plus Stephen Green!
ALLAHPUNDIT: Obama’s getting a bad rap on the “superpower” comment. Yeah, I had something on this earlier, though as I mentioned then, it doesn’t get the writers off the hook.
UPDATE: “Hospice America?”
BYRON YORK: How Clinton Exploited Oklahoma City For Political Gain.
What Clinton and his supporters do not talk about is the way in which Clinton, aided by pollster/adviser Dick Morris, exploited the bombing to make a political comeback from what was the lowest point in Clinton’s presidency to that time. (The Lewinsky scandal was still three years in the future.) In the days after Oklahoma City, Clinton and Morris devised a plan to use the bombing to discredit and outmaneuver the new Republican majority in Congress. . . . It was a political strategy crafted while rescue and recovery efforts were still underway in Oklahoma City. And it worked better than Clinton or Morris could have predicted. In the months after the bombing, Clinton regained the upper hand over Republicans, eventually winning battles over issues far removed from the attack. The next year, 1996, he went on to re-election. None of that might have happened had Clinton, along with Morris, not found a way to wring as much political advantage as possible out of the deaths in Oklahoma City. And that is the story you’re not hearing in all the anniversary discussions.
Yes, there’s some good stuff in George Stephanopoulos’s memoir, All Too Human, on this, too. A lot of people had forgotten this, and the shameful incompetence that led to the Waco massacre that — unlike the blamed Limbaugh, etc. — actually inspired Timothy McVeigh, but by bringing it up again Clinton is reminding people, and undermining the elder-statesman role he was trying to carve out. Bad move. Either he’s losing his touch, or they’re getting desperate. Probably desperate: Rasmussen Presidential Approval Index: Obama Drops Nine Points in Three Days.
And for those wanting a refresher on this history, I recommend Dave Kopel and Paul Blackman’s No More Wacos: What’s Wrong With Federal Law Enforcement and How to Fix It. There’s also Dan Gifford’s documentary, Waco: The Rules of Engagement.
Related: Bill Clinton Returns To The Scene Of The Crime. “Clinton knows how false and dishonorable his charges are. But they worked for him, and he is helping Barack Obama set the stage for a similar political comeback in the event that some violent event might occur; or, perhaps, in the absence of any such event. So far, all of the violence associated with Tea Party or townhall events has been perpetrated by union thugs employed by the Democratic Party, but that hasn’t stopped the Democrats from claiming that it is the Republicans who are somehow violence-prone.” Actually, I think there have been some non-union thugs, too.
Lies and smears aimed at their fellow Americans, for short-term political gain. This is who they are, and this is what they do. It worked better, however, when there were fewer alternative channels of communication, and when their character was less well-known.
Meanwhile, Tam has some thoughts on homeland security:
We have guys with their jockeys full of Semtex buying airline tickets with cash, and the feds are busy getting spun up about bubbas in Mossy Oak angry about taxes. Way to keep your eye on the ball…
When Clinton was yammering about the danger of domestic terrorists, Osama bin Laden was planning 9/11, and Clinton wasn’t doing much. It would be unfortunate if the Obama Administration followed in his footsteps.
WASHINGTON POST: ‘Tea partiers’ more wacky mavericks than extremist threat.
I went to the “tea party” rally at the Washington Monument on Thursday to check out just how reactionary and potentially violent the movement truly was.
Answer: Not very. . . . I found that I agreed heartily with the tea partiers on what is perhaps their single biggest concern: that America’s swelling government debt seriously threatens our long-term prosperity.
Read the whole thing.
CATHY YOUNG on Russia and Poland.
PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE: Guns Or Butter?
I had some thoughts on that in Forbes a while back.
THINGS THAT DON’T SUCK: I ordered one of these cheap keychain LED lights a while back, and I’ve been surprised how handy it’s been. It’s surprisingly bright, and it’s always handy on my, er, keychain; last night it found Helen’s lost earring under the car. I just ordered several more for family members.
UPDATE: Dan Hanson writes with lots of flashlight talk:
Hi, Glenn. Dan here from the old HappyFunPundit. After reading your flashlight blog entry, I thought I’d share my findings from a recent flashlight obsession I went through, which landed me upon a couple of lights that, in my opinion, are the best out there.
For a keychain light, check out this one: http://goinggear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=14_19&products_id=255. It’s an ITP single AAA cell light (barely larger than the battery itself).
These lights use a microprocessor and a high-tech CREE LED. They have three brightness modes. On the lowest, 1.5 lumen setting, they’re perfect for reading a program at a concert, or looking for something you dropped at the theatre (i.e. bright enough to see without disturbing others), or reading something in front of you during a presentation or seminar in a darkened room. They have a little clip which you can reverse to slide the light onto a ball cap brim, making a poor man’s miner’s light for hands-free operation.
The microprocessor uses pulse-width modulation to control current to the bulb in low light modes (as opposed to adding resistors, which doesn’t help battery life). The result is an amazingly long battery life – They last 40 hours on a single AAA cell at that brightness, making them a good little survival light to have on you at all times.
At the highest power setting, this little thing will put out 80 lumens of light – as much as a large tactical flashlight. That also makes it an excellent survival/emergency light, as you can flag people down with it from a very long distance. The CREE LEDs are amazing. I’ve purchased a half dozen of these for various gifts for friends and family, and everyone absolutely loves them.
I use mine constantly. I originally thought I’d just use it for emergencies or for the occasional need to look in a dark space, but I find the thing is perfect for adding extra light when working behind my computer, or checking fan openings for dust, or reading the label on a product in a store. The extra light makes all the difference to my 46 year old eyes when reading small text.
For a larger flashlight for your camping/survival needs, the Fenix LD-20 is one of the best out there. It uses two standard AA batteries, and is the size of a MagLite, but it puts a MagLite to shame in all categories. It also uses a CREE LED, and can put out 17 lumens for 71 hours. It’s also got strobe modes, and a 200-lumen bright mode, which is just incredibly bright for a small flashlight. I got mine with an accessory kit containing a red wand attachment for road signalling and a white diffuser which turns it into an emergency candle. It can light up a room with 17 lumens for three days straight on two AA cells. With typical night-time only use, you’ll get more than a week’s worth of emergency light from it.
A light like this is a must for any survival/emergency kit, and I carry one in my car for road emergencies. There are lots of tactical flashlights out there, but I like ones that use standard batteries so it’s easy to carry spare or cannibalize batteries from other devices when necessary. I won’t need my remote controls when the power fails, but I can scavenge enough AAA and AA batteries from them to keep my in light for a month.
Both of these lights are fully waterproof. You can throw them in a pool for an hour and they’ll work fine. They’re not dive lights, however, and won’t do well under any kind of real pressure.
Cool.
WELL, SO DOES THE MARITAL KIND, IF YOU DO IT RIGHT: Kooky Ayatollah: Extramarital Sex Causes Earthquakes.
MORE SCANDAL? Gore takes cash for water campaign from chemical firm. “Al Gore, the self-styled squeakiest-clean and deepest-green politician in American history, has some explaining to do this weekend. His environmental organisation has taken money to raise awareness about the need for clean water from a controversial chemicals company involved in the aftermath of one of the world’s worst pollution disasters.”
UPDATE: Don Surber emails:
I hate defending Gore but if you want to clean up water you go to the guys with
the chemicals that clean up water. Dow took over Union Carbide 15-20 years after
Bhopal.On my commute to work, I drive past the U.S. plant that was the model for Bhopal
and it still makes MIC. (Bayer owns it now.)Dow’s a good guy. It provides jobs and damned good products and it tries to do so
safely.
From Don that’s sensible. But the problem is, demonization, not being sensible, is what Gore does. Except when there’s a buck in it. Then he can become sensible real quick.
As Jonathan Tobin points out, the official goal of the Middle East “peace process” is a “two-state solution”, in one of which Muslims live alongside Jews and have voting rights and representation in the legislature, while in the other there are no Jews at all and, as in “moderate” Jordan, to sell your house to a Jew is a crime punishable by death. There goes the neighborhood, right? When the western campus left holds its annual “Israeli Apartheid Week”, presumably it’s in philosophical support of the notion that you don’t need to run an “apartheid” system if you just get rid of everyone who’s not like you.
So, basically, American campuses are full of Apartheid supporters these days. How progressive.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: How Could We Be So Stupid? Let Us Count the Ways.
ELEANOR CLIFT: Why were complaints about Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY) not made public for so long? Because of the culture of Capitol Hill. “It took just three weeks for upstate New York Democratic Rep. Eric Massa to resign his seat in Congress after accusations surfaced that he had sexually harassed members of his staff. The long trail of unwanted and often abusive advances that preceded his resignation—and why his alleged behavior went unreported for so long—highlights how much Capitol Hill is a feudal society, with each member the lord of his or her own territory.”
This also explains the hauteur with which they greet complaints from constituents.
UPDATE: A whole slew of readers note that Clift was not making “institutional” excuses when the Republican congressional leadership was confronted with the Mark Foley affair. Good point.
WELL, THAT’S A COMFORT: Secret Gates memo warns that U.S. has no strategy for dealing with a nuclear Iran. “Of course they didn’t prepare alternatives. How could they possibly fathom that diplomacy might fail?”
UP TO 40% OFF on fitness gear.
WHITE HOUSE PRESS CORPS: You said you’d respect us in the morning!
PLAN TO ASSASSINATE COPS IN NYC: Call the SPLC! Oh, wait, never mind, no Tea Partiers involved . . . .
DAN RIEHL charges Fox News with cowardice. Fox has hurt its brand by caving here, and a lot of people won’t forget.
But I’ll remind you that PJTV was covering the Tea Parties, and didn’t cave to anybody. PJTV isn’t really competition to Fox, but if Fox keeps screwing over its core audience, that could change . . . .
OH, CANADA: General orders investigation into himself. “The commander of Canadian troops in Afghanistan has ordered a special investigation — on himself. . . . Ménard said he was loading his C8 carbine at Kandahar Airfield on March 25, something he said he’s done thousands of times, when it went off. Nobody was injured and nothing was damaged, but the National Defence Act makes it an offence to accidentally discharge a weapon.” (Via an unhappy Michael Yon on Facebook.)
UPDATE: Reader C.J. Burch writes: “Maybe the generals should get one bullet they can carry around in their pocket.”
CYBERWAR: Right of self-defense extends to cyber attacks: “The U.S. must fire back against cyber attacks swiftly and strongly and should act to counter or disable a threat even when the identity of the attacker is unknown, the director of the National Security Agency told Congress.”
OMRI CEREN: Did the White House not get the memo? Given their history of vetting-ineptitude, that’s entirely possible. But why the hysterical reaction? It’s not like there’s anything wrong with being gay.
WHO NEEDS THE GOLD STANDARD when there’s the Whiskey Standard?
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE: Wajeha Al Huwaider, a woman, driving in Saudi Arabia.
REX MURPHY: Save the Earth . . . or else! “Who knew that rage was green? . . . Like every self-appointed messiah before them, these militant environmentalists view with chill contempt those others who cannot see their truth, who won’t bow to their self-assigned imperatives. It’s not just that they won’t abide those who differ from them. They want them actively punished. They are a very tense and unmoored bunch, possessed — in the old sense — with a vision that brooks no dissent. Gene and Polly have done us the wonderful favour of offering a glimpse of the future, were the future theirs to ordain.”
THE BELMONT CLUB: Out Of The Box. “Any idea that threatens to invert the positions of the elite and the peasantry is by definition subversive.”
READER C.J. BURCH SENDS this link and comments: “Ailes and the rest should be concerned that the tea parties are very disappointed in them. That should be their concern.” Indeed. Fox treated its fans shabbily.
PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE: “It was inevitable that the government would go after one of the big investment banks for their conduct during the run up to the credit crisis. Someone must be thrown to the lions so that the polis are distracted from the role their government played in the fiasco.”
COPS GETTING CAUGHT ON CAMERA.
I had a column on this a while back.
DAVID BOAZ: Are Libertarians Anti-Government?
WHO KNOWS THEIR Batman trivia?
BARACK OBAMA AS GEORGE W. BUSH: Life Imitates Art.
CLEANUP ON Gate Eleven.
BOB CORKER DOESN’T WANT TO PAY for AARP’s palace. “I’ve been by it several times. It makes the best of the embassies look like cottages.”
AMERICA’S WORST NIGHTMARE: Sexually functional men?
THE NEW CURRENCY is obedience.
Meanwhile, remember how the left went crazy over Ari Fleischer’s advice to “watch what you say?” But now Bill Clinton is comparing Tea Partiers to Tim McVeigh and proffering rather Fleischeresque advice. Maybe Clinton should watch what he says, when it comes to branding large numbers of nonviolent Americans as terrorists. But this statement serves as a useful reminder to those who have come to think of Clinton as some sort of cuddly, not-so-bad figure. He was a demagogue who would say whatever he thought might work when he was President, and he still is.
PLANS for a do-it-yourself Kegerator.
ANDREW KLAVAN: The Long Way Home For The Tea Party. Republican politicians remain “out of sync with this movement,” says Andrew.
KELLY O’DONNELL asks a dumb question, gets a simple answer.
MICHAEL YON ON GENERAL MCCHRYSTAL: “This War Is Above His Head.”
IN THE MAIL: From Charles Stross, The Trade of Queens.
INTERESTED IN FISHING? Check out The Itinerant Angler, a site run by one of my former students.
FROM THEODORE RICHARD: Reconsidering the Letter of Marque: Utilizing Private Security Providers Against Piracy.
FROM MEREDITH BRAGG, a story about cheese, and free enterprise.
THE “UNEXPECTED UNEMPLOYMENT” CHART OF THE DAY. It’s hilarious, except for, well, you know . . . .
Downside: “We’re not seeing any improvement at all after the loss of so many jobs in the crisis period. We’re seeing stagnation at high levels of unemployment, and despite a massive hiring binge at the Census Bureau, the numbers aren’t improving in the private sector at all. Maybe the media analysts should get their ducks in a row and start reporting on reality.”
A REPORT FROM THE New York Tea Party.
PROF. JACOBSON: What’s the left’s problem with homosexuality?
BACK TO THE FUTURE: A Texas town enrolls the paddle to teach unruly students a lesson.
A Texas town just outside Fort Hood has decided to bring back an old-fashioned weapon to instill a little more discipline in the increasingly unruly student body: the paddle.
With just weeks remaining in the academic year, has the return of corporal punishment brought law and order to the classrooms, cafeterias and hallways in Temple schools?
“The discipline problem is much better than it’s been in years,” school board president Steve Wright, who runs a construction business, told the Washington Post.
Everything old is new again.
DAVID REMNICK: HOW BARACK OBAMA invented himself.
THE JOYS OF slow-cooker spaghetti. Putting the uncooked pasta into the slow-cooker? Is that heresy, or genius?
UPDATE: Reader Mont McNeil emails: “My wife makes a terrific lasagna in the slow cooker, just layering all the ingredients including the uncooked flat noodles. Genius often looks like heresy at first…”
TONY BLANKLEY: “The Tea Party is a Blessing for the Republican Party.” Well, that depends on what the Republican Party does . . . .
FORCING A CHILD TO LIVE WITHOUT BACON? That sounds like abuse to me. . . . .
Repeat after me: Bacon is a right! Or maybe, No bacon, no peace!
OBAMAVILLE UPDATE: Camden Tent City Residents Get A Reprieve. “Homeless people who built a community of campground tents just a few blocks from downtown Camden got a reprieve Thursday, allowing them to remain, at least for now, at the self-governing settlement in one of the nation’s poorest cities.”
JOHN MERLINE: Health Care Reform’s “Bounce” Lands With A Thud.
Plus, a “we told you so” from Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell.
THE SUITS AT FOX MAY HAVE WIMPED OUT, but PJTV was covering the tea parties all over. See the coverage at the link. (Bumped).
Yesterday we examined the latest evidence and concluded that there is still no corroboration for three black congressmen’s claims that tea-party protesters yelled racial slurs on March 20, the eve of ObamaCare’s enactment. Today we’d like to step back and ponder the meaning of this alleged event.
Why are racial slurs such a taboo? . . . Free speech notwithstanding, there are circumstances in which legal redress is available to people who have been hurt by racial slurs. The most obvious cases are those in which slurs are wielded by an authority figure like a boss or a policeman, who is legally obliged not to discriminate in the exercise of his authority.
That is the opposite of what happened, or didn’t happen, on Capitol Hill. There, three powerful men allege that anonymous members of a crowd yelled racial slurs at them. The Associated Press’s Jesse Washington reports that the lawmakers claimed to have heard the slurs as they were walking toward the Capitol. Some time later a widely circulated video, which depicted an angry crowd but on which no racial slurs could be heard, was “captured by the black lawmakers’ cameras” as they walked away from the Capitol, Washington reports.
If the congressmen had felt threatened by the supposed slurs, they could have taken the underground railroad that connects the Capitol to congressional office buildings. Instead, they went back into the crowd, armed with video cameras.
It seems fair to surmise that they were hoping to gather evidence, and this would be an entirely reasonable thing for them to do under the circumstances as they described them. But it illustrates a salient point: If racial slurs are weapons, in a political context such as this they are weapons only of self-destruction.
Read the whole thing.
ANOTHER fake Tea Party fail.
AT AMAZON, it’s the Friday Sale.
TEA PARTIERS GET VALUABLE LESSON from David Axelrod.
A CIVIL RIGHTS VICTORY OUT WEST: Arizona legalizes carrying concealed gun without a permit.
JIM GERAGHTY: New Jersey Not Looking That Blue Any More.
CAPITULATION TO GRADE INFLATION at LSU.
A MOBILE TOUCHSCREEN that’s projectable on any flat surface.
APTERA UNVEILS its 200 mpg prototype.
DAN MITCHELL: The Joy of Tax Serfdom.
