JOHN HINDERAKER: Cronyism 101. “Here it is, a pretty good introduction, I think, to the subject of corporatism in the Age of Obama.”
JOHN HINDERAKER: Cronyism 101. “Here it is, a pretty good introduction, I think, to the subject of corporatism in the Age of Obama.”
CHANGE: Average Gasoline Price Jumps To Highest In 5 Months.
NOT ONE HOSTAGE CRISIS: Lots of them.
DAILY CALLER INVESTIGATION: Inside Media Matters: Sources, memos reveal erratic behavior, close coordination with White House and news organizations.
My favorite bit: “Greg Sargent [of the Washington Post] will write anything you give him. He was the go-to guy to leak stuff.” Lots of other names named, too.
Of course, to the extent that Media Matters affects coverage it’s because left-leaning journos regard it as legitimate, and want to help. In this regard, like JournoList, it’s a “self-herding device.”
IS PINTEREST A PINK-COLLAR GHETTO? “AppData and Facebook’s advertising tool show that over 97% of Pinterest’s Facebook fans are women.”
WHEN EVERYTHING BECOMES A COFFEESHOP: Stephen Gordon’s blog post became a piece in the Boston Globe. Some serious higher education bubble implications.
Now, imagine a personnel manager at a mid-sized corporation who’s looking for an employee with some particular knowledge. There are two candidates: one with an appropriate college degree from the local state school, a second with relevant MITx certificates. Let’s say all other things between the candidates are equal. Which should the manager choose?
Given the caliber of professor at MIT, the online student may have learned just as much. The candidate who went to college probably enjoyed his experience more, but the potential employer is unlikely to care about that. Finally, there’s the financial reality: To some extent, the student debt of the job candidate dictates his salary requirements. If the MITx candidate has the knowledge required and far less student debt, he probably can be hired more cheaply. Ultimately, the cheaper option will win.
Phil Bowermaster has some additional thoughts.
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Also, books on container vegetable gardening.
ABC NEWS: White House Chief of Staff Errs on Senate Budget Rules.
JUSTIN HIGGINS: Why I Choose to (Tea) Party, Not Occupy.
THE PROBLEM WITH RETIREMENT ACCOUNTS IS THAT THEY’RE HOSTAGE TO FUTURE CONGRESSES’ GREED: Congress Eyes New Rules For Inherited IRAs. “A Senate Finance Committee proposal floated this past week as part of a highway-funding bill would give heirs five years to empty inherited individual retirement accounts or 401(k)s, which would typically trigger income-tax payments. The rule change could raise some $4.6 billion in income taxes over the next decade, according to a statement by Sen. Max Baucus (D., Mont.), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.”
J.E. DYER on Russia and Syria.
LOOK AT THE BRIGHT SIDE — LOTS OF IT ISN’T BURNING: Athens tonight. Nice pic, though.
UPDATE: Reader James Ellison writes: “So, your main source of hard currency is tourism and you scare all the tourists away? Wizards of smart.” Greece and Egypt.
THE MOST AMAZING SCIENCE IMAGES OF THE WEEK.
SHOULD YOU convert your car to natural gas?
LIVING IN THE AGE OF BIG DATA:
The story is similar in fields as varied as science and sports, advertising and public health — a drift toward data-driven discovery and decision-making. “It’s a revolution,” says Gary King, director of Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science. “We’re really just getting under way. But the march of quantification, made possible by enormous new sources of data, will sweep through academia, business and government. There is no area that is going to be untouched.”
Welcome to the Age of Big Data. The new megarich of Silicon Valley, first at Google and now Facebook, are masters at harnessing the data of the Web — online searches, posts and messages — with Internet advertising. At the World Economic Forum last month in Davos, Switzerland, Big Data was a marquee topic. A report by the forum, “Big Data, Big Impact,” declared data a new class of economic asset, like currency or gold.
We’ve barely begun to tap the power of this sort of thing. On the other hand, there will always be a place for a more aesthetic, intuitive angle, too — especially where consumers are involved. And will Big Data methods go small in an Army-of-Davids fashion via intermediaries like Wolfram Alpha?
TOO CRAZY FOR MSNBC: Scarborough Calls ‘Preposterous’ Sullivan’s Claim Obama Intentionally Set Contraception Trap for Conservatives.
DANGER IN THE EAST: “The Times report would at any rate explain the unprecedented buildup of the Pakistani nuclear stockpile in recent years. It was building weapons not just for itself, but supply a whole region.”
MORE SAFETY NET MUSINGS: “The NYT never paints wealthy liberals who don’t volunteer extra money to the state as hypocritical and guilty, but that’s no surprise.”
Plus this: “The NYT is continuing the progressive bait-and-switch here: Social Security and Medicare were sold to America as earned benefit programs, not welfare. It’s the ‘secondary mission’ of middle-class vote-buying — and the Boomers heading into retirement — that accounts for most of this story. The NYT overlooks that the US welfare state contributes to the supposed income inequality problem progressives have been decrying for the past few years. Moreover, compared to other developed countries, the US system is unique only in terms of low upward mobility from the bottom among men (although cross-country comparisons of mobility can be tricky). The left would no doubt argue this means we must have ever-higher taxes and more redistribution, while the right would argue we need lower taxes and less redistribution. However, what seems clear is that the Democrats’ version of the welfare state has been a political boon to Democrats and less beneficial to the poor they claim to champion. Moreover, if the NYT is at least correct that the increase in the safety net is fueling anger at the government, it may be that the political value of the welfare state to Democrats is diminishing as well.”
EUROPE: Greek protestors greet bailout vote with fire-bombs.
Related: Athens Burning As Police Run Out Of Tear Gas. “FinMin Venizelos has been speaking for the last 15 minutes so. He says that the country produces nothing and that is its main problem.” But they feel entitled to consume.
FASTER, PLEASE: New Surgery Heals Nerve Damage In Weeks. “When a nerve is severed through injury, surgeons must suture the two stumps together as quickly as possible. Yet even under controlled lab conditions, Bittner’s tests in rats suggest that these conventional sutures restore little more than 30 per cent of previous mobility, even three months after surgery. His new technique helps to restore twice that, in as little as two weeks. The secret, he says, is to prevent the body lending a helping hand.”
CAR DEALERS WINCE at site designed to end sales haggling. I predict additional state laws to protect car dealers from competition.
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THE CRISIS OF ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANCE: Bacteria are finally overrunning our last defenses. Can we stop them? We need newer and better antibacterial drugs. Also new antivirals. But in the interim, we need to increase our emphasis on sanitation and disease control methods of the sort that were a keystone of public health back during the pre-antibiotic era.
Unfortunately, it seems as though most “public health” people these days would rather talk about gun control or climate change than, you know, actual diseases.
HEALTH CARE: Supply of a Cancer Drug May Run Out Within Weeks. “A crucial medicine to treat childhood leukemia is in such short supply that hospitals across the country may exhaust their stores within the next two weeks, leaving hundreds and perhaps thousands of children at risk of dying from a largely curable disease, federal officials and cancer doctors say.”
This seems kinda third-worldish to me. And these shortages keep happening.
UPDATE: Reader Don Jansen writes: “So price controls are imposed on injectable drugs and lo and behold a shortage arises. Who would have thunk it?” Indeed.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Physician-reader Eric Novack writes: “Glenn- these shortages are very real… one center I work at has trouble getting propofol for anesthesia and another cannot get zofran (ondansetron), one of the most effective anti-nausea drugs on the market…” Very upsetting.
MORE: More here: “Again, the reader is left with the impression that drug manufacturers are hugely incompetent, failing to produce the needed amount of drugs even in the face of rising prices. Thank goodness President Obama is on the case, issuing executive orders! But the existence of any kind of shortage in a market-driven economy should make one’s nose twinkle. One drug shortage might be some kind of freakish anomaly, but 180 crucial drug shortages? The usual suspect in these kind of situations is the dead hand of government, and according to bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel, writing in last August’s New York Times, that’s exactly the case. . . . In other words, government has distorted the market and removed incentives for the production of life-saving drugs. And the New York Times’ readership, unless they somehow recall Emanuel’s opinion piece, are left none the wiser.”
THE MITSUBISHI MIEV’S ACHILLES HEEL: A cheap, crappy interior.
JUSTICE: Court of secrecy: How Richard Baumgartner, a drug-addicted judge, stayed on the bench despite warnings. Check out the photo.
I continue to wonder if the “wall of protection” erected around him by law enforcement has anything to do with the rather obvious foot-dragging in the Henry Granju case. There may be no connection, but it’s easy to imagine that law enforcement folks might have feared one would turn up if they looked into things. And there really was a lot of foot-dragging.
I’ll also note that if this kind of scandal happened in a private-sector entity, we’d be hearing criticisms of the entire enterprise, not just the players involved. Why is it different when it’s the government? People are covering for impaired judges in courthouses all over the country.
NEAL BOORTZ doesn’t like Rick Santorum. “Rick Santorum believes that Libertarians belive in ‘no government.’ Now anyone with just the most basic education would know that it is anarchists who believe in not government, not libertarians. So why would Santorum utter this absurdity?”
IN THE MAIL: Why Americans Hate the Media and How It Matters.
REPORT: BIN LADEN GAVE UP ON JIHAD:
The big news today: according to family members, by the end of his life Osama bin Laden was telling his family to “Go to Europe and America and get a good education.”
What? The great Islamic umma, center of global culture and light of the world has no universities where the children of the Great Jihadi can get a decent education? The clueless, hell-bound infidels of Europe and America make the Sons of the True Faith look incompetent and backward on the vital matter of educating the young? It isn’t enough to sit on a dirt floor in Pakistan memorizing the Koran and learning how to wear a suicide bomb vest?
But what about the obligation to take up the cause of jihad and violence and crush the evil doers in the West?
Never mind about all that, Osama supposedly told his children and grandchildren. “Do not follow me down the road to jihad,” he said. “You have to study and live in peace and don’t do what I am doing or what I have done.”
All those Salafi ideologues promoting the idea of jihad against the West as a sacred obligation compulsory on all Muslims are presumably choking on their beards as they read these words. The homosexual-hangers and the adultress-stoners are having a bad morning. No doubt they will tell themselves that this story is yet another lie from the cynical west, but they will have to wrap themselves ever more tightly in the delusions and wishful thinking that blinker their thoughts — and undermine their political effectiveness.
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE: Reader Dave D’Auria writes: “So wait, that can’t mean Bush was right when he basically said Bin Laden wasn’t that important anymore, right?” Of course not. Bush, right? Don’t be ridiculous.
STICKY FINGERS IN THE CHOCOLATE CITY? Former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin under investigation: source. “The investigation includes whether Nagin received favors or items of value from vendors to the city in return for contracts they received while Nagin was in office, the source said.”
BALTIMORE POLICE: It’s Legal For You To Record Us, But If You Keep It Up We’ll Arrest You For Loitering.
Okay, they obviously don’t care about the law. But as a result, citizens will start to wonder why they should respect the law, or those who purport to act in its name. The citizens of Baltimore shoud fire ‘em, and privatize. Their replacements will probably have a clearer sense of responsibility, or at least a smaller sense of entitlement.
“I THINK MY BREASTS SAVED MY LIFE:” Huge-breasted model, 32, walks away from horror crash after her 38KKK chest acts as AIRBAG. Is there anything they can’t do?
TOM MAGUIRE ON THE NEW YORK TIMES’ CAREFUL BLURRING OF ENTITLEMENTS: “Wait – Medicare is now a ‘safety net’ program? I thought that, like Social Security, it was an earned benefit – we all paid our taxes, and we are all eligible. Medicaid is means-tested; Medicare is not.”
Plus, from the comments: “If you’re paying for the pizza, you might as well take a slice. That’s the other part of the big government agenda. One is to create a permanent class of non-paying clients while the other is to make sure everyone else takes advantage of entitlements they’re paying for.” Yeah, you don’t want people to question the whole redistribution scheme, so you displace alternative approaches then call anyone who uses it a hypocrite if they complain. It’s political genius, until you run out of other people’s money.
UPDATE: Several readers point out that you can’t decline Medicare without also giving up Social Security.
“YELLOW PERIL” FEARS ON CAMPUS: Asian students face discrimination in college admissions.
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MIA LOVE AT CPAC: Conventional Wisdom Says I Don’t Exist. “If CPAC has reinforced one thing for me, it’s this: The presidential election is important, but retaining the House and taking back the Senate is essential.”
Here’s her campaign website.
VIOLENCE AGAINST MEN: This Oikos yogurt commercial where the man (John Stamos) gets head-butted to the floor is still bugging me. Imagine if the genders were reversed. If you can. There certainly wouldn’t be excuse-making from lefty publications. Instead we’d hear that there’s no excuse for domestic violence!
HISTORY: Secret documents lift lid on WWII mutiny by US troops in north Queensland. “An Australian historian has uncovered hidden documents which reveal that African American troops used machine guns to attack their white officers in a siege on a US base in north Queensland in 1942. Information about the Townsville mutiny has never been released to the public. But the story began to come to light when James Cook University’s Ray Holyoak first began researching why US congressman Lyndon B Johnson visited Townsville for three days back in 1942.”
JOURNALISM: BBC ‘buried Savile sex abuse claims to save its reputation.’
The BBC now stands accused of covering up the allegations, which were detailed in The Oldie magazine, because senior executives did not want the corporation’s reputation to be tarnished.
A BBC News source said: “The extreme nature of the claims about Savile meant that the Newsnight report was going to seriously compromise the lavish BBC tributes scheduled to run later the same month.
“And second, the allegations directly involved the BBC, in that the woman who gave the interview said that she and others were abused by Savile on BBC premises.”
Well, it’s not like there were priests involved or anything.
MARK STEYN: Obama goes Henry VIII on the church.
The president of the United States has decided to go Henry VIII on the Church’s medieval ass. Whatever religious institutions might profess to believe in the matter of “women’s health,” their pre-eminences, jurisdictions, privileges, authorities and immunities are now subordinate to a one-and-only supreme head on earth determined to repress, redress, restrain and amend their heresies. One wouldn’t wish to overextend the analogy: For one thing, the Catholic Church in America has been pathetically accommodating of Beltway bigwigs’ ravenous appetite for marital annulments in a way that Pope Clement VII was disinclined to be vis-a-vis the English king and Catherine of Aragon. But where’d all the pandering get them?
The wages of appeasement are usually the same.
LIFE AMONG THE BARBARIANS: Islamists Storm Maldives Museum & Destroy Entire Collection of 12th Century Buddhist Relics. Hmm. This’ll do wonders for the tourism industry upon which Maldives depends, just like the previous ban on hotel spas.
Fine. Go ahead and starve.
ANDREW BREITBART on libertarians in 2012.
LIES: George Lucas Confirms It: The Star Wars We Loved Never Existed. “Here’s the medicine we all need to swallow: as children we were more grown up than George Lucas is now as an adult. Han Solo’s entire character rested on what we saw in that early scene in the film. In shooting first Han Solo was a role model doing what any Real Man was supposed to do. Now we know that character only existed in our imaginations, not his creator’s. And that George Lucas regards most of his fans as amoral neanderthals.”
Meh, after the three “prequels,” who cares what he thinks?
A LOOK inside the bubble.
TEN YEARS AGO ON INSTAPUNDIT: WHY IS IT THAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING that the lesson of Enron is that we need more regulation? Seems to me, the lesson is that regulators are corrupt or incompetent. Or both. And by “regulators,” I include the press.
Also this: “It has always amazed my that the people who want the government to do a few important things, and to do them well, are called ‘anti-government,’ while those who want the government to do many things, all of them badly, are not.”
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ON THAT JEZEBEL GANG-RAPE VIDEO: “They definitely violated the SPJ code of ethics by posting this, but as we’ve seen, Gawker Media’s code of ethics seems to be limited to one rule, and that is ‘if it gets hits, publish it.’”
IN A TRULY UNCHARACTERISTIC FAILURE OF SELF-PROMOTION, I somehow forgot to post on my New York Post column earlier this week: Obama’s Flawed Fix For the College Cost Crisis. I don’t think he really understands the higher education bubble.
MITT ROMNEY wins the Maine caucuses.
PETER ROBINSON’S UNCOMMON KNOWLEDGE IS NOW ON PJTV.
THIS IS SAD: Reportedly, Whitney Houston has died.
AND WHERE DID THE MONEY GO? What Happened at MF Global?
IF YOU MISSED IT YESTERDAY, THE FINAL VERSION OF MY Southern California Law Review piece on Second Amendment Penumbras is now online. It’s short and to the point. Download early and often! (just click the one-click-download button at the top center.)
CALIFORNIA COURT: Owning an “assault weapon” is a crime of moral turpitude.
MICHAEL WALSH: “A specter is haunting America — the specter of violence that challenges the notion of civil discourse and threatens our democracy. Embodied by the Occupy Wall Street rabble and its imitators, and shamefully abetted by far too many Democratic elected officials, what once masqueraded as ‘dissent’ is now unmasked as partisan thuggery.”
Dissent is okay when it’s really just factional infighting among the elite. It’s only when it becomes actual dissent — see, e.g., the Tea Party movement — that elites worry about civility.
OCCUPY KINDERGARTEN?
The greatest predictor of a child’s academic success, even more than economic class, is still their parents’ education level. But among adults, education and income are becoming more and more intertwined. College graduates couple off and use their resources to raise children who will also go on to succeed academically. When he ran the numbers, Reardon actually found that parental education couldn’t explain the entire growth the academic gap between classes. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a factor.
Even if we still have to tease out the reasons why, we appear to have reached a point where the children of the rich end up better educated, and more likely to succeed, simply because they’re children of the rich.
The buried assumption here, however, is that this could be changed with money. But it’s just as likely that the higher incomes are the result of a better genetic endowment — higher intelligence, more self-discipline, ability to defer gratification, etc. — that is likely to be passed on to kids. This seems particularly likely in light of Bryan Caplan’s conclusion that parental “investment” doesn’t make as big a difference as people think.
RETRACTO, THE CORRECTION ALPACA demands an apology from Gawker for bogus racism charges.
Have you noticed that lately, bogus racism charges are pretty much the only kind of racism charges you see?
TRANSPORTATION INDICATORS looking kind of grim.
THIS SEEMS COOL: Felix Baumgartner’s 120,000-Foot Space Dive: It’s On. “In August 2010, Popular Mechanics’ cover story featured Red Bull Stratos, the name of Felix Baumgartner’s mission to set the world record by surviving a jump from 120,000 feet that would accelerate him to speeds beyond the sound barrier. But a lawsuit delayed Baumgartner’s attempt—until now. Red Bull Stratos confirmed this week that the jump is back on and scheduled for this summer. Baumgartner talked with PM about the mission, the tech, and what it’s like to wait two years for one big day.”
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HIGHER EDUCATION UPDATE: College Student Suspended For Writing About Being Attracted To Professor.
HMM: Romney Wins CPAC Straw Poll. And a severe falloff for Ron Paul, who usually wins these things.
HOW YOUR CAT is making you crazy. “Toxoplasma might even kill as many people as malaria, or at least a million people a year. . . . My guess is that there are scads more examples of this going on in mammals, with parasites we’ve never even heard of.”
Tom Maguire says this is putting cat-blogging in a harsh new light. But I think my childhood litterbox duties explain why I am fearless and irresistible to women. . . .
UPDATE: Skepticism.
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OPEN YOUR MOUTH, and you’re dead. “How deep can they go? Nobody knows. Competitive freediving is a relatively new sport, and since the first world championships were held in 1996, records have been broken every year, sometimes every few months. Fifty years ago, scientists believed that the deepest a human could freedive was about 160 feet. Recently, freedivers have routinely doubled and tripled that mark.” Yeah, I was talking with a freediving instructor on Cayman a couple of years back and he said he could have me diving that deep (150 feet) in a couple of days. But I stuck with scuba.
PUTTING THE BUBBLE INTO THE HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE: Moody’s May Downgrade Law Schools’ Credit Rating.
JASON FERTIG: Ditch The Textbooks.
DICTATOR SUCKUPS: Leaked emails show Westerners truckling to the Syrian regime.
TOM MAGUIRE: This Contraception Controversy Would Have Been Avoided If Obama Were President.
THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: IRS Employee Stole Data To Forge $8M In Fraudulent Returns.
BAD NEWS: New Drugs Cost Even More Than You Think.
COUNTING CROWS want you to hear their new album for free.
IN THE MAIL: From Elizabeth Price Foley, The Tea Party: Three Principles. Blurbed by George Will, Ron Paul, Randy Barnett, and me. Very much worth reading.
GOV. SCOTT WALKER: Political Courage at Stake in Recall Fight.
WELL, THEY TOLD US THIS WAS COMING IN 2008: Three Coal Plants Closing In West Virginia.
CORPORAL PUNISHMENT OF CHILDREN: A CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT.
So held the Hawaii Supreme Court, in Hamilton ex rel. Lethem v. Lethem (Haw. Feb. 7, 2012), interpreting the Hawaii Constitution, though in reasoning that could be seen as applicable to the federal Constitution and to other state constitutions. And the court concluded that even a noncustodial parent retains this right “with respect to that child’s conduct during the visitation period.”
Based on this constitutional right, the court concluded that, to warrant the issuance of a domestic restraining order based on alleged child abuse, there must be (1) a finding that “the parent’s discipline is [not] reasonably related to the purpose of safeguarding or promoting the welfare of the minor,” (2) taking into account “factors such as [a] the nature of the misbehavior, [b] the child’s age and size, and [c] the nature and propriety of the force used.”
The court left it for a lower court to apply this standard to the facts of the case. Here, though, are the facts as alleged by the child (a 15-year-old girl), which led to the issuance of a restraining order against the father.
Read the whole thing.
GUN REVIEW: Beretta Px4 Storm Subcompact.
A VICTORY FOR CITIZENS IN THE WAR AGAINST PHOTOGRAPHY: Public can record Baltimore police officers on duty, new rules say. “Baltimore police have issued new rules governing how officers deal with a public increasingly armed with cameras and video records, saying that in most instances, cops cannot stop people from filming crime scenes. The general orders, issued in November and made public Friday, come days ahead of a federal court hearing in a civil suit brought by a man who says an officer confiscated his cell phone camera and deleted images of an arrest at the Preakness Stakes in 2010.”
Somebody must have read Morgan Manning’s article on photographers’ rights.
BYRON YORK: Did Romney quell conservative doubts?
IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, shut up.
YES, OF COURSE. NEXT QUESTION? Should A Christian Have Used Violence To Stop The Beating of Brandon White Because He Is Gay?
YESTERDAY’S MENTION OF LASER SIGHTS produced this email from reader Scot Echols: “I used to work a couple of blocks from Crimson Trace. A coworker and I walked down one day to play with their laser grips, and one of the designers told us that they were learning from law enforcement agencies that they were shooting fewer people since switching to laser grips. It seems that being able to see the red dot on your chest causes criminals to make better choices in their own best interest. Fascinating concept.” That would make sense.
UPDATE: Reader Matt Murphy writes:
Hi Glenn. I’m a former infantry Marine who spent several years as a security contractor in Iraq after getting out. I’m currently an executive protection specialist and new competitive shooter. I’ve spent a lot of time around firearms. I think of this every time you mention Crimson Trace, but few if any experienced shooters use them. What I’ve witnessed on the rare occasions I’ve seen them in “the wild” is poor shooters using them as a crutch rather than applying the fundamentals of marksmanship. Specifically, they will watch the “dot” on the target instead of using the sights with proper grip, stance, sight alignment etc. This makes it very difficult to stay on target, and you will see people “chasing the dot” around and jerking the trigger when the dot is where they want it to be. While Crimson Trace may have a place somewhere, there are no shortcuts to competence with firearms and gadgets are no substitute for training and proper technique.
That’s certainly true. As a late adopter, I have many years of establishing habits about sight pictures, etc. I certainly think that people should acquire their skills first. On the other hand, in a home-defense situation, I think the laser sight is likely to be quite helpful, in addition to its intimidation benefits.
ANOTHER UPDATE: A female reader emails:
I wanted to comment on the discussion regarding marksmanship and laser sights. I am a middle aged female that has been carrying concealed in Washington state for over 20 years. My first gun was a Taurus .38 revolver purchased 20 years ago. Last year, my partner gave me a Ruger LCR .38 revolver with Crimson Trace laser (what a guy!). I have to say that is has not changed my shooting style, however, getting that red dot in the right place in relation to the sights for an accurate shot is so much easier on the eyes – especially if you are at the range shooting for any length of time. I don’t know whether its aging eyes, the low light of most shooting ranges, or the shortcomings of progressive lenses or contacts…but I always found myself squinting and peering at the sights on my Taurus – not so with the Ruger. While the Ruger is a more comfortable gun all around, my accuracy, at least at the range, is much improved with the laser.
Good point.
WELL, I DIDN’T GO TO CPAC, but I won two blog awards. Thanks — it’s nice to be remembered!
CLIVE CROOK: US Taxes Really Are Unusually Progressive.
If you ask me, Jonathan Chait, a writer I respect, has made an ass of himself in a fight he picked with Veronique de Rugy over taxes and progressivity. She offended him by saying that America’s income taxes are more progressive than those of other rich countries. Chait assailed her “completely idiotic” reasoning, called her an “inequality denier”, “a ubiquitous right-wing misinformation recirculator” and asked if it was really any wonder he cast insults now and then at such “lesser lights of the intellectual world”. (Paul Krugman said he sympathises. With Chait, obviously. The only danger here is in being too forgiving, Krugman advises. Chait may think the de Rugys of this world are only lazy and incompetent, but we know them to be liars as well.)
Just one problem. On the topic in question, De Rugy is right and Chait is wrong. . . . Why, according to the OECD, is the US system so progressive? Not because the rich face unusually high average tax rates, but because middle-income US households face unusually low tax rates–an important point which de Rugy mentions and Chait ignores.
Not surprising. Next we’ll learn that income inequality is actually down, not up! Oh, wait. . . .
HEH: “Instapundit is basically my newspaper.”
As I’ve said before, InstaPundit isn’t a news service, and makes no effort to be balanced. Then again, after following news services closely for over a decade of blogging, I’m no longer sure that is such a difference.
OCCUPIERS BEING PAID to protest CPAC. “I thought these people were against the influence of money in politics?”
THE FINAL VERSION OF MY Southern California Law Review piece on Second Amendment Penumbras is now online. It’s short and to the point. Download early and often (just click the one-click-download button at the top center)! (Bumped).
REASON TV: Inside and Outside CPAC.
MIA LOVE IS A BLACK REPUBLICAN RUNNING FOR CONGRESS IN UTAH. Here’s her website, with an interview video. I see she’s accepting online donations, too. David Kirkham likes her.
SCARED: Iran government cuts off internet access as hardline regime makes a stand.
ANDREW BREITBART: “I Got Video From Obama From College.”
STEPHEN GREEN IS LIVING PROOF: Why Being Sleepy and Drunk Is Great for Creativity.
SURE, WHY NOT: A wall-mount flatscreen fireplace. “The Pureflame fireplace comes in a number of different styles to match your decor. Some have a more solid, more traditional look, but all are decidedly modern-looking. After all, it’s fire that’s on your wall.”
(Via Tom Maguire.)
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HERE’S DAVID KIRKHAM’S CAMPAIGN WEBSITE. I see he’s accepting online donations now.
TABLES RESERVED FOR THE HEALTHIEST:
Some residents support the new policy, however, including Martha Haycox, 80, past president of the Resident Advisory Council, who took pains to point out that three independent living residents with health problems are also excluded from the dining room, while many who do use it require wheelchairs or walkers.
“It happened to me twice in one week that somebody at the next table threw up,” requiring hasty clean-up by the maintenance staff, she said. Another time, she said, someone’s wheelchair got tangled in a tablecloth at Sunday brunch and nearly pulled all the food off the buffet table.
“I should be able to have what we call quiet enjoyment,” she said.
“It’s a very upscale community,” said Mr. Volder. “When someone comes in wearing a coat and tie, with guests, they want an ambience of fine dining.”
Read the whole thing.
MEGAN MCARDLE: Administration Backtracks On Birth Control, But At What Cost? This is what happens when you live in a bubble.
