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LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSIONPosted by Ron Coleman on July 25, 2009
REASON TV: Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie on Why The Obama Honeymoon Is Over.
I’m sure it’s a good piece, but as long as I have to go to Reason TV to find it, the honeymoon still isn’t over.
When Glenn links to ABC with this story, that’s when I expect to see rolling pins and broken dishes.
Posted in Medialites | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Ron Coleman on July 23, 2009
Dave Price writes about choice and risk:
Ace makes a great point on one of the many problems in the health care bill:
On Fox & Friends, they offered another good talking point: Currently 90% of all Americans are covered by insurance. Obama’s vaunted plan will cover, theoretically, another 7%.
So: We’re destroying the entire system to move from 90% to 97% coverage? And that 7%, of course, includes a lot of young people who think they don’t need health insurance because they’re young and healthy (and, in fact, they’re right, according to the statistics; even more right when you consider that each young person is forced to pay way too much for health care, as he subsidizes older customers).
I’m one of those people. I don’t have health insurance now, and I haven’t ever carried it when I wasn’t working a W-2 job, because I’m generally healthy and don’t particularly want to subsidize people who are more likely to require medical care. It’s possible, of course, I could regret this decision due to circumstances beyond my control, but I’d prefer to put that money into investments and play the odds by making an effort to stay healthy via exercise and supplements and generally engaging in low-risk behavior.
It would be great if everyone talking about this issue read Dave’s piece, in its entirety, to just be exposed to this perspective and his typically lucid analysis.
Posted in Gelt, Stragety | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Ron Coleman on July 21, 2009
David Lat reports that the NYU community is up in arms over the appointment of Dr. Li-ann Thio,
the NYU visiting law professor whose views on homosexuality have made her the legal academic everyone loves to hate. It’s an online petition, addressed to the NYU law school and university administration, expressing “deep dissatisfaction with New York University School of Law’s appointment of Dr. Thio Li-Ann as a Global Visiting Professor of Law.”
The petition concludes by articulating the belief “that the Administration’s decision to appoint Dr. Thio was a grave mistake and her designation to teach ‘Human Rights in Asia’ is inappropriate and offensive.” There’s an additional option, selected by many (but not all) of the signatories, calling upon the administration to rescind Dr. Thio’s appointment.
Not all the signatories are quite that crass, or open, about their limited scope of their tolerance for unfashionable intellections as to that moral “human rights” issue regarding which no dissent is tolerable.
This should be interesting to watch.
Posted in Edumacallit, O Mores!, Oppression | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Ron Coleman on July 20, 2009
Maybe this is for real now. Maybe the sky really is falling, and all my measured lectures for loyal and genteel opposition were wrong, wrong, wrong after all.
Because, you know, it’s really always about the money. And look what the New York Post, via Instapundit, is reporting:
Congress is now spending about $3 trillion more than it did in 1945, at the end of World War II, once numbers are adjusted for inflation.
The only thing that surprises me about this is that this is only happening for the first time just now.
Of course, 1945 was a mighty expensive year, and I would have bet 1944 was even more costly. I would have been wrong, though:
Year GDP-US Total Spending-total
1940 101.4 20.42
1941 126.7 24.35
1942 161.9 45.58
1943 198.6 92.71
1944 219.8 109.95
1945 223.1 118.18
(Courtesy of the U.S. Government Spending website.) Astonishing. We’re breaking through every conceivable measure of indebtedness, and doing so recklessly, ineffectually and irreversibly.
What does the man with this plan, President Obama have to say about all this? Addressing the risk his fellow chefs may be balking at applying, as icing on the cake of fiscal collapse, the nationalization of the medical care sector (not to mention the criminalization of private medicine), he wants us to think big picture:
President Obama yesterday sought to reassure the public that his overhaul plan was financially sound and asked lawmakers not to “lose heart.”
“This is what the debate in Congress is all about — whether we’ll keep talking and tinkering and letting this problem fester,” Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address.
“Or whether we’ll seize this opportunity — one we might not have again for generations — and finally pass health-insurance reform this year, in 2009.”
You know, it’s one thing to soft-pedal atomic-bomb type radical changes such as are being proposed for the healthcare system as “reform.” How much more do we expect from a politician? But when you are already betting the company on a radical fiscal policy that crosses lines not last crossed since the time our country’s very existence was threatened, and you think “reform” is the “opportunity we might not have again for generations” — it begins to sound a tad like you’re, I don’t know, being very unrealistic about certain things.
Like whether “we” will have any generations to speak of, government-of-these-United-States-wise.
I am now bona-fide worried. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Gelt, Politics and Poker, Sisyphus | 1 Comment »
Posted by Ron Coleman on July 19, 2009
A year after the Supreme Court told the Washington, DC city counsel that, yes, the Second Amendment does apply to the District of Columbia, it’s exactly as the Brady Bunch has predicted — with pretty much everyone packing heat, it’s now a wide-open, Wild West firing range where you have to run, squatting, from your car to the lobby of the building you’re going into just to avoid the ricocheting ordnance.
Posted in Lex scripta, Metropolis, Packing heat | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Ron Coleman on July 16, 2009
Hm. Instapundit cites Randy Barnett, who writes:
When [Jeffrey] Rosen published his critique [of Sonya Sotomayor], I knew very little about Sotomayor. After forcing myself to watch much of the hearings, I wonder if those who criticized him then are having any second thoughts today.
I am having second thoughts about my own measured enthusiasm for Sotomayor, which was based on a selfish interest in a particular area of law plus what I believed was the range of options from this Administration, yes.
But do I have second thoughts about my criticism of Jeffrey Rosen (it’s buried in here; and no, I don’t think Jennifer Rubin meant me when she asked the question)?
No. Rosen’s article seemed rushed, and was based on very few specifics, and a lot of anonymous sources. The specifics were also very pedestrian. She was obviously vulnerable on Ricci v. DeStefano, but, well, “everyone” knew that — I am sure that that includes Randy Barnett. If her opinion in Ricci was that bad (and evidently it was!), why couldn’t Rosen give us six more such-a’s? That was his job as a reporter.
To the contrary, Rosen is to be criticized not only for pulling back from his original view so he wouldn’t lose out on invitations to all the right parties, but for writing such a damned lazy legal journalism article when in fact there may have been not only smoke but some fire to report. There’s a lot of that going around.
I also didn’t, and still don’t, think much of this slam by Jennifer Rubin, also cited by both Glenn and Randy:
The question is not whether Sotomayor will get through, but why the president felt so compelled to select her. If he was desperate to find a Latina, he should have found a wise one.
Talk about “wise.” I know wisdom is not the same as intelligence, but I don’t think Jennifer Rubin has the slightest inclination to make that distinction here. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Lex scripta, Medialites, Politics and Poker | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Ron Coleman on July 16, 2009
Joy McCann: “Wait. I’ve Changed My Mind About Sotomayer.”
Not in a good way, either.
Posted in Lex scripta | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Ron Coleman on July 15, 2009
And even more so when you’re paying — or not paying — in Canadian.
Free health care is going to be so awesome!
Posted in Euroids, Gelt | 4 Comments »
Posted by Ron Coleman on July 9, 2009
The 71-year old Bernard Madoff isn’t going to appeal his 150-year sentence, it turns out.
“We won’t be appealing the sentence,” Madoff’s lawyer, Ira Sorkin, said Thursday. He declined to say why the decision was made.
How about the fact that a successful appeal could well get the sentence cut, I don’t know, maybe in half?
Maybe even by two-thirds?
Yeah. Would not have been the brightest use of stolen money.
(More on sentences of this nature at Colin Samuels’ new blog, by the way.)
Posted in Gelt, Lex scripta | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Ron Coleman on July 8, 2009
I am steamed — steamed — about these Atlantic magazine “salons” we’re learning about now.
It is so wrong.
At this point I should be getting invited to things like this.
Posted in Medialites | 4 Comments »
