I’d like to see someone (Tapper?) ask the president why he thinks he’s a better expert on the Honduran constitution than the Honduran Supreme Court.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
More Hope And Change In Michigan
Paved roads are reverting to gravel.
I guess this is the kind of “progress” that results from “progressive” polices like the ones the Democrats have delivered in the Great Lakes State.
The Cost Of Cap And Trade
Burning one ton of coal produces about three tons of CO2. So a tax of $15 per ton of CO2 emitted is equivalent to a tax of $45/ton on coal. The price of Eastern anthracite coal runs in the neighborhood of $45/ton, so under the proposed system, such coal would be taxed at a rate of about 100 percent. The price of Western bituminous coal is currently about $12/ton. This coal would therefore be taxed at a rate of almost 400 percent. Coal provides half of America’s electricity, so such extraordinary imposts could easily double the electric bills paid by consumers and businesses across half the nation. In addition, many businesses, such as the metals and chemical industries, use a great deal of coal directly. By doubling or potentially even quadrupling the cost of their most basic feedstock, the cap-and-trade system’s indulgence fees could make many such businesses uncompetitive and ultimately throw millions of working men and women onto the unemployment lines.
It’s OK. Even if they have paychecks, they won’t be able to afford to eat any more, anyway, after the price of food skyrockets. And it will solve that pesky population problem in the third world.
Lionesses
An interesting story on American women soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Let’s Put The Government In Charge Of Health Care
Charles Murray (who by the way co-wrote one of the best histories of Apollo
You want to know what a Medicare identification card is like? It is a little larger than the standard size for credit cards and driver’s licenses. (Of course. Couldn’t have the federal government make a card that will fit in a stack with all the other cards you use.) It has no magnetic strip. It is plain vanilla text and fonts—no security features whatsoever. It could be counterfeited by a sixth-grader with a scanner. It is made out of flimsy paper that would barely qualify for a really cheap business card. This, for Medicare benefits, for Pete’s sake. It’s pathetic.
Actually, it is shoddy and incompetent, as are so many things that the federal government does.
Let’s hope they’ll stick to making little cars.
I’d Be Ashamed To Be From Minnesota
Caligula sent a horse to the Senate. Minnesota is just sending part of the horse.
Unfortunately, it will fit right in.
Iran And Honduras
Is President Obama objectively pro-fascist?
Sure looks like it.
Also, thoughts from Ron Bailey on energy Leninism.
It’s a tragedy (though perhaps it’s a plan, going back to Thomas Dewey) that the voters understand neither history or economics.
[Mid-morning update]
Everything inside the state, nothing outside the state.
An Example Of How Lucky We Have It
The worst job they could come up with:
I’ve held my silence for long enough, but my true identity (for about 2 months) was the bird at Red Robin – Red, he really has a name. It was horrible, you could only be out in the restaurant getting poked and stepped on by little kids for 15-20 minutes at a time- at which point you would overheat and the staff would waddle you back to the huge meat freezer to cool off and start all over again. Perk: free steak fries and soda.
Boo. Hoo.
I don’t want to get into a Monty Python “we had to live in a cardboard box and get killed by our father every morning, and be grateful that we had the luxury of a box” sort of thing, but I’ve had worse jobs.
But I’m not going to bother to talk about them, because I know that at the worst, I lived in a paradise compared to many millions in the world. For example, consider the people who have to work in real sweat shops, where you don’t get a break every 15-20 minutes.
But even there, I don’t think it compares to a “job” in North Korea, where your job is to go out and find something to eat that will be worth the energy that it took you to find it — forget about whether or not it will feed your family.
These people have no conception of what bad jobs are. And the frightening thing is that they may find out before the reign of The One, who many of them voted for, is over, because he seems to think that state planning, as occurs in the extreme there, should reign over the market.
Cultural Imperalism
How McDonalds conquered France:
In the battle for France, Jose Bové, the protester who vandalized a McDonald’s in 1999 and was then running for president, proved to be no match for Le Big Mac. The first round of the presidential election was held on April 22, and Bové finished an embarrassing tenth, garnering barely 1 percent of the total vote. By then, McDonald’s had eleven hundred restaurants in France, three hundred more than it had had when Bové gave new meaning to the term “drive-through.” The company was pulling in over a million people per day in France, and annual turnover was growing at twice the rate it was in the United States. Arresting as those numbers were, there was an even more astonishing data point: By 2007, France had become the second-most profitable market in the world for McDonald’s, surpassed only by the land that gave the world fast food. Against McDonald’s, Bové had lost in a landslide.
As Hitler discovered, it helps a lot to have Frenchmen on your side. It’s a very entertaining read.
[Via Veronique]
[Update a couple minutes later]
The best take, from Michael Goldfarb:
In the course of Donald Morrison’s review of Au Revoir to All That by Michael Steinberger, we learn that McDonald’s is the largest private employer in all of France, which is sort of like being the largest provider of health insurance in North Korea, but nonetheless, it feels like a major triumph for American culture and cuisine. I once ate at the McDonald’s right next to the Arc de Triomphe. My quarter pounder tasted like hegemony.
Even better than the smell of napalm in the morning.
[Via Mark Hemingway]
Selective Meddling
Some questions:
Now that the president has decided it’s okay to meddle in Honduras (where they are fighting to keep preserve their democracy against the Chávez-style thug who Obama wants to re-install) but not Iran (where thousands of Iranians who seek democracy are being killed, maimed and jailed by a regime which has been at war with the United States for 30 years), the president’s tack is to say that Honduras’s action in removing Zelaya is “not legal.”
What on earth makes Obama think he knows better about what is legal under the law of Honduras than the Supreme Court of Honduras and the law-writing legislature of Honduras? The Honduran military acted after Zelaya defied an order by that nation’s highest court which pronounced his coup attempt illegal; he has been replaced under a Honduran legal process by that nation’s Congress, which essentially impeached him and democratically voted in a successor. That sounds pretty legal to me. I am the first to admit I am not an expert in Honduran law, but I’d bet the Honduran Supreme Court has a better grasp on it than President Obama. On the issue of what is legal in Honduras, as between Hugo Chávez and the Honduran Supreme Court, our president has decided to go with Chávez.
Secondly, as IBD notes, the Obama administration is now “threatening to halt its $200 million in U.S. aid, immigration accords and a free-trade treaty if it doesn’t put the criminal Zelaya back into office.” Can someone explain to me how it is that Obama is willingly giving $900M to Hamastan (i.e., the jihadist-controlled Gaza strip) but would pull back a comparative pittance of aid in order to penalize a poor country in our own hemisphere for trying to preserve its democracy against a would-be left-wing dictator?
Also, as Charles Krauthammer said last night on Special Report:
…our decision ought to be: Yes, a coup isn’t a nice thing, but it’s preferable to having Zelaya dismantle the democracy. And we should insist on the elections of a president as scheduled in November, so it is a temporary situation.
Look, a rule of thumb here is whenever you find yourself on the side of Hugo Chavez, Daniel Ortega, and the Castro twins, you ought to reexamine your assumptions.
Hey, left-wing dictators have to stick together.
[Update early evening]
Zelaya’s operatives did their dirt all the way through. First they got signatures to launch the “citizen’s power” survey through threats — warning those who didn’t sign that they’d be denied medical care and worse. Zelaya then had the ballots flown to Tegucigalpa on Venezuelan planes. After his move was declared illegal by the Supreme Court, he tried to do it anyway.
As a result of his brazen disregard for the law, Zelaya found himself escorted from office by the military Sunday morning, and into exile. Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Cuba’s Fidel Castro rushed to blame the U.S., calling it a “yanqui coup.”
President Obama on Monday called the action “not legal,” and claimed that Zelaya is still the legitimate president.
There was a coup all right, but it wasn’t committed by the U.S. or the Honduran court. It was committed by Zelaya himself. He brazenly defied the law, and Hondurans overwhelmingly supported his removal (a pro-Zelaya rally Monday drew a mere 200 acolytes).
Yet the U.S. administration stood with Chavez and Castro, calling Zelaya’s lawful removal “a coup.” Obama called the action a “terrible precedent,” and said Zelaya remains president.
In doing this, the U.S. condemned democrats who stood up to save their democracy, a move that should have been hailed as a historic turning of the tide against the false democracies of the region.
They only like democracy when it gives them the right (in this case “left”) result.