Category Archives: Media Criticism

“A Travesty For Government Accountability”

The Obama administration continues to use the Constitution for toilet paper. If they get away with this, they’ll regret it when someone else comes to power. And the media, of course, lies for them and calls it a “recess appointment.”

[Thursday morning update]

Barack Obama’s tyrannical abuse of power.

[Bumped]

[Late-morning update]

The Constitution is clear on recess appointments. This isn’t one.

[Update a couple minutes later]

The appointment is Constitutionally dubious, and so is the job itself.

[Update early afternoon]

More thoughts from John Yoo:

President Obama is making a far more sweeping claim. Here, as I understand it, the Senate is not officially in adjournment (they have held “pro forma” meetings, where little to no business occurs, to prevent Obama from making exactly such appointments). So there is no question whether the adjournment has become a constitutional “recess.” Rather, Obama is claiming the right to decide whether a session of Congress is in fact a “real” one based, I suppose, on whether he sees any business going on.

This, in my view, is not up to the president, but the Senate. It is up to the Senate to decide when it is in session or not, and whether it feels like conducting any real business or just having senators sitting around on the floor reading the papers. The president cannot decide the legitimacy of the activities of the Senate any more than he could for the other branches, and vice versa.

Is the president going to have the authority to decide if the Supreme Court has deliberated too little on a case? Does Congress have the right to decide whether the president has really thought hard enough about granting a pardon? Under Obama’s approach, he could make a recess appointment anytime he is watching C-SPAN and feels that the senators are not working as hard as he did in the Senate (a fairly low bar).

I think this will come back to bite him. And it’s all about his reelection.

The Statin Fraud

Exposed.

I’ve always had high cholesterol (around 240 total), but I’ve never bought into the statin thing. And over the past year, since I went mostly paleo in my diet, I’ve gotten it down to 207 (as of October), with HDL of eighty and triglycerides below fifty, so for me at least, diet makes a big difference (not by cutting out cholesterol, but by cutting out the wrong carbs). I’ve also lost almost twenty pounds, though that wans’t a goal (and I gained seven or eight pounds over the holidays, what with the mashed potatoes and bread with holiday meals). The notion that “you are what you eat” and that fat makes you fat and cholesterol gives you high cholesterol is primitive thinking, and yet it remains the medical mainstream view. And while it’s been good for the drug companies, I think that it’s killed millions over the decades, including my father.

The Problem With The Welfare State

isn’t just its cost:

When people come to be more reliant on the state than they are on each other, community bonds fray and social solidarity falls into disrepair. When the struggling mum looks to the state for help, rather than turning to family, friends, neighbours, the end result is that she becomes more isolated from her community. When a 17-year-old school student short of cash turns to the state for a weekly handout, he never really develops skills of self-sufficiency or dependency on friends and neighbours. When young men looking for work know that the state will sustain them for long periods of time, especially if they make a performance of being “ill” or “depressed” at the dole centre, then their instinct to work becomes frayed. The old healthy working-class habits of pulling together, “getting on one’s bike”, offering one another work and advice have slowly but surely – and tragically – been replaced by the “helping hand” of the ever-watchful state. People start to rely less on their own wits and mates, and more on the faceless keepers of charitable cash.

It is soul sapping.

Why Can’t Hollywood?

get DC right?

Because they don’t care, any more than they care about getting science right. And it never occurs to them that maybe this is one of the reasons why they haven’t been doing well in terms of selling movie tickets. The Deer Hunter was ruined for me by shooting what was supposed to be Pennsylvania in the Olympic Mountains, but apparently they don’t realize how stupid that was, or care that it was so grating to some people.