It’s not just a water crisis. Like many cities, Flint is the culmination of decades of Democrat malgovernance. It’s a few days old, but Shikha Dalmia has been on the case:
…IMHO, if liberals were truly interested in helping Flint residents rather than simply sacrificing them to the altar of the God of Beneficent Government, they should approach private philanthropists for donations to buy out the houses of Flint’s residents and let them flee to better climes where jobs are more plentiful and the government less intrusive. (Houston, anyone?) Giving each Flint resident $10,000—or $40,000 to a family of four—will require about $4 billion, which is hardly beyond the means of the wealthy trinity of Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Mark Zuckerberg. And surely there are others whose help liberals will allow Flint victims to accept!
And what about the city of Flint? Indeed, if liberals were really as caring as they claim to be, they would shift their focus from saving geographical areas to saving living, breathing human beings.
But if they really, really want to do something about it, they should hand it to private developers to turn it into a giant landfill to bury liberal good intentions.
Reminder: they may be good intentions (though I think it’s more about power and corruption), but there is little “liberal” about this.
A timely essay on the current state of the nation from Charles Murray.
[Sunday-morning update]
A bridge too far: I agree with Ace that Trump finally damaged himself last night, at least with actual Republicans. It’s one thing to say we had bad intel; it’s entirely another to say that Bush deliberately lied us into war. That’s the ravings of the left, not a leading Republican candidate.
The stay implies that they think the administration is likely to lose on the merits when the case is argued. But this points out the stakes of the election, given that the next president is likely to appoint more than one justice.
[Wednesday-morning update]
Jonathan Adler explains the ruling. (Note: He is more concerned about climate change than I am.)
“The ecological effect of eliminating harmful mosquitoes is that you have more people. That’s the consequence,” says Strickman. Many lives would be saved; many more would no longer be sapped by disease. Countries freed of their high malaria burden, for example in sub-Saharan Africa, might recover the 1.3% of growth in gross domestic product that the World Health Organization estimates they are cost by the disease each year, potentially accelerating their development. There would be “less burden on the health system and hospitals, redirection of public-health expenditure for vector-borne diseases control to other priority health issues, less absenteeism from schools”, says Jeffrey Hii, malaria scientist for the World Health Organization in Manila.
They kill more humans than any other animal species, by many orders of magnitude. I wouldn’t miss them.