If you ignore all the stuff about the Hobby Lobby ruling, this is probably the nuttiest thing you’ll read today.
[Tuesday update]
The case for libertarian populism. There are a lot of good ideas there.
[Bumped]
Category Archives: Media Criticism
Guilty Until Proven Innocent
Let’s treat Lois Lerner the way she and the rest of the IRS would treat us.
Birth Control, Over The Counter
Yes, the Republicans should pass a bill to allow it.
Why Government Doesn’t Work
…and how to make it better.
Climate “Consensus”
Well, partially because it’s being dishonestly rammed down our throats to promote economically harmful policies.
The Huntsville Reality-Distortion Zone
This isn’t new, but I don’t think I linked it at the time. Eric Berger reports on the people working SLS:
May turns the cost issue around.
“My question would be, how could we afford not to do this?” May asked. “Great nations explore. Great nations push their boundaries. And this country has continued to the limits of what we know and learn for a generation, and I think we’ve got to continue to explore.”
And in the larger perspective, he argues, SLS does not cost that much. NASA spends about $1.6 billion a year building it, less than 9 percent of the space agency’s total budget, he said, which is itself less than one half of one percent of the federal budget.
“I think it’s a relatively small amount of money to set the leadership for the world in space exploration,” he says.
Count the number of logical fallacies in just those four grafs.
Poor Democrats
Why they lie about how poor they are.
They have to pretend to not be part of the plutocracy. Of course, they have to lie about a lot of things to get elected.
College Costs
The denial industry.
They have to lie and deny it. It’s their only hope of keeping the bubble inflated.
Operation Choke Point
As Glenn says, this does seem like a criminal conspiracy by the Justice Department to deprive people of their civil rights because the administration doesn’t like the kind of (legal) business they’re in. They should certainly have standing to file a lawsuit. We have to stand up against these thugs.
Obama’s Amnesty Strategy
OK, so it’s not just a partial shambles:
Obama’s pass-a-bill-or-I’ll act strategy was not just tactically dumb (alienating the very House Republicans it was designed to coerce, stoking activist expectations of an imminent executive overreach to achieve a goal that wasn’t popular enough to sustain the overreaching). It was also substantively dumb – the actual policy assumptions underlying Obama’s proposals (that amnesty doesn’t act as a magnet for further illegal immigration) were disproved by the Latin American reaction to his initial pen-and-phone moves before House Republicans had time to be coerced.
Democrats are still putting on their Goodfellas faces and pretending they have leverage. Dem Whip Steny Hoyer promises a “significant change in policy” if the House does not act in July, according Breitbart News. Senator Dick Durbin says that if Speaker Boehner doesn’t act “the President will borrow the power that is needed to solve the problems of immigration.” (I must have been sleeping in Con Law when they taught the Borrowing Clause.) Senator Robert Menendez defensively declares ”the threat of executive action is not a bluff.”
It’s a bluff. House GOPs should feel free to ignore it, at least through November.** If Obama takes any executive action before then, it will be of the most timid, face-saving variety.
Speaking of Con Law, it would have been appalling, if I weren’t used to it, to hear Xavier Becerra say on Fox News Sunday that it was OK for the president to ignore the Constitution and bypass Congress if what he was doing was popular. Those are the words of a caudillo. The Democrats seem ever-more determined to turn us into a banana republic.