Category Archives: Media Criticism

Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Satire, Weird

My New Healthcare Plan

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Well, I finally broke down and went to the web site last night, before midnight.

After all the horror stories I’d been hearing, I was shocked to get in immediately. It was surprisingly easy to navigate, just like Amazon or Kayak, just like the president promised. All the options were laid out clearly, and the prices were surprisingly affordable, even for the Gold Plan. I signed up, and I finally have the insurance I’ve been waiting for all these years, good in every state, and it allows me to keep all my doctors. It includes free fitted condoms, and I can finally get that hysterectomy I’ve been putting off all these years.

I was wrong, Mr. President, and you were right. I’m sorry I so foolishly listened to ignorant criticism of this wonderful new law these past four years, and so harshly and falsely criticized it myself. I don’t know what I can do to make amends, but I know that from here on out, I will be a Democrat right up until that day that the death panel makes what I’m sure will be the right decision for me. From the bottom of my heart, thank you, thank you Mr. President.

[Update a few minutes later]

I’m a little shocked to hear that some people think I would make jokes about something as serious as health care.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Bush Versus Clinton

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Are we really doomed to that in 2016?

More thoughts from Mark Steyn:

Bush/Clinton/Bush/Clinton now and forever, at least until George P Bush marries Chelsea Clinton and the two ruling houses are consolidated into one House of Bush-Clinton-Rodham-Coburg-Gotha. I’ve nothing against Jeb Bush. I happen to disagree with him on “immigration reform”, but he was a competent executive of Florida and he’s a thoughtful and (on his game) gifted speaker. But there are over 300 million people in this country, and, granted that 57 per cent or whatever it’s up to by now are fine upstanding members of the Undocumented-American community, what is it about the Bush family that makes them so indispensable to the Republic as to supply three presidential candidates within a quarter-century? Say what you like about actual monarchy but at least you get a non-heriditary political class: this may seem incredible to Americans but neither Canada’s Stephen Harper, Australia’s Tony Abbott, New Zealand’s John Key nor Britain’s David Cameron is the previous Prime Minister’s brother or wife.

So who are these “influential Republicans” working to draft Jeb?

Many if not most of 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s major donors are reaching out to Bush and his confidants with phone calls, e-mails and invitations to meet, according to interviews with 30 senior Republicans. One bundler estimated that the “vast majority” of Romney’s top 100 donors would back Bush in a competitive nomination fight.

“He’s the most desired candidate out there,” said another bundler, Brian Ballard, who sat on the national finance committees for Romney in 2012 and John McCain in 2008. “Everybody that I know is excited about it.”

The guys who picked last season’s loser are already excited about next season’s loser. How exciting is that?

Sigh.

Business, General Science, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Cosmos

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Chad Orzell has some problems with the reboot. So do I and while it’s not his main concern, he puts his finger on it:

The bit where he called out young-Earth creationism for the impoverished scale of its vision was cute, too, though I’m not sure it was all that necessary or useful (in that the people who believe that won’t be watching, and wouldn’t be convinced), but then the show has clearly established a pattern of throwing red meat to the anti-religious from time to time.

Yes, if by “from time to time” he means every episode so far. I’m not traditionally religious, but I find it gratuitous and off putting. The writers and Tyson seem to get some sort of righteous satisfaction from putting a rhetorical thumb in the eyes of believers. It does not advance science, or their own secular religious cause.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Harry Reid

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The grandfather:

We all know the motives of liberal Democrats are pure, their hearts true, their lives guiltless of the favoritism and nepotism and self-interest and ideological blindness of Republicans and conservatives. Harry Reid is willing to go the extra step. He did nothing wrong in handing $31,000 of his donors’ money to his granddaughter, he told reporters, but he plans to reimburse his campaign anyway. What a saint.

“I must study politics and war,” John Adams said, “that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.” In Harry Reid’s America a man must win political office so that his sons may have the liberty to practice law and register as lobbyists, engage in rent-seeking and government relations and crisis management and communications, in order to give their children a right to live in Brooklyn, to enroll in the New School, to visit the Vermont Studio Center, to have cronies finance their off-off-off-Broadway shows, to enjoy their allowance from grandpa. This is the arrangement put before the voters this coming Election Day; this is the “system” rigged to benefit the family Reid; this is the configuration of power that Charles and David Koch want to disrupt. How awful of them. How “un-American.”

Indeed.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary

The Democrats’ Scandals

34 Comments

They’re all rooted in the evil of unlimited government:

Adam Smith’s formula for prosperity — “peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice” — is the very modest ambition that conservatives aim for. Limited government is the tool by which government can be made to do good without necessarily being good, or being composed of good men.

The progressive state, on the other hand, is a state infused with moral purpose. If politics is to be a jihad, then the state must be invested with extraordinary power to achieve its moral mission. There is no way to invest the state with extraordinary power without also investing those powers in the men who hold its offices and staff its bureaucracies, which hold ever more nearly absolute power over our property and our lives. (And given that the Obama administration has made a policy of assassinating U.S. citizens without legal process, we might as well call that power “absolute.”) But if those elective offices and regulatory fortresses are to be staffed with men who are corrupt and corruptible, then the progressive vision of the morality-infused state must falter.

And they — we — are all corruptible.

Lord Acton was right, once again, about the power of power to corrupt.