Another review of Rick Boozer’s book
Category Archives: Media Criticism
The Next Housing Bubble
Are we being saved from it by the student loan bubble? What an awful, awful government policy. It’s destroying a generation’s financial prospects.
Hillary’s Past
Of course it’s relevant. Democrats who say that the voters won’t be interested in it are just expressing a desperate hope. They got away with that “it’s old news” nonsense in the nineties, but it’s not the nineties any more. Hillary enabled Bill’s sexual predation and corruption and participated in it, including targeting inconvenient women who were his victims. Speaking of which, three cheers for Kathleen Willey for not letting the Clintons’ thugs intimidate her.
Hillary should, finally, be held accountable, even if all that means is that she doesn’t get to rule over us.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Byron York has it right:
Of course Clinton’s recent experiences are relevant to a presidential run. But so are her actions in the 90s, the 80s and even the 70s. It’s not ancient history; it reveals something about who Clinton was and still is. And re-examining her past is entirely consistent with practices in recent campaigns.
In the 2012 presidential race, for example, many in the press were very interested in business deals Mitt Romney made in the 1980s. In the 2004 race, many journalists were even more interested in what George W. Bush did with the Texas Air National Guard in 1968, as well as what John Kerry did in Vietnam that same year. And in 2000, a lot of journalists invested a lot of time trying to find proof that Bush had used cocaine three decades earlier.
So by the standards set in coverage of other candidates, Clinton’s past is not too far past.
That’s especially true because there will be millions of young voters in 2016 who know little about the Clinton White House. Americans who had not even been born when Bill Clinton first took the oath of office in 1993 will be eligible to vote two years from now. They need to know that Hillary Clinton has been more than Secretary of State.
Yes. There is a new generation that needs to learn just what kind of people these people are.
[Another update]
More from Wes Pruden:
The “bimbo eruptions” that Bill and Hillary thought were well behind them are coming back with a vengeance, and it’s only 2014. Bimbos have been a menace to ambitious men since Eve treated Adam to his first apple tart, Delilah gave Samson his first haircut, and Anthony Weiner tweeted his first crotch shot to the bimbos of the cyberworld.
The invention of politics raised the ante. The cultivation of the libido at taxpayer expense, together with the explosion of media, makes official indiscretion unsustainable.
The fact that Bubba’s bimbos were leftovers from an earlier century means that the recollection of them won’t be old news to the millions of voters who grew up after the Clintons left the White House. Fourteen years and two presidents later, a lot has been swallowed by the memory hole.
Bubba’s bimbos and Hillary’s enabling and manipulation of scandal will be new and titillating stuff. Sex sells, even the creepy sex attributed to old fogies over 30. The modern American culture is built on the cultivation of sexual titillation.
Yup.
And Monica was the least of Bill’s predatory conquests, because unlike Juanita Broaddrick, whom he forcibly raped, Paula Jones, whom he had delivered to his hotel room by an armed police officer, and Kathleen Willey, whom he assaulted in the White House after she came seeking a job, she threw herself at him.
Venezuela
The day it died:
Even before President Obama was elected in 2008 I wrote that he was showing Chavez-like tendencies. I have never seen any reason to revise that notion; it has only strengthened. Reading the Globe and Mail article I quoted above, I am struck in particular by this seemingly unimportant quote, “the government releases almost no reliable data.” That’s been especially true of Obamacare and the present administration, as I pointed out last Thursday. Far more than ever before in my memory, domestic statistics released by the government have become almost pure propaganda, and few on right or left trust them.
But bluffing can only get you so far. Sooner or later economic reality comes to call.
As noted, collapses can come suddenly. And of course, the silence of the administration on what’s happening in Chavistaland is deafening.
[Update a few minutes later]
This is an important point:
It is easier to destroy than to build. Much easier. That’s true whether destruction is your goal or not. And if you’re blinded by the need to stick to your ideology and declare it a success no matter what the truth is, you may not even know what’s going on until Humpty Dumpty finally takes that tumble.
That’s what entropy is all about. There are millions of forms of crap, but just a comparative few of worthwhile things. Collectivism is a highly entropic system.
[Update late morning]
Fausta Wertz is live blogging the protests.
Administrative Bloat And Astronomical Tuition
Colleges and universities are nonprofits. When extra money comes in — as, until recently, has been the pattern — they can’t pay out excess profits to shareholders. Instead, the money goes to their effective owners, the administrators who hold the reins. As the Goldwater study notes, they get their “dividends” in the form of higher pay and benefits, and “more fellow administrators who can reduce their own workload or expand their empires.”
But with higher education now facing leaner years, and with students and parents unable to keep up with increasing tuition, what should be done? In short, colleges will have to rein in costs.
When asked what single step would do the most good, I’ve often responded semi-jokingly that U.S. News and World Report should adjust its college-ranking formula to reward schools with low costs and lean administrator-to-student ratios. But that’s not really a joke. Given schools’ exquisite sensitivity to the U.S. News rankings, that step would probably have more impact than most imaginable government regulations.
Something’s going to have to give.
The Big Bang Theory
The unaired pilot.
You can see why it was unaired.
One thing I’ve never understood. Why would an financially struggling waitress and aspiring actress live in a high-rent area that’s a longer commute like Pasadena? It would make a lot more sense for her to be in Burbank, or at least Glendale.
The Risk To Liberty
It doesn’t come from the welfare state, but from central planning:
Obamacare provides the illustration of this, as I think many people have intuited. The “economic problem,” of course, is inescapable in health care. The supply of health care is scarce (only so many resources can be dedicated to it relative to other ends in society) and the demand is pretty close to unlimited. Somehow or other we have to decide how to allocate these scarce means among all the different ends–preventive medicine, end-of-life care, primary research, specialists v. generalists, etc.
Now one possibility that–thank goodness–we have historically rejected in the United States is the idea that certain people should just feel a moral obligation to die for the good of society. You do hear this sometimes–that some people should voluntarily forgo life-extending treatment for the “good of society”–and it sends chills down my spine. This is essentially the Maoist approach.
The alternative is to come up with some way of allocating scarce resources among competing wants. The myth of Obamacare is the same problem repeated: it rests on the idea that we can simply change the means of health care delivery (central planning of health insurance) but it will not require determining the ends at some point–i.e., in the end who gets treated and what treatments are covered and which are not. So, for example, the core of Obamacare is the system of cross-subsidies for some treatments (maternal care) and the expense of others (unmarried or infertile people). So infertile people have less money for things that they want to do (such as join a health club) because they now have to pay more money for things that the central planners have decided is more important than whatever they would do with their money.
And of course, E. J. Dionne remains clueless, as always.
The Modern Diet
Eleven charts that show what’s wrong with it.
It’s particularly interesting that the “obesity epidemic” started about the time the pseudo-scientists started recommending cutting back on dietary fat.
The Rushdie Fatwa
It’s been a quarter of a century:
Most analyses of the Rushdie Rules focus exclusively on the growth of Islamism. But two other factors are even more important: Multiculturalism as practiced undercuts the will to sustain Western civilization against Islamist depredations while the Left’s making common political cause with Islamists gives the latter an entrée. In other words, the core of the problem lies not in Islam but in the West.
Yes, and there is a deep rot in our universities, as demonstrated by groups like the American Studies Association.
Obama’s Other Health-Care Lie
Of course he knew that the the site was having problems.
As Jonah notes:
As the article points out this all flies in the face of countless denials from the White House that the president had any idea implementation of Obamacare would be spotty. If that’s the case, what in the world did Obama and Sebelius discuss at those meetings? It seems to me the only options are: She was utterly clueless and misled the president by accident. She wasn’t clueless and knew there were problems but misled the president on purpose. She wasn’t clueless and told the president the truth. I leave it to others to determine which of these three reflects best on the White House and the president’s managerial skills.
There was never any reason to think that the president had any managerial skills, other than “hope and change.” And he doesn’t seem to have acquired any after five years on the job.