I have a piece up on that subject over at Reason. It’s a reprise of some of the arguments I make in the book, which I now expect to be available next week (my printer screwed up). I’d hoped to have them available for SpaceUp LA this weekend, but that’s not going to happen.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
The ObamaCareBear
The web site has a new mascot.
Updated #ObamaCareBear poster, to better accentuate our compassion (ignore previous). But don't forget the rabies. pic.twitter.com/JResyN6i1h
— HealthCareDotGov (@HealthDotGov) November 5, 2013
The Inner Solar System
Rick Boozer (who has a book out
Meanwhile, Bob Crippen is spinning fairy tales about SLS:
The combination of SLS and Orion will effectively establish a highway to the entire solar system.
It will be obsolete before it flies.
Obama As Manager
ObamaCare supporters are worried that he might not actually be a very good one.
What tipped them off? And why didn’t they notice it five years ago, as some of the more perspicacious among us did?
ObamaCare And The Widening Disconnect
A good piece by Salena Zito:
Our relationship with government is in shambles, our feeling of disconnect with Washington at an historic level.
Yet the real problem is not a health-care website that doesn’t work. The real problem is a president and a Washington culture which both believe it is okay to lie to get a bill passed.
Hey, gotta break a few eggs to make an omelette. As I said before, I hope that this is an asteroid smashing an ideology.
The Tea Party And Alger Hiss
A takedown of Cass Sunstein’s idiotic theory:
We aren’t seeing a right-leaning populist surge today because of Alger Hiss; we are seeing it because many Americans believe that President Obama’s liberal and technocratic agenda represents a threat to a way of life they value. We are seeing it because many Americans blame the establishment of both parties both for the financial crisis and for the vast transfer of resources to the wealthy that came after the crash. We are seeing it because whether you look at foreign or domestic policy, the technocratic suggestions of the Great and the Good have not been helping ordinary Americans much for the last 20 years.
Via Meadia isn’t a Tea Party house organ, and any tea parties at the stately Mead manor are more about Earl Grey than Ayn Rand. But we don’t think Tea Partiers are wrong to see President Obama’s political goals as fundamentally opposed to their own vision of what America should be. They aren’t angry because they are stupid, and deep disagreement with technocratic liberalism is not a mental disease.
But if it is, ObamaCare will cover it. One way or the other.
The “Second-Term Curse”
Really? That’s Obama’s problem? Not listening, but that’s the title of the panel segment on This Week.
Of course, if we’d known half of what we know now a year ago — about Benghazi, the IRS targeting of conservatives, the blatant deliberate lies about keeping your health plan, period, etc., there wouldn’t have been a second term.
Barack Obama’s Narrative Delusions
Thoughts from Andrew Klavan:
Within the narrative cloud created by these journalists, Obama remains safe in his illusions while the rest of us suffer the consequences. He believes that playing the president and being the president are much the same thing. It is as if Bruce Willis believed he could save a skyscraper full of people by jumping off the roof clutching a fire hose.
For those of us who face the world head on? We don’t need Mulder and Scully to tell us: the truth is out there. Obama has lost the gains of the Iraq war and sacrificed the lives of our soldiers in Afghanistan to no purpose. He has alienated our allies in Germany, France and, God help us, Saudi Arabia, while playing the fool for our enemies in Iran and Russia. He has ruthlessly curtailed free speech by abusing the powers of the IRS against his political opponents, spying on and persecuting journalists, and encouraging the imprisonment of a video maker to suit his political ends. He has brutally hobbled our economy with anti-business regulations written by the very legislators who brought on the recession in the first place. And now, through lies and corrupt political machinations, he has saddled us with a chaotic and overbearing health care law that, even when operational, will never be worth its weight in debt and curtailed liberties.
But other than that, it’s great.
[Update a while later]
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been opposed to government health care because, as I’ve said in at least two books, it fundamentally redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state into one closer to that of junkie and pusher. But that’s a philosophical position. Others prefer constitutional arguments: The federal government does not have the authority to do what it’s doing. Dear old John Roberts, chief justice of the United States, twisted himself into a pretzel to argue that, in fact, the government does. But he might as well have saved himself the trouble and just used Nancy Pelosi’s line: Asked by a journalist where in the Constitution it granted the feds the power to do this, she gave him the full Leslie Nielsen and said, “You’re not serious?” She has the measure of her people. Most Americans couldn’t care less about philosophical arguments or constitutional fine print: For them, all Obamacare has to do is work. That is why the last month has been so damaging to Big Government’s brand: In entirely non-ideological, technocratic, utilitarian terms, Obamacare is a bust.
I think, and hope, it was a regulatory policy bridge too far.
Public Schools
Who is stupider? It’s pretty tough to choose. But this is a point I hadn’t considered:
…as smarter people abandon public schools, the dumber ones who remain have more impact. They should be subjected to public humiliation, in the hopes that they’ll learn, or at least serve as an example to the others.
I wonder if we aren’t already in a death spiral in that regard.
.”Liberals” Who Love The Regulatory State
There’s nothing “liberal” about them.