Of course, it would almost empty the current Senate. Not to mention the White House (and Naval Observatory).
Category Archives: Media Criticism
Beyond ObamaCare
Ramesh Ponnuru and Yuval Levin respond to their critics:
The first thing to note is that none of our critics actually defend Obamacare, and therefore none dispute the argument of the piece. Their dispute is entirely with what we propose instead — which our piece of course lays out only briefly and broadly, since we assumed that the argument that replacement is still the right way to think about things first had to be made. Their lack of interest in defending the law is interesting. Do they agree with us that Obamacare cannot work as enacted? Do they agree that piecemeal reforms will not work and Obamacare must be replaced? If they do, do they imagine that the party that forced this unpopular law down the country’s throat will be trusted to fix or replace it once it fails?
If they don’t agree that Obamacare is untenable (as we assume at least some of them don’t), how would they defend it? Do they not think it is headed for an insurance death spiral? Do they not think the financial incentives it sets up will result in far higher federal spending and far fewer insured Americans than its advocates promised? Do they think it will lower premium costs? Is it sustainable over time? Have you seen much of a substantive answer from the left to these commonly voiced concerns?
The critics of our piece offer no such answers, and actually suggest that we’re wasting our time repeating the obvious case against Obamacare. Several of them want to get right to a debate about what should replace it. That’s great. Not all of them, though, want to discuss the solution we pointed to. Kevin Drum acknowledges (twice) that he didn’t actually read our piece; he just read Yglesias and Klein (who just summarized Yglesias) and “sighed.” We know the feeling.
Don’t we all?
Skeptical Of Skeptical Science
Bob Tisdale has a rebuttal to their latest nonsense.
[Update a while later]
Note that we seem to have attracted a cowardly anonymous (and apparently not very bright) troll in comments, who seems unable to address the actual content of this post.
Gun Control
The great fizzle:
…the assault weapons ban has been deep-sixed by Democrats in the Senate. Same with any limit on the size of magazines. The argument now is all about increasing the reach of background checks, although any bill that can pass the Senate and the House will be much less extensive than the president or his supporters would like.
The gun control debate has shown the president again to be hopelessly detached as a legislative mechanic and ineffectual as a shaper of public opinion. Before writing rhetorical checks that his own party’s majority leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, couldn’t cash, the president might have at least consulted with the wily old son-of-a-gun about what was plausible and adjusted accordingly. He might have taken into consideration Reid’s ribbon-cutting ceremony with National Rifle Association honcho Wayne LaPierre at the Clark County Shooting Park in Las Vegas in 2010.
Once again, we’re saved from the fecklessness of the electorate by his incompetence.
Real Hunting Groups
Versus fake ones.
What does it say about your political agenda that you have to resort to lies and political subterfuge to get it passed? Unfortunately, the media eat it up.
Redford’s Latest
It’s not just awful politics, but a terrible movie. I wonder what Ebert would have thought about it?
Gun Owners
…turning them into felons. I doubt if this would pass Constitutional muster.
Fortunately, I don’t think that Schumer’s fascist nonsense will get through the House, even if it somehow survives the Senate.
[Update a few minutes later]
Link fixed now, sorry.
Redefining America (And Space Policy)
Larry Greenfield writes that those who prefer tyranny are winning. Unfortunately, like many conservatives, he doesn’t understand what’s going on with space policy:
American innovation both promoted and benefited from the space race. Today, Mr. Obama has lowered his sights, cut NASA spending, and opposed lunar exploration and continued human spaceflight.
This is simply untrue. The administration hasn’t cut NASA spending — the Congress has, on a bi-partisan basis. And while the administration did shut down the disastrous Constellation program whose stated purpose was to get us back to the moon, it had no real prospects of doing so. They have not “opposed continued human spaceflight.” They have repeatedly requested funding increases for commercial crew, the only NASA program with any chance of getting Americans to orbit on American rockets in this decade, and Congress has repeatedly cut the funding for it. One can argue about how effective the administration’s plans will be, but to say that they oppose human spaceflight is simply false as a matter of objective fact. In fact, in its actions of wasting billions on an underfunded, unneeded new rocket, and starving of funds the programs actually needed to get humans beyond earth orbit, one could say that it is Congress, including many of the Republicans within it, that is objectively opposing continued human spaceflight.
Rules Of Good Nutrition
…that almost everyone should be able to agree on. I think that the degree to which whole grains are better than refined is marginal. It’s definitely bad versus worse, not good versus bad.
The Global Warming Hysteria
1. Global warming has gone AWOL over last 10 years, per the satellite record
2. Cumulating [sic] CO2 emissions in the atmosphere have had a minor impact on global temperatures over the last 20 years
3. The mainstream press, as represented by The Economist, and other proponents of convential [sic] climate orthodoxy are moving closer to the AGW skeptics’ (lukewarmers’) position
4. The publics [sic] (per Pew) belief in catastrophic AGW predictions is plummeting
As it should. As Robert Tracinski says:
So here’s the state of play of climate science a third of a century into the global warming hysteria. They don’t have a reliable baseline of global temperature measurements that would allow them to say what is normal and natural and what isn’t. Their projections about future warming are demonstrably failing to predict the actual data. And now they have been caught, yet again, fudging the numbers and manipulating the graphs to show a rapid 20th-century warming that they want to be true but which they can’t back up with actual evidence.
A theory with this many holes in it would be have been thrown out long ago, if not for the fact that it conveniently serves the political function of indicting fossil fuels as a planet-destroying evil and allowing radical environmentalists to put a modern, scientific face on their primitivist crusade to shut down industrial civilization.
I think that history will record that 2009 was the height of the hysteria, just before the release of the CRU data and emails, which broke the fever, and was a partial cause of the Copenhagen fiasco. And “FOIA,” whoever he or she is, will be viewed as a hero of humanity.
[Mid-morning update]
The new climate deniers.
[Later-morning update]
Why Freeman Dyson is a skeptic about climate “science”: “I believe any good scientist ought to be a skeptic.”
Amen.
Here‘s the full story.