Category Archives: Media Criticism

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The Futility Of Gun Laws

25 Comments

They don’t seem to work in California:

So we are again left with the question: how did the killer get this gun? It would seem as though he broke a stack of laws, without much of a struggle. It almost makes you wonder if California is barking up the wrong tree. They pass all these laws, starting with attempts to deal with a mass murder involving a mentally ill person in 1989, and they do not work. Short of house-to-house searches for guns, how are they going to be successful at enforcing these laws? Perhaps most importantly, if someone is mentally ill and intends to murder people (a capital crime), what sort of penalty is going to actually deter such a person from breaking gun-control laws?

Gun-control advocates, at least the more rational ones, will usually admit that these laws only work at the margins, by making guns harder for criminals and the mentally ill to get. I can buy that argument; all laws work only at the margins, and that is all that they have to do to justify their existence. I can also agree that when there is a large stockpile of illegal goods in circulation, it can take a while before laws aimed at those goods will remove them from the illegal marketplace. Still, when I see that laws that are decades old failed to disarm a 24 year old who could not possibly have legally acquired this weapon, I find myself wondering in what century California’s gun-control laws are going to be effective.

Because, you know, criminals don’t obey the law. By definition. And as he says, it’s not really a gun problem.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Detroit’s Van Gogh

2 Comments

…would be better off in LA:

Rather than an offense against art, a properly structured sale would represent a public-spirited update of how the art came to Detroit and other U.S. cities in the first place: as a way of providing liquidity to Europeans in need of cash. “The second world war has opened up an opportunity such as may never come again,” the DIA’s director wrote unabashedly in 1948. “Great private collections which have been held intact for a hundred years or more are being broken up.” Detroit is like an aristocratic estate forced to adjust to changing times. It can’t marry an heiress, but it might find some lucratively appreciative new homes for some of its heirlooms.

This is the just consequence of terrible voters’ decision and awful city management.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

A Smoking Gun

16 Comments

What was a campaign official doing in White House meetings with the IRS?

Congressman Issa should call in Ms. Cutter and recall Mr. Shulman to testify under oath about these meetings. I, for one, would like to watch them squirm as they commit perjury.

Yes. Particularly since, no matter how much they attempt to synchronize their lies beforehand, they won’t know just how much independent information Issa has.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Susan Rice?

85 Comments

Susan “Youtube” Rice?!!!

Is this the most politically tone-deaf administration in history?

And do they really think that throwing Donilon under the bus is going to make Benghazi go away?

I feel much more secure now that we have a security advisor who doesn’t know the difference between a terrorist attack and a rambunctious movie review.

[Afternoon update]

“Not one, not two, but three flips of the Obama bird:

Susan Rice is no more qualified to opine on matters of national security than a character from The Wizard of Oz. Like Obama himself, she is a highly politicized, over-credentialed Scarecrow, with certificates from Stanford, Oxford, and the Brookings Institution in place of a brain.

He’s being kind, I think.

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, per comments here and elsewhere, how can the administration prevent her from testifying on executive privilege when the thing that she will be testifying about occurred when she was working for the State Department?

OK, let me amend that. How can they credibly do so?

Not that that ever slows them down, either, of course. It didn’t with Holder in Fast and Furious.

And then there’s this. Maybe Bob-1 is right in comments (hey, you know, blind squirrels and all) and it’s not Donilon that’s becoming a bus speed bump:

As for birds two and three, I’ll leave it to my PJ colleagues to unpack the implicit antisemitic and anti-Israel nature of the Power appointment; the Irish-born Ms. Power is married to Harvard egghead Cass Sunstein, proving once again that leftists, like rock stars and supermodels, tend to travel in packs and marry each other because they never meet anybody else. But surely Hillary Clinton, who’s clearly now being fitted for the fall guy jacket regarding Benghazi, must be seething.

Keep the corn popper on standby.