Unfortunately, we own a house in one. I’m wondering if we should sell while we have equity, and rent as long as we continue to live here. I wish we’d done that in Florida a few years ago.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
Prometheus
The Lileks review (scroll down). He’s not impressed. I’m pretty sure I’ll never waste time watching it.
Mass Transit
…is the new Jim Crow.
It’s funny how so many “liberal” fetishes (e.g., gun control, minimum wage, legal and rampant abortions, welfare) have such devastating consequences on the people for whom they profess to care so much.
[Via Instapundit]
[UPdate a few minutes later]
Here’s another example. The moronic war by the “progressives” on Walmart, which has done more for poor people than any government program.
“Assault Weapons”
The wrong way to argue against bans against them:
Gun control at its root has always been about gun control. Feinstein is a statist, and her laws and regulations will always and forever increase the power of the state. Feinstein sees through McArdle’s argument on cosmetics, which is why her proposed ban includes semi-automatic weapons. There isn’t anything cosmetic about the aims of the gun control advocates.
Arguing that their bans don’t adequately distinguish between weapons leads them to refine their ban. Arguing that there is equivalent lethality between weapons denies aspects of utility and design, and only causes them to ban weapons that have specific utility for home and self defense. And arguing that their regulations were ineffective only embarrasses them to pass even more onerous ones.
The correct way to argue against Feinstein’s proposed assault weapons ban is to argue that there is no constitutional basis for such a ban, and any new assault weapons ban would be at least as immoral and obscene as the last one was.
Yup.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Related: Go have a Tea Party by seeing Red Dawn.
Balancing The Budget
Yes, you can do it without raising tax rates.
The Next Four Years
You cannot beat something with nothing. Obama had a record that was less than nothing but a machine and an approach to victory that were more than enough to add up to something. Romney, in the end, had nothing but Obama’s nothing.
Seen in this light, the notion that the right is dying is ludicrous. Romney called himself “severely conservative,” and that may be true of him personally, but it certainly was never true of him politically. Indeed, it was only when he finally and at long last ran as himself—the confident and well-spoken serious person with leadership skills—that he began making the sale to the American people. Then, when his challenge was to put meat on those bones in the second and third debates, he could not do so. When he needed to convince people not only that he had it in him to be presidential but that he had distinct ideas of what he would do once he became president, he failed. Conservatism could have saved him. He did not understand it, and he rejected it.
How can Romney’s loss invalidate the right when he was not a candidate of the right? It can, perhaps, as a matter of image, but it cannot as a matter of fact.
…The United States will now undergo a four-year stress test of American liberalism, as Obama will get his tax hike and ObamaCare will be implemented. Those who think Obama cared about people like them will now experience the full extent of his caring.
As Mencken said, democracy is about the idea that the common man know what he wants, and should get it good and hard.
The Gods Of The Copybook Headings
The Tax-Rate Debate
…and its ideological underpinnings. My thoughts on that, and Paul Krugman, over at PJMedia.
Kaus Versus Krugman
It’s like Godzilla versus Bambi:
Krugman knows all this, of course. He just writes as if we don’t.
Which is what makes him a hack, for whom the Times should be embarrassed to provide a platform. Of course, they have a lot of hackery to be embarrassed about.
“Blue” Science
As I noted a couple days ago, denial of science is bi-partisan. The only difference is the issues affected by the denial.