Category Archives: Media Criticism

My Alarm Didn’t Go Off This Morning

I forgot to set it last night. It’s just another miserable day in the continuous living hell that is Barack Obama’s America. And Romney has promised to do nothing on this crucial issue, either. Like Tom Friedman, I wish that Mike Bloomberg would run for president, so we’d finally have someone in the White House who cares about people like me, and will take care of serious problems like this.

[Update a while later]

More idiocy from Tom Friedman — he thinks the problem with America is that the government is gridlocked. Even ignoring all the legislative lunacy over the past decade that puts the lie to the notion, gridlock is the only thing that saves us from even worse laws.

[Update a few minutes later]
More thoughts from Yuval Levin:

The fact is that the legacy of the Great Society, especially but not exclusively in the form of the two health-care entitlements of the Great Society, Medicare and Medicaid, now threatens the fiscal future of the government and therefore the economic future of the country. The design of those two entitlement programs was not well thought out in the mid-60s, and in more recent times has been a primary driver of the inflation of health costs that is at the core of both the health-care financing crisis and the government’s fiscal woes. It is far worse than the usual kind of legislative screwup. Medicare and Medicaid, structured as they are, are just the kinds of “bad laws” passed “through haste, inadvertence, or design” that Alexander Hamilton warned against in Federalist 73, and thought the constitutional system’s various restraints would protect us against. The elite governing consensus of the mid-60s represented a failure of those constraints that resulted in a number of costly errors. It was that period, not our own time, that marked a breakdown of our constitutional system. Continue reading My Alarm Didn’t Go Off This Morning

More Space Property Rights Commentary

It’s sort of turning into a telephone game, like this piece:

Simberg, an aerospace engineer, says a new law granting the United States conditional permission to claim extraterrestrial land is internationally legal. His view: failure of the 1979 Moon Treaty to get even one signature nullifies the Outer Space Treaty.

a) The Moon Treaty has fourteen countries who have acceded to it.
b) I didn’t say that the Moon Treaty’s failure nullifies the OST.

Other than that, they get it completely right.