Category Archives: Political Commentary

Political Commentary, Space

The Roots Of Liberal Nostalgia

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Michael Barone has an interesting article at the Journal today (subscription required, at least for now):

There’s a longing on the left for the golden years of the 1940s, ’50s and early ’60s. Income distribution was significantly more egalitarian than it is today, and Americans had far more confidence in big government, the wisdom of our elected officials, and the ability of Keynesian spending policies to stimulate economic growth.

Hence the search for policies that will somehow get us back to those golden years.

I would note that the current nostalgic longing among some for a big-government space program has its roots in that same “liberal” impulse, though many, perhaps most conservatives don’t understand what an unconservative project Apollo was. NASA was, after all, one of those big-government institutions in which so many had faith in the post-war, early sixties. If you take away the raw rent seeking on the part of those who don’t want to see their home-state pork going away, this nostalgia lies at the heart of much of the outrage over Obama’s sensible new space policy. But unfortunately for NASA, the current justifiable disillusionment with government institutions in general is bleeding over to them as well.

Political Commentary, War Commentary

The President’s Speech

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I managed to actually listen to the whole thing because, praise Gaia, it was short.

I remain bemused at his idiosyncratic pronunciations. The Taliban remains the Tollybahn (Hey Mr. Tollybahn, tolly me banahna, daylight comes, and me wanna go home), yet Afghanistan is pronounced like Stan Laurel. It is clear that he doesn’t want to end the war so that he can reduce the nation-destroying deficit, but so that he can “reinvest” (i.e., continue to spend us into oblivion) at home.

And he remains, like most modern Democrats, congenitally incapable of using the words “win” and “war” in the same sentence, at least when it’s an American war — at best, it can be “ended.” He would choke on such a conjunction — our national sins remain too great to allow such an outcome. He only wants to “end” it. He reserves actual victory for his goal with respect to his much more fearsome and evil domestic enemies.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

The Runaway NLRB

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I agree with this:

The NLRB has five seats (and four members serving; there’s a vacancy at the moment). The fact that such a tiny group of unaccountable political appointees can just wake up one fine morning, have some Pop-Tarts, and then decide to rewrite the nation’s union-election rules is terrifying. Such changes ought to require an act of Congress.

My own preference would be to dissolve the NLRB, repeal the Wagner Act and the Railways Labor Act, and stop forcing businesses to accept contracts that they do not wish to accept. (In what other field of life is a contract considered valid if one side does not wish to be a party to it?) Our labor “relations” are an exercise in extortion, and they probably cost American workers more in the form of forgone opportunities and lost investment than they win for them. The problem is that the fruits of that extortion are highly concentrated: among government workers and the 7 percent or so of private-sector workers in unions. Repealing the Wagner Act sounds radical, and it would not be easy, but it would be a very good thing for the country.

I guess that makes me an “extremist.”

[Update a couple minutes later]

NLRB rulemaking at the speed of light.

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Office Of Civil RightsWrongs

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Apparently it doesn’t think that free speech is a civil right.

Lukianoff notes that campus definitions of sexual harassment include “humor and jokes about sex in general that make someone feel uncomfortable” (University of California at Berkeley), “unwelcome sexual flirtations and inappropriate put-downs of individual persons or classes of people” (Iowa State University) or “elevator eyes” (Murray State University in Kentucky).

All of which means that just about any student can be hauled before a disciplinary committee. Jokes about sex will almost always make someone uncomfortable, after all, and usually you can’t be sure if flirting will be welcome except after the fact. And how do you define “elevator eyes”?

Given the prevailing attitudes among faculty and university administrators, it’s not hard to guess who will be the target of most such proceedings. You only have to remember how rapidly and readily top administrators and dozens of faculty members were ready to castigate as guilty of rape the Duke lacrosse players who, as North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper concluded, were absolutely innocent.

What the seemingly misnamed Office of Civil Rights is doing here is demanding the setting up of kangaroo courts and the dispensing of what I would call marsupial justice against students who are disfavored by campus denizens because of their gender or race or political attitude. “Alice in Wonderland’s” Red Queen would approve.

I hope that FIRE (which is a great cause to which you should contribute) will take them to court, and demand that they obey the First Amendment.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The ATF Criminals

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More thoughts:

Imagine the DEA telling pharmacists to illegally sell oxycontin to known drug dealers or they would be shut down. Then imagine the DEA using the fact that more oxycontin was on the street (and hundreds of overdose deaths) as a pretext for making it harder for patients to get prescribed narcotics. This is essentially what happened with the ATF and Project Gunwalker

And as for evidence that this was part of a push by the administration on gun control, I should have pointed this out yesterday.

I’ve heard a lot of folks wondering if this is what Obama meant back when he said he was working on gun control under the radar.

Let’s hope that the radar lights this up very brightly. If we can’t get a federal investigation into this, I would suggest that relatives of the victims killed by these weapons file a suit against BATF and the Justice Department, and name Eric Holder. Discovery would be very interesting.

[Update mid afternoon]

You don’t say. This requires a special counsel investigation:

we’ve discovered that the president and Democratic lawmakers have lied, and continue to lie, about the role of American guns and American small businessmen in arming drug cartels south of the border. We’ve watched as they’ve lied, and continue to lie, blaming gun shops for the carnage that has resulted from the depravity of Mexican narco-terrorists.

We’ve watched as ATF special agents and supervisors testified in front of Congress, angry and ashamed, about how the multi-agency task force they were a part of was responsible for arming the cartel gunmen that have killed scores of law enforcement officers and civilians in two countries.

This scandal must come to an end not with graceful and fault-free resignations, but with deliberate and careful prosecutions of those responsible.

There were four federal agencies involved in Gunwalker, including the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Each of these agencies deserves dishonor and a thorough post-mortem review from their own respective inspectors general. But that is simply a start towards righting an unconscionable wrong.

But at least it would be a start.