Category Archives: Political Commentary

Matt Labash

…doesn’t seem to fear having his…whatever shoved through a plate-glass window. His thoughts on Mr. Ackerman:

From his hermetically sealed masturbatorium, he can…rhetorically threaten people who have soft hands and who type about politics for a living, but who could still pound the Bad Brains out of him (punk reference!) if they ever came face to face, even if it devolved into a girls-school windmill slap-fight, which it probably would. Though they won’t come face-to-face, of course, because being a tough-guy Washington blogger is a bit like being a phone-sex operator: you can pretend you’re sexy, even when you’re wearing a ratty terry cloth robe, hot curlers, and bunny slippers. Just like as a tough guy blogger, you can pretend on the outside that you want to crease the skull of Frank Foer with a baseball bat or annihilate Ryan Lizza in front of his toddler, while on the inside, you’re a moony-eyed trembling fanboy who writes unicorn-and-silly-bandz sentences such as “Yes we did!” when your swain wins an election. Which is sooo not punk rock. But that’s where the Black Flag t-shirt comes in. It’s a symbol. And what it symbolizes is that Hackerman is a dangerous man, not to be trifled with, since Black Flag was an ur-punk band whose former lead singer, Henry Rollins, was a genuine American badass, the Attackerman of his day. You could tell this, because he swore a lot, and wore tight black t-shirts. Even now, screwing with Rollins is like making a death wish. There’s no telling what that muscled wall of menace might do. He might write a really bitchy spoken-word piece about you, then release it as a podcast.

There’s a lot more where that came from. I wouldn’t want to be these “progressive” dweebs. Of course, I would have never wanted to.

[Via Treacher]

Quake in your boots.

Did I Call It, Or What?

I just ran across this old post of mine from two and a half years ago:

I’m reminded by a commenter that today is the 234th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. I had never really thought about the date before–it hadn’t occurred to me that it took place in the winter in Boston. What did Narragansetts wear in that clime?

Anyway, sometimes, particularly given how little difference there is between the two parties, I think we’re overdue for another one.

See, Rick Santelli just channeled me a little over a year later.

A Vast, White-Wing Conspiracy

Wow, it’d be hard to find a more Caucasian demographic than the JournoList, other than the MSNBC host lineup and the burglars in the Broadview Security commercials. They’re probably racists.

[Update Sunday morning]

Was Sharrod pushed out by a bunch of West-Wing white guys?

See, I told you — racists all.

[Update a few minutes later]

The Obama administration doesn’t know when to hold or fold the race card.

[Bumped]

More Democrats’ War On Science

The Inspector General of the Interior Department is investigating claims that the department officials falsified a report:

In response to a request from Republicans on the House Natural Resources Committee, the Department of Interior’s acting Inspector General, Mary Kendall, announced she is opening an investigation into whether a Department of Interior report recommending an offshore drilling ban was manipulated to appear as if the ban was endorsed by seven experts from the National Academy of Engineers.

The report endorsed a six-month ban on deepwater drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf, and explicitly stated “the recommendations contained in this report have been peer-reviewed by seven experts identified by the National Academy of Engineering.” The National Academy of Engineers experts responded to the report by noting that their views had been misprepresented and that a drilling ban “will not measurably reduce risk further and it will have a lasting impact on the nation’s economy which may be greater than that of the oil spill.”

I expect she’ll get the Walpin treatment. Perhaps including the accusation that she’s senile.

The Defense For Sarah Spitz

It’s pretty pathetic. And as is generally the case with these people, it’s classical projection:

The general manager of her station chimed in with the news that we are all as depraved as she is, so really, get over it:

Sarah was not acting in her position as KCRW Publicity Director when she wrote these comments. She spoke in the heat of the moment without consideration to the impact her words would have. We’ve all said things we didn’t mean and don’t reflect our core values. We believe that was the situation in this case.

We’ve all e-mailed a group of 400 relative stranger with the news that we would laugh like maniacs while watching a man’s eyes bug out as he dies of a heart attack? Seriously? What is in the stuff they are smoking in California, and how could they possibly think of legalizing it?

It reminds me of an old Monty Python sketch (though I guess that’s redundant — it’s not like there are any new ones…):

Well, we psychiatrist have found that over 8% of the population will always be mice, I mean, after all, there’s something of the mouse in all of us. I mean, how many of us can honestly say that at one time or another he hasn’t felt sexually attracted to mice. (linkman looks puzzeld) I know I have. I mean, most normal adolescents go through a stage of squeaking two or three times a day. Some youngsters on the other hand, are attracted to it by its very illegality. It’s like murder – make a thing illegal and it acquires a mystique. (linkman looks increasingly embarrassed) Look at arson – I mean, how many of us can honestly say that at one time or another he hasn’t set fire to some great public building. I know I have. (phone on desk rings; the linkman picks it up but does not answer it) The only way to bring the crime figures down is to reduce the number of offences – get it out in the open – I know I have.

Who among us haven’t fantasied about Rush Limbaugh dying painfully of a heart attack, while we cackled in glee? Why, you’d have to have a heart of stone to imagine Glenn Beck going blind and not take great joy in it.

I have no idea how widespread this fantasy psycho behavior was at the Journolist, or how well it was received. Maybe the Daily Caller could sift their archives and run some denunciations of these sorts of posting. These libs spent years deploring Bush’s macho cowboy act and declared it to be the end of Western Civilization when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded, so I would like to hope that one or two pushed back against the plate glass window smashing and heart attack eye-bugging.

I’d like to hope so, too. But I sure can’t get into the heads of these kind of people. And I don’t think I want to.

[Update a while later]

Put up or shut up, Ezra.”

Zero-Cost Stimulus

…and a good moratorium:

The fact is that regulation now costs the US economy over $1 trillion a year, according to my colleague Wayne Crews. Every year, Wayne puts together a snapshot of the regulatory state called Ten Thousand Commandments. This year he found that regulation eats up 8.3 percent of the US economy and its cost is equal to 63 percent of corporate pretax profits. The burden of regulation on business dwarfs the burden of the corporate income tax.

So the one year moratorium is probably a good idea, slowing if not halting the regulatory juggernaut. However, we can go further and provide the stimulus the economy provides at zero cost by getting rid of some of this burden. We call this program “Liberate to Stimulate” and some of the measures we suggest are:

• Rather than trying to improve speeds by picking the particular R&D horses to run on the racetrack, improve the business and regulatory track so everyone can go faster, and let jockeys keep more of their earnings.

• Allow freer trade in skilled labor: Bright foreign workers want to stay and create U.S. jobs after graduating here. That’s a better way to address global competition.

• Avoid safety regulation that makes us less safe: Many frontier technologies like nanotech can make our environment cleaner. Exaggerating risks overlooks the hazards of stagnation.

• Liberalize capital markets: Capitalism ranks among the world’s great democratizing forces, but post-Enron Sarbanes-Oxley regulation has severely distressed smaller companies. Exempting firms with small market capitalizations is just for starters.

There’s more.

It will never fly, though. It doesn’t give the fascists on either side of the aisle enough power over our lives.