…has gone live. Salmon are being caught.
Category Archives: Social Commentary
Birth Control
If it’s not your boss’s business, why do you expect him to pay for it?
…the Hobby Lobby decision opens the door for closely held companies to deny coverage of all forms of birth control if they can plausibly argue that doing so would violate their conscience. The decision doesn’t apply to large, publicly held corporations, but even if it did, it is unlikely that many companies would go down that path. And even if they did, birth control would not be “banned” – employees simply would have to pay for it themselves. The notion that denying a subsidy for a product is equivalent to banning that product is one of the odder tenets of contemporary liberalism.
The cognitive dissonance required to be a leftist must be quite painful.
College Speech Codes
FIRE is going to sue every school that has one until they are gone forever.
Good. They’re one of the ways that the ideology is imposed, and they’re in complete opposition to the purpose of a university. Go here if you want to contribute to the cause.
Liberals Versus Leftists
Can true liberals take the name back? Jonah Goldberg (with sadness) doesn’t think so.
[Update a while later]
More thoughts at Ace of Spades HQ.
Cats
A bunch of reasons to have one.
I’m not particularly persuaded by the carbon footprint thing, though.
Birth Control, Over The Counter
Yes, the Republicans should pass a bill to allow it.
The Huntsville Reality-Distortion Zone
This isn’t new, but I don’t think I linked it at the time. Eric Berger reports on the people working SLS:
May turns the cost issue around.
“My question would be, how could we afford not to do this?” May asked. “Great nations explore. Great nations push their boundaries. And this country has continued to the limits of what we know and learn for a generation, and I think we’ve got to continue to explore.”
And in the larger perspective, he argues, SLS does not cost that much. NASA spends about $1.6 billion a year building it, less than 9 percent of the space agency’s total budget, he said, which is itself less than one half of one percent of the federal budget.
“I think it’s a relatively small amount of money to set the leadership for the world in space exploration,” he says.
Count the number of logical fallacies in just those four grafs.
Poor Democrats
Why they lie about how poor they are.
They have to pretend to not be part of the plutocracy. Of course, they have to lie about a lot of things to get elected.
Operation Choke Point
As Glenn says, this does seem like a criminal conspiracy by the Justice Department to deprive people of their civil rights because the administration doesn’t like the kind of (legal) business they’re in. They should certainly have standing to file a lawsuit. We have to stand up against these thugs.
Phony Scandals And Election-Year Demons
Very few are buying the IRS’s fairy tales:
In fact, an objective assessment of the Republicans conduct over more the course of the 14 months since this scandal broke has been relatively apolitical, especially considering that the IRS is charged with executing a partisan vendetta against conservatives. By and large, members have avoided bombast and overreach in pursuit of the facts surrounding the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups. The Republicans’ prudence in concert with the IRS’s improbable self-defense has resulted in a great majority of the country backing the GOP in this matter.
Republicans and Democrats, women and men, blacks and whites, the rich and the poor, the old and the young; according to a recent poll, the vast majority of the public across the political spectrum believe this matter deserves a thorough investigation – one which results in accountability.
Accountability to these people is like a cross and garlic to a vampire.
And no, it’s not the IRS that’s the victim here:
Specifically, says NOM, the group’s 2008 tax return and donor list was turned over to activist Matthew Meisel, who then gave it to the Human Rights Campaign which distributed it to the media.
Not surprisingly, since the leaked information was used against their last presidential candidate, Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee took an interest in the case. Congressional pressure may well have induced the IRS to surrender, admit error, and turn over a little cash it mugged from other taxpayers to make nice with NOM, but it couldn’t get the Department of Justice to take an interest in the case. Shocker.
“The DOJ’s refusal to take any action to protect taxpayers demonstrates why this Committee, and the American people, cannot trust their supposed investigation into the IRS targeting, let alone the protection of the constitutional rights of conservatives,” complained House Ways and Means Chairman Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.) the day the settlement was announced.
Well, same as it ever was. The IRS has never been a safe tool in any administration’s hands. It never will be, so long as it remains such a tempting weapon for whoever wields its excessive power.
Camp wants a special prosecutor to look into the IRS’s behavior. But that behavior is inevitable, so long as a government body as dangerous as the IRS is allowed to exist.
People need to be jailed for this.