Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Tea Party’s Cost To A Republican Senate

3 Comments

…has been grossly exaggerated:

Had “the Tea Party” won in Missouri, the GOP likely would have gained a Senate seat. Had it lost in Indiana and Delaware, the GOP likely would have gained them. It’s a jump ball in Colorado and Nevada—let’s split the difference and say maybe Jane Norton would have eked it out. I’d say you can only blame “the Tea Party” for a net loss of two Senate seats since 2010. That’s a period during which it helped send Mike Lee, Ron Johnson, Pat Toomey, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Rand Paul to the upper House—during which “establishment” candidates like Denny Rehberg, Heather Wilson, Rick Berg, Josh Mandel, George Allen, Tommy Thompson, Carly Fiorina, and Dino Rossi totally failed to win seats.

The notion that Tod Akin was a Tea Party candidate remains hilariously ignorant. Actually, the Tea Party seems to have effectively taken over the Republican Party, in the sense that its candidates have been forced to run on limited-government themes, which is a good thing.

Business, Economics, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Next ObamaCare Lie

5 Comments

The Dems don’t really want to “fix it.” Every attempt to make a legislative change has been blocked in the Senate. Don’t let them get away with it.

[Update a few minutes later]

Hey, remember when Dems thought that the VA was a great model for government health care?

But they continue to pine for single payer, and surreptitiously or otherwise hope that the ObamaCare debacle will push us in that direction.

[Update a couple minutes later]

More problems and arguments lie ahead:

…the vast middle ground of “modify the law without repealing it” is terra incognita. It is as accurate as Burns’s formulation, and no less precise, to say that those who want to leave the law as it is are outnumbered more than 5 to 1 by those who want to repeal or change it.

There’s an additional ambiguity: What does it mean to leave the law “unchanged” when the Supreme Court has already struck down parts of it and the administration has declined to follow or enforce others? That’s not a salient question for immediate electoral purposes; in terms of voting intention, “left unchanged” can be taken as a statement of support for the Democrats. But even if the statutory language proves resistant to any effort at modification, there will be a new administration after 2016. That could mean more discretionary (or extralegal) changes and perhaps the end of ObamaCare as we know it.

“ObamaCare as we know it” is also an ambiguous turn of phrase, to say the least, for what do we know of ObamaCare? A few provisions are relatively straightforward, such as the expansion of Medicaid eligibility (in those states that have gone along with it) and the mandate that family insurance plans cover 23-, 24- and 25-year-old children of policyholders.

But the whole of ObamaCare is an insanely complicated scheme that even experts are still struggling to understand. “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it–away from the fog of the controversy,” then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously said in March 2010. We’ll be finding out for many years to come, and there’s no reason to think that “fog” will ever lift.

The only way to lift the fog is to blow it all away.

[Update a few minutes later]

And then there’s this:

“The IRS isn’t likely to bring such proceedings to earn a pittance,” Nicholas Bagley, a law professor at the University of Michigan, tells McIntyre. Then again, it wasn’t money the Obama IRS was after when it embarked on a campaign of harassment against conservative nonprofit organizations. These ObamaCare penalties may be too draconian to be applied generally, but applied selectively, they could be a powerful weapon of an abusive administration.

This administration is nothing if not abusive of the weapons at its disposal.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Terminating The ISS

53 Comments

General Bolden says that no single partner can do it.

Eric Berger says that Charlie doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

[Update a while later]

Second link was wrong, but fixed now. Sorry.

I should add that Zvezda is a much bigger problem than Soyuz (we could solve the latter simply by ending the irrational “safety is the highest priority” mantra). But that’s probably solvable too. If it were important.

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Climate-Change Fundamentalists

1 Comment

More thoughts on the extreme-green religion.

[Update a while later]

Saving the planet, lawsuit by lawsuit:

Aside from the idea that a cease-&-desist letter can be copyrighted anymore than a parking ticket or a receipt from the gas station can, there are several other curious points the University makes. I’ve written to Ms Malloch seeking clarification, and will let you know as soon as I receive her response. Re the defamation threats, Brandon Shollenberger might like to know that my cracker-barrel legal team was the driving force behind “Rachel’s Law”, which ensures that no libel judgment from a jurisdiction that does not provide free-speech protections as strong as America’s will be recognized by courts here. But note yet again that, for all the complaints that “climate change denialists are suing scientists”, it is, in fact, the other way round. In Queensland as in the District of Columbia as in British Columbia, it’s the scientists who are suing.

Yes. Their “legal defense” funds are actually legal offense funds.

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Origination Clause

36 Comments

Sorry, NYT, but I just went and looked, and no one has passed an amendment repealing it.

As with Halbig, the Chief Justice may see this as a chance to rectify his previous screw up. When you strip out all the language of a House bill, leaving nothing but the bill number, it’s pretty clearly a violation of the spirit of the clause, no matter what kind of procedural games the Congress wants to play.

Business, Education, Humor, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

P. J. O’Rourke

2 Comments

“What I would tell the graduating Rutgers class of 2014.”

Here you are graduating from Rutgers, which is, as I mentioned, the 69th-best university in America. Maybe Rutgers should add more vegan selections to its cafeteria fare. U.S. News & World Report scorekeepers go for that kind of thing. Actually, you’re tied for 69th with Texas A&M, an NFL first-round draft with a small college attached.

Your most famous alumni are Garret A. Hobart, 24th vice president of the United States, Ozzie Nelson of Ozzie and Harriet, Mr. Magoo, and seven former governors of New Jersey. Given the recent history of that office, I promise not to tell anybody. (Gov. Kean went to Princeton.)

And you just wasted $100,308 on tuition, fees, and room and board, assuming you were able to zip through Rutgers in a mere four years. Although you only wasted $53,996 if you were living in your parents’ basement. But you wasted $156,404 if you’re one of those bridge and tunnel people from out of state. Let’s call it a hundred long. Approximately 14,000 of you are graduating this year. That’s $1.4 billion wasted.

Why do I say “wasted”? Those of you who are, know why. Those of you who, for reasons unfathomable, are sober on this occasion may need it explained.

I have done research. I used the same tools for deep and comprehensive understanding that you used for your essays and term papers—Wikipedia and random Internet searches.

According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers (at least as reliable a source as the National Association of Cats and Dogs), the average starting salary for a newly graduated B.A. is $45,633.

Not bad, you say. There’s almost rent and a car payment in that, after taxes. But “average starting salary” assumes you’re salaried. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 75 percent of college graduates are in the labor force. Maybe the rest are on a grad-school full ride getting a Ph.D. in string theory.

There’s reason to doubt it. A study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York shows 44 percent of recent college graduates are underemployed. A report in The Atlantic claims half of those recent graduates are working “in jobs that don’t require a degree.” And, in a National Center for Education Statistics survey, 48 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds with student-loan debt say they are unemployed or underemployed. Can you spell KFC?

I wouldn’t bet on it.

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