Striking a major blow:
he Connecticut state senate approved a bill Thursday that would allow citizens to sue police officers who arrest them for recording in public, apparently the first of its kind in the nation.
As it is now, cops act with reckless immunity knowing the worst that can happen is their municipalties (read: taxpayers) would be responsible for shelling out lawsuits.
I want to see laws like this in every state and municipality.
Jim Treacher continues to have too much fun:
As for our moral, ethical, and intellectual superiors in the Democratic Party who don’t appreciate this one bit, here’s a question:
If you don’t want to talk about dogs, why did you bring up dogs?
Now: Add up the number of days you’ve yammered about Romney’s dog. Take that sum and add 1. Find a calendar, count out that number of days from today, and mark the date. That’s the day I’ll consider not hurting your feelings anymore by bringing up the fact that Obama eats dogs.
I think that it’s the best strategy for Romney to ignore this and continue to focus on the real issues, but it’s also useful to mock this eminently mockable president at every opportunity, something that had the usual suspects like Jon Stewart done four years ago, we wouldn’t be in this mess.
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
The most popular and well-known dinosaur never existed.
Gee, I would have expected them to be much more attractive. They wouldn’t be worth the money or risk to me. Now I think even less of those secret service agents.
[Update a while later]
Mark Steyn has some caustic and appropriately snarky thoughts:
Cartagena’s most famous “escort” costs $800. For purposes of comparison, you can book Eliot Spitzer’s “escort” for $300. Yet, on the cold grey fiscally conservative morning after the wild socially liberal night before, Dania’s Secret Service agent offered her a mere $28.
Twenty-eight bucks! What a remarkably precise sum. Thirty dollars less a federal handling fee? Why isn’t this guy Obama’s treasury secretary or budget director? Or, at the very least, the head honcho of the General Services Administration, whose previous director has sadly had to step down after the agency’s taxpayer-funded public-servants-gone-wild Bacchanal in Vegas.
All over this dying republic, you couldn’t find a single solitary $28 item that doesn’t wind up costing at least 800 bucks by the time it’s been sluiced through the federal budgeting process. Yet, in one plucky little corner of the Secret Service, supervisor David Chaney, dog-handler Greg Stokes, or one of the other nine agents managed to turn the principles of government procurement on their head. If the same fiscal prudence were applied to the 2011 Obama budget, the $3.598 trillion splurge would have cost just shy of $126 billion. The feds’ half a billion to Solyndra would have been a mere $18 million. The 823-grand GSA conference on government efficiency at the M Resort Spa & Casino would have come in at $28,805.
Chaney-Stokes 2012! Grope . . . and Change! Red lights, not red ink.
Go read the whole thing.
Here’s the list of Obama campaign bundlers for the first quarter of the year. You know whose name isn’t on it? Elon Musk. I’d like to see the list for previous quarters, so we’d know if Christian Adams is far too trusting of his Congressional source.
[Note: this is a guest post by Alan Wasser, Chairman of the Space Settlement Institute]
As the Space Settlement Initiative says, the settlement of space would benefit all of humanity by opening a new frontier, energizing our society, providing room and resources for the growth of the human race without despoiling the Earth, and creating a lifeboat for humanity that could survive even a planet-wide catastrophe.
Unfortunately, it seems clear that, as things stand now, space settlement will not happen soon enough for any of us to see it, if it ever happens at all. The US government has now officially decided not to go back to the moon, philanthropists cannot afford it, and there is nothing else on the moon or Mars that could be profitable enough to justify the cost of private enterprise developing safe, reliable and affordable human transport. Continue reading A Rebuttal To Jim Dunstan On Space Property Rights
Some thoughts from Mark Steyn:
It was, in a certain sense (and putting Russia and Japan to one side), a “western civil war” between the Anglophone democracies and Continental Fascists – but for some reason that’s far less congenial an interpretation to EU myth-makers.
Indeed.