The recent revelation that the head of Media Matters walked the streets of Washington with a Glock-toting personal assistant acting as a bodyguard may make it a little awkward for the group the next time it seeks a donation from a gun control advocacy group. Media Matters reportedly took more than $400,000 from the Joyce Foundation specifically earmarked to promote a $600,000 initiative on “gun and public safety issues.” At the same time, Media Matters’ gun-guarded boss David Brock reportedly obsessed over his own security. . .
“He had more security than a Third World dictator,” one Media Matters employee told The Daily Caller.
I’ve noticed that this sort of hypocrisy is very widespread, and not just with guns either. There is a general phenomenon on the left of people believing that basic necessities not only should be provided by the government, but that they should be provided only by the government. Such people turn out to be hypocrites when it comes to their own consumption of those basic needs.
Those who believe that the government should be sole provider of protection from violence (i.e., gun control advocates) nevertheless carry guns or hire bodyguards who do. Those who believe that the government should be the sole provider of health care (e.g., many Canadians) nevertheless cross the border to obtain treatment for themselves. Those who believe that the government should be the sole provider of education (e.g., President Obama) nevertheless enroll their children in private schools. If the left ever succeeds in nationalizing food, the same bunch will be lined up at black-market groceries.
In the case of the North Carolina school that replaced a child’s home-packed lunch because it wasn’t nutritious enough, the school says they know nothing about the incident:
Reached again, a different representative said they had “no information at this time” about the situation. A West Hoke Elementary official similarly denied any knowledge and referred all questions to the school district.
The school district says it was just a misunderstanding:
Bob Barnes, assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction, told the McClatchy News Service Thursday that the first preschooler to make headlines just misunderstood her teacher when she thought she was told to ditch her homemade lunch for one from the cafeteria . . .
“We are not the lunch bag police,” Barnes told McClatchy. “We would never put a child in any type of embarrassing situation. . .”
Barnes confirmed there was an agent from Department of Health and Human Services’ Division of Child Development and Early Education at the school Jan. 30 who examined six student lunches and determined one did not make the nutritional cut — presumably the first little girl whose story made news.
And the state says they aren’t doing any such inspections:
In a statement to The Blaze, the Division of Child Development and Early Education said it is investigating what happened but flatly denied any of its employees or contractors “instructed any child to replace or remove any meal items.” The division issued a similar statement to McClatchy even after Barnes said it was one of their agents who examined the lunches.
“It is not DHHS’ policy to inspect, go through or question any child about food items brought from home. The facts we have gathered confirm that no DHHS employee or contractor did this,” the statement said.
These stories contradict each other, so they can’t all be true. Most likely, none of them are, because we a second incident has now come to light:
Now a second mother from the same school has come forward exclusively to The Blaze to say the same thing happened to her daughter. . .When [Diane] Zambrano picked Jazlyn up from school late last month, she was told by Jazlyn’s teacher that the lunch she had packed that day did not meet the necessary guidelines and that Jazlyn had been sent to the cafeteria.
The lunch Zambrano packed for her daughter? A cheese and salami sandwich on a wheat bun with apple juice. The lunch she got in the cafeteria? Chicken nuggets, a sweet potato, bread and milk.
Nancy Pelosi and MoveOn.org are pushing a completely bogus graphic, purporting to show that, deficit wise, Barack Obama is the most responsible president in years, and Reagan was the least.
As I’ve written before, the main problem with global warming alarmism isn’t the reconstructions of the Earth’s past climate (which I haven’t the scientific expertise to debate), but the predictions for the future. The basis of the scientific method is to generate testable hypotheses, and then test them. The models that climate scientists use to predict long-term changes to climate simply cannot be tested over the short-term. In regards to long-term changes, they are simply unscientific.
Worse, when those same models are used to make short-term predictions, which can be tested, they tend not to come true. Two cases in point:
First, a new report from the British Met Office and the (infamous) Hadley CRU shows that the Earth has not warmed since 1997. Now, any particular year is mostly noise, but this is 15 years without any trend:
Second, a new study from the University of Alabama shows that snowfall in the Sierra Nevada hasn’t changed for 130 years:
The analysis of snowfall data in the Sierra going back to 1878 found no more or less snow overall – a result that, on the surface, appears to contradict aspects of recent climate change models.
A preschooler at West Hoke Elementary School ate three chicken nuggets for lunch Jan. 30 because a state employee told her the lunch her mother packed was not nutritious.
The girl’s turkey and cheese sandwich, banana, potato chips, and apple juice did not meet U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines, according to the interpretation of the agent who was inspecting all lunch boxes in her More at Four classroom that day.
The Division of Child Development and Early Education at the Department of Health and Human Services requires all lunches served in pre-kindergarten programs – including in-home day care centers – to meet USDA guidelines. . .
When the girl came home with her lunch untouched, her mother wanted to know what she ate instead. Three chicken nuggets, the girl answered. Everything else on her cafeteria tray went to waste.
The school also told the child that her mother wasn’t packing her lunch properly, and billed the mother for the replacement lunch.
I’m tempted to quip that I’m glad North Carolina has solved every real problem facing the state and can afford to waste money on lunch inspectors. But, in truth, this would be an outrage if it cost nothing at all.
Researchers have found that electric cars can be worse for the environment than conventional cars. Specifically, the study found that, in China, the pollution resulting from generating electricity for electric cars is worse than the pollution generated by gasoline-powered cars.
The trade-off is likely to be different in America, where we have cleaner electric generation, but it’s a reminder that environmental trade-offs can be much more subtle than the green industry would have us believe.
David French has an interesting post at NRO on how Governor Romney fought to protect freedom of conscience in Massachusetts. Your mileage may vary, but I find it persuasive.
We might be tempted to think Lew misspoke, except that he said virtually the same thing, on two different shows, when he was specifically asked about the failure of Senate Democrats to pass a budget resolution. He even prefaced his comment on CNN by citing the “need to be honest.”
He could have tried to argue, as some Democrats do, that the debt-ceiling deal last year in effect was a budget resolution. Or he could have spoken more broadly about gridlock in the Senate, after acknowledging a traditional budget resolution had not been passed. Instead, the former budget director twice choose to use highly misleading language that blamed Republicans for the failure of the Democratic leadership.
On the very first day in an introductory economics course, one learns that price caps lead to shortages. Case in point: price controls on prescription drugs lead to shortages. Good thing we’re extending price controls to all medical care. . .
Vanderbilt University announces that Christian student organizations are no longer welcome on campus. Anti-religious activists have been trying to accomplish this sort of thing at various schools for years (they tried and failed at CMU in 1994), but this is their first high-profile success.
President Obama’s compromise on the contraception mandate is a complete fraud. Instead of requiring Catholic organizations to offer contraception, they require insurance companies to provide the contraception “free of charge”. Of course, “free of charge” means that the insurer will pass the cost on the payer (the aforementioned Catholic organizations), but it’s okay (we are told), because the insurer won’t be allowed to list contraception as a specific line item. Instead, the insurer will have to spread the cost throughout.
In short, this “compromise” doesn’t change anything whatsoever. It’s true, this sort of shell game often fools those who wish to be fooled, but so far the Catholic bishops don’t seem to be buying it.
But wait, it’s worse than that. The whole thing is a lie. The administration isn’t even implementing the supposed compromise. The final regulation was promulgated Friday. After 17 pages of smokescreen, it contained the actual legal language, of which the very last paragraph reads:
Accordingly, the amendment to the interim final rule with comment period amending 45 CFR 147.130(a)(1)(iv) which was published in the Federal Register at 76 FR 46621-46626 on August 3, 2011, is adopted as a final rule without change.
A. An employer is required to provide its employees health insurance that covers birth control.
B. An employer is required to provide its employees health insurance. The health insurance company is required to cover birth control.
I can understand someone endorsing both A and B, and I can understand someone rejecting both A and B. But I cannot understand someone rejecting A and embracing B, because they are effectively the same policy.
Of course, the fact also remains that the policy is actually staying at A.
UPDATE: The Obama administration didn’t even consult with the Catholic church in determining its “compromise”.
Honestly, if Sarah Palin were president and terrorists struck New York again she would say two things. First, is Mount Rushmore okay? And two, well at least they didn’t hit the “real America.” Democrats don’t do this. Jerry Brown doesn’t stand under the Hollywood sign and say “Now, I don’t know if this will play in Texas or down on the farms where they have no values and f*** chickens. But you here in Hollywood are the real Americans.” It never happens.
We needn’t speculate, since 9/11 did happen. No prominent Republican, Sarah Palin included, said anything like that. It’s hard to imagine that a Republican would, since conservatives still believe that politics ends at the water’s edge. But one prominent Democrat did. Michael Moore’s lament was that the terrorists hit the wrong target:
They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, DC and the plane’s destination of California – these were places that voted AGAINST Bush!
Baltasar Garzón, the celebrated (by some) Spanish judge and supposed human-rights crusader, has been convicted of wiretapping.
You may have heard of this guy before. He was the darling of the left when he sought to use universal jurisdiction to prosecute Bush administration officials for war crimes.
Eric Holder has already changed his story about when he learned of the Fast and Furious operation:
During a May 3 House Judiciary Committee hearing, Holder told Congressional investigators at least twice that he had only learned of the controversial Operation Fast and Furious gun-walking program a “few weeks” beforehand. But testifying Tuesday, Holder’s timeline changed. . .
“I did say a ‘few weeks,’” Holder clarified Tuesday, responding to questions from Vermont Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee. “I probably could’ve said ‘a couple of months.’ I didn’t think the term I said, ‘few weeks,’ was inaccurate based on what happened.”
Now his story has to change again. However bad “[a] few weeks” is as a description of a six-week period, it’s even worse as a description of a five-month period:
Attorney General Eric Holder’s Department of Justice dumped documents related to Operation Fast and Furious on congressional officials late Friday night. Central to this document dump is a series of emails showing Holder was informed of slain Border Patrol agent Brian Terry’s murder on the day it happened – December 15, 2010.
Holder’s office was notified of Fast and Furious on the very day Agent Terry was murdered. Five months later he told Congress that he had just learned of it. That’s perjury.
We still don’t know when Holder first learned of Fast and Furious. Holder said it was shortly before May 3, 2011. We later learned it was by March 2011, then January 2011, and now December 2010. This could be the end of the walkbacks, but that’s not the way to bet.
I’m pretty sure that if Elizabeth Warren were a Republican, this would be a big deal:
One of the Harvard professor’s many well-compensated part-time gigs included consulting for Travelers Insurance. I know that it is hard to believe that on one hand, Democrats would be bashing an industry, and on the other hand they are making money from it. To be a Democrat is to be a hypocrite.
What did Lizzy do to earn $44,000 in compensation from the insurance company? She made it harder for claimants to collect. Warren helped establish the bankruptcy strategy for companies to avoid crushing lawsuits. In short, go bankrupt to avoid paying victims.
The American takes a look at Mitt Romney’s job-creation record at Bain Capital, and finds: “The companies Bain Capital funded under Romney have created tens of thousands of jobs using any measure.” Read the whole thing.
Of course (as Glenn Reynolds remarks) even creating one job (heck, even destroying just a few million) would be a big improvement over President Obama’s record.
POSTSCRIPT: For readers with an Economist subscription, the Economist also has an informative column about Romney and Bain.
Just to be clear, the parents weren’t asking to be placed on the list for a kidney. They wanted to transplant from a family member, but the hospital refused to do it.
Now this family can still potentially get the operation done by going to a different hospital. But under health care nationalization, we are on a slippery slope to all medical decisions being made centrally. Then people like this will have no recourse.
I’m late in reporting this, but a Federal court has upheld the ATF’s new policy requiring gun stores in southwestern states to report sales of more than one semi-automatic rifles.
This is unfortunate on multiple levels. First, it’s a bad policy. Second, even setting aside the Second Amendment, it’s troubling on separation-of-powers grounds that the executive branch can invent new burdens on gun ownership without the consent of Congress. Finally, it’s very troubling that the ATF operated a massive criminal enterprise at least in part to support its case for this policy and is being rewarded for its malfeasance.
Iran has demonstrated further evidence of its strict regime after the government cut internet links leaving millions without email and social networks. . .
Gmail, Google and Yahoo are all thought to have been restricted, and users have been unable to log in to their online banking.
‘The interesting thing is that when asked, they deny the fact that all these services are all blocked,’ an Iranian contacted by CNET said.
‘I don’t know the the infrastructure that they will use but I don’t think we have a way out of that one.
Ohio based FirstEnergy Corporation announces it will close three coal fired power plants in West Virginia by this fall. The closings come directly from the impact of new federal EPA regulations. . .
The three plants produce 660 megawatts and about 3-percent of FirstEnergy’s total generation. In recent years, the plants served as “peaking facilities” and generated power during times of peak demand for power.
The church’s mission is not class warfare, nor is it to give shelter to people who have homes but choose not to use them. The money spent accommodating Occupiers, and repairing the damage Occupiers did, could have been spent on the truly needy, or on spreading the Gospel. They should have known better.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved the first new nuclear power project in more than three decades. The panel on Thursday approved plans from Southern Company for two reactors at a Georgia site. The $14 billion reactors could begin operating as soon as 2016 and 2017.
A new study finds that red-light cameras lead to more car crashes. Of course, that’s not surprising, since that’s what all the previous studies have found as well:
The results didn’t surprise Rajiv Shah, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who studied the effectiveness of red-light cameras in Chicago and concluded in 2010 they offered “no significant benefit.”
“I’d say that’s very consistent with what cities across America have found,” he said of Kansas City’s results. “There’s not really a hard connection between reducing accidents and red-light cameras.”
Red-light cameras are just a very inefficient tax.
Transportation deputy secretary John Porcari told a House subcommittee on Wednesday that LightSquared’s planned wireless network is “not compatible” with flight-safety GPS devices used in commercial aircrafts.
He told lawmakers on the House Transportation and Infrastructure’s subcommittee on Aviation that LightSquared would disrupt GPS systems that pilots use to help them navigate in low altitudes, including devices that warn them when they are getting too close to terrain.
The FAA also pointed out how ridiculous it is that we keep spending taxpayer money to test this privately owned system:
Porcari said the Federal Aviation Administration has spent $2 million testing LightSquared’s network. He called spending that amount of money to review a private company “quite unusual.”
“However, due to the Administration’s commitment to increased access to broadband, the investment was merited, but given the results we reviewed, further investment cannot be justified at this time,” he said.
Pssst, it’s not because of any commitment to broadband that this has been going on; it’s because of the administration’s commitment to paying off its cronies.
For their part, LightSquared is sticking with their “it’s not us, it’s everyone else” routine:
The company says the problem is that GPS receivers are poorly designed and are receiving signals from outside their designated frequency bands.
Yeah, 75% of all GPS receivers are poorly designed. . .
The ACLU has come out in support of the Obama administration’s mandate requiring the Catholic Church to change its position on contraception. I can’t say this surprises me. The ACLU has been very weak on religious freedom; opposing it more often than defending it.
POSTSCRIPT: A new Rasmussen poll finds that the public opposes the mandate 50-39.
Hawaii’s legislature is weighing an unprecedented proposal to curb the privacy of Aloha State residents: requiring Internet providers to keep track of every Web site their customers visit.
President Obama says the entire country should be run like the military. Enough talk of freedom; America is best when everyone does what they are told.
I do find it striking that the left doesn’t find any of this stuff sinister.
No matter who you support this year, you have to admit Mitt Romney went about becoming president the wrong way. Instead of wasting his time learning how business works and building a multi-billion-dollar company that really did save or create hundreds of thousands of jobs, Mitt should have lived off his daddy’s fortune like Jack Kennedy. Chasing skirts and molesting teenage virgin is a lot more fun than figuring out how to revive an old business.
Instead, Mitt Romney gave his inheritance to charity. Who does that anymore? . . .
And what was with graduating in the top third of his class at Harvard Law School and going into business? He should have parked his butt in Chicago thanks to a two-book deal and a handsome advance and written a couple of autobiographies. Practicing one’s faith by spending 2 1/2 years as a missionary? That’s for suckers. Write about it instead of living it. As “The Audacity of Hope” shows, that is where the money is — and best of all, the press treats you like a living god when you write instead of do.
Marrying into wealth may get you better press, but as John Kerry and John McCain discovered, the press can carry you only so far.
Hard work though. Who does that? Small wonder the public is so suspicious.
Megan McArdle comments on the Obama administration’s order for Catholic hospitals to dispense contraceptives:
Everyone . . . seems to assume that we’re doing the Catholic Church a big old favor by allowing them to provide health care and other social services to a needy public. Why, we’re really coddling them, and it’s about time they started acting a little grateful for everything we’ve done for them!
These people seem to be living in an alternate universe that I don’t have access to, where there’s a positive glut of secular organizations who are just dying to provide top-notch care for the sick, the poor, and the dispossessed.
What McArdle is insufficiently cynical to recognize is that the far left doesn’t care whether anyone can do what the Catholic Church does. To that bunch, it’s better for the unfortunate to go without, than for them to be served by people who don’t answer to the government.
Unchastened by its 9-0 rebuke by the Supreme Court in its effort to gain the power to dictate to churches who their ministers will be, the Obama administration has turned its attention on Army chaplains. The administration prohibited Catholic chaplains in the Army from reading a pastoral letter from the Catholic Church to their congregations. (The letter opposed the Obama administration’s order that Catholic hospitals dispense contraceptives.) The administration also edited the letter before allowing it to be distributed in printed form.
Let’s please not have any more nonsense about this administration’s respect for civil liberties.
“I would not look to the United States Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012,” she said. She recommended, instead, the South African Constitution, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms or the European Convention on Human Rights.
That’s certainly consistent with her rulings. She’s done her best to make the Constitution into something else.
The public health case for making sure insurance covers contraception is clear. But we also recognize that many religious organizations have deeply held beliefs opposing the use of birth control. That’s why in the rule we put forward, we specifically carved out from the policy religious organizations that primarily employ people of their own faith.
This is untrue, and don’t think for a moment she doesn’t know it. Alan Sears explains:
The mandate explicitly does not exempt groups merely if they primarily hire members of their own faith. It forces those groups to violate their beliefs, unless they also primarily serve persons of their own faith. So a Christian hospital would have to turn aside Jews and Muslims at the door to be “religious enough” under the president’s aggressively secular policy.
POSTSCRIPT: Actually it’s worse than that. Just in case the exception still happened to apply to someone, it contains several other provisos as well, the sum of which is to ensure that no one will ever be exempt.
A special board formed to advise the federal government on the clash between Global Positioning System receivers and LightSquared’s proposed cellular/satellite communications network has concluded there are “no practical solutions or mitigations” that would allow the two to coexist on adjacent segments of the radio spectrum.
The National Space-Based Positioning Navigation and Timing Committee, in a letter released this afternoon, said it had reached the “unanimous conclusion” that the LightSquared network would “cause harmful interference to many GPS receivers” as well as a GPS-powered ground-alert system overseen by the Federal Aviation Administration.
Based upon this testing an analysis, there appear to be no practical solutions or mitigations that would permit the LightSquared broadband service, as proposed, to operate in the next few months or years without significantly interfering with GPS. As a result, no additional testing is warranted at this time.”
Recall that LightSquared’s business strategy is based not on new technology, but on using its political connections to obtain a competitive advantage. That’s why they aren’t giving up despite all the technical findings against them: they think their politicians still might prevail.
It takes a lot of context to fully appreciate this story, so I’m going to pull a long quote from Power Line:
A few years ago, as part of its strategy of facilitating voter fraud as a means of winning close elections, the Democratic Party undertook a campaign to secure as many Secretary of State offices in swing states as possible. From those perches, the Democrats would be in a position to oversee elections and enforce (or decline to enforce) election laws. That strategy has been quite successful, but the Democrats suffered a setback in Iowa in 2010 when conservative Republican Matt Schultz won an upset victory in the Secretary of State race. Since then, Iowa Democrats have targeted Schultz.
That targeting has taken a sinister turn–a criminal one, in fact–as the Des Moines Register reports:
A Des Moines man has been arrested after police say he used, or tried to use, the identity of Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz in a scheme to falsely implicate Schultz in perceived unethical behavior in office. . .
Edwards is a former Obama staffer who directed “new media operations” for Obama in five states during the 2008 primaries. Thereafter, he was Obama’s Director of New Media for the State of Iowa. In the Democratic Party’s lexicon, “new media” apparently includes identity theft.
Edwards now works for LINK Strategies, a Democratic consulting firm with extraordinarily close ties to Iowa Democrat Tom Harkin.
POSTSCRIPT: For a media failure angle on the story, Newsbusters notes that the Des Moines Register sat on the fact Edwards worked for a prominent Democratic consulting firm until it could safely report that he had been fired.
It’s always interesting when we can learn new edges in the priority order of causes on the left. Coyote Blog looks at the contrast between the government’s handling of Toyota’s accelerator problems (which turned out to be imaginary), and its handling of the Chevy Volt’s tendency to burst into flames (which turned out to be real).
The only question is which factor it is that trumps consumer safety. It could be crony capitalism (labor unions own GM) or it could be environmentalism (greens love electric cars).
Well this will complicate the Obama campaign’s efforts to vilify Bain Capital:
Jeffrey Zients will serve as President Obama’s new acting director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), but the president’s decision might undercut attacks on Republican Mitt Romney’s career as a venture capitalist, because Zients and Romney are both alumni of Bain & Company. . .
The White House emphasized Zients’ “twenty years as a CEO, management consultant, and entrepreneur” when announcing his promotion, but did not mention that Zients’ used to work with Bain & Company.
The news for religious freedom out of the Supreme Court isn’t all good, though. The Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal filed by a Bronx church that meets in a public school against a decision by the Board of Education to evict it. (The Board said that it was protecting the minds of “impressionable youth”!)
The church seemed to be on good legal grounds, since the courts have found that if a public facilities decides to rent out its space, it cannot discriminate as to who may do so. The Alliance Defense Fund found the Court’s decision not to take the case “befuddling“.
Earlier this month religious people of every stripe scored a major victory against the Obama administration when the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church v. EEOC. It’s quite astonishing what the administration was trying to pull, even from that bunch: they asserted that the government has the power to dictate to a church who its ministers will be.
The case involved a woman, Cheryl Perich, who was hired as a “called teacher” at the Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church. The position carried the official title of “Minister of Religion, Commissioned.” Perich became ill and was unable to begin work on schedule. Part way through the year, Perich reported for work, but the church disputed whether she was really ready to return to work. At this point, according to the church, Perich behaved badly and was dismissed.
Perich filed a claim with the EEOC, which agreed with her and filed suit. The lower court ruled in favor of the church, finding that the ministerial exception prevented the case from going forward. The exception, which is grounded in the First Amendment, says that the government cannot regulate a church’s choice of ministers. However, the court of appeals vacated the decision, finding that the position of “called teacher” is not really a minister.
The appeals court’s position that some church ministers weren’t really ministers was troubling, but then the Obama administration dramatically raised the stakes. The Justice Department filed a brief arguing that there should be no ministerial exception at all! (This position was even more radical than the one taken in the atheists’ brief.)
Instead, the DOJ argued that churches must rely on the same freedom of association that protects all Americans. Freedom of association has been shown to be a porous “freedom” offering very little protection, which is precisely what the administration intended.
The Supreme Court rejected the administration’s radical contention 9-0, observing:
Their position, however, is hard to square with the text of the First Amendment itself, which gives special solicitude to the rights of religious organizations. The Court cannot accept the remarkable view that the Religion Clauses have nothing to say about a religious organization’s freedom to select its own ministers.
The court also found that Perich was a minister covered by the ministerial exception.
A more brazen attempt to undermine the First Amendment can hardly be imagined. Let’s please not have any more nonsense about this president’s respect for civil liberties. He is quite the opposite.
UPDATE: It should be obvious that giving the government any foot in the door in regard to churches’ choice of ministers is inimical to religious freedom. In case it isn’t, this article explains how even anti-discrimination law could be leveraged into a substantial burden on religious freedom.
The White House has announced that it will again fail to deliver a budget by the first Monday in February, as required by law. This will be the third time during the four years of the Obama administration.
The Democrat-controlled Senate, of course, has not been able to produce a budget in years.
10/25/2010 — Solyndra CEO writes to the DoE that he will announce worker layoffs on 10/28.
10/27/2010 — In the White House, climate change adviser Zichal sent out an e-mail to Obama adviser Browner and several other officials warning of a layoff announcement in very specific terms — “200 of their 1200 workers” — and added, “No es bueno,” which is Spanish for “not good.”
10/28/2010 — No announcement comes forth from Solyndra on layoffs.
10/30/2010 — Solyndra investor explains that the DoE “push[ed] very hard” for a delay on the announcement until November 3rd, the day after the election, even remarking that the DoE “oddly they didn’t give a reason for that date.”
One of the major indicators of the decline of our civilization is our failure to favor law-abiding citizens over criminals. In one of the most egregious cases you’ll see, police in Swampscott, Massachusetts (a suburb of Boston) arrested a man who stopped an armed thief who broke into his truck.
This isn’t even a gun-rights case. The hero in this case was unarmed, and disabled a criminal carrying a knife and a billy club. Nevertheless, the police charged the hero with a felony, and only after considerable media pressure was applied did the DA agree not to prosecute. Even then the DA pointedly refused to say that the police had acted incorrectly.
The message is clear: no one is to stand in the way of criminals plying their trade.
A “sensitive and confidential” briefing document written by Larry Summers, head of President Obama’s economic team, in 2008 and leaked to the New Yorker recently, confirms what the president’s critics have said all along. The purpose of the Obama stimulus plan was to implement Obama’s domestic agenda, and it was known to be dangerously over-large:
The short-run economic imperative was to identify as many campaign promises or high priority items that would spend out quickly and be inherently temporary. . .
It is important to recognize that we can only generate about $225 billion of actual spending on priority investments over next two years, and this is after making what some might argue are optimistic assumptions about the scale of investments in areas like Health IT that are feasible over this period. . .
Closing the gap between what the campaign proposed and the estimates of the campaign offsets would require scaling back proposals by about $100 billion annually or adding new offsets totaling the same. Even this, however, would leave an average deficit over the next decade that would be worse than any post-World War II decade. This would be entirely unsustainable and could cause serious economic problems in the both the short run and the long run. . .
The stimulus package is a key tool for advancing clean energy goals and fulfilling a number of campaign commitments.
Richard Griffin, one of President Obama’s illegal recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board, where is supposed to be a neutral arbiter between labor and business (ha ha!), will be on a union’s payroll while serving on the board.
Content creators have a legitimate interest in protecting their property. With the break-the-internet bills hopefully going to defeat, is there another, better way to do it?
ASIDE: Some have said that Hollywood and its ilk are liberal institutions and we should let them swing in the wind. I despise that bunch as much as anyone, and yes, I know that that is exactly how the Democratic party operates, but I don’t think we should stoop to that kind of Chicago-style politics. The right thing to do is the right thing to do, even if it benefits Hollywood.
Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Ron Wyden’s (D-OR) OPEN bill might be right way to do it. I can’t speak to all the details, but the basic concept seems workable: Rather than censor the Internet, OPEN would go after the finances that make piracy profitable.
What makes this attractive to me is that is puts the solution in the same space as the problem. The Internet is not broken; it is a tool for transmitting data and it works well. Content piracy is a financial problem and the solution should be situated in that space.
And if Hollywood isn’t satisfied with that, they can swing in the wind.
A Utah school district decided not to select a cougar as the mascot of a new high school partly because school officials and some parents believed the word is disrespectful to women. . .
In pop culture, the term “cougar” refers to a sexually aggressive middle-aged woman who attracts younger men. However, the cougar is also a large mountain cat — that also happens to be the mascot for Brigham Young University — along with three other Utah high schools.
I think this is good. Kids need to be clearly taught the idiocy of political correctness. I’m glad the Canyons School District is stepping up.
Yesterday’s online protests against the break-the-internet bills are moving Republicans into opposition, but not Democrats.
Interesting. There’s lots of things this could mean, none of them favorable to Democrats. The easiest explanation is Democrats don’t give a rat’s behind what the people think.
When the government decides who gets health care, people die:
A 23-year-old died of cervical cancer because doctors said she was too young for a smear test, her devastated family have claimed. Mercedes Curnow, from Cornwall, first went to her GP at 20 years old but her mother says her symptoms were ‘ignored’ because of her age. . .
Government legislation was changed in 2003 to mean regular smear tests are only given to women aged over 25, where previously all women over 20 were given the tests.
Whatever you do, don’t call our new health care rationing board a “death panel”, that would alarmist. . .
A few weeks ago (yes, I’m still catching up), the very interesting story broke of the White House’s extravagant 2009 Halloween party. The White House was decorated in Alice-in-Wonderland style by director Tim Burton and the party was attended by Jonny Depp in character as the Mad Hatter. One participant came wearing the original Chewbacca costume!
Realizing how bad this looked, the White House hushed up the event, and asked the press not to report it, claims a new book on the first couple:
“White House officials were so nervous about how a splashy, Hollywood-esque party would look to jobless Americans — or their representatives in Congress, who would soon vote on health care — that the event was not discussed publicly and Burton’s and Depp’s contributions went unacknowledged,” the book says.
The fascinating thing is that the press went along with it!
This isn’t a White House scandal (although it is curious that neither Burton nor Depp appears on the White House visitor logs), but it’s a first-rate media failure scandal. How much were the White House press corps in the tank for President Obama? So much that they would agree not to report a story that made Obama look bad.
What’s amusing about this story is how it was the White House that persuaded me that it’s true. The official White House blog attacked a straw man, saying that the party wasn’t a secret. That’s beside the point; no one is saying that the fact that a party was held was a secret. What was kept quiet was the extravagance of the party. On that subject the blog weighed in as well:
The author attempts to paint the fact that some involved in the film attended and were not singled out in previews of the event as an attempt to hide their involvement — this was a large event, word of their involvement was certain to be reported, and indeed it was.
Oh, it was reported? That would change things, but let’s not take the White House’s word for it; let’s follow the link to the Politico story (archived here):
The official White House social media releases and the reporter pool dispatches from the party do not mention either Burton or Depp, but the Depp fan site JohnnyDeppNews.com reported that the actor was in attendance with Burton. And the Nashville Tennessean also reported that both Depp and Burton were at the White House for the party.
Seriously? JonnyDeppNews.com and the Nashville Tennessean?! That doesn’t refute the story, it confirms it. The White House pool (and Politico, for that matter) didn’t say anything. The only reporting they can find was in a Depp fan site and some local paper no one’s ever heard of. Very well, I will happily concede that neither JonnyDeppNews.com nor the Nashville Tennessean seem to be in the tank for Obama. For the rest of the media, and especially the weasels in the White House press corps, the charge remains.
A reminder of why Dodd-Frank is so bad, and why it has nothing whatsoever to do with consumer protection:
The CFPB is a constitutional affront, the crowning achievement of this White House’s mantra of never letting a crisis go to waste.
The agency has the power to regulate any practices it deems “unfair” — primarily the practices of institutions and businesses that had nothing whatsoever to do with the financial crisis.
Indeed, it has blank-check power to write the rules it wants to enforce. Worse, it cannot be reined in by Congress, because Dodd-Frank gave it a self-funding mechanism. It can simply take up to 12 percent of the Federal Reserve’s operating expenses to do whatever it wants. The power of Congress is ultimately the power of the purse. But in their finite wisdom, Democratic lawmakers gelded themselves. They also insulated the rogue agency from the courts, requiring that judges defer to the CFPB’s legal theories.
It’s pretty clearly an unconstitutional delegation of legislative power, although you can’t count on the Supreme Court enforcing the Constitution any more.
As everyone already knows, countless web sites around the Internet are going black today to protest the break-the-internet bills, SOPA in the House and Protect IP in the Senate.
I’m not going black, because the bill is supposed to be dead in the House. But I’ve thought that before (remember when we thought we’d killed health care nationalization?), so I called my Congressman anyway. You should too.
Any decision on developments such as the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline should be left to Canadians, Prime Minister Stephen Harper says. . .
“But just because certain people in the United States would like to see Canada be one giant national park for the northern half of North America, I don’t think that’s part of what our review process is all about.”
Via Instapundit, who adds: “Funny, the usual suspects aren’t denouncing ‘Yankee imperialism’ here.”
Some thoughts on President Obama’s recess appointments, now two weeks old:
Clearly it’s appallingly hypocritical, even by the low standards of Congress, for Democrats now to oppose a tactic they invented just a few years ago to frustrate President Bush’s recess appointments.
I think that Jonah Goldberg is right that Obama did this in order to try to pick a fight, for political purposes, and that Republicans are smart not to take the bait. And indeed, they don’t have to. There are plenty of other parties that have standing to challenge this appointments in court.
In regard to the “Consumer Protection” agency, they will certainly win too, because the law is clear. Regardless of the legitimacy of the Cordray appointment itself, the law makes clear that Cordray will have no power until he is confirmed by the Senate, which still hasn’t happened (and now probably never will).
John Elwood makes the case that the appointments are valid, because otherwise the Congress would have the power to frustrate the President’s constitutional authority. But I find John Yoo and Richard Epstein’s analyses more convincing. Both of them point out that President Obama is arrogating the authority to decide for Congress whether Congress’s session is a real one. To the contrary, the Constitution always grants each branch of government the power to make such decisions itself. (Epstein goes further and challenges the entire power of recess appointments as it is now used, but I don’t think we need to reach that.)
The President’s claim that the Senate was not really in session because it didn’t do any work is particularly problematic because it actually did do some work during the session in question. This seems to make the White House’s position entirely untenable.
Making the White House’s position even more absurd is the fact that just two years ago the Justice Department wrote an opinion acknowledging that the Senate could block recess appointments with pro forma sessions. (The letter was written by Elena Kagan, now a Supreme Court justice.) The White House sought and obtained a new opinion just two days before the recess appointments.
U.S drug enforcement agents secretly helped a Colombian cocaine supplier launder millions of dollars in drug proceeds so they could infiltrate cartels working through the Mexico border, it has been revealed. . .
They carried out wire transfers for tens of thousands of dollars, smuggled millions in bulk cash and even escorted a shipment of cocaine through Ecuador, Dallas and finally Madrid.
This isn’t the first time either. With all of its effort spent assisting criminals, one wonders if Federal law enforcement has any time for actual law enforcement.
The untold story of the Obama Administration’s widely reported, $335 million discrimination settlement with Countrywide Financial Corporation is that, under a secret Justice Department program, a chunk of the money won’t go to the “victims” but rather leftist groups not connected to the lawsuit.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) will determine which “qualified organizations” get leftover settlement cash and Democrat-tied groups like the scandal-plagued Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and the open-borders National Council of La Raza (NCLR) stand to get large sums based on the hastily arranged deal which got court approval in just a few days.
Newark, New Jersey has instituted a program offering cash to people to inform on their neighbors who own guns.
Late in the ad (over a minute in) they drop the work “illegal” into the mix, but probably for legal cover, because it’s only after making it very clear they are trying to stop all guns:
There are a small group of people in our City that think they can walk around with guns. It is unacceptable.
The FAA halted a program (Operation Migration) that used ultra-light planes to help whooping cranes migrate. Is there anything the government won’t screw up, given the chance?
The city of New London, Connecticut, has won a lawsuit over a discrimination claim filed by an applicant to the police force who wasn’t hired because he scored too high on an intelligence test.
As a matter of law, I think this is right. Smart people are not a protected class under discrimination law. On the other hand, it seems indefensible as public policy. Of course this is the same city that won the right to use imminent domain to condemn a neighborhood in order to turn it into a garbage dump, so stupidity must reign supreme there.
However, in a related item, the EEOC has ruled that employers may not require a high-school diploma without showing a business necessity. So it seems that (according to the Obama administration) uneducated people are a protected class.
A Virginia school district is defending a program in which 8-year-olds sang a song supporting the Occupy Wall Street movement. They actually make the risible assertion that the professional “facilitator” had nothing to do with the song’s content, which the facilitator’s (leftist) organization eventually admitted wasn’t true.
Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, chairwoman of the DNC, took the anniversary of the Tucson shootings as an opportunity to revive the calumny that conservative rhetoric was somehow responsible for the crime. That is contemptible in its own right, but it also takes an astonishing amount of chutzpah, given this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, or this. Over the last year, the left has shown how truly un-“civil” it is.
But then Wasserman-Schultz exposed her rigged standards in a surprisingly obvious way, telling RNC chair Reince Priebus that his remark — taking her to task for her own contemptible remarks — is the sort of incivility she was talking about. So accusing people of responsibility for murder is civil, but criticizing her for it is uncivil (and, by extension, somehow contributes to murder). What a disgrace.
The New York Times wants you to believe that holders of firearms permits are dangerous:
The New York Times examined the permit program in North Carolina, one of a dwindling number of states where the identities of permit holders remain public. The review, encompassing the last five years, offers a rare, detailed look at how a liberalized concealed weapons law has played out in one state. And while it does not provide answers, it does raise questions.
More than 2,400 permit holders were convicted of felonies or misdemeanors, excluding traffic-related crimes, over the five-year period, The Times found when it compared databases of recent criminal court cases and licensees. While the figure represents a small percentage of those with permits, more than 200 were convicted of felonies, including at least 10 who committed murder or manslaughter.
Here’s the hint that the NYT is trying to deceive you: these are all absolute numbers. What matters is the crime rate, and how it compares to the general population. They don’t say. But Robert VerBruggen does:
Fortunately, state-level murder data are easy to find. North Carolina has a statewide murder rate of about 5 per 100,000. Even without counting manslaughter, that’s 25 murders committed per 100,000 North Carolinians every five years. There are about 230,000 valid concealed-carry permits in North Carolina, so by pure chance, you’d expect these folks to be responsible for nearly 60 murders over five years. And yet only ten of them committed murder or manslaughter.
So the murder rate among permit holders is a sixth of that among the general population. The NYT knows this — you can’t tell me that at no time in their investigation did it occur to them to perform this simple calculation — but they chose not to share the fact with their readers. They want you to believe the opposite.
If you trust content from the New York Times, you’re a sucker.
POSTSCRIPT: VerBruggen’s calculation is good, but here’s one that’s even better: The crime rate among members of Mayors Against Illegal Guns (Mike Bloomberg’s anti-gun astroturf group) is at least 45 times higher than among Florida’s permit holders. (Via Instapundit.)
I’ve never been a fan of Ron Paul: His foreign policy is irresponsible and disqualifying. His domestic objectives are impractical. (“Shut them all down” is fine for a gadfly to shout from the outside, but it’s not a realistic legislative agenda. We need a real plan to downsize the government, and he doesn’t seem to have one.) I don’t share his obsession with the gold standard. And then there’s the troubling material in his newsletters.
But even as a non-fan, I still found this dismaying:
He turns out to have no plan to reform Medicare and Social Security, other than cutting defense spending to make more room for them in the budget.
He wants to slash defense spending in order to prop up entitlements (which won’t work anyway). Yikes.
A state-appointed panel said Tuesday that California’s plan to build a high-speed rail system in the state is not financially feasible and should be placed on hold. The report by the California High-Speed Rail Peer Review Group said the state should not authorize $2.7 billion in bonds to build the initial section of the system.
I’m sure the project will go ahead nonetheless. High-speed rail proponents are impervious to reason.
POSTSCRIPT: This seems like an appropriate time to remind everyone of the biggest problem with high-speed rail, bigger than the billions in wasted money. America has the world’s best rail system already, and high-speed rail could ruin it.
Brown’s office signaled that the governor isn’t likely to be swayed by the panel’s findings. “It does not appear to add any arguments that are new or compelling enough to suggest a change in course,” said Gil Duran, Brown’s press secretary.
One problem with technocracy is it’s so hard to distinguish from kleptocracy:
In May 2010, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi took to a podium in the Capitol to introduce a half-dozen economic experts she had convened for a meeting on how to jump-start the economy. . . What Pelosi did not mention is that one of the men in the group was her son’s boss and a partner with her husband in more than a half-dozen investments, including one that generated more than $100,000 in income for the Speaker’s family last year.
Eric Holder says that all the criticism of the Gunwalker scandal is because he is black:
“This is a way to get at the president because of the way I can be identified with him,” he said, “both due to the nature of our relationship and, you know, the fact that we’re both African-American.”
Really, Mr. Holder? Really?! The ATF trafficks thousands of weapons to Mexican drug cartels, makes no effort to track them, and won’t explain why. The Justice Department promotes the perpetrators, and punishes the whistleblowers, and obstructs the Congressional investigation. The US Attorney spits in the face of the victims. Holder himself can’t keep his story straight. And the only possible reason for someone to be upset is because Eric Holder is black?!
No, the person bringing race into this is you, Mr. Holder.
The legacy media is running a story claiming that Rick Santorum, taking questions at a campaign event, said “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.” The story apparently began with NPR.
The first thing I want to note is there is nothing inherently offensive in this statement (unless you are so liberal that you’re offended by the idea of not redistributing wealth). What might make this offensive would be if he had brought it up outside the context of inter-racial redistribution of wealth, in which case it could be race-baiting. That’s the allegation in this case.
But he never said it. Here’s the video:
He said “I don’t want to make [unintelligible] people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.” It’s not clear to me what he did say; I’m getting “lah”. Tommy Christopher renders it “mmbligh”. Ed Morrissey renders it “lives”. But one thing he clearly did not say is “black” — there is no K sound.
The story gets muddier with an interview Santorum gave to CBS News. They asked him about the statement, but they didn’t play the context. So what is Santorum to answer?
He can’t explain why he said it, because he doesn’t remember saying it, because he didn’t say it.
He can’t deny it and tell them what he did say, because he doesn’t know, because they didn’t play him the context.
He can’t deny it and tell them he would never say such a thing, because (as above) there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. It’s only wrong in context, and they didn’t play him the context.
So in this situation, all he can do is say something like what he said “I’ve seen that quote, I haven’t seen the context in which that was made”. He then guessed (incorrectly) at what the context might have been:
Yesterday I talked for example about a movie called . . . ‘Waiting for Superman,’ which was about black children and so I don’t know whether it was in response and I was talking about that.
NPR acted shabbily by putting words in Santorum’s mouth; if you can’t tell, don’t guess. (Although perhaps the reporter really did hear “black”, which — being completely out of context — would tell us a lot more about him than about Santorum.) CBS acted shabbily by ambushing him with the question and not giving him the information to answer. Santorum made a political blunder by guessing.
There had originally been some confusion about whether Santorum actually said the word “black,” which he appeared to clear up in the CBS interview by acknowledging that was in fact the statement he made.
That’s simply a lie. Santorum did not confirm making the statement.
Finally, I can’t help but observe how disingenuous it is for the left to pretend shock and amazement at race baiting (which, at the risk of repeating myself, Santorum didn’t do), when their response to every single criticism of this administration is to accuse the critics of racism (for example).
More quotations from administration and ATF officials tying Gunwalker to the administration’s domestic gun-control agenda have surfaced:
There is no evidence the administration initially considered using the operation to justify stronger gun laws. But as the investigation dragged on, and Washington saw more and more weapons from U.S. gun stores show up at Mexican crime scenes, at least some officials saw a political argument developing to support their legislative agenda.
In March 2010, Holder’s Chief of Staff Gary Grindler attended a detailed briefing on Fast and Furious in Washington. In handwritten notes, Grindler wrote the words “long rifle,” “multiple sale” and “need regulation” in the margin of a briefing paper.
On July 14, 2010, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Assistant Director Mark Chait asked then-ATF Phoenix Special Agent in Charge Bill Newell “if these guns were all purchased from the same (licensed gun dealer) and at one time. We are looking at anecdotal cases to support a demand letter on long-gun multiple sales.”
On Jan. 4, 2011, Newell apparently saw the opportunity to publicly push for the new gun regulation. The Fast and Furious news conference provides “another time to address multiple sale on long guns issue,” he wrote Chait.
A day after that news conference, Chait replied in an email: “Bill — well done yesterday … in light of our request for demand letter 3, this case could be a strong supporting factor if we can determine how many multiple sales of long guns occurred during the course of this case.”
The “demand letter” would require border-state gun stores to report buyers who try to purchase multiple rifles or long guns in a one-week period.
Two months earlier, U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke had an email exchange with his counterpart in Washington state, Jenny Durkan. Burke informed her of the Fast and Furious case and its use of straw buyers to deliver guns to Mexico that “have been directly traced to murders of elected officials in Mexico City by the cartels.”
Durkan wrote back: “Let me know when you have time to talk. I want to discuss our approach in enforcing gun sale laws at (gun stores) and gun shows.”
Some of these quotes are new; some we knew already.
As the article points out, this doesn’t mean that Fast and Furious was conceived as a scheme to promote domestic gun control (although the administration has yet to offer any alternative explanation consistent with the facts), but at the very least they did decide to exploit it that way after the fact.
Argentina has temporarily blocked sales of certain electronics including Apple’s iPhone and RIM’s BlackBerry in order to stabilize the country’s ailing economy, while suggesting that companies must build plants in the country to resume sales. The decision by the Argentinian government claims that the selective consumer electronics ban is meant to slow rising inflation and correct the disparity between the pesos and U.S. dollar. . .
If someone were to look, I think they’d find a Kircher ally who benefits financially from this. At least, I hope so. It’s actually more frightening if they are actually telling the truth; if they really think that banning smartphone sales will help their economy. Who is going to invest in Argentine manufacturing under these circumstances?
POSTSCRIPT: Vodkapundit’s link is no good any more (the article’s been replaced by a full page of ads); you can find the article here.
A flashback to the genesis of the Gunwalker scandal:
The president has directed us to take action to fight these cartels and Attorney General Eric Holder and I [Deputy Attorney General David Ogden] are taking several new and aggressive steps as part of the administration’s comprehensive plan. . .
DOJ’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is increasing its efforts by adding 37 new employees in 3 new offices using $10 million dollars in Recovery Act funds and redeploying 100 personnel to the southwest border in the next 45 days to fortify it’s Project Gunrunner- which is aimed at disrupted arms trafficking between the United States and Mexico.
The announcement obviously didn’t say that those efforts would include trafficking guns to Mexican drug cartels while making no effort to track them. That, they didn’t know yet (probably). But, at the very least, it’s easy to see how it could happen: “Here’s a blank check — go do something!”
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac understated their exposure to subprime and reduced-documentation mortgages by 90%. Freddie disclosed $140 billion of their $901 billion exposure; Fannie disclosed just $73.7 billion of their $1.1 trillion exposure.
This might have been good to know as the federal government was deciding to give Fannie and Freddie a blank check.
A career employee in the Voting Section of Justice’s Civil Rights Division has confessed to committing perjury, sources say. The employee, Stephanie Celandine Gyamfi, reportedly told investigators from the Inspector General’s Office that she perjured herself during an inquiry into Justice Department leaks during the previous administration. Despite the admission, she has not been fired for criminal malfeasance. Indeed, it appears she has not been disciplined in any meaningful way at all. . .
Amazingly, despite Ms. Gyamfi’s admission of committing perjury not once, but three times, she so far has been neither terminated nor disciplined by the Justice Department. In fact, her boss, Voting Section Chief Chris Herren, continues to assign her to the most politically sensitive of matters, including the Department’s review of Texas’s congressional redistricting plan.
Now why on earth would the Justice Department let perjury slide? Wonder no longer:
The genesis of Ms. Gyamfi’s perjury is apparently rooted in political attacks on the Bush Justice Department. Throughout 2005-2007, numerous attorney-client privileged documents, confidential personnel information, and other sensitive legal materials were leaked from inside the Voting Section to the Washington Post and various left-wing blogs.
Now, the Obama administration cannot be held responsible for Gyamfi’s malfeasance, but they should be held responsible for their failure to discipline her. Not only have they let her off scot-free, they have continued to use her in precisely the area in which she has shown she cannot be trusted. And thus they support her actions after-the-fact.
Seattle’s city council has enacted a ban on plastic bags, despite such a ban having been overwhelmingly defeated by the voters. (Take that, silly voters!)
There’s a lot to hate about this: The government giving the people the finger. Infringement of our personal liberties. The fact that paper bags are no better for the environment than plastic.
But what takes the cake is this: The reusable grocery bags that they are trying to induce people to use carry health risks:
The International Association for Food Protection’s Food Protection Trends published a study in its latest issue revealing that most consumers surveyed never wash their reusable bags between uses, permitting bacteria to grow. The peer-reviewed study, completed by University of Arizona Microbiologist Dr. Charles Gerba, found that large numbers of bacteria were found in almost all bags and that coliform bacteria were found in half of those tested. Eight percent of bags contained E. coli.
A wide variety of coliform bacteria were detected in the bags including Escherichia coli. E. coli
was identified in seven bags (12% of bags tested). . . Many of the bacteria isolated are capable of causing opportunistic infections in humans.
So the Seattle City Council is creating a health risk by infringing our freedom in order to address an unimportant problem in a manner already rejected by the people.
POSTSCRIPT: It’s always interesting to me to see the hierarchy of causes on the left (e.g., multi-culturalism trumps feminism). From this NPR story, downplaying the risks of grocery bags, we see that environmentalism (in its stupidest form) trumps food safety. “Don’t fret” they say, based on interviewing one person who says that having E coli in your grocery bags is probably fine. They don’t usually take that line on matters of food safety, even for threats that — unlike this one — are entirely speculative (for example).
To be fair, it’s perfectly sensible to say you’re willing to do something provided others do their part too. But then you don’t get to take the rhetorical step of saying “I want my taxes raised.” You don’t want your taxes raised; you want other people’s taxes raised.
ASIDE: On the other hand, if the point is that millionaires somehow have the moral authority to call for tax increases on millionaires, then by the same token, middle class people like the Tea Party have the moral authority to call for middle-class entitlements to be abolished. Heck, I’ll make that trade.
Moreover, I suspect most of these people are being disingenuous. Crony capitalists are all for higher taxes because higher taxes mean more government spending, which puts more money back in their pocket. And others profit from higher taxes in other ways, such as by running tax shelters or (like Warren Buffett) by selling insurance against tax bills.
Posted by K. Crary 
Internet Scofflaw 
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