Freedom of Press is limited to those who own one - H.L. Mencken

Wednesday, September 01, 2010

Here’s a multiple choice exam.  The man who attacked the Discovery Channel today had a manifesto.  In it, he rants about human population control, immigration, war, global warming, the economy, housing, endangered species, etc.  With the exception of a rant on illegal immigration, it’s mostly radical left wing environmentalist stuff.

Is the appropriate response to this loser to:

1) Claim that he’s obviously been inspired by the anti-wealth and environmental rhetoric of the left, just as right-wing violence has been inspired by anti-government rhetoric?

2) Admit he’s just a nut and the political rantings of nuts should not be taken seriously?  He could just as well have been ranting about the aliens controlling his mind as environmentalism?

3) Claim that this man is a nut and his rantings don’t impugn the Left; but rantings of anti-government loons definitely impugn the Right?

I’ll give you three guesses as to where the Left Wing commentariat is going with this. Anti-immigrant sentiment formed a very small part of this manifesto.

I haven’t commented on the Glenn Beck rally this weekend since I was in transit and it crossed me as more of a religious revival than a political event, which set by interest-o-meter to “low”.  However, one interesting aspects of it was the failed attempts by the Left to find racist signs in the rally.  The Beck people actually asked people not to bring signs to the rally as they wanted to keep it less political.

But that’s good enough for some people.  Apparently, this is not about message discipline; this is just masking the real racism that festers in the hearts of the Beckistas.

You just can’t win with these people.  If protestors show up with racist signs—even if, as happened with Dale Robertson—they are immediately asked to leave, this unveils secret racism.  If signs are discouraged, this conceals racism.  Either way, they’re a bunch of racists.

Update: Incidentally, the rally for Beck involved leaders of all faiths, including Islam, and raised millions to benefit the children of soldiers.  What a horrible horrible thing to go on in Washington.

On November 5th, 2008 the smug liberals told us that they had finally crushed the idiotic and evil machine, that the American people had spoken, and that collectivism was the wave of the future. Unlike their reactions in 2000 - where they simply decided to ignore reality and created the twisted notion in their even more twisted minds that the one that stole the election was Bush & the SCOTUS, and not Gore with his army of lawyers and the Florida Supremes – which started the liberal slide into illogical insanity, and 2004, where they were dejected to see the country simply not trust that buffoon John Kerry, and driven even further into the wilderness, they could not wait to get out and rub salt into the wounds of the opposition. We were told that the world was finally saved, that other countries would finally love us again, the economy would be fixed, that evil America would stop torturing people and inflict war on poor people whose only crime was that they were brown, everyone would magically be working according to their ability, and get back according to their needs, and Utopia would follow. Cats and dogs would start living together! Oh wait, that was Bill Murray’s character in Ghost Busters, but you get the point. They laid it on thick.

We were promised decades of liberal rule for the evils of the capitalist right. Many of us that experienced the Carter years and knew better, told them that the gloat was not just premature, but that once the American people got a taste of the insanity that’s part & parcel of the left’s ideology and governing, that they would sour on it, and sour on it fast. So it isn’t a surprise to me to discover that just 2 years into their reign of fire that Americans now trust the GOP more on almost all election issues, as the below graph clearly shows.

I and many others weren’t fooled for a second by Obama and the demcorats sweet talking and promises of “Hope & Change” – as I said I remember the Carter years, and to anyone that was paying real attention the left’s ideological shift was so drastic it compared to Carter idiocy redux on steroids - that these people could do anything but set us back. The GOP might have been bad at these things when they had power, but the demcorats, especially the current crop of elitist bastards and crooks, make the GOP losers look damned awesome. And the shift took just 2 years of liberal policy & rule to happen.

No, this is not me gloating. I remain quite aware that the GOP will now actually have to do what the American people want, or they too will face our wrath, and then sooner than later. It might surprise you that am actually looking forward to that, though. I seriously believe that if the GOP, once they have power, doesn’t derail this collectivist behemoth that is driving us at Warp speed into the abyss, reverses course of this out of control spending and lunacy, and lets the American people down yet again, that they will be gone too. The one thing I do know is that the American people, now that they know what they will get under democrat rule, the disastrous policies and last 2 years will still be fresh in their minds, will not go back to the demcorats. At least not the sane ones. And while I expect the left to revert to the same tired tactics of the 8 tiresome Bush years, I doubt the American people will buy either the propaganda or the obstructionist anti-Americanism. It will be their Armageddon if they do so. We might even end up with a third party finally breaking the deadlock that elephants and donkeys have had on our government, and even might be set back on the path of exceptionally when they finally gut that bureaucratic monster that pretends to be serving our needs while really enslaving us to its ever growing appetite for control and power.

Miss him yet?

Reason has a cool thread on Obama’s new threads.  He’s apparently put a new rug in the oval office that has five quotes.  Here they are:

“The Only Thing We Have to Fear is Fear Itself,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt

“The Arc of the Moral Universe is Long, But it Bends Towards Justice,” Martin Luther King Jr.

“Government of the People, By the People, For the People,” President Abraham Lincoln

“No Problem of Human Destiny is Beyond Human Beings,” President John F. Kennedy

“The Welfare of Each of Us is Dependent Fundamentally Upon the Welfare of All of Us,” President Theodore Roosevelt

Fairly blah, as you would expect from our President.  I’m not fond of the last one.  So the question becomes: what quotes would you put in the Oval Office?  The Reason commenters are going with humor—I particularly like this one:

“That rug really tied the room together, did it not?”

Which works on so many levels, given that Obama is doing to the Constitution what Jackie Treehorn’s thugs did to the rug.  We can go with humor, but I’ll take a serious spin on my quotes.  There was a fantastic article a couple of weeks ago from the incomparable Jonah Lehrer on the corrupting effects of power.  Essentially, we tend to give power to good people.  But power tends to make them into bad people.

Mr. Keltner compares the feeling of power to brain damage, noting that people with lots of authority tend to behave like neurological patients with a damaged orbito-frontal lobe, a brain area that’s crucial for empathy and decision-making. Even the most virtuous people can be undone by the corner office.

So I would want quotes that would remind me of the dangers of power.  Things like:

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” - H. L. Mencken

“Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.” - P. J. O’Rourke

“A society that gets rid of all its troublemakers goes downhill.” - Robert A. Heinlein

“I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.” - Thomas Jefferson

“Four-fifths of all our troubles would disappear, if we would only sit down and keep still.” - Calvin Coolidge

Actually, I would take five quotes from any of those men in lieu of what Obama chose.  Apologies to Ayn Rand, Ronald Reagan, George Washington, Ben Franklin, Thomas Paine, Penn Jillette, Barry Goldwater, Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher.

Anyway, have at it.  Funny quotes, ironic quotes, inspiring ones.  Go nuts.

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Tonight President Obama is scheduled to deliver a speech about the whole Iraq situation. Frankly I am intrigued at how the morons in the WH will try to play this. It seems all bad things they inherited from Bush, but this victory that clearly came from the efforts of our troops that these same grandstanding demcorats put in harms way with their actions and words, and the conviction of President Bush to fight it despite the fact that the opposition was trying to hand our troops another Vietnam-like loss - if you believe the talking heads that are predicting this - that the WH is going to claim is theirs. I doubt Obama will give credit to Bush for this, because that’s not his way. If he does, he will somewhere in there take it back and blame Bush. Maybe by indirectly brining up the liberal meme that Bush faked the intel, red meat for the morons that buy this crap, or some such other nonsense. I certainly hope he credits the troops. And of course he will play to his left wing moonbats and claim he is keeping his promise. The problem is that it will be all show, and we won despite of him and his party, while there is still a risk that we might be pulling out too soon.

The fact is that Obama was part & parcel of the donkey lineup that made the claim back when Bush’s team announced they would pursue the surge option, that it was going to fail. I do give him credit for not declaring it a failure before it happened like Reed did, or for slandering our troops or taking other actions to help the enemy’s cause like Murtha and other demcorats did, but Obama was one of the people that tried - real hard - to derail any and all efforts intended to support our troops and give them what they needed to win in Iraq. Obama made it a point during his campaigning – I mean before the election, not the continued campaigning they are doing almost 2 years after taking the WH and that is making everyone stop wondering if these morons know anything else – to say Iraq was still a failure, and that unless he was elected to fix it by pulling out the troops, things would get even worse. In short, this guy, while not going as far as many in his party have, was if not outright rooting for us to lose in Iraq, at least vested in making our efforts in Iraq look & go bad, for political and personal gain. And the troops at least seem to know that. Of course, I doubt the Lame Stream Media will bring any of that up.

Even more interesting, as I already pointed out, is the fact that most believe that Obama is about to likely claim he kept his campaign promise and that this withdrawal is due his work, when there is no doubt for anyone willing to do the leg work that the pullout going on right now was following Bush’s team’s withdrawal time table, set a long time ago, and the only contribution from the Obama team was that they didn’t fuck it all up in Iraq and pull defeat right out of the jaws of victory before now, as many of us suspected they would. My guess is that the LSM would go right along and hand him that credit. After all, he is their guy, and he desperately needs to be propped up, because the mood of the American people after seeing Obama & the progressive left in action these past 2 years is dour indeed, and November promises a massacre at the polls for the left.

Then you have the fact that Obama now is ramping up the fighting in Afghanistan, which promises to be a difficult and costly slugfest. I wonder if he and his team realize now why Bush’s team moved the fight to Iraq back in 2003. And this whole endeavor seems to be mired in doubt, what with all the talk of a fixed withdrawal table and all, despite the fact he has put General Petraeus whom immediately opted to go on the offensive and actually do some killin’ – hear much about that in the LSM these days? No stories of US troops murdering babies either, huh? - in charge of that operation as well. And then there is of course Iran, which I still feel Bush made a mistake not to deal with at the same time as they took on Iraq.

Say what you want, but tonight’s speech should be interesting. At least it should provide people with a lot to waste time on. Me, I bet it will be a lot of nothing, Obama grandstanding and campaigning, taking credit for other people’s work, blaming Bush as usual for his mistakes, and then the fawning LSM telling us how lucky we are to have this guy in charge. I sure hope I am wrong.

What the hell, man?

Two men taken off a Chicago-to-Amsterdam United Airlines flight in the Netherlands have been charged by Dutch police with “preparation of a terrorist attack,” U.S. law enforcement officials tell ABC News.

...

The two were allowed to board the flight at O’Hare airport last night despite security concerns surrounding one of them, the officials said.

The men were identified as Ahmed Mohamed Nasser al Soofi, of Detroit, MI, and Hezem al Murisi, the officials said. A neighbor of al Soofi told ABC News he is from Yemen.

Airport security screeners in Birmingham, Alabama first stopped al Soofi and referred him to additional screening because of what officials said was his “bulky clothing.”

In addition, officials said, al Soofi was found to be carrying $7,000 in cash and a check of his luggage found a cell phone taped to a Pepto-Bismol bottle, three cell phones taped together, several watches taped together, a box cutter and three large knives. Officials said there was no indication of explosives and he and his luggage were cleared for the flight from Birmingham to Chicago O’Hare.

Once in Chicago, officials say they learned al Soofi checked his luggage on a flight to Washington’s Dulles airport for connections on flights to Dubai and then Yemen, even though he did not board the flight himself.

Instead, officials say, al Soofi was joined by the second man, Al Murisi, and boarded the United flight from Chicago to Amsterdam.

When Customs and Border officials learned al Soofi was not on the flight from Dulles to Dubai, the plane was ordered to return to the gate so his luggage could be removed. Officials said additional screening found no evidence of explosives.

I just flew to Australia and back.  During that time, I was patted down, forced to take my laptop out of its supposedly X-ray friendly bag, asked questions about my wife’s medicine and put in an X-ray backscatter machine that irradiated me and snapped pictures of my junk.  Read this story about TSA digging through a woman’s purse and accusing her of embezzlement because she had checks on her (note: TSA is not supposed to be screen for criminal activity).

And these bozos were allowed to board not one but two flights with a mock bomb in their luggage?  And they were then allowed to check their luggage on one flight while they boarded another and escaped to Europe?  The excuse I expect to be made is that they were flagged by TSA and their luggage searched and found to be harmless.  But you don’t let mock bombs go through.  That only sets the stage for them to try with real bombs and non-bulky clothing. I mean, what is a cell phone strapped a bottle of Pepto suposed to be if not a mock bomb?  Was he planning to call the bottle when he landed to make sure it was OK?

Stories like this make me really think our elaborate security screenings are so much anti-terrorism kabuki.  The illusion of safety is more important than the reality of it.

Monday, August 30, 2010

One of the problems I’m having with so-called green technologies (which are often not so green) is that we seem to be going backward in terms of progress. Many of them are simply not up to the technologies they are replacing in terms of performance.  A perfect example would be the time I spent in Australia stumbling around half-lit rooms because the government has mandated the use of CFC bulbs.  They’ve come a long way but they still do not light up completely for some time.  And maybe it’s just me, but I think having well-lit rooms is a hallmark of civilization.

The same is true of other technologies.  My wife has a new Apple laptop and it’s far less stable and reliable than our old one.  Does this have something to do with the “greening” of the apple brand and the banishment of nasty evil chemicals like lead (see here for one of the drawbacks of the lead ban)?

Now we find out that one of the hallmarks of civilization—pest-free bedding, may be being sacrificed on the alter of environmentalism:

While worst in the Northeast and especially New York City, blood-sucking bed bugs are making a remarkably rapid resurgence worldwide.

....

But why are bed bugs back? Though they’ve been sucking humans’ blood since at least ancient Greece, bed bugs became virtually extinct in America following the invention of pesticide DDT.

There were almost no bed bugs in the United States between World War II and the mid-1990s.

Around when bed bugs started their resurgence, Congress passed a major pesticides law in 1996 and the Clinton EPA banned several classes of chemicals that had been effective bed bug killers.

I know you’re thinking about the DDT ban, but the DDT ban is a little overblown since many insects have developed a tolerance for it. However, malathion and propoxur do work. The EPA-approved chemicals don’t kill bedbugs; they simply stun the little bastards.  Environmental groups complain that the effective pesticides have known health concerns.  But there’s a tradeoff here.  Most people will accept a little health risk if it means they don’t spend their nights being attacked by vermin.

And therein lies the problem.  To the radical environmentalists, there are no tradeoffs.  Anything dangerous or icky has to be banned, whether we have a replacement for it or not.

Have fun.

Thursday, August 26, 2010

Just for the hell of it,
Great shooting and Great tunes.

and

I Love to shoot, when i get the time, it is in many ways a great form of release from the stresses of daily life. Sadly the cost of it is ever growing, the cost of ammo is on a continual rise, due to the prices of the metals used in production of ammo. Copper, Zinc, Brass, Tin and Antimony, are on the rise oh and now it seem that Lead, will be to.  It seem that our Imperial Federal government, via the EPA has decided that the lead, specifically used in ammo, is a danger to the environment.

With the fall hunting season fast approaching, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under Lisa Jackson, who was responsible for banning bear hunting in New Jersey, is now considering a petition by the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) – a leading anti-hunting organization – to ban all traditional ammunition under the Toxic Substance Control Act of 1976, a law in which Congress expressly exempted ammunition.  If the EPA approves the petition, the result will be a total ban on all ammunition containing lead-core components, including hunting and target-shooting rounds. The EPA must decide to accept or reject this petition by November 1, 2010, the day before the midterm elections.

The CBD is pretty much your typical feel good environmentalist organization, with the admirable goal of saving wildlife from the ravages of man, at pretty much any cost. This group is so concerned about overpopulation, destroying the enviroment, that they are handing out Endangered Species Condoms.
Now this is just a petition from one organization, how much weight they carry with Lisa Jackson, is something I do not know, but you can bet your sweet ass that other anti-hunting and firearms groups will pile on this.

So what is the issue here?
According to the CBD:

An estimated 10 million to 20 million birds and other animals die each year from lead poisoning in the United States. This occurs when animals scavenge on carcasses shot and contaminated with lead bullet fragments, or pick up and eat spent lead-shot pellets or lost fishing weights, mistaking them for food or grit. Some animals die a painful death from lead poisoning while others suffer for years from its debilitating effects.
“The science on this issue is massive in breadth and unimpeachable in its integrity,” said George Fenwick, president of American Bird Conservancy. “Hundreds of peer-reviewed studies show continued lead poisoning of large numbers of birds and other animals, and this petition is a prudent step to safeguard wildlife and reduce unacceptable human health risks.”
American Bird Conservancy, Center for Biological Diversity, Association of Avian Veterinarians, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, and the hunters’ group Project Gutpile are asking for the ban under the Toxic Substances Control Act, which regulates dangerous chemicals in the United States.

With a error range like that one has to wonder how they conducted the estimation. I would assume that they took a few known deaths and multiplied it by a number of their choosing.
While it is true that animals some times consume lead shot, it is also true that many pass it and are unharmed, others once they get the taste of the metallic lead spit it right back out, it is not a pleasant taste. None the less, the source of the Lead that poisons the Condors can not be verified.
Lead, when consumed is dangerous I have not doubt that the hundreds of peer reviewed studies show that. As far as the Human race, we have gone on a crusade to ride the nation of Lead paint, and pipes. One often repeated myth is that Children got lead posing from eating chips of paint, when in fact, it was the inhalation of lead dust during renovations, that was the major factor.

From Wikipedia:
Ingestion of metallic lead, such as small lead fishing lures, increases blood lead levels and can be fatal. ingestion of lead-contaminated food is also a threat. Ceramic glaze often contains lead, and dishes that have been improperly fired can leach the metal into food, potentially causing severe poisoning. In some places, the solder in cans used for food contains lead. People who eat animals hunted with lead bullets may be at risk for lead exposure. Bullets lodged in the body rarely cause significant levels of lead poisoning, but bullets lodged in the joints are the exception, as they deteriorate and release lead into the body over time.

And yes that is peer reviewed too. Oh notice words like, can be, potentially, and may be.

As a hunter in California, compliance with the recent state nonlead ammunition regulation has been simple,” said Anthony Prieto, a hunter and co-founder of Project Gutpile, a hunter’s group that provides educational resources for lead-free hunters and anglers. “I still get to hunt, there is no toxic impact on wildlife or my health, and copper bullets shoot better.”

Shoot better? How so? Copper has a lower mass, which to any person that knows their firearms an ammo, know this means less range, less energy delivered and worst of all less accuracy.
Oh by the way Copper can be toxic too.

So how much of this horrible Lead is injected into the environment each year?

In the United States, 3,000 tons of lead are shot into the environment by hunting every year, another 80,000 tons are released at shooting ranges, and 4,000 tons are lost in ponds and streams as fishing lures and sinkers.

I wonder if they realize that a vast majority of the bullets fired at ranges is recovered and recycled? Lead is a commodity and is has value, no range owner in their right mind would pass up recovering that precious metal. 3000 Tons might seem like a lot but it is spread over the vastness of this nation,

Lead ammunition also poses health risks to people. Lead bullets explode and fragment into minute particles in shot game and can spread throughout meat that humans eat. Studies using radiographs show that numerous, imperceptible, dust-sized particles of lead can infect meat up to a foot and a half away from the bullet wound, causing a greater health risk to humans who consume lead-shot game than previously thought. A recent study found that up to 87 percent of cooked game killed by lead ammunition can contain unsafe levels of lead. State health agencies have had to recall venison donated to feed the hungry because of lead contamination from lead bullet fragments. Nearly 10 million hunters, their families and low-income beneficiaries of venison donations may be at risk.

notice the use of “can “ again.

This guy lived for years with a bullet in him. There are numerous stories similar to this and none of then that I can recall ever mention lead poisoning. 

Some studies have shown that hunters do not have elevated lead levels. Think about it. What dinner plate would have the most “harmful additives”? The plate of a rural hunter, or that of a suburban dweller?

The CBD helpfully cites alternatives to lead based bullets, such as

Non-toxic steel, copper, and alloy bullets and non-lead fishing tackle are readily available in all 50 states.

See here is the thing, all metals are toxic , it just depends on the amounts you are exposed to. Also You get a performance hit with the lighter metal bullets, and metals that are less malleable, such as steel, are banned or controlled due to their penetration abilities. You know Armor …..
Oh and another thing, those non-toxic bullets?
Tungsten
and again.
“Green" ammo
And more Green ammo. Which is vastly more expensive than the traditional ammo.
Copper bullets, which also is very much more expensive than traditional lead based bullets, are on the market, but due to the price, and performance hit, they have not flown off the shelves.

the EPA with out any congressional over-site, can unilaterally ban a entire class of commodity from the market., while claiming as they did with CO2 that it is a pollutant and needs to be regulated, you know for our own good.
IF this rule goes though it will cause a major uproar in the gun owners community. One part of this that particularly bothers me is Enforcement, will one just get a ticked and a fine,in the 100’s or 1000’s of dollars? Or will they get a 2 AM visit from the EPA swat team?
A major component of the firearms community is handloaders, men and women that reload their own ammo and cast their own bullets. What will become of them? Will this require them to turn in thier lead, stop manufacturing new cast lead bullets? What would the penalties be,and how will this effect the re-manufacturing market?

I would have to guess the people at the CBD dont give a shit.
The folks over at the CBD, are pushing a agenda that has no real basis in reality, it is simply another backdoor means to restricting firearm ownership.

Oh by the way the decision is due to me made on November 1, 2010…

Thoughts, comments?

Update:

The EPA has decided that, they do not have the authority to ban lead in bullets, but it can regulate the CO2 you produce from your daily activities.
So for now we win, but we must remain vigilant.

I am a huge baseball fan.  I have been since my dad took me to my first Braves game back in 1977 or 1978.  There’s little better than watching a game in one of the new beautiful stadiums. I can’t wait until SAL 11000 Beta is old enough to go.

That doesn’t mean I’m down with this bullshit:

The swindlers who run the Florida Marlins got exposed Monday. They are as bad as anyone on Wall Street, scheming, misleading and ultimately sticking taxpayers with a multibillion-dollar tab. Corporate fraud is alive and well in Major League Baseball.

A look at the leak of the Marlins’ financial information to Deadspin confirmed the long-held belief that the team takes a healthy chunk of MLB-distributed money for profit. Owner Jeffrey Loria and president David Samson for years have contended the Marlins break even financially, the centerpiece fiscal argument that resulted in local governments gifting them a new stadium that will cost generations of taxpayers an estimated $2.4 billion. They said they had no money to do it alone and intimated they would have to move the team without public assistance.

In fact, documents show, the Marlins could have paid for a significant amount of the new stadium’s construction themselves and still turned an annual operating profit. Instead, they cried poor to con feckless politicians that sold out their constituents.

I didn’t post this just because of my outrage against the duplicitous vile league division rivals of my Braves (whose stadium was mostly paid for by private contributions from Olympic interests*).  I link to this because it is an example of how our money-starved decrepit cities are victims of their own stupidity.  Check this out:

It is enough to stink. In the annals of bad stadium deals, it’s among the most odious, right alongside the Washington Nationals’ extraction of $611 million from the D.C. city council to get Nationals Park built. The team spent $20 million on a parking garage and pays $5.5 million a year in rent. So desperate was Washington to become the landing spot for the Montreal Expos, it ignored reality – there were no other legitimate options for MLB – and vastly overpaid.

Such sentiments are echoed when looking at the Marlins’ deal. One of the county’s loans is particularly egregious. According to the Miami Herald, J.P. Morgan gave a $91 million note – $80 million of which will go toward construction – that from 2041-47 will cost $118 million per year. In all, the county will spend $1.2 billion to pay off $91 million.

You know, I’m no financial whiz.  But it seems to me that spending $1.2 billion to borrow $91 million is a bit much.

There’s pork within pork here, including multi-million dollar “art” displays within the stadium.  Meanwhile, the arguments that stadiums stimulate the economy—Hey! We’re back on stimulus again!—have turned out to be bogus.  Right now, the Devil Rays are trying out this scam, claiming poverty to justify a public stadium.  In their case, it’s not quite as egregious since they have been spending some money since they became competitive.

This isn’t confined to sports stadiums, of course.  While their cities crumble around them, most city councils are interested in landing big projects with rich developers—be they stadiums, office parks, malls or rich condos.  The hum-drum business of keeping a city going just isn’t terribly exciting to politicians.  Bankrupting your people to finance rich guys’ playthings while abusing eminent domain is.  The problem really isn’t the sports team owners, who are just human.  It’s hard to pass up a $2 billion gift.  It’s the city councils and, by extension, the voters, who allow themselves to get bamboozled this way.

And frankly, I have a hard time believing that the authorities in Miami were completely ignorant of the financial state of the Marlins.  I mean, when we took out a home loan, my wife and I had to provide the bank with every piece of information about us except her bra size.  How on Earth does a $1 billion deal go down without the city knowing about the Marlins’ lack of cash problems?

My guess—it doesn’t.  The city just didn’t care.  It wanted its big project and was fine if the Marlins lied their asses of to the media and, more importantly, the voters, to make it happen.

One of the few exceptions to the starry-eyed “big project” mentality was my former hometown of San Antonio.  Thanks to strict term limits, the San Antonio city government was mostly interested in maintaining the city infrastructure, not engaging in big stupid expensive “projects”.  The special interests campaigned relentlessly against term limits—sometimes with the fairly naked rhetoric that SA needed to invest in big projects.  In 2008, the succeeded and I expect SA to promptly go downhill, probably after the drop a few hundred million on a new stadium for the Jacksonville Jaguars or something.

The usual Lame Stream Media propagandists must be desperate to try and defend the close to $1 trillion dollar stimulus patronage bill known as the “The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009” as this desperate and transparently vain attempt by Time tries to make this pig pretty proves.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 — President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus — has been marketed as a jobs bill, and that’s how it’s been judged. The White House says it has saved or created about 3 million jobs, helping avoid a depression and end a recession. Republicans mock it as a Big Government boondoggle that has failed to prevent rampant unemployment despite a massive expansion of the deficit. Liberals complain that it wasn’t massive enough.

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

The Institute for Justice is one of the evil libertarian organizations partially funded by the evil evil Koch brothers (see below).  You may remember them from two prominent lawsuits—on eminent domain (Kelo) and interstate wine sales (Granholm).  They lost the former, but have spurred numerous legislatures to pass laws restricting the process (although they need to get involved in the disgusting blight scandal in Montgomery).  The won the latter, which allowed interstate wine shipping.  However, Congress is trying to restore the wine cartels through the back door.

They’ve now found a new enemy—Death, Inc.:

Five years ago, Hurricane Katrina gave the Benedictine monks at St. Joseph Abbey a new calling.

After the storm pummeled much of a pine forest they had long relied on for timber and income, the monks hatched a fresh plan: They would hand-craft and sell caskets.

But now, local funeral directors are trying to put a lid on the monks’ activities. The state funeral regulatory board, dominated by industry members, is enforcing a Louisiana law that makes it a crime for anyone but a licensed parlor to sell “funeral merchandise.” The morticians are serious. Violators such as the monks can land in jail for up to 180 days.

“I don’t relish that thought,” said Abbot Justin Brown, head of the 107-year-old abbey, as he sipped coffee in the monastery on a recent misty morning.

St. Joseph’s 36 monks, whose pastimes include baking raisin bread for the homeless, are putting up a fight. On Aug. 12, they filed a lawsuit in federal court in New Orleans to try to overturn the state edict. In the filing, the monks argue that the state law violates their right to pursue a gainful occupation. “We’re not just going to sit back and let these guys bulldoze us,” says Deacon Mark Coudrain.

Penn and Teller have a great episode on the funeral industry and how they treat consumers.  So I’m not surprised by the reaction.  I think the IJ has a great chance here.  To enforce licensed markets, the industry has to show a need for licensing—think of amateurs doing surgery in the absence of medical licensing.  Unfortunately for them, the funeral industry’s attempts to justify their licensing is becoming laughable:

The regulatory board, naturally, “has nine members, eight of whom are funeral industry professionals”.  And the explanations of why the monks should not be able to sell caskets are embarassingly bad; the best the Journal could come up with, apparently, is this:

Boyd Mothe Jr., a member of the fifth generation of his family to run Mothe Funeral Homes outside New Orleans, says Louisiana’s law should remain on the books because licensed directors have the training to sell caskets--transactions he calls “complicated.” For instance, he says, “a quarter of America is oversized. I don’t even know if the monks know how to make an oversized casket.”

Because, you know, changing the dimensions on a box is really complicated.  Presumably it took the funeral directors years and years to learn the advanced technical skills--multiplication--involved.

Caskets are a high-margin items, turning over gigantic profits for their purveyors.  But you can’t got to court and say that.

The IJ is fighting the good fight, again.  Too bad their an evil shady organization funded by the evil shady Koch brothers.

I have some admiration for Jane Mayer. Her book The Dark Side is eye-opening on the torture regime implemented by the last Administration.  But she recently wrote an article detailing the evil Koch Brothers and their war against Obama.

The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests.

...

But Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said, “The Kochs are on a whole different level. There’s no one else who has spent this much money. The sheer dimension of it is what sets them apart. They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation, and obfuscation. I’ve been in Washington since Watergate, and I’ve never seen anything like it. They are the Standard Oil of our times.”

The rest of it is of a similar vein.  It took me about ten seconds to see what was wrong with this, as Ira Stoll notes:

Charles Lewis is a left-winger and the Center for Public Integrity gets its funding from left-wing foundations including George Soros’s Open Society Institute and Barbra Streisand’s Streisand Foundation.

Bing!  Mayer addresses Soros briefly:

Of course, Democrats give money, too. Their most prominent donor, the financier George Soros, runs a foundation, the Open Society Institute, that has spent as much as a hundred million dollars a year in America. Soros has also made generous private contributions to various Democratic campaigns, including Obama’s. But Michael Vachon, his spokesman, argued that Soros’s giving is transparent, and that “none of his contributions are in the service of his own economic interests.”

This is absurd.  Mayer quotes the Kochs’ critics extensively, often anonymously.  But when it comes time to talk about Soros, she only repeats a quote from his spokesman.

And it’s a wrong quote.  George Soros waged a perpetual personal political war against George W. Bush and has funded tons of political organizations that masquerade as non-partisan but are, in fact, partisan as hell and often disguise their assocation.  Media Matters is a perfect example.  They are relentlessly partisan: you may remember in the ACORN scandal that they uncritically parroted the ACORN line.  They have claimed they are not funded by Soros but later admitted to back door funding from MoveOn and CAP.  Put the Kochs’ name on it and make Media Matters a libertarian watchdog and it would be a conspiracy.

Moreover, Soros has used his power and influence to make himself wealthy, as documented in Do As I Say, Not As I Do.  But since he supports left-wing causes, we shouldn’t look too closely.  A similar hypocrisy applies to the think tanks.  Ones funded by the Kochs are suspicious partisan organizations; ones funded by lefties are non-partisan public interest groups.

Stoll again:

Ms. Mayer describes what she calls “the Kochs’ subsidization of a pro-corporate movement.” But a lot of Koch-backed institutions would be more accurately characterized as pro-individual or pro-small-government than as “pro-corporate.” These think thanks and professors and groups were criticizing ObamaCare when the drug companies were backing it, criticizing TARP when the investment banks were backing it, criticizing the auto bailout when GM and Chrysler were begging for it, criticizing “clean energy” subsidies when GE and Ford were begging for them.

More relevant to Ms. Mayer’s work?  The libertarians think tanks were, for the most part, massively opposed to the wars and diametrically opposed to the torture regime she so ably detailed in her book.

The core of her article is the Kochs funding of libertarian opposition to climate change legislation, an effort that supports their own energy interests.  She has a point here, but massively exaggerates it.  For example, she says the libertarians promoted Climategate:

Cato scholars have been particularly energetic in promoting the Climategate scandal. Last year, private e-mails of climate scientists at the University of East Anglia, in England, were mysteriously leaked, and their exchanges appeared to suggest a willingness to falsify data in order to buttress the idea that global warming is real. In the two weeks after the e-mails went public, one Cato scholar gave more than twenty media interviews trumpeting the alleged scandal.

This is an amazing distortion.  Cato has been mostly quiet on Climategate with the exception of the “one Cato scholar”.  And that “one Cato scholar” who gave 20 interviews is, in fact, Patrick Michaels, who was specifically mentioned and derided in the leaked e-mails.  Michaels has not asked for anonymity.  The only reason to leave that piece of information out is to make it seem more dark and mysterious than it is.  And Michaels, incidentally, disputes the severity of global warming, not its existence.  Additionally, the chief climate commenter at another evil Koch-supported libertarian think tank—Reason—also accepts the reality of global warming.  However, both think tanks dispute statist solutions to global warming and do not accept the disaster scenarios peddled by Algore.  So that makes them Evil Climate Deniers.

The final onion in the ointment of Mayer’s thesis?  Has all this vile corporate money worked to stop the growth of government?  We have had a decade of unrestrained government growth in every direction, under both Republican and Democratic leadership, that has brought us to the brink of financial ruin.  If the Kochs’ support of libertarian causes is undermining our Republic, it’s doing an awfully subtle job of it.

Anyway, read both her article and Stoll’s response.  Mayer’s book on torture was well-documented and included first-hand non-anonymous interviews with most of the principals.  It was very convincing.  This?  It’s a thinking man’s Shock Doctrine.  I’m not overly enamored of the Kochs, who have run afoul of environmental regulations, among other things, and used their influence to reduce their responsibility.  I’m under no illusion that their motives for funding libertarians ideas are pure as driven snow.  But that could be said of anyone who funds political interests.  if you’re going to disagree with the thinks tanks, dispute their ideas.  Don’t try some nebulous one-sided guilt by association bullshit.