Kay Bailey Hutchison tries to walk back her comments, unsuccessfully. She says she opposes abortion, but supports taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood. That’s like saying you support the Second Amendment, but also support the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. You can believe one or the other, but not both at the same time.
Even The New York Times has noticed the absurdity of the Obama Administration’s position on ObamaCare: “The Justice Department is essentially arguing that the penalty is not a tax, except when the government says it is one.”
The decline in culture at Goldman Sachs: “Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and doing the right thing. Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence.”
Sarah Hoyt on the myth of the war against women: “War is where the enemy decimates your numbers – like, say in China where abortion is killing mostly females. War is where you are kept from learning – like in most Arab countries, where women have restrictions placed on their education…If this is war it is war on men…If you truly believe refusing to force employers to pay for birth control is a war on women, then you are fragile little flowers who deserve to experience life practically anywhere else in the world.”
From Ace comes word that Nurse Bloomberg has outlawed food donations to the homeless that’s too high in fat and salt. If you put this in a Saturday Night Live parody, people would criticize it as too unbelievable…
In shocking news, liberal writer Froma Harrop, who appears to have spent all her life in and around New York City, isn’t worried about high gas prices. Imagine my shock. And if that name sounds familiar, there’s a reason:
A left-wing Irish documentary maker sets out to make a documentary about the plight of the Palestinians, but gets waylayed by those annoying facts, and instead decides to tell both sides of the story. Guess what? His friends aren’t interested. “The problem began when I resolved to come back with a film that showed both sides of the coin. Actually there are many more than two. Which is why my film is called Forty Shades of Grey. But only one side was wanted back in Dublin. My peers expected me to come back with an attack on Israel. No grey areas were acceptable.”
Israel and Hamas declare a ceasefire after four days of fighting. Honestly, maybe because I was traveling, or because I no longer feel the need to consult MSM news sources on a daily basis, I was actually unaware that there was slightly more violence than usual in the Middle East. The fact that Hamas cried uncle after a mere four days, despite the fact that Israel set it off by giving Hamas leader Zuhair al-Qaissi an express ticket to paradise, tells you that they must really have been getting their asses kicked by the IDF. Maybe Zuhair al-Qaissi really was important, or possibly Iran and Syria have had their hands too full to dole out the Qassam rockets with their customary generosity.
In related news, here’s a piece from last year in the liberal Texas Observer talking about Republican outreach to Hispanics. That seems to be working out a lot better than the “inevitable Democratic majority” theory people like Ruy Teixeira have been pushing for the last decade.
Iowahawk on Andrew Breitbart: “How did this socially liberal Jewish RINO from Brentwood become the Emmanuel Goldstein of the left’s unhinged 2-Minutes Hate? A big, lovable, random, generous, fearless, patriotic grinning goofball.”
Down With Wind: “If wind power was going to work, it would have done so by now. The people of Britain see this quite clearly, though politicians are often wilfully deaf. The good news though is that if you look closely, you can see David Cameron’s government coming to its senses about the whole fiasco. ” (Hat tip: Powerline.)
UT to student media director: Balance your department budget. Student media director: OK, how about we sell these TV and radio licenses? UT: Not that balanced. You’re fired. (Hat tip: Mike Godwin’s Facebook page.)
Media Matters is a paranoid interest group that works as an extension of the Democratic Party, and which many liberal journalists take their marching orders from. In other news, pro-wrestling is fake.
Texas ranks top in exporting yet again, with exports bringing in more than $249.8 billion in 2011, up 20.7% from $206.9 billion in 2010.
Is the redistricting fight all about Lloyd Dogget? So black and Hispanic interest groups are fighting a long, drawn-out court battle to protect a single white incumbent.
I got that story from Must Read Texas, which seems like a veritable firehose of Texas news and links.
To support its welfare state, Denmark travels quite a way down the road to serfdom: “A suspected terrorist has more legal protection than the ordinary Danish taxpayer.”
Some Marin County residents are fighting George Lucas’ plans to expand film-making facilities. Because California is just doing so well it can afford to alienate job creators.
Over at Shall Not Be Questioned, Sebastian talks about a review of Adam Winkler’s Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America, an excerpt of which Clayton E. Cramer was kind enough to examine here. This particular post is notable as both Winkler and Cramer chime in in the comments. I would be most interested in reading a full-length review by Cramer of Gunfight, but I don’t think he’s done one yet.
LinkSwarm, or EuroDoom? LinkSwarm, or EuroDoom? Well, the first link has some of each, but with Davos just starting up, I imagine their will be a nice helping of EuroDoom ready to serve tomorrow, so let’s put up a LinkSwarm today:
Mark Steyn looks at the Costa Concordia sinking and smells a metaphor.
Myth: Newt Gingrich told his first wife he was divorcing her on her hospital deathbed. Fact: They had already agreed to a divorce, Newt was just visiting her, the tumor was benign, and Jackie Battley Gingrich is still alive. But who are you going to believe: Online liberal trolls, or the daughter who was actually in the hospital room at the time?
Jonah Goldberg discusses Newtzilla, but his best barbs are reserved for his opponent: “Romney seems like a creature put on Earth to blend in with the humans and report back what he finds. He clearly likes earthlings, and they in turn find him pleasant enough and surprisingly lifelike.”
Maureen Dowd on on Obama’s cocoon of self-aggrandizing victimization. Like all Dowd’s columns, it focuses on the trivial minutia of the-personal-as-political…and is all the more devastating for it. “The man who came to Washington on a wave of euphoria has had a presidency with all the joy of a root canal…The Obamas, especially Michelle, have radiated the sense that Americans do not appreciate what they sacrifice by living in a gilded cage. They’ve forgotten Rule No. 1 of politics: No one sheds tears for anyone lucky enough to live at the White House. And after four or eight years of public service, you are assured membership in the 1 percent club.”
After 12 months, what has the Arab Spring wrought in Egypt? Cairo Winter: “The reality of the past twelve months, however, has undone whatever high hopes one might have held. Egypt is now headed for radical theocratic, rather than liberal democratic, rule. And a befuddled Obama administration has failed to do anything to stop the coming disaster.” (Hat tip: Michael Totten, who adds: “I know a few Egyptian intellectuals and activists who are authentic liberals, but they’re not remotely a majority. The percentage of Egyptians who genuinely support most or all the tenets of Western-style liberal democracy is in the high single digits at best.”)
Japan suffers its first trade deficit since 1980. Remember all those stories from the 1980s about how Japan was going to take over the world? They were very similar to the ones we were getting about China just a few years ago…
Hat tips: Ace, Insta, The Corner, and the usual suspects.
Like a squirrel hording nuts for winter, I’ve set aside a few tasty links for you to chew on:
George Will offers up a masterful column on why big government actually increases, rather than decreases, inequality.
Liberals have a rendezvous with regret. Their largest achievement is today’s redistributionist government. But such government is inherently regressive: It tends to distribute power and money to the strong, including itself.
Government becomes big by having big ambitions for supplanting markets as society’s primary allocator of wealth and opportunity. Therefore it becomes a magnet for factions muscular enough, in money or numbers or both, to bend government to their advantage.
[snip]
Not only does redistributionist government direct wealth upward; in asserting a right to do so, it siphons power into itself. A puzzling aspect of our politically contentious era is how little contention there is about the ethics of coercive redistribution by progressive taxation and other government “corrections” of social outcomes it considers unethical or unaesthetic.
This reticence, in an age in which political reticence is rare, reflects the difficulty of articulating principled defenses of these practices. They go undefended because they are generally popular with a public that misunderstands their net effects and because the practices are the political class’s vocation today. The big winners from these practices are that class and the interests adept at collaborating with it.
Government uses redistribution to correct social outcomes that offend it. But government rarely explains, or perhaps even recognizes, the reasoning by which it decides why particular outcomes of consensual market activities are incorrect. When taxes are levied not to efficiently fund government but to impose this or that notion of distributive justice, remember: Taxes are always coerced contributions to government, which is always the first, and often the principal, beneficiary of them.
Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindel makes the case for Rick Perry:
Mark Styen on the left’s idea of empathy: “In 2008, the Left gleefully mocked Sarah Palin’s live baby. It was only a matter of time before they moved on to a dead one.”
Speaking of Steyn, here are his wishes for a Happy New Year in his usual gloomy, depressing, acerbic way.
And speaking still further of Steyn, he once noted that China will get old before it gets rich. And just what is it like to be old in China now? It really sucks. It turns out Communism’s claims of taking better care of the helpless was just as big a lie as all communism’s other claims…
The year winds down, and I have a bunch of more-or-less lengthy posts in various stages of completion. You know what that means? That’s right! LinkSwarm!
Charles Murray concludes that more prisons means less crime. “Higher imprisonment was the necessary condition for 100 percent of the reduction in violent crime.”
If I’m reading these tea leaves correctly, Gary Johnson is about to give up running as a Republican and run as a Libertarian. Which is a shame, because the Republican Party needs more libertarians. But his campaign never caught fire. Alternately, he’s going to pull out and endorse Ron Paul, which his front page sort of hints at.
To clear the air on Ron Paul: He’s not an Anti-Semite, he just wishes Israel didn’t exist, and he’s not a homophobe, he just refuses to shake gay’s hands or use their bathrooms.
Amy Alkon gets a TSA agent patdown. And by “patdown” I mean “repeatedly stick their fingers in her vulva.”
Rebel Syrians holding a sign slamming Obama and praising Bush. Real, or Photoshop? I try to have a healthy suspicion of things that fit too neatly into my worldview.