Month: September 2009

From the Department of WTF comes news of plans expand the Community Reinvestment Act. Apparently the mortgage crisis wasn’t big enough. We can do more! In other news, the “life expectancy as health care barometer” meme so loved by the progressives has been demolished. (h/t Glenn) And Ace reports seventy percent in swing districts oppose…

As most readers know, I can’t stand to watch television, so I missed all of the past weekend’s MSM Obama Extravaganza. I don’t know how he does it, but Stephen Green not only sat through it, but managed to put together a video review of the marathon which Glenn Reynolds linked earlier. Which is great…

Via Dr. Helen, I found this very disturbing analysis of the “science” of neurolaw. (I use the word “science” advisedly, for phrenology was once called that, and sociology still is.) What neurolaw proposes is basically scrapping the criminal justice system as we know it and dispensing with the idea of punishing crime or criminals. That’s…

This was made in 1933. Marijuana was made illegal in 1937. Harry Anslinger was the front man for the effort to make marijuana illegal. Harry Anslinger (1892-1975) was the first US drug czar. Anslinger was appointed to the newly created position of Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics on August 12, 1930 and he…

The conventional wisdom on the left for going on five years has been that Iraq was a mistake, that it diverted resources from the “real fight” in Afghanistan. But as Victor Hanson points out, that cuts both ways, and our difficult victory was Al Qaeda’s crushing defeat. 2) We were far more able to inflict…

ECN Magazine has an article up on Polywell and other small fusion efforts. You will never guess who the author is. Heh. Cross Posted at Power and Control

While we might debate the appropriate penalty for stealing cell phones, I don’t think too many people would agree that it should cost you an arm and a leg: London, England – Civil rights watchdog Amnesty International has called on the Somali Al-Shabab armed group not to carry out amputations on four men accused of…

Yesterday I returned a cell phone I found which turned out to have been stolen. When I found it over a month ago, it had been half-buried in mud, and it was so severely water-damaged that I thought it was junk. Even after I cleaned it up, the screen was filled with water droplets and…

Let’s see if I can get this straight. A killer (acquitted by reason of insanity in the 1987 slaying of an elderly woman whose body he soaked in gasoline to throw off search dogs) who has been declared criminally insane, with a history of escape, was taken on a “field trip” to the Washington State…

Howard Wooldridge, a retired police officer who is against the drug war, had this to say about his experience at the 9/12 March Against Washington (via e-mail). “Resistance continues to crumble: How conservative does one have to be to board a bus & travel all night to go to a march on Washington on September…

I always thought that the thing to do was to bless people in the hope that they would see the light. These “Values Voters” from 2007 don’t seem to see things that way. The New York Times reports on the 2009 Values Voters Summit. The Times does have some good news for us libertarian types.…

How do you know Obama is lying about health care reform? His teleprompter is moving. Apparently under the theory that if you lie often enough the lies start to sound true, the Magical Mendacity Tour kicked into high gear this weekend, with even more facepalming dishonesty: President Barack Obama says requiring people to get health…

While I’m delighted to see the final downfall of ACORN (which I’ve condemned repeatedly), I’m fascinated by the fact that even though the organization had a long history of voter fraud, mortgage fraud, and the worst sort of political corruption, and all of these outrages were repeatedly exposed, it wasn’t until something was uncovered that…

Here is what ACORN had to say about Mr. Obama. Since then, we have invited Obama to our leadership training sessions to run the session on power every year, and, as a result, many of our newly developing leaders got to know him before he ever ran for office. Thus, it was natural for many…

The New York Times passes on the rumor that Obama has asked New York Governor David Patterson to withdraw from the New York Governor’s Race. President Obama has sent a request to Gov. David A. Paterson that he withdraw from the New York governor’s race, fearing that Mr. Paterson cannot recover from his dismal political…

I want to return briefly to a point made in a hard-hitting post from Canadian blogger Blazingcatfur about the awful treatment his mother received: With barely contained anger I informed the nurse that keeping an ill, 84 year old woman in a hospital corridor for 18 hours was not the type of care that anyone…

Eric at Classical Values was discussing the efforts to maginalize Glenn Beck. In that piece Eric also mentions the Drug Warriors on the right. Reality of course is much more hilarious than anything I could imagine. Instapundit shows that the Democrats are using Glenn (who claims to be a libertarian) to make fun of the…

I woke up this morning to see an apparently reassuring headline: Obama: Health care anger not motivated by his race Finally! I thought. The president has had the decency to at least acknowledge something dictated by simple logic and common sense. (As I pointed out not long ago, no one said opposition to Hillary Clinton’s…

I like sexual freedom. I think that arises out of the fact that I don’t like being told what to do. Being told what to do sucks, especially when people are trying to tell you what to do in the most personal area of your life. Americans have a long history of hating being told…

The ugly truth of government rationing: In a letter to The Daily Telegraph, a group of experts who care for the terminally ill claim that some patients are being wrongly judged as close to death. Under NHS guidance introduced across England to help doctors and medical staff deal with dying patients, they can then have…