I saw someone snark, "One of the many things he didn't predict."

He'll be appearing on Piers Morgan on CNN tonight.

from @benk84's news round-up.

Posted by: Ace at 07:54 AM | Comments (254)
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• BuzzFeed Plays Nice With Rubio To His Face, Attacks When His Back Is Turned
  
• Thousands Of Sandy Victims Still In Expensive Hotel Rooms
  
• Egypt Prime Minister: Women's Unclean Breasts Cause Diarrhea
  
• Apparently Iran Conquered Space
  
• 7 Million To Lose Their Health Insurance Because Of Obamacare
  
• Blue On Blue In CA
  
• Brace For A Stock Market Accident
  
• Michelle Rhee: My Break With Democrats
  
• Fox News Cuts Ties With Dick Morris
  
• Canada Does Away With The Penny
  
• Feel Good Home Defense Story Of The Day
  
• Online Shopping Replaces Malls
  
• "Now the President always has to back up his words with proof?"
  
• House Republicans Caving On Gun Control?
  
• When Did The Left Fall Out Of Love With Guns
  
• Saturday Mail To Be Cut By the USPS
  
• A Man Was Stabbed To Death At Baltimore Super Bowl Parade
  
• Jonah Goldberg: Education Spending Isn't Smart
  
• Cockamamie Schemes Can't Stop Argentinian Death Spiral
  
• The Coming War In The Middle East
  

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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:07 AM | Comments (90)
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I was aware of the negative economic consequences of plastic bag bans and plastic bag taxes, both for bag manufacturers and businesses that use the bags. I was also aware that when you raise the price of things (as the plastic bag tax does in places like D.C.), you make things harder for the people least able to adjust to arbitrary price increases -- the poor. And I was aware that any environmental benefit we're likely to see from bag bans and bag taxes is speculative at best.

I was not aware that the plastic bag bans have a death toll, as Ramesh Ponnuru writes in Bloomberg:

Warning of disease may seem like an over-the-top scare tactic, but research suggests thereÂ’s more than anecdote behind this industry talking point. In a 2011 study, four researchers examined reusable bags in California and Arizona and found that 51 percent of them contained coliform bacteria. The problem appears to be the habits of the reusers. Seventy-five percent said they keep meat and vegetables in the same bag. When bags were stored in hot car trunks for two hours, the bacteria grew tenfold.

[...]

Klick and Wright estimate that the San Francisco ban results in a 46 percent increase in deaths from foodborne illnesses, or 5.5 more of them each year. They then run through a cost-benefit analysis employing the same estimate of the value of a human life that the Environmental Protection Agency uses when evaluating regulations that are supposed to save lives. They conclude that the anti-plastic-bag policies canÂ’t pass the test -- and thatÂ’s before counting the higher health-care costs they generate.

Of course, this is common sense. There's a reason we keep food in refrigerators and discard or wash packaging when we're done with it. But washing the heap of reusable cloth bags in the back of the car? I'll admit: I never have. (I also usually just use plastic bags. There's no bag ban or tax in Virginia and the bags make excellent bin liners.)

Norovirus, which causes diarrhea and vomiting, was already known to be spread by reusable grocery bags at the time Los Angeles adopted its bag ban. The additional deaths and greater healthcare costs of the bag ban do not appear to have given environmental activists much pause. Naturally, enviroweenies have a long history of ignoring the human cost of their harebrained green ideas.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:32 AM | Comments (407)
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Happy Tuesday.

A couple of people have pointed out this Veronique de Rugy piece to me, one favorably and one very not. I tend to agree with the fellow who thinks she's whistling past the graveyard.

Now, sequestration may be the thing to do. But we should at least be honest about what's going to happen if we do it. De Rugy completely minimizes the disruption these indiscriminate cuts would cause this year by arguing that funding will largely be restored in future years. As someone much smarter than me remarked, this is "akin to arguing that it's okay to stop breathing for six straight months, because hey, we'll just breathe twice as often *next* year."

The Army, for example, is planning to simply not train 78% of combat brigades. You better believe that's going to affect military readiness. Among other things, they're also going to cut back on pilots -- even the ones they keep won't get enough flying time to meet proficiency reqs. Furloughs will be the order of the day. And the effort to ship equipment home from Afghanistan will stop.

Suggesting that "post-war reductions of defense spending are common practice," as de Rugy does, is a gloss. It avoids the real issue. These indiscriminate cuts are nothing like the well-considered "builddowns" she mentions. They won't feel like those other "builddowns" either. Not for the men and women in uniform and not for the thousands of civilian DOD employees either.

I'm not opposed to defense cuts; I am opposed to pretending that the sequester is going to be a peachy time. Maybe we have to eat this bullet; let's not act like it'll have no effect on our war-fighting capabilities. That takes the sequester from "unfortunate reality" to "dangerous self-deception."

Update: I have been informed by someone who claims to know that it is, indeed, Wednesday and not Tuesday. I, um . . . have to go. Tawk amongst yaselves.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:49 AM | Comments (348)
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On The Eternal Grievances of the Left

There are certain people, Dianne Abbott being a good enough example, whose existence is only validated by telling people to do something different from what they are. If everyone's a model of Victorian primness then the shriek will be that free love is a necessary part of civilised society. If everyone is indeed practising free love then Victorian modesty is the only valid more for society to allow. It's not that either is better or worse. It's that, by definition, whatever people are doing is wrong and they must be controlled to do the other. After all, Kip Esquire's Law does require that someone should do the controlling and there are those who do insist they are in the vanguard of those who ought to be. What is being controlled and to what end is much less important than the controlling itself.

Kip's Law: "Every advocate of central planning always - always - envisions himself as the central planner."

Fen's Law:  "The left believes none of the things they lecture the rest of us about."

Well these two laws plus the constant gnawing fear that something somewhere somehow might be unequal do account for a solid 85% of all leftist policies.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:00 PM | Comments (546)
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Posted by: CAC at 03:59 PM | Comments (314)
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Elections and consequences.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who campaigned as a limited government Republican, on Monday announced that he would implement one of the costliest provisions of President ObamaÂ’s health care law by expanding the stateÂ’s Medicaid program. His decision, a huge victory for the White House that will provide cover for more Republican governors to do the same, serves as a great case study on how difficult it is to impede the growth of government.

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Posted by: Ace at 03:12 PM | Comments (274)
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Bad boys.

I met a celebrity through my volunteer work, and we have flirted ever since we met. I’m young, unattached, and enjoy the occasional one night stand. This man has made it clear he wants to wine and dine me and then take me back to his place, and I’d take him up on the offer—I’m wildly attracted to his intensity and his passion for this cause—except for his tumultuous past. You can’t believe everything you read, but he has a pretty dodgy reputation, and his outbursts have sent him to jail before.... it’s also difficult to ignore how poorly he’s treated women in the past.

But I can manage to ignore it for a night, apparently.

I like how she claims she doesn't want his "money or celebrity" but apparently she's wildly attracted to him anyway.

Guess it's all that "intensity and passion." It's not like 3 out of 4 psychopaths in your local prison would have that same level of "intensity and passion."

But there's something special about this guy -- not his money or celebrity, mind you.

I notice she doesn't say he's handsome, which is sort of a nod in the direction of JamieWF's guess.

I have my own guess: That's right, America's hardest-working actor, Brian Dennehy.

But seriously, I love that she's writing a public letter to an advice columnist and asking "Hey should I bang this sketchy semi-psychotic with a history of mistreatment of women?"

I also love that the columnist says, "Absolutely!" Well, she says something like "If you'd look back on the experience fondly, then do it; if not, then don't."

Doesn't really seem to be any judgment here -- not even about the part about "how poorly he's treated women in the past." Not even a question about that.

Meanwhile? That Audi commercial?

Why that's just terrible.

Current Frankfurt-School Feminism

Logic and consistency are patriarchal constructs.

Posted by: Ace at 02:11 PM | Comments (543)
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I was a little sad that Mika was not doing her chirpy parrot thing here.

She does get in a typical Mika crack though.

Speaking of: Kept Conservatives: Prominent Right-Wingers Who Sound Very Liberal.

Have you ever noticed how many of the most prominent conservative voices in America sound more like liberals? I have, and I believe they are in class all their own: they have a special mission and fit a particular profile.

They are what I like to call ‘kept cons.’ They are ‘kept’ by liberals in that kept cons generally work for liberal institutions and seem to fill the role of token conservative; they write conservative columns for national liberal newspapers or appear as conservative hosts or commentators on CNN or MSNBC or CNBC; but they don’t sound all that conservative. You can spot them slamming Sarah Palin or tamping down on the Tea Party. Their usual message is always something like, “I’m a conservative but these other people, these gun owners/southerners/TEA Partiers/Tax Cutters/Randians/Supply-siders/Pro-lifers/Climate Change Deniers/Libertarians/Gun Nuts/ Gold Bugs, etc., are beyond the pale.

The kept conservative’s announced job is to represent the conservative point of view, but their real job is to give the illusion of balance without really challenging any of the core tenets of liberalism. They spend lots of time ‘reinventing’ the Republican Party, and the new invention is always the same: more liberal. They live among liberals, their friends are liberals, and, of course, they are paid by liberals.

...

I wonder: canÂ’t we at least get conservatives in Washington who value their integrity more than their lifestyles?

I just want to link this clip again. I love it so much. Mika does a little of the Chirpy Parrot here.
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Posted by: Ace at 01:36 PM | Comments (179)
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He issued a clarification -- which is in fact just a confirmation that he meant what he said when he ghoulishly blamed the victim for his own murder.

His statement here-- that unconstitutional wars have "endless consequences."

Which as it stands is an unobjectionable enough statement... the problem is of course that he gleefully pointed out that Chris Kyle got what he deserved, when he observed "Live by the sword, die by the sword."

There are nicer, softer hippies, and there are harder, nastier hippies. The first sort might attempt to maintain some distinction between his hatred of war and his hatred of the individual warrior, who, after all, is just doing a job that society has asked him to do and can't even refuse to do that job once he signs up. (Apart from a never-invoked Nuremberg exception.)

The nasty hippie hates soldiers just as much as he hates war. Because Ron Paul was a politician, running in military-supporting Texas, he pretended to care about the soldiers themselves. (Precisely as he pretended to be interested in fighting the Taliban, when he voted for the AUMF right before an election, and then immediately retracted his support immediately thereafter.)

Now that he's out of office he can stop pretending, and so he lets his freak flag fly and giddily applauds as the militarists get their due.

Glenn Beck congratulates Ron Paul on joining the Westboro Baptist Church (the crazies who protest military funerals because "God Hates Fags").

And in fact he's not exaggerating. He may have been exaggerating when he said that, but recent events have rescued the statement from the category of exaggeration. The Westboro Cultists and Idolators really did ride to Doctor Paul's defense (Update II).

A Medal of Honor winner, Dakota Meyer, asks if he's lost his mind.

Nope. He's just freed now to express it honestly. He's the same soaking-in-your-own-hatred nasty hippie he's always been.

Posted by: Ace at 12:38 PM | Comments (296)
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