Monthly Archives: January 2013

Wisconsin budget surplus projected to grow to $484 million : Wsj

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In 2011, Walker took office facing a roughly $3 billion budget shortfall and attacked the problem with deep cuts to education, local governments and other programs. He also forced public workers to pay more for health insurance and pension benefits, and effectively ended workers’ collective bargaining rights, leading to an unsuccessful attempt to recall him last year.

The surplus this time makes it easier for Walker and Republicans to follow through on their promises to cut income taxes while also increasing spending on K-12 schools.

via Wisconsin budget surplus projected to grow to $484 million : Wsj.

Ryan Smith, WSJ: The Reality That Awaits Women in Combat

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When we did reach Baghdad, we were in shambles. We had not showered in well over a month and our chemical protective suits were covered in a mixture of filth and dried blood. We were told to strip and place our suits in pits to be burned immediately. My unit stood there in a walled-in compound in Baghdad, naked, sores dotted all over our bodies, feet peeling, watching our suits burn. Later, they lined us up naked and washed us off with pressure washers.

Yes, a woman is as capable as a man of pulling a trigger. But the goal of our nation’s military is to fight and win wars. Before taking the drastic step of allowing women to serve in combat units, has the government considered whether introducing women into the above-described situation would have made my unit more or less combat effective?

via Ryan Smith: The Reality That Awaits Women in Combat – WSJ.com.

Buzzfeed – Congressman To Clinton: “The Only Person That’s In Jail Right Now Is The Filmmaker”

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Rep. Dana Rohrabacher Wednesday alluded to the fact that no one involved in the Benghazi terrorist attack has been arrested while the the man who made the anti-Islam film “Innocence of Muslims,” was arrested by California police for a parole violation. The administration originally said the video was the cause of the attack

via Congressman To Clinton: “The Only Person That’s In Jail Right Now Is The Filmmaker”.

Climate Catastrophe: The Myth of the Monster Storm – SPIEGEL ONLINE

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Hurricane Katrina had hardly devastated the southern US city of New Orleans five years ago before a “hurricane war” broke out among US scientists. The alarmists, using the rhetoric of fiery sermons, warned that Katrina was only the beginning, and that we would soon see the advent of superstorms of unprecedented fury. Members of the more levelheaded camp were vehemently opposed to such predictions and insisted that there was no justification for such fears.

The dispute escalated when Kevin Trenberth, a climatologist and a lead author of the IPCC report, announced at a press conference at Harvard University that there was a clear relationship between global warming and the increased intensity of hurricane activity. Chris Landsea, a meteorologist with the National Hurricane Center in Miami, was so furious over this unfounded prediction that he withdrew from his participation in the IPCC.

Now the two rivals have reached a surprising truce, and Landsea has largely prevailed with his reassuring assessment.

Last month Landsea, together with top US hurricane researchers, published a study that finally disproves the supposed link between hurricanes and global warming. The study concludes with the assessment that “tropical cyclone frequency is likely to either decrease or remain essentially the same.” Top wind speeds could increase somewhat, says Landsea, but the changes would “not be truly substantial.”

via Climate Catastrophe: The Myth of the Monster Storm – SPIEGEL ONLINE.

Tim Carney: If you want bigger government, you need to side with big business | WashingtonExaminer.com

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I’ve said before that conservatives need to be as suspicious of large corporations as they are of government.

Corporate-federal collusion was embodied in ObamaCare, largely written by drugmakers, vociferously supported by hospitals, and driving business to private insurers. Obama’s stimulus was a huge gift to corporate America, with its plethora of subsidies. In the fiscal cliff deal, Obama insisted on a raft of corporate tax extenders. Obama’s “New Economic Patriotism” is a dress for corporate welfare to wear to the prom. Obama supported TARP. He bailed out GM. He signed cash for clunkers. He has set new records in export subsidies. I could fill a book with this sort of thing.

via If you want bigger government, you need to side with big business | WashingtonExaminer.com.

Wayne LaPierre – NRA Believes Americans Have the Right to Own “Assault Rifles” and “High Capacity Magazines” | The Truth About Guns

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Words do have meaning, Mister President. And those meanings are absolute, especially when it comes to our Bill of Rights.

Don’t take it from me. Take it from former Democratic U.S. Senator and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. Fifty years ago, after he had been appointed to the Supreme Court by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, liberal Justice Hugo Black said, and I quote: “There are ‘absolutes’ in our Bill of Rights, and they were put there on purpose by men who knew what words meant and meant their prohibitions to be ‘absolutes.’” End quote.

Let me read that again. “There are ‘absolutes’ in our Bill of Rights, and they were put there on purpose by men who knew what words meant and meant their prohibitions to be ‘absolutes.’”

Justice Black understood the danger of self-appointed arbiters of what “freedom” really means — like President Barack Obama — who want to redefine freedom, whittle away freedom and infringe upon the freedoms that we the people reserve to ourselves.

They’re God-given freedoms. They belong to us as our birthright. No government ever gave them to us and no government can ever take them away.

Mister President, you may not like that. You may wish it were some other way. But you can’t argue that it isn’t true.

In that, the American people are, and will always remain, utterly absolute! We are not people to be trivialized, marginalized or demonized as unreasonable. We’re not children who need to be parented or misguided “bitter clingers” to guns and religion.

We get up every day, we work hard to pay our taxes, we cherish our families and we care about their safety. We believe in living honorably, and living within our means.

We believe we deserve, and have every right to, the same level of freedom that our government leaders keep for themselves, and the same capabilities and same technologies that criminals use to prey upon us and our families. That means we believe in our right to defend ourselves and our families with semi-automatic technology.

We believe that if neither the criminal nor the political class is limited by magazine capacity, we shouldn’t be limited in our capacity either.

We believe in our country. We believe in our Bill of Rights. And we believe in our Second Amendment, all of our Second Amendment.

via Wayne LaPierre, NRA Believes Americans Have the Right to Own “Assault Rifles” and “High Capacity Magazines” (Full Text) | The Truth About Guns.

NY Mag: Elizabeth Wurtzel Confronts Her One-Night Stand of a Life

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One of the things I try to impress on my children is that things MEAN things. Or to say it philosophically, there is a final cause. Nearly all human traditions share the theme that it is not good for man (and I include woman here; “man” is an inclusive term, and I don’t feel it’s degrading to our females to be singled out with a special variation) to be alone. The bodies and minds of men and women were built to be together, to join with each other in the creation of families. Please don’t think I’m saying that you can’t have a full life without marriage. But please also recognize that the telos of our differentiation is to be joined together. If we choose not to do that, we lose part of ourselves. Wurtzel’s words:

By never marrying, I ended up never divorcing, but I also failed to accumulate that brocade of civility and padlock of security—kids you do or don’t want, Tiffany silver you never use—that makes life complete. Convention serves a purpose: It gives life meaning, and without it, one is in a constant existential crisis. If you don’t have the imposition of family to remind you of what is at stake, something else will. I was alone in a lonely apartment with only a stalker to show for my accomplishments and my years.

via Elizabeth Wurtzel Confronts Her One-Night Stand of a Life – The Cut.

Challenging the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change | Watts Up With That?

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Anyone who knows me knows that consensus is usually the last evidence I consider. In fact, consensus tends to make me suspicious. It gives everyone an excuse to support stupid things, like Harry Potter (forgive me).

Consensus is often cited in support of scientific paradigms, including anthropogenic climate change. Australian physicist Tom Quirk has neatly dissected the consensus argument for the human role in climate change in an article in Quadrant Online entitled “Of climate science and stomach bugs.” This curiously entitled piece begins with the story of how Australians Barry Marshall and Robin Warren revolutionized the treatment of stomach ulcers in 1982 when they discovered that peptic ulcers are mainly caused by a bacterium.

via Challenging the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change | Watts Up With That?.

From The Atlantic: 8 Ways to Stop Overzealous Prosecutors From Destroying Lives

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In the wake of Aaron Swartz’s suicide, this issue is seeing some light:

 

Federal prosecutors are facing unusual scrutiny of the tremendous power that they wield after the suicide of Aaron Swartz. The open-Internet activist was threatened with decades in prison if he contested charges that he used MIT’s computer network to illegally download millions of academic papers. Senator John Cornyn is pressing for an investigation into whether the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Boston inappropriately targeted the 26-year-old Reddit co-founder. Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, wants to look into the case too. Said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, “I think the Department of Justice was way out of line on the case.”

Perhaps so.

But as legal scholar Orin Kerr points out, the hardball tactics used against Swartz are “business as usual in federal criminal cases around the country — mostly with defendants who no one has ever heard of and who get locked up for years without anyone much caring.” The need for systemic reform to prevent already widespread abuses are what makes a new paper by University of Tennessee Law Professor Glenn Reynolds so timely. Its title, “Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything Is a Crime,” alludes to a common saying –that a good prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. There’s truth in that quip, Reynolds argues, and that’s problematic: Grand juries are supposed to meaningfully check overzealous prosecutors. “Though people suspected of a crime have extensive due process rights in dealing with the police, and people charged with a crime have even more extensive due process rights in court, the actual decision whether or not to charge a person with a crime is almost completely unconstrained,” he writes. “Yet, because of overcharging and plea bargains, that decision is probably the single most important event in the chain of criminal procedure.”

via 8 Ways to Stop Overzealous Prosecutors From Destroying Lives – Conor Friedersdorf – The Atlantic.

Posted in: Law |