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Is nothing sacred?

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Hey, life is what happens while you’re busy crafting theories….

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Hey, it worked in Zimbabwe … no, wait….

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The tax that dare not speak its name.

Commerce Secretary Gary Locke took to the White House blog to write that while ObamaCare is great for business, “In the last few days, though, we have seen a couple of companies imply that reform will raise costs for them.” In a Thursday interview on CNBC, Mr. Locke said “for them to come out, I think is premature and irresponsible.”

Meanwhile, Henry Waxman and House Democrats announced yesterday that they will haul these companies in for an April 21 hearing because their judgment “appears to conflict with independent analyses, which show that the new law will expand coverage and bring down costs.”

In other words, shoot the messenger. Black-letter financial accounting rules require that corporations immediately restate their earnings to reflect the present value of their long-term health liabilities, including a higher tax burden. Should these companies have played chicken with the Securities and Exchange Commission to avoid this politically inconvenient reality? Democrats don’t like what their bill is doing in the real world, so they now want to intimidate CEOs into keeping quiet.

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Name a Muslim country in which power transfers peacefully, other than maybe Turkey.

Some Informative Charts.

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Anybody who can’t get affirmative action points from the government. This includes Caucasians and Asians.

Nell Irvin Painter’s title, “The History of White People,” is a provocation in several ways: it’s monumental in sweep, and its absurd grandiosity should call to mind the fact that writing a “History of Black People” might seem perfectly reasonable to white people. But the title is literally accurate, because the book traces characterizations of the lighter-skinned people we call white today, starting with the ancient Scythians. For those who have not yet registered how much these characterizations have changed, let me assure you that sensory observation was not the basis of racial nomenclature.

A Crustian view of a recent book.

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But Yee and his liberal-to-moderate contemporaries in other states need not fret, textbook industry experts say. Though Texas has been painted in scores of media reports as the big dog that wags the textbook industry tail, that’s simply no longer true — and will become even less true in the future, as technological advances and political shifts transform the marketplace, said Jay Diskey, executive director of the Association of American Publishers. Diskey calls the persistent reports of Texas dominating the market an “urban myth.” Yet the myth persists.

“I’ve been in this job about three and a half years, and I see it reported all the time,” Diskey said. “I give my explanation to reporters, and about half of them believe me and half of them don’t.”

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There must be some way to cut off internet access to Nigeria.

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Can you think of a more singularly useless talent to have? This is on a par with the guys who could make pictures of Snoopy on a “letter-quality printer”. Impressive, yeah, but what’s the point?

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As doctors move from being employers to employees, their politics often take a leftward turn. This helps explain why the American Medical Association — long opposed to health care reforms — gave at least a tepid endorsement to Mr. Obama’s overhaul effort.

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We have the technology.

Gotta love Australians.

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I am not making this up.

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My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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The thing is that if we just stayed out of the middle these people would be killing each other — remember the Iran/Iraq war in the 80s? — and we could have some peace.

Ilya Somin reviews the legal issues involved.

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We’ve been tracking the increased openness on the center-right to new or increased federal taxes: David Brooks, Glenn Hubbard, Karl Rove, Tyler Cowen, Greg Mankiw. The latest example comes in the new Spring issue of National Affairs, which bills itself as the successor to Irving Kristol’s Public Interest. There, Donald Marron, who served on President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers (as did Professor Hubbard and Professor Mankiw), writes: “No one solution — not economic growth, not tax increases, and not spending reductions — can get us to our goal. To put ourselves on a sustainable fiscal trajectory, we will need to use all the measures at our disposal.” Or, to be more blunt: “some tax increases will almost certainly be required.”

An ugly trend.

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The best precedent for a Frum-style strategy of selling out compromise is probably Medicare Part D. That bill picked up support from genuine fiscal conservatives like Rep. Paul Ryan because the understanding was that, if this version doesn’t pass, something bigger and worse will. As a political calculation, this makes sense. But the end result wasn’t one to be proud of: We still ended up with a poorly designed, unsustainable, potentially disastrous policy. If ObamaCare opponents had compromised, that’s all they would have succeeded in passing here. Fine, you might say, but that’s what we got anyway! Fair enough. But unlike the current situation, they would have been responsible for those outcomes, would have given liberals political cover, and ultimately put themselves in a far weaker position to push for reforms.

Preach it, brother. Suck on it, Frum.

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Using your own stem cells—extracted from your fat or bone marrow—a San Diego company called Organovo is offering a $200,000 bioprinter that prints human tissue in 3D. While the current model, which ships this year, can only handle simple stuff like blood vessels, printing up whole organs is very close.

Lileks.

A story in this fine paper reported that the state of Minnesota spent almost half a million dollars on bottled water last year. New Mexico, which doesn’t have 10,000 lakes and has a rather parch-inducing climate, spent $78,000. No, I don’t expect our workers to run a bucket-brigade from a lake or boil snow, but c’mon.

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

Actually, it’s not that hard….

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Residents of his district, which covers Harlem and part of the upper West Side, know chutzpah when they see it.

“Well, I think if anyone is going to tell you how to pay – or not pay – taxes, he’s your guy,” chuckled retiree Ed Hanft, 85. “It’s too much of a reminder to his constituents as to what he did. He shouldn’t talk about taxes at all.”

Reno Brown, 89, agreed. “I’d never take tax advice from that guy,” Brown told the Daily News.
“It’s probably not the best time to put something like that out,” observed Keisha Jones, 40.

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Well, the people who knew it all along say, ‘Told you so.’

The government already has spent all of this money (and then some). All that is left in the “trust fund” is IOUs from one part of the government to another. And guess who has to make good on those IOUs? While there is budgetary significance to this accounting fiction (since Social Security cannot legally continue paying benefits after its notional reserve is officially exhausted), all this talk of a trust fund tends to obscure reality.

Ever notice how the government commonly does things that, were they done by any other entity, would have people going to jail?

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The government’s war on small businesses claims more victims.

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Smoking kills. Never doubt it.

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We have the technology.

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I’ve always thought that Schadenfreude would be a great name for a high-end German sports car.

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Today’s big news story, along with the epic debate on health care taking place in the Senate, is the Democrats’ claim that some of their Congressmen have been threatened with violence after voting for the government’s takeover of health care. Steny Hoyer claims that more than ten House members “have reported incidents of threats or other forms of harassment.” He also admits that figure is “just an estimate,” which I guess means he made it up. Nor is it clear what “other forms of harassment” means; angry phone calls from constituents, perhaps.

As for the threats, we will take them more seriously if they result in the cancellation of a public appearance by a liberal due to security concerns. But that never happens to liberals, only to conservatives. It happened again last night. That was in Canada, of course; the home of government medicine and little regard for free speech. No coincidence, that.

It is important for conservative leaders to embrace the tea party movement, and it seems that nearly all do. For what it is worth, I do not consider David Brooks to be a conservative leader. To be a leader, you need to have at least a handful of followers.

The fact is that, unlike conservatives, modern liberals have had little quarrel with political violence. This is best demonstrated by their support for card check legislation, the entire point of which it to abolish the secret ballot so that union goons can use the threat of violence to extend union power and thereby enrich the Democratic Party. (If you doubt the truth of that proposition, try to think of another reason why the Democrats want to eliminate the secret ballot in union elections.) The beating of Kenneth Gladrey by union goons–more specifically, the lack of any interest in it by anyone in the Democratic Party, the media, or on the Left generally–shows how hypocritical the Democrats’ current pacifism is. If the day ever comes when conservative groups start hiring goons, we can take the liberals’ purported fears of violence more seriously.

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A Princeton University research team has demonstrated that all sweeteners are not equal when it comes to weight gain: Rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained significantly more weight than those with access to table sugar, even when their overall caloric intake was the same.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

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Tell the truth: Would you want Joe Biden as President? or Nancy Pelosi?

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A special panel of federal judges is being asked Thursday to consolidate before a single court dozens of proposed class-action lawsuits filed by Toyota owners who say the value of their vehicles has plummeted after millions were recalled for safety fixes.

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Lord Oxburgh, a geologist by training and the former scientific advisor to the Ministry of Defence, was appointed to lead the enquiry into the scientific aspects of the Climategate scandal on Monday. But Oxburgh is also a director of GLOBE, the Global Legislators Organisation for a Balanced Environment.

GLOBE may be too obscure to merit its own Wikipedia entry, but that belies its wealth and influence. It funds meetings for parliamentarians worldwide with an interest in climate change, and prior to the Copenhagen Summit GLOBE issued guidelines (pdf) for legislators. Little expense is spared: in one year alone, one peer – Lord Michael Jay of Ewelme – enjoyed seven club class flights and hotel accommodation, at GLOBE’s expense. There’s no greater love a Parliamentarian can give to the global warming cause. And in return, Globe lists Oxburgh as one of 23 key legislators.

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And there was much rejoicing.

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The researchers base their claim on DNA from a finger bone belonging to a hominid that lived in the Altai Mountains of central Asia between about 48,000 and 30,000 years ago.

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This attitude, that the Muslim is entitled to live in perpetuity off the labours of infidels, goes a long way to explaining the peculiar propensity of Muslim societies for producing bandits and pirates. In my Holy Warriors: Islam and the Demise of Classical Civilization, I examine the part played by Muslim piracy in the destruction of Graeco-Roman civilization during the seventh century. The war begun by Islam against the rest of the world in the seventh century was a total and unending one, and a real or enduring peace with the infidel world is impossible, owing to Muhammad’s stipulation that Muslims wage war against the non-believers until all peoples accept the one god, Allah. All Muslims were therefore permitted and even required to wage active jihad against the infidel world. A private individual cannot raise armies and invade infidel countries; but he can organise small-scale raids and guerilla attacks. And this is precisely what we see Muslims doing throughout history wherever they lived in proximity to non-Muslim peoples.

It was such “low-key” warfare, in the form of countless piratical raids, that effectively closed the Mediterranean to trade during the seventh century and terminated Classical Civilization.

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For nearly 80 years, contractors working on federally funded construction projects have been forced to pay their workers artificially inflated wages that rip off American taxpayers while lining the pockets of organized labor. The culprit is the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, which requires all workers on federal projects worth more than $2,000 to be paid the “prevailing wage,” which typically means the local union wage.

James Sherk of the Heritage Foundation finds that repealing Davis-Bacon would save taxpayers $11.4 billion in 2010 alone. Simply suspending Davis-Bacon would allow government contractors to hire 160,000 new workers at no additional cost, according to Sherk.

Let’s get rid of these FDR-era payoffs to the Democrat base.

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Manor (MAY-ner; population 6,500), which is 12 miles east of downtown Austin, has turned civic participation into a sort of online game, complete with virtual currency. It uses barcode-like images that can be read by cellphone cameras to give residents everything from historical information to data on municipal projects. And it allows residents to report problems to its public works department by taking a photo with their phones.

Some of the technologies Manor is using are available elsewhere. But Manor is unusual in employing all of these programs in a small city that has a limited budget and no history as a high-tech hotbed. The town has been getting more attention lately for its efforts and generated some buzz at this year’s South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin.

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Two would-be robbers called a bank ahead and demanded that the cash be ready for them when they arrived, Connecticut officials said, giving police ample time to get to the scene.

Not quite a Darwin Award ….

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An island that has been at the centre of a dispute between India and Bangladesh for three decades has disappeared beneath rising seas.

New Moore Island in the Sunderbans has been completely submerged, said Sugata Hazra, a professor of oceanography at Jadavpur University, in Calcutta. Its disappearance has been confirmed by satellite imagery and sea patrols, he said.

“What these two countries could not achieve from years of talking, has been resolved by global warming,” said Mr Hazra.

Every cloud has a silver lining.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Sorry, two wheels do not a stable firing platform make.

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A passer-by was reported to police for trespass on a school’s grounds after she came to the aid of a five-year-old boy who had been left on his own in a tree after playtime.

However, she said she was “surprised and angry” when she later received letters from Manor primary school, Melksham, Wilts, and the local council, reprimanding her for entering the school grounds without permission.

No good deed goes unpunished.

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Movin’ to Montana soon … Gonna be a dental floss tycoon….

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Why provide something that your employees can get from the government at a subsidized price? How many Canadian employers provide health benefits? I doubt that any do.

If preliminary summaries of Obamacare  are true, it looks like individual health insurance will soon be a better deal than employer-provided health insurance.  In the individual market, you can now wait until you’re really sick to buy insurance: “Heads I win, tails I break even.”  Firms won’t have that gimme – and it seems more valuable than premiums’ tax deductibility.  Admittedly, Obamacare imposes a small penalty on individuals who don’t buy insurance, and a moderate penalty on firms that don’t provide it.  But it still seems like it will be in the financial self-interest of many firms and their workers to get rid of insurance, and split the (cash savings minus penalties).

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Well, when governments refuse to perform their essential function, people have to take matters into their own hands. Whenever you get a proliferation of private security services, it indicates that the government is falling down on the job.

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We have the technology.

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More honest than union officials tend to be.