Read it.

With even Time magazine’s Michael Grunwald reporting that the BP gulf spill, now capped, “does not seem to be inflicting severe environmental damage” and even the New York Times reporting, “The oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico appears to be dissolving far more rapidly than anyone expected,” the question arises: where does BP go to get its $20 billion back?

Much like those the-world-ends-Thursday cults, the EnviroNazis seem to think that, when their doomsday scenarios fail to pan out, they can just say ‘Never mind!’ and everybody gets a do-over.

Erick Erickson has a new book out.

George W. Bush gave us steel tariffs in Pennsylvania, No Child Left Behind, the prescription drug benefit, TARP, and the auto bailout. His father before him gave us his lips on which we read a lie. They, like so many other Republicans, paraded around in conservative’s clothing while having little in common with actual conservatism.

The Republicans gave us progressivism (read up on Robert LaFollette and Teddy Roosevelt). The Republicans gave us the Environmental Protection Agency. Heck, Republicans gave us Earl Warren, Nelson Rockefeller, Dede Scozzafava, Charlie Crist, and the list goes on and on and on.

The Democrats, by contrast, have given us over to European socialism, degenerated our moral society, destroyed the nuclear family, never met a race they didn’t bait, and mushroomed the GOP’s spending programs.

For too long the Republican Party has decided to be the Democrat-lite party, and the American voters in 2008 decided to just go with the real thing. Turns out, there is a difference between the Republican Party and the Democrat Party. While both may be terrible, the Democrats are worse.

Can’t really argue with any of that.

Read it.

Freeberg nails it yet again. His explanation for Palin Deragement Syndrome rings true.

There is a large, and perhaps still growing, contingent of mostly females who believe it’s quite alright for some among their sisters to be prettier than they are. And more powerful. Just not both.

Our current President has had an opportunity to nominate replacements for, what, two Supreme Court vacancies now? And both nominees are ugly toad-like women. You only have to analyze the statistics so long before there is an ugly truth revealed to you: Someone is being satisfied with this unbroken trend. It has to be the case. If you sent me out to find women this homely and unappealing, I wouldn’t be able to do it. I wouldn’t know how to start. Two out of two of our vacant seats on the Supreme Court have to go to homely women? This is what “best qualified” looks like, huh. Yeah. Tell me another.

So with real power, among liberals, men have to be at least as handsome as John Kerry, and women have to be at least as homely looking as Hillary.

I think that this is behind my objections to Liv Tyler as Arwen in the Lord of the Rings movies. The woman is a thousand years old, and she looks and acts like a prom queen? Oh, please. Cheerleader? Sure. Sorority? No problem. Most beautiful woman alive? Not even close. Try, oh, Angelina Jolie. Or, better yet, Catherine Zeta-Jones. Not only drop-dead gorgeous, but it’s entirely believable that she could kick your ass and run a global corporation. Liv Tyler? She could maybe put her makeup on in the morning, and then rest for a while. But casting someone like Catherine Zeta-Jones as Arwen would have been offensive to the Target Demographic, and Jackson (consciously or unconsciously) realized this, and stepped back from the brink.

Read it.

Surprisingly enough, none of them appear to have targeted Barbra Streisand.

Read it.

Well, a lot of people talk about doing that….

Read it.

Especially considering how the Horns are doing on the field these days.

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Judging by the ‘hip and trendy’ vestments he’s wearing in that picture, I don’t see that as unreasonable.

Read it.

This is God telling you not to wear high heels, which are stupid anyway.

Megan and Sara had been to an Indian restaurant in Worthing, West Sussex and on their way to the station for the last train home, they finished off the vodka and Red Bull they had bought earlier in the evening.

The inquest was told that on the train also were two sisters who had walked through the carriage where Sara and Megan were sitting and saw the empty vodka bottle fall on the floor.

That too.

Read it.

This incident quite handily illustrates the collectivism inherent in all such ‘labor’ organizations. Individuality and free choice are suppressed, and this is touted as ‘principle’. Well, yes, it is — socialist principle. And these are the first people to bitch and moan when companies combine (and they do) to keep wages below the market rate.

Read it.

I like Daniel Hannan, but on this topic he’s full of shit. However shabby a deal Turkey may have gotten from the E.U., it’s less shabby than they deserve. Turkey is not a European country in any meaningful sense — indeed, one of the definitive experiences in European history is the centuries-long effort to keep Turkey the hell out of Europe — and it doesn’t belong in the E.U.

Turkey has been a drag on European civilization since the Seljuks stole Anatolia from the Byzantines a thousand years ago, and eventually Europe will wake up to the fact that no Muslim country is anything other than a long-term enemy of Europe and its civilization (what there is left).

Read it.

I can see it now: Hid in the jungle. Killed people. Overthrew the government. Killed people. Destroyed the economy. Starved people. Lived in luxury. Tortured people. Slowly decayed into senility. Brainwashed people.

Makes for a gripping narrative.

Read it.

Read it.

Daddies, don’t let your babies go up to be law students….

Read it.

This is God telling you not to marry game experts. It always ends badly.

His persistent berating of her and his heavy drinking formed the background to the couple’s stormy relationship which culminated in Green stabbing her 99 times at their flat in the seaside town, Preston Crown Court was told.

You know that somebody was assigned to do that count.

Read it.

And if you think mooring the yacht in Rhode Island rather than in Massachusetts is a tax dodge, the senator’s spouse’s decision to be a Pennsylvania resident rather than a Massachusetts one for tax purposes has its own advantages. The Massachusetts state income tax is 5.3%, while Pennsylvania’s is 3.07%, according to the Tax Foundation. The Massachusetts estate tax is up to 16%, while the Pennsylvania inheritance tax maxes out at 4.5%. The lost income to Massachusetts as a result of Teresa Heinz Kerry’s decision to be an official resident of Pennsylvania probably dwarfs the $500,000 or so at stake in the debate over where the yacht is moored.

Well, one of the way that rich people get, and stay, rich, is by not paying a lot of taxes.

As recently as March of this year, Senator Kerry issued a press release touting “new tools” for the IRS “to detect, deter and discourage offshore tax abuses that currently allow companies and individuals avoid paying taxes.” He said, “It repulsed me that while the average American plays by the rules and pays taxes, some of the biggest corporations avoid paying their fair share.” And he vowed to “close the loophole that allows for offshore tax havens to help taxpayers shirk paying their fair share.”

‘We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.’ — Leona Helmsley

Read it.

Under George W. Bush’s “tax cuts for the rich” the rich paid more in taxes in 2005 than any time in the prior 20 years. In fact, as the Wall Street Journal noted, thanks to George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the rich, the richest one percent went from paying 25% of all income taxes in 1990 to 39% in 2005. The richest 5% went from paying 44% of all income taxes in 1990 to paying 60% of all income taxes in 2005.

Democrats want to ‘tax the rich’, not because they think it’s more fair (although they will gas on endlessly in that vein), but because they want to discourage not-rich people from trying to become rich – like them. (Most not-rich people don’t know the tax code and don’t realize that rich people don’t pay those ridiculous rates they publish in the newspapers.)

Most rich people, especially those who inherited their money rather than actually earned it, are Democrats. (Of course, there are sufficient tax breaks that rich Democrats don’t suffer all that much. Especially those in public office, as the Obamas and the Clintons can tell you.)

This is why people like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates come out in favor of higher taxes; they realize that, with higher taxes, their relative advantage in terms of wealth is greatly exaggerated. The point is not to have a lot of money, but to have a lot more money than the people around you, so that you get most of the benefits, and can rub the noses of the less-rich in it. There’s less competition for seats in fancy restaurants, for ski chateaux in Aspen, for yacht-slots at the marina, for seats in Rich Class on the airplane when God forbid you might have to fly commercial, etc.

The truth is out there. You just have to run the numbers and follow the money.

Read it.

Science is losing its credibility because it has adopted an authoritarian tone, and has let itself be co-opted by politics.

Steve Sailer cuts to the chase.

One reason why class has faded relative to race so dramatically as a subject of liberal concern since the days of Harry Truman is that there’s no money in it. You can’t file a disparate impact lawsuit over class discrimination because the government doesn’t count by class, it counts by race/ethnicity, by sex, and by age. The Soviet Union counted people by class, but the whole project seems pretty hopeless in the U.S. The Office of Management and Budget has rules for how to count by race, but not by class.

Read it.

Madame Hillary apparently has no comment. (What could she say? ‘Gee, I wish we could do that.’?)

Secretary Clinton’s remarks with President Correa on June 8: “I think the goals that Ecuador and its government have set are goals that the United States agrees with.”

Read it.

It follows two of the worst winters in recent memories when many householders refused to clear snow from the pavement outside their homes fearing they could be taken to court if somebody fell over.

“People and local communities want to be able to take practical steps to clear snow and ice without fear of litigation,” Mr Quarmby said.

That’s modern Britain for you. “Shut up, slaves!”

Read it.

And these are the people who won’t allow voucher programs so that poor people can get a decent education for their kids. Ain’t that special.

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At someone else’s expense, of course.

This is why we don’t want to be like Europe.

Read it.

Two members of a ‘happy slapping’ gang who killed a Muslim pensioner outside a mosque for fun will be free in less than 18 months.

This is outrageous. The initial sentence was just four and a half years, which is inconceivable.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably in California.

Read it.

He said that the website was preparing to publish the material and decided to include The Guardian and their American and German counterparts.

The Guardian is, of course, a rabidly left-wing and anti-American publication in Britain; it’s telling that the New York Times is considered an American equivalent. (Not really news, but a useful reminder.)

Read it.

Yet another appeal to competitive narcissism.

Rod Dreher puts the boot in.

Well, at least he admits it. What he’s saying is that he’s someone who identifies as a Catholic but who hates the things that define Catholicism. He goes on to say that he remains a Catholic because “the Gospel matters.” Well, it matters to Protestants too; they have the Gospel without Catholic claims for authority. What Pierce has done is become Protestant without leaving the Catholic Church. Except Protestants, at least in theory, recognize an authority outside of themselves, namely, Scripture. Not Charles Pierce.

Hey Charles — you’re not a Catholic! Man up and admit it. You are a Catholic by birth and cultural identification, but you have ceased to believe as Catholicism teaches. Why do you lack the courage to be what you are: a non-Catholic Christian? Catholicism is far more than a set of propositions, but it is at least a set of propositions to which one must assent to call oneself a Catholic. I am not a Catholic any longer, and I don’t call myself Catholic — even though I probably believe far more of what the Catholic Church teaches than Pierce does. If I called myself Catholic now, without qualifying it as “fallen-away”, I would be lying to myself. Look, I know it’s extremely painful to leave the Catholic Church. It was the most difficult thing I ever did in my life. But if one cannot believe, or one will not believe, why stay? I’m not talking about the Catholics who struggle with this or that aspect of the Church’s teaching. I was one of those Catholics too, and I suspect most Catholics are. That’s normal. I’m talking about people who stand there and say with pride, anger and defiance that they don’t believe this stuff anymore, but they want all the privileges of being able to call themselves Catholic.

The same criticism applies, mutatis mutandis, to the ‘gay marriage’ crowd. Marriage has a common traditional definition, around the world and in every human society, and that definition has never included people of only one gender. Why is that important? Because words have meanings, and if people can, like Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty, just make them mean whatever they want them to mean, then there is no means available to make distinctions between things that are different. Language is how we express thought, and if our language becomes corrupted, our thought becomes corrupted as well.

Read it.

Armed with a newly-acquired master’s degree in public health from New York’s prestigious Columbia University, she is being lined up for a top role at the philanthropic foundation set up by her father, ex-president Bill Clinton.

For now, however, Miss Clinton, 30, clearly has other priorities. On Saturday, she will marry Mr Mezvinsky, 32, an investor banker whose parents both served in Congress and whose father recently completed a different sort of term – five years in prison for fraud.

Let’s see: Cutesy name: check. Rich Democrat liar politician father: check. Rich Democrat bitch politician mother: check. Went to a ‘spensive private school where she had to apologize for being white: check. Coasted through the Ivy League: check. Lined up for a cushy ‘job’ in the Crustian NGO millieu: check. Marries a guy of similar background who probably thinks Alan Alda is a Real Man: check. Never have to work a day in her life: check. Yup, all bases touched.

Prediction: They will have exactly one child, who will be given a last name as his first name (can’t really say ‘Christian name’ with this crowd), and who will follow a similar course during his life.

Robert Samuelson connects some dots.

If you want a preview of President Obama’s health-care “reform,” take a look at Massachusetts. In 2006, it enacted a “reform” that became a model for Obama. What’s happened since isn’t encouraging. The state did the easy part: expanding state-subsidized insurance coverage. It evaded the hard part: controlling costs and ensuring that spending improves people’s health. Unfortunately, Obama has done the same.

Aside from squeezing take-home pay (employers provide almost 70 percent of insurance), higher costs have automatically shifted government priorities toward health care and away from everything else — schools, police, roads, prisons, lower taxes. In 1990, health spending represented about 16 percent of the state budget, says the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation. By 2000, health’s share was 22 percent. In 2010, it’s 35 percent. About 90 percent of the health spending is Medicaid.

Similar forces will define Obamacare. Even if its modest measures to restrain costs succeed — which seems unlikely — the effect on overall spending would be slight. The system’s fundamental incentives won’t change. The lesson from Massachusetts is that genuine cost control is avoided because it’s so politically difficult. It means curbing the incomes of doctors, hospitals and other providers. They object. To encourage “accountable care organizations” would limit consumer choice of doctors and hospitals. That’s unpopular. Spending restrictions, whether imposed by regulation or “global payments,” raise the specter of essential care denied. Also unpopular.

A pity that the Crust don’t seem inclined to learn anything from history, but would rather live in their own fantasy world of myths and legends.

Moe Lane gloats. It is not a pretty sight.

Do I sound entertained?  It’s because I am: and I will enjoy every second that Jimmy Webb is broken on the wheel for relapsing into error like this.  And do you know why I will enjoy every second?  Because of ‘macaca,’ that’s why.  Jimmy Webb stood by and calmly, disinterestedly watched as his new owners flash-mobbed his opponent for supposed racism in the 2006 Senatorial election. He did that because Jimmy Webb wanted to be Senator so badly that he was willing to overlook precisely the hyper-emphasis of race that he complains about now; after all, it put him in office, and that was the important thing, right?

Read it.

Ah, the unintended consequences of bad legislation. It’s no surprise that many people have pinned a lot of the blame  on the financial crisis on the ratings agencies (mainly Moody’s and S&P). After all, they were the ones who went out there and said that collections of slices of dices of the worst mortgages around should be rated as top notch, sure-fire, investments. And there were clear conflicts of interest in how the ratings agencies did their ratings. But, in the end, the ratings agencies were really just giving an opinion — and opinions are (last we checked) supposed to be protected by the First Amendment.

The real problem came from the government writing those agencies’ ratings into the law. Basically, the government, in a really short-sighted attempt to avoid financial problems, required certain institutions had to maintain a percentage of “highly rated” or “investment quality” bonds, in order to engage in certain activities. Suddenly, these “opinions” weren’t just opinions, but had important legal consequences. If a ratings agency downgraded an investment, it could legally force some holders of those bonds to have to sell them to maintain its investment ratios. With that, those ratings also took on the sheen of something objective and factual, rather than a random opinion put forth by a bunch of guys (mostly guys) who might not know what’s really going on, and who have some serious conflicts of interest.

Read it.

And that really tells you everything you need to know about the Church of England and its derivatives.

Freeberg, of course, distills the essence.

Somewhere out there is a democrat talking point that says this: Talk these things up at your heart’s content, make money on your book deals, that’s all fine & good — but make sure at the end of the day that the character of conservatives is impugned. In fact, make sure that’s the case every time you end a sentence and come to a (.) dot.

Had Sherrod taken the time to think this thing out…or if she wasn’t making an effort to talk to morons…she would have seen the strategy runs into some real problems here. Andrew Breitbart received a video. The NAACP saw the same video. They both came to the same conclusion, as did Vilsack. This makes Breitbart a terrible person and the other two parties innocent pawns. How’s that work? Breitbart has gone on the record to say the video was whittled down before it got to him, and I know of no evidence to suggest anything different.

I saw this before, recently. Yes, a number of democrat legislators voted for the AUMF, the Authorization of Use of Military Force in Iraq, so they could look all tough. And then, as if someone said “go!” it was time to be all dovish and anti-war. (Maybe someone really did say it.) Suddenly, it was George W. Bush’s war. He fooled us all. We’re still saying “Somewhere in Texas a village is missing an idiot,” but the idiot fooled us. Those right-wingers. So stupid, and yet successfully fooling everybody. And they never get fooled, oh no. They’re just evil.

Liberals would be able to connect with people so much better if they’d just allow us to make up our own minds about who’s a monster. They must have figured out somewhere they cannot afford to do this.

However, from about Wednesday on there has arisen a sense that Sherrod, personally, doesn’t really feel this way. She really does see issues as race-based even if they don’t need to be. She’s as racist as anybody else. From that point in time two days ago, I would have characterized this as likely-but-irrelevant. I left it unaddressed because it was not germane to the point, and it was idle speculation. Granting it the benefit of the doubt — Shirley Sherrod is giving a speech saying when we help people we should be race-blind, and she doesn’t personally believe this so she’s standing up there lying. Then her comments are taken out of context and she’s fired. Alright, you may say that’s poetic justice. But it’s still a raw deal, and not just for Sherrod. The people who saw the chopped-down version should still understand what was in the longer version.

But if that’s part of the story, it’s also part of the story that the woman is a liar and a manipulator. To me, we can’t even make it to the question of whether she’s a racist or not. We don’t make it that far, because she’s a democrat party activist and she’s read & chosen to practice this talking point about make-all-conservatives-look-like-monsters. Because her mouth moves faster than her brain, it’s extraordinarily blatant in this case.

Read it.

I’d heard that carjacking was a problem in South Africa, but really….

Read it.

Remember Fremont, Nebraska? In June, citizens of the 25,000-person town voted in favor of banning illegal immigrants from renting property or landing a job in the town.

The law, which requires town officials to evaluate the citizenship of anyone renting property, has put the town at the center of the roiling immigration debate.

How dare they restrict the activities of, well, criminals. I guess the fact that one is here unlawfully ought not to be allowed to harsh one’s mellow. I guess the ACLU won’t be happy until every city is a Sanctuary City.

The suit claims that Fremont’s law interferes with the federal government’s authority over immigration matters and further that it has a discriminatory effect on those who look or sound “foreign.”

Not sure how helping the Feds enforce the law (which they haven’t been doing all that well so far, so obviously they need something in the way of help) “interferes” with their authority; and since all it does is allow “discrimination” against illegal aliens, and since discrimination against people who “look or sound foreign” is already against the law (and enthusiastically defended by, uh, the ACLU), it’s not clear that there would be any “effect” that a court can take cognizance of.

But that’s just common sense, and we all know that common sense doesn’t last long in the brains of the ACLU — or courts, for that matter.

Read it.

This article addresses what should be a puzzling question: Why did Barack Obama nominate Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court? Not only has Kagan never been a judge, but, far more problematically, she has over the course of a 25-year legal and political career taken almost no public positions on any significant legal or political questions. This latter fact would, at first glance, seem to disqualify her from consideration for a lifetime appointment to one of America’s most powerful political institutions. That it has not tells us a great deal about deep-seated cultural myths regarding the possibility of separating law from politics, and about the elite institutions that have molded Obama, Kagan, and so many other members of America’s contemporary legal, political, and economic establishment. Ultimately, in one sense Kagan remains, on the eve of her confirmation by the Senate, as much of a blank slate as ever. Yet in another we, like Barack Obama, can venture a good guess regarding what sort of Supreme Court justice she will make. That we can do so reflects both the cultural and ideological power wielded by the elite institutions that are producing the contemporary American establishment, and the relatively narrow range of political views those institutions generate among those who go on to become part of that establishment.

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Everyone knows that the UN is a sinkhole of corruption.

Actually, he could have stopped there … but he goes on to give details.

Not really news, but a useful reminder.

Read it.

Consider what the academic job market now looks like.  You have a small elite on top who have lifetime employment regardless of how little work they do.  This lifetime employment commences somewhere between 35 and 40.  For the ten-to-fifteen years before that, they spend their lives in pursuit of the brass ring.  They live in poverty suck up to professors, and publish, for one must publish to be tenured.  It’s very unfortunate if you don’t have anything much worth saying; you need to publish anyway, in order to improve your chances.  Fortunately, for the needy tenure seeker, a bevy of journals have sprung up that will print your trivial contributions.  If nothing else, they provide a nice simple model which helps introductory economics professors explain Say’s Law.

At the end of the process, most of the aspirants do not have tenure; they have dropped out, or been dropped, at some point along the way.  Meanwhile, the system has ripped up their lives in other ways.  They’ve invested their whole youth, and are back on the job market near entry level at an age when most of their peers have spent ten years building up marketable skills.  Many of them will have seen relationships ripped apart by the difficulties of finding not one, but two tenure-track jobs in the same area.  Others will have invested their early thirties in a college town with no other industry, forcing them to move elsewhere to restart both their careers and their social lives.  Or perhaps they string along adjuncting at near-poverty wages, unable to quite leave the academy that has abused them for so long.

Could one deliberately design a process more guaranteed to produce a train wreck of an educational system?

Most scholars in their sixties are not producing path-breaking new research, but they are precisely the people that tenure protects.  Scholars in their twenties and thirties, on the other hand, have no academic freedom at all.  Indeed, because tenure raises the stakes so high, the vetting of future employees is much more careful–and the candidates, who know this, are almost certainly more careful than they would be if they were on more ordinary employment contracts.  As a result, the process of getting a degree, getting a job, and getting tenure has stretched out to cover one’s whole youth. So tenure makes young scholars–the kind most likely to attack a dominant paradigm–probably more careful than they would be under more normal employment process.

Read it.

The nation’s three dominant credit-ratings providers have made an urgent new request of their clients: Please don’t use our credit ratings.

The odd plea is emerging as the first consequence of the financial overhaul that is to be signed into law by President Obama on Wednesday. And it already is creating havoc in the bond markets, parts of which are shutting down in response to the request.

Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s Investors Service and Fitch Ratings are all refusing to allow their ratings to be used in documentation for new bond sales, each said in statements in recent days. Each says it fears being exposed to new legal liability created by the landmark Dodd-Frank financial reform law.

That is important because some bonds, notably those that are made up of consumer loans, are required by law to include ratings in their official documentation. That means new bond sales in the $1.4 trillion market for mortgages, autos, student loans and credit cards could effectively shut down.

In an effort to avoid another financial crisis, they actually created one. Smooth move, guys.

Read it.

Not really news, but a useful reminder.

Steve Sailer says: ‘Sometimes I get discouraged when I realize that I’ve been debunking dumb ideas for many years now, yet dumb ideas remains wildly popular. ‘

Oh, tell me about it….

Read it.

Let’s see: Disobey the rules + Disrupt everyone’s life = $35,000

Nice work if you can get it.

On June 20th, 1969, a human being set foot on the moon. I remember that day.

So does Jerry Pournelle: ‘When I was reading science fiction  in high school I never doubted that I would live to see the first man on the Moon. I didn’t think I would live to see the last one.’

Quite frankly, neither did I. But it’s looking increasingly likely.

Read it.

Well, I have to say, the feeling is mutual.

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The  Senate Judiciary Committee, by a vote of 13 to 6, has sent Elena Kagan’s nomination to the full Senate for a vote by that body. Naturally, ever Democrat on the Committee voted “yes,” and naturally Republican Lindsey Graham voted “yes” as well. Graham explained that Kagan is “funny” which “goes a long way in my book.”

RINOs, RINOs everywhere….

Read it.

This month, Oakland laid off 80 police officers, just over 10 percent of its total force, in order to balance the city’s budget. As a result, the city’s police chief says cops will no longer respond to 44 categories of crimes, including grand theft. The city’s elected officials regret the change but say they simply cannot afford to maintain current staffing levels. Whether that’s true depends upon your definition of “afford.”

At current levels of compensation, yes, Oakland cannot afford to maintain a police department with 776 employees. That’s because total compensation for an OPD employee averages an astounding $162,000 per year. But at a more reasonable level of pay and benefits, Oakland could afford to maintain its force, or even grow it.

Oakland police officers’ compensation is generous along every dimension. As touted on the department’s own recruiting website, cadets start out at a salary of $64,656 plus benefits. (For comparison, the NYPD pays police academy attendees a starting salary of $44,744). Once an OPD officer finishes training, he or she is entitled to a starting base salary, before overtime and benefits, ranging from $71,841 to $90,459. And the payscale continues upward from there.

Katherine Mangu-Ward takes a look at your Friendly Neighborhood Nanny State.

That’s 12-year-old Jasmine Palmer, speaking her mind to agents from the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office, Los Angeles County Sheriff, Ventura County Sheriff, and the California Department of Food and Agriculture. She was objecting to the loss of her third computer in an early morning raid on her family’s Ventura County farmhouse. They stand accused of selling raw milk goat cheese to members-only food clubs.

I suppose one could say ‘Thank God I don’t live in California’, but the situation’s just as bad everywhere else.

Ross Douthat pulls back the curtain.

For minority applicants, the lower a family’s socioeconomic position, the more likely the student was to be admitted. For whites, though, it was the reverse. An upper-middle-class white applicant was three times more likely to be admitted than a lower-class white with similar qualifications.

Nieli highlights one of the study’s more remarkable findings: while most extracurricular activities increase your odds of admission to an elite school, holding a leadership role or winning awards in organizations like high school R.O.T.C., 4-H clubs and Future Farmers of America actually works against your chances. Consciously or unconsciously, the gatekeepers of elite education seem to incline against candidates who seem too stereotypically rural or right-wing or “Red America.”

Among the white working class, increasingly the most reliable Republican constituency, alienation from the American meritocracy fuels the kind of racially tinged conspiracy theories that Beck and others have exploited — that Barack Obama is a foreign-born Marxist hand-picked by a shadowy liberal cabal, that a Wall Street-Washington axis wants to flood the country with third world immigrants, and so forth.

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We use the cross-county introduction of the program in the 1960s and 1970s to estimate the impact of the program on the extensive and intensive margins of labor supply, earnings, and family cash income. Consistent with theory, we find modest reductions in employment and hours worked when food stamps are introduced. The results are larger for single-parent families.

In other words, people who got Food Stamps worked less. Welfare payments have that effect.

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There was never any guarantee Falcone would succeed in the marketplace. But if Falcone fails due to these regulatory obstacles, it is not clear that the intended beneficiaries (those without wireless service in rural areas, for example) are any better off. It is worth asking the FCC if the harm done by regulations outweighs benefits that never materialize.