Freeberg speaks for me.

So this isn’t about the fact that BP screwed up…although, for the record, they most certainly did. If the cost of putting things right exceeds their worth, then I see no earthly reason why they shouldn’t be subjected to corporate euthanasia and parted out like an old car at a junkyard.

Leaving that aside though, Barton’s original statement was completely right. The precedent is horrible. In fact, the spectacle of the Congressman being bludgeoned into apologizing the very same day raises very disturbing possibilities. The appearance — to me, anyway — is that Republicans and democrats alike who work in the beltway are putting together a phantom industry. It is an avenue toward fantastic profits to be enjoyed by the non-producers.

Power Line looks at the Obamateur’s new slush fund.

Modern politics consists largely of promoting the interests of those who are aware they are getting money, in opposition to those who don’t realize they are paying it.

Read it.

Read it.

There is so much wrong with how Barack Obama has handled the Gulf oil spill, it’s almost hard to know where to begin.

Jerry Pournelle sums up the President’s speech.

The Speech from the Oval Office didn’t plug the hole. Apparently the teleprompter wasn’t up to the job. The boot on the neck is still in place, and BP will put $20 billion into a kitty to be administered by Obama’s cronies. There will be another commission of people who have no experience in oil production engineering. Months will go past. More oil will flow into the Gulf.

It’s not the end of the world. It’s a terrible oil spill, a financial disaster for the people of the Gulf Coast, and the harbinger of several bad years for the wildlife in parts of the Gulf. It’s a good illustration of the limits of government power. It’s a good illustration of the inevitable problems of electing a president who has no executive experience. It’s not the end of the world.

The Congress is the Grand Inquest of the Nation. If there’s to be a commission to investigate the causes of the runaway oil gusher with a view to preventing them in future (and to aiding in development of cleanup technology)  – and there should be such a commission — it should be given the usual investigatory powers, and should be technically competent, not a partisan witch hunt. I suspect the best comment here is ‘Good luck with that.’

Read it.

Several Senate Republicans told POLITICO that they don’t favor privatizing Social Security, as Angle has supported. Small government conservatives said it doesn’t make sense to eliminate the Energy and Education departments – as she’s called for in the past. And some recoiled at the thought of pulling the United States out of the United Nations, a position Angle has touted.

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

Read it.

Although only 14 percent of the public approves of Congress, in an ordinary year 95 percent of all incumbents are re-elected. How is this possible?

Read it.

I flew out of Dulles last Wednesday, and the security process there was pure living hell. First there was an endless line just to get to the checkpoint where the TSA guy looks at your passport and boarding pass. Then there was another line — this one snaking back and forth through what seemed like miles of elastic tape barriers — that eventually divided up into several streams to go through the X-ray machines and the metal detectors. Shoes off, coat off, laptop out, liquids into the little bag, go through the Mystical Arch of Examination — and if you’re lucky, they don’t select you for some of that Extra Scrutiny.

Coming home yesterday I had to repeat the same procedure in Zurich, although it was less strenuous there. Unfortunately, however, I had to change planes in Philadelphia (a five-hour layover), and Philly is a point-of-entry. That meant I had to go through passport control (an endless line), and then reclaim my luggage. Next came customs (an endless line), and then I had to re-check my suitcase. And then — here’s the killer — I had to go through security again. A long line down a winding corridor to the checkpoint with the grumpy TSA guy, then the inevitable snake back and forth to the X-ray machines. Shoes off, etc., etc. Once more with feeling.

But — and here’s the kicker — everywhere I went there were Muslims working the security. Muslimas in hijab checking boarding passes. Muslims at the X-ray machines. Muslims wanding people. And in Philly I saw a Muslim guy doing the security screening on an entire family of Muslim travelers — women and girls in hijab, Dad in his little beanie, kids straggling along.

We are less safe after all this folderol because we’re letting people who could well be our enemies screen people who could well be our enemies. Which, needless to say, is insane.

IF IT WEREN’T FOR MUSLIM TERRORISTS, NONE OF THIS HUMILIATING RIGMAROLE WOULD BE NECESSARY.

Freeberg chimes in on the Case of the Combative Congresscritter.

This further supports my theory that progressives are the kids you knew who got away with everything under the sun, now all grown up. Their mommas caught ‘em red handed fishing a cookie out of the jar, and when “I was just putting it back” didn’t work, they went for the tried-and-true “Who ya gonna believe Ma? Me or your lyin’ eyes?” They think this will work, because it always has, and they could very well be right.

In their world, they can’t really be caught at anything. Anything. Ever.

Read it. And watch the video.

A Republican would be hounded out of Washington for something like this.

A Democrat … not so much.

Read it.

Tigers mauled a man to death after he entered their enclosure with his son at a northern Chinese wildlife park, police and a park spokesman said on Monday.

It doesn’t qualify for a Darwin Award – the tigers didn’t get the kid, too, and Darwin is all about the genes – but it’s still a notable achievement.

Read it.

Whenever I read a science fiction story, I give no credibility to any alien species unless they are at least as strange as the Japanese.

Read it.

Well, Czechoslovakia split – can Belgium survive?

Read it.

Because he’s the smartest guy in the room, you see. It’s right there on the program.

I am not making this up.

George Carlin once said, ‘If you nail together two things that have never been nailed together before, some schmuck will buy it.’ This is living proof.

Read it.

Cool. We’ll come home and he can see what kind of luck he has on his own.

Sounds like a plan.

Check it out.

Be the first on  your block to name your startup after a thinly disguised bowel movement.

Dorothy Rabinowitz pulls back the curtain.

A great part of America now understands that this president’s sense of identification lies elsewhere, and is in profound ways unlike theirs. He is hard put to sound convincingly like the leader of the nation, because he is, at heart and by instinct, the voice mainly of his ideological class. He is the alien in the White House, a matter having nothing to do with delusions about his birthplace cherished by the demented fringe.

Your masters aren’t.

According to a Zogby International survey that I write about in the May issue of Econ Journal Watch, the answer is unequivocal: The left flunks Econ 101.

Rather than focusing on whether respondents answered a question correctly, we instead looked at whether they answered incorrectly. A response was counted as incorrect only if it was flatly unenlightened.

Adam Smith described political economy as “a branch of the science of a statesman or legislator.” Governmental power joined with wrongheadedness is something terrible, but all too common. Realizing that many of our leaders and their constituents are economically unenlightened sheds light on the troubles that surround us.

Read it.

We are well on the way to creating a subspecies like the Ringworld’s ‘Night People’. I predict that they will, over time, come to resemble cockroaches in appearance as well as lifestyle.

Read it.

As long as all hands are Democrats, of course.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Yeah, we sure want more of these people in the United States.

Read it.

A ‘stone’ is 14 pounds. Why the Brits can’t use ‘pounds’ for weighing stuff (or even kilograms) passes all understanding.

Ross Douthat is pessimistic.

From Washington to Athens, the economic crisis is producing consolidation rather than revolution, the entrenchment of authority rather than its diffusion, and the concentration of power in the hands of the same elite that presided over the disasters in the first place.

The panic of 2008 happened, in part, because the public interest had become too intertwined with private interests for the latter to be allowed to fail. But everything we did to halt the panic, and all the legislation we’ve passed, has only strengthened the symbiosis.

This is the perverse logic of meritocracy. Once a system grows sufficiently complex, it doesn’t matter how badly our best and brightest foul things up. Every crisis increases their authority, because they seem to be the only ones who understand the system well enough to fix it.

But their fixes tend to make the system even more complex and centralized, and more vulnerable to the next national-security surprise, the next natural disaster, the next economic crisis. Which is why, despite all the populist backlash and all the promises from Washington, this isn’t the end of the “too big to fail” era. It’s the beginning.

The Other McCain takes a look at Rachel Corrie.

n case you’ve forgotten, or perhaps never knew, who Rachel Corrie was, she was a 23-year-old middle-class college kid from Olympia, Washington, who got caught up in post-9/11 ”peace” activism.

That was, in and of itself, a damned foolish thing to do, but college kids do foolish things all the time, and I suppose marching around with a bunch of smelly International A.N.S.W.E.R. commies shouting senseless slogans is no more foolish than getting a tramp-stamp tattoo during Spring Break in Daytona.

Ah, but Rachel Corrie was not content with peace slogans. She became a fanatic. Every fanatic needs a scapegoat and — like other fanatics before and since — Rachel scapegoated the Jews.

Read it.

And rightly so, I should think.

Read it.

Little noticed before the holiday weekend was this piece in the Washington Post,  where Obama administration officials bemoaned the fact that they can’t find anyone to accept the job of Director of National Intelligence (DNI). After floating the name of General James Clapper, the Obama administration is apparently looking elsewhere because of pressure from Capitol Hill to appoint a civilian. Problem? Apparently no qualified civilian intelligence experts are interested. The Post quotes an intelligence official saying, “Nobody who knows this stuff wants this job.”

Read it.

We have reached a point where nobody in public life who values his career prospects dares to mention the word “Islam” in connection with terrorism or mob violence. “Jihad” has officially been ruled out of the lexicon by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The word “terrorism” itself is discouraged, because too many people have come to associate it in their minds with Islam, for some strange reason.

We are so far down the rabbit hole that returning to a state of denial would be an improvement.

Read it.

The diamond has been in British possession since East India Company forces in India defeated the Maharaja of Punjab in 1849 and forced him to hand it over to Queen Victoria as a tribute following the Treaty of Lahore.

So how does India have any claim to it? I don’t see them asking for it to be returned to the proper heir of the Maharaja of Punjab, who in any event was a Sikh, a minority persecuted by the Indian government.

Jeff Jarvis understands the dialectic.

AT&T’s service sucks. Just listen  to our most trusted newsman on the topic. But AT&T response to this core business problem is not to improve its service, to invest in better ways to handle more customers.

No, AT&T’s response is to change its pricing to make us use its service less.

That’s cynical. It’s evil.

Read it.

Time to move.

Read it.

I guess that’s the best you can hope for in Nanny-State Britain.

Read it.

The author, Peter Saunders, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Sussex, concludes that governments are therefore wrong to put so much effort into opening up universities to working-class teenagers and increasing taxes for middle-income earners in order to provide more benefits for the poor.

He writes: “The ideal of promoting social mobility by increasing meritocracy has in the last few years been used to justify some old-style socialist politics which in reality have little or nothing to do with increasing individual opportunities or rewarding effort and ability.

Why do people use ’emeritus’ when they mean ‘retired’ or ‘former’? ‘Emeritus’ means ‘for merit’ — you can look it up — and certainly retired people can be given ’emeritus’ positions, but there is a distinction there that seems to be rapidly becoming lost.

Read it. And watch the video of the ‘peace activist’ stabbing an Israeli soldier.

Let’s be clear, this flotilla had nothing to do with humanitarian supplies, which could have been shipped by land. The flotilla, if successful, would have opened the door to military supplies to Hamas concealed in later shipments.

The flotilla was a collective human shield operation in which civilians, including reportedly including an 18 month old child, were put on the ships either to dissuade the Israelis from stopping the ships, or alternatively, to create an international incident. Prior to the flotilla launching, the leader of Hamas announced that it would be a triumph  regardless of whether the flotilla landed or was stopped by Israel.

When did ‘out of pocket’ come to mean ‘out of touch’ or incommunicado?

The Other McCain turns over a rock.

What you are seeing here is an attempt to delegitimize the United States in the same way Palestinian nationalists have attempted to delegitimize Israel. Like the “Zionism is racism” argument that Palestinians use to justify their terrorism against Jews in israel, the advocates of a Mexican reconsquista proclaim that the mere desire of Americans to control their borders — to have an orderly system of immigration — is “racist.”

What these activists are attempting to do is to propogate a racist/nationalist myth — a sort of fascism. What else to say about their claim that, because most Mexicans have some native ancestry, that this gives them to a right to reside hundreds of miles north of the homelands of their own peoples? It’s as if the Mayan Empire had belatedly laid claim to Arizona.

Read it.

The voyage is symbolic because Israel routinely allows food, medical supplies, etc., into Gaza. Israel has invited the activists to dock at an Israeli port, where the cargo will be unloaded, searched, and then shipped into Gaza. But that, the flotilla’s organizers say,  is a “ridiculous and offensive” suggestion. This is what passes for argument in the world of the Palestinians.

Now, Israeli naval vessels are moving to intercept the flotilla. They will tell the ships that they must proceed to Ashdod harbor or else be boarded. Israel’s Government Press Office also responded to the activists’ claim of hardship in Gaza by recommending the Roots Club in Gaza City. “We have been told the beef stroganoff and cream of spinach soup are highly recommended,” the Press Office said in an email to reporters.

Read it.

A US cage fighter ripped out the heart of his training partner while he was still alive after becoming convinced he was possessed by the devil.

Jarrod Wyatt also cut out his friend’s tongue and ripped off most of his face in a brutal assault that police said looked like a scene from a horror film.

They found the 26 year old standing naked over his friend’s body with body parts, including an eyeball, strewn around the blood splattered room.

I wonder whether this guy does requests….

The Other McCain points out a little-appreciated problem.

Read it.

Read it.

Listen to the Crust talk to itself.

Follow the chain of logic here: State governments committed themselves to paying for everybody to go to college because of some vague feeling that it would be an ‘investment’. (Considering how much the degeneration of modern culture is caused by these college-educated people, I find this assumption ludicrous on its face, but let’s accept it for the sake of argument.)

As the population grew and more and more people took advantage of this freebie (Extend your adolescence for 4/6/8 years at taxpayer expense! Make more money when you get out than your parents ever dreamed of!), they discovered that, no, they couldn’t afford such an open-ended project.

When you can’t afford something, you either have to find more money or cut back spending. You can’t just wish yourself more money (unlike the Federal government).

The people riding the gravy train, of course, object to being expected to pay for their own improvement. (Mom! Dad! I need more money!) So this is all a plot by some unnamed set of villains to screw the poor. Women and minorities hardest hit, etc., etc.

I’m working on a concept here: How about the people who benefit from something are obliged to pay for it? And if they can’t pay for it, they don’t get it?

Read it.

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

Read it.

In fact, more oil is spilled from the delta’s network of terminals, pipes, pumping stations and oil platforms every year than has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico, the site of a major ecological catastrophe caused by oil that has poured from a leak triggered by the explosion that wrecked BP‘s Deepwater Horizon rig last month.

But of course. Who cares what happens on the fringe of the SWPL world?

Read it.

Read it.

Ixtoc I was an exploratory oil well being drilled by the semi-submersible platform, Sedco 135F  in the Bay of Campeche of the Gulf of Mexico, about 100 km (62 mi) northwest of Ciudad del Carmen, Campeche  in waters 50 m (160 ft) deep.  On 3 June 1979, the well suffered a blowout resulting in the second largest oil spill and the largest accidental spill in history.

In the next nine months, experts and divers including Red Adair were brought in to contain and cap the oil well.  An average of approximately ten thousand to thirty thousand barrels per day were discharged into the Gulf until it was finally capped on 23 March 1980, nearly 10 months later.  Prevailing currents carried the oil towards the Texas coastline. The US government had two months to prepare booms to protect major inlets. Eventually, in the US, 162 miles (261 km) of beaches and 1421 birds were affected by 3,000,000 barrels (480,000 m3) of oil.  Pemex spent $100 million to clean up the spill and avoided paying compensation by asserting sovereign immunity.

Read it.

Always look up.

Read it.

A definition of ‘romantic’ that few would recognize.

Read it.

Semtex looks a lot like honey, and the technology of detonating bombs via cellphone is well known.

Hmmmm.