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Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

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Lots of taxpayers would like to get the deal UAW workers still get.

As would I. If I had gone to work in an auto factory right out of high school, I’d be better off financially than I am right now, with three degrees (one from Yale).

Megan McArdle considers the President’s plan.

Well, the obvious point is that it represents a massive transfer to borrowers from lenders and the rest of us.  As far as I can tell, there is no penalty for having borrowed more than you could realistically afford to repay–not so much as a speck of dirt on the credit report.  The administration’s release talks a lot about “responsible homeowners”, but very few responsible homeowners have payments that amount to 43% of their monthly income.  There are exceptions, of course, such as people who have just lost their jobs, but most of the people being helped are, nearly definitionally, people who bought more house than they could afford in the belief that prices would keep rising indefinitely and they would make big bucks.  It was leveraged investing, just like a hedge fund, and often at the same kind of leverage ratios.

But I bet they all vote Democrat.

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How useful and constructive.

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It’s sad to watch. The Golden State — which a decade ago was the booming technology capital of the world — has been done in by two decades of chronic overspending, overregulating and a hyperprogressive tax code that exaggerates the impact on state revenues of economic boom and bust. Total state expenditures have grown to $145 billion in 2008 from $104 billion in 2003 and California now has the worst credit rating in the nation — worse even than Louisiana’s. It also has the nation’s fourth highest unemployment rate of 9.3% (after Michigan, Rhode Island and South Carolina) and the second highest home foreclosure rate (after Nevada).

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Saturn goes the way of all flesh, and Pontiac is not far behind it.

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Liberals shoot the wounded….

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And peole will pay money for this.

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The affidavit was Burris’s third attempt to describe his contacts with the Blagojevich team during the months before his surprise appointment. It differed on several key points from the testimony he gave under oath to an Illinois House of Representatives impeachment committee.

Now that he’s safely in the Senate, Burris feels comfortable revealing that he’s a serial liar. Isn’t that special.

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Boy, those Zimbabweans are sure lucky they’re no longer under the boot of that oppressive white regime.

Thank God for the U.N. and the international community, or who knows what sort of hell they’d be living in now.

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I am not making this up.

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Boy, those Zimbabweans are sure lucky they’re no longer under the boot of that oppressive white regime.

Thank God for the U.N. and the international community, or who knows what sort of hell they’d be living in now.

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I am not making this up.

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Actually, if it’s only 10 grand, they’ll probably pay it just to get rid of her. An American would have sued for 10 million.

Considering the hundreds of thousands of people who have ridden on that ride without untoward result, Disney ought to counter sue the girl and her mother for “negligence in her design and operation”.

And claiming that a fairground ride makes Disney a “common carrier” is absurd when talking about a mechanism that delivers you right back to the point where you started. If she had been on the monorail, or even a golf cart, she’d have a case. But not a roller coaster.

And anybody who gets on a ride named “The Tower of Terror” really deserves whatever she gets.

If I were Disney, I’d have her whacked. It wouldn’t cost all that much more, and it would remove her from the gene pool. In fact, have her mother whacked too; venality probably runs in the family.

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Next step: Sue somebody. Then hire lobbyists.

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I am not making this up.

Megan McArdle is nonplussed.

New York City’s main industry lies in ruins; its finances are in peril; its housing market is falling. What does the city need?  That’s right, tougher rent controls!

In times like this, it’s easy to believe that if you laid all the economists in the world end to end, they still wouldn’t reach a conclusion.  But here’s one of the things that basically everyone, left to right, agrees on:  rent control is the surest way to destroy a city’s housing stock short of aerial bombing, and one of the major culprits behind New York’s painfully low vacancy rate.

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“All you need to do is grant visas to two million Indians, Chinese and Koreans,” said Shekhar Gupta, editor of The Indian Express newspaper. “We will buy up all the subprime homes. We will work 18 hours a day to pay for them. We will immediately improve your savings rate — no Indian bank today has more than 2 percent nonperforming loans because not paying your mortgage is considered shameful here. And we will start new companies to create our own jobs and jobs for more Americans.”

And I have no problem with that. The problem is that, in actual practice, it would be two million Muslims and Latin Americans, and that is what got us into this mess in the first place.

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This reminds me of the Monty Python sketch about “the machine that goes ping!“, where a pregnant lady in a delivery theater, when she asks “What should I do?”, is patted on the head by a doctor and told “Nothing, dear; you’re not qualified.”

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

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Not really news, but a useful reminder.

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I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

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The general didn’t get much time. After a long, controversial career, Brig. Gen. Mauro Enrique Tello Quiñones retired from active duty last month and moved to this Caribbean playground to work for the Cancun mayor and fight the drug cartels that have penetrated much of Mexican society. He lasted a week.

Tello, 63, along with his bodyguard and a driver, were kidnapped in downtown Cancun last Monday evening, taken to a hidden location, methodically tortured, then driven out to the jungle and shot in the head. Their bodies were found Tuesday in the cab of a pickup truck on the side of a highway leading out of town. An autopsy revealed that both the general’s arms and legs had been broken.

Where is Zorro when you really need him?

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(The Financial Times is the British equivalent of the Wall Street Journal — if the Wall Street Journal were run by the staff of The Nation.)

Citing Keynes gives us special licence to talk economics without using any. To paraphrase the lawyers’ dictum, when the facts are on our side, we pound the facts; when theory is on our side, we pound theory; and when neither the facts nor theory are on our side, we pound Keynes – and to great effect.

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Health-care resources are not unlimited in any country, even rich ones like Canada and the U.S., and must be rationed either by price or time. When individuals bear no direct responsibility for paying for their care, as in Canada, that care is rationed by waiting.

In Ontario, Lindsay McCreith was suffering from headaches and seizures yet faced a four and a half month wait for an MRI scan in January of 2006. Deciding that the wait was untenable, Mr. McCreith did what a lot of Canadians do: He went south, and paid for an MRI scan across the border in Buffalo. The MRI revealed a malignant brain tumor.

Ontario’s government system still refused to provide timely treatment, offering instead a months-long wait for surgery. In the end, Mr. McCreith returned to Buffalo and paid for surgery that may have saved his life.

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THE comment from the photographer at Sears was typical. “Are these all yours?” she asked, surveying Kim Gunnip’s 12 children.

“No,” Mrs. Gunnip replied, “I picked some up at the food court.”

Note that this is in the “Fashion & Style” section of the New York Times. For readers of the Times, kids are a fashion statement.

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Steve Sailer digs up an inconvenient truth.

After I reported yesterday that Bill Gates had given $1 million in 2001 to long-time Weatherman fugitive Rick Ayers (brother of President Obama’s extremely distant acquaintance Bill Ayers) to start “small learning communities” within Berkeley High to, among other things, take students to Cuba to study “social justice,” a reader who graduated from Berkeley High in the 1970s reported that the exact same idea had already been tried way back when the Ayers brothers were making bombs instead of agitating for “small schools.”

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For the first time, the General Teaching Council for England – the profession’s regulator – wants staff in the independent sector to be subjected to the same code as those in state schools.

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All of them run by Democrats. Fancy that.

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For an alleged genius, Bill Gates can be pretty stupid at times.

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Far be it from me to make derogatory remarks about Italians, but … I mean, really.

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Must be pretty gross if even the U.N. noticed.

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This is why lobbyists exist, and make so much money: They can get the government to pass a law that means big bucks for them. (And you thought ethanol was about the environment! Foolish mortal!)

Not really news, but a useful reminder.

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

Boy, those Zimbabweans are sure lucky they’re no longer under the boot of that oppressive white regime.

Thank God for the U.N. and the international community, or who knows what sort of hell they’d be living in now.

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Okay, he’s got the “Bill Clinton” level; can he make it to “Jimmy Carter”? Stay tuned.

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Guess That Party: Note that Voinovich is immediately tagged as a Republican, but nowhere will you see any mention of the fact that White was a Democrat, thus avoiding the obvious conclusion to be drawn from the fact that the city improved under Republican administration and then collapsed under Democrat administration.

Voinovich is also one of the most notorious RINOs in the history of the state of Ohio, so calling him “tough-minded” says more about the author than the subject.

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The wage of sin is death.

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Can you blame them?

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Don’t think of it as selling out; think of it as buying in.

Senators fetch the best prices, after all.

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The Democratic Party is of the intellectual rich, not of the worker, and not very inclined to deep change. The most critical political story of the election was the 12 to 15 percent shift of the rich, educated and suburban to the Democrats, offsetting the shift of about 6 percent of the less educated or professional, but more religious and rural to the Republicans.

A sharp observation. Unfortunately, as with many academics opining outside of their field, it is followed by a stupid conclusion:

By far the greatest issue before us, one barely on anyone’s agenda, is the astounding degree of economic inequality, perhaps approaching the levels of 1929 or even 1913. This obscene outcome, an astounding concentration of wealth by the super-rich, is a consequence of market failure – the capacity of those at the top to exercise monopoly power over the economy, and whose tax cuts and deregulation contributed to the current financial crisis and deepening recession.

1. “barely on anyone’s agenda”? The left has been whining about this for as long as I’ve been reading newspapers.

2. Economic inequality is “obscene” only if you’re reasoning from the a priori position that there is some mandate either in morality or natural law for economic equality.

3. The “astounding concentration of wealth by the super-rich” is a result of modern technological progress that produces a “winner take all” culture (why, there’s even a book by that name that explains it very well) as markets widen and there is more room for good products and services to drive out less good products and services.

4. None of this is a “market failure” unless you consider the market to be a mechanism to produce the result you want rather than the result that it actually produces. Hint: The market doesn’t care what you want. It works when willing buyers and sellers get together; the only “market failure” is when nannyists in government use their coercive power to meddle, and that’s not the fault of the market.

5. The “capacity of those at the top to exercise monopoly power” is soley the fault of the government; only the government can produce a true monopoly, and it does so by interfering with the market. That’s why lobbyists make the riches that they do — when legislators and bureaucrats determine what can be bought and sold, the first thing to be bought and sold will be legislators.

6. “Tax cuts and deregulation” didn’t contribute at all to the current economic crisis, as anybody who has been paying attention and has two brain cells to rub together would realize. It was produced by governmental agencies and quasi-agencies meddling in the housing and financial markets in a vain attempt to achieve politically fashionable ends. The market works whether you want it to or not; try to mess with it, and it will bite you in the ass every time.

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I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

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Look at Britain today, and see where we will be after four years of Obama.

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Manipulate the market? Why would they want to do that?

Notice that the Obamessiah isn’t doing anything about oil market manipulation; he’s too busy trying to get his Porkulus bill through Congress.

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Considering the train wreck that is the British police, I can’t blame them.

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Simon Heffer wonders how a young man who is illiterate could have gained seven GCSEs.

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Removing apostrophes from road signs will cause “utter chaos”, the Apostrophe Protection Society has warned.