Chris Christie taking names

Watch this video. No pandering, no spin.

Carolan's Law of Liberal Credence

The Sestak episode has forced Washington Post, the New York Times, and other liberal redoubts to begin to admit that President Obama has not made good on his promise to have "the most transparent administration in history." leading Matt Carolan to observethat "Now people other than conservatives can respectably discuss it at their cocktail parties." Not that it will lead Obama's supporters to admit conservatives were to question his grandiose claims. Nor will it give them a moment's pause before attacking any conservative who dares question any claim or promise that issues from the mouth of Saint Barak in the future. The pattern is familiar to anyone who has been paying attention.

Matt sums it up nicely, offering "Carolan's Law of Liberal Credence": "No liberal shall believe anything a conservative says until it is repeated six months later by their favorite liberal pundit or publication." Spot on.

Ignoring religious persecution

Get Religion is a great blog that reviews religion coverage in the media. This short interview with Julia Duin, the stellar longtime religion reporter for the Washington Times, is worth reading. Her response when asked what religion-related stories aren't getting the attention is unsurprising but still maddening.

(2) What is the most important religion story right now that you think the mainstream media just do not get?

Overseas religious persecution tops the list. I did a front-page story recently on how the Chinese government is killing off hundreds — no one knows the true number — of Falun Gong prisoners for their organs and I got no pickups. Now that story is not completely new but the MSM is not touching it. It’s Nazi horror stuff: people getting snuffed out for their skin, lungs, corneas, livers and kidneys. The Falun Gong had a press conference recently in the Capitol on this — with secular folks who are not part of their movement testifying — and it was pathetic how few media attended. The slow strangulation of Orthodox Copts by the Egyptian government is another story. Teen-aged girls are getting kidnapped, gang-raped and forced to convert to Islam. Islamic mobs attack Christians with impunity. These stories are not hard to do but I don’t see journalists out there doing them.

These are incredibly important stories, involving egregious, unambiguous violations of human rights, involving a oppressive majority preying on an oppressed minority. In other words, they actually fit the template into which the mainstream media tries to stuff just about every story it can. And yet these stories are ignored -- even when all it would take would be to reprint a story already written by a pro like Julia Duin (and thus her Times front-pager on the Falun Gong got "no pickups"). It makes one especially grateful for journalists like Duin, and like Jay Nordlinger, who has been shedding light on the ChiCom's persecution of Falun Gong practitioners for years.

A story about private property

I was talking to a friend this weekend and he was re-telling a story about a visit he had to a boat-hotel in the Bahamas. It's one of these hotels where you can dock your boat overnight while staying in the hotel. While he was there, a boat was stolen, despite the fact that the boat was locked and someone was sleeping (with a gun) on a nearby boat. Apparently, the hotel has a big problem with boat theft, and even the police and security guards seemed to be in on it.

After he told the story, I asked, "But what about the owner of the hotel? Why do they allow this to happen? If I owned that hotel, I would make certain that I had the proper security. Otherwise, why would anyone come to my hotel?"

And his response was, "Well, the hotel is owned by the Bahamian government."

It's the debt, stupid

Rand Paul just won the Republican primary in Kentucky by 20 plus points over Trey Grayson, the favorite of the GOP establishment.

What was Rand Paul's number one issue? Debt.



It's not that complicated.

[Update]

Here is my favorite part of his victory speech.

America is a great country. It's because of our system, and our system is capitalism. Capitalism is freedom. It means the freedom to voluntarily exchange goods, and retain the fruits of your labor. Capitalism is a system we should be proud of. Profit is a system we should be proud of. Private property is a system we should be proud of. And we should not apologize to the rest of the world for our system.

Blumenthal

Remember this creepy guy, the Attorney General who tried to charge AIG executives with breaking a law that doesn't exist?

He's back!

I assume this will pass 100-0

Senator Bob Corker:

At the core of the financial crisis were home loans that should never have been written because the borrowers could not repay them. To correct this glaring vulnerability in our financial system, our amendment would direct federal banking regulators to establish minimum loan underwriting standards, setting an appropriate down payment and requiring verification of the borrower’s ability to pay for the life of the loan

Read about it here.

While I am uncomfortable with the idea that the Federal government is establishing underwriting standards, as long as the taxpayers are going to be on the hook, this seems like common sense. Can't wait to find out what happens on this vote!

The dumbest thing ever said by an economist

I would like to dispute the idea that windmills are not profitable. Once one adds up all of the subsidies and financial support the industry receives from the government, it is losing very little money.

The French goddess Veronique de Rugy tells the story here.

Kagan for SCOTUS?

I am no expert on such things, but Elena Kagan, Obama's presumptive pick to replace retiring Justice John Paul Stevens, seems somewhat underqualified for the job. As Powerline notes:

She has no judging experience.

She has little experience as a practicing lawyer.

She has approximately one year of experience as Solicitor General of the United States.

She has lots of experience in academia, but has published only a small amount of scholarly work, none of which seems particularly noteworthy.

More here and here. Since she has no judicial experience (in fairness, President Clinton nominated her for the federal bench in 1999, but she did not receive an up or down vote -- a black mark on the GOP in my view); one would naturally turn to her career as a practicing lawyer. But her experience is thin in that area too -- according, for whatever it's worth, to Wikipedia, prior to being chosen to be Obama's Solicitor General, in January 2009, she had never argued a case at trial.

Since she has spent some 20 years in legal academia, one might look to her scholarship for signs of brilliance. According to Paul Campos, a law professor at UC Boulder, there isn't much there, either.

Yesterday, I read everything Elena Kagan has ever published. It didn't take long: in the nearly 20 years since Kagan became a law professor, she's published very little academic scholarship—three law review articles, along with a couple of shorter essays and two brief book reviews. Somehow, Kagan got tenure at Chicago in 1995 on the basis of a single article in The Supreme Court Review—a scholarly journal edited by Chicago's own faculty—and a short essay in the school's law review. She then worked in the Clinton administration for several years before joining Harvard as a visiting professor of law in 1999.
While there she published two articles, but since receiving tenure from Harvard in 2001 (and becoming dean of the law school in 2003) she has published nothing. (While it's true law school deans often do little scholarly writing during their terms, Kagan is remarkable both for how little she did in the dozen years prior to becoming Harvard's dean, and for never having written anything intended for a more general audience, either before or after taking that position.)

[SNIP]

(Of course cynics have noted that today Supreme Court nominees are often better off not having an extensive "paper trail" regarding their views on controversial legal issues. Who would have guessed it would be possible to retain this virtue while obtaining tenure at two of the nation's top law schools?)

At least in theory Kagan could compensate somewhat for the slenderness of her academic resume through the quality of her work. But if Kagan is a brilliant legal scholar, the evidence must be lurking somewhere other than in her publications. Kagan's scholarly writings are lifeless, dull, and eminently forgettable. They are, on the whole, cautious academic exercises in the sort of banal on-the-other-handing whose prime virtue is that it's unlikely to offend anyone in a position of power.

Of course, when Clarence Thomas was nominated for the Court, people said he was not qualified, and it is true that he had not written very much. And when President George HW Bush said he was the "most qualified" person for the job, that was stretching it. But he had been Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the US Dept. of Education, and Chairman of the EEOC, served as a state prosecutor and a federal judge (albeit for only 19 months) and had briefly worked as an in-house counsel for a multinational corporation, giving him at least some experience in most if not all of the facets of the law (criminal, civil, administrative, constitutional) that the Supreme Court regularly faces. That's something you can't say about Elena Kagan.

More to the point, anyone who has read Justice Thomas's opinions would have to admit, that he has demonstrated that he is every bit the equal (to put it mildly) of his colleagues on the Court. Perhaps Ms. Kagan will do the same.

[UPDATE] Two more favorable views about Kagan and her legal scholarship over at the law-professor-blog Volokh Conspiracy from Jonathan Adler of Case Wesetern U and Ilya Somin of George Mason. I am not terribly famliar with Professor Somin, but Adler is solid on legal issues, and has strong libertarian political leanings, and all of the VC contributors are worth taking seriously.

Mayor Bloomberg...

...you've got to be kidding me.

"If I had to guess 25 cents, this would be exactly that. Homegrown, or maybe a mentally deranged person, or somebody with a political agenda that doesn't like the health care bill or something."

For some hilarious perspective on the whole situation, read Mark Steyn.