Archive for March, 2009
TABLA RASA
Monday, March 30th, 2009OBAMA’S NEW MATH
Monday, March 30th, 2009Jonah Goldberg has a great article in the most recent National Review. It’s a humorous piece, but his point at the end is so striking that it’s worth sharing even without the hilarious parts. So here’s Goldberg with the funny edited out:
Barack Obama often laments the deficit he “inherited” from George W. Bush, suggesting that if only someone like Barack Obama had been at the helm these last eight years, things would be better.
Spending under George W. Bush went through the roof: education (up 58 percent), Social Security (17 percent), Medicare (51 percent), health research and regulation (55 percent), highways and mass transit (22 percent), and veterans’ benefits (59 percent). Spending grew twice as fast under Bush as it did under Clinton. But Obama thinks that amounts to laissez-faire.
To recap: Obama says Bush ignored necessary spending, which is why our new president needs to borrow $7 trillion just to spend enough money to catch up to where we should be. But he goes on to suggest that if he had been running the show, we wouldn’t have this Republican-fueled deficit that he inherited, because Democrats would have spent two, three, or ten times as much money as Republicans. Something doesn’t compute there.
This deserves to be mashed up with the Washington Post’s budget deficit graph (as posted on the Heritage blog):
Hope 0, Change 0
GLOBAL CARBON TAX REVISITED
Friday, March 27th, 2009On April 30, 2007, talk radio host Glenn Beck discussed Al Gore’s “mass persuasion campaign” on global warming and warned, “the goal is [a] global carbon tax.”
The following day, “Peskyfly” Chris Davis cut-n-pasted a Media Matters post condemning Beck and added that the idea amounted to a “batsh*t crazy one-world-government conspiracy theory.” Davis urged his readers to call Beck’s advertisers and try to remove him from the air.
A few days later, I posted an exhaustive analysis of the whole affair, providing some much needed context and a few helpful links.
In December of that year, a post from the office of Senator James Inhofe titled “Global Carbon Tax Urged at UN Climate Conference” gave credit to Beck’s hypothesis. I thoroughly investigated the entry and found it to be generally correct, though not without some minor factual discrepancies.
Today a U.N. working group’s document on “climate change” (PDF) prepared for next week’s global warming conference has been obtained by FOX News. Among the things it considers is a global carbon tax.
In this detail of the document, you can see part of a table listing the positive and negative consequences of “carbon taxes or levies,” included under the “International” heading:
The “global carbon tax” Beck warned us about is one more step closer to reality.
Hope 0, Change 1
THE PERIL OF FREE INQUIRY
Tuesday, March 24th, 2009The perennially-constipated interest group Americans United for Division has sent a warning letter to the Texas Board of Education, objecting to this item from their January meeting:
Specifically, AU has a problem with this being the goal of scientific instruction:
The student uses critical thinking, scientific reasoning and problem solving to make informed decisions within and outside the classroom. The student is expected to: analyze and evaluate scientific explanations using empirical evidence, logical reasoning, and experimental and observational testing…
Pretty terrible stuff, huh? It’s almost as if the Texas Board of Education wants students to learn to think critically, rather than blindly accepting and regurgitating whatever they’re told.
The group says such instruction would “undermine science education,” “create constitutional problems,” “threaten the religious liberty of students,” and “harm students’ education.”
Here’s part of AU’s letter to the board:
Of course, AU’s method would prevent students from using their own critical faculties to judge the “alleged criticisms” against the “overwhelming evidence” AU mentions no fewer than three times in these last three sentences. Teachers would be hard-pressed to even present such “overwhelming evidence” without exposing students to an examination of its alleged validity.
Furthermore, if the evidence is so overwhelming, you have to wonder why groups like AU are so paranoid about controlling what students see, hear, discuss and think. When you try to manipulate people like that, it can only end badly for you, as I’m certain it will end badly for AU in the long run. They’re the anti-Galileos of our generation.
A (MARKET) MARKET FAILURE?
Monday, March 23rd, 2009It’s been a while, so I thought I’d post the article I wrote for the February edition of the Main Street Journal:
A local Democratic activist recently found that Memphians living in some of the city’s poorest areas have essentially no access to healthy food. The limited food products available in these neighborhoods are “processed with high levels of sodium and high fructose corn syrup,” contributing to epidemics of “Type 2 Diabetes, Strokes, Heart Disease and Obesity.”
“There has been a market failure, and it is causing a health care crisis,” writes Frank Burhart, a graduate of both Rhodes College and the University of Memphis, who blogs under the alias Polar Donkey (polardonkey.blogspot.com).
Burnhart’s signature issues are social inequality and wealth distribution, and his blog posts are frequently illustrated by maps he creates using geographic information system (GIS) software.
To punctuate his argument about the unequal distribution of healthy food access points around the Memphis area, Burnhart plotted grocery stores and liquor stores and overlaid them with maps of zip codes by population, median household income and food stamp recipient totals.
Burnhart discovered three poor zip codes in particular – 38106, 38107 and 38108 – that combined for a total of 18 liquor stores but not a single major chain grocery store, Easy Way or Save-A-Lot. These he contrasted with the wealthy Cordovan zip code of 38018, which contained four grocery stores and only two liquor stores. By his calculations, the ratio of people to liquor stores was markedly different, as well, with twice as many liquor stores per capita in the poorer areas.
These findings led Burnhart to the conclusion that the city of Memphis had it in for poor people and that “local government should step in and regulate food sales / distribution.”
There are some problems with Burnhart’s analysis. For one thing, he under-represents the population in 38018 by at least half, meaning the ratio of people to liquor stores would actually be four times larger in Cordova. But that’s only if you accept his assertion that there are only two area liquor stores, when a cursory web search reveals at least five. Additionally, Google lists some 28 grocery stores in 38107 alone, and while many of these are actually dilapidated convenience stores without much selection, there’s at least one Save-A-Lot (999 Jackson Ave), though Burnhart specifically claimed there were none.
Still, the overall thrust of his point remains unanswered: is our society trying to starve and mistreat poor people, keep them sick and inebriated?
Much more likely, it’s a problem of simple economics. Store owners, shareholders and investors build and maintain stores in safe locations where they can turn a profit and sell as many products as possible, not in areas where the crime rate is out of control and the residents can’t keep them in business. Would you rather open a store in a zip code with a median household income of $74,000 or $22,000?
But if an abundance of liquor stores is any indication, it must be profitable to run some businesses in these areas. So we’re left to wonder what would happen if Tennessee reformed its wine and liquor laws to allow grocery stores to sells these items, as they do in 18 other states. Perhaps that’s one way major chain grocery stores could be enticed to do business in impoverished areas, sparing us all of more government regulation.
Which is another reason to support the wine in grocery stores bill.
WIDGETS, SPROCKETS AND COGS
Monday, March 16th, 2009Bill has an exclusive license to sell widgets, as long as he never sells widgets to populations that are forbidden from purchasing them. Bill is not allowed to sell sprockets, which go nicely with widgets, and he’s definitely not allowed to sell cogs.
Bob sells cogs and sprockets, but he’s not allowed to sell widgets, and he’d like that to change. Bob says he’d be more than happy to maintain the same widget-selling rules concerning forbidden populations, and in return he’ll help Bill change the rules so he can sell sprockets.
Bob has asked George, Gerald, Greg, Gabriel, Gary and Grant to speak on his behalf:
- George says widget customers would appreciate having easier access to widgets at Bob’s store and sprockets at Bill’s store.
- Gerald says Bob already prevents the forbidden populations from buying widget-like items in his store, so the same will hold true if he starts selling widgets.
- Greg says widget prices would be more competitive if Bob was allowed to sell them.
- Gabriel says both Bill and Bob are losing business to Brian, who has a store just across the state line.
- Gary says people in other states look at us weird, because people like Bob have always been allowed to sell widgets where they live.
- Grant says it’s a free country, Bill and Bob should be allowed to sell whatever they like, widgets, sprockets, cogs or all three.
But Bill is having none of that, so he’s enlisted Randy, Ryan, Roscoe, Ralph and Rudolf to help scuttle the rule change:
- Randy says he’s afraid Bill will go out of business if Bob starts selling widgets. In order to save Bill’s business, we’ve got to preserve his exclusive license.
- Ryan says he’s afraid that the forbidden populations will have more access to widgets if Bob starts selling them. And they would probably harass Bob’s customers in the parking lot.
- Roscoe says if people want widgets, they know where to go.
- Ralph says Bill does better things with his sales revenue than Bob does.
- Rudolf says he sympathies with Bob’s request in the generic sense, but he personally doesn’t like widgets, so he’s torn.
I personally wouldn’t buy widgets from Bob or Bill, but I agree with Grant.
If you’re with me, join the movement.
GIVE US THE NEWS OR GO AWAY
Thursday, March 12th, 2009Tom Guleff is probably right — when newspapers like The Commercial Appeal finally collapse in piles of their own feces, bloggers like Mike Hollihan will write the obituary.
Hollihan added a devastating comment to the discussion on today’s column by Wendi C. Thomas, titled “Funeral dirge for newspapers plays on.”
Along those lines, why am I, as a resident of the Memphis area, forced to consult the Tennessean in order to hear from my State Representative and State Senator, both of whom had op-eds published recently in Nashville’s newspaper?
UPDATE: Knoxnews Reporter/Blogger Michael Silence calls this a “perfectly reasonable request.”
UPDATE II: A second-degree Instalanche. Thanks, Glenn!
THE WORKS AT SUBWAY
Thursday, March 12th, 2009
According to the Subway sign above, does “The Works” include banana peppers and jalapenos?
They’re pictured, but the small print says they’re excluded. So are they included or excluded? I don’t think Subway’s graphic designer is too sure.
I know how most Subway sandwich artists answer the question, because they include peppers and jalapenos about 90% of the time.
The other 10% of the time, they ask what the customer means by “The Works.”
Whatever advantage Subway executives hoped to gain by creating and promoting this would-be convenient shorthand has been lost in translation. Quite literally, in some cases.
FAILURE: CHRIS “PESKYFLY” DAVIS
Wednesday, March 11th, 2009The Memphis Liar’s Chris “Peskyfly” Davis says I’m one of “the dumbest people on the planet” and a member of “halfwit central.” But of course not everything Chris Davis says is true. Take, for example, this comment (from the same post linked above):
Rush [Limbaugh], as we all know, said he hopes Obama “FAILS.” That, obviously, is not dissent. And although liberals openly disagreed with Bush and predicted at every turn that his policies would fail none ever actually wished for failure. There’s no hair to be split, these are VERY different concepts.
The transcript of Rush Limbaugh’s “I hope he fails” discussion is available online for all who care to read it in context, though Davis and other Leftist bloggers are loath to provide you with a direct link so you can examine the statement for yourself and make up your own mind.
Now that the rest of the historical record is trickling out, it looks even worse for Mr. Davis.
First, it seems that political strategist James Carville was recorded saying he wanted Bush to fail — on the morning of September 11, 2001, of all days.
Second, a FOX News/Opinion Dynamics poll found that “51 percent of Democrats wanted Bush to fail” in 2006, at the height of the Iraq war when the President was formulating the “surge” strategy.
How is it that “the dumbest people on the planet” can disprove radical Leftists like Chris Davis without even the slightest bit of effort?
UPDATE ONE: As you may recall, it was James Carville who helped launch the coordinated attack on Rush Limbaugh.
UPDATE TWO: As you may recall, it was Leftist bloggers who launched the “miserable failure” google-bomb on President Bush.