I read a lot of tech blogs and such — stuff written by people whom I expect to be pretty savvy about the internet; how it works and it’s remarkable place in our society. So, seeing those people react to the FCC’s net neutrality ruling with almost unanimous glee makes me want to lay my head down … Read more
There was a time when a senator would never ask an Attorney General nominee if the president could selectively enforce laws, because everybody knew the answer would be, “Of course not.” That time is long gone. Attorney general nominee Loretta Lynch says President Obama’s executive action on immigration is a reasonable use of the president’s … Read more
It’s easy to make fun of paranoid, conspiracy-theory loons, but 2013 made them look a lot less loony: It’s now a matter of public record that the NSA collects and stores the calling records of domestic phone calls, tracks the location of millions of mobile devices worldwide, infiltrates the data links between the data centers … Read more
Daniel Greenfield lays out for us what kind of leaders our society has now: These are the people who love Freakonomics, who enjoy all sorts of mental puzzles, who like to see an idea turned on its head, but who couldn’t fix a toaster. The ObamaCare website is the natural spawn of that technocracy who … Read more
Instapundit pens a USA Today column on the horrors of the ongoing government shutdown. Just kidding. He’s pointing out how we could stand to shut down a lot more: The big lesson of the shutdown is that — in a time when so-called “draconian cuts” usually refer to mere decreases in the rate of growth … Read more
Mark Levin recently came out with a new book called The Liberty Amendments. It’s his ideas for the amendments we need to add to the Constitution to restore America to, well, constitutionality. Instapundit Glenn Reynolds also addresses the idea of amending the Constitution in a USA Today column: And that gets to what I think … Read more
I can’t wait to see all the coverage this gets: Ex-Gay Community Lobbies Congress for Recognition, Protection From Discrimination: Two weeks ago, Doyle announced that a planned reception that was to be held at the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C. had to be postponed and moved to an undisclosed location after members of the … Read more
Over on GetReligion, in an aside on a story about the IRS, we get this: I wrote a story in 2003 about how federal data indicated that not a single employee at Labor, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, Energy, Education, Veterans Affairs and State had been fired in the previous five … Read more
Sarah Hoyt is trying to figure out why the press et al refuse to believe (or at least acknowledge) anything bad about their progressive heroes, despite ample evidence. People want to believe figures of authority are right. Constitutional monarchies give the people a figure head to believe in, while they can jump on and kick … Read more
Mark Steyn names the government as Kermit Gosnell’s unindicted co-conspirator: The Gosnell trial is winding down, and the pro-abortion crowd’s line seems to be that yes, this guy was an unfortunate outlier but he’s of no broader significance. This conveniently overlooks the fact that he couldn’t have done what he did without the assistance of … Read more
The front runner to be the next Smoot-Hawley Tariff? The terrible and Orwellian-named Marketplace Fairness Act. At the Points and Figures blog, Jeff Carter breaks it down: The tax will restrict competition. Today, people have a choice between online and physical retailers. Physical retailers know that a person can enter their shop, whip out their … Read more
From the “I can’t believe we still have to explain this” file, David French explains the difference between charity and political graft disguised as charity: Imagine development officers from two relief agencies visit your house — one is from a large Christian agency, the other from the government. The Christian development officer will tell you … Read more
The USPS can no longer afford to pay its obligations to its retirees. This is bad news if you are a USPS retiree, but a valuable object lesson on the incompetence of a government that can even run a monopoly into the ground. Good luck with that GM stock, guys!
Thanks to affirmative action, Latinos applying for city contracts in New York are now going to have to provide documentation of their ethnicity: As part of the application, the city’s Department of Small Business Services asked the Leon-Veras, whose parents were born in the Dominican Republic, to furnish not just her birth certificate, but also … Read more
People tend to take better care of things that they own. This simple truth is apparently beyond environmental activists, whose prescription for saving the environment always involves bigger government and more restrictions on private property rights. But Jonathan Adler writes that in many cases, private property rights might be just the thing: At the same … Read more
If Lord Humungus had recently moved to town and enrolled his kids at Warren G. Harding Middle School… if the Visigoths had been displaced from the plains of ancient Gaul and relocated to the parking lot in front of the GameStop… if the heads of impertinent chess club members were routinely seen on pikes in … Read more