Love it:
Hey, Salon: spending any time denying BHO’s weakness triggers the Streisand Effect, and calls attention to the fact that BHO is the first POTUS whose VP appears to be packing more heat.
And, if not for ObamaCare, and Government Motors, and offshore drilling, and the failed stimulus, I’d be tempted to say that a POTUS is not really directly controlling the economy. He may not have as much direct control as he’d like, but BHO has perturbed the crap out of the economy in a very big way.
In another first, BHO is the first POTUS to spend over a year as a lame duck.
Somebody tell this twerp on video over at Althouse’s site that Wisonsin’s motto is ‘Forward’. SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS is the motto of the Commonwealth of Virginia.
One is tempted to say that the public sector unions are behaving tyrannically in Wisconsin, but that gives the unions too much credit. They’re behaving in an inept, infantile fashion.
If Scott Walker actually was a tyrant, and we allow that Caesar was also such, I’d reply to this knob:
ROLAND, Iowa Rick Santorum’s schedule lists the address for his event this afternoon as 3275 400th Street. The Google Map directions to this location directed me to turn left onto 570th Avenue – which is a dirt road that runs between two cornfields. And after going a mile and a half, then I was directed to turn right onto 100th Street which is – you guessed it, didn’t you? – another dirt road between two cornfields. Here is a photo of the intersection:
Now, you may ask yourself: Why do Iowans endow their dirt roads with such seemingly grandiose names? My theory: The alternative would be to name the roads for people. But they’ve got more dirt roads than they’ve got people to name them after. And “Cornfield Road” wouldn’t be particularly distinctive, would it?
Psychologists will tell you that people, when faced with a threatening situation, react instinctively: either “fight or flight”. What they overlook is the not inconsiderable number of human beings who are occasionally overwhelmed with a desire to shrink to the size of a dime and roll into the first convenient crack in the floor, but have no alternative but to stick things out.
A nonprofit backed by U.S. Rep. Chaka Fattah (D., Pa.) spent more than $2 million in federal funds to provide environmental education to Philadelphia high school students — including trips to a resort in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
For three years, the Caribbean-American Mission for Research, Education, and Action ran an exchange program for students at Overbrook High School and two island high schools.
The Philadelphia students and their adult chaperones stayed at the Marriott Frenchman’s Reef beachfront resort, on what the hotel website calls a “luminous white sand beach framed with the majestic turquoise waters of the Caribbean.” Fattah’s longtime friend James P. Baker Jr. was paid as much as $142,000 annually to run the organization, far more than usual for charities of that size. One federal audit said students on one trip spent “less than half” their time learning about the environment.
Thanks to Mike in Ardmore for the tip. When President Herman Cain appoints me to my prestigious tropical island diplomatic gig, I’ll institute an “environmental education” program for bloggers.
DES MOINES, Iowa — Friday, I visited the Iowa HQs of the Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain presidential campaigns, and then attended a Christian music festival in West Des Moines where Bachmann spoke.
Bachmann poses for a photo with a boy and his frog.
Bachmann poses for a photo with a family. The man in the background with the white beards is part of her security detail.
Bachmann shakes hands with a young admirer.
It was pouring rain most of the day at the Midwest Spirit Christian Music Festival, and these teenagers were covered in mud. On purpose.
Front door of Herman Cain’s Iowa campaign headquarters in Urbandale.
Michele Bachmann’s Iowa campaign HQ is right across the street from Cain HQ. Her bus was preparing to depart for an event in Dexter.
Reflecting the stakes of the straw poll, Santorum told the Friday night dinner crowd of about 400 activists the event would narrow the field and he urged them to give his struggling campaign a boost. He accused the media of ignoring him because he would be the strongest GOP candidate.
Let’s hope that Santorum’s rivals have the necessary sense of irony to appreciate that claim.
My next byline will be filed from somewhere on the road. My plan at this point — and plans may change en route — is to spend tonight in Sioux City, 200 miles west of here. Herman Cain’s bus tour begins Monday in Sioux City, and his advance team is arriving there tonight.
Let’s try the Santorum method: The media is ignoring me, so hit the freaking tip jar.
Via Insty, MIT’s Technology Review points to a McAfee article about governments getting hacked.
The attacks stretch back almost five years, and ranged in duration from one month to 28 months. They affected 32 types of organizations, including government agencies and defense, construction, information technology, and accounting firms.
McAfee believes the attacks were orchestrated by a nation-state, but it has not named that country.
I won’t hazard a guess, but if I had to, I’d throw out some place whose name rhymes with ‘vagina’.
This post will argue that the threat of hacking is the second greatest thing, after elections, for trimming the irrationally exhuberant growth of government. You see, when it comes to implementing the Iron Law of Bureaucracy what you see is increasingly deep hierarchies. The org charts go on for days. Organizations are all about controlling information flow, setting up patronage relationships where certain boxes on the org chart are choke points. People in the boxes control information to store up power and breed their own bureaucracies, in the fashion of a jungle.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.–Oscar Wilde
Well crafted information systems are Agent Orange to the bureaucratic jungle. Transparent, flat, unambiguous, reliable information delivered by software renders all that peopleware in the org chart completely moot. When the data are readily available, more work is accomplished, and it’s all over but the retirement party for the bureaucratic deadwood.
Which is precisely why the bureaucracy is fighting so hard to entrench. Arguably the most detestable example is Nancy Pelosi on ObamaCare:
“But we have to pass the [health care ] bill so that you can find out what is in it.”
No, you Botox-addled bimbo, that is precisely the opposite of the desired result.
And hacking is precisely, if illegally, what is going to drive the Pelosis out. The capacity to blow smoke up the public backside is diminished when email and websites spread the perfidy far and wide. Hacking off government fingers will prove a harsh, but effective, way of keeping them out of the economic pie. The government is going to be forced to focus on legitimate, core functions, and perform them more more transparently, as more and more data leak out. Government hasn’t been forced to conduct public business in a forthright manner, but increasing attention from taxpayers is going to drive precisely that. When people are asking questions, the simplest, most honest approach becomes the most defensible.
One real avenue for improvement along these lines will be the tax code. If the threat of exposure for private information is significant enough, maybe we’ll get around to the idea that income tax really sucks, and set about funding government through less intrusive means. Making the formulae for calculating tax burdens more transparent and public would seem an obvious improvement. The notion that we’re paying for service through taxation, but not privileged to see the business rules, is baffling. If I buy an application from Microsoft, and their proffered license hides the source code from me, well, fine: there are other vendors. Government, not so much. We need to amend this attitude that the Government regularly says ‘no’ to taxpayers without a national security basis for saying no.
So, while I’m not encouraging illegal activity, I’m saying that hacking will not be without positive side-effects for liberty.
