Libertyblog

A Bounty on Furriners

Snakes, that is.

Stay Classy

Occupiers disrupt anti-abortion rallies. I guess they don’t want the 99% becoming the 99.5%.

We Don’t Need Newt Debating Obambi, ...

... we just need a video of Milton Friedman.

Occupiers Rejected ...

... in Sodom-by-the-Sea.

Not Just Desperate, Dumb

Let’s hear from the world’s most highly-paid historian:

Newt Gingrich laid a stark attack on his rival in the run-up to Florida’s “winner -take-all” Republican presidential primary Tuesday, accusing Mitt Romney of being no different than President Obama and suggesting the frontrunner will be a threat to religious freedom.

As Romney seeks to tighten his grip on the Republican presidential nomination, charging ahead by double-digits in most late polling in Florida, Gingrich told Fox News on Monday that Romney’s decision while Massachusetts governor to cut Medicaid funding for health care services that benefited Jewish and Catholic facilities demonstrated that he has little respect for religion. He added that the trend is for a secular state assault on people of faith.

“I think Governor Romney is extraordinarily insensitive to religious freedom in America and the Obama administration is clearly engaged in a war on religion,” said Gingrich, a converted Catholic.

Okay, so the Mormon is “insensitive to religious freedom in America”?

What’s So Funny?

Many a true thing is said in jest:

In what may be the strangest market indicator ever, a blogger found that the amount of laughter recorded in the official transcripts of Federal Reserve Open Market Committee meetings from 2000 to 2006 correlates almost perfectly with the rise in housing prices taking place at the time.

A particular series of side-splitting meetings by the central bank in 2006 marked the very top of the housing bubble.

The blog, The Daily Stag Hunt, tracked the times “laughter” was recorded by the Fed’s stenographer during the FOMC meetings. In 2001, the FOMC averaged 16.5 moments of guffaws per meeting. In 2006, there were, on average, 44 outbreaks of laughter.

(Via Drudge.)

Not the Wealthiest One Percent ...

... of secretaries, the most misleading one percent of bosses—and cheap!

No Global Warming in Ten Fifteen Years

And the punchline [emphasis added]:

[T]he data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit.

Eating Our Young

Will Allen West be gerrymandered out of Congress and onto Fox News?

Tomorrow’s Forecast

Ninety percent chance of politics based on half-assed science.

“My Parents Came to America Looking for Freedom and Opportunity, and Now America Is Starting to Look Like the Country My Parents Fled”

And there’s no place left to run.

Shameful, But Inevitable

Juan Williams on Fox News Sunday described as one of Mitt Romney’s political problems “the fact that he’s got assets hidden in the Cayman Islands.”

Juan, Libertyblog said without belittling him, one doesn’t hide assets by listing them on one’s tax forms.

Of course, Romney asked for this.

Populist Plutocrats

Victor Davis Hanson:

The problem with President Obama’s us-vs.-them fairness campaign is that the Democratic technocracy that runs the redistributionist state is so deeply embedded within the One Percent that it is impossible to hide the hypocrisies. Today’s Big Money is not the staid GM and IBM of the ’60s, but the hipper Wall Street and Silicon Valley where millionaires can still wear the same sort of clothes, listen to the same sort of music, and adopt the same sort of platitudes as the left-wing counterculture of Occupy Wall Street. Without that veneer of coolness, someone who milked Freddie, Fannie, or Citigroup would be reduced to an Enron- or Halliburton-style caricature.

This week we heard that consumer populist and Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren is, by both net worth and salary, part of the One Percent herself — as well as a past consultant to insurance companies seeking to avoid litigant claims. All three of Barack Obama’s chiefs of staff were Wall Streeters; all three made their Wall Street millions in very little time; two had some sort of association with Freddie and Fannie. Peter Orszag of both OMB and Citigroup is emblematic of the technocratic class’s revolving door between “public service” and ever more enhanced billets back on Wall Street. And, fairly or not, even good handlers cannot keep Michelle Obama’s taste for the aristocratic life of high fashion out of the press.

George Will Enlists

He joins Jonah Goldberg on the barricades against Obambi’s militarization of civil society.

Reading Libertyblog’s Mind

Don’t recall if I’ve blogged about it, but Adam Carolla is on my wavelength:

Were Carolla to design the tax system, “you should get one vote for every $10,000 you pay in taxes,” he says.

I’d settle for electing the Senate that way.

Did Occupiers Break the Law?

No, it was a “violent splinter group”!

Implausible

In Indiana:

Indiana’s top elections official is himself facing allegations of voter fraud.

Secretary of State Charlie White, a Republican, is in the unusual position of being the person entrusted to protect the integrity of the ballot box, while at the same time fighting seven felony charges involving allegations he registered to vote at his ex-wife’s house and served as a local councilman when he actually lived outside the district.

[...]

White has claimed he spent four nights a week living at the home of his ex-wife, Nicole Mills, because his then-fiancee, and now wife, Michelle Quigley White, did not want them to live together until they were married.

Ah yes, traditional values: We can’t live together until we’re married, so you go shack up with your ex.

Thought for the Day

Is the new not-Romney alternative a brokered convention? Imagine if Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul promised to (a) stay in the primaries to the end and (b) not accept the nomination themselves. We’d see the wildest political fight of our lifetimes. Filing deadlines wouldn’t matter, any GOP pol could jump into the race. Dem opposition research would be paralyzed by uncertainty. Bring on the smoke-filled room!

Our Old Bias Is Inconsistent With Our Present Bias

NBC objects to Mitt Romney’s use of its video wherein Tom Brokaw announces the result of a Newt Gingrich ethics investigation. The story was accurate, it is clearly presented as news reporting, not Brokaw’s personal opinion, and at least one NBC affiliate is airing the ad. But anything which might help the nominee most likely to unseat The One get the GOP nomination must be wrong. (Via Drudge.)

Spartan Exceptionalism

Jonah Goldberg demonstrates that he understands our military better than its Commander-in-Chief does:

President Obama’s State of the Union address was disgusting.

The president began with a moving tribute to the armed forces and their accomplishments. But as he has done many times now, he celebrated martial virtues not to rally support for the military, but to cover himself in glory — he killed Osama bin Laden! — and to convince the American people that they should fall in line and march in lockstep.

He said of the military: “At a time when too many of our institutions have let us down, they exceed all expectations. They’re not consumed with personal ambition. They don’t obsess over their differences. They focus on the mission at hand. They work together. Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example. Think about the America within our reach.”

That is disgusting.

What Obama is saying, quite plainly, is that America would be better off if it wasn’t America any longer. He’s making the case not for American exceptionalism, but for Spartan exceptionalism.

It’s far worse than anything George W. Bush, the supposed warmonger, ever said. Bush, the alleged fascist, didn’t want to militarize our free country; he tried to use our military to make militarized countries free.

Indeed, Obama is upending the very point of a military in a free society. We have a military to keep our society free. We do not have a military to teach us the best way to give up our freedom. Our warriors surrender their liberties and risk their lives to protect ours. The promise of American life for Obama is that if we all try our best and work our hardest, we can be like a military unit striving for a single goal. I’ve seen pictures of that from North Korea. No thank you, Mr. President.

I’m reminded of my job interview with Ed Crane at the Cato Institute. Military retirees aren’t thick on the ground there, and he seemed a little surprised to be meeting with one. I told him that the American military is the “authoritarian means to libertarian ends.” (I got the job.)

Most of our military members, like Cincinnatus, dream of some day laying down the sword and returning to the plow. Anything else would be dangerous.

Let’s Clear This Up

When Newt Gingrich attacked Ronald Reagan’s anti-Communist policies as “failures” in 1986, he wasn’t calling Reagan a closet Commie, he was saying the policies were weak tea, doomed to fall short. But Gingrich was demonstrably wrong; the Soviet Union collapsed. Now he’s been called on it, and the only response of his defenders is to claim he’s been quoted out of context by people out to defeat him. He hasn’t been. Rich Lowry elaborates.

He Might Want to Elaborate Next Time

Mitt Romney, when he wasn’t being pilloried for saying he likes to be able to fire poor performers, was pilloried for saying corporations are people. The consequence of that legal precept is an enormous tax rate:

This is ironically the embodiment of the “corporate personhood” legal doctrine otherwise so decried by the left. The law taxes corporations as if they were separate beings from the shareholders who own them and then levies a separate tax on shareholder payouts and gains. This double taxation brings the effective tax rate on investment income to as much as 44.75%.

(Via InstaPundit.)

Wingmen

In September I wrote that I was “never prouder” of my alma mater—yes, that includes the NCAA hockey championship (suck on that, MIT!)—then after Professor Emeritus and Nobel laureate Ivar Giaever smacked the global warmalists around a bit.

He has some company now, sixteen distinguished scientists and engineers:

In spite of a multidecade international campaign to enforce the message that increasing amounts of the “pollutant” carbon dioxide will destroy civilization, large numbers of scientists, many very prominent, share the opinions of Dr. Giaever. And the number of scientific “heretics” is growing with each passing year. The reason is a collection of stubborn scientific facts.

Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 “Climategate” email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” But the warming is only missing if one believes computer models where so-called feedbacks involving water vapor and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO2.

The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2.

[...]

If elected officials feel compelled to “do something” about climate, we recommend supporting the excellent scientists who are increasing our understanding of climate with well-designed instruments on satellites, in the oceans and on land, and in the analysis of observational data. The better we understand climate, the better we can cope with its ever-changing nature, which has complicated human life throughout history. However, much of the huge private and government investment in climate is badly in need of critical review.

Every candidate should support rational measures to protect and improve our environment, but it makes no sense at all to back expensive programs that divert resources from real needs and are based on alarming but untenable claims of “incontrovertible” evidence.