Political Commentary, War Commentary

Outlaw Regimes

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They should be toppled:

We should respond in scale to violations of international law, whether at our expense or not, and opportunistically move to make an example of such regimes when they so mismanage their affairs as to lose control of their own countries. When these awful governments can be eliminated easily, do it. Instead, we have helped destabilize and bring down the Shah of Iran, President Mubarak of Egypt, and President Musharraf of Pakistan, who were allies, however far removed they may have been from replicating the state of Connecticut or the kingdom of Denmark in their own affairs. And we have given the ayatollahs a pass for a brutally stolen election in Iran and waffled inelegantly for years over Syria. This, of course, summarizes the contrasting errors of the George W. Bush and Obama administrations: Bush stumbled into nation-building and Obama has tried and failed to make deals with Iran and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.

In terms of foreign policy, the Bush administration’s biggest failing was that there seemed to be no strategy once Saddam was removed, when he should have taken the opportunity to pressure the mullahs in Iran. And the Obama administration’s naive approach to Tehran has been worse than feckless.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Whistleblower Hearing

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Seven things we learned. Too bad we couldn’t learn it before the election.

[Update a few minutes later]

And the Pentagon continues to stonewall.

[Update a few more minutes later]

The Benghazi patsy:

A violation of probation, though, usually produces a court summons and doesn’t typically lead to more jail time unless it involves an offense that would be worth prosecuting in its own right under federal standards. Not for Nakoula.

This wasn’t a case of nailing Al Capone on tax evasion. As Nina Shea of the Hudson Institute points out, Al Capone’s underlying offense was racketeering and gangland killings. Nakoula Basseley Nakoula’s underlying offense wasn’t an underlying offense. He exercised his First Amendment rights.

His case has symbolic significance in the ongoing battle over whether the Muslim world will embrace modernity, and the panoply of freedoms associated with it, or whether it will continue to slide backward by adopting blasphemy laws punishing expressions deemed offensive to Islam. The administration has been dismayingly willing to accommodate the latter tendency. Nakoula’s jail time appears indistinguishable from what the 56-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation, devoted to pushing blasphemy laws around the world, calls “deterrent punishment” for “Islamophobia.”

His video, which did spark violent protests in the Muslim world by the kind of people who are looking for an excuse to protest, should have been an object lesson in freedom. Obama should have explained that our culture is full of disreputable film directors and producers. Some of them are even honored by the Academy.

Instead, Nakoula ended up the patsy in a tawdry coverup.

They had to maintain the narrative. As Glenn says, House investigators need to subpoena any communications between Washington and the local law enforcement in LA. Maybe we can find a whistleblower in the sheriff’s office.

Business, Economics, Health, Political Commentary

Hospital Costs

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Why the huge variation? It’s because of the huge disconnect between the consumer and provider. When a third party pays, all transparency, and need for it, is lost. As Glenn writes:

You could do more for real cost control by requiring hospitals to publish fixed prices for most procedures than from any amount of bureaucratic fiddling — though such an approach would provide disappointingly few opportunities for graft.

When I got my hernia fixed last year, I didn’t just shop doctors, I shopped surgery facilities and even anesthesiologists. Because I was paying for it.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Roy Spencer

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World’s greatest scientist?

Well, I wouldn’t go that far, but he’s certainly head and shoulders above most of the climate crowd:

Texas A&M has a large atmospheric sciences department. On their website there are 22 tenured and tenure track faculty. What is really unusual about the department is that all the regular faculty are seemingly required to sign a global warming loyalty oath called the climate change statement. Every faculty member except one new arrival has signed. None of the lowly adjunct faculty’s names appear.

The Texas A&M atmospheric sciences department is part of the College of Geosciences. That college also houses the department of Geology and Geophysics that operates practically as a satellite of the Texas energy industry. Texas A&M has a large endowment, heavily invested in energy industries, and of course, the revenue of the state of Texas is heavily dependent on carbon burning energy industries. There are strange bedfellows in the Texas A&M College of Geosciences.

Andrew Dessler wrote his paper attacking Spencer’s paper. It zoomed through peer review in 19 days, a remarkable speed record. It was published in Geophysical Research Letters, a favored journal of the global warming establishment.

It probably didn’t matter what Dessler’s paper said or how objective it was. All that really mattered is that the climate establishment could say to the world of media and politics that Roy Spencer had been refuted. Spencer had a response on his website within 24 hours of receiving a preprint of the paper. One problem for the establishment is that Dessler is prone to go a bit wobbly and lose focus as to the main task. The main task is making skeptics like Roy Spencer look like incompetent idiots. Dessler entered into a dialog with Spencer and accepted suggestions from Spencer to correct errors and otherwise improve the paper attacking Spencer himself. Spencer felt this was a great step forward from establishment figures ignoring him or taking potshots from afar.

The global warming scientific establishment is starting to look like the final days of the Soviet Union. On the surface it appears impregnable and the dissidents are a minor problem. But the huge soviet edifice quickly collapsed when people lost their fear of the system and the functionaries stopped following orders. There came a point when everyone decided to stop living a lie. I can’t believe, for example, that every faculty member at Texas A&M is really happy about signing a climate loyalty oath.

I think the collapse may be nigh.

Education, Philosophy, Political Commentary

Those Nutjob Founding Fathers

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Obama tells students, hey, don’t sweat this tyranny stuff. Big Brother Barack loves you!

As others point out, this experiment in self government was born from a justified fear and rejection of tyranny. Yeah, what would George Washington, John Adams or James Madison know about tyranny? And then there’s this wingnut:

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and those will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

Man, that black guy, Fred Douglas, must be one of those crazy militia types.

Jonah has more thoughts:

I like America’s instinctual fear of tyranny. It is single best bulwark against, you know, tyranny. It’s a bipartisan tendency by the way. Conservatives tend to fret most over government exceeding its Constitutional authority to encroach on civil society. The left tends to fret over excesses in the government’s constitutional obligation to protect our citizens from crime and foreign threats. Libertarians have an abundance of both concerns. Not surprisingly, I tend to find the left’s excesses more annoying than the right’s (“Oh no, the state is trying too hard to fight our enemies!”) but both instincts are healthy and shared to one extent or another by all Americans. It is the fundamental dogma of Americanness and I for one would hate to see it erode further.

It’s just another facet of the president’s lack of understanding of the founding principles, and his deep aversion to limited government and Constitutional principles.

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