Stupid question: where was this information in 2008? How poorly can a candidate be vetted? (Hat tip: Michael Graham.)
Less
More
Zilla of the Resistance beautifully recounts growing up with Sherry Hayes. Hayes was stabbed to death by her husband, who then hung himself. Their four children are being cared for by family members. Zilla writes:
Sherry’s children are now orphans, and they will have to live with the horror of what happened forever. The kids are being cared for by relatives now, and a trust fund has been set up to help them. What has happened to these kids is beyond what anyone should ever have to endure. The relatives who are grieving for Sherry are now the guardians of four severely traumatized kids and will be dealing with the consequences of this real life nightmare for many years to come; you can help to at least alleviate one burden for them – money – by contributing any amount you can spare to the address below:
The Hayes Children Trust
P.O. Box 644
North Bellmore NY 11710
Please lift this family up in your prayers along with all of Sherry’s friends who are mourning their beloved friend, and please help to spread the word about the trust fund to help Sherry’s innocent children at this incredibly heart breaking and difficult time. Thank you.
How horrible for those four children and their family.
Jay Cost explains how the Democrats and liberals have turned to “clientelism” as a method of governance: giving groups special goodies in exchange for votes. (Hat tip.) Cost writes,
The problem, though, is that once the door was opened to this brand of clientelism, it could never again be closed. Over the decades, the Democrats have added scores of clients to their operation: trade and industrial unions, African Americans, environmentalists, feminists, govern-ment unions, consumer rights advo-cates, big business, and big city bosses and their lieutenants. All of them are with the Democratic party in part because of the special benefits it promises them when in office, and all have a major say in how the party behaves in government. With more and more clients who needed constant tending, it became harder and harder for subsequent Democratic leaders to focus on the public good. Thus, in the years since FDR’s tenure, the Democratic agenda has looked less like republican liberalism and more like clientele liberalism—big government activism not for the sake of the whole country, but for the sake of the voters whom the Democrats privilege.
Contemplate that while reading this article at CNN: 2011 Census indicates that a majority of babies born are of a minority race. The article is full of ridiculous, upbeat, “embrace the melting pot” garbage (as if Americans had not been doing so since before there was an America), but very little is said about the economic changes that will result from this.
The more “minorities” there are, the harder it is to give them benefits paid for by the majority. That is because it becomes exponentially more expensive to give a financial benefit to a linearly increasing share of the population.
If you are lucky enough to live in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, or Nevada, or are silly enough to live in California, you can spend your Sunday watching the first annular eclipse (when the moon blocks out most of the sun) in eighteen years.
Contrariwise, if you live in Massachusetts, it will be harder for you to get ice cream this summer. The Department of Conservation and Recreation shut down a popular ice cream stand in a state park after it made renovations. (Hat tip.)
“I like ice cream as much as anybody, so it pains us to even temporarily close what is an iconic property, but we have to make sure people eating ice cream there are safe,” said [Edward] Lambert.
Since the state didn’t manage to ban bake sales, it is working on banning ice cream.
Moving right along: Georgia Tech professors are using Markov chains to improve the timing of the bus routes. No word yet on whether the MBTA will adopt such for the Green Line.
Or maybe the MBTA could use it for the Silver Line, the buses of which are used for secret, no-stop trips from the Convention Center to Logan Airport.
The FBI, with its extensive, real-world business experience, will investigate JPMorgan – JPMorgan, which has more than enough assets to absorb the $2 billion loss and will still end the quarter will a several-billion dollar profit.
On the subject of banks, the Greek nation, contrite over its profligacy, gave a gift of a large horse to the European Central Bank.
In the latest installment (okay, on the second, but you get the idea) of “Keep your eyes on the ball, kids,” this blogger will reveal the newest distraction of the media, Obama Administration, and the Left: JP Morgan’s $2 billion loss, Dimon’s $23 million pay package, and the regulation of large banks.
Okay, I can hear you all now: Roxe! That’s not a distraction, that’s a big freaking huge deal. That’s two billion, with a b!, dollars!
Yes, $2 billion is a lot of money. But let’s do some math. The federal government alone spent $3.6 trillion last year. Ergo, the federal government spends about $10 billion per day. If you go to bed at midnight and wake up at six am, the federal government spent more money while you were sleeping than JP Morgan lost in the latest debacle.
If the government were to cut its spending by a measly 2%, we could have a JP Morgan-type loss every other week and still come out ahead. The Obama Administration deficits are roughly seven hundred times as high as JP Morgan’s loss – as in, Obama has run more of a deficit since Sunday morning than JP Morgan has with this mess – a deficit of our money, not money that we voluntarily invested (or voluntarily did not invest) with a private company.
Think of this the next time someone complains about the free market or the need for more government regulation. Bring this up any time someone justifies “more spending” “for the children.” Bring it up whenever someone suggests that Scott Brown ought to return his campaign donations from JPMorgan employees.
Update: more from Jonathan Adler of the Volokh Conspiracy.
So went financial advice from Papa de Luca.
S.L. Bathgate’ s essay on spending in her twenties typifies the opposite mentality. (Hat tip: Instapundit.) As she forthrightly says,
Everyone has his or her own very personal and unique relationship with money. Looking back on my twenties, I realized that I spent my money mainly because I wanted to feel richer than I actually was. This single desire was probably the most fundamental problem I had with money during my twenties, and admittedly, it is one that I still struggle with today.
Yep. That’s a common feeling. Ms. Bathgate does a lovely job of explaining how and why she got to that point, but what she doesn’t really talk about is how her parents’ lifestyle compared with their means.
One of the things that shook the foundations of my “middle-class” world was finding out exactly how much my parents earn. (Hello, “evil 1%”!) If they earn that much, buy used cars and drive them until they die, eat only a handful of fancy dinners a year, drink $12 bottles of champagne on special occasions, and only get on a plane for vacation every few years, then who am I, with earnings a small fraction of theirs, to live it up?
Of course, this put me at odds with my peers, especially pre-recession. There was a “Get Roxe to buy a new car and stop driving her ’91 Volvo” movement, but, as I pointed out, no car payments plus cheap insurance and repairs I could do myself – what’s not to love?
That said, cars are a personal thing, whereas socialising is a group thing. The other untouched landmine in frugality is being frugal when your friends (or boyfriends) aren’t focused on paying down debt and saving for their retirements. Amongst twenty-somethings, there seems to be this idea that if you have money, you can spend it, and it’s hard to explain that yes, you have the cash sitting in your bank account, you have no balance on your two credit cards, but you really don’t want to spend $100 on a fairly routine Friday night.
This isn’t to say that I’ve been financially perfect – far from it – but I got much more frugal when I viewed refusing to spend money that I have as an investment in myself and my sanity.
Ann Althouse smacks down Rebecca Traister (via Instapundit and The Other McCain). The incoherent Traister wrote thus:
The image of the feminist as a mirthless, hirsute, sex-averse succubus is a friendly-fire casualty of the Republican “war on women.” It’s a grave loss to conservatives, who have used this faithful foot soldier as a comfortably grotesque stand-in for the real people whose liberties they have sought to conscribe: women.
While y’all are reverting to the extra-credit portion of your seventh-grade English exams and parsing those sentences, I’m going to rant a bit.
Yes, it is wrong, evil, and mean of people, especially men, to judge the validity of a woman’s politics by the way she looks. However, that hardly gives anyone license to turn their own neuroses into a political movement, or an attempt at one thereof (See: Occupy Wall Street). Traister also ignores the very real ways in which her favoured political party aligns with the right-wing “caricature” thereof:
In a famous 1992 fundraising letter, television evangelist Pat Robertson described feminism as a movement that “encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians,”
Traister writes. To which we must ask: does not leftist feminism discourage marriage, promote abortion, despise Christianity, adore socialism, and claim the mantle of “LGBTQ rights”? Is there anything about the modern liberal movement that is pro-traditional marriage, pro-life, pro-Christianity (or Muslim, or Judiasm), and pro-capitalism? Isn’t the entire premise of the “war on women” that traditional morality, pro-life messages, self-reliance, and religion are hostile to women and feminism?
As much fun as it is to fisk Traister over her use of “sex-averse succubus,” is that not a perfect description of lefty feminism? Traister brags about Sandra Fluke’s robust bedroom life – thus, “succubus” would be somewhat apt – but Traister also believes that Justice Clarence Thomas terrorised Anita Hill with his sexual mojo (or whatever it is that Hill’s backers believe). In the mind of a liberal woman, sex exists for a woman’s pleasure only, and the pleasure and drives of their (sometimes) male partners are considered ancillary to the whole endeavour.
If Stacy McCain truly wanted to celebrate Offend a Feminist Week, he would have told these “empowered” chickies that their male partners actually enjoy getting laid, and any woman who puts out for “I would go halfsies with you on the abortion” is not having a spiritual experience with a highly evolved male; she’s a cheap lay, a fool, or both. The “sex-averse succubus” is a being who inherently despises authentic sexuality – the loving gift of self to another that can create new life – but sees sexual activity as a selfish end, hateful of the life that may be created, and contemptuous of the wiring, emotions, and needs of one’s partner.
Reality is that “sex-averse succubus” is a reasonably good description of sluts who pretend that their partners lack sexual desire, just as Robertson’s description of the modern left’s version of feminism is eerily accurate.
Update: These people get bent out of shape over a cute, flirty M&M’s character. (Hat tip.) But we aren’t supposed to point out that the very same women who think of nothing but sex and abortion are also the same women who freak out at the idea that men have sex drives.
First: I applaud anyone who tries to do their best by their child. Women who resist the temptation to abort, who ignore the lie that a dead baby is better than a living baby who struggles, show the rest of the world that abortion is the most evil thing that can be done to a child.
That said, Michele Weldon’s article for CNN is nothing more than anti-child, anti-social garbage aimed at making adults feel good about themselves, at the expense of the very real needs of their children. It has been demonstrated, ad nauseum, that non-adopted children do the best when their parents are married to each other. Widows and widowers do a fine job of raising kids. Third to those scenarios is parents who are married when the child is born, but divorce thereafter. By far the worst situation for a child is to be raised by a parent who never married his other parent.
Yet Weldon wants to “focus… on the kids who succeed.” You may as well dose children with cocaine and “focus on the children who manage rehab successfully,” as if such makes it acceptable to drug the children. Yes, children from horrific circumstances do manage to succeed, and some tough parents do a fantastic job without another parent around. That does not change the fact – the absolutely incontrovertible fact – that never-married parenthood is horrible for children. “Focus[ing] on the kids who succeed” takes the focus away from the best way to get kids to succeed: be married when they are born.
Weldon also elides that point and focuses on “single” parents, as if parents who were married to each other and then divorced, or lost a spouse to death, raise the same type of kids as parents who never bothered to get married in the first place. This is plainly wrong, and is akin to the business of lumping all “immigrants” together, as if the computer engineering Ph.D. on a visa will have a similar outcome to an illegal immigrant with an eighth-grade education.
Stacy McCain asks if lefties who host Planned Parenthood fundraisers on Mother’s Day have no sense of irony or shame. Probably both; I’ve often said that a working definition of a modern liberal is someone with no sense of irony.
That said, by the perverse logic of the pro-abortion movement, a pregnant woman is not a mother: after all, she doesn’t have a baby in her womb. Therefore, if she’s not a mother, she can’t be a bad mother by killing her child. She can even abort to be a good mother: a mother who “plans her pregnancies” for an optimal time in her life (and a happy, successful mother means a happier, more successful baby, right?), or “plans her family” so that she can devote maximum attention to a child or children that she already has.
Of course, that rationale doesn’t work with born children: “I’m going to kill the youngest of you so that the rest of you can go to private college and I can return to work!” is the stuff of horror films and tragic plays, not to mention something that would freak out and permanently scar the other kids.
This is the time for pro-lifers to reiterate that carrying an unplanned pregnancy to term, in bad circumstances, doesn’t make you a bad mother; having an abortion doesn’t undo or delay motherhood; and killing your unborn child only makes the mother of a baby dead by your own hand. Likewise, a male who pushes a woman for abortion isn’t trying to “plan” his fatherhood; he is a father who is infinitely worse than any parent who doesn’t pay child support or visit the kids.
That leads me to wonder what would happen if men were to hold a “how to get your girlfriend to abort” seminar on Father’s Day, or distribute funds for the killing of children that a man does not want.
The Institute for Justice’s Dick Carpenter and Lisa Knepper discuss onerous and absurd occupational licensing schemes. (Hat tip: Instapundit.) Regarding some of the more absurd licensing schemes:
Are all these regulatory barriers to entry really necessary to protect public safety or prevent consumers from shoddy work, as defenders of occupational licensure claim? Regulatory inconsistencies from state to state undermine this argument.
The vast majority of jobs we studied are done in one state or another by people without any government-issued license. Interior designers are licensed in just three states and the District of Columbia, for example, funeral attendants in only nine states, and shampooers in a mere five states. We know of no evidence that consumers in the remaining states demanded occupational licenses to protect them from an epidemic of dangerous shampooing.
Guild members, whoops, I mean, members of highly dangerous professions, justify licensing schemes as a means to protect the public. Licensing a physician? Sensible. Ensuring that attorneys are not convicted felons? Fair enough. But even in those fields, licensing regulations can be absurd. The Virginia State Bar can deny admission to anyone who is delinquent on bill payments, as but one example. The background checks are akin to those that I went through to obtain a high-level security clearance back in my engineering days – but those background checks must be passed before someone can close a real estate deal for clients.
In a more logical world, government licensing of most professions (e.g. acupuncture, interior design, cosmetology, auctioneering) would operate as a seal of approval, rather than a complete bar to working in that field. The last thing that anyone needs in this economy is to spend time and money obtaining an expensive license from the government, the sole purpose of which is often to prop up the salaries of those already in the field at the expense of potential competitors.
Since the 1950s, the percentage of workers who need an occupational license for their field has grown by a factor of six. Query whether consumers are even close as six times as safe from fraud, abuse, misfeasance, and malfeasance as they were sixty years ago.
Michigan, thanks to the wonderful Rick Snyder, may become one of those more logical places. Snyder’s administration is contemplating the deregulation of eighteen different industries, such as interior design, community planning, and auctioneering.
Recent Comments