He'll never live it down

One step forward, two steps back.

Human shields

The IRS commissioner has been canned.

Maggie's Farm is having fun with this one, but it's truly an eerie video:

 

Who can keep them straight?

Guy Benson at HotAir asks: "But why did Lois Lerner secretly monitor Susan Rice’s talking points for two months before trying to coerce a 'donation'?"

If the right people don't have power . . . .

Now you're talking my language

I visited FireDogLake out of curiosity to see whether they would acknowledge the Gosnell story (no, of course not), and was amused to see they're talking like Tea Partiers in the wake of the DOJ AP wiretap scandal.  They're passionately discussing limited government and traditional Constitutional values.  One of them quoted this passage from Justice Brandeis in the 1928 Olmstead case:

The makers of our Constitution … sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone—the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilized men. 

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent.  Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers.  The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding. 

If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy … to declare that the Government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal—would bring terrible retribution.” 

Justice Louis Brandeis,
dissenting in
Olmstead v. United States,
277 U.S. 438,
June 4, 1928

Bad week for anti-conspiracy theorists

Also from a Hoyt commenter:  what the week feels like in some corners.

Getting up off the floor (minor version)

One of Ms. Hoyt's readers recounted this story about a man who, in his small way, stood up for reasonable principles at his office (see Robin Munn reply at May 14 1:13pm).

The day after Andrew Breitbart died, this guy saw a coworker (of the 20-something hipster-liberal variety) wearing a Che T-shirt.  Normally, he said, he would have brushed it off, but after losing Andrew and seeing all the “Breitbart is here” and “Be Breitbart” slogans that were popping up, he decided to say something.  The Che T-shirt guy didn’t take it kindly, and got a few of his hipster-liberal buddies to complain to HR, and an anonymous email (which later proved to have been from a liberal-leaning HR person) got distributed widely among the Ace of Spades commenter (hereafter called AoS guy)’s group—WAY more widely than company policy said it should have.  AoS guy immediately stopped driving his nice car to work and started driving his junky car, which proved to be wise because a few days later, someone slashed his tires in the parking lot.  He reported this fact to HR (to someone he was pretty sure was NOT the person who sent out the anonymous email).

The upshot, described in more detail at Hoyt's site, is that more sensible people in this financial company got wind of the situation and were unhappy with the first HR person's flagrant violation of company policy re the privacy of HR disputes—enough so to fire him.  Management also assigned AofS guy a young bodyguard to take him to and from his parking spot.  Presently the bodyguard witnessed some guys trying to spraypaint a message on the car, broke the vandal group up, and received minor injuries.  Fortunately, he also took down the escaping car's license plate, which proved to have an indirect connection to Che guy, though not enough to get him fired.

Now, AofS guy and Che guy worked in the same division, with Che guy on a different team, one that happened to have poor results.  The company reassigned Che guy's team leader and replaced him with AofS guy, with explicit directions to let go anyone he thought necessary to improve the poor team results.  Did he immediately fire Che guy?  No, he said he wanted to give him a fair shake and judge by the numbers, not the personalities.  His attitude so impressed other team members, including Che guy's running buddies, that one of them upped her game and improved her performance.  Che guy, on the other hand, improved nothing and in fact quit before he could be fired, crowing that he'd now get unemployment benefits.  (Actually, by quitting he forfeited them.)  AosS guy then called the remaining team together to announce that the numbers were now so improved that no one else faced a layoff.   Meanwhile, AofS guy became good friends with the bodyguard and even better friends with the bodyguard's highly eligible older sister.

As the commenter notes:

So go ahead and stand up for your beliefs — you never know WHAT might happen.

Hearing voices

Biggest difference?  One of them had enough class to resign.

I can't do better than Jim Geraghty on this week's news:

When there is evidence of scandalous or bizarre behavior on the part of a political figure, and no reasonable explanation is revealed within 24 to 48 hours, then the truth is probably as bad as everyone suspects. 

Nobody withholds exculpatory information.  Nobody who's been accused of something wrong waits for "just the right moment" to unveil information that proves the charge baseless.  Political figures never choose to deliberately let themselves twist in the wind.  It's not the instinctive psychological reaction to being falsely accused, it's not what any public communications professional would recommend, and to use one of our president's favorite justifications, it's just common sense.

As someone else said recently,

Unfortunately, you've grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that's at the root of all our problems.  Some of these same voices also do their best to gum up the works.  They'll warn that tyranny always lurking just around the corner.  You should reject these voices.

I should reject something, that's for sure.

The eighth deadly sin

Sarah Hoyt urges us to "Get up off the Floor":

And right now you’re going “It’s all done, we’re done, we—” 

Get up off the floor.   First, if you’re a believer, despair is a sin.  And if you’re not a believer, despair is spitting on the graves of all the men and women who fought in much worse conditions than you face.  The ghosts of Tiananmen Square rise up against you.  The men who in the Gulags carried a hope of freedom accuse you.  The victims of communism point fingers at you.   The millions of dead at the hands of marching statism would like to remind you that to give up is to die.  And that’s when you should give up.   Not a second earlier.

The government loans me my children

Here's a proposal so wrong-headed in so many ways I hardly know how to begin.  Kristin Wartman's NYT Op-ed observes that:

The home-cooked family meal is often lauded as the solution for problems ranging from obesity to deteriorating health to a decline in civility and morals.

Well!  That certainly identifies the high stakes.  What to do?  We're way too busy to cook, even those of us who stay home.  And it's expensive to buy fresh food!  We need affordability and convenience, but without sacrificing good looks, health, civility, or morals.   Fantasy economics comes to the rescue.   Remember in the early days of feminism the proposals for housewives to earn salaries?  Acknowledging that "[i]t’s nearly impossible for a single parent or even two parents working full time to cook every meal from scratch, planning it beforehand and cleaning it up afterward," Wartman notes that families "of means" just hire outsiders to take care of these problems.  But then what happens to the obese, unhealthy, uncivil, and immoral children of the paid housekeepers?

Something Must Be Done, and as usual, it takes the form of totally misunderstanding what salaries are for, as in "money that one person (or group) gives to another for performing a service that the first person (or group) values enough to pay money for it."  Here, it obviously wouldn't help much for the husband or the children to pay the wife a salary for putting a fresh, healthy dinner on the table and then washing the dishes.   Evidently it doesn't count that the husband deposits his salary into the household account and pays the bills.  What to do?   Somehow I knew it would involve tax subsidies, tax penalties, and the phrase "sugary foods," and Wartman did not disappoint:

Stay-at-home parents should qualify for a new government program while they are raising young children—one that provides money for good food, as well as education on cooking, meal planning and shopping—so that one parent in a two-parent household, or a single parent, can afford to be home with the children and provide wholesome, healthy meals.  These payments could be financed by taxing harmful foods, like sugary beverages, highly caloric, processed snack foods and nutritionally poor options at fast food and other restaurants.  Directly linking a tax on harmful food products to a program that benefits health would provide a clear rebuttal to critics of these taxes.  Business owners who argue that such taxes will hurt their bottom lines would, in fact, benefit from new demand for healthy food options and from customers with money to spend on such foods.

Progressives are so cute when they try to talk about market principles.  See, it makes sense for the taxpayers to pay mom's salary, because business owners benefit when families demand healthy food options at the store! Also, we need "workplace policies that incentivize health, like 'health days' that employees could use for health-promoting activities:  shopping for food, cooking, or tending a community garden."   I guess there's not much a family should supply for itself by deciding that it's important and paying for it with money the family brings in by doing valuable work for outsiders.  If it needs to be done at all, the taxpayers should fund it.  Probably best if the government mandates it, too, just to be sure, because you can never be sure that most parents will take care of their children out of love, duty, or simple self-interest.

One thing I don't understand is why the tax subsidy would be limited to families with young children.  Don't older children deserve to avoid obesity, illness, incivility, and immorality?  What about middle-aged people who don't have parents any more?

A Book Review Of Unusual Persuasiveness

It's rare that I read a review that very much makes me more (or less) inclined to read a book than I would have been just from knowing the book's title and genre, the author's qualifications, and its subject. But this sounds like a really good book.

Familiar steps, part two

How we get from here to there:  France is toying with Step 3 now.

(1) We want to spend more than we have.

(2) People who will get the goodies can outvote those who will pay for them.

(3) People who will pay for them start thinking about leaving.

(4) Build fences at the border, and make the gun turrets point in.

The taxman guideth

Terrific, if horrifying, analysis from Megan McArdle of how tax policy bankrupted a lot of pensions.

We just love using tax deductions to guide public policy.  Unfortunately, it always leads to making economic decisions on the basis of tax treatment rather than on the basis of rational economics.  Then the IRS has to step in and try to substitute its rules and judgment for the rational economics.  How many time does it have to fail?  If taxes were low enough, it wouldn't be necessary to have so many deductions for things like healthcare and retirement expenses, and there's never any need for the government to micromanage how people provide those things for themselves, either.

Don't be so cynical

More sequester fun:  the BLM cancels auctions of more than 3,000 acres of oil & gas leases on public land.  As the Wall Street Journal noted, that makes as much sense as unmanning toll booths and forgoing the income from drivers, citing budget cuts.  MacDonald's can save money by not selling hamburgers!  But, as the WSJ also notes, it makes perfect sense if the idea is to exert maximum pain, so as to build political pressure to stop the sequester, and to cripple the O&G industry in service of environmental orthodoxy as a bonus.  Meanwhile, President Obama advises us not to be cynical about government.

I'm not cynical about government.  I think government is the crowning glory of our social species, used for its right purposes.  I am cynical about our president.

This Is A Good Way To Support a Dentist

Apparently the French have picked up on Hank Williams III, without quite getting the culture that underlies the music.



H/t: Our brothers of the BSBFBs.

IRS apologizes for not politicizing tax-exempt org applications

On the plus side, the New York Times is actually covering this story.  On the other hand, is anybody really buying this explanation?

Lois Lerner, the director of the I.R.S. division that oversees tax-exempt groups, acknowledged that the agency had singled out nonprofit applicants with the terms “Tea Party” or “patriots” in their titles in an effort to respond to a surge in applications for tax-exempt status between 2010 and 2012.  She insisted that the move was not driven by politics, but she added, “We made some mistakes; some people didn’t use good judgment. . . .  For that we’re apologetic,” she told reporters on a conference call. . . .  But Ms. Lerner said the examinations of the Tea Party groups were not a response to [campaign watchdog activist] pressure.  She portrayed it more as a bureaucratic mix-up. . . .  Staff members at that office singled out the terms “Tea Party” and “patriot,” she said, but not out of political bias; it was “just their shortcut.”

That's All Right, We Find It Comforting To Be Proven Correct About You

The IRS issues an apology.

UPDATE: Powerline says of the story:

This is a shocking news story–one that would be a major scandal in a Republican administration–but...

Come off it. The "but..." gives it away. None of us are shocked by this. This is exactly what we expect from our government. That's why the President made his famous joke about it. It's funny because it's true, right?

We all always knew it was true.

It's Not Just The Gas Can

In an essay called "How Government Wrecked the Gas Can," writer Jeffrey Tucker describes the frustration of just trying to pour gasoline into a car. It's hard to do, not because we don't understand how to do it better, but because we aren't allowed to: gas cans are no longer permitted to have vents.

That sound of frustration in this guy’s voice was strangely familiar, the grumble that comes when something that used to work but doesn’t work anymore, for some odd reason we can’t identify.

I’m pretty alert to such problems these days. Soap doesn’t work. Toilets don’t flush. Clothes washers don’t clean. Light bulbs don’t illuminate. Refrigerators break too soon. Paint discolors. Lawnmowers have to be hacked. It’s all caused by idiotic government regulations that are wrecking our lives one consumer product at a time, all in ways we hardly notice.

It’s like the barbarian invasions that wrecked Rome, taking away the gains we’ve made in bettering our lives. It’s the bureaucrats’ way of reminding market producers and consumers who is in charge.

Let's talk not just about the gas can, but about the gasoline itself. The ability to store energy is at the basis of all our advances in civilization. The ability to produce more food than we could use and store it up was one of the things that enabled cities, with all the advances of philosophy and its products, mathematics and the early sciences. The ability to bring the energy stored in a rushing river to work brought us the mills that were such an amazing technical advance at their time. The ability to bring the energy stored in wood and coal to work in the steam engine enabled us to cross mountains and vast distances at speeds as fast as a horse could run, and faster, without tiring. And the internal combustion engine, and the gasoline that powers it, enabled us to fly.

More than that, it enabled us to be free in the literal sense. We could go where we wanted to go. We could do many things, as individuals, that we could not have done by ourselves before. With a chainsaw I can, by myself, fell a great oak and buck it into logs in part of an afternoon. There's enough stored energy in that tree to heat my home for a good part of a winter, but the only reason I can access it is the stored energy in the gasoline. The ability to bring that to bear on the work I need to do is what enables me to live as a free individual, outside of a city and in no larger a community than I want.

It used to be that gasoline was a kind of energy you could store. When I was a boy, we would have a gas can -- with a vent -- that had a few gallons inside of it in case we needed it around the place. It might be used for a lawnmower, or the tiller for our garden that excused us from owning a mule, or to mix up with fuel oil for a chainsaw.

These days you can't store gasoline for very long. Even with fuel stabilizers, the stuff will go start to go bad after about thirty days. It's not that we don't know how to make it better, so that we could store it up and use it when we liked. It's that we aren't allowed to do it.

The new stuff rots, partially turns into varnish. It'll burn so hot it will score your pistons, destroying the engine it was supposed to serve. Why? Because we said so.

Unnatural

One of those things that gets passed around:



Ought nature to be illegal? It might be a reasonable argument against the illegal status of cannabis, as opposed to (say) manufactured drugs such as methamphetamine or cocaine. On the other hand cyanide is all natural, and it's still good policy to at least advise people about the effects of its consumption.

Still, perhaps there ought to be a presumption of legality in the natural. Else we depend on masters, where once we could grow our own food.