Sunday night Obama olio

Let's start with a song, "It Ain't Obama's Business If I Do."



Misterdregs has more of these on his Youtube channel. Nice work, Misterdregs. For the inquisitive, that's a parody of a song by Porter Grainger and Everett Robbins, recorded by Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, and many more. It later gave rise to another song, by Eric von Schmidt, called "Champagne Don't Hurt Me, Baby," and a book, Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do, by Peter McWilliams, who died a casualty of the War on Drugs. Some people with badges thought it was their business what he did.

Doug Ross asks if Obama is Smarter than a fifth grader?

Roger Kimball links to Thomas Sowell and quotes a lot of Shikha Dalmia, in the course of envisioning Obama as Tony Soprano, or, flipping America the bird.

Quick hits

Glenn Reynolds links to Jules Crittenden: "What are we on, Day 103? I think that Change shark just officially got jumped." Seems that Obama will be reviving the military tribunals for Gitmo inmates, the ones he had previously condemned. That is, for the inmates he does not plan to release onto the streets of the US, with assistance (which would mean cash and what else?) to help them get settled.

Via the Crittenden link above, Gateway Pundit: "Al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Omar al-Baghdadi has close ties to the Saddam regime. [… much else …] Remember this the next time you see a mainstream media report claiming there was no links between Saddam and Al-Qaeda."

Fox News: "The Obama administration has asked a federal judge to throw out a lawsuit against Iran filed by Americans held hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran 30 years ago."

Peter W. Huber: Bound to Burn. TigerHawk calls it "[t]he best article you will read on why it is not merely futile, but counterproductive, for rich countries to struggle to reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide," and has comments.

Stages of Denial: Take pity on the left as it grapples with the tea party revolt.

Putting MADD in Charge of America's Highways: President Obama's troubling nominee to head the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. To go with that, The Dangers Of The Drinking Age: The government pressured states to raise it to 21. So why didn't the move save lives?

Obama says, "I would love to get the U.S. government out of the auto -- auto business as quickly as possible.… I don't want to run auto companies." Meanwhile, the government is moving even deeper into the auto business: 'Cash for clunkers' kicks in gear. Subsidies at both ends, the sellers and the buyers. That ought to do it! Inline update: Katherine Mangu-Ward at Hit & Run points to a NY Times item on this with a lot of smart comments.

Barney Frank is messing with the money again, with The Mortgage Reform and Anti-Predatory Lending Act of 2009. Nick Gillespie says, "Frank is nothing less than a trickster figure in American politics." There's a great graphic, oh, what the heck, here:



Some history: The Assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem, by Peter Kross.

More disgusting lefties, indulging in ad feminam about Carrie Prejean: Reynolds links to Hot Air. TigerHawk links to GayPatriot. These videos are not safe for anyone. Partial transcription, and commentary, at the Daily Howler. Did Michael Musto actually compare Carrie Prejean to a "Klaus Barbie doll?" Good grief. Meanwhile — could Perez Hilton possibly be embarrassed? If not why this copyright fight with Patterico?

Feats of Strength at the Cocktail Competition: Tasting 150 liquors in two days (via)

Bad ideas in the Nutmeg State

Proposed, a state AIG bonus tax:

In the latest proposal to recoup the AIG bonus money for taxpayers, state Senate Democrats are calling for an 80 percent tax surcharge for anyone who receives a bonus from a company receiving federal bailout money.

Senate President Pro Tem Donald Williams, the highest-ranking senator, said the law would apply only to Connecticut residents, and the surcharge would be paid through their state income tax. Many of those receiving bonuses worked out of the AIG financial products division in Wilton in Fairfield County.

Vengeance is theirs.

***

Proposed, making the state legislature even more like an oligarchy:

An upstate lawmaker has a novel idea for coping with Connecticut's fiscal crisis -- get rid of two-thirds of the General Assembly.

State Sen. Gary LeBeau, D-East Hartford, proposed a bill to combine the part-time Senate and House of Representatives into one full-time body, decrease the total number of legislators from 187 to 60 and have them serve four-year terms instead of two.

Sen. LeBeau's press release. I think it would make more sense to have more legislators, and pay them a lot less, but no-one asked me.

***

And the state Supreme Court upholds the DUI conviction of a man who was not driving:

Drunken people don't actually have to drive their cars to be charged with operating a motor vehicle under the influence of alcohol or drugs, the state Supreme Court ruled Monday.

The court's 5-0 ruling came in the case of Michael Cyr, who was arrested in Manchester in February 2005 in a parking lot near a bar. He had started his car remotely and then sat in the driver's seat intoxicated, but never put the key into the ignition and didn't drive anywhere.

Another story on this, with more comments.

Don't take any wooden nutmegs.

Nursing home patient goes outside for a smoke, dies of hypothermia

I thought the purpose of these smoking bans was to benefit people's health, not to kill them. Myles Patterson was 65 years old. "Mr. Patterson had been forgotten outside in temperatures which witnesses told the court dropped to -20 Celsius. Mr. Patterson, who was wheelchair-bound after a recent health setback, had gone outside to smoke."

Hypothermia is putting it mildly; I'd be inclined to say he froze to death. "The death of Mr. Patterson was contributed to by hypothermia resulting from being left outside in temperatures ranging between -16 and -20 Celsius on January 16, 2007. When rescued by nursing home worker Tanya James, Mr. Patterson was described as being drooped over with spittle frozen to his face. His jacket was partially zipped up and he was wearing no gloves or hat."

Roundup here.

All part and parcel of the "liberal" way of thinking, which sees only classes and masses, never individuals. (Except for the Great Leader, who is doing the seeing.) Individuals are collateral damage. It's all for the greater good, don't you know.

These Obama photos are a little different ...

… from the usual ones.

"I'm a Midnight Toker" -- Getting Stoned with Barry O

Hey, we all had our youthful indiscretions, right? And wrote about them in a couple of autobiographies? And went to prison, and found that our options for the future were not at all constrained, afterwards.

Van der Leun has the words and pictures: here is the music. Start this video, then read the linked post in another tab while the music plays to get the full effect.

Update: The video I had before does not work any more. Try this one instead.

Wowsers are ever with us

Richard Miniter describes Why L.A. Should Be Pushed Into The Sea. Smoking, this time. Members of the anti-fun brigade are present in the comments.

John Lott says: "Nonsmokers may feel better off because of bans, but what they gain is less than what smokers lose. If the opposite were true, it wouldn’t be necessary to impose the bans."

In Gram Parsons' Sin City (almost 40 years ago!), the singer is resigned to the earthquake that will come to clean up the town, so to speak. Looks like the more puritanical segment among the bien-pensant would like to enforce righteous behavior lest the city be smitten. But since many of them would recoil at the notion that God would (or could!) smite a city for the behavior of its people, then the motivation must be be something else. What could it be? And what accounts for their inability to view other human beings and fellow-citizens as people like themselves, to be respected rather than to be controlled? Some kind of philosophical immaturity similar to what we see from the plaintiffs who sue over anything or nothing, I suppose.

A nation-wide smoking ban would be a lot like a return to Prohibition. Of course, we already have the "Son of Prohibition" going on, in the form of the War on Drugs; and MADD and their supporters and sycophants in the legislatures are working on the alcohol part of it. I'd like to see the pendulum swing back in the Dionysian direction in my lifetime. Less regulation, more freedom, please.

Gleanings

Just another batch of things that caught my eye.

Drug war casualty: "Marie Walsh was the very picture of American suburban respectability. She and her husband, a company executive, lived in a £400,000 house in an affluent area near San Diego, California. But the 53-year-old had a secret that even her husband and three children did not know: she was really Susan Lefevre, a convicted drug dealer who had been on the run for 32 years after escaping from the Detroit House of Corrections."

Fierce comment threads at Althouse and Volokh on Ayers and Dohrn, and Barack Obama's relationship with them. The Althouse thread inspires a post by Blake: Terrorism and Indoctrination vs. Education, which gets some silly comments by yours truly.

Adopted Man Finds Biological Father on Death Row.

Bagpipe bands violate EU noise regulations and must be muted. (via)

PSA from Hungary intended to promote bicycling. Looks pretty persuasive to me.

How'd you like to walk (or cycle) across this footbridge? (via)

Strange But True photos at the L.A. Times.

Great tits cope well with warming. Well, that's good news! (via)

ROFLcon. Sounds like fun. Over, though; it was held the last weekend in April. The blog includes a list of Sleeper Hits of the Internet, a bunch of (mostly) fun videos that you may have missed. And that seems to require a mention of ROFLMAO. "Do-doo-do-do-do."

Another wowser heard from

Why am I not surprised that someone writing in the NY Times wants to raise taxes? This time on booze. David Leonhardt cites a load of specious reasons for raising taxes on the anodyne of the poor in his mendaciously titled Let’s Raise a Glass to Fairness, inspired by a book, Paying the Tab, by Peter Cook, a Duke University economist. This economist can't tell the difference between a tax and a subsidy:

Each of the three taxes is now effectively 33 percent lower than it was in 1992. Since 1970, the federal beer tax has plummeted 63 percent. Many states taxes have also been falling.

At first blush, this sounds like good news: who likes to pay taxes, right? But taxes serve a purpose beyond merely raising general government revenue. Taxes on a given activity are also supposed to pay the costs that activity imposes on society. And for all that is wonderful about wine, beer and liquor, they clearly bring some heavy costs.

Right now, the patchwork of alcohol taxes isn’t coming close to covering those costs — the costs of drunken-driving checkpoints, of hospital bills for alcohol-related accidents and child abuse, and of the economic loss caused by death and injury. Last year, some 17,000 Americans, or almost 50 a day, died in alcohol-related car accidents. An additional 65,000 people a year die from other accidents, assaults or illnesses in which alcohol plays a major role.

Mr. Cook, besides being a wine lover, has been thinking about the costs and benefits of alcohol for much of his career, and he has come up with a blunt way of describing the problem. “Do you think we should be subsidizing alcohol?” he asks. “Because that’s what we’re doing.”

"We" subsidize drunkenness to the extent that some recipients of disability payments spend the money on booze. To say that not taxing something is the same as subsidizing it is to fall into the same sort of Newspeakery that makes it a "budget cut" when a government agency's budget is increased less than someone (administrator, legislator) had asked for. A smaller increase is still an increase. If you can pass through Sherwood Forest without being robbed, Robin Hood has not given you a subsidy. Low taxes do not "cost" the government money that it never had to begin with.

I'll dissect this phony "reasoning" further in a while; right now I need a couple of drinks. In the meantime, go read what Glenn Reynolds has to say about it.

Later: The call for an increase in taxes sounds to me like "Let them eat cake." The Times writer, the Duke professor, what is a couple of dollars increase in the price of a bottle of Champagne to them? I am reminded of the sort of billionaire Democrats who think everyone's taxes should be increased. There's another post in that: in the days of ancient Rome, as now, wealthy politicians ran for office, promising everything under the sun to the voters; but in those days, if elected, they paid for the bread and circuses themselves!

The article, like the book, is a call for a regressive taxation scheme, based on phony numbers, with social engineering as its goal.
• Regressive: Good booze is too good for the poor; if the manufacturers won't raise the prices enough to keep the stuff the writer likes out of the hands of those not in his socio-economic class, well then, the tax power of the government can be used for that purpose.
• Phony numbers: Old stuff, but the MADD propaganda machine doesn't quit. The expression "alcohol-related" is the tip-off. If a passenger in the car not at fault was tipsy, that counts as alcohol-related. Links: National Motorists Association. Responsibility In DUI Laws. (Ugly formatting, interesting numbers:) GetMADD: Real Numbers. A business writer ought to have better grasp of numbers … oh never mind, it's the Times.
• "Taxes on a given activity are supposed to pay the costs …" Supposed to? Where is that in the Constitution? Taxes are "supposed to" raise revenue. How about a tax on newspapers to pay for recycling? The Times is in a bad place to be talking about tax fairness, considering the combination of eminent domain abuse and tax breaks involved in clearing the ground for its new HQ.

This is the Times' business section. If this is the kind of wisdom they can muster over there, it's no wonder the paper's own stock is down as far as it is.

Update: Bill Quick has a post on this.
More on wowsers, with quotes from Candace Lightner, founder of MADD, who does not like what that organization has become: Prohibition Returns!

Happy Repeal Day!

It is the anniversary of December 5, 1933, happy ending of an unhappy experiment. The evils inflicted upon the nation, and the world for that matter, by Prohibition, continue, but now our gangsters, politicians and G-Men quarrel over different kinds of contraband. We know from history that anodynes need not be outlawed; there is just too much profit in misery for the current version of Prohibition to be ended. Volstead and Anslinger have worked much evil in the world. Thanks to The Wine Commonsewer at Hit & Run for this lovely bit of nostalgia: But today let us be joyful, within the limits imposed by the current bunch of wowsers.