URLs du Jour

2017-02-15

Today's Proverb is 29:13:

The poor and the oppressor have this in common: The LORD gives sight to the eyes of both.

I can't help but think that's an incomplete list, but that quibble would probably indicate that I'm Missing the Proverbial Point.

  • Patterico's not a fan of the announcement that the IRS won't require tax filers to declare whether or not they have health insurance: "ALL HAIL THE KING! Trump’s IRS Will “Turn a Blind Eye” to Enforcement of the ObamaCare Mandate"

    I’m sure plenty of Trump supporters will cheer this — because, you know, Trump. But if you’ll recall, conservatives (including myself) screamed bloody murder — with good reason — when Obama unilaterally decided to delay enforcement of ObamaCare provisions like the employer mandate. For me and for many others, this was a genuine and principled concern. But I think we’re about to find out that, for some conservatives, the complaints about Obama’s actions were pure partisanship — and for these unprincipled hypocrites, non-enforcement is about to be cool again.

    Patterico also links to this 2014 article by Charles C. W. Cooke, written in response to President Obama's decision to (as the NYT euphemized it) "enforce the nation’s [immigration] laws with discretion". Cooke was astonishingly prescient:

    In our more frustrated moments, those of us who still hope to forestall the constitutional crisis that President Obama’s executive action is almost certainly going to provoke will resign ourselves to showing rather than telling. Thwarted by the considerable difficulty of explaining constitutional and historical norms to an audience that is either too impatient to absorb the context or too self-interested to care about anything other than its own desires, the president’s opponents eventually resort to blunt and brutal threats of retaliation. “I can’t wait until President Cruz decides to reform the tax code on his own,” we muse darkly. “And imagine what will happen in 2017,” we add, “when a Republican executive tires of the stasis and simply refuses to enforce Obamacare.” For the more cynical among the progressive champions of what Ross Douthat has accurately described as “the will to power of this White House,” such prospects should rankle. If we can’t convince the vandals that Obama is entering “extraordinarily brazen territory,” our thinking goes, we can at least remind them that he is opening the door for his opponents to tear apart everything that they hold dear.

    Just s/Cruz/Trump/ .

  • Mark Liberman of Language Log writes on "-ism Exceptionalism", spurred by Jonah Goldberg's recent claim:

    I’m reminded of Martin Diamond’s point that the concepts of “Americanism,” “Americanization,” and “un-American” have no parallel in any other country or language.

    If you're wondering: is that really true?, there are no better places to ask than Language Log. Just ask them if it's true that Eskimos have N words for "snow". (No.)

    Now, they're academics over there, and there's a little reflexive leftism in Liberman's discussion, and a lot more in the comments. But after reading them through, I think Jonah's point stands up pretty well.

  • We've been blogging a Proverb a day for a little over a week now. I'm happy to note that others are joining in:

    I am not sure whether Senator Rubio is a Pun Salad reader. It may just be a case of "great minds think alike".

    Or it could be a case of: "I got nothin'… Maybe I'll just quote something random from the Bible."


Last Modified 2018-12-25 10:39 AM EDT