URLs du Jour

2020-11-23

My Political Opinions Funny Yard Sign

Our Product du Jour (not an Amazon link) is another yard sign I lack the courage to buy myself.

  • At the otherwise obnoxious Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby notes: A student debt bailout would be unjust.

    During the presidential primary campaign last winter, as Democratic candidates were promoting various plans to cancel federal student loan debt, one Iowa father’s encounter with Elizabeth Warren captured the raw unfairness of the idea.

    “My daughter’s getting out of school. I saved all my money [so] she doesn’t have any student loans,” the man said. “Am I going to get my money back?”

    “Of course not,” Warren answered.

    “So you’re going to pay for people who didn’t save any money, and those of us who did the right thing get screwed,” said the father, visibly upset. “My buddy had fun, bought a car, went on vacations. I saved my money. He made more than I did, but I worked a double shift, worked extra. My daughter’s worked since she was 10.”

    That exchange vividly illustrates the injustice of student-debt proposals that would, in effect, punish those who saved and worked more to pay for college, those who deferred higher education until they could afford it, and those who responsibly repaid their loans — by forcing them to pay for those who didn’t. Even more outrageous, it would compel the two-thirds of Americans who didn’t earn a college degree to help pick up the tab for many of those who did.

    Mrs. Salad and I did much the same as the Iowa dad; Pun Son and Daughter got out of school with no debt.

    David Henderson provides an excerpt from Milton and Rose Friedman's memoir about how there's "no government program that so clearly transferred income from low- to high-income people as government subsidization of higher education." You might expect progressives to be against that. Instead, they look to make the transfer even worse.


  • Lawprof Jonathan Turley notes that on Sunday morn's episode of "Meet the Press", Chuck Todd and Gretchen Whitmer were an excellent source of lies.

    Chuck Todd interviewed Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer this morning and turned to the recent decision of the Michigan Supreme Court that ruled that she had violated the Michigan Constitution in her extended pandemic orders. Todd did not challenge Whitmer stating falsely that the opinion was a “partisan” decision. It was not. The “Democrat justices” agreed that Whitmer violated the Constitution. They only disagreed on the remedy.  However, that untruth was quickly lost in what was a flagrantly untrue statement by Todd himself. He told NBC viewers that the justices did not cite any law to support their decision against Whitmer. Todd stated as fact that the Court did not “cite any Michigan law, they didn’t cite any law in deciding that you didn’t have this power.” The roughly 50 page opinion contains over 60 cases discussed in support of the decision. It does not seem to matter anymore at Meet The Press or NBC.  NBC is not alone. I previously noted how the Washington Post also has failed to correct openly false accounts of cases.  Not only is there no apparent inclination to be accurate but even less expectation to do so.

    A detailed takedown follows. Professor Turley's conclusion:

    For academics who have called for an end to objectivity in journalism, Meet the Press.


  • One of Reason's podcasts is the "Soho Forum Debate", and the most recent one was between Richard Epstein and Lawrence Lessig. The topic was The Electoral College: Keep or Replace?. Lessig is a well-known "modern" liberal, Epstein a "classical" liberal. Epstein defended the Electoral College, Lessig argued against.

    And here's a surprise: I found myself leaning toward Lessig's side of the argument, despite my stick-in-the-mud conservatism and my reverence for the Founders.

    If only Lessig had been this persuasive when he was arguing Eldred v. Ashcroft before SCOTUS.


  • Crypto/security expert Bruce Schneier signed a letter recently attesting that "no credible evidence" exists that the election was compromised.

    Schneier's political opinions are tediously liberal, but I think he's honest enough to play this straight. I'm pretty tired of the conspiracy theories.

    But he also provides a link to his Guardian article from a couple years back: American elections are too easy to hack. We must take action now.

    Elections serve two purposes. The first, and obvious, purpose is to accurately choose the winner. But the second is equally important: to convince the loser. To the extent that an election system is not transparently and auditably accurate, it fails in that second purpose. Our election systems are failing, and we need to fix them.

    Today, we conduct our elections on computers. Our registration lists are in computer databases. We vote on computerized voting machines. And our tabulation and reporting is done on computers. We do this for a lot of good reasons, but a side effect is that elections now have all the insecurities inherent in computers. The only way to reliably protect elections from both malice and accident is to use something that is not hackable or unreliable at scale; the best way to do that is to back up as much of the system as possible with paper.

    Recently, there have been two graphic demonstrations of how bad our computerized voting system is. In 2007, the states of California and Ohio conducted audits of their electronic voting machines. Expert review teams found exploitable vulnerabilities in almost every component they examined. The researchers were able to undetectably alter vote tallies, erase audit logs, and load malware on to the systems. Some of their attacks could be implemented by a single individual with no greater access than a normal poll worker; others could be done remotely.

    One of the serious problems with all the current easily-debunked conspiricism is that it feeds into the (false) narrative that everything is hunky-dory. It's not.


  • And a final amusing item from the Free Beacon: Antiracism Icon Robin DiAngelo Paid More Than Black Woman for Same Job.

    The prominent diversity consultant Robin DiAngelo raked in $12,750 for a speaking gig last month at the University of Wisconsin—70 percent more than the other keynote speaker, black female author Austin Channing Brown.

    The University of Wisconsin-Madison's Division of Diversity, Equity, and Educational Achievement paid Channing Brown just $7,500 for her keynote address at its annual Diversity Forum, receipts obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show. The payments were negotiated with the Harry Walker Agency, a New York-based speakers bureau that represents both women.

    The "woke" position is that racial disparities prove racial discrimination. So…?


Last Modified 2022-10-01 10:19 AM EDT