Search Results for: free lunch

Dave Begley: Live from Council Bluffs

Featured image Yesterday socialist Bernie Sanders brought his campaign for the Democratic presidential campaign to Council Bluffs. We had Dave Begley on hand to cover the festivities. Dave is a Nebraska attorney practicing elder law and estate planning in Omaha. He is also our occasional presidential campaign correspondent. Dave has filed this report on Sanders in Council Bluffs (thumbnail photo and photo below courtesy of Matt Johnson): For the first time in »

Thoughts from the ammo line

Featured image Ammo Grrrll remembers THE PLAYHOUSE. She writes: Sometime in 1924, my maternal grandfather came home from a neighbor’s farm hauling what he called “a chicken coop for my three little chicks.” When his three small daughters, who were 3, 4, and 6 came running outside, they found a beautiful little white playhouse, about 5 or 6 feet square, sturdily built from wood with a steeped shingled roof and latching front »

Thoughts from the ammo line

Featured image Ammo Grrrll lets her imagination run wild: OH THE FUN WE’LL HAVE…WHEN WE ACT LIKE THEM. She writes: As the brilliant and funny Kurt Schlichter says repeatedly: “You guys are gonna hate the new rules.” And we have so many of those new rules now; it’s time to redeem a few of those “Get Out of Acting Like a Civilized Grownup Free” Cards. Let’s start with emulating Obama’s buddies in »

Title IX from Outer Space

Featured image Not even Edward Wood could contrive a more unbelievable legal regime than the federal Office of Civil Rights and its Title IX “guidance” for colleges and universities (hence my title above), and there is no one who is more adept at plumbing the depths of this matter than Shep Melnick, the Tip O’Neill professor of politics at Boston College. As it happens, I’m hosting him tomorrow (Monday) at noon at »

Upcoming Events

Featured image Now here’s some news you can use depending on where you live: I’ve got three public events over the next two weeks that I’d be delighted to see local Power Line readers attend if you have the time and inclination. • First, for Bay Area residents, on Monday afternoon I’ll be part of an “Election Eve” panel discussion from 4 to 5 pm on campus at Berkeley, sponsored by my »

Analyze this

Featured image A friend has forwarded a copy of what he swears is the secret Democratic National Convention schedule for Saturday, August 27. The Democratic convention is scheduled for Philadelphia next month from Monday, July 25 through Thursday, July 28. I therefore suspect that the document may not be entirely authentic. Internal evidence, however, suggests that the document originates with a highly reliable source of some kind. I thought readers might want »

The war on standards: gifted student programs edition [UPDATED]

Featured image The Washington Post reports that the Montgomery County school district (which covers an affluent suburban county just outside of Washington, D.C.) is concerned about racial disparities in its “gifted student” programs. A report it commissioned found marked disparities by race and ethnicity in enrollment and acceptance rates, with white and Asian students faring much better than their black and Hispanic counterparts. The report notes, for example, that enrollment in the »

Schadenfreude on the Charles

Featured image Many conservatives are chuckling over this New York Times story about the impact Obamacare is having on Harvard’s health care plan: “Health Care Fixes Backed by Harvard’s Experts Now Roil Its Faculty.” Heh. It was easier to promote Obamacare when they thought it was only going to apply to others: For years, Harvard’s experts on health economics and policy have advised presidents and Congress on how to provide health benefits »

Who Had the Worst Year?

Featured image If you go by John Podhoretz (and you’d be wise always to do so), or the National Enquirer (“Obama: ‘Everybody Hates Me!’”) Obama had the worst 2013.  But a clear rival would have to be the climate change crusade.  The Daily Caller sets out the “seven global warming alarmist setbacks of 2013” including sharply rebounding Arctic ice, record low temperatures (but wait!—record high temperatures this week! proof that we’re doomed!), »

The Slow Unraveling of Obamacare Continues

Featured image Obamacare represents, I think, the first time that the Obama administration has actually had to face reality. The stimulus was a disaster, but most people don’t care much about wasting borrowed money. Green energy has been a fiasco, but hey–it’s only money, and half the population doesn’t pay income taxes. Obama’s foreign policy has been an utter failure, but foreign policy mistakes take time to come home to roost. There »

Bend this

Featured image Back in the heady days of 2009-2010, I couldn’t eat a meal in a restaurant or watch a soccer match in a bar without overhearing wonky Washingtonian 20 or 30-somethings gushing about how proposed health care legislation — Obamacare — was going to “bend the cost curve.” These insufferable leftists were adopting a myth espoused by candidate Barack Obama in 2008. As Avik Roy reminds us: Back in 2008, three »

Milton Friedman at 100

Featured image Today is Milton Friedman’s 100th birthday.  It is one of the great privileges of my life to have known him some, and to have spent some time with him in San Francisco back in the 1990s.  Driving with him up and down the hills of San Francisco was not for the faint of heart.  All of his rational calculations of risk seemed to go out the window when he was »

A word from “Zeb” Zobenica

Featured image Reader “Zeb” Zobenica writes to comment on the OWS phenomenon: Watching, and listening to, the #OWS crowd on TV provoked a “flashback” to the time I was readying myself to enter the corporate world. I was a Marine jet pilot with an engineering degree, a wife, two young kids, a dog…and a cane. After sixteen months of “paint and repair” at a naval hospital following a plane crash, and an »

Post-Mortem for “Clean” Energy

So the Intelligence Squared debate last night in New York on the motion “clean energy can drive America’s economic recovery” went very well for the side of truth, justice, and the American way. My debate partner Robert Bryce and I were voted the winner of the contest in a landslide: the undecideds broke more than three-to-one in our favor, and we even peeled away three percent from the pre-debate vote »

More Financial Incompetence at the New York Times

I wrote this morning about the New York Times’s vendetta against financial instruments like credit default swaps. The paper’s ill-informed crusade seems to extend to just about any complex financial instrument. A reader wrote to point out this article in Friday’s Business section, titled “The Swaps That Swallowed Your Town,” by Times reporter Gretchen Morgenson. Our reader comments: Unbelievable!…How do they get away with this? This article is about the »

Ballad of the sad CAFE

In yesterday’s subscribers only Wall Street Journal column “CAFE break,” Holman Jenkins reflected on the history of the government’s mileage standards and observed: There’s a lesson in civics here. There are no votes in good policy per se. There are only countervailing pressures from motivated groups whose interests are a serviceable proxy for the real cost of policy excursions that politicians peddle to voters as a free lunch. Jenkins notes »

Why Not Just Steal the Oil Companies’ Money?

Any answer I would give to that question would be, to put it charitably, non-technical. But my friend Bob Cunningham, who has worked in and around the energy industry for a number of years, sent us a more scholarly explanation, which I’m reproducing in full: There was a great article in slate.com last week by Jacob Weisburg on how oil price increases can drive otherwise normal, intelligent people completely insane, »