URLs du Jour

2012-03-29

  • Mountain Weasel (Mustela altaica) You may be disgusted or amused by the exercise in futility known as the so-called LaTourette-Cooper proposal in the House of Representatives. A good summary was posted yesterday at the NR Corner by Yuval Levin.
    It’s very hard to imagine that any House Republican would want to be caught voting for a budget that keeps Obamacare in place, cuts defense even more than the Obama budget, and—relative to the Ryan budget—raises taxes by $1.5 trillion and increases domestic discretionary spending by over $400 billion.
    Well, as it turned out, LaTourette-Cooper failed last night in a squeaker: 38-382. (A dismal drubbing, but at least that was 38 more votes than President Obama's budget got.) As for Yuval's "hard to imagine" bit: 16 of the 38 Ayes were Republicans.

    One of those 16 being New Hampshire's Other Congressman, Charlie Bass. Back when Bass was running to get his old Congressional seat back, he was happy to sign Grover Norquist's pledge to vote against tax increases. Bass even co-wrote an article with Norquist about out-of-control spending.

    That was then, this is now.

    Previous Pun Salad articles mentioning Bass's unsatisfactory return to Congress: here, here, here, here, and here.

  • Trivia: Jennfer Horn's old website URL has been taken over by someone babbling (I think) about online casinos in Italian.

  • If you haven't Adblocked the Amazon links over there on the right, you may have noticed that I'm currently reading Empire of Lies by Andrew Klavan. It's my first crack at one of his novels. Without knowing too much, and having read some of his columns on the web, I was expecting a decent potboiler. But it's even better than I expected, full of sharp observations rendered in pellucid prose.

    Which brings me to his recent article: "ObamaCare — How Nice People Crush Freedom". A reaction to the recent Supreme Court arguments, he summarizes a great Hayek quote:

    In other words, there’s always a good reason to take your freedom away — your health, the poor, your evil opinions, the lousy way you raise your kids — and never a reason to preserve freedom except the love of freedom itself. Thus, so often, the people destroying the American way of life are actually nice people who just want to help.
    I've added Mr. Klavan's blog to the blogroll. What took me so long?

  • Adam Schaeffer of the Cato Institute refutes the never-enough-spending rhetoric of Laura Hainey, president of the American Federation of Teachers–New Hampshire.
    Let’s look at the reality of government school spending in New Hampshire: Per-student spending has increased more than 50 percent, after adjusting for inflation, since 2001. And though it’s declined slightly from the all-time high in 2010, per-child inflation-adjusted spending is still 5 percent above the previous all-time high in 2009, despite the struggling economy.

    If more than $15,000 per student isn’t enough, how much is enough to educate a child?

    There's a nice bar chart at the link, so check it out.