Oct
16
2012

URLs du Jour

2012-10-16

  • I hope President Obama loses the election in (gulp!) three weeks. But every so often I'm reminded that I can't get equally hopeful about Mitt Romney winning. Here's Phil Greenspun with some common sense about the defense budget.

    One of Mitt Romney’s big ideas is a dramatic increase in funding for the U.S. military. As a taxpayer this reminds me of watching $1 billion Navy ships confronting a few Somalis in a rubber boat with an outboard motor and wondering “How could we possibly afford to sort through these guys one at a time?”

    I like our military just fine, but pretending they're a lean organization doesn't pass the giggle test.

  • Smuttynose - Old Brown Dog Ale Senator Tom Coburn, M.D., has brought out Wastebook 2012, a compendium of this year's Federal government profligacy.

    For Granite Staters, our local pork is being consumed by Smuttynose Brewery:

    A New Hampshire brewery, Smuttynose, will use $750,970 in federal funds to construct a new brewery and restaurant on farmland outside of Portsmouth.The taxpayer money will help the brewery purchase three brew tanks and install sewer connections to its 42,000-square-foot facility.

    References available via the link. I like beer as much as the next guy… OK, I might like beer much more than the next guy, but Smuttynose should pay its own way.

  • Thomas Sowell provides random thoughts on the passing scene, which, as usual, are insightful and fun.

    How are children supposed to learn to act like adults, when so much of what they see on television portrays adults acting like children?

    Sowell also quotes a claim by Edward Lazear: “there hasn’t been one day during the entire Obama presidency when as many Americans were working as on the day President Bush left office.”. An inconvenient truth!

  • "Responsibility" is much-discussed today, since Hillary has taken "full responsiblity" for the botched security decisions leading to the murder of diplomatic personnel in Libya last month.

    Jeremy Lott thinks Hillary should do the right thing:

    She should resign immediately or Obama should fire her. If neither of these things happens in short order, American voters have a duty to punish her party at the ballot box in November.

    Captain Ed recalls a time when Hillary said:

    “I believe we need a president who believed what Harry Truman believed. That buck stopped in the Oval Office.”

    … that was then, this is now.

    And (last but not least) the indispensable Geraghty notes that "I take responsibility" has been an "endless empty refrain" in the Obama Administration (with plenty of examples, if you have the stomach for them). It's a cheap way to make yourself sound like an adult, without it actually meaning anything.