URLs du Jour

2014-02-25

pinocchio, imagine four

  • Glenn Kessler of the rabidly right-wing Washington Post sadly notes that President Obama's assertions about Obamacare's benefits continue to be truth-impaired. To wit, his recent claim that “We’ve got close to 7 million Americans who have access to health care for the first time because of Medicaid expansion.” After doing some rudimentary research, Kessler concludes this is a Four-Pinocchio whopper:

    In any case, no matter how you slice it, it does not add up to 7 million. It is dismaying that given all of the attention to this issue, the president apparently does not realize that the administration’s data are woefully inadequate for boastful assertions of this type.

    That's an overly charitable interpretation. Mine is: he's lying. Because he thinks he can get away with lying.

  • A perceptive point made by Thomas Sowell:

    It seems as if, everywhere you turn these days, there are studies claiming to show that America has lost its upward mobility for people born in the lower socioeconomic levels. But there is a sharp difference between upward "mobility," defined as an opportunity to rise, and mobility defined as actually having risen.

    I smell the social-engineering mentality behind this confusion. In that view, the mass of people can and should be pushed/nudged/regulated/controlled/etc. into furthering grand societal goals imagined by their betters. The obvious corollary: if those grand societal goals aren't being accomplished, it can only be due to insufficient pushing/nudging/regulation/control/etc.

    Need I encourage you to read the whole thing? Didn't think so.

  • Ricochet headline du jour is "The Duke Porn Star Is a College Republican".

    And it gets even better with the first sentence, which starts "Well, she's actually a libertarian…"

    Now that's diversity, kids. Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown has a positive reaction here.

  • Kevin Williamson recalls a historical Republican who also had to deal with others' poor opinions.

    “She drinks whiskey, and she swears, and she is a Republican, which makes her a low, foul creature.” That was one schoolgirl’s description of Mary Fields, a.k.a. Stagecoach Mary, who is an obvious candidate for induction into the inaugural class in the American Bad-Ass Hall of Fame. Miss Fields was a freed slave who worked for some years as the foreman of a Catholic mission in what was then the Montana territory, hauling freight through blizzards and fighting wolves to defend the nuns’ cargo.

    There's a link to an Ebony article where Gary Cooper (yes, that Gary Cooper) tells Mary's story.

  • A lot of appreciations of the late Harold Ramis are out there. I especially liked this one where Matt K. Lewis shares Charles Murray's plug for Ramis's Groundhog Day in his latest book. (The Curmudgeon's Guide to Getting Ahead: Dos and Don'ts of Right Behavior, Tough Thinking, Clear Writing, and Living a Good Life) which I've just pre-ordered).

    It was never sold as a smart or important film, but, instead, as a Bill Murray comedy. In this regard, Murray says that reminds him of Huckleberry Finn: ”In the very beginning of the book, there’s a notice to the reader, something about ‘anyone attempting to find a moral in this book will be banished,’” Murray says. “Mark Twain is saying to his readers,’ hey, this is just for fun.’ And Groundhog Day was similar in this regard. It was presented as a really fun Bill Murray movie.”

    As far as I know Bill and Charles Murray are not related. Also see Jonah Goldberg's classic 2005 essay on Groundhog Day.

    And if you have 28 seconds, enjoy the odd chemistry between Ramis and Annie Potts in Ghostbusters:


Last Modified 2024-01-27 6:11 AM EDT