Oct
30
2025

I Dream of Jeannie

Specifically, I dream of the day she will start being honest in the last few months of her Senate term. But, alas, that day was not yesterday:

At Cato, Michael F. Cannon is similarly impatient, waiting for honesty to break out in the group once identified by Mark Twain as a "distinctly native American criminal class": What Will It Take for Congress to Admit Obamacare Has Failed?

In 2008, then-Sen. Barack Obama (D‑IL) pledged that if he were to become president, by the end of his first term he would sign a law that would reduce family health insurance premiums by $2,500. On February 20, 2010, President Obama delivered his weekly radio address:

The other week, men and women across California opened up their mailboxes to find a letter from Anthem Blue Cross. The news inside was jaw-dropping. Anthem was alerting almost a million of its customers that it would be raising premiums by an average of 25 percent, with about a quarter of folks likely to see their rates go up by anywhere from 35 to 39 percent.

Ah, yes. Those were the good old days, when Obamacare was pushed onto the country, aided by what (even) Politifact called the "Lie of the Year: 'If you like your health care plan, you can keep it'".

And (back then) Senator Jeanne was one of the votes passing Obamacare, despite promising "Emil from Salem" in a town hall: "a requirement that I have for supporting a bill is that if you have health coverage that you like you should be able to keep that." Which inspired me to write her a futile but irate letter back in 2009. Still holds up.

Also of note:

  • Et tu, WSJ? Today's print WSJ has a potboiler of a story, headlined: Your Best Homicide Defense: ‘I Feared For My Life, Officer'. (WSJ gifted link)

    The online version's headline is even more provocative: "Six Words Every Killer Should Know: ‘I Feared for My Life, Officer’". And the grabbing lead paragraphs:

    It’s easier than ever to kill someone in America and get away with it.

    In 30 states, it often requires only a claim you killed while protecting yourself or others.

    While Americans have long been free to use deadly force to defend themselves at home, so-called stand-your-ground laws in those 30 states extend legal protections to public places and make it difficult for prosecutors to file homicide charges against anyone who says they killed in self-defense.

    The number of legally sanctioned homicides by civilians in the 30 stand-your-ground states has risen substantially in recent years, The Wall Street Journal found in an analysis of data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

    Justifiable homicides by civilians increased 59% from 2019 through 2024 in a large sample of cities and counties in those states, the Journal found, compared with a 16% rise in total homicides for the same locales.

    Good news for murderers, right?

    Well, hold on, partner. Ed Morrissey at Hot Air pokes some holes in the WSJ's story: Six Words? WSJ's Deeply Deceptive Analysis Of 'Stand Your Ground' And Self-Defense.

    The percentages look damning, until one recalls the famous adage popularized by Mark Twain: There are lies, damned lies, and statistics. If those cases increased by 59% over five years, what's the scale involved? How many cases does a 59% increase entail?

    Not many, as it turns out. The entire data set consists of 200 cases or fewer in each of the five years, which isn't exactly a crime spree when it comes to homicides. Take a close look at the Y-axis used by the WSJ to chart this data:

    The Y-axis tops out at 200 cases -- not 200 per 100,000, just 200 in each year. They note that overall homicides increased 16% in these same jurisdictions over the same period. What does that look like? Curiously, the WSJ doesn't bother to chart that, so we will have to rely on other data on overall homicides.

    Ed does an impressive job pulling together those stats from other sources, painting a more complete picture that deflates the tendentious WSJ story pretty convincingly. It's the right way to do things.

    (Thanks to the interesting publishing schedule between online and print, Ed actually posted his rebuttal, and I read it, before I got the article in today's paper. Welcome to the future.)

  • Phoniness seems to be today's blog theme. George Will weighs in on The choreographed fakery of American politics: East Wing edition. (WaPo gifted link)

    Trump’s ballroom has already served the public good. It has triggered some people who need triggering. They have been blasé about his presidential grandiosity when he spends money for purposes Congress has explicitly refused to authorize (the Big Beautiful Wall), or when he insults local police forces by sending troops to pacify U.S. cities, or when he vaporizes perhaps criminal Venezuelans. Now, however, because of the ballroom, and the East Wing, the blasé are suddenly aghast.

    During the fierce late-1970s opposition to conferring on Panama control of the canal there, a U.S. senator said: My state consists of millions of people of diverse political, social, religious, racial, and ethnic beliefs and backgrounds, but they are united by fervent devotion to a canal that they have not thought about since learning of it in high school. Today there is a similar eruption of devotion to the East Wing, the destruction of which is being called a “desecration.” Well. To desecrate is to disrespect a sacred place. Something is sacred when it is venerated because it is associated with worship and religious purposes. Republics do not have sacerdotal offices.

    For decades, the constitutional, political, social (and, lately, aesthetic) damages done by the ever-more-swollen modern presidency have become increasingly evident. Congress, in its decades-long siesta, has empowered presidents to unilaterally tax (see: tariffs) and wage war (hello, Venezuela) as they please. Congress is now composed almost entirely of two cohorts: those who do nothing but genuflect to their party’s president, and those who do nothing but caterwaul about him.

    Caterwauling and genuflecting will be the latest song and dance moves in the new ballroom.

  • Wait, let's hear him out. I hope David Harsanyi has good reasons for this: Why I’m going to stop using the term ‘antisemitism’. (archive.today link)

    The term “antisemitism” is anesthetized, imprecise, and historically obtuse jargon that is meant to obscure evil beliefs. Regrettably, I’ve been using the term to describe hatred toward Jews for decades.

    For one thing, the term was coined by Jew-baiting German journalist Wilhelm Marr in 1879 to give the age-old bigotry a modern pseudoscientific framing. Outbursts of violence and discrimination against Jews were nothing new in Europe, but Marr, an atheist and socialist, wanted a systematic philosophy to sustain the antipathy.

    Well, that's bad. David advocates using the blunt and more accurate "Jew-hatred" instead. I'll try that.

  • This is why his middle name is "Indispensible".

    Took me a few seconds to get it. I'm sure you'll do better.

    Apparently, Platner is all misty-eyed about the days when there was passenger train service to Hancock, Maine. Population 2,466 at the 2020 census.

    If you watch the video: he's also apparently a big fan of metric.


Last Modified 2025-10-30 11:55 AM EST