Oil Spill Shows We Need Big Government
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on June 3rd, 2010 4:31 am by HL
Oil Spill Shows We Need Big Government
Donna Brazile, CNN
In 1947, when AT&T was America's only phone company, a woman called the company's chief operator to protest a long-distance charge on her bill. She proved her house had been shuttered when the call was made, but the operator refused to reverse the charge.”This isn't the end of this, you know,” she said.The operator replied, “And where will you go?”This week on the Gulf Coast, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, lashing out at BP's failure to stop “the biggest oil spill in human history,” threatened that BP had better produce or…
Saving New York City
Conor Friedersdorf & Brian Anderson, The Atlantic
1) In the autumn of 1990, City Journal published its first issue. Its letter from the editors spoke of the “intolerable conditions” suffered by New Yorkers, a generation of residents who'd never known anything better, and a desire “to focus some of the immense ingenuity and energy which flows to New York on making the city livable once again.”All these years later, it is difficult to imagine that bygone New York City. Take us back to the bad old days. How was life different? What particular ills inspired the magazine's launch? And how did it go from an…
Has Obama Lost Control?
Maureen Dowd, New York Times
It’s not a good narrative arc: The man who walked on water is now ensnared by a crisis under water.One little hole a mile down on the ocean floor, so deep it seems like hell spewing up its sulfurous smoke, has turned the thrilling saga of “The One” into the gurgling horror of “The Abyss.” (Thank goodness James Cameron, the director of “The Abyss,” came to Washington Tuesday to help the administration figure out how to cap the BP well. What’s next? Sending down the Transformers and Megan Fox?)
Virginia Postrel on Obama’s Glamour Problem
Ted Balaker, Reason
Virginia Postrel has a knack for changing the way people think about everyday phenomena. As editor of reason during the 1990s, Postrel predicted how Western enthusiasm for Marxism would, in the wake of communism’s collapse, transfer seamlessly to a top-down, regulatory brand of environmentalism. When the World Wide Web triggered the excitable imaginations of censorious legislators, she calmly explained that thick strains in both major political tendencies cling to the precautionary principle at the expense of liberating progress.In The Future and its Enemies (1998), Postrel tossed…
Chicago v. Self Defense
Jeremy Lott, RealClearPolitics
Talk about your inconvenient truth. Five days after Chicago Mayor Richard Daley had held a press conference touting the benefits of the city's handgun ban by brandishing a rifle with a bayonet and — I swear I am not making this up — cracking a joke about shoving it up a reporter's bum, an 80-year-old man on the West Side of Chicago traded gunfire with a burglar, killing the intruder.For advocates of gun control, the optics on this story are just awful. It's nearly impossible to drum up any sympathy for the deceased, Anthony Nelson, who had a long history of drug and weapons…