Quotulatiousness

August 22, 2009

What a contrast!

Filed under: Football — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:56

I didn’t get to see this game (no surprise at all during the pre-season), so I’m depending on press reports for the details. Wow! The amazing quarterback seems to have arrived in Minnesota, although he was booed by the crowd when he took the field: 12 completed passes from 15 attempts, 2 touchdowns, 202 yards, and a perfect 158.3 passer rating. I’m very impressed . . . with Tarvaris Jackson.

Oh, and Brett Favre was also in the game: 1 of 4 completions for 4 yards over two series. But he got a standing ovation from the Metrodome crowd when he ran on to the field.

Right wing nutbars, observed

Filed under: Health, History, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:23

P.J. O’Rourke tries to save readers the effort of reading the Washington Post coverage of recent town hall protests:

So there was Rick Perlstein calling everyone to the right of Nikita Khrushchev a candidate for the state psychiatric ward with Alec MacGillis playing his KGB Bozo sidekick, firing blanks and honking his “End-of-life care eats up a huge slice of spending” airhorn. Then, to add idiocy to insult, the Post sent Robin Givhan to observe the Americans who are taking exception to various expansions of government powers and prerogatives and to make fun of their clothes.

Givhan writes a column called “On Culture,” and this is what passes for culture at the Post: “Of the hundreds of thousands of style guides currently for sale on Amazon, not one . . . was prescient enough to outline the appropriate attire for those public occasions when good citizens decided to behave like raving lunatics and turn lawmakers into punching bags.” Meeting with Givhan’s scorn were “T-shirts, baseball caps, promotional polo shirts and sundresses with bra straps sliding down their arm.”

I’ve never seen Robin Givhan. For all I know she dolls herself up like Jackie O. But I have seen other employees of the Washington Post and — with the exception of the elegant and, I dare say, cultured, Roxanne Roberts — they look as if they got dressed in the unlit confines of a Planet Aid clothing-donation bin.

Perlstein, for all the highness of his dudgeon, doesn’t catch the nuts saying anything very nutty. The closest he gets to a lunatic quote is from a “libertarian” wearing a holstered pistol who declares that the “tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of tyrants and patriots.” And those are the words of lefty icon Thomas Jefferson. I myself could point out the absurdity of protestors’ concerns about government euthanasia committees. Federal bureaucracy has never moved fast enough to get to the ill and elderly before natural causes do. And what’s with those “birthers”? Why their obsession with a nonentity like Obama? How about John Adams with his Alien and Sedition Acts choke-hold on the First Amendment? Or Jefferson? He could tell his Monica Lewinsky, “I own you,” and he wasn’t kidding. Or John Quincy Adams, pulling the original Blagojevich, buying the presidency from Henry Clay? Or that backwoods Bolshevik Andrew Jackson? Or William Henry Harrison, too dumb to come in out of the rain? Not one of these scallywags was born in the United States of America — look it up.

Tweet of the day

Filed under: Liberty, Quotations, Russia — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:06

Esther Dyson: russian pol Yavlinsky said: “Problem is not freedom of speech. Problem is freedom *after* speech.”

US daytrips to Canada drop significantly

Filed under: Cancon, Economics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:05

Megan McArdle has an interesting post about the precipitous drop in US visits to Canada:

Kevin Drum is puzzled:

Well, here’s today’s [chart]: day trips to Canada are down. Way down. It’s not clear why, either. The accompanying story blames it mostly on new passport rules, along with “other factors, including the recession and the higher Canadian dollar.” But that doesn’t really hold water. The downward spike from May to June might be due to new passport rules, but the chart makes clear that travel has been steadily decreasing ever since it recovered from 9/11 in early 2002. Obviously passport rules have nothing to do with this 7-year trend, and neither does the recession or the strength of the Canadian dollar.

Blog_Canada_Day_Trips

Megan points out that the strengthening Canadian dollar does actually account for much of the change, with the passport requirement only being the final nail in the coffin. Security theatre, as pointed out in the comments, probably accounts for some of the decline as well.

The comment thread is quite interesting, as both facts and “facts” get deployed to support pre-existing positions. Do read through them.

I’m finding this an interesting discussion, as I’m headed the other way tomorrow . . . I’m taking a week-long course near Pittsburgh. I remember the days of the cheap Canadian dollar, when we used to use terms like “Canadian Peso” or “TundraMicroBuck”, and I don’t particularly miss them. I don’t know if I’ll be doing much shopping while I’m in Pennsylvania, but the price differences are much smaller than they were the last time I was in the states.

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