Quotulatiousness

November 5, 2010

Banned from visiting Afghanistan due to weight

Filed under: Asia, Britain, Humour, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:07

John Turner sent me this link, which could be said to point out fitness requirements for lawmakers:

Britain’s defence ministry says two lawmakers from Northern Ireland have been barred from visiting troops in Afghanistan until they can find flak jackets big enough to fit their bellies.

The ministry says Ken Maginnis and David Simpson were scheduled to fly to Kabul this week, but army-issued body armour doesn’t exceed 49 inches (124.5 centimetres), too snug for both.

A ministry spokesman said Thursday the British army offers “a wide range of sizes but, regrettably, none was suitable on this occasion.”

Alternatively, you could just roll ’em up in kevlar carpets, or something . . .

November 4, 2010

Globe editorial: “Mr. Clement has much to explain”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:56

I keep wondering if there are any actual conservatives left in Stephen Harper’s merry band of economic nationalists:

Tony Clement, the federal Minister of Industry, has much to explain after his laconic rejection of BHP Billiton Ltd.’s application for permission to proceed with its offer to buy Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan Inc.

Canadians and investors around the world — not least Potash Corp.’s own shareholders — are entitled to learn what Mr. Clement thinks is the meaning of “net benefit” to Canada, in the words of the Investment Canada Act. Evidently, in his and his colleagues’ minds, free markets and the free flow of investment are not sufficient.

Canada, as an exporting nation, has far more to lose by kicking off this kind of protectionist move than any imaginable gains. We might as well write off any economic growth from exports if this is the new modus operandi of the federal government.

Something I’m adding to my Christmas list

Filed under: Books, Humour, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:40

H.L. Mencken was a literary giant in the 1920s and into the 1930s, but fell from the pinnacle of popularity as the Great Depression hit. His consistent opposition to FDR and the New Deal moved him further and further away from the limelight, and his outspoken opposition to the war rendered him all but unpublishable from 1941 until his death. A large collection of his shorter works from 1914 through 1927 were published in Prejudices, running to six volumes.

The books are back in print, in two large volumes, through Library of America. An excerpt from the New York Review of Books just starts to get interesting before the cut-off for non-subscribers:

The material that H.L. Mencken published in a series of six volumes under the title Prejudices was a collection of his journalism written between 1914 and the late 1920s. Most of it, he told a good friend on publication of the first volume in 1919, was “light stuff” with an occasional “blast from the lower woodwind” that would “outrage the umbilicari, if that is the way to spell it.” Such books, he added, were “mere stinkpots, heaved occasionally to keep the animals perturbed.”

Most of the pieces in the first volume — or “series,” as it was called — had originally appeared in The Smart Set, the magazine he had edited since 1914, but they also included articles published in newspapers, as well as material written especially for the book. A painstaking editor of his own work, Mencken also did a good bit of rewriting; stinkpot or not, this was not to be a quick harum-scarum hustling of secondhand goods but a high-quality piece of prose from a master.

Its commercial success surprised him as well as his friend and publisher, Alfred Knopf, who seemed to realize for the first time that Mencken had a promising future, or, as he expressed it to his author, “that H.L. Mencken has become a good property.” The book was quickly followed by Prejudices: Series Two, Series Three, and so on to a final Series Six in 1927, by which time Mencken had developed from a good property into the most exciting literary figure in the country.

H/T to Mark at Unambiguously Ambidexterous for the link.

November 3, 2010

Will it really be a big change in Washington?

Filed under: Economics, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:36

Maybe US politics have become “post-racial” after all

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:19

One of the worries before the US midterm elections (aside from the Democrat fears of a Republican “tidal wave”) was that the number of female elected representatives would drop. That may have happened, but the unexpected result is an increase in the number of minority candidates elected:

The Republican wave produced groundbreaking results for minority candidates, from Latina and Indian-American governors to a pair of black congressmen from the Deep South.

In New Mexico, Susana Martinez was elected as the nation’s first female Hispanic governor. Nikki Haley, whose parents were born in India, will be the first woman governor in South Carolina, and Brian Sandoval became Nevada’s first Hispanic governor.

Insurance company owner Tim Scott will be the first black Republican congressman from South Carolina since Reconstruction, after easily winning in his conservative district. Scott, a 45-year-old state representative, earned a primary victory over the son of the one-time segregationist U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond.

In Florida, veteran Allen West ousted a two-term Democrat to a House seat. He is the first black Republican elected to Congress from Florida since a former slave served two terms in the 1870s.

The last black Republican in Congress was J.C. Watts of Oklahoma. He left office in 2003. There were 42 black Democrats in Congress this term.

Liberty: consistency matters

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:13

James Delingpole, after suddenly discovering a man-crush on Marco Rubio, outlines how the Tea Party can still succeed:

[. . .] I’d suggest that the key lesson of yesterday’s mid-terms is this: it is simply not enough to stick a Tea Party label on any old candidate and hope that the US electorate’s growing antipathy towards Big Government will take care of the rest. Christine O’Donnell was more than proof enough of that. Not only did her candidacy allow the liberal MSM to tar the entire Tea Party movement as the natural home of anti-masturbation ex-witches and other fruit loops. But it demonstrated a worrying complacency and ignorance within the Tea Party movement about what it stands for and what it ought to stand for.

Christine O’Donnell puzzled me . . . if she’d actually been a witch, then her anti-masturbation activities made no sense. I’ve met lots of witches, and it’s hard to imagine any of them being anti-sexual in that kind of dogmatic manner. I didn’t follow the story, but I assume that she lost on the basis of both accusations influencing different voting groups.

So, if O’Donnell and other marginal candidates can’t depend on just wearing the “Tea Party” label to get elected, what do they need to do?

The Tea Party does not stand for: banning lesbian or sexually active single women from teaching at schools; discouraging onanism; banning abortion; keeping drugs illegal; God; organised religion generally; guns; or, indeed, Sarah Palin.

The Tea Party stands, very simply, for small government. So long as it understands this, a presidential victory in 2012 is guaranteed. If it forgets this — or doesn’t understand it in the first place — then hello, a second term for President Obama, and bye bye Western Civilisation.

In other words, Delingpole is calling for the Tea Party to be true to a minarchist vision: the least possible government to get the job done.

If you are against Big Government, you are for liberty. If you are for liberty you are also for free citizens’ right to choose whether or not they get out of their trees on cannabis, or indeed whether or not they have the freedom to terminate unwanted pregnancies or never, ever, go to church and in fact worship Satan instead.

Liberty is not a pick and mix free-for-all in which you think government should ban the things you don’t like and encourage you things you do like: that’s how Libtards think. Libertarianism — and the Tea Party is nothing if its principles are not, at root, libertarian ones — is about recognising that having to put up with behaviour you don’t necessarily disapprove of is a far lesser evil than having the government messily and expensively intervene to regulate it.

Monty: The flushing sound you just heard is California’s future

Filed under: Economics, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:57

Monty pronounces the final doom of California:

That sound you just heard was the State of California irretrievably flushing itself down the toilet.

[. . .]

California’s most dire problems right now are related to public-employee obligations (pensions and healthcare). The power of public-employee unions in California have held the State and local governments in thrall for years, and with the election of Jerry Brown as Governor, the people of California have opted to spray kerosene on a blaze that was already threatening to overwhelm them.

[. . .]

Well, the die has been cast, California. You have placed your fate into the hands of a political party and a governmental machine that cares for nothing except what it can squeeze out of you to keep the party-train rolling. There will come a time in the not-too-distant future when you will have cause to bitterly regret what happened last night, and to wonder when the disaster truly became unavoidable. Well, now you know: it happened last night when you elected Jerry Brown as your governor. You chose to kowtow to the labor unions; you chose to believe comforting lies rather than the horrible truth.

You will reap the whirlwind.

Update: A couple of Twitter updates from Iowahawk sum things up nicely.

10:28: Boxer, Brown, no on Prop 19: congrats, California. You have officially gone Full Retard.

11:05: And as if California wasn’t already full of idiots, lunatics, and drug abusers, I’m flying there this afternoon.

November 2, 2010

This is either App-alling or App-ealing, depending on your party affiliation

Filed under: Law, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:30

There’s now an iPhone app for reporting suspicious election activity:

Just in time for Election Day, American Majority Action has created the nation’s first mobile application to help identify, report and track suspected incidents of voter fraud and intimidation. This free, cutting edge system will enable voters to take action to help defend their right to vote. Whether you’re a campaign junkie, or just want a better America, Voter Fraud will help you report violations at the election booth and serve to uphold the democratic process.

H/T to Ace of Spades HQ for the link.

November 1, 2010

QotD: The emergence of the Tea Party movement

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:06

There’s something else that’s been making me very happy lately, and frankly I don’t give a chipmunk’s cheeks who knows or what they may think about it. After years, decades, what even seems like centuries of unremittingly putrescent political news, we are suddenly all witnesses to the spectacular emergence of the so-called Tea Party movement.

The Tea Parties are just one of a number of historically pivotal developments (including the Internet, conservative talk radio, and perhaps even on-demand publishing) that became necessary to get over, under, around, and through the Great Wall of the Northeastern Liberal Establishment and its numberless, faceless hordes of duly appointed gatekeepers.

In that sense, the Tea Parties are exactly what the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left always aspired to be and never really were.

Just like each of those other developments, the Tea Parties are essentially a medium of communications. So far, they are leaderless and centerless (and at all costs, must remain that way). They have no founders, and no headquarters. They have no constitution, no by-laws, and no platform to argue over endlessly. More conventionally-minded politicrats might view all of these qualities as weaknesses, but they would be mistaken. As presently (un)constituted, Tea Parties can’t be taken over by high school student government types or mercenaries from the major political parties, who have nothing better to do with their lives.

I would point out, especially in the light of the recent Bob Barr embarrassment, that this arrangement is inexpressibly better suited to libertarians and to libertarianism than any formal, hierarchical structure copied from the other political parties (and I have been doing exactly that for almost thirty years) but that would be a digression.

L. Neil Smith, “My Tea Party”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2010-10-31

Gallup calls current polling data “unprecedented”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:23

The US midterm elections are often taken as a poll on the performance of the President, so the Gallup organization is saying what many Republican and Tea Party speakers have been saying for weeks: Barack Obama is dragging down his party:

Gallup models the number of seats a party will control based on that party’s share of the national two-party vote for the House of Representatives, using historical voting data in midterm elections from 1946 to 2006. The model takes into account the majority party in Congress entering the elections.

Gallup’s historical model suggests that a party needs at least a two-point advantage in the national House vote to win a majority of the 435 seats. The Republicans’ current likely voter margin suggests that this scenario is highly probable, making the question of interest this election not whether the GOP will win the majority, but by how much. Taking Gallup’s final survey’s margin of error into account, the historical model predicts that the Republicans could gain anywhere from 60 seats on up, with gains well beyond that possible.

It should be noted, however, that this year’s 15-point gap in favor of the Republican candidates among likely voters is unprecedented in Gallup polling and could result in the largest Republican margin in House voting in several generations. This means that seat projections have moved into uncharted territory, in which past relationships between the national two-party vote and the number of seats won may not be maintained.

The other thing to keep in mind is that polling isn’t quite as definitive as pollsters would like you to believe: voters sometimes conceal their actual voting intentions. The most recent example of this was the Toronto municipal elections, where polls consistently had Rob Ford and George Smitherman in a statistical dead heat, but the actual result was a 12 point lead for Ford.

H/T to Ace for the link.

This will come as a surprise only to drug warriors

Filed under: Britain, Health, Law, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:10

A recent British study totted up the effects both on the individual and costs to society of various legal and illegal drugs:

Alcohol is more harmful than heroin or crack, according to a study published in medical journal the Lancet.

The report is co-authored by Professor David Nutt, the former UK chief drugs adviser who was sacked by the government in October 2009.

It ranks 20 drugs on 16 measures of harm to users and to wider society.

Tobacco and cocaine are judged to be equally harmful, while ecstasy and LSD are among the least damaging.

H/T to DarkWaterMuse, who writes:

An interesting result, no doubt, but one thing the researchers failed to do is to aggregate the harm due to all illicit drugs, or even a handful of drugs frequently abused by the same users. Seems to me this would likely reveal alcohol as relatively benign though it’s not clear how additive the effects are.

October 28, 2010

It’s “like asking an alcoholic to run a distillery”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:26

The dissent on the announced purchase of F-35 fighter jets continues to gain traction:

In an interview on CBC’s Power and Politics last night, Industry Minister Tony Clement admitted we are buying the F-35s because the military wants them. “It is the best plane on the market. I will say on your program, I’m not the expert. The military are the experts. Why don’t the Liberals take the word of the Canadian military on that?” he asked.

Let me count the ways. A brief read of the A-G’s report on the purchase of military helicopters suggests a host of reasons why allowing the Department of National Defence to dictate procurement is like asking an alcoholic to run a distillery.

Sheila Fraser’s report concluded that National Defence knew, but did not tell the politicians, that the helicopter it wanted was not an “off-the-shelf “ model, with a relatively low risk of cost and time overruns.

In the event, the total cost for the 15 Chinook heavy lift helicopters more than doubled to $4.9-billion from the $2-billion price tag when the project was presented to the Conservative government and approved. Helicopters that were initially scheduled to be delivered last July, now won’t be ready until June 2013 — a state of affairs Ms. Fraser decried as “totally inappropriate”.

I’m not convinced that the F-35 is the aircraft Canada actually needs, and the DND’s track record on equipment purchases combined with the ultra-spendy pricetag on the F-35 make me concerned that they’re going to put themselves in the same state as the British armed forces by over-committing to kit that they (that is, we) can’t afford.

A significant indicator of social decline

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:04

Monty puts his finger on the biggest social change since the 1960’s and posits the likely results:

The recipe for the decline and fall of the American republic: most people who receive government benefits will not willingly give them up, or even allow them to be reduced. They’ve been told that these benefits are a right so often by the so-called “progressives” that they’ve come to believe it, and any attempt to reduce their benefits amounts, in their eyes, to a civil-rights violation. This is what the welfare state leads to — an entire class of dependents who insist upon receiving the sweat of your brow not as charity or payment for services rendered, but as a birthright not to be denied them. Class warfare (between public-sector workers and taxpayers) and generational warfare (between the recipients of Medicare and Social Security and those who must fund it) is the only possible outcome if things do not change soon. And I don’t mean that in rhetorical or symbolic terms; I mean in actual, bloody, street-fighting terms. It’s the culture of grievance, of victimhood, of moral equivalence playing out in real time. As I wrote in an essay a while back, look at what’s happening in England and France right now. That is our future — only more violent — if we don’t change our ways.

October 27, 2010

The new broom in Toronto

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:25

After a particularly hard-fought election campaign, Chris Selley looks at the opening moves Toronto mayor Rob Ford will be making:

It’s kind of funny to see people who’ve spent the past 10 months trashing Rob Ford now insist he needs to extend olive branches to the progressive community. If I were Rob Ford, and I had an olive branch, I might be tempted to extend it rather violently towards my harshest critics. (Then, in accordance with my new and improved image, I’d take two deep breaths and calm down.)

Clearly Mr. Ford is sticking with his gravy train priorities off the top: departmental efficiencies, contracting out services, cutting councillor budgets and staff. At a media scrum on Tuesday afternoon, his message hadn’t changed, that I could discern, from what it was during the campaign. Basically: Trust me. The money’s there to be saved, and it won’t hurt a bit.

Still, Mayor Ford will have a city to keep happy. And while they received very little notice during the campaign, his platform included several populist, pro-democratic and dirt-cheap measures I’d defy anyone to oppose and that could earn him some grudging praise from disaffected Pantaloons and Smithermanians.

The large turnout and the not-quite-majority of votes cast for Ford should at least quiet the claims that he “doesn’t have a mandate” for a little while. If he can actually deliver on some of his campaign promises to reduce spending and eliminate some of the least useful municipal programs/initiatives, he’ll be a vast improvement over the last mayor. Even if he doesn’t — he only has a single vote on council, so it’s not automatic that he’ll be able to implement his agenda — it should be an interesting term in office.

Kathy Shaidle shows why Rob Ford had “hidden” strength in the campaign that the media couldn’t account for:

What is Rob Ford most famous for?

No, not that he looks exactly like everybody’s drunk, abusive stepfather. No, not the “gravy train” line.

Rob Ford is “the guy who returns every call.”

That was always Ford’s claim to fame: that even if you didn’t [live] in his ward, he returned your call. If you were wrapped up in red tape and called Rob Ford, an hour or maybe a day later, the tape got snipped. The Wheeltrans showed up at your elderly mother’s door. That stupid problem you’d been screaming at bureaucrats about got taken care of.

Everyone in Toronto knows a Rob Ford story like that.

October 26, 2010

Did we just witness the start of “Tea Party Ontario”?

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:53

Steve Paikin looks at the unexpected toppling of incumbent mayors across Ontario yesterday:

Did we just have our own “tea party” Ontario?

All over the province, incumbents were feeling the wrath of the electorate.

In the capital city, Rob Ford cruised to victory, besting George Smitherman by more than 90,000 votes. His margin of victory was bigger than David Miller’s when he “swept” into office with his broom seven years ago.

But it wasn’t only Toronto. Incumbent mayors lost in Hamilton, Ottawa, Burlington, Vaughan, London, Thunder Bay, and Sudbury.

In Mississauga, where Hazel McCallion is accustomed to winning with more than 90% of the vote, she only won re-election with 76%.

[. . .]

A few weeks ago, none of these results was seen as obvious.

[. . .]

The conventional wisdom in local politics is that name recognition counts for so much. The power of incumbency is fantastic.

Not last night. If anything, the opposite was true. If you were in, you had a target on you. And precious few escaped it, including many incumbent city councillors in Toronto.

A stunning night for upsets. A big night for turnout (more than 50% in Toronto…twice the normal turnout rate).

An Ontario Tea Party would be a good idea . . .

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress