….. But I Don’t Have Any Time For:
- At RedState — “Don’t be fooled by President Obama’s purported renunciation of the Fairness Doctrine last week. The far left fully intends to use a new regulatory scheme, the Son of The Fairness Doctrine, to regulate conservative talk radio.”
- From the Associated Press’s Ben Feller at the wire service’s “We’re Deliberately Trying to Understate the Importance of This” Dept. last Friday afternoon — “(Rick) Santelli’s report has become something of an Internet sensation.”
- From the AP’s Matt Friedman at the “We’re Just Making This Up” Dept. down the hall — “But (Tzipi) Livni, a centrist, would certainly exact a high price: sharing the prime minister’s job she so fervently sought with a reluctant (Benjamin) Netanyahu. Should he balk, his alternative would be an unstable coalition of right-wingers sure to collide with the Obama administration and its ambitious plans for ending 60 years of conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.” The White House web site has two sentences of pablum (see “Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” under “Renewing American Diplomacy”) that could have been written during any of the previous three administrations.
- George Will longs for repeal of the 17th Amendment that created the direct election of US Senators. Of course, Brian at Repeal the 17th caught it. The Constitution originally had senators selected by state legislatures. As Will reminds us, it gave us statesmen such as Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John Calhoun (Calhoun was noble in many respects, but dead wrong on slavery, which was a “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” matter that the Declaration of Independence — whose “we hold these truths” section should be treated as the equivalent of a Founding Document but isn’t — logically doomed to elimination). The 17th was a pivotal mistake, and set the stage for consolidation of power in Washington. It should be repealed. I fear it never will be.
- Joe Kernen of CNBC’s Squawk Box ripped a copy of the New York Times on camera after the paper criticized the network for (imagine that) prominently displaying Rick Santelli’s riffs on its web site. That doesn’t make up for his snide “mob rule” and similar remarks during Santelli’s original rant, but it’s a start.
- “Arctic Sea Ice Underestimated for Weeks Due to Faulty Sensor” — Hey, they’re only off by 193,000 square miles, or an area about 17% larger than California. What’s everyone so excited about (/sarc)?
- From the “Too Bad It Didn’t Go This Way” Dept. — In December 2006, John Fund looked at a possible Obama presidency, and liked the post-racial prospects, writing, “Who better to help the country get over its racial hang-ups than a 45-year-old man who was born in multiethnic Hawaii to a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya and who grew up partly in Indonesia? He’s the political equivalent of Tiger Woods.” Too bad that isn’t the route Obama chose. Instead we have a racist Attorney General lecturing us about how we’re a “nation of cowards” about race. Of all the unfortunately predictable disappointments in the administration thus far, in the midst of a lot of other big ones, this is the biggest. A post-racial society is exactly where we could have been as long as 20 years ago if grievance-mongers like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Jeremiah Wright and lawyers like Holder hadn’t seen so much opportunity for personal gain in preventing it.
