Month: January 2011

#rsrh High-speed rail.

The Left is whining about it again [Link fixed.].  Speaking as somebody who’s actually used Amtrak in the past, let’s just establish this once and for all: it’s great for going from Manhattan to Philadelphia, Baltimore, and/or Washington DC… if you’re having work pay the several hundred dollars in fares that you need for a round trip.  If you’re don’t, it’s expensive.  If you need to go somewhere else than from city-to-city, you’re stuck.  If you rely on Amtrak for a daily commute, you are smoking crack.  If you have kids, then an Amtrak trip is excellent practice for dealing with the fires of Hell.

Bottom line, folks: urban types love high-speed rail because it more or less conveniently links the roughly .5% of the country that they actually care about.  The rest of us use this thing called an “automobile,” which is a marvelous device that likewise goes from city to city; plus, you can use it to do such different activities as facilitate shopping, explore rural and suburban areas, and engage in emergency transportation.  In a pinch, it even makes for an impromptu locale for fornication.

Try doing that on the Acela.

#rsrh Eliminationist rhetoric in the… Mikado?

I am afraid that complaining about calling for the beheading of Sarah Palin IN THIS SPECIFIC CASE falls into the category of “They will get away with it:” the production was of The Mikado, which is a Gilbert & Sullivan opera that features a song called “As someday it may happen” (more commonly known as “I’ve Got A Little List”).  The topic of said song is about suitable subjects for execution; it was wide-ranging in the original, included public figures generally, and has traditionally been updated to include contemporary targets.  I can personally speak to this tradition being both real, and scrupulously followed; a decade ago I attended one revival in DC where the song called for the mass culling of everybody involved in Bush vs. Gore.

Not having seen the production by the Missoula Children’s Theater, I don’t actually know if the aforementioned beheading was included in that specific song; if it wasn’t, the letter writer has a point.  If it was… hey, I love reading Instapundit and James Taranto, but the Republic has survived in spite of this tradition for a century now.  The real question is whether the director thought to balance the score by,  say, hoping for the defenestration of a left-wing politician…

Moe Lane

[UPDATE]: James kindly sent me the MCT Community Theater’s (I was pleasantly surprised to hear that kids were being shown Gilbert & Sullivan) “Sorry if anybody was offended; we’ve removed the lines in question” response.  I normally hate that sort of thing, so I will simply note that they did so and move, as they say, on.

#rsrh Gun-grabbers’ ghoulish Giffords-grandstanding.

Just because they’re not anywhere near a majority at the moment doesn’t mean that they’re not prepared to stop on their radical agenda.  I imagine that the Tucson shootings must seem to be a heaven-sent opportunity for them:

Rep. John Conyers (Mich.), top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, and 15 other Democrats on the panel sent a letter to Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) on Friday seeking hearings on several gun-safety issues related to the Tucson shooting.

Conyers and his fellow House Democrats wanted to ‘investigate’ (read: grandstand) on extra-large ammunition clips; less superficially obnoxiously, they wanted an investigation into the procedures regarding mentally ill people’s access to guns.  The problem is, it’s a little disingenuous of them to have the hearings now.  There’ll be plenty of time for those after we hear precisely how Loughner slipped through the system – and actually get confirmation that the man is too insane to stand trial.

House Republicans understand that last bit, which is why I can take this occasion to write something that I had so few opportunities to meaningfully do during the previous four years: “Representative John Conyers?  Sit down, make yourself comfortable, and pour yourself a big mug of Shut The F*** Up.” Continue reading #rsrh Gun-grabbers’ ghoulish Giffords-grandstanding.

#rsrh …So. Egypt.

Darned if I know who to root for, in this one: the government’s corrupt and the revolutionaries aren’t really our friends.  I guess my opinion pretty much can be summed up by this spreadsheet (all data from the CIA World Factbook):

Country Population Per Capita % Pop % PC
USA 310,232,863 $  47,400 100% 100%
Egypt 80,471,869 $    6,200 26% 13%
Israel 7,353,985 $  29,500 2% 62%

Guess which countries are the peaceful, multiparty, free market democracies?  And which country is the corrupt, strongman kleptocracy?  There’s a lesson there, hopefully.

Hopefully.

Moe Lane

Colorado ‘Amazon tax’ unconstitutional?

[UPDATE: ‘Amazon tax laws,’ for those who are wondering, represent attempts to get around a Supreme Court ruling regarding out-of-state transactions.  Residents of states who have a sales tax are theoretically expected to pay sales tax on all transactions, not just ones that take place in-state: however, vendors with out-of-state customers have long taken the position that trying to keep track of every jurisdiction’s sales tax rules is an undue burden upon them.  The Supreme Court agreed, ruling that vendors are only required to track and collect sales tax on transactions for states where they had a physical presence.  This effectively means that online retailers such as Amazon.com are effectively released from the burden of collecting sales tax information.  Various Democratic state legislators – blanching at the very idea of trying to enforce individual residents from reporting their online transactions for taxation purposes – have attempted to make an end run around this ruling by writing legislation declaring in-state affiliates of online retailers as counting in terms of ‘physical location:’ Amazon’s typical response is to immediately cancel all affiliate programs in the targeted state, thus eliminating any need for them to collect sales tax information.]

That’s the preliminary ruling by a US District Court judge, at least: he’s ruled that the law is unconstitutional on Commerce Clause grounds, and has issued a preliminary injunction to prevent the state of Colorado to enforce the disclosure rules on out-of-state vendors before the deadline.  I am not a lawyer, but the short version is that the judge ruled that the Amazon tax law violated the Commerce Clause by putting regulatory and disclosure burdens on out-of-state vendors that were not present on in-state ones; that the plaintiffs (including the Direct Marketing Association) had a valid chance to prevail in the broader case; and that until the issue was involved it would be inappropriate for the State of Colorado to collect information as per the Amazon tax law.

This is only a preliminary injunction, obviously: if this court or a higher one decides that the law is Constitutional after all it’ll be reversed.  That’s why Colorado House Majority Leader Amy Stephens (Republican, of course) is introducing legislation repealing the original law.  Colorado Senate Majority Leader John Morse (Democrat) is reflexively opposing the repeal, even though he’s sufficiently ignorant of the ruling as to apparently think that either the DMA or its members have revenue caps of $600/year.  New Governor Hickenlooper is thus in a bit of a jam; he’s facing a House that decidedly flipped last election cycle and a looming court controversy, and a remarkably uneducated set of Senate allies on the other.  That this can be fairly categorized as a ‘bit of a jam’ tells you a lot about the current ideological condition of the various state Democratic parties. Continue reading Colorado ‘Amazon tax’ unconstitutional?

#rsrh Ryan J. Reilly should feel *privileged*…

…that Jim Oberg stopped by to correct Reilly’s, ah, misunderstanding of the history of the Space Race – a misunderstanding not shared by THAT WOMAN, much to Reilly’s eventual (but undoubtedly never publicized) chagrin.  If you don’t particularly feel like clicking through: the Russians’ launch of Sputnik (and their later firsts in manned space flight*) were indeed scored as wins; those wins did fuel Apollo**; and Apollo had later repercussions on Soviet space policy, which contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union as a whole.  As Oberg noted, this is a complicated subject (I’m not an expert in it myself; Jim Oberg definitely is, particularly when it comes to the Russian space program); so it’s probably not Reilly’s fault that he’s less checked out on it than Sarah Palin is…

Via Instapundit.

Moe Lane Continue reading #rsrh Ryan J. Reilly should feel *privileged*…

#rsrh QotD, Tea Party edition.

Jim Geraghty, on the deliberately decentralized nature of the Tea Parties:

The whole point of this movement is that these people hate being told what to do.

To pile on, it has been fascinating to watch liberal Democrats so comprehensively sabotage what was one of their greatest advantages in the political sphere: to wit, “Rightie don’t march.”  Conservatives thought that they hated activism.  We were proud about hating activism.  “Do I smell like a patchouli-reeking hemp nut?” “There are better ways to meet girls.” “That’s something that they do.” “Marching around with signs never accomplished anything – look at the peace movement.”  And, of course, the classic put-down:

“How come,” I asked Andy, “whenever something upsets the Left, you see immediate marches and parades and rallies with signs already printed and rhyming slogans already composed, whereas whenever something upsets the Right, you see two members of the Young Americans for Freedom waving a six-inch flag?”

“We have jobs,” said Andy.

Annnnnnnd that would be the problem, right there.  Because the hidden deal that the Right made with the Left in all of this was that if they wanted us to leave the marching and the megaphones and the signs and the slogans and the organized protests (and, yeah, the costumes and the theatrics and the camera-friendly stunts) to them then the Left had better reciprocate by making sure that we still had jobs. But apparently that deal no longer applies… and a bunch of people have now discovered that hey, this activism thing is kind of fun and gets them out into the fresh air on a regular basis, which they’ve been meaning to do anyway.

The long-term implications of that last realization will be playing out over the next twenty years.  Particularly once the Left fully internalizes their realization that there was a reason why their operating economic/cultural paradigm of Big Government Solutions was never able to spark a true populist movement… Continue reading #rsrh QotD, Tea Party edition.