Monthly Archives: January 2013

A waiting period for laws—Glenn Harlan Reynolds – NYPOST.com

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So New York’s stringent new gun-control law bans guns or magazines capable of holding more than seven shots. Everybody’s safer now, except that — in the Gov. Cuomo-led rush to pass the bill — nobody thought to exempt the police, making all those Glocks felonious.

The Rolling Stones once sang that “every cop is a criminal,” but even they didn’t mean it as a prescription for legislation.

Yes, Cuomo argues (unpersuasively) that the ban still doesn’t apply to cops, but Albany is amending things just to “clarify.”

Maybe someone might have noticed the problem before the bill passed — if legislators had had time to, you know, read the bill and talk about it and maybe even hold hearings. But Cuomo issued a “message of necessity” to allow skipping the state’s normal “waiting period” before passage of legislation.

Perhaps the governor feared that, if lawmakers took the time for intelligent discussion, the bill might not pass?

Maybe so, but — as they say in the software business — that’s not a bug, that’s a feature.

After every tragedy, legislation gets rushed through that’s typically just a bunch of stuff that various folks had long wanted all along, but couldn’t pass before. Then it’s hustled through as a “solution” to the tragedy, even though close inspection usually reveals that the changes wouldn’t have prevented the tragedy, and don’t even have much to do with it.

via A waiting period for laws—Glenn Harlan Reynolds – NYPOST.com.

Senators not in ‘millionaires’ club’ would be hurt by lost paychecks – The Hill

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I am not feeling much sympathy for them.

The Senate is often called the “millionaires’ club,” but some of its members would feel the pain if a blown budget deadline costs them their paychecks.

Provisions in the “No Budget, No Pay” debt ceiling bill that is headed to the Senate floor would impound senators’ salaries if the upper chamber doesn’t approve a budget by April 15.

For most of the upper chamber, the loss of the $174,000 annual salary would be no hardship. Many senators are millionaires many times over, having earned substantial fortunes outside of politics.

But for a small group of senators whose net worth is measured in thousands instead of millions, the passage of “No Budget, No Pay” would put their very livelihoods at risk.

“We’re not all millionaires,” Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) told The Hill. “When I splurge, it’s on a Ravens t-shirt.”

“As much as I love my job and my constituents, I have bills to pay,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska).

“As a non-millionaire senator, I am certainly in a different spot that someone who is independently wealthy,” Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) said.

The provisions in the bill specify that if the Senate does not pass a budget resolution, pay will be withheld until Jan. 3, 2015, when the 113th Congress ends.

via Senators not in ‘millionaires’ club’ would be hurt by lost paychecks – The Hill.

Hackers take over gov’t website to avenge Swartz – CBS News

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I don’t support Anonymous in any way, nor do I approve of their methods. But I will not argue with this. I’ll have more to say about the issue in a future post.

The hacker-activist group Anonymous says it hijacked the website of the U.S. Sentencing Commission to avenge the death of Aaron Swartz, an Internet activist who committed suicide.

The website of the commission, an independent agency of the judicial branch, was taken over early Saturday and replaced with a message warning that when Swartz killed himself two weeks ago “a line was crossed.”

via Hackers take over gov’t website to avenge Swartz – CBS News.

Obama recess appointments unconstitutional – Washington Times

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The important difference between this and other recess appointments is that the Senate had not declared they were in recess when Obama made the appointments. This was an abuse of emergency powers to overrule Senate approval of Presidential appointments.

In their ruling the judges said their duty is not to speed up the workings of government, but to hold to constitutional principles.

“If some administrative inefficiency results from our construction of the original meaning of the Constitution, that does not empower us to change what the Constitution commands,” the judges wrote.

The judges said the recess power was created for a time when Congress met only a few months out of the year, and was designed for the president to fill vacancies during the long periods when Congress was not meeting. In modern times, when Congress is almost always capable of meeting, the recess powers should be more circumscribed.

Obama recess appointments unconstitutional – Washington Times.

Feinstein Gun Control Bill to Exempt Government Officials | The Weekly Standard

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This is America. They’re entrenching their aristocracy. We aren’t going to allow this.

The Huffington Post confirms these exemptions, and adds that guns owned prior to the legislation becoming law will be permissible, too. “[T]he bill includes a number of exemptions: It exempts more than 2,200 hunting and sporting weapons; any gun manually operated by a bolt, pump, lever or slide action; any weapons used by government officials and law enforcement; and any weapons legally owned as of the date of the bill’s enactment.”

via Feinstein Gun Control Bill to Exempt Government Officials | The Weekly Standard.

Unlocking Cellphones Becomes Illegal Saturday | TechNewsDaily.com

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You idiots asked for it.

The clock to unlock a new mobile phone is running out.

In October 2012, the Librarian of Congress, who determines exemptions to a strict anti-hacking law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), decided that unlocking mobile phones would no longer be allowed. But the librarian provided a 90-day window during which people could still buy a phone and unlock it. That window closes on January 26.

via Unlocking Cellphones Becomes Illegal Saturday | TechNewsDaily.com.

David Mamet: Gun Laws and the Fools of Chelm – Newsweek and The Daily Beast

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Healthy government, as that based upon our Constitution, is strife. It awakens anxiety, passion, fervor, and, indeed, hatred and chicanery, both in pursuit of private gain and of public good. Those who promise to relieve us of the burden through their personal or ideological excellence, those who claim to hold the Magic Beans, are simply confidence men. Their emergence is inevitable, and our individual opposition to and rejection of them, as they emerge, must be blunt and sure; if they are arrogant, willful, duplicitous, or simply wrong, they must be replaced, else they will consolidate power, and use the treasury to buy votes, and deprive us of our liberties. It was to guard us against this inevitable decay of government that the Constitution was written. Its purpose was and is not to enthrone a Government superior to an imperfect and confused electorate, but to protect us from such a government.

Many are opposed to private ownership of firearms, and their opposition comes under several heads. Their specific objections are answerable retail, but a wholesale response is that the Second Amendment guarantees the right of the citizens to keep and bear arms. On a lower level of abstraction, there are more than 2 million instances a year of the armed citizen deterring or stopping armed criminals; a number four times that of all crimes involving firearms.

The Left loves a phantom statistic that a firearm in the hands of a citizen is X times more likely to cause accidental damage than to be used in the prevention of crime, but what is there about criminals that ensures that their gun use is accident-free? If, indeed, a firearm were more dangerous to its possessors than to potential aggressors, would it not make sense for the government to arm all criminals, and let them accidentally shoot themselves? Is this absurd? Yes, and yet the government, of course, is arming criminals.

via David Mamet: Gun Laws and the Fools of Chelm – Newsweek and The Daily Beast.

Victor Davis Hanson – Women at the Front

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One way or another, we have now apparently made a number of assumptions: that in the next war we will see overtly gay men and women fully integrated in small ground units amid firefights and carnage at the front; that this will not affect negatively, but more likely improve, U.S. combat efficacy;and that those intolerant reactionaries who object and feel less safe or simply less comfortable will shun the military — and that the military will not suffer as a consequence of their absence, but more likely improve. If all true, then we are onto the brave new world!

via Women at the Front – By Victor Davis Hanson – The Corner – National Review Online.

College Degree, No Class Time Required – WSJ.com

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This is the future:

Wisconsin officials tout the UW Flexible Option as the first to offer multiple, competency-based bachelor’s degrees from a public university system. Officials encourage students to complete their education independently through online courses, which have grown in popularity through efforts by companies such as Coursera, edX and Udacity.

No classroom time is required under the Wisconsin program except for clinical or practicum work for certain degrees.

Elsewhere, some schools offer competency-based credits or associate degrees in areas such as nursing and business, while Northern Arizona University plans a similar program that would offer bachelor’s degrees for a flat fee, said spokesman Eric Dieterle. But no other state system is offering competency-based bachelor’s degrees on a systemwide basis.

Wisconsin’s Flexible Option program is “quite visionary,” said Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education, an education policy and lobbying group that represents some 1,800 accredited colleges and universities.

In Wisconsin, officials say that about 20% of adult residents have some college credits but lack a degree. Given that a growing number of jobs require a degree, the new program appeals to potential students who lack the time or resources to go back to school full time.

“It is a big new idea in a system like ours, and it is part of the way the ground is shifting under us in higher education,” said Kevin Reilly, president of the University of Wisconsin System, which runs the state’s 26 public-university campuses.

Under the Flexible Option, assessment tests and related online courses are being written by faculty who normally teach the related subject-area classes, Mr. Reilly said.

Officials plan to launch the full program this fall, with bachelor’s degrees in subjects including information technology and diagnostic imaging, plus master’s and bachelor’s degrees for registered nurses. Faculty are working on writing those tests now.

via College Degree, No Class Time Required – WSJ.com.

From Bobby Jindal’s speech to the Republican National Committee in Charlotte | via WashingtonExaminer.com

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Let the Democrats sell the stale power of more federal programs, while we promote the rejuvenating power of new businesses.

We don’t believe old, top-down, industrial-age government becomes a good idea just because it agrees with us or because we are running it.

We must focus on the empowerment of citizens making relevant and different decisions in their communities while Democrats sell factory-style government that cranks out one dumbed-down answer for the whole country.

This means re-thinking nearly every social program in Washington. Very few of them work in my view, and frankly, the one-size fits all crowd has had its chance.

If any rational human being were to create our government anew, today, from a blank piece of paper – we would have about one fourth of the buildings we have in Washington and about half of the government workers.

We would replace most of its bureaucracy with a handful of good websites.

If we created American government today, we would not dream of taking money out of people’s pockets, sending it all the way to Washington, handing it over to politicians and bureaucrats to staple thousands of pages of artificial and political instructions to it, then wear that money out by grinding it through the engine of bureaucratic friction…and then sending what’s left of it back to the states, where it all started, in order to grow the American economy.

What we are doing now to govern ourselves is not just wrong. It is out of date and it is a failure.

 

Full text: Bobby Jindal’s dynamite speech to the Republican National Committee in Charlotte | WashingtonExaminer.com.