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Mandate smandate says David Harsanyi.
Debbie Wasserman Shultz: “There was no mandate” in an election in which the president’s opponent, Sen. John Kerry, won 48% of the vote, she says. “Half the country agreed with us.”
Barack Obama: ”Our task is not to shove our views down the throats of the losers but to see if we can arrive at common ground,” Obama says.
James Taranto plays back some words from “Audacity of Hope.”
“Maybe peace would have broken out with a different kind of White House, one less committed to waging a perpetual campaign–a White House that would see a 51-48 victory as a call to humility and compromise rather than an irrefutable mandate.”
Yeah, well, shut up, you Republican losers. Obama won, which means a majority of Americans support his policies. Stop being obstructionist and get with the program.
Oh wait, sorry. That quote wasn’t from a Republican but from a recently elected Democrat. It was referring not to Obama but to George W. Bush after the 2004 election. The author: Barack Obama, junior senator from Illinois. The book: “The Audacity of Hope.”
In the following paragraph, Sen. Obama goes on to complain about antitax activist Grover Norquist, who was “unconstrained by the decorum of public office.” On Tuesday, as PBS’s “NewsHour” reports, President Obama met with a group of similarly unconstrained “leaders of labor and liberal groups” at the White House to discuss economic policy.
Dennis Van Roekel, president of the teachers union that styles itself the National Education Association, told the network: “I brought the message that, number one, it’s important that we let the Bush tax cuts disappear for the wealthiest 2%. As we’re looking for a $1.2 trillion solution, $829 billion takes us a long way there.”
Do you see the problem here? The annual budget deficit has been running at around $1.2 trillion. (The Hill reports the deficit for October alone was $120 billion.) Raising taxes on “the wealthiest 2%,” it is estimated, would increase government revenues $829 billion over a decade. When Van Roekel says the tax hike “takes us a long way there,” he’s off by an order of magnitude.
The president’s answer is still more massive, job-killing tax increases: …
Megan McArdle with a mini-rant about 4 lb. bags of sugar.
… This is, of course, beyond moronic, since it doesn’t help us actually need less food. Instead, we can shop more, or fill the trunk with more packages. But it exploits human attentional flaws: we tend to look at the headline number and ignore the details. That’s why companies will frequently woo you with a great price on a television (and a terribly inflated shipping charge), and why big box retailers push wildly inflated extended warranties. People will leave the store to save $100 on a washer-dryer, but it will not occur to most of them to check the price of your competitors’ warranty programs.
This is super-annoying in a world that was designed around stable package sizes–my sugar canister was clearly intended to hold a five pound bag, and now I know why it’s never quite full. I also have a fair number of recipes that call for 12 ounces of something that is now being sold in a ten ounce package. Now you have to either buy two, or break out the calculator.
The fact that producers are shrinking the packages instead of raising the price also contributes to something I’ve recently seen popping up both on personal finance boards, and in personal conversations: people expressing surprise and frustration at their inability to control their soaring grocery bills. …
There is little chance there is one group more responsible for the present problems in our society than college administrators. The recent election shows how poorly educated their graduates have become. And the student debt crisis shows how little college leaders care about their customers. Educators live high on the hog while they load students with debts that will plague them for much of their adult lives. Just this past week FordhamUniversity’s president demonstrated his callous disregard of one of our essential freedoms when he criticized a student group for inviting Ann Coulter to speak. That kerfuffle lead to this weeks WSJ interview with the leader of a group that tries to protect free speech on college campuses. That’s right, there is actually is a need for a group that fights for free speech for college students – Foundation for Individual Rights in Education or FIRE.
… Administrative self-interest is also at work. “There’s been this huge expansion in the bureaucratic class at universities,” Mr. Lukianoff explains. “They passed the number of people involved in instruction sometime around 2006. So you get this ever-renewing crop of administrators, and their jobs aren’t instruction but to police student behavior. In the worst cases, they see it as their duty to intervene on students’ deepest beliefs.”
Consider the University of Delaware, which in fall 2007 instituted an ideological orientation for freshmen. The “treatment,” as the administrators called it, included personal interviews that probed students’ private lives with such questions as: “When did you discover your sexual identity?” Students were taught in group sessions that the term racist “applies to all white people” while “people of color cannot be racists.” Once FIRE spotlighted it, the university dismantled the program.
Yet in March 2012, Kathleen Kerr, the architect of the Delaware program, was elected vice president of the American College Personnel Association, the professional group of university administrators.
A 2010 survey by the American Association of Colleges and Universities found that of 24,000 college students, only 35.6% strongly agreed that “it is safe to hold unpopular views on campus.” When the question was asked of 9,000 campus professionals—who are more familiar with the enforcement end of the censorship rules—only 18.8% strongly agreed.
Mr. Lukianoff thinks all of this should alarm students, parents and alumni enough to demand change: “If just a handful more students came in knowing what administrators are doing at orientation programs, with harassment codes, or free-speech zones—if students knew this was wrong—we could really change things.”
The trouble is that students are usually intimidated into submission. “The startling majority of students don’t bother. They’re too concerned about their careers, too concerned about their grades, to bother fighting back,” he says. Parents and alumni dismiss free-speech restrictions as something that only happens to conservatives, or that will never affect their own children.
“I make the point that this is happening, and even if it’s happening to people you don’t like, it’s a fundamental violation of what the university means,” says Mr. Lukianoff. “Free speech is about protecting minority rights. Free speech is about admitting you don’t know everything. Free speech is about protecting oddballs. It means protecting dissenters.”
It even means letting Ann Coulter speak.
If you’re adventuresome and like to travel maybe avoiding Stalin’s Atlantis might be a good idea. Der Spiegel with a look at town on stilts in the Caspian Sea.
In the 1950s, Soviet engineers built a massive city in the Caspian Sea off the coast of Azerbaijan. It was a network of oil platforms linked by hundreds of kilometers of roads and housing 5,000 workers, with a cinema, a park and apartment blocks. Gradually disintegrating but still closely guarded, this astonishing place inspired a fiery scene in a James Bond movie. …
… After the war, Soviet engineers took a closer look at a reef that mariners called the “Black Rock.” They built a shed on the tiny island and conducted test drilling. During the night of Nov. 7, 1949, they struck top-quality oil at a depth of 1,100 meters below the seabed and shortly thereafter, the world’s first offshore oil platform was built at the spot, now renamed Neft Dashlari, or “oily rock.” “Platform” is a hopelessly inadequate word for the many-armed monster of steel and timber that gradually spread across the waves of the sea, which is only 20 meters deep on average, over the following years.
The foundation of the main settlement consists of seven sunken ships including “Zoroaster,” the world’s first oil tanker, built in Sweden. In Neft Dashlari’s heyday, some 2,000 drilling platforms were spread in a 30-kilometer circle, joined by a network of bridge viaducts spanning 300 kilometers. Trucks thundered across the bridges and eight-story apartment blocks were built for the 5,000 workers who sometimes spent weeks on Neft Dashlari. The voyage back to the mainland could take anything between six and twelve hours, depending on the type of ship. The island had its own beverage factory, soccer pitch, library, bakery, laundry, 300-seat cinema, bathhouse, vegetable garden and even a tree-lined park for which the soil was brought from the mainland.
It was a Stalinist utopia for the working class. A Soviet stamp from 1971 summed up the gigantic hopes it embodied in a tiny image: against the black outline of a drilling rig, a road made of bridges snaked its way across the deep blue sea towards further rigs and a red sun on the horizon. …