Click on WORD or PDF for full content
Mark Steyn says David Gregory made a point about our many stupid laws when Gregory was making a point about a stupid law he supports.
A week ago on NBC’s “Meet The Press,” David Gregory brandished on screen a high-capacity magazine. To most media experts, a “high-capacity magazine” means an ad-stuffed double-issue of Vanity Fair with the triple-page perfume-scented pullouts. But apparently in America’s gun-nut gun culture of gun-crazed gun kooks, it’s something else entirely, and it was this latter kind that Mr. Gregory produced in order to taunt Wayne LaPierre of the NRA. As the poster child for America’s gun-crazed gun-kook gun culture, Mr. LaPierre would probably have been more scared by the host waving around a headily perfumed Vanity Fair. But that was merely NBC’s first miscalculation. It seems a high-capacity magazine is illegal in the District of Columbia, and the flagrant breach of D.C. gun laws is now under investigation by the police.
This is, declared NYU professor Jay Rosen, “the dumbest media story of 2012.” Why? Because, as CNN’s Howard Kurtz breezily put it, everybody knows David Gregory wasn’t “planning to commit any crimes.”
So what? Neither are the overwhelming majority of his fellow high-capacity-magazine-owning Americans. Yet they’re expected to know, as they drive around visiting friends and family over Christmas, the various and contradictory gun laws in different jurisdictions. “Ignorantia juris non excusat” is one of the oldest concepts in civilized society: ignorance of the law is no excuse. Back when there was a modest and proportionate number of laws, that was just about do-able. But in today’s America there are laws against everything, and any one of us at any time is unknowingly in breach of dozens of them. And, in this case, NBC was informed by the D.C. police that it would be illegal to show the thing on TV, and they went ahead and did it, anyway: You’ll never take me alive, copper! You’ll have to pry my high-capacity magazine from my cold dead fingers! When the D.C. SWAT team, the FBI and the ATF take out NBC News, and the whole building goes up in one almighty fireball, David Gregory will be the crazed loon up on the roof like Jimmy Cagney in “White Heat”: “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!” At last, some actual must-see TV on that lousy network.
But, even if we’re denied that pleasure, the “dumbest media story of 2012″ is actually rather instructive. David Gregory intended to demonstrate what he regards as the absurdity of America’s lax gun laws. Instead, he’s demonstrating the ever-greater absurdity of America’s non-lax laws. His investigation, prosecution, and a sentence of 20-to-30 years with eligibility for parole after 10 (assuming Mothers Against High-Capacity Magazines don’t object) would teach a far more useful lesson than whatever he thought he was doing by waving that clip under LaPierre’s nose. …
… This is all modern life is. Ernest Hemingway had a six-toed cat. The cat begat. (Eat your heart out, Doctor Seuss.) So descendants of his six-toed cat still live at the Hemingway home in Key West. Tourists visit the property. Thus, the Department of Agriculture is insisting that the six-toed cats are an “animal exhibit” like the tigers at the zoo, and therefore come under federal regulation requiring each to be housed in an individual compound with “elevated resting surfaces,” “electric wire,” and a night watchman. Should David Gregory be treated more leniently than a domestic cat just because when Obama tickles his tummy he licks the president’s hand and purrs contentedly?
There are two possible resolutions: Gregory can call in a favor from some Obama consigliere who’ll lean on the cops to disappear the whole thing. If he does that, he’ll be contributing to the remorseless assault on a bedrock principle of free societies – equality before the law. Laws either apply to all of us or none of us. If they apply only to some, they’re not laws but caprices – and all tyranny is capricious.
Or he can embrace the role in which fate has cast him. Sometimes a society becomes too stupid to survive. Eleven-year-old girls fined for rescuing woodpeckers, serving Marines put on the no-fly list, and fifth-generation family cats being ordered into separate compounds with “electric wire” fencing can all testify to how near that point America is. But nothing “raises awareness” like a celebrity spokesman. Step forward, David Gregory! Dare the prosecutor to go for the death penalty – and let’s make your ammo the non-shot heard round the world!
Steve Hayward of Power Line says renewable energy is still breaking wind.
The federal budget is not the only thing looking at dropping off a fiscal cliff. One of the loose ends caught in the whole mess is the renewal of the “production tax credit” (PTC) for wind power, a supposedly “temporary” measure to help the industry get on its feet, but which, like wartime rent control, somehow becomes a permanent necessity to “save jobs” now. The wind industry is currently lobbying Congress furiously to extend the PTC, which currently costs taxpayers $1 billion a year.
But the lobbying crusade isn’t going very well. In fact, the head of the wind rent-seeking lobby, Denise Bode of the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), abruptly resigned recently when her most proposal to extend the PTC came with a $12 billion annual price tag. Lisa Linowes reports over on the indispensable Master Resource blog:
“When Representative Pat Tiberi (R-OH), chairman of the House Select Revenue Measures Subcommittee asked AWEA in April to present a proposal for phasing-out the PTC, the trade group ignored the question. The idea of a phase-out fell outside the limits of their campaign messaging and thus, outside their ability to respond. Last week, the pressure for a proposal reached a peak and AWEA threw together a six-year, front-loaded extension with a price tag in the tens of billions of dollars.
The sheer ridiculousness of the proposal outraged Congressional members and may well have changed the debate. It’s NO coincidence that within 24-hours of AWEA’s poorly received proposal, Denise Bode bailed. A move that sudden suggests the industry thinks it’s better off without her and probably without AWEA’s inflexible, out-of-touch campaign.”
Even the Washington Post has come out against renewing the PTC. Here’s my suggestion: the American Wind Energy Association should change its name to the Fatuous Attempt to Rob Taxpayers, or FART for short. …
David Zuriwak, a serious reporter, has a go at Chelsea Clinton’s journalist creds.
I know there are questions on my beat larger and more pressing than who’s worse as a TV journalist, Chelsea Clinton or Jenna Bush Hager, the presidentially-connected, pretend correspondents at NBC News. But I continue to be fascinated by a network news division putting someone as outrageously unqualified as Clinton on a prime-time newsmagazine. I watched her again last week in a softer-than-soft piece on a weight loss program started by Pastor Rick Warren at his Saddleback Church, and I can say with absolute certainty that she has not improved one lick in the last year.
In fact, I think she is worse than when she started this job for which NBC News President Steve Capus said “it’s as if she had been preparing her whole life.” That’s why I read with such fascination a piece at Politico this week suggesting Clinton was ready for the “next act” in her life. Here’s the nut graph: “Family friends and supporters says Chelsea Clinton, who has evolved from a frizzy-haired little girl in the White House to a self-assured public figure in her own right, is ready to play an increasingly larger role in the national debate and may emerge as a pre-2016 surrogate of sorts as her mom mulls her future plans.”
The piece is filled with quotes from those family friends and supporters describing Clinton as “incredibly articulate and human…charmingly personal while at the same time substantively deep.” If true, it’s amazing how none of that manages to work its way into her on-air work for NBC with such programs as Rock Center.
In the Warren piece, for example, …
Above the Law Blog posts about a serious program to reduce education costs. No, it is not legal education. They’re content to keep abusing their customers.
If you talk to legal educators for long enough, you might start to think that they are trying their best. You might start to think that there is no other way they can approach the training of lawyers. You might even start to think that they are more concerned with education then with bilking law students for all they’re worth.
Don’t believe it. Law schools are involved in a straight cash grab, and it turns out the we only need to look towards our nation’s medical schools to see how things look when schools are more concerned with the profession than profits.
It turns out that a very prestigious medical school is looking to trim a year off of the education — because doing so will reduce student debt and encourage young doctors to go into underserved fields….
The New York Times has a great article about a new pilot program at NYU Medical School. The plan is to reduce the number of years it takes to go through med school from four years down to three: …
Chicago has made it to 500 homicides for 2012. This from the city that gave us obama and valerie jarrett. Trib has the story,
Chicago reached “a tragic number” today, according to Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy: Its homicide total for the year hit 500, the highest annual total since 2008.
The city’s latest homicide occurred around 9 p.m. Thursday when Nathaniel T. Jackson, 40, an alleged gang member with a lengthy arrest record, was gunned down outside a store in the Austin neighborhood.
As of Thursday night, homicides were up 17 percent over last year in Chicago and shootings had increased by 11 percent, according to police statistics. Earlier this fall, Chicago already exceeded the number of homicides that occurred last year, but this is the first time the city has had 500 or more murders since the 512 in 2008. …