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Tim Carney at the Examiner posts on why you should consider shopping at Sam’s Club rather than Costco.
If you’re a millionaire corporate bigwig using your wealth to influence elections, and using your company’s clout to influence legislation, President Obama might give you a tongue-lashing. Unless you’re a fundraiser and donor for the Obama Victory Fund, and your company’s lobbying agenda coincides with the White House’s — then Obama will give you a shout-out in a major economic address.
In his nationally televised speech Wednesday (last week), Obama sang the praises of retail giant Costco, whose founder Jim Sinegal gave Obama the maximum contribution in two elections and hosted fundraisers for his reelection. Costco has also lobbied for many of Obama’s legislative priorities, including higher minimum wage, Obamacare, and price controls on financial processing fees.
Given the company’s politics and tendency to seek profit through big government, Costco stands out as a model of Obamanomics. The money trail and the free advertising also give off a whiff of cronyism. …
There were a couple of good posts at Dilbert’s Blog on the reactions to the Zimmerman verdict.
… My understanding of the Trayvon Martin protests is that the participants would like the public to stop believing that young African-American males are crime-prone. The strategy for accomplishing this involves holding largely peaceful protests in which a small number of young African-American males are likely to be filmed by news crews wearing masks, breaking store windows, threatening innocent motorists, and getting arrested. That’s exactly what I watched on the news last night as Oakland was starting to heat up.
The trouble-makers are a small percentage of the protesters – maybe 1%. The problem is that the 1% gets the lion’s share of news coverage, thus reinforcing the racial bias that the peaceful protesters are trying to combat. In terms of managing the public’s impressions, the protests are an epic fail. …
Dilbert’s creator, Scott Adams, was so taken with one comment he posted it on the blog.
“When I buy a can of Coke, I see the label, and I know what to expect.
Stereotypes are wrong of course. But brands are good.
So if there are a bunch of people that dress a certain way, and act a certain way, they are creating a brand for themselves.
There’s a nerd brand. There’s a metro-sexual brand. There’s a jock brand, a cheerleader brand, a gothic brand… I can go on but of course you know what I mean.
Then there is a gangster brand.
This may be shocking, but if you dress like a gangster – talk like a gangster – and ride around in a car like a gangster, people are bound to pick up on the brand you’re showcasing. …”
David Garman and Sam Thernstrom report on Europe’s growing problems with power produced by renewables.
… Another challenge of Europe’s growing dependence on renewable energy is far more serious: the potential loss of reliable electrical supply. It’s one thing to ask consumers to pay more for cleaner energy; it’s another to force them to endure blackouts.
Since large amounts of electricity cannot be easily or inexpensively stored, it must be generated and delivered (“dispatched”) to meet the constantly changing demand for power. As millions of consumers turn electric lights and appliances on and off, power generators and grid operators must match supply to demand to ensure that current is moving across wires at the proper frequency to avoid power failures, brownouts and other problems.
Normally, this is fairly straightforward. Grid operators generally rely on coal and nuclear plants to meet baseload demand while modifying gas and hydroelectric power output to meet shifting demand. But electricity from wind and solar is variable and intermittent. Nature determines when and how much power will be generated from available capacity, so it is not necessarily “dispatchable” when needed.
When intermittent renewables are small players in the grid, they can be easily absorbed. But as they reach European levels of penetration, the strain begins to show. There are increasing reports of management challenges resulting from wind and solar across the European grid, including frequency fluctuations, voltage support issues, and inadvertent power flows. Anxious operators are concerned about potential blackouts. …
Gabriel Schoenfeld takes the time to remind us of Howard Zinn’s lack of scholarship.
… It is not that Zinn was a naked falsifier in the manner, say, of the historian and Holocaust denier David Irving. Rather, he was a mythmaker who was at constant pains to portray the American story as one long chronicle of exploitation, oppression and deceit. To Zinn, the dark strands of our country’s past — of which there is genuinely no shortage — became the only strands, all of them useful in telling a left-wing morality tale in which class interests always determine the development of ideas and control the course of events.
To take one example of how the grist emerges from Zinn’s historical mill, the political philosopher John Locke is introduced by Zinn with the observation that his “Second Treatise on Government,” which so heavily influenced our Founding Fathers, “talked about government and political rights, but ignored the existing inequalities in property” — an unsurprising fact when one notes that Locke was “a wealthy man, with investments in the silk trade and slave trade, income from loans and mortgages.”
To Zinn, the Great Depression of the 1930s is a demonstration that “the capitalist system was by its nature unsound: a system driven by the one overriding motive of corporate profit and therefore unstable, unpredictable and blind to human needs.” In this narrative, the safety net Franklin Roosevelt erected with the New Deal was not a step forward in constructing a more humane society, but simply a way “to stabilize the system for its own protection” and to avert :the alarming growth or spontaneous rebellion” that the crisis of capitalism had created. …
More from Paul Mirengoff at Power Line.
From time to time, we have noted President Obama’s lack of knowledge about American history. The most recent manifestation — his claim that Ho Chi Minh was inspired by America’s Founding Fathers — suggests that Obama’s ignorance is to some extent willful.
It is, in any event, not accidental. From Stanley Kurtz, we learn that Obama is a fan of the leftist historian Howard Zinn. Stanley cites this passage from James T. Kloppenberg’s book Reading Obama:
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that President Obama had a special interest in the views of an anti-American historian. And it is only mildly surprising that Americans elected a president with a special interest in those views. As the NRO editors warn: “From kindergarten through graduate school, American education is a sewer of left-wing ideology.”
Unless Mitch Daniels and others succeed in improving this state of affairs, the distorted Obama/Zinn view of America likely will prevail within a decade or two. And a self-hating America does not have a promising future.
Ilya Somin with a great post pointing to the Baptist/bootlegger alliance attempting to strangle marijuana legalization.
Public choice economist Bruce Yandle famously developed the concept of a “baptist-bootlegger coalition” to describe situations in which regulation is supported by a strange bedfellow alliance of groups who favor it for narrowly self-interested reasons and those who support it out of moral or ideological considerations. The paradigmatic example was the way in which Baptists (who opposed alcohol for religious reasons) and bootleggers (who wanted its sale to be illegal in order to protect their business interests) supported Prohibition in the 1920s. It looks like a similar alliance is emerging to oppose marijuana legalization:
Pot legalization activists are running into an unexpected and ironic opponent in their efforts to make cannabis legal: Big Marijuana. …
Late Night from Andy Malcolm.
Leno: Eliot Spitzer is now taking the moral high ground in his bid to become comptroller of New York City. He’s saying he’s not been with a prostitute in five years. New slogan: ‘Whore-Free since 2008.’
Fallon: Obama’s big speech on the economy. Really big! Longer than his State of the Union. He opened with 20 minutes of Anthony Weiner jokes.
Leno: In his economy speech President Obama said we’ve all been distracted by phony scandals. He prefers we be distracted by his phony recovery.
Fallon: Obama had a big retreat at Camp David the other day for all his Cabinet members and their families. Joe Biden couldn’t make it because he was in Asia. That’s because Obama told him the retreat was in Asia.