Great column from Jacob Sullum on the striking similarity between Twinkie Taxers and fat acceptance advocates. The best part:
Neither seems to consider the possibility that people are simply making ambivalent choices in a world of tradeoffs, where food tastes good but too much makes you fat, where exercise is a bother but helps you stay lean, and where it’s good to be thin, other things being equal. They rarely are.
Remember Wisconsin LP gubernatorial candidate Ed Thompson? Here’s another story about him. This one covers his whirlwind tour of Washington, D.C. It’s hard to believe that his brother Tommy is a cabinet secretary and Ed claims to have never before been east of Chicago.
Sure, this story is not very substantive, but if it takes some personality to get people to vote for you, then so be it. Votes are votes in the end. We’ll see how much space these papers will have for colorful profiles in the heat of the race in fall.
Yes, I suppose that could be just about every subsidy. But farm subsidies looked like they were dead, or at least on life support, when the Freedom to Farm Act was passed a few years ago. Now they are back with a vengeance.
It’s another wonderful example of Dubya the free-marketeer in action. First there were the steel tarriffs, and now farm subsidies. Looks like those anti-globalization protesters were a lot more effective than we thought. To wit:
“This is an appalling signal to the world and the farm bill is very, very bad for international agriculture,” Warren Truss, Australia’s agriculture minister, was quoted as saying on his country’s national radio network. The United States, he said, “is telling other people to lower subsidy levels but not doing the same thing itself.”
Yep. But it will pass with flying colors. God bless agribusiness. Here’s a comprehensive look at the issue by J.D. Tuccille, with lots of helpful links.
Here’s Steve Chapman on Dubya’s “delusions on mental-health treatment.” He lays out the case against mental-health parity very well. Here’s a tasty nugget:
What the advocates fail to explain is why American businesses would refuse to provide something that is so cheap and yet so valuable. Employers don’t have to provide any health insurance at all, and those that do are not acting entirely out of the kindness of their hearts. Most do it because they have to compete to attract and keep good workers. If mental-health coverage were something treasured by employees and easy to afford, you can be sure that businesses would be knocking each other down to provide it.
In fact, companies are not only declining to offer such broad coverage but resisting congressional efforts to force it down their throats. That suggests they don’t believe mental- health “parity” is quite the free lunch it pretends to be.
Why should I even bother with a career in journalism when Steve Chapman‘s already around to do the heavy lifting? I suppose he’ll die someday. Otherwise …
Here’s Chapman on Catholic clergy abuse scandal.
It annoys me when sports fans complain that they don’t like a certain “style” of play. For example, people complain that too many basketball teams focus on defense because that’s what wins in the playoffs. So we wind up seeing games like the Celtics-Pistons game last night.
Or they complain that too many teams have no inside game — they live and die by the three. Needless to say, these folks are misguided. As Bob Ryan pointed out in a recent column, the NBA has changed dramatically in the last 20 years. “The Celtics launch, therefore they are,” Ryan writes. More to the point, they have two gifted three-point shooters in Pierce and Walker — why should they try to build some kind of inside game when that is not their strength?
Teams have to work with their personnel. If the Celtics had drafted Tim Duncan the way Rick Pitino thought they would, I’m sure they’d have a much stronger inside game. But things didn’t work out that way. Likewise, defense is what wins in the playoffs. If that’s what it takes to win, that’s the way teams will play. Their job is not to make the game look pretty; their job is to win. Coaches are only playing by the rules of the game and working with what they have been given by management.
The sooner fans realize that and get over their ideal of what their team “should” play like, the sooner they’ll enjoy the game actually being played on the court.
And, as Ryan points out in another column, things are actually looking pretty good for the NBA. The style of play is becoming more up-tempo and the number of young and exciting stars is astounding. But it’s a natural development, not the result of coaches dictating a certain style.
Well, either that or a firing. The oldest cards in the sports columnist’s deck. The Tribune’s Phil Rogers says the Cubs should deal for a catcher.
Yes, the Cubs’ current output from the catcher’s position is pathetic, but the alternatives aren’t much better. In a way, it’s a good thing that Hundley‘s on the DL with his sore thumb. The only advantage he theoretically offers is a left-handed bat with power, but it’s all theoretical. He doesn’t call a particular good game and his defensive skills are subpar.
So why not just write off the position as an offensive contributor? Just let Machado catch most of the games and throw in Girardi once or twice a week. Bill Mueller is back and looks like he will contribute. Bobby Hill is up and will add some offensive power. Yes, it stinks that McGriff and Alou haven’t done much so far, but those are positions we can’t do much about. So let’s just consign the catcher’s spot as a defensive specialty. A deal is not advisable. Here is what Rogers suggests:
There’s no GM sneaky enough to find a team to take Hundley. So unless Tribune Co. agrees to write off Hundley as if he were an oldies radio station in a college town—not a bad option—MacPhail will have to use Girardi in a trade to upgrade at catcher.
One immediate possibility is to send a starting pitcher, Matt Clement or Jason Bere, to Seattle for talented backup Ben Davis or even regular Dan Wilson. Kansas City’s Brent Mayne and the White Sox’s Sandy Alomar Jr. could also be made available.
It’s a long shot, but Texas might cut the cord with Pudge Rodriguez now that it’s playing better behind backup Bill Haselman. If that is pie in the sky, sorry, but grim reality is the mother of implausible dreams.
Clement has way too much upside to trade for a slight upgrade in the catcher’s slot. As for Bere, I’d be behind that deal — especially with Prior itching to come up — but who realistically will give up much for a guy who’s making last year look like a fluke. He’s 1-5 with a 6.62 ERA and really hasn’t had a good start all year. Why not throw in Fassero into the deal as well? I’m sure teams will go for that.
As for the Pudge trade — yeah, keep dreaming. A Hall of Fame catcher for Jason Bere and Joe Girardi? This isn’t one of those video baseball games where you can trade Ken Griffey Jr. for Damon Buford. Pfft. Sports columnists.
If you ever happen upon a Buffalo Wild Wings location, please do yourself a favor: do not order the blazin’ sauce on your buffalo wings. The description for the sauce is “Taste the pain.” There are five little fires next to it. But I was a hot shot. I ignored the warnings. By the last two wings of my dozen order, I was wiping them down with a napkin to get the sauce off. The entire area around my mouth was swollen and red.
It makes for a funny story, but it was truly painful.
If you know the tune that goes along with those words, you’ve seen “Chuck & Buck.” And the memory of the tune may bring a smile to your face or it may make you squirm — if you’re like me, it makes you do both.
“Chuck & Buck” is a remarkable movie. Not only because it is a stalker movie without any violence. Not only because it wrings laugh out of painfully awkward situations. But because, looking at who worked together to make the movie, you’d wonder how it ever got made. The star and screenwriter, Mike White, got his first big break in the movies by writing the screenplay for “Dead Man on Campus.” Exactly.
OK, so he’s also written for “Dawson’s Creek” — a good show in its early seasons — and “Freaks and Geeks,” which unfortunately did not stick around long enough to get bad. How about the director? Miguel Arteta directed “Star Maps.” Precisely.
But here’s what’s especially surprising: it co-stars Chris Weitz as Chuck — or Charlie. Weitz was the producer of “American Pie,” wrote the screenplay to “Nutty Professor II: The Klumps,” and directed and wrote the new Hugh Grant clunker, “About a Boy.”
It just goes to show that you never know what gem will be produced by people who are otherwise Hollywood hacks. You may not like “Chuck & Buck,” but it is definitely a moviegoing experience you won’t soon forget.
I bet you didn’t know that. Sure, they may have won four World Series in the last six years, but they suck on a moral level, you see. Express your hatred by buying Yankees suck gear, here. A man wearing a t-shirt from this site was tossed out of Seattle’s Safeco Field to satisfy their family-friendly policy.
In my mind, nothing could be more family-friendly than expressing the truth about the evil, evil Yankees (26 championships, 38 pennants, 52 human sacrifices).
Or so says the Mises Institute‘s William L. Anderson in a provocative essay, “The Press and the State.” Writing of his days as a working journalist in Tennessee:
In a word, government was our lifeline, and while there was somewhat (but only somewhat) of an adversarial relationship between news reporters and government officials, as I look back, I see that government and the press were and are mutually dependent upon each other.
Thus, it is in the interest of the press not only for government to be big and intrusive, but also for it to grow. For all of the vaunted talk of the press being the “watchdog” of government, if anything, the modern news media is government’s lapdog, and the implications for a free society are enormous.
I don’t think it is quite as clear-cut as that, but Anderson is definitely on to something. He also discusses the antipathy journalists in his day had toward the business beat. I think that has clearly changed, as the Enron story alone shows. There’s a lot more interest in quality coverage of the economy and of business trends, between the skyrocketing rate of stock-market participation, the tech boom and bust, Microsoft trial and more.
But another aspect of covering government that is very attractive to journalists is that it’s a lot easier. As difficult as accessing government records can sometimes be, accessing private records is even more difficult. What journalists crave more than anything is information. Without new information, there’s no “news,” by definition. Without “news,” there’s nothing to write about. Journalists need something to scrutinize, and because government is funded through taxpayer dollars, journalists have an excellent claim on any and all information about the doings of government.
What big government does, without fail, is provide news. An endless stream of records are generated, press releases are issued, reports are done, studies are conducted, hearings are held — it goes on forever. If nothing else, huge government makes news. I must admit that as resistant as I was to the idea of a student government at Columbia, the prospect excited the newshound in me. I’m graduating this year, so I won’t get much chance to really cover what the SGA, but it will be a great source of play news for Chronicle writers in years to come.
If government were as small as libertarians believe it should be, what would journalists write about? There would of course still be plenty to cover. It would make journalists’ lives a lot harder, though. And I think that, at a subconscious level, that plays into the average journalist’s bias in favor of government control over individual liberty.
An pro-gun activist’s plan to give away free guns to sympathetic people in Chicago is a bad idea. Then again, it’s not the first bad idea John Birch has had.
Last year there was the plan to have people carry concealed weapons to the Taste of Chicago, a city festival that draws millions every year to downtown. Then there was the suggestion that folks could get around the state’s no conceal-carry law by carrying their gun unloaded in a special fanny pack.
I have no problem with civil disobedience — it’s a healthy tradition. And certainly, it’s no accident that it’s a felony to own a gun in Chicago and 666 homicides were committed last year in the city. But encouraging people to break gun laws gives those in the middle precisely the wrong impression about legal gun owners. They are, by and large, law-abiding and extremely judicious in exercising their constitutional rights.
Yes, the fight against the gun grabbers is frustrating, but this is not the way to go about fighting it. If Birch really wants to help people protect themselves, he should do so without seeking publicity. In the meantime, making a strong case for concealed carry will eventually make a dent. Certainly, these type of stunts just reinforce the perception among the large majority of people who don’t own guns that gun owners are a little nuts.
You’ve come a long way, baby.
The libertarian Cato Institute turned 25 yesterday, which means that it was born only four days before I was. That never occurred to me before. John Fund wrote a nice little tribute. Here’s a nice column from founder Ed Crane on why Sept. 11 calls for us to refocus government on its first priority — defending our borders — and otherwise retreat.
Crane rightly points out Sept. 11 was a grand failure of government to do the one task which is most important. And yet, the CIA and the Justice Department are now dragging their feet in releasing information that will help us find out how the Al Qaeda terrorists were not stopped before they could commit their “evildoings” on Sept. 11.
In the end, I think Cato has done a great job of being both principled and pragmatic in its approach to advancing the libertarian cause in Washington, D.C. Here’s to 25 more years. I’d love to say that in 25 years much of Cato’s agenda will have been accomplished, but I don’t think it will come even close to that in 250 years.
Though he went 0-for-4 with a walk in his first major-league game today, Baylor is magnanimous enough to let Bobby Hill play tomorrow. He told the AP’s Nancy Armour:
It’s not one of those trial things. He still probably has to learn how to handle things at this level. He’s really come a long ways in the last two to three weeks as far as his batting average.
Great. It’s not “one of those trial things.” I’m surprised, with that “proven veteran” Delino DeShields on the bench, after all.
kboreilly.com 
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