When the Obama administration took over financially ailing General Motors instead of allowing the bankruptcy courts to reallocate the bloated firm’s assets to sharper entrepreneurs, more than one wag dubbed the resulting state-socialist enterprise “Government Motors.” Since then, GM has geared up production of pricey “hybrids” that supposedly cause less pollution — until one considers […]
As we were saying last week, most political decisions are based on “narratives” — histories of how we got here, reduced to easy-to-grasp stories a few sentences in length. The problem is, if we get the “narrative” wrong, bad outcomes grow far more likely, since we’ll be working to “solve” the wrong problem, or even […]
Since few of us can actually wade through and comprehend a federal budget (or even a 2,000-page “health care law,” as written), most political decisions are based on “narratives” — histories of how we got here, reduced to a few easy-to-remember sentences. The problem is, if we get the “narrative” wrong, bad outcomes grow far […]
Bruce Babbitt, former governor of Arizona, says it won’t be easy to tap wind and solar energy sources in the West while at the same time preserving wildlife, native cultural sites and landscape views across millions of acres. The key, he told the Review-Journal last weekend, is for the Bureau of Land Management to adopt […]
The Health Nazis have tried for years to discourage cigarette smoking — at the same time they greedily seize cigarette tax revenues to plug their budget gaps, of course — by placing more and more onerous warning labels on packages, forcing smokers to huddle outside in the snow, slashing magazine revenues by barring colorful ads […]
Barack Obama, who regularly attended a Muslim school and Muslim religious services with his mother’s Indonesian husband when he lived in that country as a youngster, told Indonesians in their own language last week as he re-visited that country with his thousands of courtiers — his $200-million-a-day royal entourage — that “Indonesia will always be […]
Skeptics of the United Nations have long warned that subsidizing an outfit that holds any Third World potentate preening on an upturned bucket stands as a moral equal to the president of the United States could lead to trouble. Supporters scoffed at the notion that — humored long enough — dashiki-clad kleptrocrats from nations where […]
And so another election has come and gone. Nearly every concerned voter can be expected to emerge from the tumult in a state of adrenaline depletion: exuberance mixed with a few lingering doubts (still too early for REAL “buyer’s remorse”) over the victory of a favored candidate, puzzlement if not something closer to bereavement over […]